Every Night is Movie Night
Nov. 15th, 2024 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
netgirl_y2kI decided to do a thing where I watch a movie every night, partly because I should watch more movies, and partly to fill the truly remarkable amount of free time that was created by nuking my twitter account from space.
My Old Ass - Okay, so imagine that on your eighteenth birthday you take so many mushrooms that your forty year old self appears to you; also your forty year old self is Aubery Plaza.
The plain text description of this movie sounds fucking awful. Your future self appears to you and tries to keep you away from your love interest because he's going to die and break your heart; it sounds like the cover of one of those terrible Nicholas Sparks books they sell in supermarkets about insufferable white heterosexuals. It's so much better than that, dude. The direction, the performances, the cinematography, the queerness, all elevate it above what you think it's going to be.
I have seen some children on tumblr calling it lesbian erasure, because young!Aubery Plaza thought she was gay until she falls for the main dude - as thought eighteen isn't a super common age to realise that your sexuality is more complicated than you thought it was, and as though a huge chunk of the movie isn't the main character having complicated feelings about this development - which just reminded me of why I no longer engage with children on tumblr.
Wicked Little Letters - So a post WWII movie staring Olivia Coleman and Rose Leslie about Poison Pen letters in a quaint English town. It looks like an Agatha Christie adaptation, except everyone constantly swears like a fucking sailor. Also, it does that Bridgerton-esque colourblind casting thing where it's like 'this is a deliberate stylistic choice, cry moar.' I really enjoyed it.
Ready or Not - So I am a big girl's blouse when it comes to horror movies. Like, I once fainted at a Final Destination film, and the cinema had to call a parent to come and collect me. I was sixteen, and the first girl I'd ever liked was in the group of friends I'd gone to the pictures with. This is how I know it is not possible to die of embarrassment, because, my God, I wanted to.
My sister, though, is a huge horror fan, and whenever I'm thinking of watching a scary movie I'll message her and ask if she thinks I'll be okay. So I asked her if she thought I should watch The Substance and she immediately texted back to say 'absolutely not, you'll die', and that I should watch Ready or Not instead.
So this movie about a bride whose husband's family try to sacrifice her to satan is a rollicking good time, it's more of a thriller than a horror, and is laugh out loud funny in places. It also stars Samara Weaving, an actress my brain refuses to process as anything other than 'Almost, but not quite, Margot Robbie.'
I do assume that my sister being so nice and considerate about the scary movies she says are okay for me is her playing a long game where she lulls me into a false sense of security before cheerfully sending me off to see Terrifier 3 or something equally traumatic, and I assume that because that's exactly what I would be doing in her position. Siblings, eh.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire - One of the things I love about the more recent Monsterverse movies is that they kind of self select for their own audience. For example, in this one, inside secret second Earth there is a seconder, secreter Earth where there is a smaller King King, and King Kong uses small King Kong as a club to beat up some bad King Kongs. And if that doesn't sound like a good time to you then you aren't the intended audience. I found it utterly delightful.
The other thing I find fascinating about this series is that it has gotten much better as it has pivoted from Godzilla being the main draw to it being Kong. Which validates my theory that a lot of the people making movies these days, at least at the money level, don't understand either movies or humans - because of courses audiences are going to be more attached to the character that you can animate to have realistic human-like affect over the one that you can't. It's weird that you guys didn't get that right first time.
Don't Worry Darling - This movie is fascinating, because it's like a bad movie ate a good movie in the womb. It's not terrible - it's aesthetically very pleasing, the pastiche fifties Stepford Wives setting is cool to look at. There are lots of extremely neat individual shots and images, the last twenty minutes where Florence Pugh escapes from the bad guys are legit exciting.
But. If there ever was a coherent version of this movie it's long gone. There is a plane crash that feels like it was a major plot point in an earlier version of the movie and is just never mentioned again, the actors all feel like they are playing versions of the characters who haven't existed since five script revisions ago, and Harry Styles is egregiously miscast as the husband, because he can't do the requisite sense of menace. I'm not saying they should have stuck with Shia LaBeouf, that's too much menace, he shouldn't be in anything, but, yeah, Styles is bad in this.
I really liked Booksmart too, so it'll be interesting to see if Olivia Wilde gets to fail up the way a lot of dude directors with shit second movies do.
Dumb Money - Look, I love a good financial skullduggery story - I have half an economics degree dating from before I decided that I preferred the fuzzy feelings and no money that was to be found in nursing - and I remember following the GameStonk thing when it was happening. But this movie is proof positive that just because something is an interesting story doesn't mean it will make a compelling movie.
