And yes, I am up for any squabble about Dune and Interstellar. They are both terrible.
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And yes, I am up for any squabble about Dune and Interstellar. They are both terrible.
Hereditary -- phew, that's some scary stuff, very good!
Sometimes I just want to be entertained, making things like plot, dialog, decent acting, and editing unnecessary. This is why I love watching B-grade horror films. There's something to be said for mindless entertainment.
Oh, absolutely. I love a good bad movie.
But when a movie is supposed to be good and it turns out bad, I find no enjoyment in that. All I see are the missed opportunities, the flaws, the bad lines, the bad acting, the (usually) bad CGI, all the problems that could have been fixed easily to make the movie good. Especially if there’s a core story there that I would love to see told well. Take Batman v. Superman, for example. The core idea of this is very interesting—we take it as a given that Superman is good, but why? He’s from another planet and possesses all the power of the world’s militaries combined. Short of nuking the world a hundred times over, which might not even kill him, there’s no way to stop him (minus his rare weakness which everyone seems to have in the cartoons). So, while by the grace of, well, him, he doesn’t make himself king of the world. But he could. It makes sense to fear something that powerful and accountable to no one. It makes sense for someone like Batman to distrust him and look for a way to defeat him. There’s even a classic JLA storyline where someone steals Batman’s files on his fellow Justice Leaguers—including their weaknesses and his plan to stop them should they go bad.
For someone who grew up on DC as a Batman kid, this was a fascinating premise. And in the end, we got a big flop of a movie that hinged on the fact that Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent both have a mother called Martha.
When something could have been good, but isn’t, that really gets to me. When something is supposed to be B-movie schlock and is, then it’s good fun. There’s room for all sorts of entertainment in the world. And turning your brain off now and then and just being entertained is a good thing. You need that. You can’t always just watch the heaviest, deepest, darkest, most emotionally affecting movies all the time. It’s exhausting.
^^^I'm just sad Shark Week is over. :thumbsdown:
Unsane -- not a masterpiece, but good bordering on very good.
Asteroid City
I went into this with one expectations—well, that’s not entirely true. I expected not to like it. Generally, Wes Anderson’s overly quirky style grates on me after a while; with no straight man to contrast, the movies just come across as needlessly obtuse. Asteroid City is no different.
However, I liked it. A play presented as a movie, reality as a play, whatever you want to call it, the actor-y pretentiousness didn’t detract from what I found a story of profound sadness. All the characters are lost in some way. Deeply sad in a way. And, well, maybe it’s me right now, but that really resonated with me. All the regular Wes Anderson crew are here, minus Bill Murray, but while I’m usually perpetually unimpressed with Jason Schwartzman, he managed not to annoy me at all here. I even kind of liked him in this role. There were some truly beautiful scenes here, amidst some rather on the nose writing, but I enjoyed the film and would watch it again.
I give Anderson some credit here. It’s very bold to make a movie that bucks so many conventions and doesn’t have an ending. I’m struggling to give it a grade, but I’d rank it as my second favorite Wes Anderson film, ahead of Life Aquatic, but behind Moonrise Kingdom.
I’m thinking B+ is fair.