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#11
Bad Movies / Re: Generate Movie Poster with...
Last post by bob - Today at 10:26:49 AMChatGPT
copilot
copilot
#12
Press Releases and Film News / Re: Star Wars original theatri...
Last post by bob - Today at 10:23:07 AMI want edition of Star Wars on bluray badly
#13
Good Movies / Re: Recent Viewings, Part 2
Last post by M.10rda - Today at 09:25:33 AMAlso, let's talk about that opening tracking shot! It's fine. Madame and I briefly watched the "Making of" featurette after the movie and it focuses on that tracking shot. I was quickly confused by the doc and thought I'd misheard some information. Nope - it took five weeks for Baumbach to set up and execute that shot. Now I - as a failed filmmaker who has never been lucky enough to enjoy many millions of dollars nor the participation of movie stars like Sandler, who appears quite impatient with Baumbach during the doc - thought to myself, How long would it take me to set up and shoot this opening? After a few seconds of reflection, I decided it would take me maybe a day or a day and a half. But maybe that's unfair or ignorant of me. So I did a little Googling:
* The tracking shot in TOUCH OF EVIL took five hours to set up and shoot. Five hours.
* Just to pull another random famous tracking shot from a famous film - the tracking shot through the nightclub in GOODFELLAS was set up and shot first thing in the morning. Scorsese got it in the can by lunch. Three hours!
* It's been at least twenty years since I watched RUSSIAN ARK but as soon as that ended I watched its making-of doc. IIRC they may have rehearsed that 90-minute tracking shot for something like five weeks - as you would with a play - but then that poor Russian camera op, God bless his soul, strapped on that huge DV rig and shot the whole thing twice - back to back. So... 90-minute tracking shot... executed in under three and a half hours.
Baumbach = five weeks for five minutes.
Now JAY KELLY is the best Baumbach film I've seen, yeah, and it's a good movie. But it ain't, like - Kubrick... or TOUCH OF EVIL or RUSSIAN ARK. Thus based on the above, I still maintain:
Noah Baumbach is triflin', yo.
(Adam Sandler appears to agree.)
* The tracking shot in TOUCH OF EVIL took five hours to set up and shoot. Five hours.
* Just to pull another random famous tracking shot from a famous film - the tracking shot through the nightclub in GOODFELLAS was set up and shot first thing in the morning. Scorsese got it in the can by lunch. Three hours!
* It's been at least twenty years since I watched RUSSIAN ARK but as soon as that ended I watched its making-of doc. IIRC they may have rehearsed that 90-minute tracking shot for something like five weeks - as you would with a play - but then that poor Russian camera op, God bless his soul, strapped on that huge DV rig and shot the whole thing twice - back to back. So... 90-minute tracking shot... executed in under three and a half hours.
Baumbach = five weeks for five minutes.
Now JAY KELLY is the best Baumbach film I've seen, yeah, and it's a good movie. But it ain't, like - Kubrick... or TOUCH OF EVIL or RUSSIAN ARK. Thus based on the above, I still maintain:
Noah Baumbach is triflin', yo.
(Adam Sandler appears to agree.) #14
Good Movies / Re: Recent Viewings, Part 2
Last post by M.10rda - Today at 09:18:05 AMJAY KELLY (2025):
The fact that we watched this brand new, (apparently) quite expensive, star-studded, Oscar-baiting, holiday season "crowd"-pleaser on Netflix must only be seen as spelling the inevitable and possibly more-impending-than-I'd-thought doom of movie theaters. Maybe it's playing in some theater somewhere, however it isn't playing in any theaters in the WNY (Buffalo) region, and it doesn't appear as if any other films with stars the caliber of Clooney or Sandler are playing in those theaters. At the very least Netflix is clearly trying to kill movie theaters, and this seems like a "critical hit" in role-playing terms if not cinema terms. (Maybe cinema terms too, reviews seem mostly effusive.) So that sucks - though we watched it too, so I'm part of the problem.
I guess I've seen at least half of Noah Baumbach's films and while I admire parts of all of those I've seen, I've also disliked each one overall. JAY KELLY is clearly the best Baumbach-directed film I've seen. (He did co-write THE LIFE AQUATIC, a film I love but a film with long melodramatic dialogue scenes like a Baumbach movie and little of the swift economy heard in Wes Anderson films not co-written by Baumbach, most obviously the snappy and still profound RUSHMORE.) JAY KELLY doesn't indulge in gratuitous or cheap sadism towards its characters, like say THE SQUID AND THE WHALE; it doesn't engage in profligate perambulation around its central conflict and fritter away its viewers' time, like MARGOT AT THE WEDDING; and it never catastrophically leaves the rails, as WHITE NOISE certainly did. JAY KELLY is a handsome, confident film (like its title character and the star that plays him) which generally hews towards conservative choices... somewhat unlike Clooney, who has participated in the pedestrian projects of others and then used the capital on his own often-unprofitable but more interesting (and often leftist) projects. There is some artistry to JAY KELLY though its mostly of the tasteful and understated variety that wouldn't confound home viewers in the fly-over states. (I guess I imagine fans of the OCEANS franchise rather than fans of the sort of dense surrealism that WHITE NOISE was aspiring towards.)
