FisterRoboto

So, I watched it last night and enjoyed it, but something just felt kind of....off about it. And I think it's what y'all have already said about everyone being at different levels. I agree that Branagh stuck out REALLY badly, especially early on. I felt like the other three male leads were doing that thing that happens far too frequently in Shakespeare productions where they are just rushing to get the words out as quickly as possible and not putting any meaning behind them. Then in swoops Branagh, and he's just magnificent. I mean, maybe it's unfair because at this point, the dude has spent decades performing in various productions, so everything about him comes off far more natural than it does with others. Spall was actually the other person in the movie I really enjoyed. Even though I didn't really love most of the songs (I'll get to that in a minute), I thought his version of "I Get a Kick Out of You" was one of the better numbers in the movie. He's playing so broadly and just fucking going for it in a way that I can't help but love. It's really hammy kitsch, but it's so delightful to watch. The songs also felt out of place to me. I like that they tried to do something different with the play. I think it's always interesting when a production tries to inject something new (e.g., I saw a production of The Taming of the Shrew when I still lived in Ft Worth that was staged as a Western, and it was WONDERFUL). I like that they set it in the 30s, and I liked a lot of the other choices. But the songs all felt really weird and off to me. They're all songs I really like, but using songs from the Great American Song Book as music for an English play set in Spain never really gelled for me. But there were a lot of things I liked a lot about it. I really liked that they put Lillard with Ejogo and Lester with Mortimer. When they first introduce to the two groups, I was like, "Oh, they're just going to put the two black people together." So I was very happy to see that they instead went with two interracial couples instead. Logically, it would make their masquerade ruse a almost impossible to pull off, but I liked how the movie just didn't even care. It was there for silly fun, and there was no reason to weigh it down with all that. I also LOVED Nathan Lane. I think he is so fucking funny in this movie. He's another one that stuck out because he has so much musical theater experience. But he's so incredibly funny, and he just instinctually knows how to sell his whole performance. I'm sure I have more thoughts about it, but the last thing I'll say is that I was really distracted by the fact that Ferdinand was Pollux Troy. It's not his fault. The dude has been in films for 20 years, and that's the only thing I can ever see him as. But every time he was on screen, I was like, "I hate when you call me 'bro.'"

It was the headlining movie of a small sci-fest fest called Other Worlds Austin last year, and I heard a lot of praise for it. Also, I'm on board with anything that has Frank Grillo, Iko Uwais, and Yayan Ruhian.

Yeah, the whole cast is really bizarre, but Lillard is the icing on the weird cake we're about to eat.

Everything about this sentence hurts my heart.

I mean...not a bad one if you had to pick just one, though But yeah, I see a bunch. I decided to do the MoviePass thing, so I tend to try to get as much out of it as I can - something that would be pretty much impossible if I had a family.

They've been doing that since pretty much forever. I get Cameron's point about not having any respite from it, but it's not like this is any more or less than it's been at the same time as any other SW release. I was a senior in high school in 1999 and worked in a toy store. Maybe I just saw sooo much Star Wars stuff at that point that I'm kind of blind to it now? I honestly don't know, but it doesn't bother me because it's something that SW has always done, and I guess I just kind of block it out.

Me too. And that's without leaving my living room

Maybe that's why I feel that way about Marvel. I usually see 2-3 movies a week in the theater, and it's rare that I don't see a Marvel trailer. I don't watch that much TV, or when I do, it's DVR'd or on Hulu, so I either don't see ads or can skip right past them. I think I might also just be blind to how much SW is everywhere because it feels like it's been pretty ubiquitous for most of my life.

