recent movies seen in the theater
Jan. 8th, 2024 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretNext Goal Wins
Jews do not dance in this film.
November's mystery movie at the multiplex, it's Taika Waititi's latest and it's a fairly formulaic soccer movie about a down on his luck soccer coach who goes to American Samoa to teach its soccer team how to win, and learns valuable life lessons along the way. It's made by Waititi so it has a lot of great attention to detail that makes the smallest things funny and charming, but it's still just a formulaic sports movie. Anyway, I enjoyed it.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Jews do not dance in this film.
I have read the first three Hunger Games books but not seen the movies, and I haven't read the book version of this, but went to see this with R because nothing else in the theater sounded interesting to her. The first part of the movie, which showed Coriolanus Snow as a mentor in an early Hunger Games, was suspenseful and powerfully compelling. After the resolution of that storyline, the film moved on to belatedly set up new storylines in a new setting for the film's conclusion, something that I strongly suspect the novel did a better job of meshing into a single unified whole.
R and I are still arguing about the moral position of Snow in the film, whether the film offers anything redemptive to where Snow ends up in the original trilogy. My sense is that it deepens our understanding of who Snow is as a person and why he makes the choices he does, but doesn't make his actions any more forgivable. R argues, and excuse me if I am not representing her position fairly, that the film shows that Snow is perpetually in survivor mode within a brutal totalitarian regime, so when he betrays people or betrays his own values it's because he had no better option, and thus should not be seen as morally culpable.
The Marvels
Jews do not dance in this film; Muslims do.
I really enjoyed it, especially some of the sillier cosmic stuff like the planet where all language is sung, and especially Iman Vellani's Ms Marvel. But it was clearly hacked together with reshoots and the plot and emotional beats suffered. I don't quite know what a compelling Carol story looks like in this movie, but we didn't really get a satisfying one, we got a jumpy and mismatched stab at a character arc about her sort of learning to become part of a team.
The Boys in the Boat
Jews do not dance in this film.
December's month's mystery movie at the multiplex, it was a satisfyingly paint by numbers sports movie about the University of Washington 1936 rowing team, which competed in and won at the '36 Olympics in Germany as underdogs.
Jews do not dance in this film.
November's mystery movie at the multiplex, it's Taika Waititi's latest and it's a fairly formulaic soccer movie about a down on his luck soccer coach who goes to American Samoa to teach its soccer team how to win, and learns valuable life lessons along the way. It's made by Waititi so it has a lot of great attention to detail that makes the smallest things funny and charming, but it's still just a formulaic sports movie. Anyway, I enjoyed it.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Jews do not dance in this film.
I have read the first three Hunger Games books but not seen the movies, and I haven't read the book version of this, but went to see this with R because nothing else in the theater sounded interesting to her. The first part of the movie, which showed Coriolanus Snow as a mentor in an early Hunger Games, was suspenseful and powerfully compelling. After the resolution of that storyline, the film moved on to belatedly set up new storylines in a new setting for the film's conclusion, something that I strongly suspect the novel did a better job of meshing into a single unified whole.
R and I are still arguing about the moral position of Snow in the film, whether the film offers anything redemptive to where Snow ends up in the original trilogy. My sense is that it deepens our understanding of who Snow is as a person and why he makes the choices he does, but doesn't make his actions any more forgivable. R argues, and excuse me if I am not representing her position fairly, that the film shows that Snow is perpetually in survivor mode within a brutal totalitarian regime, so when he betrays people or betrays his own values it's because he had no better option, and thus should not be seen as morally culpable.
The Marvels
Jews do not dance in this film; Muslims do.
I really enjoyed it, especially some of the sillier cosmic stuff like the planet where all language is sung, and especially Iman Vellani's Ms Marvel. But it was clearly hacked together with reshoots and the plot and emotional beats suffered. I don't quite know what a compelling Carol story looks like in this movie, but we didn't really get a satisfying one, we got a jumpy and mismatched stab at a character arc about her sort of learning to become part of a team.
The Boys in the Boat
Jews do not dance in this film.
December's month's mystery movie at the multiplex, it was a satisfyingly paint by numbers sports movie about the University of Washington 1936 rowing team, which competed in and won at the '36 Olympics in Germany as underdogs.
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