Watching Movies Alone with crumbsroom

I never said I hated that film. I've always simply pushed back hard and consistently and for the rest of my life against the idea that its any good. Because it isn't. The first half is a vaguely competent but completely redundant ghost story. The conclusion is a disaster. Nothing is remarkable about it, neither its successes or its failures. Mark my words, it doesn't live beyond its generation in any important way. I've said it once, I'll say it again, it is the milleniums Amityville Horror.


Malignant is at least....interesting in how annoying it is. It's nice that Wan went sorta ******* with a big budget film. But his tepid calculations towards what is ******* is what puts me off of that. There is something cynical about it. He's slumming and you can smell his refusal to actually get his hands dirty in its 'madness'. Ultimately he approaches it as softly and pointlessly as he does The Conjuring, and because of this, I find Malignant frustrating in many more ways.


I probably don't technically hate either, although I'm probably closer with Malignant (probably mostly because of the fudged potential). But Glass Onion is definitely tipping into the hate territory. And Babydriver is firmly in it. And, it needs to be mentioned, since it seems to miss my wrath much too often (probably because no one on earth likes it, so its no fun to attack it endlessly), Yesterday actually might be my least favorite film of all time. That is where all hate in the universe begins.



Yes, even worse than Babydriver

The worst thing a movie can ever be in my eyes is a cynically empty and pointless grab at a pre manufactured audience. Babydriver isn't actually this, so it misses that bottom rung. I try not to even talk about movies that are this. I almost never see them. Certainly not all the way until the end.


But what is next worst is a movie whose whole function is to be cool and isn't. Watching a movie aim at nothing but the most superficial goals and get airball after airball is a deeply painful experience for me. What is Babydriver if it isn't hip? If it isn't free and loose and fun and irreverent and the coolest kid in the room. The answer is nothing. It's nothing. It's a giant pose. It grovels for attention and never proves it deserves it. A loathesome creature.



Very few movies get by on 'cool'. Drive? Trainspotting? Cool as shit, and probably not much more, but they know how to strut. Babydriver? lol. What a dork of a movie.

Then I think the connection between Yesterday and Baby Driver shows us what the real question is…

What did Lily James do to you?

Is she in both of them??


Seriously, **** you Lily James. I thought you were one of the good ones.

She’s the good-natured love interest in both.

Did you think she was a good one because of her transformative performance in Pam & Tommy or are you only now realizing it was her under the latex and now you know why you hated the mini-series despite watching all 8 episodes?

On a separate note, Glass Onion is even better on a rewatch. Tons of little jokes sprinkled throughout to only be noticed in the different context of knowing all the twists.

Way to stand by your opinions then, Wool...



/awkward

While I didn't hate Glass Onion, some part of my brain rebels at the thought of watching it again.

I think it's vibrant, light-hearted and meticulously detailed fun. I appreciate that even scenes that seem like cloying try-hard jokes (the Amongus Zoom) are actually set-ups to Blanc's Achilles heel in this case.

It isn't revelatory cinema nor as fresh as the first, but I get the sense that it's giving its all to be the kind of pulpy fun that makes Christie and Doyle so fun. At this point, I'm too enamored with Craig's turn as Blanc and Johnson's ability to craft extremely strong women leads to not feel like I could pop em on whenever I need a comfort watch and a good chuckle.

I get what you mean, but for me it's overly constructed to the point that it becomes kind of soulless. Blanc is fine, but everything around him is thoroughly one dimensional.

I think shallowness comes with the territory but I don't think the commentary lacks merit or bite. While I wouldn't place it on the same level of Strangelove, I felt like it's use of caricature served its purpose well and like Strangelove, the BIG performances were well suited to the material and most importantly, funny.

I would disagree on Monae's character being shallow though. I thought she matched De Armas in terms of heart and gravitas, while being given a bigger playground to show off different sides of the character.

And given that she and Blanc are the heart and soul of the story, everything else can be a shallow plaything for us to laugh at.

Sort of. The people in Knives Out were over-the-top, but they felt like people. I got tired of the characters in Glass Onion really fast, and it sort of translated into not caring.

I think that the world is very different from 2019 and the people that GO is targeting have outed themselves as more superficial, opportunistic, moronic, and carelessly malevolent than the most extreme caricature could capture.

GO is a movie fuelled by insanity and inanity of pandemic and for better or worse, many of the most ridiculous things those characters do were plucked straight from the headlines, tweets, and tiktoks of Johnson's targets. To me, he hit a bullseye, right down to having Birdie wear a nigh identical mesh face mask to Lana Del Rey.

