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Comments
I watch practically all their official unboxing videos and the premiere of their video special a few months ago was something I looked forward to for like, a month.
So when I saw that there was not only a new video special, but a stop-motion movie, I was pretty excited.
Of course it's behind Amazon Prime Videos not just giant paywall, but Amazon Prime Video is super region-by-region locked, so I probably wouldn't be able to watch it anyway.
But I can understand why M.G.A. decided not to go with Netflix considering how many of Netflix's children-based property partners get completely screwed over.
*ever since the O.M.G. fashion dolls came out, I've wondered if I'm supposed to call the main line "dolls" or "B.B.s" like they do in the videos.
I've been looking forward to this movie for quite a while so I'm glad I finally saw it. The basic concept is "What if Superman was actually an evil alien plant", and the middle of the movie feels like a lot of attempts at proving that theory in different ways to it's own detriment.
Thankfully the rest of it makes up for that, even with the clearly tiny budget. The main character's immaturity really came through (he is just 12 at the time of his evil awakening) and though most of the other characters were more sketched than fleshed out I found they worked really well.
I think, as a movie, there are a lot of real discussions that can be had about it and not just focusing on whatever overall messages you want to take away from it, so that's always good. There aren't too many obvious black and white representations and I liked that.
Also I want the dad's hi-vis hunting jacket because it's really cool.
I watched Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 2.
It was a very muddled movie in terms of messaging, but it presented a backstory for the Z-O-M-B-I-E-S universe that I found pretty fun. It turns out that the first human settlers in Seabrook stole a giant magic rock from a pack of werewolves and turned it into an energy source, which they later abandoned after it turned some of the city into the titular zombies.
Anyways, I tried to make sense of what the movie was saying. Of course, a lot of the time, the messaging was as you'd expect from a modern movie. But then we had Eliza, the local SJW, being the sort of "joke" character. However, when it mattered, it suddenly turned out Eliza was right somehow.
In fact, the initial plot, that Zed can't take Addison to the Prawn because they have to re-enact anti-monster laws, so he becomes president to change that law, is vaguely insane. The anti-monster laws are re-enacted to prevent werewolves from entering the city, so they could just write zombies out of it. Plus zombies are mutated humans (and the liability for this situation lies with the local government) so somebody should really have argued that the laws, which were presumably also originally enacted for werewolves, shouldn't apply to them at all.
It kind of clashes with the later plot, where the werewolves are literally dying because they don't have access to the magic rock. Mainly that Zed isn't told about this and so he can't help until later (though he doesn't immediately come to help either).
Zed has to deal with his attempts at integration, which are soundly rejected via peppy pop music. Anyways, this is all strangely sidelined by him needing to use his zombie abilities, but not actually dealing with how he feels about integration (and in all good sense, for zombies to become palatable in this movie, they all became way more human seeming). I mean you can't want what he wants in this movie and not continue to argue for integration, but they just kind of forget this was a plotline yet only after Eliza gets to make a speech against it.
Anyways, I do have to admit that whilst the wolves basically represent "[certain group of people] stole our [whatever] so we must get reparations*1" and act as if their culture is paramount, they come to believe human*2 Addison is their leader even though it turns out she isn't, and she spends the whole movie helping them. That I liked a lot, because it's a very human message.
I didn't like how cold and distant the relationship is between Addison and her parents. Both from them (for not really trying) but also from her (for having an entire song where she just exclaims she's never fit in anywhere except for all the fitting in she is constantly doing, but like, kid's movie).
1*there is a song towards the end where I was like "oh my gosh they are going to say reparations" but they didn't, so phew
2*Addison is probably an alien, as per the Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3 teaser.
Overall, it was super-muddled, there was too much ground to cover, and the messaging was all over the place.
There is actually a thing where Zed tells Addison he'd never wish being a monster on her, which is why he tried to stop her becoming a werewolf. Characters respond as if he'd done something for the wrong reason too, but it's pretty fair to not want a normal human girl giving up her chance at a long livelihood should they never find the magic rock. Or even just not wanting her to face extra challenges in her life (especially when it's being like, a literal monster). I guess that's one whole plotline I can identify throughout and object to...
Anyways, the songs were all really catchy but completely forgettable, so I wasn't surprised to find that Tim James (Price? he goes by Tim James Price now) of Shake it Up! fame was behind most of them. Zed and Addison's duet in this movie, especially, sounds like something from 2014's Top 40.
