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My audience burst into laughter at the very first shot. The one time that laughter started to die midway through, during a Very Serious scene, some guy in the back said "Imma get some snacks" and it was like a dam broke. We applauded as he left and howled for a solid minute.
This movie is a fucking gift, and if the world is just it will replace The Room as shorthand for jaw-droppingly bad art creating joy
This movie is a fucking gift, and if the world is just it will replace The Room as shorthand for jaw-droppingly bad art creating joy
I haven't seen it yet, despite it being the only movie playing where I'm living now, but someone I saw on twitter mentioned the idea of 'looking forward to seeing what sort of midnight showing, Rocky Horror-esque, audience interaction's will emerge from this thing', and I've been thinking about it all day.
My bets are giant dildos and bottles of milk being hurled at the screen when Derulo screams "MIIILLLLLLLLLK", if my Twitter feed has been anything to go by today.
Haha! I almost went to see it tonight just for the goof. Now I gotta see it.
Yooooooo the Mrs and I just watched Klaus on Netflix on a whim and it's an actual gem. It's basically an alternative origin story of Santa Klaus, mixed with the Emperor's New Groove. And it's hilarious.
Seriously, watch it. It's 90 minutes long and you'll like it.
Last edited by Writhyn (2019-12-22 02:15:31)
+1
Yeah. Cats is a hoot and I dont care who knows it.
The Alan Arkin "Catch-22."
Caught it on [whatever streaming service] while I was agonizing over some work stuff I no longer had any power over, and just had to wait for my thing to land or crash. Making this film an oddly fitting metaphor.
Can't believe they got so much actual military hardware for such an unflattering portrayal of the brass.
Add this to my list of films to show potential military recruits, with FMJ & Jacob's Ladder.
Excellent black comedy (? ...I mean I laughed at a few things early on...) in the vein of, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." Surreal dreamy bits, Orson Welles, perfect ending.
Apart from anything else, the mindmelting AUDACITY of the bad taste required for Spielberg and Dante to prominently feature a poster for their Twilight Zone movie in the main character's room, the year after it fucking killed Vic Morrow and two children, is... something
I mean I get it, cause it was their movie and it had a literal gremlin in it, and hell if we don't know director's love their easter eggs, but yeah, that's a, capital-C, choice right there.
Frozen II feels almost like a satire on the first Frozen. Every flaw of the original movie is amped up to nearly comical proportions - there's very little plot and everything revolves around emotional bullshit that could nauseate even Deanna Troi.
The only thing that works is Kristoff's power ballad made to resemble a kitschy '80s music video.
This is a howwible stowy
and it still made over $1,200,000,000 (as of now).
Seriously though, it's one of 2019's worst productions. It's up there with Zombieland: Double Tap, MIB International, Jumanji: The Next Level and Cats.
You realize Frozen is made for children, and children don't really care about story, as they do "IT'S ELSA AND OLAF! AND ANNA!!!"
My point being it's no wonder it makes a lot of money. Kids will see it over and over again.
My point being it's no wonder it makes a lot of money. Kids will see it over and over again.
OK, fair enough. That could explain the box office gross. Many people went to see the Transformers sequels too.
But
You're dead if you aim only for kids.
and his company usually tried to respect that sentiment (the first Frozen was even made fun of in Zootopia).
DiF gave Michael Bay a lot of shit for his "movies for teenage boys" and rightly so. I think we shouldn't be too easy on a Disney movie just because t's supposed to "be for kids" (it was Uncle George's silly excuse for the SW prequels too).
I think some people should just Let It Go! *rimshot*
I'll show myself out.
+1
I enjoyed Frozen II. Far too many songs for my liking - a "throw it all at the wall and see what sticks" sorta thing - but I had a good time in the theater with it.
Just finished Cats. The CatPeople weren’t creepy, just really poorly executed. Storywise, it made more sense than TROS did. Despite those two nonfactors which the papers have made such hay over it was still an utter disaster. Our audience was there to poke the bear, which might have been pathetic if it weren’t for the constant barrage of bizarre choices that seemed calculated to amp up the weird as much as possible. Also not helping: the volume level of the woofers in theater 5. Anytime there was a break in the music you could hear a pin drop... and the sub component of every single explosion in Avengers: Endgame.
Some characters have teleportation powers, but the movie does not give a shit and just teleports the whole cast around wherever and whenever it wants, MTV style.