So all of that is to acknowledge that I like JAY KELLY but it's hard for me to get really excited about JAY KELLY. The hoary tale of JAY KELLY recalls JERRY MAGUIRE and THE PLAYER, with stakes higher than the frivolous MAGUIRE (I mean, who really cares if Tom Cruise finds love?) and lower yet more compelling than Altman's glib, hollow PLAYER. KELLY kind of also completes a trilogy of films that, with UP IN THE AIR and THE DESCENDANTS, celebrate the deep existential questing of one George Clooney, Exceptionally Attractive Man. It's inherently challenging for me to commit to such a premise, hence my apathy for JERRY MAGUIRE; I hated UP IN THE AIR and it took me most of DESCENDANTS' long running time to warm up to it. I never really cared about Clooney's Jay Kelly, either, but at least I was willing to give the film my patient benefit of doubt. There is ultimately authentic human drama in this film - somewhat movingly between Kelly and his long-time manager (played by Sandler) and between Kelly and his estranged adult daughter (played by Riley Keough). Also I commend the film for not giving Jay Kelly a pass at the end because he's simply such an iconic movie stud. The final moments and final shot are respectful of the audience's intelligence and of the humanity of the characters around Kelly who have had to suffer his oblivious behavior - that's more than some similar films would bother to do.
There are about three things in this well-made film that don't work for me at all. The biggest are the scenes with Sandler and the great Laura Dern, which sound like they were scribbled hastily on train napkins on-location in Europe when it was discovered that Dern was available for a few days of shooting. The quality of dialogue (credited to Baumbach and, oddly, another great actress Emily Mortimer) plummets particularly in the scene where Dern exits the film. My wife was also quite upset by Baumbach's apparent ignorance about how peanut allergies work (the allergy is introduced as relevant in these Dern-centric scenes and then no one behaves accordingly). Finally, Baumbach tries for some looser, more stylized flourishes towards the end - at a film festival rave and in the woods at night - and those fall really flat.
I did appreciate the casting! Among others, we get #thegreat Stacy Keach cast brilliantly as Kelly's dad and #thegreat Jim Broadbent used beautifully as Kelly's mentor. Broadbent's under-celebrated fellow Brit Lenny Henry shows up as well in a short yet powerful flashback, and I liked the young, rather offbeat actress who plays Kelly's younger daughter. Co-screenwriter Mortimer appears briefly in the periphery of some scenes and then is never seen again after (apparently) being picked up by French President Emmanuel Macron, who I thought was married.
3.5/5
Baumbach's own current wife and former (?) co-screenwriter Greta Gerwig also appears occasionally as Sandler's wife. I dunno, I'm just speaking as a highly committed monogamous-minded kind of guy, but if I was Greta Gerwig (who co-starred in Baumbach's GREENBERG with GREENBERG co-screenwriter/former Mrs. Baumbach Jennifer Jason Leigh) I would be nervous about my husband writing screenplays with other women. I mean I suppose Greta Gerwig could rationalize that Emily Mortimer is no Greta Gerwig, but then if we're being perfectly frank Greta Gerwig is no Jennifer Jason Leigh.
The fact that we watched this brand new, (apparently) quite expensive, star-studded, Oscar-baiting, holiday season "crowd"-pleaser on Netflix must only be seen as spelling the inevitable and possibly more-impending-than-I'd-thought doom of movie theaters. Maybe it's playing in some theater somewhere, however it isn't playing in any theaters in the WNY (Buffalo) region, and it doesn't appear as if any other films with stars the caliber of Clooney or Sandler are playing in those theaters. At the very least Netflix is clearly trying to kill movie theaters, and this seems like a "critical hit" in role-playing terms if not cinema terms. (Maybe cinema terms too, reviews seem mostly effusive.) So that sucks - though we watched it too, so I'm part of the problem.
I guess I've seen at least half of Noah Baumbach's films and while I admire parts of all of those I've seen, I've also disliked each one overall. JAY KELLY is clearly the best Baumbach-directed film I've seen. (He did co-write THE LIFE AQUATIC, a film I love but a film with long melodramatic dialogue scenes like a Baumbach movie and little of the swift economy heard in Wes Anderson films not co-written by Baumbach, most obviously the snappy and still profound RUSHMORE.) JAY KELLY doesn't indulge in gratuitous or cheap sadism towards its characters, like say THE SQUID AND THE WHALE; it doesn't engage in profligate perambulation around its central conflict and fritter away its viewers' time, like MARGOT AT THE WEDDING; and it never catastrophically leaves the rails, as WHITE NOISE certainly did. JAY KELLY is a handsome, confident film (like its title character and the star that plays him) which generally hews towards conservative choices... somewhat unlike Clooney, who has participated in the pedestrian projects of others and then used the capital on his own often-unprofitable but more interesting (and often leftist) projects. There is some artistry to JAY KELLY though its mostly of the tasteful and understated variety that wouldn't confound home viewers in the fly-over states. (I guess I imagine fans of the OCEANS franchise rather than fans of the sort of dense surrealism that WHITE NOISE was aspiring towards.)
