Holiday Movie-Watching
Dec. 27th, 2022 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoThe holidays have been good for movie-watching, not as much for anything else. Mostly hits, though.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire I meant to watch this in 2019, never did, then my partner received a rec for it that pushed us over the edge. It’s good! It’s gorgeous-looking, the lighting especially is worth watching for. I’ve never before seen natural blond hair shown in all of its various shades and states of being. I’m also such a sucker for period dress and I loved that this movie did it so beautifully, using the same outfits throughout (accurate!) but incorporating all of their layers at various points. Simply lovely to look at.
The only weak part for me was the dialogue delivery, which had a clear and intentional style, it just wasn’t really my thing. A lot of pauses and blank space, not so many conversations where the lines flowed into one another like people usually talk. On the one hand, really handy for watching a foreign-language film, because it gave plenty of time to read the subtitles. On the other, it left some scenes feeling a little empty, especially the ones set in that big open studio room with hardly any furniture.
Still, wonderful film overall, beautiful romance, I cried at the ending.
Glass Onion We’d been looking forward to this for a month, since its theatrical release, and almost drove through a blizzard to see it in a cinema. That being a bad idea, we waited until it was on streaming. It’s just so fun! The cast makes it, which is hardly a novel thing to say, but they’re each fantastic. Janelle Monae is the best.
I don’t care whether the mystery hung together or not—I’m not a mystery person, I was very much all right with being told a convoluted and absurd story for the sake of surprise. It worked for me. Also worked for me: burning the Mona Lisa. I thought that was a fantastic ending to round out the themes of valuing objects, wealth, status, etc. over people.
The Banshees of Inisherin This was a weird one. Similar to Portrait, it’s got gorgeous shots of its location, beautiful lighting (every time they open a door in one of those old houses, it looks blindingly white outside of it, and that’s just perfect/incredible/a win for natural lighting), lovely costumes. I really liked the main brother and sister, Pádraic and Siobhán, and their relationship to each other. I am sort of constantly in fear that the Sister Character will turn out to be a terrible person for the sake of narrative drama, but no, she’s completely lovely and she and her brother truly adore one another, even when they’re disagreeing about something.
No fucking clue what to make of Colm’s character, though. Cutting off his fingers felt like a bad joke when it was introduced as an idea, and it just got worse with each escalation. I didn’t enjoy any part of that. I lost all my sympathy for Colm and, in the final third, was simply waiting for the film to end.
Top Gun: Maverick and Top Gun To be very honest I saw most of both of these films (and I’ve seen Top Gun before) but sort of drifted in and out while my partner watched them, in that order. Maverick was exciting, sure, but pretty much just bad at any point that Tom Cruise wasn’t flying a plane. On rewatching the original I realized that what made it so much more charming was Charlie. Charlie is (a) involved in the military stuff, and thus (b) has actual weight behind her arguments with Maverick. Maverick’s love interest in the second film is a blah nothing of generic later-life romance tropes (kid gives a shovel talk!) seemingly thrown in to fit the action film formula. The first movie’s romance contributed significantly to the overall plot!! You can’t just cut out Charlie and all of her presence (she fucking lectures Maverick on workplace sexism oh my god she’s great) and replace it with paint-by-numbers romance.
Also, the only thing worse than Miles Teller is Miles Teller with a mustache. Blegh.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire I meant to watch this in 2019, never did, then my partner received a rec for it that pushed us over the edge. It’s good! It’s gorgeous-looking, the lighting especially is worth watching for. I’ve never before seen natural blond hair shown in all of its various shades and states of being. I’m also such a sucker for period dress and I loved that this movie did it so beautifully, using the same outfits throughout (accurate!) but incorporating all of their layers at various points. Simply lovely to look at.
The only weak part for me was the dialogue delivery, which had a clear and intentional style, it just wasn’t really my thing. A lot of pauses and blank space, not so many conversations where the lines flowed into one another like people usually talk. On the one hand, really handy for watching a foreign-language film, because it gave plenty of time to read the subtitles. On the other, it left some scenes feeling a little empty, especially the ones set in that big open studio room with hardly any furniture.
Still, wonderful film overall, beautiful romance, I cried at the ending.
Glass Onion We’d been looking forward to this for a month, since its theatrical release, and almost drove through a blizzard to see it in a cinema. That being a bad idea, we waited until it was on streaming. It’s just so fun! The cast makes it, which is hardly a novel thing to say, but they’re each fantastic. Janelle Monae is the best.
spoilers
I don’t care whether the mystery hung together or not—I’m not a mystery person, I was very much all right with being told a convoluted and absurd story for the sake of surprise. It worked for me. Also worked for me: burning the Mona Lisa. I thought that was a fantastic ending to round out the themes of valuing objects, wealth, status, etc. over people.
The Banshees of Inisherin This was a weird one. Similar to Portrait, it’s got gorgeous shots of its location, beautiful lighting (every time they open a door in one of those old houses, it looks blindingly white outside of it, and that’s just perfect/incredible/a win for natural lighting), lovely costumes. I really liked the main brother and sister, Pádraic and Siobhán, and their relationship to each other. I am sort of constantly in fear that the Sister Character will turn out to be a terrible person for the sake of narrative drama, but no, she’s completely lovely and she and her brother truly adore one another, even when they’re disagreeing about something.
spoilers
No fucking clue what to make of Colm’s character, though. Cutting off his fingers felt like a bad joke when it was introduced as an idea, and it just got worse with each escalation. I didn’t enjoy any part of that. I lost all my sympathy for Colm and, in the final third, was simply waiting for the film to end.
Top Gun: Maverick and Top Gun To be very honest I saw most of both of these films (and I’ve seen Top Gun before) but sort of drifted in and out while my partner watched them, in that order. Maverick was exciting, sure, but pretty much just bad at any point that Tom Cruise wasn’t flying a plane. On rewatching the original I realized that what made it so much more charming was Charlie. Charlie is (a) involved in the military stuff, and thus (b) has actual weight behind her arguments with Maverick. Maverick’s love interest in the second film is a blah nothing of generic later-life romance tropes (kid gives a shovel talk!) seemingly thrown in to fit the action film formula. The first movie’s romance contributed significantly to the overall plot!! You can’t just cut out Charlie and all of her presence (she fucking lectures Maverick on workplace sexism oh my god she’s great) and replace it with paint-by-numbers romance.
Also, the only thing worse than Miles Teller is Miles Teller with a mustache. Blegh.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-27 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-29 02:10 am (UTC)Portrait is very very good! It’s just so beautiful and unflinching, and that’s rare/precious. If you see Glass Onion, I hope you like it!
no subject
Date: 2022-12-28 02:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-29 02:03 am (UTC)