Nolan Fans

Petulia is very good. A Hard Day's Night is a masterpiece. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a lot of fun.

The Knack is worth a look too.

The Stanford Prison Experiment—a decent movie. It convincingly extracts an enormity of suspense and terror from a relatively benign concept through an obviously psychological lens. The premise is milked to its near maximum. The film's main downfall is the horrible portrayals of Dr. Zimbardo and Dr. Maslach. Both are extremely one-note and predictable. Zodiac—another decent movie, but not outstanding. The movie feels needlessly long, or at least can't manage to maintain its energy throughout. Its narrative is extremely circular and offers little viewer engagement as new clues are invented or found on the fly. It's not as though you can piece much together before the characters find new information themselves. Much of the film is simply exposition. Both Jake Gyllanhaal and Mark Ruffalo provide good performances. Robert Downey plays his typical schtick and displays comparatively little range. Fight Club—horribly overrated, mediocre. The moments between Brad Pitt and Ed Norton are clearly the star of the movie. These scenes are well done. But almost everything surrounding these scenes and the basic concept of the movie is wasted potential. Edward Norton's narration becomes tired by the fifth minute. It doesn't help that his narrational speech is not spoken by his character but clearly by a pretentious screenwriter. When artistic lines like "I ran. I ran until my muscles burned and my veins pumped battery acid. And then I ran some more." are spewed nonstop, it ruins both the character's integrity and any immersion. The narration is also uttelry tasteless a majority of the time. He says he's running as he's running. Just about the worst implementation of narration that I've seen in an acclaimed movie. By the third act, any sense of wit or cleverness is scrapped in favor of a barely coherent, absurdist B-movie. By the end, there's absolutely no way you can take the tonal war of a movie seriously. The film's puddle-deep "philosophy" is no more complex or intellectual than American Psycho.

Geoffrey wrote: ↑

July 22nd, 2019, 11:52 pm

The Stanford Prison Experiment—a decent movie. It convincingly extracts an enormity of suspense and terror from a relatively benign concept through an obviously psychological lens. The premise is milked to its near maximum. The film's main downfall is the horrible portrayals of Dr. Zimbardo and Dr. Maslach. Both are extremely one-note and predictable.

In the third act, they also hammer the viewer over the head with an inordinate amount of close-ups on Zimbardo's reaction to camera footage, all shot from the same angle, all showcasing the same emotion. It was so extraordinarily dumbfounding. It felt like they used all the dozens of takes they filmed for what should have been a single shot or two.

You should, if you haven't already, checkout Experimenter for another movie based on a psychological experiment that examines power dynamics. Also, Peter Sarsgaard is electrifying as the renowned Dr. Stanley Milgram.

Or the German film, Das Experiment. Which is superior in every way.

Skyfall

It was good.

Transformers Last Knight

Honestly someone needs to throw Michael Bay into the deepest and darkest cell on Earth and throw away the key.

Easy Rider

Jack Nicholson was hot wtf

4N Legend wrote: ↑

July 28th, 2019, 4:09 pm

Transformers Last Knight

Honestly someone needs to throw Michael Bay into the deepest and darkest cell on Earth and throw away the key.

The screenwriters and producers and just as to blame.

Artemis wrote: ↑

July 29th, 2019, 9:49 pm

Easy Rider

Jack Nicholson was hot wtf

you should watch more of his earliest films tbh

Zodiac

Awesome.

Under The Skin

This underwhelmed me. It was a good abstract film, but the way some people talk about this is like they saw 2001 for the first time and have never seen anything like it before.