(Sorry for no subtitles, but in these sorts of cinema most of the spoken parts tends to be screaming anyway.)
It's a trailer for an upcoming Polish slasher. I like slashers, so I'm quite curious of this production. Once in a while somebody in Poland attempts a horror movie, but, I'll just say I'm of the opinion the last good one was shot before the war and in Yiddish. This one, so far, looks promising. As long as it is at least average quality, I'm going to be happy just for proving that one can make halfway decent genre cinema around here.
It looks like some good HD B-movie fun (I still have this image of B-movies being shot in like, 360p).
Today I watched Cinderella Game, it was a really good death game movie. Probably better written than a lot of death game things, but it went really wonky in the ten minutes before the last bit.
It had a lot of good commentary on idols and the nature of meritocratic hierarchies when they turn into death games (a real thing, I swear).
The characters all felt pretty authentic, despite the setting, and I loved how the main character's best friend just had the most Kansai accent ever.
This trailer is vaguely NSFW I guess?
Anyways, there's a new Japanese movie called Bye Bye, Vamp! where vampires turn people gay. I don't think I need to explain the various implications of this.
It's got some of JP twitter in an uproar (but a minimal amount since like... gay JP twitter and B-movie watchers are both tiny tiny subsets of the whole JP internet) but I'm kind of glad it exists in a "WHY?????" way and I'd watch it if that were ever possible.
Ended up deleting them.
I tried watching the new Mortal Kombat animated movie, but winced at the gore. Funnily enough, when Scorpion cut into people's bodies, they either gushed out blood or revealed what seemed to be cartoon butchery meat inside their various body parts, but neither both at once.
Unrelated to that; I know Scorpion's backstory has been loosely stitched together through the years out of the most typical things you could put in a backstory, but it really didn't hold up as a movie opening scene.
I may hold out on the gore later to find out more about the story just because I do like seeing new 2D animated content coming out of America aside from the DC movies. It really captures the comic book art feel, which nicely betrays everybody being named Satoru or Shinsuke or whatever. I wonder why Warner Bros. keeps investing in these things. Do they do very well?
The third act was uh... quite bad. Before that, there was also a part where it turns out a whole forest is some
Dynamaxedgiant Torterra and that part reminded me of the 20 or so minute bit in Transformers: Whichever One I've Seen where the movie just kind of devolves into lots of moving set pieces that make no sense. For that part, I was willing to forgive and forget.That third act though? That was rough.
I did also really like Not-Chloe Sevigny Not-AnnaSophia Robb as the journalist girl. Needless to say, I was not a fan of swearing Pikachu, but eh, life.
The EDM bit with the underground Pokemon battles was probably my favorite part. Didn't love scaley Charizard, but people have ideas I guess. Either that, or the chase with the crazed Aipom early on. The physical comedy throughout was quite fun too.
It felt weird that the movie was anti-messing with evolution when it features the final forms of starters from the Kalos region, where "let's mess with evolution!" became a thing to start with. And then well, Pokemon kind of hasn't stopped with that since.
But the rest of it was pretty solid as a movie. Unlike Detective Pikachu, it didn't really feel like they were trying to make a "Sonic" movie. After all, Sonic is (almost) called an alien a couple of times (and he is in this context, but it isn't made explicit at least), whereas the impression in the main series of Sonic games is that Sonic and his friends are kind of just unexplained creatures that exist on Earth.
This was just a movie featuring Sonic, which reminded me of early 90s movies where a human meets an extra-terrestrial or something and they start to get along. In terms of action and set-pieces, this worked much better than Detective Pikachu. The third act was very much action-based set-pieces, but I could follow along and not feel overwhelmed. It probably helped that most of it wasn't set in a city.
I was surprised to find that the movie actually did end with the message "You can be a hero and stay in your small town at the end". I was expecting the main character to leave.
Also, I think Sonic is at least 21 in this movie, and he may or may not drink alcohol at one point? I was under the impression this whole time that he was a teenager, and that characters like Miles and Cream were children, whilst Rouge was an adult, and Shadow was like, 18.
Eh, who knows, maybe it's just in this one context.
I was under the impression that the main character of this movie was played by Tom Welling, and so was the main character of Hop. I thought that they'd cast him in this movie because he had already shown that he could act carry whole scenes by himself in Hop (which I've never seen, but I saw the promos).
