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Watched The Irishman. Good movie, but really long. Also, the de-aging wasn't very good. Sure, they colored the hair and took out the wrinkles, but they didn't even bother trying to slim down the figures and they all still moved like old men, even when they were playing younger. I think Scorcese could have saved a ton of money if they had just tried to do the same thing with makeup.
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Finally watched "Us" the other night. It had me all the way until the ending. Very disappointing sort of like [spoil] Westworld having a production factory at an amusement park [/spoil]
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US never scared me the way GET OUT did. It was just creepy and gruesome, where GET OUT filled me with psychological dread. I empathised with Daniel Kaluuya's character in GET OUT, but I never could relate to the characters in US. I was too busy trying to work out who and what they were to be invested in their fate.
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[QUOTE=Arfguy;4714783]I actually thought Oculus and Mama were pretty good[/QUOTE]
Oh they sure are, they work fine. Not a big fan of both endings but good movies indeed.
Come on, [COLOR="#FFFFFF"]it would have been awesome if in the end the red head was just crazy and that there was nothing wrong with the mirror[/COLOR]. ^^
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I like the Irishman but i felt it started too drag near the end.
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Watching Westworld (HBO) because of the actors involved and Ed Brubaker co-writing episode 4 but have stopped enjoying it on any other level.
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The Irishman, good but not great Scorsese. And definitely overlong. [spoil]the climax was the killing of Hoffa, and he spent way too much time with the characters after that. He also never showed DiNiro when he decided to talk with the author of the book and finally tell it all. That was a strange omission. [/spoil]
Us, I liked it.[spoil] It did go off in a direction I didn't expect. I though most of the movie would be this family being haunted by the doppelgangers. But it was more an action movie. Not sure if I liked the reveal of Red being the real girl all along[/spoil]
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Finally was able to watch Ad Astra. There were things I liked about it, but overall, I found it way to contemplative where the movie felt like it was deep, but when given any extra thought, it's pretty surface level. It was gorgeous visually and I really got into the world that they built around the film, but the film itself just kind of dragged. In some ways this movie felt pretty familiar, but not in a good way. We can also add it to the list of movies where the main character does a bunch of bad stuff and doesn't seem to face any real consequences for it.
Oh well, I was pretty excited for this one initially, but these things happen.
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Tried watching Thor Ragnarok on TBS. They did something to the speed of the movie. It looks like they dropped a frame or two every second. Probably to fit in more commercials. This resulted in a jerky feel to the motion. It is utterly stupid of them. It makes it very unenjoyable to watch. I don't know why they would do this, since they don't need to keep to an "on the hour" schedule. But the results for me make it unwatchable.
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I saw [I]21 Bridges[/I] today. It needed a far better script for me to have liked it more than a mediocre one time viewer.
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Captain Marvel. Believe it or not for the first time. I finally got around to picking up the DVD in a sale.
It's not the best Marvel movie but was acres better than certain Youtube type people like to assure viewers that it is. I honestly enjoyed it.
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About MARRIAGE STORY (2019) directed by Noah Baumbach--with reference to:
THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (2017) directed by Noah Baumbach; ALWAY BE MY MAYBE (2019) directed by Nahnatchka Khan ; BEFORE YOU KNOW IT (2019) directed by Hannah Pearl Utt.
At a younger age, in my psychology class, I learned about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Abraham Maslow proposed that we have basic needs and, once these are met, we go on to higher needs, finally arriving at self-actualization. For a long time I thought Maslow was onto something. But watching Noah Baumbach's latest movie, MARRIAGE STORY (2019), I was reminded that satisfying our basic needs doesn't always make most of us become better people.
Maslow was probably selling an elitist notion that somehow people who are at the top of the pyramid are better versions of humanity. Whereas, it's painfully obvious they aren't. When people get all their needs met, they're just as likely to become horribly self-involved people who don't care about anyone else's problems but their own. Sometimes the people most in need are capable of greater compassion, willing to put the needs of others before their own, because they know what it is to suffer.
To be perfectly honest, I came into MARRIAGE STORY with my mind already set against it. By the end, I was emotionally invested in the outcome; however, once it was over, I found myself despising the movie and the story it told.
My main complaint is that we have had so many of these movies for over a century now about white, privileged rich people and their personal problems. It's high time we got more movies concerned with the 99% of people in the world, those who are not well off and have far greater challenges in life.
What prompted me to watch this movie was a review from "Breakfast All Day"--although I think they come from a very inside-Hollywood point of view and don't reflect my own perspective on movies--and mainly in terms of the director, Noah Bombach, whose previous movie, THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES (2017), I enjoyed so much I watched it twice.
In fact, there's another similar movie I watched the other day--BEFORE YOU KNOW IT (2019)--and my complaint about that move is it wasn't as well executed as THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES. I think that's because MEYEROWITZ displays a greater awareness of all classes and isn't merely about this one self-involved set of artsy people who have it all (yet act like they need to have more).
I suppose ALWAYS BE MY MAYBE (2019) is seen as a break-through, because instead of well-off white people getting it all, we finally see another group of people--Asian-Americans--getting the same treatment. But is that a success? We're still getting stories about people with every advantage--and we're expected to relate to them, even though the rest of us will never have that level of wealth.
One detail I didn't like in ALWAYS BE MY MAYBE is that the supposedly less well-off man nevertheless manages to travel by air from the west coast to the east coast, at the drop of a hat, without suffering crippling debt. And the same thing happens in this movie and repeatedly. Clearly these people have money, even if they act like they don't.
I also didn't think much of Randy Newman's score--which is nominated for a Golden Globe. It's all pretty and nice--like a Flintstone vitamin--getting us to swallow what's supposed to be good for us. In fact, the movie is nominated for six Golden Globes.
It rankles me that this movie is getting more awards attention than THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES, which I feel is the better movie. But I can see why--because MARRIAGE STORY is about the set of people (directors and actors) that Hollywood knows best--they can relate to these characters even if I can't.
Still, MARRIAGE STORY provoked a response from me and I'm grateful to it for that, at least. If it wasn't good on some level, I probably wouldn't give it so much time.
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The Irishman: The cgi faces of DeNiro and Al Pacino ruined it for me. They weren't the same. The movie was very boring and slow, what good actors can compensate, but in this case I watched some horrible gestalt. Sorry, that was bad.
6 Underground: crazy fast paced with some innovative action scenes and very good kills, but that's it. The rest of the film is bland and it gets boring very fast. Near the end I couldn't watch the action anymore, because it was just too much. Like in John Wick 2 and 3...
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Just got back from Parasite. It might be the best movie I've ever seen. A lot to unpack and a lot to mull over, but it grabbed me by the shirt collar and wouldn't let go for the entire second and third act.
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Knives out. I think this is my favorite movie of the year. Its edging out Jojos rabbit but just barely for me.