Movies That Don't Deserve Their Own Thread

DiveMilw · Oct 21, 2017, 06:28 PM

I watched "The Punisher" tonight. Apparently the concept was to punish the audience. I thought it was never going to end. Was it that bad back in 2004? It couldn't make up it's mind if it was a funny action movie or a serious, violent flick.

Chris L · Oct 22, 2017, 06:18 AM

I've never seen the Punisher movie and don't have a strong urge to rectify that (though I seem to be one of the few people who liked the Ben Affleck Daredevil movie, which was from the same period). Doesn't Marvel have a Punisher series on Netflix now? Maybe it's an attempt to correct this mistake, sort of the same way their Daredevil series is correcting the Ben Affleck "mistake."

EricMontreal37 · Oct 27, 2017, 02:52 PM

I don't really care for the character of The Punisher at all. I guess the only time he kinda worked for me was in limited use in Frank Miller's great run on Daredevil (back when Miller was good). But he's had a number of screen appearances--all pretty much quickly forgotten until now with Netflix where I gather he was so popular on Daredevil Season 1 that they did decide to give him a show (I'm behind on the Netflix/Marvel shows, but I don't think it's premiered yet).

(OK, I checked--it premiers in two weeks).

Dolph Lundgren starred in a 1989 version which had him up against the Yakuza because... why not? It wasn't, apparently, much like the comics, really...

I believe fans liked the 2004 version quite a bit, overall, but... I've never seen it.

Chris L · Oct 27, 2017, 03:23 PM

I'm pretty sure The Punisher doesn't appear until Daredevil Season Two (which I haven't watched, because I really wasn't that enamored with Season One).

scenicdesign71 · May 25, 2020, 08:08 PM

I came across this listicle yesterday and ended up enjoying its eighth item, a feature-length, crowd-financed 2011 dance film (and valentine to NYC) that is guaranteed to lift your mood:

https://www.girlwalkallday.com

scenicdesign71 · Aug 25, 2020, 10:52 AM

Ryan Murphy's Boys In The Band remake, with Joe Mantello directing his 2018 Broadway-revival cast, may or may not deserve its own thread. But Netflix recently announced a release date of September 30, a little over a month from now. Also check out the first-look pics, with the cast in their groovy 60s duds -- and the nifty French doors and spiral stairs in "Michael"'s (Jim Parsons) West Village duplex.

scenicdesign71 · Dec 11, 2020, 11:53 PM

Continuing the Murphy theme, I just watched The Prom on Netflix and am 99% positive this thread could have been invented for it. By turns cloyingly slick and weirdly maladroit, and a case study in Murphy's patented tonal schizophrenia, there's probably at least as much about it to hate as to love -- and, in between, oceans of just-neutral competence and professionalism, which I admire right up to the point where its onslaught becomes merely numbing.

But I'm a sap -- blame the holiday season, or maybe the year: though not a great movie, (I can't compare it to the show, which I missed), it actually had me tearing up more than once.

Laughs were in shorter supply: I recall exactly one spontaneous guffaw, and I can't even remember exactly what occasioned it, though I seem to recall it as something apparently ad-libbed by either Streep or Kidman, rather than a scripted (nor, in all likelihood, directed) moment. Still, the cast appeared to be having a fine time despite all the strenuous hoops the story puts them through, and that energy is overall pretty infectious.

A mixed bag, in other words. It may be emblematic of my reaction to the movie as a whole that I still can't decide whether The Prom's 2:20 running time is brazenly self-indulgent (you very much feel that length, it doesn't "fly by") or refreshingly unbothered by movie conventions which arbitrarily stipulate that material this slight mustn't run a second over 90 minutes.

Leighton · Dec 12, 2020, 09:23 AM

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/dec/09/james-corden-the-prom-netflix-proves-straight-actors-playing-gay-should-think-twice

