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PaperclipPerfector  14hr ago (text post)   500 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 18, 2024

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Piggybacking for some of my recent watches.

American Fiction - A victim of its maketing. It is 95% upper class dramedy with 5% race farce, but the race farce was all that was advertised. I really enjoyed it, but I quite enjoy Jeffrey Wright’s understated acting style generally. I barely recognized Adam Brody. I initially thought Issa Rae was meant to be the foil, but they both made her more relatable and a blatantly worse human as the story progressed. I enjoyed it, but it is slow and frustrating often. Qualified recommendation.

Promising Young Woman - Bo Burnham steals the show and Carey Mulligan is excellent, but this is MeToo passion play scripting. All men are monsters and anything done to them is justified. The finale has her fraudulently gaining access to a private party via blackmail, chaining a man to a bed and preparing to mutilate him with a scalpel. The movie ends with him being arrested after killing her, but the movie’s internal logic would suggest that he will get away with it because it was a clear case of self defense. Dumb pretending to be smart. Do not recommend.

Boy Kills World - needed a tighter script. The gimmick of using H Jon Benjamin to provide the protagonist’s internal dialogue wears out quickly, and the action was pretty uninspired. Do not recommend.

Haywire - Gina Carano playing Jason Bourne, but not a wimp. The action scenes are well done - Gina’s time fighting MMA clearly shows and it looks like she could hold her own against her male opponents. The story is pretty weak and Carano doesn’t have a lot of range other than glowering. Wild to me that Steven Soderbergh directed this - it feels so sterile and devoid of human characters for one of his movies. Qualified recommendation.

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