films you've seen recently and would NOT recommend

btw you may ask, where are this boy's parents?

well, it turns out he's teenage entrepreneur/schemer who employs his own mother (father never appears) so doesn't really have any parental figures

Alana Haim otoh is shown to be a directionless mid-20s womanchild - which would be a nice gender inversion of the manchild stereotype were her love interest not, yunno, a teenager - who lives at home w/her overbearing parents

more than just plot/character development these seem to be also choices designed to artificially move their relative ages closer together - he's precocious, she's immature - to make their romance seem less weird, but has the exactly the opposite effect of making it even more uncomfortable. like, cringe is totally legitimate vibe in comedy, drama, or as here, comedy-drama. but you don't resolve cringe by saying "and then they lived happily ever after".

Licorice Pizza is essentially just this but totally without any of the moral juxtaposition/ironic distancing that Kyle provides


// rant over

Oh come on mate, I rant much longer than that.
The other thing about that film is... it's very very slight. There is so little to it that I could barely recall any of it the next day. It's so entirely inconsequential it just melts away like morning mist when the sun fully rises and you can barely believe it was ever there.

IdleRich said:

The other thing about that film is... it's very very slight.

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my main thought after seeing it was "wow, PTA has reached a point of such cultural cachet that he made a movie about an idealized teen/adult romance and no one involved, including numerous Hollywood A-list types, asked him at any point if this is yunno, a good idea". the central fact is so overwhelming that it basically blots out everything else. Minus that romance tho yeah it's basically a nothing of a film, or I guess an excuse for Bradley Cooper, Sean Penn, etc to ham it up as exaggerated/thinly veiled versions of big name 70s Hollywood players.

the critical response seems to basically ignore it as well, which I guarantee would not be the case were the genders reversed (and rightly so)

oh yeah there's also a weird kinda suss take on Judaism and atheism randomly tossed in

tho in that case you could see it as the character's weird take rather than the film's, which is yunno how you actually do that kind of thing

I'll admit that I laughed at the Bradley Cooper bit.

IdleRich said:

I'll admit that I laughed at the Bradley Cooper bit.

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sure, I mean that's the point. in that sense it's basically PTA's low-key version of Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, tho even Tarantino I think would blanch at making a will they/won't they romance about a high school sophomore and a woman going on 30.

Licorice Pizza reminds me of 500 Days of Summer in the sense that it's nominally a sweet, or in the latter case bittersweet, dramedy wrapped in a twee Wes Anderson exterior that thinly veils the fact that its central romance is deeply creeply. the difference is that in 500 Days the filmmakers have at least a nominal understanding of that creepiness - tho whether they were successful at communicating that to the audience is a different question - whereas PTA seems to have either have none or to be wilfully ignoring it.

Scott Pilgrim is another in this vein, as well as the leading entry in the "fuckboi as sympathetic protagonist" canon. Really combines everything bad about the other two: mid-20s protagonist dates teenager (but doesn't have sex with her so it's yunno, no worries) then ditches her to v creepily stalk a damsel in distress/changing hair color (seriously, what else is that character?), all wrapped up in a lukewarm blanket of Andersonion sub-hipsterdom to make it cute. gods did I fucking loathe that movie.

people rooting for Scott Pilgrim and not recognizing that he is in fact, a total fucking creep, is the equivalent of finance bros rooting for Gordon Gekko

possibly worse, since at least Gordon Gekko self-acknowledges his badness. his moral justification for it is obviously extremely flimsy but he at least operates with an internally consistent morality of sorts.

whereas Pilgrim is supposed to be a harmless, pleasant cliche slacker "nice guy" who is in fact the quintessence of a softboi sexual predator

padraig (u.s.) said:

sure, I mean that's the point. in that sense it's basically PTA's low-key version of Once Upon a Time In Hollywood,

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You know what, I never thought to make that comparison but, now you say it, it's totally spot on at least one level. They are both snapshots, love letters if you like, to a period, aimless and drifting and, if you're expecting a narrative driven then they have nothing for you; I found Tarantino's one a lot more immersive though somehow, it really did feel like a love letter compared to PTA's half-hearted post card.

I didn't make it to the end of Scott Pilgrim... was that Wes Anderson or are you just saying it's like his films when you describe it as (Wes) Anderonian?

The Bridges of Madison County

Every cunt the wife and I know currently has Covid, so she asked if we could watch this elegy to unrequited love. You know occasionally you simply lack the will to get into it about something with a partner? Yeah, well I regret not speaking up sooner

This movie does to Clint what my wife has essentially done to me by forcing the hand of chance - you become a mope. Meryl Streep has an affair with Clint because he doesn’t wear dungarees and gives great cock. There are a few logistical problems. Clint lives out of state, she’s married to a dungaree wearer oh and she has kids. Also, MS has the worst could-be-from-anyway euro accent which never lets up

Somewhere in all this clunky passion its temporal walls crash, intercutting her now adult offspring finding her diary/journal of Clint stabbings. They react. With confusion. With attempts at humour and, finally, whiskey

Streep agonises over leaving her fam for her true love. Clint goes all quiet. They breakfast together one morning and, as any adult male over a certain age can attest to, she goes from geev it to me Clint to manic vere eez theez going Clint? Clint looks on forlorn and then she pretty much tells him to do one. There’s a scene or 2 where Clint returns to claim her hand but does she give in? Does she fuck. Clint even walks through rain, sopping wet, approaching her in her husband’s wagon to leave but she stays put

End title, roll credits and continue on with Covid, an abomination

Watched Tenet yesterday and - to my surprise - I really didn't like it at all. I say "to my surprise" even though most of the reviews I read were pretty negative cos the criticisms were pretty similar to those made of Interstellar and Inception which, though far from perfect, I found at least partially enjoyable.

