I don’t really care about Star Wars
the last jedi was amazing. thats my hot take
I agree
Movie theaters are money sinks for idiots.
Nolan movies are mid
Please include a good movie or producer. Otherwise the gatekeeper can’t judge you in their mind.
His characters just exist to move the plot forward, I never get the feeling that they have any agency or personality beyond existing so they can be in a Nolan movie.
Exactly. And the style, while it’s pretty and cool looking, works together with the paper-thin characters to give this introspective muffled and artificial feel to all of his works.
He’s a good director, but he keeps making gimmicky films. Someone should hire him with an actually good story.
I kind of find the gimmicks to be the most enjoyable parts of his movies. They’re also very pretty.
Yeah, but his films are all hermetic and self-contained, there’s nothing for me in them except the gimmick. I have no desire to rewatch ‘Tenet’ or ‘Inception’, because understanding the story better gives me absolutely bupkis. The stories aren’t in any way connected to the wider world and have zero impression on my life afterwards. Like, the mystery in ‘The Name of the Rose’ is a gimmick, but it remains interesting because it has layers and lots of connections to history and stuff.
If Nolan directed some kinda sci-fi ‘Robinson Crusoe’, I might’ve been left with an urge to build a hut and defensive walls and gather resources, like it happened with the book and some of Cory Doctorow’s novels. But his films don’t even give me that. It’s kind of an achievement in itself, really.
P.S. Actually, there are plenty of self-contained gimmicky films that I still want to revisit sometimes. E.g. ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ entirely consists of editing tricks, but it works. Lynch’s films are self-contained and often don’t even have a story. Idk what it is with Nolan’s films, but they’re dry as fuck.
They are mid, but that’s better than most of what hollywood shits out.
Most movies suck but people don’t realize it because they’re stupid cows.
Most movies suck
That’s probably true except people know how to avoid those ones. I don’t think 90% of movies suck, it’s more like 50-60%
Sturgeon’s Law says that 90% of movies do indeed suck. And given how anyone can make a movie these days with their phones, that’s more likely to be accurate than ever before.
Tell sturgeon to stick to sturgery, I’ll stick to celebrating my hobbies 😜
Star Wars holds a place in my heart mainly for nostalgia reasons. Seeing those original films for the first time was formative back in the day when I was a wee cunt. But yeah, they’re pretty indefensible from a film criticism standpoint.
My takes:
- Goodfellas is fine. It’s a’ight. It’s about 900% more beloved than it deserves. Casino was better, even though it was the same damn movie.
- On Goodfellas: Ray Liotta is fucking awful in it. He gives me second-hand embarrassment watching him. He’s been great in other roles, but he just seemed so out of his depth trying to hold his own in amongst the De Niros and Pescis of the world. I also think the actor playing Big Paulie was fucking awful, but he doesn’t have much screen time so it’s easy to forget how shit he was.
- Also - and lastly, I swear - on Goodfellas: the editing is less “fractured and frenetic like the rapidly-imploding mind of the main character” and more like “fractured and frenetic like the coked up Parkinson’s-suffering editor during a violent bowel movement”. Unnecessarily janky and rough around every single edge, to put it mildly.
- Nic Cage should not be allowed to be in films, full stop. Not even a documentary about Nic Cage in which he agrees with me, personally, through the camera that he’s terrible.
- The Godfather III was good. Yeah, not as good as I and II, and the downright offensively-bad acting from Andy Garcia (you thought I was about to complain about Sofia Coppola, didn’t ya? Andy was an order of magnitude worse) definitely knocks a few stars off my IMDb rating, but the film was fine.
- I’ve posted about this in Unpopular Opinion before, but I think remakes and reboots are great, as long as the film-makers are trying to do their best and make an honest go of it. I especially love when a film is transported from one culture into another. For example, Unforgiven - the Clint Eastwood modern classic - was remade in Japan, except instead of the gunslinging Wild West it was the samurai-sword-swingin’ Meiji period. How cool is that shit? I love it. Now I have two awesome movies where before there was only one.
Casino was better
Stopped reading here
I take umbrage at item 4, but I don’t have the time for the correct kind of reply.
If you could go to chatgpt and put in this prompt for me and then read the result, that’d be great.
“Please make a long, meandering reply to the assertion that Nic Cage should not be in movies, stating that Nic Cage is perfect for those movies that need that Nic Cage energy.”
I disagree with 4. Nic Cage is a great actor, he just isn’t going to give a subdued method actor style of performance.
I’m just happy with myself for sitting through a whole movie. I have no idea if it was good or bad. It’s always good I sat through a movie.
Movies are going to go away because either no one has the attention span for them or they want a full season of prestige television.
I genuinely do not want to see famous actors in any media, at all. I don’t want to recognize anyone in a movie.
The Bear had an episode with a family reunion where everyone was a famous actor, so you have some familiarity with them, but they were so characterized, it wasn’t off-putting.
I do agree though those actors that are always the same persona (e.g. The Rock), do throw me away from what I’m watching.
