So the simple fact that I had to google who that was meant that I'd already automatically missed out on a gargantuan chunk of history. Like wow, The Godfather? Really!? Wow.
He was one of the movie brats, the generation of Spielberg, Scorsese, and Lucas. While Coppola exited his golden age sooner than Spielberg and Scorsese, he shined a bit brighter imo. The Godfather films and Apocalypse Now are some of my favorites of all time. Scorsese is definitely worth checking out too, though, and, of course Spielberg has got it going on.
I dunno Malick, Linklater, Anderson or Coen... I think. I'll have to google those too I'm afraid.
Malick directed Tree of Life and Thin Red Line, Linklater directed Boyhood (or, more famously, School of Rock), Anderson directed There Will Be Blood (one of the greatest historical epics of all time btw), and the Coen brothers did No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Fargo, True Grit, O Brother Where Art Thou, and tons of pretty big titles.
I loved the latest Star Wars - A pity about the extended universe - And Marvel is getting off light only because people are comparing it to DC, and you have to give them kudos for accomplishing this after so many years.
But come on guys, Civil War? That's an event involving so many more characters and storylines than a slugfest at an airport.
To be fair, Civil War was solid narratively (can't even say that much about the first Captain America film), but aesthetically it was generic mush. I couldn't care less about any of the characters or anything that went on because I wasn't engaged on a basic level. Has partly to do with the music being pretty dime a dozen and poorly used at that, and also the CGI absorbed visuals. Seems when trying to "do something different with the Marvel Franchise" they just get different writers, but even then it doesn't diverge much. Antman which was supposed to be "different from most Marvel movies" according to most felt, to me, exactly the same and had other problems even. It gets props for using "Plainsong" by the Cure, but honestly not in a very effective way. It's all just a byproduct of a large studio trying to please too many people. The immersion and creativity can suffer sometimes.
Star Wars should never be just good. It should be freaking amazing. I want Netflix stuff in the main movie universe...
I liked the Force Awakens. It had some narrative problems, but there was a lot of passion in it. The visuals were stunning and they used a lot of practical effects. It still was too nostalgic for the original films to escape the original films' shadow, but it seemed to and still seems to show a lot of promise for later films, especially since JJ Abrams approach was to imitate the originals to give other directors a platform to expand the aesthetic in later films. While I have not seen any of his films, I have heard lots of good things about Rian Johnson, who will be directing episode 8, from people whose opinions I trust. Still need to see Looper.
Rogue One, though... it was competent for sure, but rather vapid. I mean it felt the same as a Marvel film generally. Except I was more impressed with certain aspects of Rogue One, for the same reasons I couldn't really connect with it, like for instance that its sole reason for existing was to make sense of the plot holes in the other films. As a result, it was in some ways the most solid SW film narratively (aside from the fact that Cassian backed off of Jyn when asking for her gun just because she had clever one-liners, even when the robot was saying that there was a high chance he would get shot, a plot hole pointed out, but never really addressed clearly), but ultimately not moving or intriguing or challenging for me in anyway. Perhaps it could have been longer and expounded on its themes more. It kind of all just felt technical, like when Jyn was crying in front of the hologram of her father, I was just like "this makes sense," but I didn't really get much emotion from it. Also, that Force mantra got on my nerves after a while.
I still need to see Moana though.
Ah, Moana. See, it could have been really good, and aspects of it were, but it's emblematic of Disney's embrace of the aesthetics of other cultures at arms length. Maui's song just had to be a white-as-hell musical theater number, Moana's song too, and several musical and visual things just kinda seemed very Westernized (not that there weren't moments where they had Polynesian music; they just should have had more of it), which is typical for large studios which try to package other cultures in a Western friendly way. Back when the original 1954 Godzilla first hit American theaters, they made alterations and edited in a white dude and took out a lot of the scenes that made the atomic bomb/WWII allegory obvious, to the detriment of the film. But even without a distaste for the general attitude it makes the films less immersive than they could be.
Topic: Writer Discussion Table (Read 301696 times)