It seems to me that Nolan is trying to make properly brainy sci-fi with absolutely full on action scenes, something that sort of sounds like a good idea on paper if he could pull it off. With Inception though, although there were good ideas in there, when they were used to justify these stupid full on James Bond style action scenes with hundreds of highly trained scientists performing dark ops style raids in people's consciousness or something, that was when I switched off. He didn't manage to bolt the sci-fi to the action in a way that convinced me that they were properly joined.

Tenet was more of that, but much worse. The science either didn't make sense, or, more charitably, I couldn't follow it, but either way, there was a load of clunky exposition followed by action scenes in which it was pretty much impossible to work out what they were doing or why. So the film would have a scene where they would say something like "We've got to go backwards through the transponder and then reverse the temporal pincer movement so that the entropy aligns with the negative time energy" and then the other guy would go "yeah, let's do it" and then they would do that by travelling to a random location and fighting loads of people in a really long action scene with half of the people moving backwards - and then that would end to be followed by more exposition and then more action.

My favourite bit ended up being when The Protagonist first temporally and spacially linked the manifestation of his corporeal presence with that of Neil (ie they met up) in The Royal Bombay Yacht Club and it was really beautiful and got me to thinking about how I wished I was a billionaire who could be a member of that club and others like it, waited on hand and foot in such charming and luxurious surroundings... I can't help thinking though that Nolan didn't spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make an advert for a place that most people watching can't even dream of entering.








It does look rather nice though I'm sure you will agree.

IdleRich said:

Watched Tenet yesterday and - to my surprise - I really didn't like it at all. I say "to my surprise" even though most of the reviews I read were pretty negative cos the criticisms were pretty similar to those made of Interstellar and Inception which, though far from perfect, I found at least partially enjoyable.

It seems to me that Nolan is trying to make properly brainy sci-fi with absolutely full on action scenes, something that sort of sounds like a good idea on paper if he could pull it off. With Inception though, although there were good ideas in there, when they were used to justify these stupid full on James Bond style action scenes with hundreds of highly trained scientists performing dark ops style raids in people's consciousness or something, that was when I switched off. He didn't manage to bolt the sci-fi to the action in a way that convinced me that they were properly joined.

Tenet was more of that, but much worse. The science either didn't make sense, or, more charitably, I couldn't follow it, but either way, there was a load of clunky exposition followed by action scenes in which it was pretty much impossible to work out what they were doing or why. So the film would have a scene where they would say something "We've got to go backwards through the transponder and then reverse the temporal pincer movement so that the entropy aligns with the negative time energy" and then the other guy would go "yeah, let's do it" and then they would do that by travelling to a random location and fighting loads of people in a really long action scene with half of the people moving backwards - and then that would end to be followed by more exposition and then more action.

My favourite bit ended up being when The Protagonist first temporally and spacially linked the manifestation of his corporeal presence with that of Neil (ie they met up) in The Royal Bombay Yacht Club and it was really beautiful and got me to thinking about how I wished I was a billionaire who could be a member of that club and others like it, waited on hand and foot in such charming and luxurious surroundings... I can't help thinking that Nolan didn't spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make an advert for a place that most people watching can't even dream of entering.

It does look rather nice though I'm sure you will agree.

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Tenet was maybe my least favorite Nolan film that I've seen. Part of it was admittedly extrinsic to the film itself - I saw it at a drive-in, and had limited visibility and was subject to environmental distraction, and thus wasn't able to follow the plot completely. That said, I also got the sense that I wasn't really missing out on much.

I like Inception, and I love Interstellar. Interstellar I think is an exemplary case of a sci-fi film willing to put in the work to respect the actual science. Of course, most of it was still speculative - but it was still deeply informed by theoretical physics, which is, itself, largely speculative.

Tenet I thought was forgettable, but maybe a second viewing will change my mind.

Above I said I enjoyed Interstellar and Inception but now I think back properly to Inception, I recall that the concept was used rather too often as a framework on which to tenuous hang ridiculous0 action battle scenes. Not as badly as Tenet but still...

So, of his sci-fi spectaculars it's gotta be Interstellar > Inception > Tenet, a worrying downward trend. I'm also starting to think that the only reason Interstellar didn't feature a scene in which hundreds of specially trained conscious-penetrating ninjas attacked a sleeping mind disguised as a Bond villains lair was cos he simply couldn't find a way to fit it in to a film about investigating desolate uninhabited planets.

