FisterRoboto

A lot of what I had to say has already been said, and I didn't want to just quote a bunch of posts and be like, "Yes." The biggest takeaway for me was that this movie was trying so hard to do a Forrest Gump-esque look into American culture. And usually, I'm all for that. But what makes it not work is that it's all set against a Liverpudlian immigrant coming to the US and viewing it through the filter of The Beatles. As I said previously, part of what made Forrest Gump so great was that it was a slice of Americana accompanied by great American musicians of that time: Elvis, Wilson Pickett, Credence, Simon & Garfunkel, Harry fuckin' Nilsson. From a musical perspective, I feel like this movie is overtly heavy-handed. It's been brought up before, but my biggest complaint is that there's no subtext at all. One of the biggest rules for writing dialogue is that people don't often say what they really mean; they talk around it. That goes for movies, too. MILD SPOILER ALERT FOR LA LA LAND: if we look at, say, "City of Stars" from La La Land, it's a song about what Sebastian is feeling for Mia, but the lyrics of the song are literally the stars in the sky. We feel his feelings, but he's not saying, "Man, I've developed feelings for Mia, but I'm also trying to figure out how to make my dreams come true. Is everything really about me?" Instead, we get a beautiful song that we can tie to his emotions both about Mia and his dreams. Meanwhile, in Across the Universe, we get songs that seem reverse engineered to meet the situation we are presented with. As Cameron pointed out, "Revolution" is the worst offender. Lucy's entire involvement with the SDR seems to only exist because Taymor wanted a good opportunity to sing the song and tell us quite literally that she "want a revolution" and to mock it. That not only fails on a literary level of "show don't tell," but it also cheapens the message of "Revolution," which ultimately was, "Yes, we agree that shit is fucked up, but we're all doing the best we can. We're not your enemy just because we don't want to set the White House on fire." And that's to say nothing of the scattered narrative rife with too many characters that are all sorely undeveloped. If the movie was a straightforward romance movie set in the backdrop of the Vietnam War, then I could at least partly get on board, but it spends so much time (and expends so much of its better moments) on characters that are far more interesting than the bland, uninteresting lead duo.

Sorry, totally off-topic, but did you know that Tituss Burgess actually has a Pinot Noir brand? My friend was in NYC last week and sent me a picture of a giant storefront ad for it. This just makes me think of John Mulaney's rant about Home Alone 2 and how it's "impossible" to get lost in New York.

Does The Lobster count as a romantic movie? Because that's my recent favorite. Also Blue Valentine, but that one's kind of depressing. Oh, and But I'm a Cheerleader!

AKA - Love Problematically

I wildly disagree with the last two sentences, but I definitely agree with the first. I can accept that I'm not the intended audience for these bits, so as soon as I hear the words "movie bitches," I just start skipping ahead until I'm past the part that sounds like it was recorded in a bath tub. It's really not that taxing.

Yep. But Forrest Gump is a film that's steeped in Americana, so to try to translate that into a movie based off of the music of a British band is really strange. I don't think so. Why?

I feel like a Prudence story would have been incredibly more interesting than this. I wanted to follow her when she disappeared after "Dear Prudence". And then when she turned up at the circus, I was like, "Why did I have to watch these fucking jerkoffs when we could have been seeing what brought her to this point?"

Definitely agree. She was the character I thought had the most potential, and then they didn't do anything with her at all. It also feels like they worked backwards from the song they wanted to use. They were like, "Let's create a character named Prudence so we can use 'Dear Prudence.'" "But how can we make the song mean something in the movie?" "Have her locked herself away somewhere and need to be coaxed out..." "Like a closet?" "Brilliant....and then we can make her gay!" "And then we can have her sing a love song to a woman!" "But what if we make everyone think it's a man?" "You're on fucking fire!"

