Everyone's a critic... of the last movie you watched

So here's how I propose we do this:

What was the last movie you watched? Did you love it? Hate it? Do you recommend it for any particular interest groups? Wanna tell folks about triggers in stuff still in theaters? (Or should that be in another thread?) Basically... y'know... let's all be some dorky movie buffs in here. I'll start.

The Words
A guy who wants to be ~~*~A GREAT WRITER~*~~ is struggling with the fact that all he can write about is being a young man who is ~~*~angry~*~~ about... uhh... [vague handwave] y'know. Things. One day he finds an old manuscript of ~~*~A GREAT STORY~*~~ never published, with no author named. He starts transcribing it, pretending to be ~~*~A GREAT WRITER~*~~, buuuut his wife finds it and thinks it's his so he submits the thing to a publisher and it becomes ~~*~A GREAT BESTSELLER~*~~

.....aaaand then the real author pops up and tells the guy his life story and what led him to write that book and the guy has something real to struggle about for the first time in his life and Drama Occurs.

I highly recommend this movie for all the many multitudes of writers I know are chillin' all over this forum. It's has some great things to say about inspiration and success and storytelling in general. The guy writer has a lot of very relatable moments. The one that sticks out for me the most is when he has a fit of angst over "I don't understand how anybody gets to where they are in life." I... that... yes.

Not really any trigger warnings that I can think of? So all ye writers, go forth and watch. All ye posters, tell us about your latest cinematic foray~~~

Bonus Shiny Shit:


The Real Author is played by Jeremy "IRL Disney Princess" Irons. He talks a lot in that weird American-ish accent he does. If that's your thing. [IT IS SO, SO, SO MY THING. >.> ]

 

Are we assuming spoilers are gonna be rampant? because i may come in here and try to do the thing if they are. Im not great at figuring out what plot stuff needs to be censored, or really cohesively talking about a thing at all, but reviewing things is still super fun.

 

Hmmm... How about we all agree to be considerate and reasonable when it comes to putting things behind a spoiler cut and just... see how that goes for now? :) So like... spoiler-cut for major plot twists and triggery content.

I'm not aiming for this to be a discussion of Great Cinema involving essay-length reviews, unless that's a thing you WANT to do. I just kinda want somewhere to flail about all the weird shit I watch and how attractive Jeremy Irons is in it. >.>

 

Okay, i'll do my best! I also love just flailing about movies so its not gonna be super intensive if i do come in often. I just like cinematography and like to point out neat things about scene choices and use of color and different background stuff i think is neat.

 

Let's see, what even was the last movie I watched... OH it was Logan

I 100% recommend that movie, with the condition that it may make you bawl your eyes out. .. And that it has a lot of shocking ultraviolence. But, I mean, it's a Wolverine movie, that's fairly par for the course.

Logan himself is way more interesting when he's physically fucked up and vulnerable (not a spoiler, not really.) Patrick Stewart is way more interesting when he actually gets to act (and swear!) as Professor X rather than just saying vaguely portentous things.

Bits of the ending were a little OTT, but then it turned back around into making me cry, so, like. Yes.

Also Stephen Merchant has 1) an inexplicable minor role 2) the best one-liner in the movie.

Spoiler: one-liner in question

BEWARE THE LIGHT

 

I remember seeing a preview for that. It looked interesting. I remember my friend Kyle trying to explain to me that it's am X-Men movie. I have no idea, whatever, I'd watch it. ^____^

Also, can we talk about how MOANA is the best Disney movie since The Lion King? I just saw it for the first time. 10/10 will ABSOLUTELY be watching this one over and over and over and over~~~~

All of the characters are amazing. Maui is HILARIOUS. The chicken is.... hilarious times 10. I actually really really REALLY identify with Moana as a character. Life goals there. I have always been called by the sea, too. <3

 

uh i cant remember the last movie i watched so im giving it a 1/10 for forgetability

 

The new Ghost In the Shell was, frankly, a huge disappointment. I mean it might be because I watched the original literally right before watching the new one but...

