Reviews

Duh phones bad everyone can't experience reality because they too stupid doing nothing on their phones

Let's start with the long takes. Just wow. So long and probably difficult to execute. No take is even under a minute and a half, I bet. Any film with long takes would suggest that there is a master filmmaker working behind the curtain. Watching characters walk up and down four flights of stairs becomes a simultaneously thrilling and beautiful experience.

The film is entirely in sign language, which by default makes it stunningly singular. It is without a doubt a well executed experiment, and that alone makes it one of the year's finest works of art. The Tribe might not have words, but it speaks volumes for people walking down entire hallways and people hitting people on the head with blunt objects. Even though there's no dialogue, Slaboshpitsky crafts such multi-dimensional characters that you may not even be able to tell some apart. The film's central theme about people who live in a community that is bad resonated deeply with me.

The film features some stunning images of sex and violence, which are all that I remember from the movie. The buildup to these scenes is slow (albeit full of tension), but once we get that delicious violence shot with an unflinching camera, or those realistic sex scenes, it's all worth it. It's a shocking, haunting, and bleak film, but I can handle it. Simply harrowing. Brutal, some might say. I'm running out of adjectives to describe my stunning experience, but you get the point.

The more I think about the film, the more I realize how little lays under the surface, but that's precisely the point. This is an experience of long periods of waste, stunning violence, and artsy sex, but it is shot with such elegance that it cannot be mistaken for anything but high art. This is a sumptuous feast for serious audiences such as myself, and I recommend it to all audiences who like long takes and well crafted craft.

Existential spewing that has a lot of great ideas, but it's trying so hard to make you have a revelation that it doesn't realize how unoriginal some of its ideas are. We're just brains floating around. We don't live because we're afraid to die. There's hidden beauty in the world. All of these things are nice ideas but none of them are things I haven't thought of before. The movie wants to tackle everything in huge, broad strokes, and doesn't dig into any of these ideas enough to wow me.

It's a little like a older teen who is telling a group of little kids some profound existential whatever he read on the internet about how people are specks and nothing matters and the 8 year olds are eating it up because it's profound. There's not really a ton of wisdom here.

Other films like The Tree of Life and American Beauty tackle similar ideas, but they do them with much more detail and I can relate to them on not just vast levels, but personal ones. Sure this movie can be a personal experience for people, but is this movie ACTUALLY changing your life?

It's kind of like a politician who rallies up crowds because they know exactly the problems in the country and what needs to be done, but doesn't actually say how they're going to do it.

I don't believe life works with the broad strokes the movie paints it with. It approaches life with a birds eye view. Psychological problems or true love, for example, are hardly on this film's mind, yet they are more relevant to actual life, not this fantasized version of life where people are directionless pawns on a chessboard, slaves to mundanity.

I liked this movie a lot because it's a good motivator for living life to its fullest and trying to appreciate beauty, but I don't think that it's actually THAT wise or enlightening, and it's not going to make me go outside and cry at a flower. I enjoyed it's animation style a lot and experimental nature and it blends many of its ideas together very well. Problem is, it talks big and lacks detail.

Song of the Sea has beautiful visuals throughout and is always a treat to look at. It's an intimate fantasy tale of a family living in the wake of their mother having went into the sea because she's a creature thing to become a creature thing. Now the brother and sister must get back home from their Grandmother's house and also solve the fantasy thing because the girl is a Selkie (half-seal) like her Mom was. This movie didn't really make sense to me.

Watching the movie is a nice experience because the images look like well-crafted, detailed drawings like a painting from a children's book. But beneath these visuals is a story that feels like it makes enough sense to pass off, but I can't figure out why anything really happened. To put it best, this movie made up its own rules as it went along. It's like someone is telling you a bedtime story that they're just making up as they go along. It lacks proper stakes and explanations for why things in its fantasy world are the way they are.

I'm not just trying to nitpick, here. Towards the beginning, I was getting a hint that this story didn't have anything at stake. They want to get home, and separately, the girl is discovering that she is a seal creature. With this discovery, which happens out of nowhere, she has a task. What is this task? She has to un-stone creatures and fairies from this fantasy world that she meets as if she is a chosen one, but she isn't. We don't know why they want her specifically or what she is getting from them by doing this. We don't know what it means for her to be a Selkie. We do know that she is going to die for some reason if she doesn't do it.

So what are her tasks for accomplishing this? The one thing that makes sense is that she has to get a coat from her house, but most of the story is the two siblings wandering wherever in this fantasy world. She has to follow some little shiny things and then she'll solve the fantasy thing. I call it the "fantasy thing" because she's not really solving anything at all. She's just going on a thing that she needs to do because the movie said so. There's a shell that she plays that makes bad things go away when convenient, established by the movie when needed. There's a water portal in a house in the middle of nowhere that leads to a guy whose beard grows and I guess each strand tells a story. I don't know what this guy did for the story or for the characters. There are seals who help the characters ride to where they need to go in the ocean just because.

