Discuss and Rate the Last Film You Watched

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Bartholen

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Which is why I took such exception with The Wolfman. It feels like the type of movie where amidst all the talent, SOMEONE should have said something or bailed on their part, but no; everyone stuck it out and put their name on it. I guess if your resume is is broad and noteworthy enough, you can afford a stinker every now and again, but what a unicorn it is when several notable talents have their stinkers converge in a single film.
I guess there is a distinction to be made between films like Transformers where you have a stinker with A-listers, and movies like The Wolfman. The former you never expect to be good in the first place, and are assuming the actors are there just for a check. With the latter you see the list of names and go "no way this can't be good". One of the only films I can think of like that is The Counselor from 2014, which has an absolutely insane lineup even outside of acting: directed by Ridley Scott, written by Cormac McCarthy, starring Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz and Michael Fassbender. I haven't seen it, but everything I've heard of it points to it being a genuine stinker.
 
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Johnny Novgorod

Bebop Man
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Watched two Argentine movies:

Las hermanas fantásticas

Two half-sisters meet at their dad's not-quite-funeral (they're identifying the corpse at the morgue; the joke is they're unable to recognize him because he was wholly absent from their lives). They go occupy his penthouse in the corporately chic part of BA and discover millions of euros stashed behind a fake wall. It's probably filthy money, right? One of those faintly mafioso types from the wake is probably going to come knocking, right?

The actresses are funny and effectively embody a Fleabag-type of relationship as they bond and grow closer. But the plot is kind of a dud and never takes more than one step in any given direction - we never get the comedic wish-fulfilment part of suddenly having fuck you money outside of a single tepid shopping montage, nor does the paranoid thriller angle develop in a satisfying or believable way. It's a very small-minded, very unambitious (if cute) movie.

El jockey

Argentina's submission to the Oscars, apparently. I don't see it. It's basically an off brand Jim Jarmusch 90s movie, Dead Man by way of Ghost Dog: a brain-damaged race horse jockey wanders around modern BA in a furcoat, "hunted" (just as aimlessly) by the mafiosos he's unwittingly crossed. It's farcical, surreal and technically funny. New Age enlightenment & transcendentalism vs. greedy materialism, go!

Sometimes the characters float, sometimes they dance, sometimes they comment on their role in the movie. The mafia boss looks like Videla and carries a different baby in every scene, a comment on The Dictatorship from the 70s (the comment: it happened), which is how you bait the Academy. Heres hoping!
 
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thebobmaster

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Best Texas Chainsaw movie in years.
 
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Xprimentyl

Made you look...
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Godzilla Minus One: Decent / Great

Heard a lot of the positive buzz, and was genuinely curious what makes for an "exceptional" Godzilla movie, and while this one doesn't disappoint, I'm not sure I get why it garnered the praise it did. Not bad by any stretch, just wholly unremarkable save for it being probably my favorite physical depiction of Godzilla in cinema yet. He felt truly menacing, lacking any of the antihero/tacit human sympathizer schtick he often gets relegated to; he was simply a dangerous animal. The human side of things felt really clunky, though; "incredible" in the very literal sense of the word insofar as I didn't believe most of what they experienced. But we needed heroes with a plan, and we got that, I guess.

Recommended if only for an awesome Godzilla monster that uniquely blends the concepts from the original 1950s version and one benefitting from modern CGI capabilities without sacrificing too much for the sheer spectacle of the latter.
 

thebobmaster

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Godzilla Minus One: Decent / Great

Heard a lot of the positive buzz, and was genuinely curious what makes for an "exceptional" Godzilla movie, and while this one doesn't disappoint, I'm not sure I get why it garnered the praise it did. Not bad by any stretch, just wholly unremarkable save for it being probably my favorite physical depiction of Godzilla in cinema yet. He felt truly menacing, lacking any of the antihero/tacit human sympathizer schtick he often gets relegated to; he was simply a dangerous animal. The human side of things felt really clunky, though; "incredible" in the very literal sense of the word insofar as I didn't believe most of what they experienced. But we needed heroes with a plan, and we got that, I guess.