But, it turns out that the main character was played by James Mardsen, who is a real person who is definitely not Tom Welling, but did indeed also play the main character in Hop. So I was right about why he was cast, but I had thought he was somebody else for years.
It is pretty, I admit, and it is enjoyable to watch, but it felt just so generic. The indoors looked like they were made out of iPods. The music was like taken out of one of those "epic sci-fi music mix" compilations on YouTube. (Granted, these compilations generally just take the music from film and video game soundracks, so it should be the other way around, but it so felt this way.) The protagonist is a square-jawed all-American hero who disobeys authority, flies like in one of those Top Gun-style Eighties movies about fighter pilots, rides an off-road bike, and resorts to violence as the first response.
Now, for a spoiler-y example:
Oh, and he's contrasted with a woman he lives with, who is all about sticking to rules and does not share his passion. At least she's presented in a somewhat humanized manner as opposed to a cardboard cut-out of a generic bad wife. (She's still all too close to that, yeah, but has the minimal amount of depth to imply somebody cared.)
So, yeah, the story itself is one of those types of stories when you just know you're in for a big twist. And the twist is pretty predictable. It's like, if I lived in the Fifties, I might have fallen for it. The devil is in the designs of some of the characters - without getting into the details, more recent fiction would not present them this way if they were meant to be what they were initially said to be. I also might have heard somewhere (like on TVT) what the big twist is, but I'm pretty sure I would have been clued on by the designs and a bunch of other details even without any prior knowledge of the plot. (Which actually wasn't even much more than being aware there's a twist to it.)
And then there are the stupidities. TVT calls out some cases of Fridge Logic, but I'd let that slide for now - what grated me the most were two specific cases. One I will spoiler out:
The second is the design of that flying machine. It has some sort of jet engines, but has a tail-rotor like a helicopter. The rotor is only needed if it actually is a helicopter, which it isn't. It's a really small detail, but it grated me more than it should.
The reveal at the end migh explain some of the perceived inconsistencies, but not really all of them. And while I'm at it, I generally am fine with making the story less consistent in exchange for good visuals, so some of the stuff TVT points out doesn't bother me much.
Overally? On the recommendability scale, from 0 ("BURN IT NOW") to 10 ("SELL YOUR MOTHER TO WATCH IT"), I'd give it... 6, I guess? It's not bad. It doesn't present anything new, it doesn't shock you, the amount of that "humanity fuck yeah" or "indomitable human spirit" crap is non-zero but manageably low... Mind you, I'm not rating it for quality; iI wouldn't rate it higher for lack of appeal (I wouln't have watched it if not for a family Sunday), but it's decent craftsmanship.
Literary equivalent: a second-tier story from a renowned sci-fi writer that you've just dug up in a pile of SF&F magazines.
I find that this tends to happen with sci-fi when it's holding it's cards to it's chest really hard rather than telling a story. Call it the Pretty Little Liars-aztion of everything.
Apparently the director used to make video game commercials, but made the Tron movie people really liked, so... yeah this is the sort of work I'd expect.
Every time I hope this era of sci-fi is over it... well, isn't. I think has to do with set designers expecting audiences to think something should look exactly one way, and trying to do things with really simple imagery.
Also, we don't even have iPods anymore.
If this movie was an audition for the new Top Gun, the director certainly nailed it since he's directed that too.
Yeah, it turns out Tom Cruise played protagonist in this one and the director is doing the new Top Gun. Probably not a coincidence. Also talking about the director, I was surprised to discover he did TRON: Legacy, as during watching Oblivion I kept comparing these films without knowing they actually have that in common. See, in my opinion TRON had a plot at least as stupid, but sound and visuals were simply splendid and I'd definitely recommend it before this one. Here, it is pleasant to watch and listen to and visually consistent, but it feels nowhere near this unique.
This one was really pretty, and I liked that basically everything was practical effects. Pretty people in a pretty location (featuring gardens) wearing pretty/avant-garde-lite outfits.
As far as the world-building outside the island it's set on goes; there are Uppers and Lowers, and that's the whole caste system.
Our protagonist, Uma (see it's sea-themed cause it takes place on an island) is an Upper who has lost her family fortune (along with her father via suicide re:family fortune). The man who ruined her family now wants to marry her, and since this is YA-adjacent women are treated little better than property in this universe. Basically, he wants to own her.
Her mother really wants the marriage to go ahead, so she sends her to a rehab for troubled girls. At this rehab is a rebellious pop-star who wants to do her own material, an overweight girl whose family wants her to get thin, and a hijabi non-Muslim(??) metalhead Chinese girl from Hong Kong.
