I enjoyed this very, very much.
I enjoyed this very, very much.
Have work tomorrow and still ruminating on this. Such a sad film... Tessa Thompson's last scene is going to haunt me for quite some time.
Midnight Run (1988) - 9
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) - 8.5
The Adventures of Robinhood (1938) - 8
Sisters (1973) - 6.5
Shin Godzilla (2016) - 7.5
I do love how []Quoting Peng (view post)
I can't wait to VPN into Cork tonight and watch this.
Though I will admit I am unfamiliar with this euphemism, I truly don't think this is the type of movie for anything of that sort. Decidedly unsexy material!
In other news: Enjoy this on Netflix today, rest of the world!! Find your biggest screen, heaviest sound set-up, and the window of time for the least amount of distractions, and immerse yourself enough to forget that its direct-to-streaming release is a worrying sign of the future state of studio output!
Last 11 things I really enjoyed:
Speed Racer (Wachowski/Wachowski, 2008)
Safe (Haynes, 1995)
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (Parker, 1999)
Beastie Boys Story (Jonze, 2020)
Bad Trip (Sakurai, 2020)
What's Up Doc? (Bogdanovich, 1972)
Diva (Beineix, 1981)
Delicatessen (Caro/Jeunet, 1991)
The Hunger (Scott, 1983)
Pineapple Express (Green, 2008)
Chungking Express (Wong, 1994)
Good God this was fucking terrible.
Yeah, I was unimpressed. Ballet finale was cool though.
mild spoilers below.
Sophomore slump for Mr. Garland. The mystery is obviously the most intriguing thing about this movie, but boy the payoff is unfulfilling. This plays out like a DTV monster movie in some points; specifically the scene where they are inside the old base, something cuts through the fence, and one of the member's party gets dragged away into the night while the rest of the member's are helplessly trying to figure out what happened, in some really poor editing techniques, almost as if they forgot to shoot some scenes in their entirety.
Then there's the member's of the party's mental capacity. For once, I'd like to see a team of explorers and adventurers, NOT crack under pressure. NOT try to defy their leader. NOT try and back stab the rest of the team members. Why would an organize choose such mentally incapable members in such a dangerous exploration operation? I'm also looking at you Alien franchise. Blame it on the shimmer's effect on the body, but there were signs of defiance much earlier than the BearMimic reveal. Very unconvincing.
This plays out like a really bad episode of Lost.
I loved this and am tempted to go see it again soon, provided it stays in theaters much longer. I feel bad for countries that are only getting this on Netflix.
I really liked Walter Chaw's read on the film (http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/...ihilation.html), who puts the film (absolutely, rightly) in dialogue with Stalker (a film I don't remember nearly as well as I should) and reads both films as explorations of depression, interspersed with passages from Virginia Woolf. Chaw's piece is an example of the great work film criticism can do. Your mileage, I'm sure, will vary.
I feel like there's more I want to say about it than just recommending that review, but it's feeling too much like I'd have to write a formal essay to really explore these thoughts and I don't have the time to devote to that at present. Suffice it to say that this film was a very satisfying film and I found it challenging and haunting. Portman's performance is excellent, and considering how much the script and structure of the film leaves off-screen, she really meets the demand to make the character feel rounded and lived-in.
Good call on Walter Chaw. He, Priscilla Page, and Film Crit Hulk have some of the hotter hot takes on this boy.
I have a love/hate thing with Chaw because he gives the reader a lot to consider but then tends to cast his ideas in absurdly operatic terms. (Besides that, I can say if you pump out 2,700 words and reference Virginia Woolf, the Marx Brothers, and Edgar Allen Poe, well then, you might be trying too hard.)
I think his take on "Annihilation" is akin to a LiveJournal entry and not really a piece of criticism. Chaw's primary interest is in what a movie reflects back to him about himself. It's like he sits down at the keyboard and asks "What does this piece of art say about me?" instead of taking the work on its own terms, or asking what the filmmakers might have intended, or wondering how an audience might receive it.
This is one of the reasons I can't stand most writing on the web---movies aren't extensions of the viewer's ego, but so many critics talk about them that way.
Case in point: Everything Chaw says about depression at the start of this "review."
Like bamboo under my fingernails, friend.
Haven't read Walter Chaw on this yet, but interesting about depression (I, like most I have seen elsewhere, like how the effects of trauma and tragedy are woven into the sci-fi story), because separately he, Emily Yoshida, and Angelica Jade Bastien (the latter two at Vulture) have all written on this topic.
Midnight Run (1988) - 9
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) - 8.5
The Adventures of Robinhood (1938) - 8
Sisters (1973) - 6.5
Shin Godzilla (2016) - 7.5
Shame. I like them.