It completely misses the point. Like, completely. If it wasn't for the fact that it ripped entire scenes wholesale from the original it would have been okay as a stand-alone original film or genre homage (Pacific Rim vs Evangelion springs to mind), but it's a really pants adaptation. There were some aesthetic choices I liked but it was more reminiscent of Deus Ex than the original Ghost in the Shell

 

Ironically I did not like Logan at all. I found it really, really boring. I also have only ever seen one x-men movie before and have no other canon exposure to the characters, so I don't have the character connection most people have.

Last movie I saw was Guardians of the Galaxy 2. It was good! I don't think it was as good as the original; it had some great laughs and it was definitely fun to see the characters again, but it tries to balance 2/3 different smaller plots instead of really building up a bigger arc so it just feels less epic than the original. I felt like the character development moments were a bit forced and thus didn't hit as hard.. and they overdid the ending so the intended emotion doesn't quite hit unless you were already really attached to it. Still definitely a fun movie among the marvel cinematic universe, and if you follow the universe there's no reason to give this one a pass! I've give it like a 7/10

 

I saw Bride and Prejudice last which is just a lovely Bollywood movie with awesome songs. It has the general pitfalls of a romcom that's based on Pride and Prejudice, but lovely nonetheless :D

 

THIS SOUNDS FUN. I LOVE MOVIES. Though I'll admit that I mostly jump around TV shows.

But anyway, last movie. Full disclosure: I am a huge sucker for ~inspirational~ shit. Like, a HUGE sucker. So I will watch movies that aren't even that good if they will potentially make me cry happy tears. Also, I have raging ADHD, and I jump around movies a lot, so sometimes I don't finish them.

Anyway.

I saw this documentary on Netflix called 'UnDivided'. If you look it up, you will see that it is an inspirational documentary for suckers, is under 'Faith & Spirituality', and involves an 'affluent church helping an inner city high school'. I was expecting cringey racism and classism and grossness that would make it impossible for me to enjoy the movie, but actually--

1) it deals with the whole 'white rich people swoop in to save the day, condescend, and leave' thing. they are very aware of and very serious about the fact that if they help, it has to be long term. also there are people who help who are not white, and their input is appreciated.
2) it deals with the whole 'religious people are religious and like being religious at people' thing. (as in, the church people actually stay pretty secular, even though there is God talk because it's not just the church that is religious; it's a God-fearing/God-loving area. I'm pretty sure the church is some kind of Protestant. plus the people involved with the school directly address their worries about the church people evangelizing at their students.)
3) the rich people Grow and Learn and Change as well as the non-rich students. privilege is directly addressed, and often. a lot of people admit that they were totally clueless and condescending when they came in.
4) there's acceptance of the fact that you Can't Change Everything and Can't Save Everyone. it's not all sunshine and roses.
5) there's a single teen dad who is a great dad, and little to no judgment of teen parents.
6) do note that Football is a Thing. I personally love football/sports stuff, even though I am also passionate about CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) and other issues based on repetitive head trauma, but I know it's not everyone's cup of tea. (I love sports stuff because a lot of the best Inspirational Movies are sports movies.)
7) it's genuinely not half bad, and pretty short.

I actually recommend it if you're into that kind of stuff and do not mind some God Talk. I personally do not. I think it's a pretty good example about how to make a good documentary about this stuff without being cringey offensive, and a good example for churches/volunteers that want to do stuff like what they do in the film. it's got its problems and I'd actually like to hear what other people think and if I'm being too forgiving and naive. it's just that I've seen a lot of documentaries like this, and this is probably the most self-aware one. there's eye-rolly things and privilege, but if you're into the inspirational thing, I recommend it.