This character, quite perfectly, is played by Akwafina, who is one of those people who keeps popping up in various movies while you wonder why they keep casting somebody who can't act.
Uma is already in love with a guy named Markus, who is -shockhorror- a lower. Not suspiciously at all, said boy shows up with a job at the facility and somehow is the only person in the place to deactivate the stringent security protocols.
Whilst there, the girls are overseen by a lady who wears John Galiano right off the runway played by Milla Jovovich. Occasionally, she shows off psychokinetic powers, which make no sense in this movie that's otherwise on the normal side of crazy YA barring all the high-tech.
It turns out the rebellious pop-star is a chain-smoking lesbian, and she quickly falls in love with Uma. Her hopes are soon dashed by the appearance of Markus, and she is quickly carted off the island despite not being cured of any of her righteous indignation.
Meanwhile, Uma goes around calling everything fascism and propaganda, way before she's even shown actual propaganda. Uma's other friends kind of just keep existing the way friends in these things do.
You think the girls are being brainwashed somehow, especially after the scenes where they're strapped into a carnival merry-go-round horse and shown literal propaganda about their lives. Right before she leaves, Pop Star one discovers they've been drugging the milk they serve them at dinner and carting them off to a mysterious place inside the facility.
There's also Ms. Jovovich's Mirror Exercises, which involve staring at your reflection in her late mother's lush garden whilst she asks deeply personal questions.
Honestly, when Uma spots Pop Star suddenly with a boyfriend at some awards show, even I expected that she'd been brainwashed.
But, actually the twist is that the girls are being copied in every way, including how they act sexually (Markus helped with this bit, because he's been bought off), so that Lower girls with the type of incredibly horrible lives you expect in a dystopia where the class system is so one-note can learn their mannerisms and become them.
Obviously, they have to get lots of plastic surgery to match! Which is why the doctors are making molds of the girl's faces.
As for what happens to the real girls, it turns out Ms. Jovovich is a Vampiric Plant Thing that feeds on the girls and turns them into rosebushes or some nonsense. Doesn't really matter much, Uma stabs her exactly once and she dies.
Moving on; it turns out copying rich girls may lead to lots of cases of mistaken identity and sleight of hand, which is what happens when Uma and Anna (her doppleganger) band together to kill the man who destroyed Uma's fortunes seconds after their marriage.
Having pulled off a murder than can never be pinned on either, Anna assumes Uma's life as the rich lady of the house, whilst Uma runs off to a mysterious place, the map of which was located in Pop Star's barrette.
On the weirdness scale, I'd say this movie was a solid 9/10 Will Buy DVD Copy.
Both were Awards-circuit movies so I doubt it's wish-fulfillment.
I think, aside from stuff like Invisible Sister, it's probably the worst written one I've ever seen.
See, in the story children are whisked away from their parents by a strange looking middle-aged man who leads them into the woods (nobody appears alarmed by this) and are sorted into five magic schools; Flares (shoot fire and control heat), Fluxers (become animals), Flickers (telepathically move objects towards themselves), Fluffies (talk to animals) and Fliers (Superman flying). Of course, when they receive their tickets that reveal this, those also use magic that doesn't explicitly fit into any of this but that's the least of this movie's issues.
Unlike Harry Potter (admittedly there's a pretty funny Harry Potter broom-riding reversal late in the film) they are sorted by what powers they have, but if you imagine Connecticut boarding school Harry Potter anyways that's pretty accurate.
Our protagonists fall out of this realm and are categorized as UDMs (Upside Down Magic...ers). Though UDMs used to be treated like everybody else, the school (which appears to be the be all and end all authority on all things magic) theorized that UDMs were the sole target of Shadowe Magics, which are when you get possessed by a book (which even comes with it's own bonus ghost girl only you can see).
This is all because a Flare UDM (who could only flare via flatulence) was possessed by Shadowe Magics 100 or so years ago.
The UDMs are: Nory (not Nori, which is weird because Nori is a much cuter name), who can only transform into multiple animals at a time. That kid from Bizaardvark, who shoots smoke rather than fire. Typical Angry Girl, who ficks things away rather than towards herself, and Love Interest Boy, who is in a constant state of flight. They're overseen by aforementioned angry guy, who we later learn can only Fluffie when he sings like an American Idol star.