Recommended if only for an awesome Godzilla monster that uniquely blends the concepts from the original 1950s version and one benefitting from modern CGI capabilities without sacrificing too much for the sheer spectacle of the latter.
I can say that for me, what made it great was its portrayal of PTSD through the main character, as well as emphasizing just how dehumanizing the war was in general towards the common soldiers and how much that messes with a man. Plus, as you pointed out, this is one of the cruelest versions of Godzilla.
 

thebobmaster

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thebobmaster

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Xprimentyl

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I can say that for me, what made it great was its portrayal of PTSD through the main character, as well as emphasizing just how dehumanizing the war was in general towards the common soldiers and how much that messes with a man. Plus, as you pointed out, this is one of the cruelest versions of Godzilla.
I dunno, man, I don't think the drama was very convincing. I'll admit this, though, it might be a case of getting lost in translation. I often see this in subtitled movies where the words I'm reading and what the actors are emoting align in a awkward or cringe-worthy way, most often Chinese, Korean, or Japanese films. The premises are often fine, but when the intensity ratchets up, it looks like the actors are really hamming it up over the really basic dialogue I'm reading, and my only guess is that the translation is taking the piss from the gravity of what's actually being said in their native tongue.

Example, the big Korean film from a couple of years ago, Parasite; there's a scene where the husband and wife are getting intimate, and in a moment of passion, the wife says [per the subtitles] something along the lines of "will you buy me drugs?" That translation made the scene feel really silly and elementary, and it was hard enough to unsee that I couldn't take the rest of the film seriously, and was genuinely curious why it go so many award nods.

But that's me; I'm not a cinephile, so my opinions don't carry much weight beyond the space between my ears.
 

Bob_McMillan

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Absolutely fascinated by what I've heard about Joker 2. If I still got recommendations from YouTube, I'm sure I'd be seeing angry reactions and reviews all over the place.
 
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PsychedelicDiamond

Wild at Heart and weird on top
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Absolutely fascinated by what I've heard about Joker 2. If I still got recommendations from YouTube, I'm sure I'd be seeing angry reactions and reviews all over the place.
You know, when I watched the first Joker I remarked in my review that it felt a bit like it's all setup, no punchline. I think now I have a pretty good idea of what the punchline is.
 

BrawlMan

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Absolutely fascinated by what I've heard about Joker 2. If I still got recommendations from YouTube, I'm sure I'd be seeing angry reactions and reviews all over the place.
I just know. The ending is gonna either confused a bunch of people and make fans of the first movie super angry. The one review I did see from Birdman, Gavia C-.

You know, when I watched the first Joker I remarked in my review that it felt a bit like it's all setup, no punchline. I think now I have a pretty good idea of what the punchline is.
I honestly have no intention of ever watching the first movie ever again. It's fine, but it's pretty clear that the director of these movies really has nothing to say or thinks he does. I literally not like this man's works.
 

Phoenixmgs

The Muse of Fate
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Absolutely fascinated by what I've heard about Joker 2. If I still got recommendations from YouTube, I'm sure I'd be seeing angry reactions and reviews all over the place.
I didn't think the 1st movie was very good (great acting performance but everything else not so much). At least a musical (I heard it's a musical at least) will be interesting regardless if it's good or bad.
 
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Johnny Novgorod

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Watched The Substance

Demi Moore is the star of a workout show (they still make those?) who gets fired by the network on her 50th birthday ("At 50, it ends" says a repulsive exec played by Dennis Quaid). Demi gets in a car crash, escapes unscathed and a doctor hooks her up with a black market drug called MOVIE TITLE, which basically promises eternal youth. What it does is make you birth a young, hot(ter) version of yourself through a large gash on your back (see Alien: Covenant). While one version of the person is conscious, the other is unconscious and plugged to an IV food pack that's good for 7 days. There's a switch every 7 days, or else.

So Demi Moore births her younger self (Margaret Qualley, in everything these days), reclaims her old job under a new persona and all is well until the switcheroo system starts wearing thin on the older self, who essentially locks herself up and makes herself wait for every other week to actually live her life. So she starts cutting corners, like overstaying in one body, with mortifying body horror effects, which creates tension between the older and younger self (even though they're technically the same person). Every now and then Demi calls a hotline asking for help, complaining about The Other, and she's always reminded that "You're the same" and in control.

The movie's been compared to the world of Cronenberg, Carpenter, Lynch, Haneke. Ok, I definitely see Cronenberg, and maybe a bit of Carpenter, but frankly the movie ends up owing its biggest debt to those gross and cheesy Frank Hennenlotter movies from the 80s.
 
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thebobmaster

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PsychedelicDiamond

Wild at Heart and weird on top
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Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

Sequel to 2019's Joker by Todd Phillips. Joker 2 deals with the aftermath of Joker which, of course, ended with mentally unstable Arthur Fleck taking on the identity of The Joker, commiting murder on live television and getting arrested. The sequel finds him in prison, awaiting trial, conflicted between embracing or rejecting the Joker identity.