Sir Ian’s performance suggests he was kidnapped and forced to perform at gunpoint. The audience could not contain itself whenever he came onscreen.
Conversely, everyone seemed to know that we WERE NOT TO LAUGH AT Jeniffer Hudson, and the whole theater would go real quiet whenever she came out.
Multiple characters fly and levitate ala Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain.
For the sheer amount of erect tails everywhere there is a distinct lack of butthole.
The scale of the characters changes from shot to shot. Sometimes this is intentional.
Mice with human faces are eaten. Cockroaches with human faces are eaten. Everyone is the correct scale for these things to happen.
There is near constant ballet. The trailer did not prepare me for this. This actually helps, since it reminds your brain that everyone is supposed to look like a ken doll. But also, they've taken that musical adage and rearranged it to: if you can’t sing it, dance it with cat moves, and when you can’t take it anymore, bust out the ballet.
Choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler seems to have decided that “cats put their leg up in the air” and had each actor workshop their own version of this. Judy Dench’s routine got a pretty big laugh.
So there are probably ghost dancers in this for some sequences. So, we’re watching a computer painted dancer, with another performer’s head pasted on, and then that head is computer painted over with a cat head.
The unceasing fat jokes were unpleasant.
Judy Dench’s fourth wall break (not once, not twice, DO IT AGAIN) took everyone by surprise and got one of biggest laughs of the show. Just do something first or something OH GOD SHE’S LOOKING RIGHT AT US.
Someone named Sarah Dowling was paid to be a Cat Movement Specialist for this and got placed before the actors in the credits.
There are at LEAST 5 minutes worth of overcooked takes of reaction closeups, that you can still almost hear the director yelling “hoooooooold iiiiiiiiiiit” from his chair in video village in.
The cat effect was so poorly executed. Jim Carey looked better as The Grinch than any single character in this. Although also, the more effect there was the better it looked. My theory: they tested it without a green screen or CG backgrounds and tested it on a more or less live plate instead. And it probably looked OK. The main problem, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with matting or tracking or the fantastic shader they’ve got themselves to do all that fur (how much of that body fur was real?) and everything to do with the light and shadow on the human face that is all that’s left of the original plate, not interacting with any of the digital assets, giving the effect that the actors are standing behind the screen poking their faces out of a “face in the hole” cutout at the pumpkin patch
The whole cat world/human world being different scales made sense from a story perspective, but again the execution was terrible. The scale changes so erratically it just kind mashes the whole thing into a distorted Alice in Wonderland kind of disorientation thing instead.
Had a very good laugh, zero stars would not recommend, but go see it.
Last edited by Beeg (2020-01-12 19:30:31)
Had a very good laugh, zero stars would not recommend, but go see it.
Yeah, I don't think I will.
I want to get drunk and see this flick.
The cat effect was so poorly executed.
I thought Taylor Swift looked better with it than without it.
Adam Cramer, a D.C.-based white supremacist gone South to stoke anger at integration to a fever pitch, is the role Shatner was born to play. One of the reasons his nice-guy act as Captain Kirk never quite washes is that he's unable to cover up the self-satisfied sense of superiority nestled beneath his skin, the smug disdain for others hiding in his smirks and condescending delivery. Here that smarmy self-worship is put to perfect use, in a performance that's not necessarily "good" but has an arresting ring of truth. His racist screeds aren't lies—he really does want to see a white America, free of the filth of minorities—but it's obvious from his very first interaction with the townsfolk of Caxton that he loathes the hicks he preaches to as much as he does the black people he seeks to drive out from their midst. He gets off on manipulating them, on their unthinking hero worship, but in his Anglo-Saxon empire they would be second-class citizens at best, casting their eyes toward the Great Man and begging to kiss his ring.
But of course he's really no great man at all, and where Mirror Universe Kirk is pure, makeup-slathered id, Cramer crumbles at the first sign of resistance. He's a B-movie Harry Powell, intimidating through sheer force of charisma until someone dares to poke him, reduced to hysterical appeals to the mob's intelligence only after his opinion of them as sheep has become obvious to them. If only Shatner had been born several decades later, he would have played a perfect Richard Spencer.