I loved TLJ, and while everyone is entitled to their opinions, I think it's funny to hear things like "SW movies just come out too frequently" when we live in a world where there are at least three Marvel movies per year (and one to two Netflix series). I'm so burned out on those movies, even if I totally loved Thor because it was a refreshing change of pace, so I guess I kind of get why people might feel that way about SW. But at the same time, we only get one of the main story every two years, and I stay really excited about those. I hated Rogue One, and I don't really care about the other two spin-offs they have planned (which isn't to say I won't be there opening night). I was a bit excited about the Han Solo movie because I wanted to see what Miller and Lord would do with it. But now that they've gone with Ron Howard, I feel like it's going to be a pretty boring, safe movie. About TLJ, I think a lot of the comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back are spot on. That's a movie that the "hardcore" fans absolutely hated at the time it was released. It was so different from what came before it, and the reveal of DV being Luke's dad was pretty controversial. Critics just kind of shit all over it, and the fan reviews weren't great either. However, we lived in a time before the internet, so they aren't as easy to track down. But I have read a few articles like (warning: pretty big TLJ spoilers!) this one filled with a lot of people giving the same kind of criticism that seems to be finding its way straight back to TLJ. Aaaaaanyway, some other random thoughts because I just read through this thread: I thought you were talking about the Kathryn Bigelow movie at first, and I was like, "What? That's set in the 60s" For 2017 movies, it was definitely A Ghost Story. I was really hesitant to even see the movie because of human trash can Casey Affleck. So I went with a free pass I had so I could at least be glad I wasn't spending any real money on it. And I ended up absolutely loving it. There's so much to the movie, and I totally love its themes of time and memory and how people exist only when others remember them (something I loved just as much when it appeared months later in Coco). For non-2017 movies, I'm kind of ashamed to say it was Rent. Even though the film version was....not great, watching it for MM finally convinced me to watch the stage version. And I fell in love with it. I couldn't even begin to count how many times I've listened to the Broadway soundtrack since we watched it.

It's definitely the same church; they're just working with the school now (I don't know if that's how Catholic schools work, but that's how the movie sets it up).

Okay. I have a few random questions/thoughts about this movie: 1. In the beginning of the movie, Deloris says she went to St Francis. But in the first movie, she's shown to have gone to St. Anne's. Did she transfer schools at some point? 2. At the end of the first movie, Deloris' story blows up. They do that whole thing that was popular at this time where they show the epilogue through magazine covers/newspaper headlines. We're led to believe she was a big deal. And no one in the city recognizes her? Like, at all? It would be one thing if, say, it happened in another city or something. But this literally happened at the SAME CHURCH. The administrator wasn't like, "Hey, this lady looks a lot like literally the only other black person that's ever been at this monastery." And none of the kids knew? 3. Cameron touched on it a bit, but the biggest problem I have with this movie is that it tried to do something different while also trying to cling to the wrong parts of the first movie. The first movie worked because it was a pretty by-the-book fish out of water story. She constantly butts heads with Mother Superior while winning the friendship of the other nuns because of her unconventional methods. Part of what makes it so great is that Maggie Smith and Whoopi are EXCELLENT against one another. They're the perfect foils for one another on every level. So what does this movie do? It starts out with a long hug between the two of them before Maggie Smith hands Whoopi a bucket of exposition and then disappears until the end. Instead, it looks like we're going to have a battle of wills between Whoopi and her class full of stereotypes, but she wins them over as quickly as she won over the nuns in the first movie. So where's the tension? There's the administrator that's going to shut the school down, but there's never any real conflict revealed between the two (and never any explanation of how the music program is going to be what saves the school). There's Lauryn Hill's mother, but we only see her...what, twice? Three times? That story isn't really fleshed out enough to make anyone care. A far more interesting story, I think, would have spent more time exploring Deloris trying to win over the students. It would have taken the first movie where Deloris was the unconventional outsider and flipped the premise so that now she had to realize that she was part of the establishment. OR it could have been a case of Maggie Smith reluctantly inviting her back because she knows she needs her help even though she still doesn't totally love Deloris, the class falling in love with her because she was so unconventional, but the administrator hating her for that same unconventionality, and in the end, Maggie Smith is the one that comes to her side and encourages her to be herself. Instead, the movie tries to do ALL of these things, and it comes out as a bit of a jumbled mess.

That was totally me when she grabbed Hugh's hand. I already really like the guy, but how encouraging he was and how genuinely happy he is for her at the end just melted my cold, dead heart.

So, my favorite line in the movie is when Lauryn Hill tells them that her mom won't sign the consent form. Whoopi and one of the other nuns is like, "Oh no! Why not?!" And Sister Mary Lazarus just goes, "Well give us back the consent form!" I think if this forum were a convent, and we were all analogous characters, I'd be Mary Lazarus.

Yeah, New Math was a thing in the 60s that tried to emphasize a lot of mathematical concepts that weren't included in the core curriculum of public schools. It fell out of fashion pretty quickly, so now the phrase "New Math" is generally used as a description of any sort of educational fad that doesn't last very long (or isn't expected to last very long).