Any current critics/reviewers/analysts that you'd stump for? Do you like Rob Ager and Collative Learning? He's sort of famously "reaching" in his analyses but also comes by them honestly with close readings of the details of a film.
Has Film Crit Hulk gotten over the ridiculous caps lock? I'll never be able to take him seriously until that happens.
Just reviewed this, and long review short, Annihilation on the whole carries a wonderfully dreadful sense of inevitability all the way to its mind-bending climax, and, while I ultimately can't call it a great film, as certain characters and themes here are disappointingly underdeveloped, it's still a more unique and intriguing experience than at least 90% of what Hollywood usually puts out, and one of the better cinematic examples of the concept that the universe is a fundamentally scary, incomprehensible thing, one that is apathetic to the existence of humanity at best, and at worst... completely and utterly hostile.
I've never heard of Ayer! It's this him? http://www.collativelearning.com/CLS....html#new2site
What's the appeal of Film Crit Hulk for you?
I've liked different people at different times---Nicholson at LA Weekly, Willmore at Buzzfeed, Ehrlich at Indiewire, Brody at The New Yorker, Mo Ryan at Variety, Fienberg at The Hollywood Reporter---but none of them are "one-stop-shop" critics. Sometimes I find them good, other times they make me roll me eyes.
The people I really love are all dead. I've listened to certain music because of Lester Bangs, and sought out now-obscure movies because of Pauline Kael.
I miss critics who write to be read, not to push their worldview or win a ceaseless, roiling internet argument.
This.
The closest I get to is Jeff Wells, although it's hard to call him a critic, as he basically reviews movies like we do. There's no journalism approach to it. He's just a loon with fun thoughts to read.
There's still a few print people like Lisa Kennedy, Richard Roeper, Mick LaSalle... But they aren't people I'll seek out reviews from.
Heck, Twitter-wise, Ebert owned there too.
Ha, too true. What he calls "reviews" are really lazy, but he's fun to read. I think that's why film twitter hates him so much---he's a better writer than them. He's also a bigger asshole. Wells is his own worst enemy.
No, film twitter doesn't hate Jeff Wells because of the quality of his reviews of writing (which I never see come up when his name pops in regularly in my timeline). It's because stuff like emailing a director to request for a nude pic of an actress for his own use, and other hideous attitudes he expresses openly.
Last edited by Peng; 03-14-2018 at 05:45 AM.
Midnight Run (1988) - 9
The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) - 8.5
The Adventures of Robinhood (1938) - 8
Sisters (1973) - 6.5
Shin Godzilla (2016) - 7.5
LOL, that reminds me---I really miss Nikki Finke.
Yep! Also his YouTube is here: https://www.youtube.com/user/robag88/videos
It's all close-reading film analysis that sometimes overreaches but focuses rigorously on evidence within the film.
Superficially, FCH has gone to bat for movies that I really responded to and pointed out things I hadn't noticed (e.g. The World's End and The Lego Movie) and unpacked his own misgivings about movies that similarly didn't resonate with me (Force Awakens and The Revenant are two examples).
He's also a story wonk, and I've been working on my own storytelling for years, so I appreciate the narrative-centric focus. I like the attention he gives to exploring character development, if the arcs in the film are occurring in an honest way (or if they're being shortcutted and papered over with illusions of development).
Per Ezee, he's stopped with the all-caps, which, thank God.
I'll have to read him then... THANK GOODNESS.
I gotta say, for a movie I saw several weeks ago, I'm still thinking about this film A LOT. It's probably going to wind-up at the second run theater in a few weeks since it's kinda bombing at the box office, so I'm going to try and see it again and see if I like it more. As it stands, three scenes in particular are really sticking with me: the "help me" bear which is one of the more terrifying and creative (and technically simple) uses of sound in a sci-fi cum horror movie, maybe ever?, Tessa Thompson acting like "fuck it Imma go be a plant in the woods" and doing just that, and of course the bizarro interpretive dance with the alien doppelganger creature thingy at the end.
There's been some good critical looks at this, but one I'd recommend is "The Next Picture Show" podcast with a bunch of ex Dissolve (RIP Dissolve) people discussing it, which means you don't have to support trash like "Half in the Bag."
Last edited by Pop Trash; 03-18-2018 at 04:11 AM.
Ratings on a 1-10 scale for your pleasure:
Top Gun: Maverick - 8
Top Gun - 7
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - 8
Crimes of the Future - 8
Videodrome - 9
Valley Girl - 8
Summer of '42 - 7
In the Line of Fire - 8
Passenger 57 - 7
Everything Everywhere All at Once - 6
Ha. I came here to make the exact same comment.
I throws enough weird at you to keep you going for the ride, and I actually really enjoyed the horror aspects of the story. The ending kinda felt slapped together though, not entirely satisfying.
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