by eabaker » Mon Aug 13, 2018 4:15 pm
Stayed in and had a pretty movie-heavy weekend. I already talked about my disappointment with RPO on Friday, so continuing from there...
Saturday:
A Quiet Place - Meh. Overhyped and overpraised to the point that it's hard to judge it apart from that. Technically well-executed set-pieces, but those only barely formed what I'd consider a plot, and ultimately didn't really coalesce into much of a story. A co-worked described it as "a great student film," and that feels about right to me. And that entire opening sequence should have been left out; everything we need to know is revealed in more interesting ways later, anyway.
Man of Steel - Boy, most of the events of that movie don't happen in any particular order, do they? About, I dunno, a quarter of the way in, they get to what actually might have been a really interesting way to approach a Superman story: from Lois's point of view, discovering the existence of this individual, tracking him down, and learning his history. But why had that history (including some pretty irrelevant chunks) already been shown to the audience? Terrible structure plus tiresome Objectivist rambling does not an engaging narrative make.
Sunday went better:
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - This one did live up to the hype. The billboards were a nice catalyst for a lot of different interactions, which gave us good windows into a number of different interesting characters. I loved that way that the comedy disrupted the rhythm of the movie.
Finally, just to make sure I'd end the weekend having a good time, I allowed myself a re-watch (for the I-don't-know-how-many'th time) of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. God, what a stark dichotomy between first and second halves. You have a re-cap of the first movie's ending, then about 40 minutes of rushed, inferior re-make of the first movie (and why keep the truth about the planet a secret from Brent through this, when not only does the audience know it from the first movie, they also know it from the re-run of the first movie's ending that opened this movie?!), then a little bit of filler... and then it just dives into being its own crazy, delightful thing for the remaining 45 of minutes or so, and, for me at least, all is forgiven!
Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world.