- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
- 6,457
- Reaction Score
- 18,176
Thought Oppenheimer was excellent
The new Dungeons and Dragons movie is a lot of fun. Chris Pine is a really versatile actor, he can pretty much do it all. Is anyone having more fun making movies these days than Hugh Grant? He's just hamming it up and looking like he's having a blast in everything I've seen him in.
Are you talking about this, or something else? linkI just watched "The Drop" again and I am coming to the conclusion that this is a near perfect movie. Everything in this movie is done well. The casting is perfect, the acting is top flight, the pacing of the movie, everything.
The way this movie is shot makes the story and the world the story takes place in very small. Everyone lives in a small compartmentalized personal space figuratively and literally. The director uses foreground, fences and pillars and posts to make space seem very confined.
The story line never gives itself away. The plot has many threads, each connected, but reach is given it's own space to breathe. Each builds its own tension. There is the story of the bartender, the dog, the policeman, the gangster, the psychopath, the damaged girl and only a couple of them are completely resolved. The last scene is a done in a way that makes you linger.
This film is a master class in how to make a movie.
Not the comedy the Tom Hardy film.Are you talking about this, or something else? link
Killed at the box office this weekend, $155 mil. I was not expecting that.Barbie (2023)
Really surprised by this movie. The visual experience and the potential absurdity of it got me in the door and actually looking forward to seeing this movie, but its surreality, existentialism and humor made this excellent. Overall, the film does a great job bouncing from serious, to ironic, to absurd, to funny, to every other which way. Robbie/Gosling/Ferreira were all excellent.
My only critique, maybe there were too many characters? Like, I love almost everything Will Ferrell is in, but I was not a fan of his performance or his role.
Overall, another hit for Greta Gerwig.
Avatar: The Way of Water. I don't think these need to be 3 hours. Visually it is stunning. The water looks like water. The story is: people come back to Pandora to plunder its resources and kill Jake Sully, who now has a family, 3 kids, 2 more adopted. To keep the tribe safe they head to one of the water tribes. This is just an excuse for Cameron to update the scenery, so it doesn't get boring and to introduce some aqua colored natives with cool markings and different adaptations. The whole thing is just an allegory for colonialism and the Native Americans, right down to the whaling fleets. It's worse of course, these humans can travel through space, they know the whales are intelligent, those in our history didn't. The natives are idealized and romanticized to an absurd degree which makes the whole thing a bit over the top, if still entertaining.
My own two cents about Oppenheimer: good to very good overall. I enjoyed it.
Nolan is a director with a specific set of what I consider strengths and what I consider weaknesses. I like his strengths, and I'm fine with / used to most of his weaknesses.
I will comment on the sound thing, though. Yes, the movie is very, very loud (I saw it in a laser-projected "fake" digital IMAX, so presumably the sound was close to what Nolan wants). Nolan's recent choices in overall sound design are one of the few weaknesses that I'm not exactly fine with. It's not merely loud in the places you'd expect it to be loud (e.g. the big kaboom), but also at seemingly other random bits, including scenes in quiet meeting rooms.
He seems to have become enamored with sort of flattening out the dynamic range of his movies, in a way. The dialogue, music, and ambient noise / sfx are all competing and jostling with each other over a limited sound space. He seems to view it as a daring way to treat sound in movies. I just find it irritating.
I listened to the soundtrack on Youtube after watching the movie, and it's quite good. I couldn't enjoy it as much in the movie, because I had to concentrate mental energy on hearing dialogue, while being shell shocked by blasts of sound in unexpected places.
In terms of ear damage, the effect of watching this movie is probably only a step or two down from attending a (pop) music concert in a stadium, lol.
Oppenheimer, agree the sound was a little overcooked.
Very good movie but I thought Nolan's decision to ignore CGI had some negative effects on the film. Los Alamos had 8,000 inhabitants during the Manhattan project. In the film it looks it it was one or two buildings and a checkpoint. CGI could have given the audience some sense of the size and scale of the New Mexico facility. The project was immense.
Obviously, not using CGI for the atomic blast also cost Nolan some spectacular scale shots. One of the most memorable parts of the Trinity test to the folks who were actually there, was the fireball lighting up the entire valley and making it suddenly seem very small. That could have been a breathtaking moment.
Lastly, I thought the animosity between Murphy and Downey Jr should have been set up more fully and with more passion. That would have allowed the ending to be a bit more satisfying.
That said. I enjoyed it very much. The time went quickly and Nolan gave us an in depth character piece. The pace of the film was brilliant. The period was portrayed beautifully, physically, stylistically and psychologically.
Nolan was once described to me by someone at Warner Brothers as "our Steven Spielberg." I understand the reference, but to me the two film makers could be more different in their approach to material.
Top Gun: Maverick
I didn't find it all that realistic.
Lol. The attack has some issues but they pale in comparison to Maverick landing Jennifer Connolly, who is also independently wealthy. Maybe if she was a waitress.You mean the Jennifer Connolly part? I'm with you.
He doesn’t like CGI because he thinks it makes things look too safe and I agree.