So all of that is to acknowledge that I like JAY KELLY but it's hard for me to get really excited about JAY KELLY. The hoary tale of JAY KELLY recalls JERRY MAGUIRE and THE PLAYER, with stakes higher than the frivolous MAGUIRE (I mean, who really cares if Tom Cruise finds love?) and lower yet more compelling than Altman's glib, hollow PLAYER. KELLY kind of also completes a trilogy of films that, with UP IN THE AIR and THE DESCENDANTS, celebrate the deep existential questing of one George Clooney, Exceptionally Attractive Man. It's inherently challenging for me to commit to such a premise, hence my apathy for JERRY MAGUIRE; I hated UP IN THE AIR and it took me most of DESCENDANTS' long running time to warm up to it. I never really cared about Clooney's Jay Kelly, either, but at least I was willing to give the film my patient benefit of doubt. There is ultimately authentic human drama in this film - somewhat movingly between Kelly and his long-time manager (played by Sandler) and between Kelly and his estranged adult daughter (played by Riley Keough). Also I commend the film for not giving Jay Kelly a pass at the end because he's simply such an iconic movie stud. The final moments and final shot are respectful of the audience's intelligence and of the humanity of the characters around Kelly who have had to suffer his oblivious behavior - that's more than some similar films would bother to do.
There are about three things in this well-made film that don't work for me at all. The biggest are the scenes with Sandler and the great Laura Dern, which sound like they were scribbled hastily on train napkins on-location in Europe when it was discovered that Dern was available for a few days of shooting. The quality of dialogue (credited to Baumbach and, oddly, another great actress Emily Mortimer) plummets particularly in the scene where Dern exits the film. My wife was also quite upset by Baumbach's apparent ignorance about how peanut allergies work (the allergy is introduced as relevant in these Dern-centric scenes and then no one behaves accordingly). Finally, Baumbach tries for some looser, more stylized flourishes towards the end - at a film festival rave and in the woods at night - and those fall really flat.
I did appreciate the casting! Among others, we get #thegreat Stacy Keach cast brilliantly as Kelly's dad and #thegreat Jim Broadbent used beautifully as Kelly's mentor. Broadbent's under-celebrated fellow Brit Lenny Henry shows up as well in a short yet powerful flashback, and I liked the young, rather offbeat actress who plays Kelly's younger daughter. Co-screenwriter Mortimer appears briefly in the periphery of some scenes and then is never seen again after (apparently) being picked up by French President Emmanuel Macron, who I thought was married.
3.5/5
Baumbach's own current wife and former (?) co-screenwriter Greta Gerwig also appears occasionally as Sandler's wife. I dunno, I'm just speaking as a highly committed monogamous-minded kind of guy, but if I was Greta Gerwig (who co-starred in Baumbach's GREENBERG with GREENBERG co-screenwriter/former Mrs. Baumbach Jennifer Jason Leigh) I would be nervous about my husband writing screenplays with other women. I mean I suppose Greta Gerwig could rationalize that Emily Mortimer is no Greta Gerwig, but then if we're being perfectly frank Greta Gerwig is no Jennifer Jason Leigh.
#17
Press Releases and Film News / Re: Star Wars original theatri...
Last post by Archivist - Today at 03:51:03 AMAs deeply it affected me as a kid, it has been many years since I watched Star Wars in its entirety. In the late 80s and early 90s, local TV would occasionally show all the movies, usually starting with the most recent, then the others following. That's probably the last time I saw SW all the way through. Funnily, in later years I watched Star Trek the motion picture a lot more. It would be quite a trip to see SW in the cinema as I saw it as a child, minus the bogus changes that Lucas made over the years.
#18
Humorous Captions / Re: No Noose is Good Noose
Last post by Trevor - Today at 02:01:09 AMQuote from: AliceYuri on Today at 12:11:09 AMWILMAAAAA
😳😆😅😄😀😅😄😀
#19
Bad Movies / Re: (Photoshop Thread) Turn Go...
Last post by Soup - Today at 01:05:56 AMOh we are getting some great stuff in here. 
Here's another for you fine folks. Original:
Once more with feeling:
Here's another for you fine folks. Original:
Once more with feeling:
#20
Bad Movies / Re: (Photoshop Thread) Turn Go...
Last post by Ethereal - Today at 12:55:01 AMThe Thing if it came out in the YouTube era, haha
I don't think I need to post the original for this one.
I don't think I need to post the original for this one.