Rate The Last Movie You Saw

I need to watch more Reinhardt. Saw Old Joy a while back - so good.

Must check that one out. I'm so late to the Reichardt party!

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Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

The parking garage fight set to Low's Congregation was my favorite, but I was seriously spoiled for choice.

(WARNING: SPOILERS IN THIS CLIP FOR DEVS!!!)



So I know that , yet I still feel like this movie is going to break me. It's been on my to-see list for, no joke, all 12 years since its release.

As long as we agree about how creepy that dummy was!

Also, I went into the film really expecting nothing much at all and it far exceeded my expectations, which might be why I take a more charitable view toward it.

Yes, I felt like the film explore some interesting questions about the way that our social structure/interactions can either bring out the best or the worst in people.

Is this the film with the unpleasant confrontation on the subway train?

Same, that's the musical cue that stuck in my mind the most, out of a wide array of options. One of those "gotta go buy that song the next day" kinda things. Great song, great scene, very good show.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael

Trapeze (1956)

JoJo Rabbit, 2019

The latest film from Taika Waititi, JoJo Rabbit follows a boy named JoJo who is bright-eyed, gentle, optimistic, enthusiastic, and, oh yeah, an aspiring Nazi. JoJo is influenced by various adults, including his anti-Nazi mother (Scarlett Johannson), an imaginary Adolf Hitler (Waititi), and a dashing-if-exasperated commander (Sam Rockwell). When JoJo is unexpectedly thrown into a relationship with a hiding Jewish girl, he finds himself questioning his previously uncritical adoration of the Third Reich.

From a filmmaking point of view I absolutely adored this film. The performances are all solid, the color scheme and design elements are incredibly inviting and lively, the writing is both crisp and irreverent. Waititi's sense of the absurd is on full display, and the film manages to be both incredibly fanciful and heartbreakingly sobering at the same time. In terms of emotions, it's probably closest to Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Because of the cartoonish trappings, when real violence does intrude into the narrative it's doubly shocking.

What I'm still mulling over in my mind is the portrayal of Nazis in general in the film and the softening of the atrocities of the war. I definitely understand the concept that the film is highly subjective to JoJo's point of view, so it makes a certain degree of sense that he is shielded from the realities. A huge amount of irony is mined from this chipper, compassionate boy espousing racism and hate-speech without fully understanding the implications of what he's saying or of the actions of those he reveres.

At the same time, I have mixed feelings about just how full the film is of "nice Nazis". We witness only one act of cruelty--the killing of a rabbit--and aside from that every Nazi character is portrayed as buffoonish, silly, ignorant, or some combination of those three. Despite one jarring element (which is a major spoiler, so I will not get specific), I felt that the film did not do enough to connect the dots between the actions of the people in the film and the vague threat that hangs over JoJo's Jewish acquaintance. Even the jokes about the outlandishness of anti-Jewish propaganda (they have tails! they hang upside down like bats!) never seems to acknowledge that these beliefs led to real tangible harm of real people. There has been a surge of white nationalism and Antisemitism in the last few years, and while I don't think that Waititi would ever intend to feed into that nonsense, I do think that this is yet another imagining of WW2 where most Nazi soldiers (and even higher ranking officials) just got swept up in a bit of madness, didn't really know what they were doing, etc. There's even a line where someone says that "Hitler was doing bad things we didn't know about", as if the atrocities of WW2 were just a little side project that Hitler pulled off on his own.

I didn't want my viewing to be influenced, so I didn't read any reviews or think-pieces about the film before watching. I'll now be checking some out, because I'm interested in what others thought about the things I liked and some of my hesitations.

Sounds good. Will check it out for sure!

No. I like Kaufman, I adored Anomalisa, but no. There were definitely positives. It was wonderfully acted, especially by David Thewlis and Toni Collette but they always deliver.

It was painfully slow at times. I might just be really slow tonight but I had no idea what the hell was going on. At times I thought I did, I thought it might be an allegory for one thing or the other, but I was completely confused towards the end and when it was over I just thought to myself "oh... okay"

I did read up interpretations of what happened online, pretty much everyone who knew what had happened had read the book prior it seemed like, and movies shouldn't need manuals. I had 0 idea how I was supposed to reach those conclusions based on what was presented and the way in which it was delivered, and as such I think it was a failure of the writing and directing. Editing as well, some scenes really needed cutting down.

I appreciate arthouse films are always gonna be more risky, more polarising, more challenging, but this was quite the miss for me and I feel like I wasted over 2 hours that I could have spent watching something else.

The Thing (2011)

A mediocre horror that lacks its own personality and is instead mostly rehashing Carpenter's film (while pretending it's not a remake). CGI effects are mostly bland and inferior to 80s practical effects.

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Orígenes secretos (2020)
aka Unknown Origins

A police film about murders related to superhero comics. It doesn't know if it wants to be a full comedy or semi-serious thriller(?). It has some funny moments but it feels like it's done from an early draft of a decent script (characters are bland, comedy isn't witty enough, etc.). Like the film above, it's just mediocre.

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The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964)

Charlatan (2020)

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A normal man? For me, a normal man is one who turns his head to see a beautiful woman's bottom. The point is not just to turn your head. There are five or six reasons. And he is glad to find people who are like him, his equals. That's why he likes crowded beaches, football, the bar downtown...

Le fidèle [Racer And The Jailbird] (Michaël R. Roskam, 2017)
The relationship phase was ok but, much like the Anglicised title, it's a bit of a dog's dinner afterwards

That's the one

It's up there with my favourites I think. The White Ribbon is probably the best although Amour and Funny Games are great too. So hard to rank.

My favourite Reichardt. Probably in my top 50 this film. Amazing.

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“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!” ~ Rocky Balboa

Okay so my apologies to people who enjoyed these films

Tenet (Christopher Nolan, 2020)

Slight spoilers I guess...

The plot is deliberately confusing in order to try and make the film seem a lot more complicated than it is. The bullet example of things travelling backwards it terrible, and when we actually see people travelling backwards later in the film it becomes a lot more clear how things work and things make more sense. Once we get to about the halfway point and we kind of know what's going on everything is quite straightforward and predictable. I was actually surprised that there aren't really any twists or shocks. No emotional depth, Elizabeth Debicki's character was awful in my opinion. Nothing to connect with. Also, half the film is inaudible, thanks to terrible sound mixing which I am again going to guess is a deliberate choice to make the film appear more confusing.

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

Another film that tries to be too clever for its own good. The film deliberately over constructs its narrative and pushing certain aspects to extremes in order to appear different or interesting when the actual message behind the film is so blatantly obvious. Just by making things weird doesn't make them complex.

It's a film that with its depiction of loneliness and characters obsessed with films and culture I should have connected with but instead, I felt distanced.

The irony is that much of Pauline Kael's review of A Woman Under the Influence can be copied for the film.

"Mabel tries to slash her wrist, and Nick puts a Band-Aid on the cut: the idiot symbolism may make you want to hoot, but this two-hour-and-thirty-five-minute film leaves you too groggy to do more than moan. Details that are meant to establish the pathological nature of the people around Mabel, and so show her isolation, become instead limp, false moments. We often can’t tell whether the characters are meant to be unconscious of what they’re doing or whether it’s Cassavetes who’s unconscious. "

Just replace a few words in that and Cassavetes for Kaufman and it's almost spot on. I just really couldn't connect with this at all.

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