I always find the first moments of movies with famous actors disconcerting. Why is Jack from Titanic here? Oh, he is not Jack from Titanic, just has his body-suit…
My son is big cinephile, and he complains about how contemporary movies are all filled with people who look like nepo-baby actors. He says they all have iPhone face: no matter what time period they’re supposed to be in, they all look like they’ve seen an iPhone.
He longs for the old days when older unattractive actors were in demand as character actors.
Which is why I can’t stand Will Smith movies. Or Vin Diesel. Or any of the other dozen actors who don’t actually go out of their way and act.
‘Black Mirror’ was great because I don’t know anyone in it.
anyone making noise, shining lights, or blocking the screen should immediately be thrown out.
I don’t think anyone has “cared” about SW since the prequels (besides children, ofc, I was one of them!), tbh.
modern movies suck today because Hollywood stopped telling stories and started selling fantasies.
take for example two movies that are somewhat similar, Falling Down (1993) and Law Abiding Citizen (2009).
In FD the audience spends 75% of the movie following a guy around who is clearly not well. he’s the antihero that we all sometimes wish we could be, but we also acknowledge it’s moralistically unjust to just go around blowing shit up and shooting at people. towards the end of the movie you understand the real cause of why he was acting the way he was which made his character even more relatable. it made you question our society and the cruel realities that everyday people survive. it makes you think that maybe that “pocket protecting pencil pusher” has more in common with you than you’d like to admit.
In LAC the audience is immediately jarred by a violent sexual event that charges you with a desire for revenge. The rest of the movie is about a guy taking that revenge and getting some sadistic pleasure from it. you aren’t supposed to relate to the main character, or any character in the entire movie. everyone is shitty except for his dead wife and kid. The premise of the entire movie is to make the audience feel good that “justice” is being administered and sugar coats it in a high fructose action syrup. by the end of the movie you’re filled with rage of the injustices within our own world and feel as if you have been wronged like the main character. you spend the rest of the night imagining your own revenge if you were the main character.
FD tells the story of how far a broken man will go if he has everything taken from him.
LAC sells the fantasy that revenge is action packed and you will always win if your cause is righteous and just.
that said, don’t get me wrong. I liked both movies, but I’m not going to lie to myself and say that LAC isn’t just revenge porn.
modern movies are flat and simple because audiences lack the mental capacity they used to have. this is because we no longer watch them for entertainment, we watch to escape our own realities.
edit: oh yeah and sound engineers can suck fucking dick if they can’t understand how to level out the foreground, background, and vocals for a regular not action movie. I’m tired of reading subtitles.
So did not have one but after reading through a day of responses I realize my hot take is I am so out of watching things in general that I cannot recognize tons of stuff.
Denis either didn’t get Dune (doubt it, or at least I’d like to believe so, seeing how fascinated he’s been with Dune, historically, but he’s a visual artist and not a philosopher/writer so it’s always possible) or was forced by money people for money reasons to drastically change some important characters in ways that make no internal sense (but are more appealing to the Western audience). Both movies are basically just well shot, very pretty spectacles and, if you’ve read Dune, you know the essence of it is in the silent reflection, logical inferences and ideological battles, so even at their core the movies failed to understand Herbert. Idk, it’s just a mess, a very pretty one but “random religious disunity in a group that actually believes and is currently being subjugated by the great powers” and “spicy, annoying, immature New-Yorker who’s supposed to be the ideal, loving and wise woman (and much of the reason why the plot advances at all) for a man assaulted by visions and the pressure of power” definitely soured the whole watching experience.
Books and movies have very different options and rules for storytelling. Changes must be made and those decisions will never make everybody happy. I realized at one point that a movie or show, even if it’s retelling a story from a book, will never match my expectations. It’s always just another entry in that stories universe. That allowed me to enjoy adaptations more.
True just like the Lord of the rings.
Must? Idk about that. Will, sure, for financial reasons usually, but there were too many big, nonsensical changes in Denis story… This is like making Sam from LOTR a sneaky, dishonest fella but keeping the rest of the story as it is. 🤷
A book can just tell you what a character is thinking, your focus as a reader is always exactly where the writer wants it to be, because there is nothing to focus on but the words. None of that translates to movies. The broad rule for screenplays is that one page translates to one minute of runtime. You can’t directly translate a 400 page book into a screenplay. You must adapt it and make changes. Some are easy, because descriptions of how something looks like become an image. Others are difficult.
I look at it more that Denis made a lot of choices to remove a lot of the more esoteric elements to fit that it was a movie and a sequel made years later. A lot was removed from the book, but it still feels well paced for two movies.
And if you’re going to make significant cuts, you might as well cut out the really weird shit.
The entire concept of cinemas is obsolete and I can’t wait for the last one to go out of business.
Watching a movie at home on my 120" projector with 5.1 and comfy chairs with my wife and the furkids is a far better experience than I’ve probably ever had at a cinema - partly because I can control the sound level, it’s just too loud at the cinema.
Too many movies are formulaic and boring. Even if fun, they can be boring substantially.
