Good or New Movies Review

[Coin]

@three-eyed-crow said in Good or New Movies Review:

Super belatedly.

"Wrinkle in Time" was an interesting watch for me, because it didn't work but it's one of those things that didn't work for reasons I find kind of intellectually interesting to take apart. Its failings are as much as on me as on the movie. It wasn't really the adaptation I-the-reader wanted. It wasn't really aimed at even as broad an audience as something like the Pixar movies was, but lived firmly in the realm of being first and foremost for kids. My expectations were for something different when Ava Duvernay was attached to the project and were calibrated incorrectly, not in terms of quality but in terms of the movie she and the studio (who knows which, a lot my issues were script-level) were clearly interested in making. I didn't love it but am certainly not sorry I paid money to see it in a theater.

It is probably as good an adaptation as we'll ever get and a lot the performances and visuals were fun (loved Zach Galifianakis' Happy Medium cave).

I get that.

I tend to try to divorce myself from the source material as much as possible when watching adaptations of things I really like. I put my expectations on the same level as I would going in to watch something new. It works for me--I tend to enjoy things a lot more than I have when I have NOT done that. I didn't do it (initially) for example, for Keanu Reeves' Constantine and left the theater really irritated. I watched it a few years later and, I mean, other than Shia being annoying, it's not a horrible movie. It just isn't the same Hellblazer as in the comics. That's fine.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

@coin
Yeah, I'm usually of the same mind about treating the movie version of something as a divorced entity. I just couldn't get there in this case. Or I didn't so much want a "correct" take on the book as an entirely different approach to adapting it. Idk. I feel like I could write a deeply undergrad-y paper on my reaction to it in terms of what audiences bring to movies for good or ill, even if ultimately I wasn't much beyond, "I guess that was pretty OK" with it as a product. Storm Reid was aces, though, and I hope she gets big things out of it.

[Cupcake]

My problem with Wrinkle was mainly about a particular plot point being written differently. Not because it was set someplace that wasn't in the book, and not even about the lack of Aunt Beast (I guess there's no real way to present her without coming across hokey and she became the Tom Bombadil of the film)...but the fundamental nature of a really important scene was changed, shifting the motivations of the characters, namely Meg and her father, in a way that makes the message very different.

Aesthetically the film is magnificent, the performances in and of themselves were lovely, with shout outs to my girl Rowan Blanchard (I miss Girl Meets World), and Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Hollywood Chris #2 have fantastic chemistry. And the collective stars/Misses were pretty great.

[jibberthehut]

Am I some weirdo who doesn't go see movies for it's message that may or may not actually exist or to compare to source material and just go... to be entertained and enjoy?

I saw wrinkle in time. Never read the bookn summarily enjoyed it. Thats it. Same as Black Panther. I saw it, i enjoyed it. I really couldn't care less about any social or intellectual conversations possibly gotten from it and plights of whatever.

It's a movie. I found nothing wrong with WiT. I enjoyed all of it. Meg, charles wallace and his supernatural precociousness. It was indeed a kids movie, thoroughly aimed at kids and to be entertained by them with no real slipping in of adult stuff. Aubt beast had me smile, I enjoyed Galifinakis thorough, even oprah and I'm not terribly fond of her. Costumes were gooooooorgeous. Seriously. I really do hope the one dress was a bedsheet.

[Arkandel]

@jibberthehut said in Good or New Movies Review:

Am I some weirdo who doesn't go see movies for it's message that may or may not actually exist or to compare to source material and just go... to be entertained and enjoy?

We're all weirdos here. We just bicker about our favorite flavors of weirdness.

[Lotherio]

@arkandel said in Good or New Movies Review:

@jibberthehut said in Good or New Movies Review:

Am I some weirdo who doesn't go see movies for it's message that may or may not actually exist or to compare to source material and just go... to be entertained and enjoy?

We're all weirdos here. We just bicker about our favorite flavors of weirdness.

Not weird at all, that's probably more the norm, just to be entertained. But some of us weirdos watch movie for message and content, and, to make matters worse many directors do put messages in the movies and have said as much. I blame Hitchcock for his strides in developing film language, among others.

[Lithium]

Some people do not have the ability to separate the source from the adaptation.

I am usually pretty good at it. Sometimes I'm not.

Depends on how emotionally invested I am in the source material really.

And sometimes a movie is just /bad/. Regardless of how many explosions and how many times you take advantage of Megan Fox's ass. I'm looking at you Michael Bay.

[ThatGuyThere]

@lithium
Upvoted for the shot at Michael Bay at the end, good god i have never been so disappointed in a movie as I was with the first Transformers one. I am fine with the changed they made to the Transformers themselves and the story but what I don't want in my movie about Giant Robot Shooting Each Other is for it to spend far more time on Teen Love Story than the aforementioned giant robots shooting.

[Thenomain]

@lithium said in Good or New Movies Review:

And sometimes a movie is just /bad/. Regardless of how many explosions and how many times you take advantage of Megan Fox's ass. I'm looking at you Michael Bay.

I’m looking at Megan Fox’s ass. Who wants to look at Michael Bay?

—

I need to find the interview I once heard with a multi-award winning French director who once, to prove a point, made a movie with his direction, excellent actors, good end to end, but with a bad script. It fared very poorly. His thesis: Everything else can be salvaged except for a bad script.

C.f., Avatar. (I mean the Cameron one, but the Last Airbender movie counts too.)

