Last Movie You Saw, Name & Review Movie • Page 78

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - 6.5/10
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - 8/10
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies - 7/10
Bonnie and Clyde - 8/10
Our Kind of Traitor - 7/10
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - 5.5/10
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - 8.5/10
The Big Short - 9.5/10
Hell or High Water - 9/10

A mostly great week that featured films primarily from the last five years that I had been meaning to catch up and most of them were worth the watch. The Hobbit trilogy however compared to the Lord of the Rings trilogy was an overall disappointment (and that is despite knowing the critical reception before watching them) with only the second film managing to match the low point of the original trilogy. Not only do they suffer from the problems of the previous trilogy (excessive length, exposition overload and being quite plodding narratively) it also suffers from what I call prequelsitas where in the characters that feature in the original trilogy are in no real danger whatsoever since you know they survive otherwise they wouldn't be in the films set 60 years later. This therefore removes all tension and excitement involving them during the action scenes while also making parts of the plot drag as I am saying "I know all this, please move on". I feel I would have enjoyed them more had I seen them before the original trilogy. Bonnie and Clyde was well acted and featured the same kind of extreme violence that I saw in The Wild Bunch however the violence in this felt somewhat more extreme thanks to its quick intensity. Our Kind of Traitor is a small scale British spy thriller that is adapted from the John le Carré novel of the same name and even though the plot is obvious in places while also being slightly believable at times but it works thanks to a fantastic cast who play well rounded characters and it looks absolutely gorgeous. It also doesn't rely on big action scenes and violence to give it the thrills and tension. Which cannot be said for Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit as not only does it pale in comparison to the first three Jack Ryan films but also comes across as a bit lackluster in a world that consists of the likes of Jason Bourne and James Bond who at least have something different going for both whereas this latest Jack Ryan film felt utterly routine. Now on to the best the three films of the week starting with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night while not having the best plot simultaneously felt conventional and unconventional and was utterly engrossing with its great production, gorgeous cinematography, fleshed out characters and well chosen soundtrack. Wasn't expecting to like The Big Short as much as I did but with it somehow making something utterly boring like banking and make it engrossing and entertaining it was a treat. Just a shame it only came about because of an utterly despicable industry. Finally Hell or High Water is a film that balances well played out action with well rounded characters while also looking great and having a solid score done partially by Nick Cave.

 

no lie, the Hobbit movies are all unwatchable and they degrade in quality as the series goes on

 

They're solid but very much missing what made the LotR trilogy great. Leaned way too far toward CG without anything to ground it, lacks the stakes/character investment, etc.

 

i mean, for me at least, when I say unwatchable I mean literally there is nothing that will compel me to return to that series unless you condensed it down to roughly 1/5 of its original length, cut the hamfisted romance subplot(s?), remove 70% of the subplots, and... like also i just still won't watch it again.

 

Controversial opinion(?): The Hobbit trilogy is worse to LOTR than the prequels are to Star Wars.

 

The Hobbit trilogy isn't great but least they don't have anything as annoying as Jar Jar Binks or bad acting like that from Hayden Christensen.

 

Radagast comes darn close to the "annoying as Jar Jar Binks" category.

 

Not even close and at least he is used sparingly while being at least useful. I wanted to rip those ears off the moment I saw Binks.

 

I don't really like any of the LOTR movies. Have no interest in them

 

i guess ill counter with unpopular opinion... i actually enjoy the star wars prequels. I caught episode 3 the other day and was pretty into it. And as a kid i liked episode 1... i haven't seen it since though

 

Over the past week I've watched Hounds of Love, The Love Witch, Personal Shopper, Paterson and I Daniel Blake

All of them were great

 

Finally been back to watching movies again this week:

Ugetsu
The Little Rascals
Being There
Snatched
That Thing You Do!
One Hour with You
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2
The Cowboys
Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown
Mothra
The Ladykillers ('04)
Rob Roy
The Good Shepherd

 

Personals Shopper and Paterson!!!

Did you ever get on Letterboxd?

 

I got a bit burnt out on going through the TSPDT list so I'm taking a break and watching stuff from Cahiers du Cinema's top 10 lists from the 80s and 90s. There's a whole lot of great stuff to be found in there, especially in the later works from some of the new wave directors.

Watch Chabrol's L'Enfer, Godard's For Ever Mozart, Husbands and Wives, Hana-Bi, and Garrel's Liberté, La Nuit this weekend and they were all varying degrees of excellent. I think the Garrel was my favorite, and also my favorite of his that I've seen.

 

Husbands and Wives is sold, mid-tier Allen. Never as big on his sour stuff.

Fireworks is killer though. Makes me want to see more of Takeshi's stuff. Movies that both viscerally depict violence and are acutely observant about its effects are always a rarity.

 

Agree, but mostly because I don't really care about star wars while I quite like the lotr.

 

i liked lotr as a kid but now i like movies that are interesting the whole time

 

A few days ago I watched Collateral Beauty, and it honestly was not as terrible as the critics made it out to be.

 

I did! but I really only use it to "like" stuff I've watched for tracking, haven't really explored the other functions

 

Kind of how I feel about that other movie Will Smith did last year (which I still don't necessarily like)

 

I decided to use the free time provided by summer to go back through a lot of the canon to see how a few years have changed them. It is also the first chance to watch them on my new 4K television, so I want to see them as purely as possible.

Citizen Kane came first, and it is hard to say anything fresh or new about it. I have always been intrigued by Leland, and there is such a sadness in the character's face that you can really get a sense at the downfall of Kane's empire. Of course, it is nearly impossible to watch the film now and not make connections to President Trump. Kane is more sympathetic and he fails in his political ambitions, but there are enough similarities to see how power corrupts people, although Kane is a poor boy and Trump comes from spoiled wealth.

I hope to one day see in Vertigo what everyone else does, but after so many attempts it is still a mildly interesting film with a ludicrous story (surely there are easier ways to fake a suicide). With Hitchcock, it often feels like people elevate him more because of his influence on other filmmakers and the general lack of strong auteur presences in that point of American film history. However, there was so much better artistry to be found in Europe and Japan in the time period that Hitchcock was making his most well-known films. Hitchcock films also have a frustrating tendency to end rather abruptly; North by Northwest and Vertigo end within a minute of fairly big developments. It may be the best Hitchcock film, slightly pulling ahead of Psycho, but when you have Ozu, Godard, Welles, and Fellini making masterpieces at the same time, it is hard to understand how it took first place in the Sight and Sound poll.

I have seen Renoir's The Rules of the Game multiple times, and it is always surprising how brisk and light it feels for a film about to turn eighty years old. It is still as funny and absurd as ever, with a real knack at the way people turn violent at the moment they realize they have lost control of a situation. The seriousness of the groundskeeper, juxtaposed with the complete dismissal by his wife, resonates in so many other cultural ideas about artificial shows of masculinity while lacking in the most primal signifiers of that gender role. The film may lack enough of a story for a few characters, but the dual love triangles is enough to forget that the mistress does almost nothing.

 

Don't think I've seen an entire LOTR movie or any of the hobbit movies. They do not interest me at all.

 

Fuuuuuck, the Alamo Drafthouse by me is showing Stalker tonight. I've never seen it but that's been on my to-do list for quite some time. Thought about buying the Criterion but might go with this instead

 

Gooooo

I still haven't seen Tarkovsky on the big screen. Passed up a 35mm screening of Solaris over the winter because it was at 9pm.

 

That's exactly my situation. It's at 9:30 and over 2 and a half hours long. If it's still showing tomorrow I'll probably see it in the afternoon.