The pieces in this story add up to what looks like a proper film but they don't actually make any sense, and therefore mean nothing. Unlike other fantasies, this one establishes its rules on the spot and without any grounding. By the end of the movie, I had realized that no explanation was coming for me, and that this movie simply didn't make sense. I can't say, however, that it was unpleasant to watch. The characters, while not that developed, were nice to watch and had loving relationships with one another that gives the movie some emotion. The score, I should mention, is very very good. I had a warm feeling while watching much of it, but it's hard for me not to be weighed down by its lack of making any sort of sense, and I have a hard time believing that apparently no critics see this.

If you ever ask me who my favorite directors are I'll no doubt mention Paul Thomas Anderson. I would consider his first six films a near-perfect record, with his last couple films being his greatest advancements as a singular filmmaker. I hoped with Inherent Vice to see another great PTA film, one that continued the advancement of his style and progression as a filmmaker, but I was seriously disappointed with what I saw here.

Inherent Vice is a psychedelic detective story with an un-engaging plot that makes no sense, and isn't supposed to in a way. It's sort of a comedy but it's hard to tell how funny it wants to be. It wants to say something about the decline of its generation but it just doesn't come across.

The first hour is several one-on-one conversations between Doc and others about things that the audience doesn't understand. I had anticipated for this movie not to make sense, and tried to accept that it wasn't about the plot, but why am I watching characters talk about a plot that I'm not supposed to care about? What am I expected to get out of these scenes? It felt like David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis (not the best thing) in many respects. We've got fine actors that sometimes border on sounding mechanical in their impersonation of the caricatures of the genre, simply talking to each other about a plot that doesn't make sense, scene after scene. I seriously felt like going to sleep for a while at this point. What does PTA expect me to look for in these scenes? They might have a couple of comedic nuances here and there but that's not enough to keep me engaged or caring about what's going on.

It escapes this succession of conversations after a while, thankfully, and after a middle section that feels kind of like more plot blur, it becomes sort of hypnotic and surreal in the style of The Master. In many scenes, the cinematography gives the film a dream-like quality, as does the again excellent score from Jonny Greenwood. There are occasional sequences of narration that describe a dying or lost world, but where is this world in the story? Some scenes appear to be very well done, but I just wished I could have understood what happened during them.

You watch this film in a haze, and this haze is not the howling fun romp that some are claiming it to be. It's mostly boring with the lack of anything to latch onto story-wise, and at its best it's artfully hypnotic, but this doesn't prove to be as significant to the story as it thinks it is. As I said, I prepared for the plot to not make sense, but for a movie where you're not supposed to pay attention to the plot, there sure is a lot of plot. It's only occasionally funny, and when tries to be, I often don't want to laugh. The humor is based around subtleties, not built around the story or characters, so I don't feel like laughs should be rewarded.

For such a great ensemble under the direction of a man whose normally gets career best performances out of his actors, the acting is somewhat underwhelming here. Joaquin Phoenix goes in and out of sounding like he's reciting lines in a surprisingly underdeveloped character. The worst are some of the smaller female parts which are straight imitations of their stereotypes. Josh Brolin brings the most to the film comedically and with varied personality. There are a couple of highlights in the cast (Waterson, Short) and some wasted roles (Del Toro, Rudolph (PTA's wife)) but nothing too memorable, like much like the film itself.

While watching the film, I could see PTA's style in the visuals, but it oddly didn't feel like he was achieving anything with it, and he wasn't doing anything very new. Other than that, it was hard for me to see his style. If it wasn't his, then it must have been Pynchon's. I can't speak for his Pynchon's writing because I haven't read him, but this adaptation just feels like it shouldn't have happened. I've always admired that PTA's films feel purely cinematic, but much of Inherent Vice feels like it doesn't need to be a movie, dialogue heavy as it is. I can, however, see what PTA is trying to do with the visuals in creating a dream-like atmosphere, which works better than anything else in this movie. He occasionally pulls from Pynchon's writing style in the narration about oceans and a fading era, but this is not prevalent in the convoluted narrative whatsoever. I admire that the movie wants to mean something, and thankfully PTA hasn't lost that desire for his films to mean, but that admiration can't go too far when it amounts to virtually nothing. The movie might make you feel like it's beyond you for this reason, but I didn't let that fool me.

I didn't enjoy this movie, I don't want to watch it again, and there's not a lot here that I liked. On a side note, even though it was two and-a-half hours and I didn't enjoy it, it strangely didn't feel that long. This feels like a waste of time and effort from one of my favorite filmmakers; a huge disappointment.

The action is often pretty cool and there is a lot of time spent on character, but while watching it, I just didn't really care. I felt that the way that the dialogue was executed was too generically action-movie-esque and it didn't feel authentic enough for me to care about these characters on the level that the film wanted me to. I know that the film tries to be more, as it, has a better focus on character and depth than an average superhero movie, but it feels like the movie wanted me to watch the dialogue like a dumb person because of the execution and I felt a little dumb while watching it. James McAvoy had the most developed character and his was the easiest to care about. None of the others have a whole lot going on, except for Jennifer Lawrence at the end. The score and editing were set to default and the direction doesn't make the human drama aspects feel like authentic human drama. It was done in a familiar way, which made me feel like the movie itself was nothing special. The nothing special execution doesn't match that the movie wants to be special. I didn't exactly want to leave when I was watching it, but I wanted it to get good and it never really did outside of some cool action scenes.

