BF2S Forums Rate the last movie you've seen

the power of the dog - 9/10.

this was a seriously good movie and a total inversion of just about every trope i can think of in the western genre.

for the first act i was fully prepared to hate this film. i hate benedict cumberbatch in most of his roles and find him totally distracting. arch-posho benedict as a montana rancher? wow, what a disaster. plus the fact that the (admittedly very good) johnny greenwood soundtrack made the whole thing seem like a budget netflix knockoff of 'there will be blood'. we've heard the pizzicato strings and broken upright pianos before, johnny!

i was wrong about that – and should have known better from a consummate director like jane campion. the movie is clever, artful, and every bit as incisive as the sword from the bible verse. really, very good.

the film's tension is perfectly maintained throughout, and the latter acts are deft and revelatory. the ending is superb.

Last edited by uziq (2021-12-23 12:50:57)

yeah i was not engaged for the first act. but the tension starts to build and quite a few clever conceits are introduced after that.

i think in a way it purposefully starts out by misleading you and playing with your expectations. the clichés seemed to be mounting up and all the while with benedict’s stupid face occupying way too much screen time. then you realise, halfway in, that it’s not a conventional cliché-ridden western at all but actually something quite novel and smart. kirsten dunst’s character has a great change of role from the expected western stock character.

petite maman - 8/10.

the second sciamma i’ve seen this season after catching up on portrait of a lady on fire. similarly to the last one, this is a great movie that does a lot with a little. perfect casting (in this case the whole movie hinges on the performance of two twin girls, which is sheer directorial bravado, really), minimal fuss with set and staging, and again some sort of strange spellbinding alchemy takes place.

not quite sure how to categorise it. it feels like a brother’s grimm fairytale or a children’s story, set in the woods and relying on children playing games and letting their imaginations run wild. but it’s also very much, in the tradition of the best fairytales, about transmitting a very adult lesson. even with its heavy themes and undertones, there’s a real sense of naïveté on display here that’s totally enchanting. it’s a great movie that kids and adults alike will take something from.

Last edited by uziq (2021-12-26 19:08:03)

drive my car - 6/10.

i really wanted to like this one. it has received all the critical plaudits this year, as it occupies that irresistible niche in the international festival circuit -- foreign language, based on an ultra-hip author's short story, starring a diverse cast, somehow preoccupied in that meta- way with the creative process and film-making itself, etc, etc.

but i really don't like murakami as an author, and his tics and obsessions still badly show through in the screenplay. i am really not interested in every scene opening with a static shot of a turntable playing a hip jazz record (we get it, murakami collects records), or of impossibly maladapted adults talking to one another like emo teenagers about their feelings. there's a husband and wife in this movie who invent and narrate stories to one another ... whilst having sex. the woman suffers from writer's block and can only compose when on the edge of orgasm. this type of thing is a creepy fascination in murakami's work. his women characters all have weird kinks or stand in as fetish objects. creeeepy, dude.

a lot of people will like this film. it does have lots of self-consciously beautiful moments and the actual short story plot is pretty good. it's very competent. lots of the ideas are really good. two of the main characters are writers which, inevitably, gives murakami a device with which to defer to far greater talents (beckett and chekhov plays are performed in the movie) to do all the fucking heavy lifting. in a good writer's hands, the idea of a director/actor trying to tackle a chekhov play, embedded in a wider movie plot, could be really interesting and illuminating. but here it just seems weighty, portentous, and like a giant fucking cop-out. did i mention that i really find murakami over-rated?

this one should have been an 8/10, but nah.

i don't know why you constantly harp on the running times of art films. they mostly have modest budgets, which means short production schedules, which means shorter running times. your average 'arthouse' movie, unless it's going out of its way to make some sort of point, is really over and done with within 90-110 minutes.

it's precisely comic book movies, fantasy movies, superhero movies, etc, which have contributed to bloated running times at cinemas and the box office. it's not fucking teensy weensie little art movies that are inflating running times, moron. it's the half-billion-dollar franchise movies that have 20 minute fight scenes and large extended 'directors cuts' for the dribbling fans. low-budget art movies really don't have the sort of power with cinema chains and distributors to say 'we've made a 3 hour film, please put it on nationwide'. think about it ffs.

to take two recent examples of films which people here have really liked:

spiderman - no way home: 2hr30.
petite maman: 1hr10.

ROFL. literally 'no way home'. you're trapped in the cinema for eternity with the lycra webslinger.

Last edited by uziq (2021-12-28 14:48:27)

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain - 9/10



https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-59518847

I haven't seen it but it involves cats and Benedict Cumberbatch so its bound to be a 9/10

imagine being so butthurt and defensive over a CGI movie about cats that you still mither and complain in a discussion over 2 years later.

cats came out in december 2019, dilbert. let it go. you're not really 'sticking it' to anyone in this forum. you cut a very sad figure.

i think a more pertinent question, with regards to your professed hatred of dramas or anything that broaches the complex and thorny topic of, you know, interpersonal relationships, or real life generally, really, is ... why don't you like people?

you are a genuine sadsack.

uziq wrote:

why don't you like people?

Things like this:

uziq wrote:

you are a genuine sadsack.

I feel like his contributions to pet cats are a little overstated in some articles about the film (and by extension, the person), in some cases giving him single-handed credit. I have to specifically search for Wain to read about that, yet on a nameless search I see other developments like refrigeration and clay kitty litter, and even earlier commercial cat products, credited with turning the cat into an indoor pet.

NYP brings up the 1800s cat treats: https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/stroke-of … t-painter/

Should be a foregone conclusion that you, a cat enthusiast, will watch this movie rather than just relegate it to some miserable corner so you can make a point on BF2S about how people who read critical opinions or have a filter on their film intake are being silly or whatever.

i had a console computer game adaptation of that. surprisingly decent split-screen multiplayer. not sure i'd say it was very canonical, though, very much a forgotten IP.

I got exposed to the Indian book several times in early gradeschool. I'm not sure I ever saw the movie. Small Soldiers was like the Gremlins of Toy Story. Never played the game, but I think I was doing Tribes or Delta Force at the time.

I wasn't aware there was a toy line for it, but I guess Chucky has his dolls.