It's different. I don't think it's very good but it's different. I only ever found the 2019 movie okay and if I'm being honest what stuck with me most was the incredibly skeevy viral marketing campaign that played off the earlier Dark Knight Rises mass shooting in Colorado to frame it as this dangerous, radical work that might inspire real world violence. Which, of course, stood in stark contrast to its rather tame content. What I wrote back then was that Joker felt like it's all setup, no punchline. A well directed but pretty anticlimactic origin story for what has got to be the most boring interpretation of the Joker, something that took little advantage of the preexisting setting and iconography of the Batman series and sometimes felt actively dismissive of it.

Joker 2 tries even harder to be its own weird thing, continuing to keep any connection to the Batman series at arms length and delving even deeper into unreliable narration to produce this incredibly cynical psychological drama full of postironic and metafictional quirks that should be a lot more compelling than I actually found it.

Joker 2 introduces a version of Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, as a fellow mental patient. Oh, did I mention? Joker 2 is a musical. She becomes a sort of devil on his shoulder, pushing him deeper into the Joker persona against his better judgement and against the advice of his lawyer hoping to save him from a death sentence. As the trial approaches and he keeps suffering abuses in prison while a cult of personality builds up around him on the outside, the line between Arthur Fleck and the Joker blurs, as does the line between objective and subjective. The movie really goes all in on the whole unreliable narrator thing, to the point that even by the end I'm not 100% sure if Lady Gaga was even real or not.

And, I dunno, recounting it like that I feel like I should have liked this more than I did but I really couldn't bring myself to. Yes, there are aspects of this I enjoyed and I would have liked to see explored in something better. In theory I did like the reversal of Harley Quinn being the one manipulating and gaslighting the Joker to push him over the edge, rather than the other way around. I liked the whole angle with the heavily publicized, sensationalized trial that seems to be mostly satirizing the Charles Manson trials. I liked the ambiguity of what's real and what's imagined. I don't necessarily like these aspects in combination with each other but I think individually they're valid ideas.

I very much didn't care for the weird self referential elements that feel like they're the product of an alternate universe where Joker actually was the radical, controversial blockbuster its media buzz tried to make people think it is. What Phillips probably wants us to think he's doing is deconstructing his own masterpiece and putting a mirror in front of the ignorant masses that had either disliked it or liked it for the wrong reasons. But what it really feels like is a passive aggressive humble brag. "Oh, now it's time for me to be self critical about the consequences of making the WIDELY BELOVED MASS PHENOMENON Joker (2019)! I have to take responsibility for how INSPIRING the ICONIC CHARACTER I created was to so many people! Confront the MASSIVE CULTURAL IMPACT of my work!" and it's like, dude, you're the director of The Hangover and you made a mid budget Batman spin-off, get over it.

I dunno, maybe I'm reading too much into it but something about the movie just felt self congratulatory, like a two-and-a-quarter hour victory lap trying to pass itself off as a deconstruction. Yes, you're putting Joker on trial, I get it, it's not that clever. From a technical standpoint it's still rather nice, I do think Phillips is a skilled visual director and it captures that moody, gritty 70's feel once again really well. Joaquin Phoenix once again shows what he earned that Oscar for and Lady Gaga is honestly great, if anything a bit underutilized, in her role. There's nothing wrong with the presentation of the movie but you know, no matter how much work you put in, it's still a smug addendum to an already kind of middling movie that, I feel, in the long term will mostly be remembered as "that weird pretentious sequel where the Joker gets raped in prison".

Or maybe not, maybe this will find a cult audience eventually, it seems vaguely like the sort of thing that would. But as someone who didn't care all that much for the first Joker, I didn't think this was any good and I have my doubts that the people who did like the first Joker will really be all that into it either. A dark fatalistic psychological thriller Batman spin-off sounds a lot better than this actually manages to be. Honestly, I watched the Matt Reeves Batman movie from 2022 again recently and god, does it hold up a lot better than the first Joker, much less whatever this is. I'm all for weird people trying weird shit with established properties but sometimes you just have to write off an experiment, bold as it is, as a failure.
 
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BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups.
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very much didn't care for the weird self referential elements that feel like they're the product of an alternate universe where Joker actually was the radical, controversial blockbuster its media buzz tried to make people think it is. What Phillips probably wants us to think he's doing is deconstructing his own masterpiece and putting a mirror in front of the ignorant masses that had either disliked it or liked it for the wrong reasons. But what it really feels like is a passive aggressive humble brag. "Oh, now it's time for me to be self critical about the consequences of making the WIDELY BELOVED MASS PHENOMENON Joker (2019)! I have to take responsibility for how INSPIRING the ICONIC CHARACTER I created was to so many people! Confront the MASSIVE CULTURAL IMPACT of my work!" and it's like, dude, you're the director of The Hangover and you made a mid budget Batman spin-off, get over it.
Thank you! Somebody finally said it! This is exactly why I am not touching it. That and the whole WB shelving the Bat Girl movie for a tax break. Can't afford to make one my ass.
 