Obviously, you can see how basically all of them are useful (except flying kid), but you know, Shadowe Magics that one time. The school, Sage Academy, is dumbfounding in it's light authoritarianism. Things must be done "The Sage Way", which is actually just code for "Creating a world where the UDMs really don't fit into the classes because the classes are very very specific would make it seem like the system worked as it does, which it does but let's pretend not by sending the UDMs to a gross classroom".
Now, the UDMs are very explicitly warned about Shadowe Magics, yet the whole plot hinges on
Girl from Ill-Fated But Super Cute Nickelodeon Show Star Falls Siena AgudongNori's best friend Raina, who is in Honors Flare, not even knowing the term Shadowe Magics.Raina's whole plot was also slightly confusing. The Flares spend the whole movie learning to perfectly pop popcorn.
Let me take this opportunity to mention that the production values in staging, costuming and other such aspects are amazing, but they fall short in many an area too, especially in the final scenes.
Now, back to the movie; Raina's first attempt goes okay until she accidentally burns it all. Now, skilled-but-smug Flare Phillip was shown to distract her by making a tch-ing noise, but after this scene she constantly fails to match Phillip's attempts at popcorn making.
So, is Raina actually anywhere near as skilled as we were initially made to believe? If so, has she constantly been choking because Phillip put her off one time? In fact, did she hear Phillip's "tch-ing" noise the first time at all? The only person who calls her good at magic is Nory, and Nory isn't a decent judge of anything.
Raina is spotted by Shadowe Magics Emmissary/Ghost Girl Shondra, who blips in and out of the movie in a confusing way that makes Raina's fall from grace quite ungraceful. As a result, her whole speech convincing Raina to submit to the Shadowe Magics she's absorbed so far is removed from everything that's happened.
Meanwhile, after some dumb moves on Nory's part, their minder-slash-groundskeeper agrees to train them all, and does a brilliant job of it.
When we come to the climax, Nory finds a possessed Raina (yes, this is about 30% one of those exorcism movies, which frankly I quite liked) shouting her plans high into the sky, and Nory warns their minder. His brilliant plan is to tell absolutely nobody about this until the morning, when Shadowe-d up Raina can do the most damage.
He claims it's because nobody would believe a word Nory said, but he himself has no credibility issues. I know this is entirely because they still wanted to have the next big scene set-up on Founders Day, but that's a very poor reason. Similarly bad is the fact that for some reason the UDMs haven't hidden out nearby on Founder's Day (they're uninvited due to Nory's antics) and it takes about 7 minutes of pointless fighting from the typical houses before they predictably save the day.
After the world is saved, the UDMs are allowed into the classes that initally rejected them, and their minder is made a Fluffies Professor. That is to say, after their minder pulled out the UDMs true potential, he is moved to a whole other department where he can't properly teach what is required (presumably normal Fluffies lose their ability whilst singing, or it's garbled somewhat).
Instead of installing a smaller UDM department where these special cases can properly be taken care of, they install them in classes they can't do at all. You can't pop popcorn with heatless smoke! It's not Flying if you can't land without assistance! etc
In other cases, like Nory's, she just instantly becomes better than everybody in her class, who can only transform into one animal at a time. Overall, these kids don't belong in these classes, yet this is treated as a happy ending.
And my favorite failing from this movie is that initially, they thought only UDMs could be pulled into Shadowe Magics, but that's wrong! It turns out only Flares can be pulled into Shadowe Magics! Both the initial UDM and Raina are Flares, and the ghost girl who lures them into Shadowe Magics also wears a Flare uniform! This complete disconnect between Lesson and Reality could have all been avoided by changing one animated segment and making the first kid one of any other four houses!
Overall, I quite enjoyed watching the movie, but only because I enjoy these things in general. This wasn't Descendants "I somehow knew you'd charmed me and even though my parents insist you're evil and you got here via evil deeds I still love you" level illogic, it was about 100x worse.
Okay then.
The plot is basically that a very poor young man tricks a rich housewife into hiring his whole family under pseudonyms.
I really liked the first hour, and I was expecting a lot the same good character drama from the second hour. Just as I was remembering Syd Field's observation about most high-art movies having a serious turning point just after the 60 minute mark*, the con man family discover that the previous maid who they got fired was housing her actual adult husband (who is insane after spending so much time underground) in the bomb shelter the home-owners don't know about under the basement.