Also, recently I saw a documentary on the Oklahoma City bombing. it's absolutely brutal and I cried through most of it, but it's excellent. it's on Netflix and, unsurprisingly, called 'Oklahoma City'. it has a lot of information about how and why it happened, and what the immediate aftermath was. it has stuff about what happened immediately before, like Ruby Ridge, and about Timothy McVeigh that is nuanced but not forgiving. I was also confused by the talking heads a lot because I had trouble keeping them straight since they didn't say who was talking after the first time they talked.

but trigger warning. hardcore trigger warning. if you know about Oklahoma City, you'll know that over a hundred people died, including children. people who talk are very raw and there's reawakened grief, so people cry. there is relatively graphic footage, though I think it is presented respectfully. and it's just really, really sad and brutally honest.

if it's not obvious, I'm probably going to recommend stuff that I didn't just watch. is that okay, or is there a movie recommendation thread somewhere else?

 

I freaking LOVE LOVE LOVE documentaries. Any topic. All of the topics. I love GOOD documentaries because I am an insatiable learning-sponge. I love MEDIOCRE documentaries because they make for perfect background noise that is ok to bounce your attention to while working on other things, but aren't actively trying to engage your emotions or thinky-bits too much. I love BAD documentaries because that shit is incomparably hilarious.

I think I actually already have the Oklahoma City one on my list on Netflix. Now I'm really interested to watch it, I haven't really thought about it at all since it happened when I was 11.

I haven't been able to find a separate thread for recommendations, so by all means, post them here!! 8D

 

Recommendation if you like gorgeous cinematography: WATCH KONG SKULL ISLAND.
I saw it a few months ago but, wow, still definitely one of my favorite movies i've seen this school year, and i've been going to movies like every other week or so overall. I found the characters really fun, the fight scenes actually really fun to watch and well-choreographed, the CGI and monster design gorgeous, and the cinematography was AMAZING. i have not seen a hollywood movie with so many creative shots and perfectly put together cinematic storytelling in so long. this movie is just visually amazing and lots of fun.
also possibly the least racist kong movie?? there is a native tribe thing that fall into some stereotypes, and granted i do not know too much about the details of racism in that depiction's respect, but for a fictional native tribe they seemed pretty not distracting to me.
just. the movie was gorgeous, and lets you also stare at tom hiddleston, which is always nice. v good.

(eta: also a note; i'm an animation student who goes to movies with other animation students most weekends, my opinions can get very flavored by the group and in a like, specifically academic film criticism lens, i can be harsher than the average person on a movie :P )

 

I just saw GOTG vol. 2! I think I actually enjoyed it more than the first one? It was consistently funny, I love Nebula, there was some cool shit in there.

My main criticism is that there are exactly two kinds of emotional moments in that film, and they are 1) genuinely interesting but interrupted immediately with a joke and 2) good, but overwrought and five minutes too long. Also some of the CGI near the end was pretty silly-looking, although there was one particular instance of gratuitous CGI that (deliberately) made me laugh out loud.

 

YES EXACTLY THE REASON I LOVE DOCUMENTARIES.

(lol also ~inspiring~ documentaries are always either extremely bad and hilarious or pretty bad and cringey or pretty bad and touching for suckers like me or really touching and make people feel Feelings; like, seriously, REALLY GOOD uplifting documentaries [I wouldn't actually call UnDivided one, I'd just call it 'good'] are unicorns and I love them. the thing is that I really like seeing people succeed and be happy and overcome odds and so on. I'm always rooting for humanity.

and also most documentaries about anything, even bad things, have stuff about the Good In The World or have things that happened that weren't Completely Terrible, because that's how things work in life. usually the Everything Is Terrible documentaries are very specifically making everything terrible and you can tell.

and even moving beyond 'happy' things--pretty much call something 'emotional' or 'heartbreaking' or 'heartwarming' or 'heart-anything' or 'tearjerking' and I'm there. crying.

OH OH OH SPEAKING OF

Have you ever seen First Position??? It falls squarely in the 'uplifting documentaries that are fantastic' division. it's about some kids who are dancing in the Youth Grand Prix, and it's gorgeous. I really like dance stuff because I like watching people dance, but it's really good in general, not just because the dancing is amazing.)

