Just watched The Substance as well! What a wild ass movie. Definitely recommend it. And I don’t typically like horror movies.
I’ve been watching lots of movies in the middle of the night because I have a newborn here who just wants to hangout on my chest and not in her bassinet.
Watched Alex Garland’s Civil War, which uses the civil war as a backdrop, having more in common with a zombie movie than one about politics. It’s actually kind of shocking how apolitical this movie ostensibly about politics is.
Then I watched Oppenheimer, which really demonstrates that Nolan is not interested in making movies about people or characters. Despite that, I do think it’s a good movie. Nolan is more a technician than a storyteller, so I think it makes sense he’s become what he’s become. Sort of a STEM kid’s idea of an auteur. Which maybe sounds like a backhanded compliment and I suppose it is, but the movie is delicious to look at and it has a compelling structure that carries you through. Add to that the star studdedness of the whole affair and you may never bother to ask yourself why no one in the movie has a conversation unrelated to the plot. It’s a biography where you come out of it knowing almost nothing about the subject of the film. And despite this seeming to be a showcase for Cillian Murphy, I actually think he was given very little to work with. I quite like Murphy! Have liked him for twenty years and think he’s one of the best actors around. But he didn’t deserve an Oscar for this.
This is also a strangely apolitical movie despite literally being about WWII and McCarthyism. I don’t know what to make of these two movies that are somehow absent of politics despite seeming to be completely about politics.
Megalopolis, on the other hand manages to be quite political.
@rejj
I watched Megalopolis this evening, and now I want to talk to everyone about it.
I did not think it was good.
I want to know what people that genuinely praise it saw in it that I did not. When the credits started rolling I was left in disbelief at what I had just witnessed; this was dementia manifest.
It sucks, but perhaps it also is great in a way that we will never see again. I can never recommend this film to anyone; you are better served watching paint dry than enduring this mess. I feel for Copolla. This must be exactly the film he intended to release; it took so long and he spent so much on it that there is no way this is somehow compromised from his vision.
…but that confounds me. How could this be his intention?
My 3/10 review of it is just: “this debunks auteur theory”.
Wow
I barely know what to think of Megalopolis. But I love it in ways that are difficult to explain. I talk more about it here, along with Civil War and Oppenheimer. But I think it feels like a movie from another dimension, an alternate America where our art and especially our movies never strayed from the operatic and silly, where realism was never seen as a choice worth making. I also think there’s a great beauty in something so ambitious yet so imperfect. It feels like humanity bursting from the screen. And I feel it all the more compared to Oppenheimer and Civil War, which aim so hard to be realistic, to make you feel the dirt, to hear the humming machines, to taste the foul air, whereas Megalopolis is a dream. Perhaps a dream about a dream, which does make it, at times, borderline unwatchable. And yet sandwiched between bizarre sequences will be one of breathtaking beauty or power, with sometimes insightful critique that is itself sandwiched between a blunt childlike view of the world that’s almost laughable to consider.
I watched Killers of the Flower Moon last night. That’s a long movie, fella. I don’t know that it earns its length. I also think it takes about as long to watch as it does to read the book. It is nice, however, that the book and movie are quite different and come at the story from sort of opposite directions.
My friends really wanted me to watch a movie called Terrifier, I guess because they hate me. I don’t particularly like these messes of gore and violence but it certainly has a deranged flair for the tasteless. Which is something, I suppose. My wife came into the room around the middle of the movie so I turned it off. My friends want me to fnish it, which I probably won’t, mostly because if I do finish it I’ll feel compelled to watch 50 more movies like this so that I can write a dumb 2,000 word essay about it. And probably I have better things to do with my time.
Though maybe I don’t.