It Comes at Night is definitely one od the more divisive of my faves from this year. A LOT of my friends hated it, and I think it was largely because of the way the trailer sold the film. But, having seen Krisha, I had quite different expectations. (Full disclosure: I have a couple of friends that worked on both of those movies, so I might be impartial. But then again, they also worked on a movie I straight up hated last year. I just don't talk to them about that one...)

I saw BWO at a fest last year (when it was titled Safe Neighborhood), and I was really mad when the trailers came out because I thought it gave everything away . Elijah's rat-tail alone is enough reason to love that movie. I saw it the day it came out because Macon Blair (the director) is an Austin local, and his collaborations with Jeremy Saulnier (Green Room, Blue Ruin, Murderparty) are pretty much universally adored by the film crowd here. Melanie Lynskey is so good in that movie, and Elijah Wood is a lot funnier than I've ever seen him. It's hard for me to rank things because I find it an almost impossible task to compare a movie like It Comes at Night with one like The Big Sick. So, here's a non-ordered list of my 20 favorite movies from the year: Lady Bird Five Fingers for Marseilles (a really rad South African western that still hasn't gotten major distribution) The Big Sick Get Out I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore Star Wars: The Last Jedi Coco The Disaster Artist Thoroughbreds Ingrid Goes West The Fate of the Furious It Comes at Night The Shape of Water I, Tonya The Killing of a Sacred Deer Brigsby Bear Tour de Pharmacy A Ghost Story The Square Blade Runner 2049 Honorable Mention: Good Time - a movie I didn't totally love, but that has a career best performance from Robert Pattinson, who this year has shown himself to be FAR more talented than anyone has ever given him credit for. ETA: My least favorites of the year: The Mummy Bright The Book of Henry The Circle Beatriz at Dinner Life Ghost in the Shell

I've been listening to the soundtrack and hating myself for how much I enjoy it. I like "Come Alive," but does the part right before the chorus not remind you of "Firework" by Katy Perry? I also really like "This is Me." The bearded lady was my favorite character, and I wouldn't hesitate to watch a spinoff about her.

Well, to maybe give a bit more perspective: it was an English class at a community college (no shade against community colleges because mine was great to me, but man, the freshman level classes there are rough if you actually like learning).

I'm definitely happy to discuss Muppet Christmas Carol! I watched it last week and totally forgot how much I loved it.

Aaaaaand I watched SA2 tonight. I have so much to say and I totally should have waited until the night before to watch it because now I'm going to have to wait and probably forget all the things I was going to say. This movie is something else. Good pick, SaraK!

I don't want to get too much into it because I'm hoping in about 3-4 months, someone will choose this as a MM pick. I think there's a TON to talk about, and it'll make for a great discussion. So, the main thing is that it ultimately comes down to a glorification of a total garbage person. Barnum was a terrible (and terribly racist) dude that exploited the people who the movie has praise him. I think I would have liked it a lot more if it weren't presented as a biopic but was instead presented as a fictional story inspired by PT Barnum (which is actually what it is). Or if they had done the movie as being about the circus performers and told their stories, I'd be really into it. The hero worship of Barnum, though, just really turned me off. All that said, fucking Zac Efron needs to get back in the musical game right now. He's so good in this, and his song with Zendaya was the standout scene for me. And while Jackman can sing and dance very well, Efron blows him away as soon as they have their first song together. Anyway, have a thing I found earlier:

My mom is a big Vincent Price fan, so I grew up watching a lot of his old movies. is one of the best things that has ever happened, and I've seen it what is probably an unreasonable amount of times. So I was quite surprised when I got to college and we watched the version of The Fall of the House of Usher starring Price (and directed by Roger Corman!), people in my class straight up hated it. They were like, "Why are we watching this shitty, ham-fisted, over-dramatic garbage?" And I was just going, "BUT VINCENT PRICE IS IN IT!!!" Not for the first time...I failed to win any others over to my side with that argument.

Because Vincent Price makes everything infinitely better with his mere presence

"Fucking flim-flam and bullshit, but at least it's gonna pass the time for ya" should be the new "The show where we talk to interesting people" for 2018.

I saw Greatest Showman tonight. It's...something. A critic I follow on Letterboxd described it as "The worst movie I've ever liked," and I thought that was fitting (there are a couple of genuinely awesome musical numbers, though, that I think make it well worth the time). ANYWAY, excited for SA2! I saw the first one soooo many times growing up, but I've only seen this one once. I've been meaning to revisit it ever since Broad City did their homage to it last year, but I've just never gotten around to it.