This put me off entirely

scenicdesign71 · Dec 12, 2020, 01:34 PM

While undeniably the weak link -- Corden is a modestly-talented performer with no apparent transformational range -- I'm baffled by The Guardian's (among others', it seems) outrage. Have they not noticed that "lisping and mincing" are a long-established mainstay of Corden's persona, with zero disrespect implied -- indeed, quite the reverse -- toward gay people or gay culture? While I agree that Nathan Lane would've been much better in the role (and have no difficulty believing that Brooks Ashmanskas definitively owns it), Corden acquits himself decently despite being a bit too young and a bit too cuddly; while his interpretation might not be ideal, it fits just fine into the Gleescape Murphy has (for better or worse) made of this material, and is not at all the distracting misstep -- not to say the abomination -- suggested by this article. It's not a great performance, but it's a perfectly competent one; if, at the end of 2020, this is what's getting one's knickers in a twist... $:-\$

scenicdesign71 · Dec 12, 2020, 01:52 PM

At risk of heresy, I actually questioned the casting (or perhaps Murphy's direction?) of the story's nominal lead, fresh-faced Jo Ellen Pellman, more than that of Corden. Pellman comes across here as a sweet, innocuously appealing performer -- perhaps too much the still (I'm tempted to say vacant) center around which all The Prom's zaniness orbits -- and her lovely smile is deployed far too liberally, making nonsense of the inciting predicament as she floats through school grinning dreamily while singing about how crushed her soul is by the trauma of growing up gay in a small-minded Midwestern town. I suspect the role might benefit from hints of grit and perhaps even saltiness that I can't tell whether the affable Pellman has in her repertoire (though she may possess them in spades off-camera).

scenicdesign71 · Oct 29, 2021, 10:23 PM

This looks really interesting:

DiveMilw · Oct 31, 2021, 06:47 AM

That was a VERY good trailer! (except, for me, the last few seconds. I wish they had kept the same tone the rest of the trailer had. Those few seconds took an what looked to be an interesting, elevated thriller and brought it back down mere horror. But that's just my opinion of the trailer and I'd still like to see the movie. My disappointment probably stems more from how impressed I was with the trailer up until that point.)

scenicdesign71 · Oct 31, 2021, 10:55 AM

Yeah, I actually had a similar reaction: for me, the teaser's final shot -- with the mirror-crack graphic running through Thomasin McKenzie's face, frozen mid-grimace -- was the slightly off-putting capper, pushing its tone oddly somewhere into the general neighborhood of giallo sadism. (Granted, in retrospect it's not as though the lurid Technicolor palette of the nighttime shots, not to mention the naive-girl(s)-in-the-city (and in jeopardy) setup and the literally-dripping neon intertitles, left us radically unprepared for such a shift, but for some reason it still jars a bit).

On the other hand, though, now that I think of it: the time-travel fantasy with its double edge, nostalgic and cautionary; the mirror imagery; the tone-shifting "trapped-in-the-wrong-genre" denouement -- and even, come to think of it, that final cracked-face gambit -- all contribute to the odd (but, to me, more interesting and appealing) Follies-ish vibe I had been getting prior to the teaser's decisive shift into horror. Or perhaps more The Girls Upstairs, with its past-and-present hauntings circling around a "who'll-do-it" murder mystery.

Sondheim, Goldman and Prince were of course experimenting with their form, most daringly in Follies's final sequence, yoking genre tropes (in its case, those of pre-WWII Broadway spectacle rather than horror) to subversive thematic ends. Alas, some of Last Night In Soho's critics report that its last act is essentially all-too-accurately represented by the teaser's: the interesting ideas Wright has been developing in the first two-thirds of the movie end up, they say, devolving thereafter into rote slasher-horror cliché.

Still, I want to find time to see this. It does look visually stunning. I'm not much of a Halloween person, but I suppose this movie might count as sort of seasonally-appropriate fare. (And while I love me some Jamie Lee Curtis, this definitely looks more interesting than Halloween Kills).

scenicdesign71 · Nov 02, 2021, 02:10 AM

"Full" trailer:

Though not a whole lot longer than the "teaser trailer" posted above -- both run around two and a half minutes -- this one favors plot (of which it crams in quite a bit) over atmosphere, giving the movie a slightly more conventional gloss and sacrificing some mystery in the process. (Broadly speaking, I guess that tends to be the difference between initial "teasers" -- hence their name -- and subsequent "trailers").

Doesn't matter; I'm still hooked. I'm planning to see this with a friend this coming weekend.

DiveMilw · Nov 03, 2021, 07:58 PM

Quote from: scenicdesign71 on Oct 31, 2021, 10:55 AMthe interesting ideas Wright has been developing in the first two-thirds of the movie end up, according to these critics, devolving thereafter into rote slasher-horror cliché.

This is exactly what I don't like about the end of the trailer. What they show after they cut the music should have been cut from the trailer. In other words, it should have been a shorter teaser.