sycasey 2.0

The whole thing doesn't track at all. This company pays for this girls' soccer team, seems very proud of it (to the extent that the boss displays all of the trophies in his office), and there is no direct reason given in the movie for why the Mullens do this. You'd think it's because their daughter loves soccer, but then we see that she seems to hate playing because she stinks at it. So then you think, "Maybe the parents are super-competitive go-getters and are pressuring their daughter into playing a sport." But then it turns out they know she stinks and are actively trying to keep her off the field! This whole subplot is just an endless loop.

Just to make things creepier in here, I'll note that Vinessa Shaw went on to play the prostitute in Eyes Wide Shut who helps save Tom Cruise from the masked sex party.

I must correct Jason on one point: In Twilight, it's not the BABY who imprints, it's Jacob the werewolf who imprints on the BABY. Which clearly makes much more sense, duh!

EDIT: Oh, I see Cam Bert has already made this point. Great minds!

Oh man, I have so many thoughts on this, but first of all: Let's add this to the long list of "movies by screenwriters who don't seem to realize why people wear eyeglasses." The final soccer match has a lot of problems, but can anyone help me understand why Penny removing her glasses, AND letting down her hair so it flaps in her face as she runs, is supposed to make her better at soccer? I would think that not being able to see the ball would make you worse at the game. Another HDTGM movie to add to this list would be Can't Stop the Music, in which Valerie Perrine loses her contact lenses before hosting a party, and then . . . nothing happens. But at least that movie doesn't try to suggest she'd become BETTER at anything because she's visually impaired.

I think you don't really FEEL Jen's yearning to escape her situation unless you see the romance first-hand. Otherwise it's only been told to you. I suppose you could have replaced it with flashbacks to her history with Jade Fox, but I think a sweeping romance pulls the audience along more than a teacher-student relationship.

Matchstick Men wasn't bad either. The Counselor has some fans (not me). And personally, I don't mind Alien: Covenant.

Hmm, it is rated PG-13, so maybe not for young kids. But it does seem likely they expected pre-teens to enjoy it.

The Twitter reaction seems outsized to me (not the first time that's happened!), but I understand that a lot of people felt betrayed by Devin and that given their justified anger, they are not going to give him any benefit of the doubt. Still, it seems to me that a guy starting an independent, personal blog on which he displays no ads and asks for no money (outside of voluntary donations) shouldn't be anyone's idea of intrusive, assaulting behavior. This is entirely ignorable if you wish to avoid exposure to Devin Faraci's writing. Meanwhile, if I'm considering what I'd expect to see if Devin were actually sincere about acknowledging his past misdeeds and trying to make amends and be a better person, then none of this seems inconsistent with that. He says he's contacted his victims to apologize, and in the PBS show she confirms he did. If he's sincere about not remembering the specific incident, then it seems he's at least acknowledged it's probably true, because he used to behave like an asshole (his words) to a lot of people. The tone he's taken on his blog and in other appearances (including on PBS and on this podcast) seems a lot more positive than the old Devin. So I dunno. It's entirely possible he's bullshitting us again, but if he is then we'll soon find out. It's not like he's in any position of power here.

I am horrified that this movie was intended for children. And I've seen that Garbage Pail Kids movie.

For those in the U.S. (not sure if this can be viewed outside the country), here's the episode where Devin and his accuser are both interviewed: http://www.pbs.org/video/the-accuser-and-the-accused-fnc15l/ IMO, both of them seem thoughtful and fair about the whole thing.

Oh no, this means we have Crouching Tiger to blame for Uma Thurman's car crash!

On this: when I watch Crouching Tiger I can tell that Chow Yun-Fat is delivering kind of a mush-mouthed vocal performance. I don't actually know Mandarin, but I can detect a difference between him and everyone else. I don't mind it, since for this movie and this role I think his physical performance is more important, but if I were a native speaker I might have been bothered more. I also saw this movie in theaters with a friend who was born in Taiwan (he had moved to the U.S. as a child, so was very Americanized, but he still knew Mandarin well enough from is time there). He said that Chow's accent was terrible, Michelle Yeoh obviously had an accent that was a bit "off" but she covered it well, Zhang Ziyi was obviously the best native speaker, and Chang Chen sounded like a typical Taiwanese teenager. He also liked the movie a lot, so obviously didn't consider this mix of accents a deal-breaker. To bring it back to Gladiator, I like Joaquin Phoenix's performance a good deal, and think the choices and intentions he makes are really interesting. But that said, his accent is all over the place. It seems like he's trying to do an upper-class English accent so he fits in with the rest of the cast, but gives up half the time because he's not too good at it. It kind of fits in that his character is trying to be something he's not, but it's still jarring to me.

I keep forgetting that's an Ang Lee movie, but yes, definitely Ice Storm too. I'm also surprised at how big a blowout this is, though obviously I agree with the result.