I am a terrible person who is really interested in disasters and tragedies and how people react and why/how they happen and so on and especially the aftermath, so I watch any documentary about that, and I look into it a lot. I 'like' true crime, pretty much. (These things tend to be my transient special interests.) I watched Newtown, which is now on Netflix too, and, well...it's about as brutal as you would expect a documentary about a school shooting in which twenty small children (and six adults) died to be. And yeah, I didn't know much at all about Oklahoma City (it happened the year before I was born, the day after my birthday, apparently), but the documentary was really interesting, especially with how it dealt with all the events that led up to it.

 

I am taking notes on all of this.

I am one very dark motherfucker when you come right down to it. I don't seek out things that would tend to make me emotional in the way you mean -- crying is for other people to do and me to analyze why. But I do like things that make me well and truly pissed off. I like to be pissed off at stupid people who get exactly what they were asking for when they meddle with shit they ought to have left alone.

Examples: I love "Blackfish" and "Tyke: Elephant Outlaw." These two documentaries were what convinced me 100% for the rest of my rational life that cetaceans and elephants are not just intelligent, but they are conscious, self-aware, thinking, feeling, speaking, INDIVIDUAL PERSONS. Blackfish makes me rage like 10,000 suns. And actually the killer whale who is the focus of the thing, Tilikum, died like within the past 6 months or so. He died in the same deplorable conditions that had driven him looney in the first place. He was a truly deeply psychologically destroyed person.

"The Cove" is a good one, too, that focuses on dolphin slaughter in Japan. The filmmakers have to be sneaky fucks to get anything on film, but what they finally get is one of the most chilling things I have ever witnessed.

Some other favourites of mine are two that I consider go together -- the based-on-true-events film "Everest" and the documentary "Dying for Everest." What I learned from these (and from the ensuing research I did on the subject) is that anyone who climbs Everest is a massive fucking tool. I firmly believe climbing that thing should be illegal for everyone but research teams. Do you know what stupid people DO to that mountain?? Well first they pay up to $72,000 for guides, sherpas, gear, and the privilege of taking part in a well-organized group climb with the very highest safety precautions.

Of course, once you get up past camp 3, you literally FOLLOW THE TRAIL OF DEAD BODIES to the top. If your dumb ass dies up there, it's literally not possible to retrieve your stupid neon corpse, because the extreme cold and lack of oxygen means you are LITERALLY DYING carrying just yourself and your oxygen.

Oh, and the camps all up the mountain... they're acclimation camps. Climbers spend weeks in each one, getting progressively higher so their bodies can adjust to the altitude. Know what that means? If you guessed "their trash is still up there with the bodies" and "GLACIERS OF HUMAN EXCREMENT," congratulations! You get a snowball.

 

Not so much the literal last movie I watched, but: Inside Job is a really good documentary about the 2008 financial crisis. It actually addresses a lot of the lead-up of issues to the crisis (which wasn't quite so simple as predatory lending + housing bubble = tragedy) and pulls a lot of interviews from both people who'd predicated some of the factors and people who benefited from the crash. We watched it in my econ class this last semester, and it's 100% worth checking out on Netflix.

Also narrated by Matt Damon, which was nice, because he has a clear, clean speaking voice but you can also hear how pissed he is at points. Me too, Matt Damon. Me too.

(Last movie I actually watched was Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2, which punched me in the heart because Feelings About Dads usually do. The jump-skip plot with the three sideplots that converged into one whole actually really worked for me, and I liked having those character focus moments with everyone sectioned off before being pulled back in again.

I will agree on the whole 'jokes to diffuse the Sads' and 'Sads that went on too long' as a thing though, because sometimes the emotional pacing felt a little off.)

