Star Wars + Dirty Dozen seems like it would write itself but they got almost none of the beats down, it’s really incomprehensible. Dropped the ball so hard they damn near spiked it. It’s still the best looking Disney one by far though which counts for a lot. Put Rogue One’s art design together with TLJ’s writing and you’re like 85% of the way to one good movie.
The part with Vader at the end rocks though, eyerolling it betrays someone with all the wrong priorities for watching a Star War.
i thought of it as a star wars roleplaying game campaign made into a fan-film and it was fine by that standard
rogue one was eye candy and 'remember this?" i had to go see it for one of james’s work gatherings and im just glad it was breezy and hollow so it felt over quickly
Solo: A Star Wars Story is the fourth or fifth best Star Wars movie
rogue one would have been better if all the rebels were guys like joe don baker or michael caine. basically they should have made it in the 70s with the cast of a war movie in the style of like too late the hero
I mean, they did already get max von sydow and stick as close to the original trilogy production design as they possibly could, I just think we saw the limits of Disney’s approach to that, it wasn’t a Ben Wheatley movie
Like ok but only by default
I think telling people it’s better than rogue one is a good way to encourage dialectical thinking, especially if they don’t like rogue one but still feel irritated by that statement
If they are able to stick the landing with Andor it will probably end up being the best Star Wars of all time. Another great mystery because basically all live action Star Wars TV shows seem worse than the worst star wars movies. Well OK many of them are better than rise of skywalker
Mandalorian is definitely better than like half the movies, that’s its whole pitch
The first season is, the others are quite bad actually
Like they’re barely better than the Clone Wars or the worst parts of Rebels
gladiator 2 came out streaming
paul mescal’s hair in this looks like mine at its absolute filthiest
Like everyone with taste, I hate the pandering lore impulse satisfying that you get with every modern prequel or film that features a background plot for an established character/franchise… but, I’ll say, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade – while kind of ridiculous at times (ohh, so that’s how he got the hat/scar/name/look/whip/fear of snakes) – it’s a fun and frequently surprising with delight example of what is so often these days extremely lazy and unsurprisingly attempted. I think I prefer Raiders (and Great Circle) Indy, who is mostly an archetype rather than a person. But Connery’s character (as a sort of Indy girl) and his performance alongside Ford makes this one worthwhile.
isn’t Last Crusade actually a sequel and Temple of Doom the prequel?
It is, but I mean it’s just full of lore about Indy’s past so it kind of works in the same way a prequel does for filling out details and providing justification for the present. And it has the whole opening with River Phoenix as young Indy.
Yeah the reason it’s so successful at it is because it’s a single opening scene (cute) and not a whole entire movie (boring slog)
i think there’s an argument to be made that Temple of Doom is the only good prequel (despite obviously having issues as a movie in general), in that it is just a movie about some shit that happened before the first movie, with literally 0 effort to drop easter eggs or explain shit or anything. the only reason it is significant that it takes place before Raiders is that, presumably, after coming face to face with the wrath of god Indy would stop being such an asshole, and it’s more fun to write him as an asshole so Temple is set before
Finished watching Synecdoche NY after wanting to watch it since it came out. I became semi obsessed with it because I thought it was a film about making a play, but it’s really a slow-motion body horror film that slides into an apocalypse film. It has a dreamlike logic I would almost call magical realism - the diary that updates itself - a house on fire that never burns down. There are terrifying time skips and also terrifying and dreadful doctor visits.
There’s a scene where he says he has arthritis, and then an hour later in the film he tries to have a conversation with his 2nd ex wife and the radio has a new piece on how an arthritis drug did “chromosomal damage” so even though we don’t know if he’s taken that drug he probably did and is now thinking about the chromosomal damage he has while this conversation is taking place. And I think this drives into the film’s constant theme of Health Anxiety - that it’s all going to go wrong suddenly and permanently and the end will be a long terrifying descent.
The film has some dizzying timeskips - Caden thinks it’s been a week when it’s been a year. Some scenes he looks young and it might be makeup or it might be going back in time. The movie wraps around itself, scenes from Cadens life become scenes for the play, and then those scenes from him constructing the scene of that play become a part of the play, with recursive actors for everyone.
Towards the end of the film Caden get’s asked “Do you wish you were a girl” and he says “Sometimes I do, I think I’d be better at it” and then later on an actress comes in and offers to play as Caden, and Caden sees himself direct a scene from the play but it’s really moving and pure, and then in a later scene he’s looking at a painting his first ex wife did where he posed, but in the painting he’s portrayed as a woman and feels “pretty” so I feel like this extended misery universe Caden constructs is him dealing with these gender feelings he doesn’t know how to deal with while getting into relationships that fall apart. Basically: Heterosexuality is a prison.
I think the film deals with a lot of the artsy/NPR crowd feelings of “We’re all going to die, our lives are incredibly short and meaningless and there’s no afterlife and everything is terrible” misery universe and kind of completely dives into that mindset all the way down. This was the early Obama era when Indie films were kind of going for that milieu. I don’t think it would exist today in the era of Netflix.
Anyway, I’m bummed out. Great film.
yeah this is the only movie about depression i’ve seen that actually conveys how much it sucks. in other movies no matter how hard they try it still just ends up feeling kind of cozy. like… depression is when you wear pajamas all day and carry around a mug of lukewarm tea. doesn’t seem so bad. whereas synecdoche ny proposes: depression is like when the whole world is covered in snot that is actively killing you. it’s not cool kids! i’ts not fun at all