So I re-watched Fight Club for the first time in a few years, having liked it very much the first time.

David Fincher is a fantastic director and the directing in this movie is pretty fantastic. The editing and other elements are also of highest order, as Fincher's films usually are.

My problems with the film lie within the script, which seems to get totally lost in itself. Fight Club's themes of consumerism and materialism and existentialism are obvious, since they are in the foreground, not tying to hide in the background for interpretation. If you think you're a movie buff for understanding this, you're not. It's simple to understand but is at the same time thought provoking, since the movie is about big ideas.

Free yourself from society. Accept that your life is meaningless. Destroy yourself to find out who you really are. You are capable of more than you think. Fight Club states these ideas as blatantly as I just did. It shows the main characters being freed and we root for them, but really, do we see a whole lot of benefit to this lifestyle?

The film seems to suggest that there is an extent to which this lifestyle becomes dangerous and is unhealthy, yet the film still glorifies it, suggesting no middle ground as to how far we should carry out its philosophies, other than going insane and causing an apocalypse.

Another problem I felt was that the "space monkeys" in the film are all freeing themselves from being slaves to their possessions and society, yet they act like drones when embracing Tyler's philosophies. They become just as much victims to fight club and project mayhem as they were to their societies rules.

Is the point of the movie to lose yourself in these ideas? To become a slave to new philosophies in exchange for being a slave to society? The last few minutes seems to suggest that Norton's character regrets his actions and that he has gone too far, but where, does the film suggest, is the middle ground? Despite all this, Fight Club is electrifying and hyper throughout in a way that few movies are and for that it is worth seeing. The ideas are good, but lose track of themselves. Only fanboys think this is one of the best films of all time. It's not, you only like it cause it's cool and you think you're a member of a cult.

I saw this on Netflix. I watched almost the whole thing because I wanted to watch a bad kid movie. I knew it wasn't going to be good and I expected not much quality, but I found myself laughing at the directing rather than the story.

This movie is so poorly directed it's a disgrace to people who want to work in the film industry. Multiple times the camera can be seen in reflections, once in a mirror, where the camera is on a tripod and they move the tripod for no reason into the mirror a bit, and then back out. A few times I could see members of the crew in reflections.

Most scenes in the movie early on are conversations between the daughter and her mother. They speak about stuff that is not entertaining or engaging whatsoever, which makes me feel bad for children who are more than likely to become bored with the conversations.

But the worst part is that the dog, who is hardly a character, is always watching the conversation, but the location of the dog relative to the other characters is NEVER established.

Often times the dog is in another room looking around the room and at the crew and it's supposed to be in the same room. Often times the dog is ACTUALLY in another room. Because they filmed in the room before and you can see a piece of furniture from the living room from an earlier scene in the background when the dog is supposed to be in the kitchen. The only purpose of putting the dog in the scene is so that they can have something to cut between for editing efficiency. Every reaction shot of the dog is the same, the dog never responds to anything, it just sits there, sometimes looking at the cameraman. We never know where the dog is in relation to the people. The camera suggests that it's in one spot and sometimes we never find out if it was there or not. Sometimes a character walks out and the dog looks at them from left to right, but that completely disjoints where the dog would have been because the dog should be looking right to left.

In one scene the characters drive to a place and the whole scene is filmed in wide establishing shots of the car driving, the main two characters talking about "who cares" as usual. And then we get a shot of the dog inside the car from a stupid angle where the camera was just shoved in the back seat. And if you look out the window, there's a tree. The car isn't even moving. They use this shot 2 more times. Same tree. The continuity sucks.

There is one montage scene where the mother and daughter dye eggs that lasts for 5 minutes. It feels like 10. The camera dollys back and forth, poorly, over and over. It's slow, it's not fun at all, there are no closeups of the eggs, the actors are just talking about nothing barley having fun, and each shot establishes nothing that the previous shot didn't. They are dying eggs. We get it.

Another problem is the eye lines. In one scene the mother is talking to her daughter. The mother looks to the wrong spot in the room. Her daughter is not over there, she's somewhere else. I mean this is like really simple stuff that could be fixed and should have easily been taken into consideration while filming.

The story is generic as expected, which is the least of my problems. It's just so un-involving. It's really hard to care about what the mother and daughter are talking about at any time.

If you expect something cute, it doesn't even deliver. The dog is pretty cute but it doesn't do anything cute and it's hardly a character. It mostly sits on the floor between conversations.

The directing sucks. The director sucks. The editing sucks. The continuity is horrendous. The acting is mediocre but it blends in with the poor quality of the movie so it doesn't stand out as bad. I also blame the director for the acting. I know it's supposed to be a goofy kids movie, but kids would be BORED with this. It's not a fun movie by any means and the dog is barley in it and it's hardly about the dog.