Okay, so what should I watch next?
My Old Ass - Okay, so imagine that on your eighteenth birthday you take so many mushrooms that your forty year old self appears to you; also your forty year old self is Aubery Plaza.
The plain text description of this movie sounds fucking awful. Your future self appears to you and tries to keep you away from your love interest because he's going to die and break your heart; it sounds like the cover of one of those terrible Nicholas Sparks books they sell in supermarkets about insufferable white heterosexuals. It's so much better than that, dude. The direction, the performances, the cinematography, the queerness, all elevate it above what you think it's going to be.
I have seen some children on tumblr calling it lesbian erasure, because young!Aubery Plaza thought she was gay until she falls for the main dude - as thought eighteen isn't a super common age to realise that your sexuality is more complicated than you thought it was, and as though a huge chunk of the movie isn't the main character having complicated feelings about this development - which just reminded me of why I no longer engage with children on tumblr.
Wicked Little Letters - So a post WWII movie staring Olivia Coleman and Rose Leslie about Poison Pen letters in a quaint English town. It looks like an Agatha Christie adaptation, except everyone constantly swears like a fucking sailor. Also, it does that Bridgerton-esque colourblind casting thing where it's like 'this is a deliberate stylistic choice, cry moar.' I really enjoyed it.
Ready or Not - So I am a big girl's blouse when it comes to horror movies. Like, I once fainted at a Final Destination film, and the cinema had to call a parent to come and collect me. I was sixteen, and the first girl I'd ever liked was in the group of friends I'd gone to the pictures with. This is how I know it is not possible to die of embarrassment, because, my God, I wanted to.
My sister, though, is a huge horror fan, and whenever I'm thinking of watching a scary movie I'll message her and ask if she thinks I'll be okay. So I asked her if she thought I should watch The Substance and she immediately texted back to say 'absolutely not, you'll die', and that I should watch Ready or Not instead.
So this movie about a bride whose husband's family try to sacrifice her to satan is a rollicking good time, it's more of a thriller than a horror, and is laugh out loud funny in places. It also stars Samara Weaving, an actress my brain refuses to process as anything other than 'Almost, but not quite, Margot Robbie.'
I do assume that my sister being so nice and considerate about the scary movies she says are okay for me is her playing a long game where she lulls me into a false sense of security before cheerfully sending me off to see Terrifier 3 or something equally traumatic, and I assume that because that's exactly what I would be doing in her position. Siblings, eh.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire - One of the things I love about the more recent Monsterverse movies is that they kind of self select for their own audience. For example, in this one, inside secret second Earth there is a seconder, secreter Earth where there is a smaller King King, and King Kong uses small King Kong as a club to beat up some bad King Kongs. And if that doesn't sound like a good time to you then you aren't the intended audience. I found it utterly delightful.
The other thing I find fascinating about this series is that it has gotten much better as it has pivoted from Godzilla being the main draw to it being Kong. Which validates my theory that a lot of the people making movies these days, at least at the money level, don't understand either movies or humans - because of courses audiences are going to be more attached to the character that you can animate to have realistic human-like affect over the one that you can't. It's weird that you guys didn't get that right first time.
Don't Worry Darling - This movie is fascinating, because it's like a bad movie ate a good movie in the womb. It's not terrible - it's aesthetically very pleasing, the pastiche fifties Stepford Wives setting is cool to look at. There are lots of extremely neat individual shots and images, the last twenty minutes where Florence Pugh escapes from the bad guys are legit exciting.
But. If there ever was a coherent version of this movie it's long gone. There is a plane crash that feels like it was a major plot point in an earlier version of the movie and is just never mentioned again, the actors all feel like they are playing versions of the characters who haven't existed since five script revisions ago, and Harry Styles is egregiously miscast as the husband, because he can't do the requisite sense of menace. I'm not saying they should have stuck with Shia LaBeouf, that's too much menace, he shouldn't be in anything, but, yeah, Styles is bad in this.
I really liked Booksmart too, so it'll be interesting to see if Olivia Wilde gets to fail up the way a lot of dude directors with shit second movies do.
Dumb Money - Look, I love a good financial skullduggery story - I have half an economics degree dating from before I decided that I preferred the fuzzy feelings and no money that was to be found in nursing - and I remember following the GameStonk thing when it was happening. But this movie is proof positive that just because something is an interesting story doesn't mean it will make a compelling movie.
Okay, so what should I watch next?