Joel M
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Posts posted by Joel M
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Super Dark Times. Visually very interesting but it's too self serious which is a problem because it gets dumber with every minute that passes until the laughable finale. The kids are good though.
Truth or Dare director's cut. That's even more ridiculous and way more bland but it's the fun kind of dumb. Didn't really deserve the trashing it got on release. It's ok for a gimmicky teen movie and at least it isn't boring. That demon really was just a messy bitch who lives for drama lol
Love & Basketball. Really good emotional rom com and really good basketball movie. I had no idea about it until the Blank Check podcast started doing Gina Prince Bythewood movies. Criminally underrated movie.
Palm Springs. Very cute movie and smart spin on the time-loop gimmick. Also Samberg and Milioti have great chemistry. I wonder if this could have been the rare indie summer hit ala Peanut Butter Falcon in normal non-corona times. It definately has the goods.
rewatch
Blues Brothers. I used to watch it all the time as a kid but never really had it up there with my favorites. Now it plays like a towering masterpiece that can never be repeated.
A.I.-Minority Report-Catch me if you Can. I love love that 2 year period of Spielberg. I guess even if they have only grown in esteem they 're still considered "minor Spielberg" just because he already had 6-7 zeitgeist defining classics before them, but they are absolutely major works and among his best.
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It's pretty common for middle age or older male stars to play a decade younger.
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13 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:
Watched Walter Hill’s lesser-known 1981 classic Southern Comfort the other day.
Driver and Long Riders, the other 2 movies he did around his most famous hits are also pretty great. You should watch them if you havent already.
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Shazam. Cute movie, I enjoyed the foster home/kid stuff, Mark Strong and his monsters not so much. If there ever was a superhero movie that didn't need a villain at all it was probably this one.
The Rental. Nothing grounbreaking but it's interesting and fun in surprising ways. Well done lil Franco.
How to Train your Dragon 3. It's a bit better and less busy than no2 but ofc not as good as the breathtaking original. In hindsight this is a very good franchise as a whole. The animation gets more striking with every movie, the music is amazing all the way through and there's genuine earned emotion in every single one of them. DreamWorks should be very proud of this despite it never exploding like other properties.
Rewatch
Suspiria (2018). Watched it with a friend who hasn't seen it and despised all of it. Words like pretentious bullshit were yelled angrily at the TV but personally I love it. Would let Dakota Johnson puppet dance me into a pile of bones.
TV
The Alienist. Just gave it a try because I like all of the main cast but it's a tedious and tasteless mess. Felt bad for all the good actors throughout the 2 episodes I watched, I hope at least they got some good money for this.
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Atlantics. Very strange movie, shifts from naturalism to the fantastical without needing much effort and while it gets a bit messy towards the end, it's still one of the most unique movies I 've seen in years.
Alpha. Meh, by the numbers and not even that well executed "boy and his pet" movie with some really bad animal cgi and even worse human performances. The dog is a stone cold movie star though.
rewatch
The adventures of Tintin. Lots of fun and the motorcycle chase is still one of the most insane sequences of Spielberg's entire career but the Tintin mocap just bothers me every time there's a close up. It's all really Zemeckies fault.
Munich. The last truly great Spielberg movie imo. It still irks me a bit that the Greek scenes are so obviously not shot in Athens, but that's on Greece being a bureaucratic nightmare andnot the filmmakers fault.
Lincoln. A very well crafted and surprisingly engaging movie despite the "boring" subject matter. I still have very little passion for it and the last couple of minutes still feel like the ending to a completely different much worse movie.
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Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It was so gorgeous and so understated, there are some moments in this movie that were just overwhelming for me. And the ending is 🔥🔥🔥 .
Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think I haven't seen it in over a decade, but there's still not much to say. Almost every frame of it is iconic. And it's so amusing to me, that they are still trying to rename it for the sake of brand synergy. There's real worry people won't recognise one of the most famous movies ever made if it doesn't say Indiana Jones in front of it.
IJ and the Temple of Doom. I hear the complaints about the bumbling love interest but this remains one of my favorite Spielberg movies. It's so wild, so crazy and moves at such a breakneck pace I love every minute of it. It's also a very different movie than Raiders, just takes the same character and throws him into a different situation with different stakes and even different iconography. And Harrison Ford was at peak hotness in this movie.
IJ and the Last Crusade. My minor issue with this is that it's the exact opposite of Doom. It's a bit too much like the first one. Same conflict with a race against the Nazis for a religious artifact, same structure, same sidekicks with expandeds roles, even half a dozen references to how much indy hates snakes. I think the opening segment is the best in the franchise and all the Connery stuff are perfect but a lot of the movie feels like its using Raiders as visual and storytelling crutch. None of it is bad, it's a very good movie. It just doesn't have the same spark as the first two.
IJ and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull. Like most belated sequels it is a mixed bag of cool stuff and lame stuff. My initial reaction in 08 was whatever but watching it now I thinks it's more cool than lame.
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Bad Times at the El Royale. I was really into it for almost two hours but it kinda falls apart in the last 30-40 minutes. Still worth a watch though despite where it ends up.
