Thoughts tomorrow, but for now: Holy god those last ten minutes are some horrifying shit, Chrystie.

Oh hey, I'm back, about streaming this time because Filmstruck is being shut down by Warner.

Our cultural heritage is being held hostage by people who will gladly let it fall by the wayside to save a few dollars.

The most frustrating thing about this is Netflix could take the budget for ONE SHOW out of the hundreds they produce and use it to expose so many classic movies to modern audiences, but they just don't give a damn. There's less than 20 movies on there from before 1980 at any given time, and meanwhile they're choking everyone's feeds with gallons and gallons of medicore–terrible content. I used to collect physical media just because I preferred the feel of it, but at this point I'm also doing so out of the knowledge that the arbiters of our artistic past all too often just don't give a shit about it.

The meet-cute first act is sooo good, but after that it dives into a heap of cliches, trading in potential greatness for competence. Still, a lot to like here, especially in the performances—Sam Elliott's impact in just a few minutes of screentime should be enough to get him the supporting Oscar, and Cooper and Gaga are both excellent.

The songs are a pretty mixed bag—after months of hoping this wouldn't be the next La La Land, sigh—but Gaga's voice is a punch to the throat. If nothing else, take three minutes out of your day and listen to her performance of "La Vie en Rose"—it's her first number in the movie, and god damn.

You tweeted about how great this album was earlier this year, and, you being the musical authority 'round these here parts, I duly looked her up. Looking at my post I suppose my phrasing implied more mutual agency than actually existed, but hey, we're retroactively having the conversation now

I always love it when an artist has an album like that—something that's just clearly in a realm the rest of their still-very-good material doesn't reach. I have that exact same feeling about Rilo Kiley—their first three albums are various degrees of great, but The Execution of All Things is just this monolith of emotional catharsis that the others can't touch.

. . . huh.

The moon landing sequence by itself is gorgeous, though that was a given going in. The rest . . . I'm not really a fan of Ryan Gosling outside of The Nice Guys, and he was just straight sleepwalking through this. I can't particularly blame him—the screenplay drastically underwrites every single character, and he gets the worst of it. His Neil Armstrong is basically an empty shell, a protagonist whose self I couldn't tell you a single thing about. Claire Foy does her best with a similarly empty role and gets better results, but she can't overcome the fact that there's no emotional throughline here. Though the screenplay certainly seems to think there is—tries to make us think toward the end that the whole movie has been about Armstrong's grief for his dead daughter and the whole thing is so blatantly manipulative I had to roll my eyes.

Also meh on the filmmaking itself. This movie seems to take all the wrong lessons from Dunkirk, a film that I love—it's so focused on trying to communicate the visceral experience of space travel that it overplays its hand to an insane degree. Whole sequences are basically just collections of shaky closeups, to the point that it's impossible to tell what's going on. And the sound mix is absolutely obnoxious—maybe I'm just getting too old for this, but the monotonous shriek of everything was just an irritant rather than immersive in any way. Chazelle is so focused on trying to pound an EXPERIENCE into you that he ends up managing to evoke nothing at all.

The film stock was pretty, anyway—very nice grain.

I dunno, I'm being too hard on it—I can't say it's a bad film, just a thoroughly mediocre one with some cool moments. Half of it is trying and failing to be a Christopher Nolan film, and the other half is trying and failing to be the off-kilter arthouse biopic that Jackie was but with an absolutely by-the-numbers script, and it just doesn't gel.

For better or worse, Whiplash is still Chazelle's best movie. It's kind of adolescent but doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is, an exercise in ratcheting up tension with broad character beats that are redeemed by the performers. La La Land is gorgeous visually but absolutely lifeless, and First Man is that same melody in a different key. (Had to slip a musical thing in there somewhere.)

*against better judgment wanders into the thread after holding off for days* Also worth noting that economic growth = / = a better economic situation for the majority of the population. Sluggish recovery from the 2008 crash doesn't really mean all that much if most of it is centered around massive corporations and the wealthiest of the wealthy rather than stable growth of longterm jobs.

Also (I'm sure many of us on the forum can speak to this), it's quite possible that a significant amount of job "growth" we're seeing is workers taking on multiple jobs to try and stay afloat. Which, not ideal.

Trump isn't solely to blame there—the Obama administration took a lot of half measures and reaped the whirlwind—but he most definitely isn't helping and will almost undoubtedly make things actively worse in the long run, to BDA's point.

Kneel Before Rod!

Well goddammit.

Yikes, I pity you guys trying to record all three hours of Button.

iirc you said Green Mile was missing half an hour and Dead Man's Chest was unsalvageable.

If anyone does want any specific episodes in the interim, lemme know—I've got every episode in my library (even New Moon ) and will happily do some Google driving.