I’d just like to add to @Rock8man’s list that Possessor should be available on Hulu come February 1st according to this article
I just watched Possessor today. It…was a painful laborious watch. I came away with just…this is fucking terrible. I never want to watch this movie again…
Good movie?
Man, I wouldn’t even know how to put down a top ten for 2020. My seeing new releases dropped of a cliff with no cinema to go to. I mean Birds of Prey made it before the cutoff, Invisible Man, I guess Tenet makes it by default. Palm Springs? Direct to Netflix action like Lost Bullet?
As far as I’m concerned, I walked into a cinema to see Color out of Space, and the color burned the rest of the year away. Movie of the year by a country mile.
Odds are, it’d have been it anyway, because I adored that movie, but if we’re going to have an apocalyptic hell year, that was definitely the movie for it. I so hope Stanley gets to make the two followups he’s planning.
I wonder if I actually watched more movies this year than other years. Clearly more trash, but without being able to go to theaters, I spent a lot of time just desperate for whatever new releases I could find.
Ha ha, we saw Birds of Prey. I watched that again after seeing it in the theater and still enjoyed it. Plenty of dumbness, but also plenty of charm and so much fun energy from Margot Robbie and Ewan MacGregor.
I have no idea what this is, but it’s now in my queue!
-Tom
When I wasn’t in a fugue of video games and podcasts, I gravitated more towards catching up on older stuff. Partly of it is that streaming is much worse for recent releases over here.
I could setup a vpn to get around that, but so far the part of me that’s fuck that, I’m not doing that amount of work for what should be part of the offering has won out.
Come on - Birds of Prey is not ha ha worthy. The police station fight was worth the price of admission on its own.
I…was going to offer more opinions, but I’ll let you go in blind.
You know, fair point. A little glitter with your non-lethal beanbags goes a long way. I certainly think it’s better than those rote superhero movies everyone else loves: Antman, Captain America: Winter Man, non-Waititi Thor movies, either of the Wonder Womens.
-Tom
No, but will check it out. Thanks!
Tom, do you know what the hell was going on in the final third of I’m Thinking of Ending Things? Is it gauche of me to ask? I mean look, I’m up for Fellini, Bergman, Ozu, whatever. But I don’t think I followed Kaufman around that last bend.
I think so, although I suspect there’s just enough surrealism that it might not be one of those airtight narratives that you can “solve”. And not at all gauche to ask! My read of the end is that the story is all in Jesse Plemons’ head. It’s a fake-out where you think Jesse Buckley is the first-person narrator, but it turns out it’s Jesse Plemons as an old man looking back on his failed relationship. Basically, a lonely old man’s regret.
I suspect it might be a bit clearer watching it a second time, but like Synecdoche, it’s really not a movie I’m ready to watch a second time. Did you like I’m Thinking of Ending Things? It really took me thinking about it for a few days before I decided I didn’t hate it. :)
-Tom
I support Betty Gilpin’s grand entrance into action films because, unlike Tom, I am not a monster.
Also, it’s my favorite Lindelof werdz since Watchmen.
F,
Qtchk
It goes too fast and you’ll never forget it. A perfectly crystallized vision of – and my favorite time leap – well, you’ll see.
My favorite Phildickian thing not based on Phildickian werdz.
fuk u CHIKK,
Bucky
ps. mandalorian finale sez sup
For what it’s worth, my read on I’m Thinking of Ending Things was the same as Tom’s. But I’m not exactly a deep thinker.
I cheated and looked up how the book did it.
Everything is in the old man’s head, day dreaming all this stuff up while he goes about is janitorial work… and he commits suicide at the end. So “I’m thinking of ending things” refers to the suicide, not the girl wanting to break off the relationship.
It explains why all this weird crap is happening and the girl isn’t totally freaked out at all, because she is a mere figment of the imaginary!
Well the book (that I looked up on Wikipedia) is its own thing, but I got the mostly same feeling from the movie:
Jake is fantasizing a girlfriend, and she keeps changing because he’s constantly imagining different versions of his ideal woman. So she switches from a biologist to a poet to physicist. He read a book of poetry when he was young, so Dream Woman wrote those poems. There’s a book by Pauline kael in his room, so at one point she becomes Pauline Kael. But the movie is mostly from her viewpoint, so we see the imaginary woman trying to make sense from her disjointed, shifting existence. She is absolutely freaked out.
4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Lovecraft Country - HBO, Jordan Peele, Misha Green, Bad Robot
I always point to the air traffic controller scene of Close Encounters to illustrate a point I always make: Hollywood has forgotten how to portray believable workplaces.
The decline/nosedive began with Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay in the mid 90s. Emmerich had to make every professional a WACKY goofball. Bay had to make them all swaggering frat bro rockstars. Most other movies of the 90s would follow suit (Twister).
During the 00s, The Aaron Sorkin walk & talk took over. Every professional was now way too obnoxiously clever for their own good.
The 2010s was the decade of Whedon. Every single professional was now a Buffy character who only existed to spout zany quips at their Quippy McQuipperson coworkers.
It’s depressing when you compare workplace professionals in movies of the last 30 years to stuff like The Andromeda Strain, Close Enouncters, The China Syndrome, hell even pre-80s shlock like Earthquake and Towering Inferno.
United 93 had some of that low-key Close Encounters vibe.
Just watched Towering Inferno a few weeks back, and found it’s still great fun. I’ll never call a movie that stars both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman “shlock”.
I’ll give you Earthquake, though.