As for the rest of the movie? It walks a fine line between brutal honesty and reassurance, which unfortunately lessens the impact of its social critique. Even pulled punches, however, can shock—the film's climactic portrayal of phony rape charges by a white woman against a black man is blunt and horrifyingly accurate, even if it quickly dials back its fury by hollowly allowing the white lynch mob to reconsider when presented with reasoned argument. That the creative forces behind the camera were white men clearly shows—the black "characters" are passive, saintly, there to serve as a moral but not to exist as people (save for a quick, biting "I don't know about you, but I can't tell 'em apart" from one black student to another as they eye two white jocks walking down the hall)—but that anger, even if it still doesn't go far enough, has aged far better than mealy-mouthed attempts to find the common humanity in both sides of segregation.
Under ninety minutes and available for free on YouTube!
Last edited by Abbie (2020-01-18 05:22:07)
I had not realized how much I looked forward to reading these, Abbie.
I feel like the most interesting 'Klan' adjacent films I've seen recently were Blackkklansman and 3 Billboards, and now Watchmen. This seems like a good addition to add? I'd never heard of it.
I had not realized how much I looked forward to reading these, Abbie.
I feel like the most interesting 'Klan' adjacent films I've seen recently were Blackkklansman and 3 Billboards, and now Watchmen. This seems like a good addition to add? I'd never heard of it.
Somehow missed this—thanks, Beeg!
Blackkklansman was quite good, yeah, although I agree with the general criticism that it's rather too friendly to the cops than they deserve. For another movie in a similar but far more cynical vein, Deep Cover with Lawrence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum is a really scathing look at racial politics and the war on drugs from the perspective of Fishburne's undercover cop character.
Last edited by Abbie (2020-02-06 05:07:28)
Watching his speech around the 28' mark makes me think that, holy shit, you can see the exact same defining facial expressions and looks Trump has, only with more energy. It's frightening.
Last edited by Saniss (2020-02-06 09:16:03)
only with more energy
Lol, even in the performance of Fascist pageantry, Trump can’t help but be the shitty actor he is. The Republican Party was so ready for someone to say the lines they didn’t/don't care about the delivery.
+2
The first twenty minutes of this film seem designed to alienate the viewer entirely. Multiple cuts a second, camera refusing to stay still, lights flashing from every angle, John Leguizamo and a bunch of supporting characters bantering in barely understandable accents, green fairies emerging from absinthe bottles and staging an obnoxious dance number—and THEN we travel to the titular Moulin Rouge itself and it becomes pure sensory overload, pounding music and strobing cuts abstracting the sets and costumes into some sort of fever dream. I genuinely felt like I was watching an alien artifact, something hitherto unknown to human experience.
The assault is clear in its intent. Either you acclimate and get on board or you loathe this movie forever. For a while, I didn't know where I was going to fall—it was just all so MUCH and I couldn't process it.
But then, before I realized what was happening, Ewan McGregor (who can sing like a MOTHERFUCKER) and Nicole Kidman were swerving from song to song in a mashup of seemingly every pop number with "love" in its title since 1967, atop a massive elephant with red light and stars shining all around them, as the camera swept around and around their dance, and I. Could. Not. Stop. Smiling.
It's pure excess and bad taste, but WHAT excess! Watched on a pristine 35mm print, and those colors are just something you don't see anymore—especially the rich, saturated reds that dominate the frame. The set design, the models, the costuming, the deliberately chintzy greenscreen elements are all astonishing, a perfect blend of analogue and digital that is in its own way as much the end of an era as The Fellowship of the Ring was less than a year later. Probably peak Ewan and Kidman in terms of both sex appeal and performance—they sell the melodrama with every ounce of energy they have. And while I normally hate jukebox musicals, the self-parodically bombastic orchestration Luhrmann's team applies to every single song lends the proceedings a garish cohesion that that subgenre typically lacks, bringing everything together in a melange of overpowering strings and beats.
On a small screen, this might have put me off entirely. Seen wth a packed audience, on a big screen, it was a kind of magic.
Last edited by Abbie (2020-02-12 05:37:31)
By coincidence, I just watched Moulin Rouge this weekend!
I should say rewatched. I've seen this film a good six or seven times by now, and basically agree with everything you said, except that it took me maybe 60 seconds for me to realize I was going to love this one. I'm so pleased that you enjoyed it.
The music! The beauty of it! The excess! I swoon.
And I am very curious about the recent Broadway adaptation. I certainly loved hearing some Beyonce in the new Sparkling Diamond mashup. Never had the chance to see Moulin Rouge with an audience, but dang, I think it'd be fun.
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