The only way he could've been more accurate was to have predicted the future and have Bron buy Twitter.

The characters in Glass Onion are lazy approximations of all the terrible shit we've seen from people in the last few years. I don't think it is so much satirizing it than presenting it. And frankly I don't need it presented to me. I already know its stupid and horrible and annoying. I already know what it looks like. It looks like Lana Del Rey's face mask which I already saw in real time.



I think there is a difference between noticing these things and having something to say beyond them. And Rian Johnson just notices things.

This is the exact same criticism I saw levelled at Don't Look Up, which I recall you also enjoying.

I disregard it as well. Noticing things and replicating them with accuracy without compromising the characters, narratives or themes, while providing catharsis for audiences otherwise powerless to see these privileged nitwits get any manner of comeuppance is certainly using them for a purpose.

Both Don't Look Up and Glass Onion are built upon the desire to scream and shout, to highlight that we've surrounded our institutions and powers to a kakistocracy of the most undeserving morons since Nero picked up a fiddle. They are sledgehammers and not scalpels for sure, but so were Strangelove and the Great Dictator.

Is it the same criticism? Or was theirs wrong and mine right?


Most people who balked at Don't Look Now's satire clearly didn't even grasp what its target was.

I know what Glass Onion is making fun of. It's an easy target and deserves making fun of until the end of time, but I wasn't seeing anything there terribly funny or illuminating.

I think the characters were compromised. And the performances. I thought they all mostly ranged from average to shit. Monae is fine. Norton is....fine. Craig is fine, but I thought he was way better in the first film. I couldn't care about much of anything else.

Yes, Don't Look Up would fall into that category. But I found Glass Onion so toothless in its satire that everyone was ultimately left unscathed because I didn't recognize any of them as people.

I didn't feel any screaming and shouting here. I barely even felt irritation on the part of the film. It was just a bunch of 'can you believe all these horrible cads?'. It's shouting just felt like a big shrug.

Mentioning Strangelove or Great Dictator seems insanely out of place in a conversation about Glass Onion. I wouldn't even bring them up to shame it. You're being cruel.

Both criticisms were wrong and were as lazy as the purported laziness of the filmmaker for regurgitating reality! Happy to clear that up.*

I rarely find films "illuminating," in that they show me something new or revelatory. However, I regularly find them interesting and engaging and a film that pits an intelligent, public school educator against an assembly of self important influencers and billionaires through the guise of a Christie-esque mystery is certainly treading into territory I can't find many other places.

Is it's satire as scathing and fearless as Triangle of Sadness? No. But it doesn't need to be. It functions first as a clever murder mystery (I can't recall one that it evokes past the set up) and second as a social satire, with the satire servicing the mystery and not vice versa.

The movie calls for torching institutions to topple the oligarchs and revels in the burning and destruction of their legacy. If that's not a scream and shout while offering catharsis to audiences in a way only cinema can (pangs of Hitler getting machine gunned by Eli Roth), I don't know what is. It just also finds it in itself to laugh at it all and come away with a shred of optimism while DLN prefers to wallow.

I'm sure we could dig up some contemporary reviews of DS and GD that are critical of their obviousness or realiance on caricature. They'd similarly be wrong.

So, no one is going to defend Yesterday?

Cowards.

All of you.

I'll do it. To a degree.

It's a mild, charming and well-made affair that could've said something profound about the inherent luck needed beyond talent to become a sensation, that it's all a confluence of social conditions, exposure, opportunity and lastly talent, but given that it's from the writer of Love Actually (who bought and rewrote a spec script which apparently was about just that), it decides to have a wank about how intrinsically wonderful and destined for unquestioned greatness the Beatles were.

So... It's ultimately just sort of toothless and limits itself to being a celebration of the Beatles. It was still better than Across the Universe on that front, if only for Boyle's direction and the peformances of Hamish Patel and the effortlessly endearing Lily James.

Have to agree with Takoma on the characters being shallow, Monae's in particular. Her defining attribute is that she's virtuous. We can argue that this kind of film can be perfectly fine with shallow characters, but shallow they are, and that's less forgivable for her role than the others.

As for Marta in Knives Out, her virtue was a key plot point, as Blanc noted ("you didn't play their game"). She doesn't outwit or out scheme anyone, it's just the inability of the people around her to predict that someone might act out of goodness rather than self-interest is precisely what helps her through the situation.

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you..."