From there, the thing basically went off the rails and the dramedy descended into nihilism as the family that actually owns the house is treated as a hurdle or ignored.
Then it all kind of goes insane when the new maid/the young man's mother kicks the old maid in the chest and down some stairs, killing her, which sets off a series of insane events at a young boy's birthday party (an event that was heavily telegraphed, though the actress playing his mother really sold her backstory scene).
Anyways, a lot of people get stabbed or otherwise maimed, soaking an ultraluxe upstairs/downstairs movie in blood (there was also heavy Bridesmaids level excrement in a scene a few moments before) and nobody has any morality except the now-widowed housewife and her children.
I can't help but thinking whoever wrote this movie had a mildly bad experience with house-help but held on to it for too long.
I mean, I certainly wouldn't have given it a Palme d'Or, but I imagine the competition was somehow even less coherent.
*The movie is two hours long, but Field's book The Screenwriter's Work Book argues that usually even in movies that are longer this turning point happens around then).
This is because even though production companies (or in most cases, a single movie's holding company) can do a lot of "fun" accounting to make a profit-turning movie into a lost cause.
I see this happen a lot in Deadline artiles where they just absent mindely parrot "after P&A"/Publicity and Advertising as a reason why a movie will lose money, despite the fact that the movie's holding company probably paid it's production company or a distributor owned by the same family company for all that P&A, and the largest estimates I've seen suggest that at least 25% of that money is just being moved around rather than used (even 2% or something would be a lot of lined pockets).
But with streaming, you don't even know how much the movie made, at all, ever. In fact, you don't even know how they account for how much it made. The recent "Let's Support Uighur Genocide" Mulan at least had a separate price from the regular Disney+ subscription, but no other movie seems to use that as an option.
For example, Netflix has purchased this black-and-white indie movie starring Zendaya that was shot in like two weeks for $30m, and this set off a lot of alarm bells. It's a very bad business move, no matter where you sit, because nobody will watch this but hipsters who pay for Premium HBO (which is well below what any Netflix subscription costs).
Contrast this movie, which was a real blockbuster that transferred from WB to Netflix for distribution. WB probably sold the distribution rights at a discount but I'm guessing the price was nowhere near that of production since the producing house just shifted contracts from WB to Netflix and still owns it (versus that hipster movie where the rights auction was conducted by the filmmakers themselves). This movie has costumes and bells and whistles and more than one set, yet probably cost only double in distro.
That's really weird.
I am 100% going to watch this.
I wish they'd cast anybody but Mario Lopez in the lead. I feel like this is a movie that needs to take itself seriously to some extent and Mario Lopez is like the personification of a joke about how attractive one man can be.
Though that may be the point.
I watched it. Whilst it was actually just a 15m short, it was a pretty good watch with multiple Lifetime moments.
So I watched Christopher Nolan's latest
hitmasterpieceproject Tenet.Warning: this is long;
Tenet is... not great.
At first it seemed like the time travel stuff was a backdrop for a heist movie, but then towards the end it turned into some sort of armed forces mission with a team working forwards and another working backwards and neither being very interesting.
Before that it was a heist and then a reverse-go-back-into-the-heist thing.
The main character had absolutely no personality, backstory or characteristics but it's fitting for somebody quite literally called "Protagonist".
Also, Robert Pattinson was there.
The basic plot is that somebody in the future has discovered "Inversion" which is bending the entropy of specific objects backwards so they act as if they're moving backwards in time. This includes whole human beings (and for some reason this means if somebody tries burning you to death you'll die of hypothermia instead).
For human beings this means time-travelling exactly in reverse (though this principle is forgotten several times in the movie where characters suddenly need to see other people when they're going backwards in time and are able to somehow contact them even further in the past to set up these meetings).
So the scientist girl who invented this in the future realizes what a monstrous thing she's created and kills herself so nobody else can figure it out.
Except she then also decides to set up a scavenger hunt to find the nine pieces of a physical algorithm stick thing that detail exactly how inversion works and sends them to the past. In addition, blowing up this magic inversion algorithm stick -which is the bad guy's whole raison d'etre- will end the world. No, stop asking questions, it just will okay????
The good guys trying to stop humanity from discovering this tech are called Tenet, and they have a massive network of agents all over the world all primarily from the future. This includes entire militias that only really show up when we need militia scenes.
This network recruits human beings who show off excessive levels of selflessness and/or patriotism, such as Protagonist, who refuses to give in to Russian torture and chooses to swallow a Pill of Death instead. However, it turns out the pills don't kill you, and he's recruited into Tenet.