So, I mentioned this in the Beauty and the Beast thread, but...let's talk about age. When we first meet Sadie, Max and Jude say how she's hot "for an older woman." Dana Fuchs is three years older than Jim Sturgess. But they need to age her up I guess? So they put her with Martin Luther McCoy, who is 6 years older than Fuchs. Meanwhile, Sturgess is 29 here, and Evan Rachel Wood is 20. Why isn't he saying how ERW is "a younger girl"? She's literally 3X younger than him compared to him and Dana Fuchs. Like, in this universe (and in plenty of others, to be fair) women are either 20 or 50. Side note: Dana Fuchs is probably my favorite part of the movie, even if I didn't really like her character. She has a really great presence. It's a bummer she didn't do more after this.

We started doing Musical Mondays right at the end of last year. Basically, we have a rotation where someone picks a movie during an ep week and we all watch it, and then we talk about it during the mini week. We realized a bunch of us really love musicals, so it's something fun for us to talk about while we wait on new episodes. If you want to join the rotation and pick one soon, Cameron can add you in! (And feel free to post as much as you like about the movie. That's why we do it!)

I have a lot to say about this movie, but today is a busy day at work, so I'm just going to say... Jim Sturgess was only cast because he looks like Bobo Paul McCartney, right?

I honestly think it worked better reading it on the forums vs hearing it in the ep. Otherwise, it was just someone throwing out a shitload of dates, and you're like, "Wait, what?" But also, I go read all that kind of shit to engage with you guys rather than just trying to get something read on the mini-ep, so I'm honestly happy whenever I hear my name at all (even when it's the, like, 3 times in a row that Paul read something I wrote and told me I was wrong and stupid).

As someone who saw 5 movies in the theater over the last two days, I say: Yeah, I actually went to two schools that did block scheduling. The first one did A/B block, so you'd have your A-day classes on MWF and B-day classes on TR one week, and then the next week would be the opposite. Then in high school, we did the block classes where you switch at the semester. PS - I'm disappointed in Paul for cutting out my 100% engaging and not at all snoozeworthy research about the first annual snowfall in Cincinnati.

I was supposed to see it Thursday night, but my friend I was supposed to see it with had to leave town because of a death in the family, so I promised him I'd wait until he got back and we'd see it together. I'm really bummed that it didn't play Fantastic Fest last year because the first one did in 2014 (and Keanu came and introduced the movie and he is amazing). I'm really excited for it, though!

Man, I hope this has the "Holy fuck that was some ridiculous awesomeness" that the Fast and/or Furious movies have. I saw xXx tonight, and I absolutely loved it. Donnie Yen, Ruby Rose, and Rory McCann (The Hound from GoT) are all just delightful in it. I had a total blast watching the movie, and it's exactly the kind of over-the-top ridiculousness I had hoped for.

Have you checked back since the tickets went on sale to see if any are available? I've noticed something with Alamo tickets, which is that people seem to go to the site and start the purchase process to see if there are any seats left, and then they don't actually buy the tickets, so they are held for 10 minutes or so before the purchase times out, and then there are seats available. I've had it happen several times where I clicked in the email to buy a ticket the moment I got it, and it looked like it was already sold out. Then when I checked again a bit later, half the theater was still empty, and I'm pretty sure that's what's happening. They added in the seat preview thing on the desktop site, but it's not available on mobile or the app, so I think a lot of people still check for seats without buying. It's not a great system.

Man, the new xXx is already out of, like, half of the theaters here. That was fast. Guess I have to venture to a non-Alamo theater for the first time in a looooong while (Krisha was the only other time that has happened in at least two years).

"Cameron H is gonna break down some poopin' knowledge for us." Your work here is done, my friend. You got Paul to utter that sentence.

The C&O theme called it "Errors and Omissions"

No. No. No.

*poopoisseur

Speaking of Lea Seydoux, I just want to point out Rachel Weisz is 6 years older than Colin Farrell, and that's one of the billion reasons The Lobster is one of the best movies ever. (also, Angeliki Papoulia, who plays the Heartless Woman, is about a year older than Farrell)

I do often extol the excellence of MUSICBAND