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Vengeance (2022)
removed by @ZorbaTHut
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This was one of those movies that I gave a good deal of side eye to when I saw the trailer, but I might have to give it a shot after your review. The way you've described it made it sound like a mishmash of Barbarians characters and Under the Silver Lake's style, which sounds pleasant enough. It's been choppy waters for film the past few years, anything fresh that I can give a shot is welcome.

Just saw it, excellent movie.

I walked out (not literaly) feeling: "Someone wrote the SHIT out of this motherfucker".

Always enjoy it when you can feel the hand of the author instead of the boardroom.

Literary fellow that he is, Ben explains, “There’s this playwright, Anton Chekhov, and he says that if there’s a gun in Act One of a play - “

“There’s no guns in any one of his plays I can think of,” says the overweight sister in the leopard print pants. “Cherry Orchard, no. Uncle Vanya, no - ”

“I’m not actually that familiar with his plays,” Ben says impatiently, before steering back to his point.

That's a solid joke right there which also hits on the difference between academic 'knowledge' on a topic and the actual experiential knowledge that is usually considered 'low status' but is nonetheless more in touch with baseline reality.

Which is to say, you've got Ivy-Educated elites who know all the correct terms for various high-level concepts, who have a well-defined map of a particular area in their head, and thus can claim the pretense of knowledge but have rarely actually interfaced with the phenomena referenced by those concepts in a direct way. It's like knowing all about how agriculture works from reading about it, and never actually working on a farm. An actual farmer likely can't tell you names of the biological processes by which corn grows, but he sure can explain exactly how much corn you can expect to harvest given specific conditions of temperature, moisture, soil quality, etc.

And that's translated onto the guy who has skimmed the TVTropes articles for various famous literary works (I do it all the time!) rather than actually reading them vs. the person who actually reads them and enjoys them and thus has knowledge of the actual contents vis-à-vis the words on the page rather than knowing there's some higher-level literary term derived from the works.

Maybe I'm missing the joke, but there definitely is a gun in uncle vanya.

Here's the TVTropes entry on this instance:

Chekhov's Gun: Ironically averted. When Vanya does attempt to murder the professor, it is totally done off-stage with no clues present that he is about to shoot him.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Theatre/UncleVanya

Interesting.

I walked into this movie totally blind and walked out very much enjoying it.

Without reading your analysis beforehand, it felt like it moved through a couple different genres and atmospheres through the runtime, and once I stopped trying to orient myself and just stayed for the ride I enjoyed it. I find myself being very vigilant the first quarter of movies nowadays - I've been burned by too many directors hamfisting room-temp IQ metaphors after thinking they've earned the right to after a solid 25 minutes.

Super happy surprise. Ironically I was asked to watch it because he collaborated on the Mindy project which someone else in the house had been watching.

EDIT: after reading.

Many viewers will find it pretentious, unfocused, and shallow.

Shallow is I think that's a natural consequence of not hammering one perspective as the right one for the whole movie. You have less time to devote to every concept. "Focusing" can also mean beating a dead horse. Pretentious? Sure, but I think at least the people making it knew that at some level and so found some ways to compensate.

I neither watched, nor seen any advertisements for this movie but your review has left me intrigued.

That Twitter line was one of my biggest laughs last year. Novak is a sharp observer; but, unfortunately, he's also insecure about it and weighs down the final act with a lot of unnecessary explicit explanation of his ideas and themes, so that we can acknowledge his wisdom. If he can restrain that impulse, he'll become a really good filmmaker.

People have been talking up Kutcher ever since I’ve been aware of him, for his nuance as an actor, his academic credentials, and some sane choices he’s made as an adult. I haven’t seen any of his films (that I’m aware of), but I think this will be my first.

I agree that Ashton Kutcher's a strong actor. His capabilities are underestimated because he's so handsome (Brad Pitt, James Franco, and perhaps Leonardo Dicaprio have a similar "problem").

I don't doubt he made some good investments, mainly in tech (sane choices, at least with hindsight). But academic credentials? Wikipedia says he dropped out of the University of Iowa to pursue professional modeling - surely the best academic decision he could have made.

and some sane choices he’s made as an adult

You mean insane choices ? As I recall, he was married to Demi Moore at some point.

Pretty successful venture capitalist

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