For some reason, this single trait never comes up again, and he immediately morphs into a more typical CIA agent who is all "anything for the mission's success". The only character he's shown to care about in the whole movie is the main girl, Kat, and that's really only because if he didn't care about her whilst constantly using her he'd come off extremely bad as Protagonist of the story.
The members of Tenet clearly don't need to recruit modern-day agents, considering they are also just humans from the future and can also only use people who have been razed from the records (everybody thinks protagonist is dead).
That would probably also avoid their celebrated tradition of killing every current-timer who finds out about Inversion and Tenet, which is a really weird practice considering the movie even brings up the "Grandfather Paradox". Though it's not exact, they're clearly ending lots of family lines and future lives constantly doing this.
The bad guys, also from the future, don't have a name and are working with a suicidal Russian oligarch to end time and space so they can reverse back to our era (because this totally makes sense at all) because their time is climate changed the heck out of livability because literally never can the future be normal or positive in a modern movie.
In fact, if you have the time to create Inversion tech, and this affects base molecules (as they said when explaining why characters get hypothermia when burned), why not just use that to experiment a few times and basically completely reverse any climate or environmental changes?
Anyways absolutely none of this actually mattered because the movie was mostly just fight scenes.
It clocked in at 2h20m or so but somehow all the dialogue scenes were scripted and acted as if out of an episode of Law & Order.
That means, basically, that dialogue was extremely fast, everybody already knew the relevant details so they didn't need it explained properly (like the names and exact social statuses of Russian oligarchs living in the UK even if like 2 days ago they were just a CIA agent working in Ukraine), and nobody seemed to have the time to get characterization.
The speed of it was really jarring, like the intro scene for the main girl was about 5m long in a dialogue that had a major scene transition from her art warehouse to a dinner in a restaurant. In fact, now I remember that in this scene the reason they shifted locales was that the girl didn't want people to overhear her, so she chose a location where they could be even more easily found and interrupted and protagonist who had previously worked with the CIA agreed. Brilliant.
There was also a scientist lady who showed up for about 10m at the start, explained Inversion to MC, and then never showed up again. A similar thing with the guy who gave him unlimited money and pointed him in the direction of main girl.
And at the very very end of the movie, Robert Pattinson one explains to MC that future MC is the boss of his Tenet unit and that Robert Pattinson one has been MC's assistant in the past/future for ages.
This extremely important twist is explained in like 3 more words than I've used here in about 2m.
This is also right after a future future Tenet agent almost kills one of the people who will be running Tenet for at least a few years, as part of his orders, but doesn't (defying his orders). It makes no sense he was given those orders anyways because if he did actually do it Tenet as a whole organization would be screwed.
Some people online discussing this film insist that watching it more times will allow you to SEE how great it was!
Look, I already noticed that Robert Pattinson one's takedown of one of the mysterious armed guys in the heist place the first time round was not a real feasible takedown. The fight scene with MC vs the mysterious masked man one in that very same scene was really really telegraphed (as if, iunno, he was fighting himself and knew how to do so).
And that the machine in that place was the same as the machine they use to Invert full humans later on and so that was probably exactly what was going to happen.
Others have suggested that the point is for MC to discover his own role in the Tenet system and then send himself back on this exact mission, in which case why exactly would that be the whole point?
That's not a good twist that enhances the movie, it's just a perfunctory detail considering how little personality or character arc Protagonist has. In addition, even if he discovers his role, he himself cannot have created Tenet since it doesn't allow you to time-travel forwards, and this would still have nothing to do with the villain also gaining access to Inversion, so there's no direct, beautifully planned domino effect. Plus, MC did not create Inversion nor does he know who did/will since that's waaaay in the future after his lifetime.
What did surprise me, in the end, was that the ending chose to be some Operation Desert storm thing rather than returning to the Opera House from Kiev at the start of the movie. The opening was telegraphed in a way that involved the bad guys also using inversion technology and the fact that the technology that is central to the movie is used in the opening sequence and then this comes up over and over but they don't return to it makes the whole ending feel somewhat flat. Even more flat than the ending on it's own merits is.
But not American Psycho.
I mean, going by the memes and the movie, I'm pretty sure 90% of memers have never seen this movie and those that have don't actually care...?
The Patrick Bateman portrayed in memes is cocky and self-assure but the actual Patrick Bateman is just having a breakdown in slow motion.