IdleRich said:

Above I said I enjoyed Interstellar and Inception but now I think back properly to Inception, I recall that the concept was used rather too often as a framework on which to tenuous hang ridiculous0 action battle scenes. Not as badly as Tenet but still...

So, of his sci-fi spectaculars it's gotta be Interstellar > Inception > Tenet, a worrying downward trend. I'm also starting to think that the only reason Interstellar didn't feature a scene in which hundreds of specially trained conscious-penetrating ninjas attacked a sleeping mind disguised as a Bond villains lair was cos he simply couldn't find a way to fit it in to a film about investigating desolate uninhabited planets.

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Well I'm sure a lot of Hollywood storytellers would appreciate a justification for a scene like that haha.

I watched a load of films recently and the worst was one called Promising Young Woman - interesting enough premise in that this girl would go to clubs and pretend that she was drunk and wait for a "nice guy" to take her home and then just when they were about to take advantage of her she would suddenly wake up and be totally sober and say "What the fuck are you doing?" etc The character was so annoying that I just didn't enjoy spending any time with her. I got interrupted and paused it and for the next few days I left it open on my laptop pretending to myself that I was gonna finish it. It just sat there making me feel guilty cos I was never in the mood to finish it and eventually I just went fuck it and deleted the link and I instantly felt so much better. Shame cos part of me wanted to see where it went but every second I spent watching it I wished that I was doing something else. Anyone seen it?

IdleRich said:

I watched a load of films recently and the worst was one called Promising Young Woman - interesting enough premise in that this girl would go to clubs and pretend that she was drunk and wait for a "nice guy" to take her home and then just when they were about to take advantage of her she would suddenly wake up and be totally sober and say "What the fuck are you doing?" etc The character was so annoying that I just didn't enjoy spending any time with her. I got interrupted and paused it and for the next few days I left it open on my laptop pretending to myself that I was gonna finish it. It just sat there making me feel guilty cos I was never in the mood to finish it and eventually I just went fuck it and deleted the link and I instantly felt so much better. Shame cos part of me wanted to see where it went but every second I spent watching it I wished that I was doing something else. Anyone seen it?

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Yeah I've seen it, and normally I like Carey Mulligan, but I agree this one was pretty forgettable. Its essentially a MeToo vendetta picture.

IdleRich said:

I watched a load of films recently and the worst was one called Promising Young Woman - interesting enough premise in that this girl would go to clubs and pretend that she was drunk and wait for a "nice guy" to take her home and then just when they were about to take advantage of her she would suddenly wake up and be totally sober and say "What the fuck are you doing?" etc The character was so annoying that I just didn't enjoy spending any time with her. I got interrupted and paused it and for the next few days I left it open on my laptop pretending to myself that I was gonna finish it. It just sat there making me feel guilty cos I was never in the mood to finish it and eventually I just went fuck it and deleted the link and I instantly felt so much better. Shame cos part of me wanted to see where it went but every second I spent watching it I wished that I was doing something else. Anyone seen it?

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i saw this for my film club, absolutely everyone else totally loved it, praise through the rafters. i thought it was bad. this happens quite often in film club.

it doesn't really get any better.

i think what people were getting out of it is something quite moralistic. it felt like it was simultaneously a moral instruction and intervention in the world, and a cathartic goodies vs baddies cheering on the goodie type thing.

shakahislop said:

i saw this for my film club, absolutely everyone else totally loved it, praise through the rafters. i thought it was bad. this happens quite often in film club.

it doesn't really get any better.

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I'm glad I didn't bother then. Thing is, I could see that we were gonna discover why she was like that and then - my guess is - she would thaw bit by bit, hopefully endearing herself to the audience as she found a way to face and defeat her demons - but I already found her too annoying to spend another second with and to care whether or not that happened.

There had just been a bit with what I took to be a big hint, she finally did go on a date with a former fellow student who came in her coffee shop and he mentioned a few names along with what they were up to now - and when he said one name the lighting and music suddenly went all dramatic and sinister; I don't think that there was an actual flashback but there was a sort of loaded and intense moment which I took to be subtly saying....

"That name right there was a guy who assaulted her causing her to drop out of college and abandon her dreams, retreating from the real world by training herself to become a seemingly unfeeling and spiteful automaton, and over the course of the rest of the film, as we grow to like her this will slowly be revealed to us and soon enough she will be hunting him down to get her revenge by which point we will well and truly be rooting for her. He will turn out to be a thoroughly nasty piece of work and probably do a few more really really horrible things to make us properly hate him enough that we will be cheering when she does battle through and kill him by putting his balls in some kind of mincing machine and at the end we will all be happy. However we are right now gonna leave it open as regards her new friend, he might be part of her healing process OR there might be a terrifying stomach-turning twist which means that he was in on the rape too but she didn't know about it and as a result she has to cut off his dick as part of the revenge".

Am I on the right lines there @shakahislop?