Interstellar. After enough rewatches this is just a masterpiece imo. Everything about it feels monumental, best nolan movie ever, all you need is love, Dr. Brand Hathaway was right about everything.
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Sunset Boulevard is the second best 1950 movie about an aging Hollywood diva.
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Slow week
Win It All. I kinda liked it. I'm not at all a fan of mumblecore but this was easily the most conventional Swanberg and it felt for once like a real movie, also Jake Johnson is great in it. Shame he never really made it in movies, there's always many sad sack roles around in comedies and dramas alike he could play to perfection.
The Old Guard. Decent action movie with an interesting gimmick and great performances by everyone including Dudley from Harry Potter. BUT. I feel this is a problem that all streaming "blockbusters" have, they just look like cheaper versions of big movies that would have been released theatrically. Even when they 're well directed like this one, when most of the action takes place in warehouses and offices or at night or shot extremely up close you feel like they cut corners to save money. Pretty common tv tricks to hide the financial limitations of the medium. Old Guard might have cost more than Atomic Blonde because Charlize might got 2x the salary from Netflix but the movie just looks cheaper. On the other hand this isn't the case at all for the auteur Netflix movies which feel like they got exactly the budget they wanted maybe even more.
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I have no opinion on Hamilton's quality but I don't get why anyone would want to give it the biggest movie prize around. I get that it is appealing as an entity to oscar voters because rich white people love their hip musicals, but it's still just a filmed play.
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59 minutes ago, Cap said:
My mom was sooooo pissed Will Ferrell played the role. “He is too old! Ruins the whole movie!!” I was like, yes, but VALCONO MAN mom. And Dan Stevens 🥰
the timeline is very wonky anyway because they wanted to include the Abba contest, if anything McAdams is the one too young to play a 50 year old woman lol. I think he's fine, just that his whole comedic persona is old hat by now.
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Sonic. A big yawn. Not even Jim Carrey being back on his bullshit can inject some life into it. Pikachu was much much better.
July 22. I 'll still defend some of the older Greengrass docu-dramas but this one was atrocious. It would 've been bad anyway but choosing to frame this unspeakable tragedy as a simple story of good trumps evil is just so tasteless. fuck this movie.
Unfriended: Dark Web. Don't know how much life this online footage sub-sub-genre will have but atm I'm here for it. This was much better realised and got more mileage from the gimmick than the first movie, which was already decent.
Rewatch
Hot Fuzz. Probably can recite most of it from memory but it was on Netflix.
Miami Vice. Might actually be my favorite Mann. Colin and Gong Li dancing in the club still gets me weak on my knees.
Eurovision movie. This plays much better on a second viewing maybe because the songs are so earwormy maybe because it's actually quite good. I still think like most that the Will Ferell man child thing being dead centre in the movie is the weakest part, but even for Ferell this is his best moment since The Other Guys.
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The Firm. So aggresively 90s it's no surprise it has been so forgotten compared to other peak Cruise blockbusters. It's definately way too long and boring but I liked some parts especially the climax where it's Cruise just running around in suit and briefcase and performing gymnastics for some reason to defeat the villains.
The Lovebirds. Classic case of two hilarious people being stuck in a movie half as funny as they actually are.
She's Gotta Have It. Pretty great and very hot movie, the only thing that hasn't aged that well is the way it kinda waves off what happens near the end.
Murder Mystery. I might be turning into a Sandler apologist post Uncut Gems but this was .....decent? Definately the best Happy Madison movie in over a decade for whatever that's worth.
Searching. Very good movie and I think what elevates it for me above being just a cool experiment is what might turn off a lot of people. I thought it started getting stale halfway through but then it kept piling on the twists until it crossed into ludicrous territory. Managed to be pretty fun while also maintaining an emotional core all the way through.
Eurovision: Fire Saga. Not as funny as I had hoped but it was pretty decent. McAdams kills it and should finally being given a comedy all to herself after this and Game Night, and that party song-along was a legit iconic moment. Also just retroactively award Eurovision 2020 to Dan Stevens since it got canceled.
Rewatch.
The Warriors. Haven't seen it since my teens but it remains a near masterpiece. And it wouldn't be half as great if everyone wasn't dressed like shitty boy bands. That entire late 70s-early 80s Walter Hill period is low-key one of the best director streaks ever.
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1 hour ago, filmlover said:
I shared a long article last week in this thread about the troubled history behind Atlantis: The Lost Empire and how Disney had such massive hopes for it to change the course of their studio and how it all fell apart after the movie flopped. Same thing definitely applies to the following year's Treasure Planet, which was a far bigger bomb that basically killed their traditional animation studio at a time when the format was already being phased out by Pixar/DreamWorks. Curiously both of those were regular action movies coming after they spent the 90s making a fortune on fairy tale musicals. Eisner must've been worried that they were becoming too alienating to boys.
I don't remember renaissance movies being talked about as too girly at the time, that particular panic only happened a decade later with Princess and the Frog falling flat and then Disney trying to hide Tangled is a princess musical. It was more their post-TLK hits having diminishing returns and their success being old news next to PIXAR/DW breaking out. They had already started slowly phasing out the musical aspect with Mulan and Tarzan, and with Tarzan being their biggest hit since TLK and their most action oriented movie ever they probably thought going full on action adventure could be their new big thing. It wasn't sadly, because Treasure Planet was a gem. A bit ugly because of too much CGI but still a gem.
