General Film Chat

[Hayden]

Word is Lynch has a film premiering at Cannes.

EDIT: Nope Nevermind.

"That’s a total rumor. So there you are. It is not happening. I don’t have a project. I have nothing at Cannes. It’s unfortunate. It got built up that people thought, “Oh, that’d be nice.” But there is something new, but it’s not mine. I don’t know whose it is. They say there’s something new at Cannes, and they don’t say whose it is, and some people thought it was my film, but it’s not. So we'll wait and see, and see whose it is." - Lynch

[Hayden]

[AgainstMeAgainstYou]

Ambulance is atrocious. Bay's all-time worst film, which is REALLY saying something.

Better Call Saul is four-for-four so far with its final season re: perfect episodes.

[Hayden]

[Hayden]

Cannes Awards—

Palme d'Or: Triangle of Sadness by Ruben Östlund
Grand Prix: Close by Lukas Dhont / Stars at Noon by Claire Denis
Best Director: Park Chan-wook for Decision to Leave
Best Actress: Zahra Amir Ebrahimi for Holy Spider
Best Actor: Song Kang-ho for Broker
Best Screenplay: Tarik Saleh for Boy from Heaven
Jury Prize: EO by Jerzy Skolimowski / The Eight Mountains by Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch
75th Anniversary Prize: Tori and Lokita by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Shocked Östlund won again. Figured it'd be Close for sure (nothing wrong with the Grand Prix though). Very happy for Park Chan-wook and Song Kang-ho (both just coincidentally Korean). Zahra Amir Ebrahimi winning is also awesome to see.

Looking forward to EO quite a bit. Glad it ended up with a major prize as well.

[Applerill]

I'll admit that it's weird for Lukas Dhont to show up again, because when I started my debut feature The Squish Trilogy in early 2019, my decision to avoid miserablism as much as possible was based on Girl dropping on Netflix that March, and me realizing that, as much as the things depicted reflect my feelings, that there had to be more than that depicted as the trans lifestyle.

(And strangely enough, as I saw the new and very uncomfortable Contrapoints video "The Hunger" last night, the closest reference point I felt was to... Lukas Dhont's Girl)

I probably will give his new movie another chance, but I can't say I'm not nervous.

Anyway, I liked The Square when it came out, but looking back, it was more than a little silly, and based on dispatches over the past week, I don't think that Ruben has gotten any more subtle.

[AgainstMeAgainstYou]

I've seen Top Gun: Maverick twice now and it's baffling to me that I've given and cemented perfect marks to a TOP GUN SEQUEL. We are in a Platinum Age of cinema.

[Applerill]

Yeah, it definitely was beautifully shot, and even had a lot of charm to it at times, but often it felt so uncannily like a nicecore version of Full Metal Jacket? I guess most people would instead frame it as the converse, something like "military Mighty Ducks"; but it genuinely felt so weird that the movie treats the idea of taking such talented young people and literally putting them in death machines that could risk their lives? It's clear that Cruise meant it as a mise en abyme for the style he and McQuarry have done on the Mission Impossible movie, but even though he might be thinking of his own mortality, this is still SUCH a weird way to frame a movie that's mostly very sweet.

It's also very paradoxical in a pair of ways with this conceit.
1. A lot of the conceit is supposed to be contrasted with the "soulless" CGI aesthetics of Marvel movies, but while looking at these actors doing their own piloting and cinematography is amazingly impressive ,the way they're strapped into such a claustrophobic cockpit almost creates a minor body horror element, almost like they're entering the EVA or something. I guess I could sorta compare it with the way the original Top Gun was simultaneously misogynist and homoerotic. (Full disclosure: I currently have both movies at 3 stars)
And
2. The fact that the movie frames the human actors as replacing drones, yet the main way most leftist think of drones as a concept is the idea of removing the "human element" from military violence, which is.... exactly how the film presents the "bad guys". So it's almost like the movie IS a drone (when I told my best friend Kaleigh this, she said "A VIDEODROME!" and she was very proud of herself for making a cinephillia joke that made sense)

So yeah, I still think it was really powerful in ways, but it is.... messy.

[AgainstMeAgainstYou]

I had been thinking lately that my 10/10s were getting absolutely out of hand from 2020 onwards, but now that I've laid them out like this, it feels a lot more reasonable.

https://twitter.com/zachbmarsh/status/1...w&s=19

[Applerill]

Yeah, I'll admit that I've gotten a lot more strict with my 5-star movies, and there are currently only 6 from this decade (with the high possibility of most of them leaving eventually):
Spiderman No Way Home
Little Girl
Turning Red
Emergency
Labyrinth of Cinema
(And my friend Calob Robinson's new movie Hotel)

Obviously one thing these all have in common is that I didn't see any of them in 2020, which makes me wonder if there's a recency bias to even these, even if otherwise the 5-stars I add are ones that have grown on me. Just like with my year-end lists, if someone asked me what the best movies of the decade were, and these were what I submitted, I'd feel a little embarrassed.