I just rewatched the scene on youtube and apparently it happens some other time in the movie. I am undone
iâm getting really in to watching semi recent semi forgotten hollywood drama films lately, itâs a self fulfilling prophecy after twitter and a bunch of other algorithms decided it was something i was interested in. in addition to frost/nixon iâve also seen mollyâs game and the lincoln lawyer. theyâre all kind of bad, i think mollyâs game has probably been the best one.
why does this feel like such a dead genre these days? i mean, in addition to movies just not getting released at all. i feel like robert downey jr tried to bring it back with âthe judgeâ and maybe that was the final nail in the coffin. will we ever see another major studio release that is mainly just a movie about people talking? maybe doing some lawyer stuff?
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I will always believe that that scene in Fellowship of the Ring where theyâre all like âyou have my swordâ âand my axe!â is an Army of Darkness reference
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oh yeah, that reminds me of that movie with mark ruffalo, dark waters, directed by todd haynes of all people
i feel like if it had been made 10 or 15 years earlier it would have starred philip seymour hoffman and got nominated for awards and stuff. it seems to have been pretty well received but by a very small number of people
i guess these movies are still out there, it just seems like no one cares
Michael Clayton is old though, itâs certainly not indicative of any recent trends. It is however the best lawyer movie, Cuba approved (though I still havenât seen The Counselor, I need to get on that).
The best criminal defense lawyer movie is Gone Girl, somehow. Second place goes to My Cousin Vinnie, but only for one scene really.
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mollyâs game is also pretty recent, but it feels very much like a kind of throwback thing. like to that weird era in the early aughts when movies about poker seemed to come out every year.
i found it weirdly engaging and watchable, but with an undercurrent of something subtly and undefinably irritating that makes it impossible for me to actually recommend.
there was that movie that i think is called the big short and the other one that looked exactly like it that might as well have come out on exactly the same day, those were like three or four years ago right
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youâre trying to articulate what those in The Industry call simply, âthe aaron sorkin touchâ
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Anyway yeah no major studio wants to spend the money to release a Just Adults Talking movie to theaters unless they think thereâs a chance somebodyâs going to win an Oscar for it, because just adults talking movies will never make a billion dollars, and the only thing they like more than a billion dollars (gross) per release is little gold statues of naked men that make them feel like theyâre in the business of producing Real Art That Matters and not just chasing $1 billion+ in the Gross Revenues box?
Of course there are Non-Billion Dollar releases still. There are a bunch of mini-majors in the old Miramax model (that a pair of certain brothers didnât know how to execute anymore, before the other finally went down for being a sex monster). Horror movies still make decent money relative to their budgets. Just Adults Talking movies, with Big Stars? Theyâre too expensive, because Big Stars are still expensive, even though they donât drive ticket sales anymore, and to be absolutely confident you need to surround your $20 million star with 3 $10 million stars and $100 million worth of space planes that are also dogs, and have a long history as a brand, even if nobody has thought about the Flight of the Space Pups IP in 70 years?
Meanwhile black boxes like Netflix and Amazon shovel ??? money at whomever to make whatever in the space that used to be between $10 million and $100 million, so thatâs where you find most of that stuff?
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Have you seen the Lincoln lawyer? The gimmick in the plot is so ridiculous I am really curious to see what a real lawyer would think of it. I canât tell if this would be like asking an astrophysicist what they think about like the plausibility of Killer Clowns from Outer Space or if you would just be like âoh yea that actually happensâ
They sent me [Clancy Brown], like, the first 10 pages of it [Highlander II: The Quickening], and I said, âWhat the F⌠What is this? Give me the rest of the script?â And they said, âWell, we want your commitment before we give you the rest of the script.â And they said, âWell, weâre just gonna pay you the same.â And I said, âNah, see you later. [Laughs] Iâm not gonna do this. First of all, this makes no sense. Second of all, youâre not gonna pay me anything. So thereâs no reason for me to do this at all!â So then Christopher [Lambert] calls me up and says, âOh, youâve got to do this with us! Youâve got to do this with us!â I said, âChris, itâs horrible. The idea is terrible, what I read was awfulâŚâ And he says, âI helped write that.â [Laughs] Iâm, like, âWell, I guess Iâm never gonna be doing any more Highlanders!â Heâs a great guy and I love him to death, but it was doomed from the beginning. If I wasnât getting paid⌠I will do shit for money. But Iâm not gonna do shit for no money. Iâll do quality for no money. So if it had been any good, maybe. But it was no good from the get-go.
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No but I think from a movie poster or preview I saw he drives around a big old boat with a vanity plate that reads âNOTGLTYâ so itâs probably the third best criminal defense lawyer movie
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I asked about this a while back and no one had any answer, but I am very curious to know how Netflix values these movies to put budgets behind them. I mean obviously its trivial to track how many views each movie gets, but views do not translate to $$ in Netflixâs business model. How can they determine the ostensible value of âthis platform has movies you canât see elsewhereâ in terms of subscriptions sold at all, much less on a per-movie basis? It seems almost certain that they are just shooting in the dark based on some approximation of how much budget each of these movies would ânormallyâ get in the Hollywood system with no real way to track their return on investment. I think that rules.
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oh man if you have two hours to spare you should really watch it. the first 10 or 15 minutes is just mcconaughey being the most hilarious stereotypical possible version of a sleazy defense attorney, but then what you think is going to be a character study of a weirdo very quickly becomes a very convoluted story about a guy who commits a crime then deliberately hires a lawyer who had previously convinced someone else to confess to a different crime that the guy committed earlier, for Plot Reasons it is way weirder than i was expecting it to be.
also it has marisa tomei in it, going hard for that my cousin vinny demo
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Not quite sure of the parameters of that spoilered part but any way I can figure it seems dumb, which is fine by me I am in the dumb movie business
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it is gloriously dumb
the more i think about it the more i realize the exact type of movie i am in the mood for lately is always âmovies for grownups, but idiot grownupsâ
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Youâll have a great time with Netflix originals
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finally got around to watch the second to last Jacques Tati film, Trafic.
I deliberately chose to link to a short clip that basically tells nothing about the movie at all, but if you like what you see, you should watch it. And if you love cars, that definitely helps.
If that isnât up your alley, thankfully he earlier shot his masterpiece Play Time, which you should watch in any case.
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Same
The eurovision movie with will Ferrell was exactly this
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been wanting to edit this into âthat barton fink aaron sorkin feelingâ but no history is history I will not pretend I thought of it in the momentâŚ
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