I agree that Gladiator had a lot of impact on the film industry, as discussed in the podcast episode, but let's not discount the impact of Crouching Tiger. Martial-arts movie imports exploded in the U.S. after this. In the years following, I was able to go to multiplexes and see movies like Hero and House of Flying Daggers, along with re-releases of stuff like Legend of the Drunken Master, Iron Monkey, and Once Upon a Time in China. Hong-Kong style wire work became ubiquitous in action movies. Granted, much of that can also be credited to The Matrix, but Crouching Tiger becoming another big hit helped propel this revolution along (and by the same token, you can say that Gladiator is on a continuum with Saving Private Ryan and other realistic/modernized period action movies). Finally, I'd also say that Crouching Tiger did a whole lot to drive mainstream American audiences' acceptance of Asian actors in major roles, something that most people take as a given these days but that was certainly not very common at the time it was released. After that, there was no denying that Asian faces could sell tickets. As for artistic/entertainment value, I think Gladiator is pretty decent and held up better than I expected, but in comparison it's no contest: Crouching Tiger wins by a mile. Gladiator moves in fits and starts, and it has a weird script that is pretty light on plot/characterization, yet is also somehow extremely wordy and results in a movie that is 2 1/2 hours long. The charismatic actors and Ridley Scott's hyper-aesthetic approach are carrying all the water here, but the story doesn't linger much after the movie is done. I'm also not sure entirely what it's trying to say about what Rome was "supposed" to be, given that the ending doesn't square too well with the battle at the start, where you're (I guess) rooting for the Roman army to conquer another country? I suppose this is intended as a way of setting up Maximus as a man who once believed in the system and by the end wants to crash it down, but it's muddled with his personal revenge story and a lack of context for what Rome under Marcus Aurelius was like. As an action/adventure yarn it's entertaining enough, but like much of Ridley Scott's work it struggles to land on a theme. Crouching Tiger feels a bit slow to start, but the truth is that Ang Lee & company are taking their time to set things up so that the big moments later on have actual meaning. The film takes off into the stratosphere during the first Michelle Yeoh-Zhang Ziyi fight and never comes back down. It's a clean two hours but feels bigger and more epic than Gladiator ever does at 2 1/2. All of the character arcs are motivated and speak to theme, very little time wasted. The hosts said that it was hard to determine a consistent theme to Ang Lee's work, but I'd say the thing that he has always been most interested in is how social pressures and expectations keep individuals from expressing their true selves. You can see this in Brokeback Mountain, Sense & Sensibility, The Wedding Banquet, and Eat Drink Man Woman, but it's probably stated most clearly and cleanly in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The visual metaphor is there right from the beginning, when Michelle Yeoh brings the sword into the city, and the camera lingers on her wagon wheels stuck deep in a well-worn rut in the concrete road, and the ambiguous conclusion with Zhang Ziyi flying through the air tells you that whether she lives or dies isn't the point: it's that she has a chance to be free and make her own choice. Anyway, my vote is obvious: Crouching Tiger is the winner!

Best Picture nominees for 2000: Chocolat Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Erin Brockovich Gladiator Traffic I'd say CTHD is the class of that field, with Traffic being the next best choice (and Soderbergh did win Best Director for it).

I know people who have said that Greatest Showman is worth seeing for the music, even though its depiction of Barnum is bullshit. I will also probably wait for home video.

That first TEB album was really loaded with hits. The music videos are also an interesting time capsule of 1990s San Francisco (a grungier city and not the wealthy tech paradise it is now).

Third Eye Blind was the first concert I bought a ticket for with my own money. Opening for them on that tour? SmashMouth! The late-90s were quite a time.

I see the "cultural impact" argument as a way of looking outside myself. I'm not going to act like my personal interpretation of a movie is the only "correct" one. If a movie has clearly had a shelf life with lots of other people beyond my personal feelings about it, then that should count for something. It's not the only criterion, of course, but in a choice between evenly-matched movies (as I think these are) it can be a handy tiebreaker. Your voting priorities are fine too. I think the concept of the Canon means different things to different people, but it all shakes out in the voting.

It's amazing how much he contradicts his own argument here, sometimes within the same paragraph.

I couldn't help but think about how much Spielberg's direction would have elevated Field of Dreams, possibly to legitimate slam-dunk Canon status, as opposed to the workmanlike competence we get from Phil Alden Robinson.

I'm thinking let's not have Armond White on the podcast again. https://hornetapp.com/stories/dinesh-dsouza-parkland-survivors/

I guess one slight correction here: I think the members of Steel Dragon aren't kicking out their lead singer because he's gay, as was guessed in the podcast episode. McNulty makes it fairly clear that he's being kicked out for being unreliable: missing gigs and rehearsals. Granted, some of the other members are clearly heard saying some homophobic things, but given that they've been performing together for a while, you have to assume they would have been okay to keep him around if he wasn't missing shows. Of course, that doesn't absolve the movie for all of the weird indicators it uses to create a "gay" character, including being Lord of the Dance for some reason.

You know, I'm going the other direction on this. I don't mind the synth scores. I think that at this point they are an interesting stylistic choice from a particular era. Aside from being synth, I don't think the Zimmer score for Driving Miss Daisy is out-of-step with the movie's general tone. Is the Chariots of Fire score also awful? When is a synth score appropriate and when is it not?