CriticalGaming

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Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

Sequel to 2019's Joker by Todd Phillips. Joker 2 deals with the aftermath of Joker which, of course, ended with mentally unstable Arthur Fleck taking on the identity of The Joker, commiting murder on live television and getting arrested. The sequel finds him in prison, awaiting trial, conflicted between embracing or rejecting the Joker identity.

It's different. I don't think it's very good but it's different. I only ever found the 2019 movie okay and if I'm being honest what stuck with me most was the incredibly skeevy viral marketing campaign that played off the earlier Dark Knight Rises mass shooting in Colorado to frame it as this dangerous, radical work that might inspire real world violence. Which, of course, stood in stark contrast to its rather tame content. What I wrote back then was that Joker felt like it's all setup, no punchline. A well directed but pretty anticlimactic origin story for what has got to be the most boring interpretation of the Joker, something that took little advantage of the preexisting setting and iconography of the Batman series and sometimes felt actively dismissive of it.

Joker 2 tries even harder to be its own weird thing, continuing to keep any connection to the Batman series at arms length and delving even deeper into unreliable narration to produce this incredibly cynical psychological drama full of postironic and metafictional quirks that should be a lot more compelling than I actually found it.

Joker 2 introduces a version of Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, as a fellow mental patient. Oh, did I mention? Joker 2 is a musical. She becomes a sort of devil on his shoulder, pushing him deeper into the Joker persona against his better judgement and against the advice of his lawyer hoping to save him from a death sentence. As the trial approaches and he keeps suffering abuses in prison while a cult of personality builds up around him on the outside, the line between Arthur Fleck and the Joker blurs, as does the line between objective and subjective. The movie really goes all in on the whole unreliable narrator thing, to the point that even by the end I'm not 100% sure if Lady Gaga was even real or not.

And, I dunno, recounting it like that I feel like I should have liked this more than I did but I really couldn't bring myself to. Yes, there are aspects of this I enjoyed and I would have liked to see explored in something better. In theory I did like the reversal of Harley Quinn being the one manipulating and gaslighting the Joker to push him over the edge, rather than the other way around. I liked the whole angle with the heavily publicized, sensationalized trial that seems to be mostly satirizing the Charles Manson trials. I liked the ambiguity of what's real and what's imagined. I don't necessarily like these aspects in combination with each other but I think individually they're valid
The weird thing to me about this film is how much it tries to undermine the first film. I wonder how much of this project was meant to erase the weird propagandists backlash the first film got, about inciting violence and all that bullshit.

So they spend the whole time sort of trying to undo that film while also trying to play off the origins of these characters. The Joker was a great, unique and compelling origin story for the Joker that I dont think has been done. And they try to do it again this time, not only for Joker again but also Harley Quinn.

While there is an interesting potential in twisting Harley into this demon that sort of pushes the Joker further. Ultimately I don't think it works. Partly because I'm annoyed at the "modern day bulkshit" of it in that they cannot possibly allow a woman to be a victim to a man's manipulation. But also like most attempts at making "Girl bosses", her new role completely undermined everything Arthur was in the first film and continues to undermine his potential agency in this film. It turns the Joker from his own character into a manipulated puppet of her's. It's a role reversal that isn't done well and also doesnt really fit based off the events of the first film.

And again I feel like this whole this was meant to be an apology to the Twitter weirdos who tried to call the first Joker film as some sort of extremism film.

As a result not only is this film bad, but it actively works to ruin the first one.
 
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Johnny Novgorod

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Late Night with the Devil

A floundering late night host tries to score a comeback with a Halloween show - focusing on a bunch of paranormal guests - in 1977. The centerpiece is a girl who's ostensibly the only survivor from a satanic cult and may or may not be possessed by Abraxas.

The found footage conceit only works half the time. The costuming and production design looks the part, lots of browns oranges yellows and greens, and the movie has that bland soft-focus filter from old TV. However I don't think it's shot particularly like 1970s TV, and the editing and framing betrays a more modern sensibility. The movie also cheats every time they "cut to commercial" by having backstage black and white footage that looks like The Office crew covering (quite impossibly) the more private conversations between the characters. Ok, if this is found footage, who spliced those in?

It's a very enjoyable movie with a fun premise and a charmingly flustered Polka Dot Man in the lead role. The found footage/1970s aesthetic doesn't 100% work but it's still a cool unique look compared to most horror tripe. I would excise the opening 5 minute 'News on the March' montage that basically spells out where we are and where the movie's headed. Make the movie a little more mysterious, more ominous.
 

thebobmaster

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