[Ganymede]

@thatguythere said in Good or New Movies Review:

Upvoted for the shot at Michael Bay at the end, good god i have never been so disappointed in a movie as I was with the first Transformers one. I am fine with the changed they made to the Transformers themselves and the story but what I don't want in my movie about Giant Robot Shooting Each Other is for it to spend far more time on Teen Love Story than the aforementioned giant robots shooting.

And now they are rebooting the series, and I'm happy with that. Maybe they'll follow the classic comic line, having named the protagonist "Charlie."

[SG]

Saw The Towering Inferno the other day.

Richard Chamberlain really nailed playing a shitheel in that movie, it was great. Also watching Steve McQueen and Paul Neuman trying to out macho each other was a real treat as well.

[TNP]

@sg said in Good or New Movies Review:

Saw The Towering Inferno the other day.

Richard Chamberlain really nailed playing a shitheel in that movie, it was great. Also watching Steve McQueen and Paul Neuman trying to out macho each other was a real treat as well.

I remember seeing this as a kid in the theater. Scared the shit out of me. Monster movies didn't bother me at all but 'realistic' disaster movies always bothered me.

[Jaded]

Does anyone else think that the new Skyscraper Dwayne Johnson movie looks like a Die Hard/Taken mashup?

[SG]

@tnp said in Good or New Movies Review:

@sg said in Good or New Movies Review:

Saw The Towering Inferno the other day.

Richard Chamberlain really nailed playing a shitheel in that movie, it was great. Also watching Steve McQueen and Paul Neuman trying to out macho each other was a real treat as well.

I remember seeing this as a kid in the theater. Scared the shit out of me. Monster movies didn't bother me at all but 'realistic' disaster movies always bothered me.

Wow, I'm amazed, was there an intermission? It's like a 3 hour movie, I couldn't imagine that in a theater as an adult, never mind being a kid.

[Coin]

@sg said in Good or New Movies Review:

@tnp said in Good or New Movies Review:

@sg said in Good or New Movies Review:

Saw The Towering Inferno the other day.

Richard Chamberlain really nailed playing a shitheel in that movie, it was great. Also watching Steve McQueen and Paul Neuman trying to out macho each other was a real treat as well.

I remember seeing this as a kid in the theater. Scared the shit out of me. Monster movies didn't bother me at all but 'realistic' disaster movies always bothered me.

Wow, I'm amazed, was there an intermission? It's like a 3 hour movie, I couldn't imagine that in a theater as an adult, never mind being a kid.

My stepfather and a friend of his, during a roadtrip with me and his friend's son, in a truly magnificent move of adult sadism, decided we'd all go to the movies... to see Nixon. Go ahead. Go ahead and type "Nixon movie run time" into google.

[SG]

@coin Good God, Lemon!

[Auspice]

Gods and Generals run time.

I remember when my parents went to see that (it did have an intermission, thankfully) and I asked, bluntly, if they were insane.

[ThatGuyThere]

@auspice
I loved seeing Gods and Generals in the theatre, but I also went with a bunch of other history folks.
Edit to add: I also second the thank god for the intermission.

[Jennkryst]

@thenomain said in Good or New Movies Review:

For instance, I actually liked the Super Mario Brothers movie. I know that nobody else on the planet did, and I know that if I saw it again I would cringe so hard that I’d invert myself, but fuck it.

SO DID I... mostly. My most negative association with the film is that during my fifth watch-through, one of my dogs died. Which just hit me harder than I'd have thought after 20 years. WHY YOU DO THIS TO ME, THENO?!? (The second most negative is that wacky 90s cliffhanger that we will never get resolved.)

I may end up regretting missing Wrinkle in Time in theaters, but I was too busy being HYPED on A Quiet Place's audio design.

For my own late-addition: Solo? It was entertaining, and gets bonus points for triggering my schadenfreude when others rage against it.

As always with the Star Wars stuff for me, I find it incredibly more compelling when they drop random world-building (galaxy-building?) details that just shatter years of presupposed rules or facts of the setting. Entire swaths of Wookiepedia are just up and invalidated because of cool-effect-thing. 'Gravity wells have shadows in the Hyperspace realm that makes things explode when they interact with them' FUCK THAT. You want to throw the emergency break while at Light Speed while in atmosphere? DONE! You want to engage the Hyperdrive while still in atmosphere? EASY! The Empire stores Battle Station plans on magnetic tape? HELLS TO THE YES.

... that said, I do have a few minor critiques.

• L3-37 needed to be in at least 200% more of the movie. Sassy Droid's Rights activist? Yes please!
• The whole Kessel Workers' riot could have been at least twice as long. (Unrelated to Solo, but BB-8 using the rich dude's money as a weapon against the police? Could have validated the entire Canto Bight plot for me BY ITSELF, even if it had 0 impact on Finn's arc).
• The whole Kessel Run bit (I am of a similar mind to Darths and Droids when it comes to the Kessel Run - that it was just a thing Han threw out to sound impressive (and rolled poorly on his bluff check, as evidenced by Obi-wan's reaction). So including it as an actual thing, while visually neat, was a bit of a drawback for me.)

[Wizz]

So I passed on Pacific Rim: Uprising when it released, but I gave it a shot tonight and...wow. Really surprisingly fun and I honestly thought it was a better film than the original, which I wasn't expecting considering the very lukewarm critic reviews. The cast was so much better and more engaging and for once I was a little thrilled by the franchise teaser at the end.