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If the awards indeed happen, I feel it will be the type of year when something that isn't on the predictors radar before the fall will win.
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12 hours ago, John Marston said:
I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and is this show really supposed to be good? It feels like I’m watching episodes of Goosebumps
It has it's ups and downs but it's great. It's also a cult show from the 90s. I absolutely love it but I remember even in 2005 when I started watching it the production values made it a pretty rough watch until deep into season 2. I can't imagine how much rougher it 'll look to someone watching in 2020 for the first time. Pretty much all the exterior/graveyard scenes of the extremely low budget 1st season were shot on the studio parking lot. It gets a decent budget from season 2 onwards but only decent for WB standards. It was never a big network tentpole show like X-Files or Lost.
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47 minutes ago, Barnack said:
It would quite something for a serious media outlet to publish a story about an anonymous twitter account without some validating work.
43 minutes ago, WittyUsername said:I mean, false allegations do in fact happen. That happened to Johnny Depp and ProJared. I’m not saying this is false, but suggesting that any serious allegation of misconduct must be true, because you can’t imagine why someone would lie about it, is a pretty dangerous precedent to try and set.
yeah sorry, I didn't mean that it's definately true just because she tweeted it.
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Wow. This is kinda huge. How can you think this will go away or major outlets won't pick it up is beyond me. Do you think she's some crazy person publicly accusing someone of something so serious just for attention?
I don't know how defamation lawsuits work but I assume the girl has at least something to back up her very serious claims even if it isn't enough to send Ansel in jail. Otherwise she would have been sued into oblivion by everyone and maybe go to jail herself, no? So I think she must have something which mean Elgort is over and so is the current version of West Side Story. They 're definately have postpone and reshoot his part.
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Inception after the re-release.
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9 hours ago, Barnack said:
Gotta pay the bills for Tribeca somehow.
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To me Lindo doesn't seem close to the borderline cases of Parasite and Favorite. He's definately the lead. It is ensemble but the focus is explicitly on him, half of Majors and Peters screentime is reacting to him, even the flashbacks are half about him half about everyone else combined. Ofc they can fraud him into supporting because it's "ensemble" but this isn't a case of a movie having multiple people with equal focus and someone has to go supporting. The movie has only one lead and it's Lindo.
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Birds of Prey. Loved the aesthetic, loved the villain and Margot as Harley but the structure of it is a bit disastrous. To the point every character and team moment in the final act doesn't feel earned. A mixed bag.
1917. Looks pretty but it barely registers as a movie in the end and is more than a little boring. The one take angle pretty much undones any tension they 're trying to build. Also Tommen is hilariously bad in it. Would be very funny if this bullshit had actually won Best Picture or Director.
The King. Timmy is fine and RPatz is hilarious in his few scenes. The movie in general is pretty decent but like Outlaw King the "epic scale" of it is only epic for TV standards. I guess Netflix doesn't have that much money after all.
The Hunt. The first 20 minutes are genuinely exciting and the last 20 absolulety hilarious. As a whole it's a shrug of a movie and I don't think they manage to drive home their point whatever that point was.
The Nightingale. A harrowing watch especially at the start but it gets much more palpatable in the process. Kent has some pretty bad insticts (like the dream sequences) but it's definately an interesting story told without holding back.
Da 5 Bloods. I was not that enarmored with the obviousness of the first hour and some choices like the flashbacks and the video gamey firefights threw me off a bit but after the "incident" the movie just levels up almost immediately. I like it about as much as Klansman, that was more polished and concentrated all around but this one aims much higher and when it hits those highs damn.
Rewatch
Disturbia. Such an entertaining movie, such an inspiring riff on a classic. Shia had some real PRESENCE even when he looked like a 15-year old. If they had handled the terrible girlfriend character and the ensuing romance with at least a little care this would have been one of the best teen movies of the 00s.
A Cure for Wellness. I think I mostly liked it back in 2016 just because someone let this batshit insane movie happen. Now I'm pretty sure I love it. I need some GORE in my life again.
The Lighthouse.
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6 minutes ago, lorddemaxus said:
Lmao, why is the Last of Us 2 discourse still so toxic? First it was "this game is going to get bad reviews" and now since it got amazing reviews, it's "the game has you kill dogs so its misery porn".
If you think the conversation is toxic now, just wait a week. It's been the biggest incel/sjws ruin everything target since the "kiss" on the Left Behind dlc. It's gonna get user review bombed next week and even if/when it breaks sales records and win all the awards these people will still make their own alternate reality on their online corner. Reviews and awards are bought, sales are fake, people who like it are not real gamers etc. Just type Last Jedi on ytb and see what comes up😂
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Name & Rate the Movies/TV You've Watched.
in Box Office Discussion
Posted
Yeah War of the Worlds is great up to a certain point but The Terminal not so much. Haven't seen it in ages but I remember it as one of the more listless Spielberg movies.