 

Yeah, with Guardians I just wasn't expecting a scattered plot until about 1/3 through the movie when i realized it was going that way, so the switch in expectations threw me off- I'd have to give it a second watch to really see what I feel about it

 

@Carrickfergus Idk, I have thoughts about Everest but I've only really read about it--as in, I read Into Thin Air (the John Krakauer book about a particularly disastrous expedition that does come down on the side of 'climbing Everest really isn't a great idea').

what you talk about is actually a thing I really specifically avoid. the thing is that I get the 'they got what they were asking for, serves them right' feeling about very, very, very few people in very, very, very few situations, and usually it can only be when there's not enough time for me to create any sort of connection to the people in any way at all that can allow me to empathize with them. like, if a person in an action flick just shoots a bad person, I can go 'ha, finally!', but if they make someone Beg For Mercy Like a Dirty Coward/draw it out or give them a Fate Worse Than Death or Ironic Revenge or whatever, and you're supposed to feel a schadenfreude type emotion...I can't. I'm pretty sure I don't have the capacity for schadenfreude. I just end up feeling devastated for the People You're Not Supposed to Feel Bad For and it's...really unpleasant. (especially if the People You're Not Supposed to Feel Bad For aren't Pure Evil). and if something terrible happens to a Person You're Supposed to Feel Bad For and it's In The Moment and horrifying and has that particular tone of Humanity Caused This, What Assholes, No One Deserves This But It Happened or There Was Hope That Was Ripped Away...yikes.

and when it comes to social issue documentaries like the ones you're talking about that are about social issues that aren't in my wheelhouse, it's...well.

it's not like 'this brutal, cerebral documentary will stay with you', it's like 'this brutal, cerebral documentary will dig into your brain and rip out your heart and every time you think of it you will feel absolute wrenching horror and devastation and this will fade over time but it will never ever leave you and there's nothing you can do [or if there is, there's nothing you can really do unless you become an activist and dedicate yourself to this in a way you do not want to because you are more interested in these other topics and quite honestly care more about them you horrible excuse for a human being]. I mean, if just what you wrote about Blackfish and The Cove made me feel horrified, I definitely don't want to watch them even if they're amazing. if something is supposed to disturb and outrage you...I very much prefer to stick with the facts as opposed to watching pure pain. idk it's complicated and my feelings change easily and contradict each other sometimes (I'm actually good at intellectualizing sometimes) but I know that I can't feel schadenfreude and I have those feelings about certain kinds of storytelling.

ugh, I'm sorry about the novel. I was actually coming here to write reviews ;-; (also I don't want to imply that I am somehow Better than other people/you bc I'm a huge wimp??? being an ~empath~ isn't better than not being one, I was just trying to explain bc I think it's interesting, the way people react to things???) tbh I'm gonna hold off on writing the reviews bc I'm embarrassed about writing an even longer comment but I want to post this incoherency bc I've been writing it for like an hour forgive me ;-; ;-; ;-;

edit: also what you wrote about Everest didn't bother me I just found it interesting how differently we feel about that; I'm afraid it comes off like you triggered me or something and you didn't, I thought what you wrote was both legit and funny

 

Oh. My God. I saw the new king arthur movie last night and. hoo boy. I don't know hardly anything about the original legends so i can't say anything regarding that but

this movie had no regard for sensible storytelling. they would tell scenes all out of order and not explain exactly what was going on for wayyy too long and sometimes whole sections of the movie were pretty much shown in trailer format with no context or expansion??? but sometimes it would go back to being a normal movie with pacing and stuff.
man if you want to see how not to edit a movie this is a great one for that. also if you want to viscerally FEEL the difference between good fight cinematography and bad. There is some awfulllll fight cinematography and some like, really fuckin cool stuff. There's this slowed down really interesting stuff when he's like, super using excalibur but. yeah. other fight scenes are just shaky cam from hell with terrible shot composition

so like, if you want to learn some stuff about filmmaking via what not to do or just want some pretty fantasy imagery without necessarily knowing what's going on, sure, go to this movie. but it's not worth it on quality entertainment value alone. half the movie you don't even get to know what's going on and that gets frustrating

Warning; this movie gave me a headache die to too much shakycam and lots of fight scenes that would vacillate from dark to light a lot

Spoiler: trigger warnings for those who might need them; some spoilers

wife/child murder, lead-up to a beheading, and on-screen snake bite