I wish somebody had warned me about this movie being some sort of absurdist fantasy nonsense so I could just avoid it forever. Frankly, if anybody ever complains about modern (non-superhero) movies ever again I will force them to sit through all of American Psycho.
The first half is painfully, pointlessly depressing and the second half is stupid, violent and most of all confusing. The two halves are stitched together with a weird series of pseudo-explicit sexual encounters. First with Patrick, a prostitute and an escort (not sure why there was such an emphasis on the difference between them) and then with Patrick and the woman he's having an affair with, who never shows up again.
The prostitute does show up again though, in a sequence where Patrick (naked) chases her through an apartment building with a chainsaw...? He kills her by dropping the chainsaw right down a set of stairs so accurately it slices right through her midsection?
Am I honestly supposed to believe it ends with Patrick's lawyer (who is just now a character) having been covering up his crimes this whole time? Did he imagine everything? What happened to the not Steve Carell detective? What about the time he shot a police officer in the arm point blank and then blew up a police car? Did that happen?
Was the anti-Reagan spiel a the end somehow supposed to tie this together (you see, it's actually an allegory for the Iran Contra situation... or something!) or was that just to get the critics to forget and clap like seals because "Reagan sucks!".
The nihilism throughout was tiring, and I finally found a movie where I can actually say "hey, Parasite did rich people+murders way better than this". Parasite.
Every time I watch a movie or read a book based on an online recommendation it ends up being really bad. I'll just make my own decisions from now on. Also to be avoided; movies with a male lead where Reese Witherspoon plays a supporting character. First Election, and now this (both also somehow involve the main character being addicted to adult film; whenever Patrick has to run off somewhere, he cryptically says he has to "Return some videos").
As for other movies I've seen recently, I saw the 2011 TV movie version of The Bling Ring, which I loved (Austin Butler, who plays Elvis in his new biopic, was amazing in it) and Honey Girls, which was a toy-commercial but with very fun music (and also a toy commercial, I love those).
I'm not sure if I ever posted it here (and I'm too lazy to search it) but I do have a Letterboxd account.
https://letterboxd.com/glennmharvey/
My "diary"/recent activity is a little messy because it doesn't actually show some of the films I've watched recently, though you can go to my Films page:
https://letterboxd.com/glennmharvey/films/
and then sort by "When Added": "Newest First". Though not all movies were added when I watched them (some are "I watched this a while ago but haven't added it yet", especially early on).
I finally watched the first two Alien films this year. And it seems that's all I've watched this year. (The bunch of anime films are mostly backlog adds, with the exception of the Nanoha and LWA movies.)
racebeing a genie).I also want to watch some documentaries. I found out that Ryan Murphy produced a movie called Pray Away last year (not this one, though this movie does sound fun) and this year the What is a Woman? has been making waves in all the places I hang out so I figured why not see it. It's like a LW v RW type of thing in my head.
Letterboxd is a little bit more useful/less clunky than imdb but I think I still prefer the latter for future movie searching purposes.
I walked into Star Wars Episode VIII without much in the way of particular expectations. (It was a family movie outing, what can I say.) While the movie didn't directly delight me, it did seem interesting: the good guys were locked in an ongoing struggle, and there were lots of moments when things just didn't go their way. There were tragedies, some born from circumstance, some arguably the result of poor decisions, but...this is all fair game for a story. Interestingly, it left me more interested in the franchise, because it seemed to suggest strongly that there was something new yet to come, something being born even while older generations of heroes faded away. It was definitely intriguing.
I didn't know about the arguments over it at the time; only later did I run into people saying stuff like how the movie didn't mesh with other Star Wars media or had excessive influence from "SJWs" and such. I can't say I agree with them, beyond just that the movie might not feel satisfying...but that's because it's not a complete story on its own.
Later on, I had heard the arguments over Captain Marvel before seeing it. I watched it anyway (as wading into contentious stuff that I'm personally curious about is a pretty common practice, which y'all might know from my anime tastes). This movie ended up feeling kinda meh. As in, the story just felt less convincing overall. Amusingly, I don't remember as this movie as well...but that's probably because it just ended up being kinda meh.
Similarly, the people who spend way too much time complaining about these franchises are: a) giving life to a thing they now profess to hate and b) not moving on with their lives.
Especially with Star Wars. I get that it's basically the post-70s version of some cult American religion but people really should be able to quit it.