haven't seen either jarhead or spotlight; will eventually see spotlight though.
7 psychopaths is, compared to the excellent job done for In Bruges, sub par, but I did enjoy the quirkiness and did my best NOT to see this as a knockoff from the nineties. And I was even MORE relieved to see Walken have a little more to his character than the usual crazy/dangerous guy.
And since you're quiet during movies, then I wholeheartedly recant my concern about watching a movie with you. I just had this amusing image of you breaking out into rants throughout any given movie lol
To be fair, if I'm quiet during a comedy then that's probably not a good thing.
As for
Seven Psychopaths - it definitely felt like the quirkiness only went so far and often worked against the film. It reminded me a bit too much of
Smokin' Aces, which also tried to jam in as many wacky characters as it could to compensate for its fairly lacklustre writing. This much is true of
Seven Psychopaths as well - as much as I appreciate Tom Waits in general, his inclusion in this movie is almost entirely superfluous. Hell, I think that's true of quite a few of his movie roles where he exists only to drive home how weird the movie's world is (e.g.
Wristcutters, The Book of Eli, The Fisher King). I did acknowledge in my review how good it was to see Walken actually play a character with some depth for the first time in ages.
Jarhead is something I've become more interested in seeing over the last year or so for some reason, but I'm hardly desperate to take the next opportunity I get.
Given your general disdain towards Kubrick and how
Jarhead could easily be oversimplified into being called a Gulf War version of
Full Metal Jacket, I can't imagine that you'd get a whole lot out of it. Mendes in general is a fairly middling director anyway and I don't think there are any films he's done that I'd go out of my way to recommend to people.
Loved In Bruges and I haven't seen psychopaths, but hope it's better than your review. I disagree with Jarhead though because the film has a lot to salvage in it. I think it's my favorite work Deakins has ever done and it's just got so many memorable scenes. The only thing I wish is that they would cut some of the less interesting things down a little, like you said in your review it gets a little too boring at times. I probably wouldn't go positive with it, but I still enjoy it a lot. Also, you forgot to mention Peter Sarsgard, he was great.
To paraphrase something I wrote about
To the Wonder recently, I think it's possible to get used to certain cinematographers being so good all the time that their capabilities don't really factor into whether or not I think a film is good in general. I'm pretty sure I name-check Deakins every time I cover a film that he's involved with and his cinematography alone is practically worth a full popcorn box on its own, but even his work only goes so far when it comes to making
Jarhead good. The same goes for individual scenes - a few good ones scattered haphazardly through a movie may redeem it somewhat but it doesn't automatically save the film as a whole. A
seems like a fair rating for a film that's generally boring but has a handful of good moments - even Sarsgaard, generally decent though he is, didn't leave enough of a favourable impression on me to change that.
Jarhead was a film I really liked back in the day, but I haven't revisited it in forever, so who knows...
I liked In Bruges, now that it's mentioned, but Seven Psychopats I never got around to, though I was interested for a while. I might even have started the movie once, but never finished it.
Hard to say if it'd truly be worth your time. It doesn't even feel like a film I could grow to like on repeat viewings.