I can’t imagine Top Gun winning anything other than special effects oscars, Tom will get his lifetime achievement oscar later.
are the SAG awards traditionally that strongly predictive of oscar winners???
Cara Dune got “recruited into the qanon special forces” wat
I really liked Banshees of Inisherin, probably more than EEAAO. Very funny but also intense. I guess I need to read up on what the Irish Civil War was about now.
if anyone’s curious whether chris rock is over the will smith slap… watch the last ~7 mins of his new netflix special. Pretty savage.
i couldn’t get through the first ten minutes of that special.
I just skipped to the end
TLoU:
I guess it’s easier when you remove most of the fighting & action sequences. Like I remember tonight’s episode being really long in gameplay:
- you hunt the deer & meet the two guys
- while waiting for the other guy to come back with medicine, you’re attacked by infected and have to fight them off; this takes awhile
- in the game, Ellie escapes on horseback when the men come looking for them, and makes it to the town; she kills a bunch of people before being captured
- she escapes captivity and continues through the town, killing a bunch more people, before the scene in the lodge/restaurant where it’s set on fire
This episode also had some of the most video-game-y aspects to it:
- In video game boss fight logic this stuff goes out the window obv, but IRL, the restaurant catching fire seems…kinda like a big deal? It’s weird that he doesn’t react at all to the place lighting up lol
- Also, after Ellie kills the guy and she and Joel escape, where’s, uh, everyone else in the town? In the game it’s plausible that you actually murdered the entire town so it’s not necessarily weird that no one shows up when the town hall is on fire. In the show this seems very weird!
And fun easter egg, the voice actor who played Joel in the game (and a ton of other roles in AAA titles) is in this episode: He’s the preacher guy’s friend who goes back for the medicine and then gets killed by Ellie
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Agree about the video-gamey stuff weakening some of the plot. I still liked it a lot and think Bella will deservedly win an Emmy.
Semi related note, seems like way more people get upset about plot/timeline contrivances in marvel and Star Wars stuff than that do prestige-y shows like this or succession. Could just be my perception being skewed by the sheer number of people who watch and comment on the former versus the latter.
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i felt like a fun easter egg would have been an epic fight with joel. but oh well.
Probably obvious, but based on my own experience and talking to others about the latest TLoU episode, but it seems like women have a very different experience/reaction to it than most of the guys I know.
I and my female friends clocked the pedophile/groomer aspects of David immediately, while a LOT of the men I have talked to didn’t really pick up on it until the show made it obvious (the convo in the cell). Also, our reactions to the assault at the end were definitely different based on gender as well.
It nothing really important, I just find shit like that interesting in an academic sort of way.
How early is “immediately”? Like I forget exactly when he gets creepy with the girl whose father died but that was certainly a quick warning flag.
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I was on to him instantly lol. Like he got to speak for <1 second. I didn’t play the game. His sermon was weird and manipulative and then there’s the reality that nobody quoting the new testament in a post apocalyptic show has ever been the good guy.
I’d have really enjoyed watching him get butchered if Bella wasn’t such a good actress.
I’m gonna amend my assessment of who clocked the pedo stuff fast and who didn’t, and it’s a lot worse than by gender.
I swear to god, the people who didn’t recognize it as fast, while mostly men, also included some women…so I thought about it more and from what I know of them…it’s the ones who actually still either go to church or have some sort of religious inclinations that didn’t see it right away. Either they are innocent to the ways of the world, or didn’t want to think it, I’m not sure.
Yeah I’m a preachers son. That episode triggered a lot of religious trauma. Loved that part of the ending lol.
Mando season 3 so far isn’t really doing it for me. Didn’t watch boba fett but my son filled me in, bringing Grogu back seems like a weak crutch tbh.
This side quest to start off the season is really not interesting, but it em seems like it’s complete as of Ep. 2 so maybe the rest of this season will be better.
Update: I think the new background show is going to be Ted Lasso.
Finished the last BP nominee last night. My rankings:
- The Fablemans - Just absolutely dreadful. I’m not one of those people who complains that much about the stereotypical Oscar bait trope of “movies about movies”. But the entirety of this movie is just boring as hell or full of characters doing completely unrealistic things. As I said earlier, it’s a total vanity project from one of the last people on Earth who needs one.
- Top Gun Maverick - Just like the first one, it’s full of unlikable characters that I’m apparently supposed to root for. Since I didn’t like the original, I didn’t have any of those nostalgic feelings that others had. It really felt like rah rah America boomer porn.
- Triangle of Sadness - Parasite already did this, and did it much better. The first part was totally unnecessary and the ending was stupid. It’s a shame because this had potential, but outside of a pretty solid half hour about halfway through the movie, it missed the mark for me completely.
- The Banshees of Inisherin - Maybe I just don’t appreciate allegories for the Irish Civil War. This just dragged for me. There just wasn’t enough here for a 2 hour movie. Maybe I would have liked this more as a short film.
- All Quiet on the Western Front - For the second straight year, we have a remake of a previous BP winner. It was almost a century ago and this one is in German, so I’m more forgiving of this one. But the original is still better, many due to the fact that the ending is far inferior.
- Tár - Still not sure what to think of this one. The director should be pelted with tomatoes for what he did for the first 30 minutes of the film. I don’t want to see 5 minutes of credits and I don’t want to hear what amounts to an in depth Wikipedia article about conductors I’ve never heard of. Credit for the ambition of the film and Cate Blanchett is great, but I’ll stop there in terms of major praise.
- Avatar The Way of Water - The script is pretty thin (it’s basically the first movie with some relatively minor changes). But you know what to expect and it delivers. There’s more to a movie than visual effects, and I’m not sure that should have been enough to land it on the BP nomination list, but in terms of pure enjoyment, I have to put it here.
- Elvis - It took awhile to get used to Baz Luhrmann’s directorial shtick, but once I did, I could just sit back and be mesmerized by an unbelievable performance from Austin Butler. It was so good I could mostly ignore whatever the fuck that was from Tom Hanks.
- Women Talking - The title is definitely truth in advertising. It’s a very dialogue heavy movie (honestly this could have been a play with almost no changes). There are some plot holes that bothered me, but the intense philosophical discussions were enough for me to mostly ignore those. Watching this reminded me of One Night In Miami, though this wasn’t quite as good. I’m seeing people compare this to 12 Angry Men. I really need to see that.
- Everything Everywhere All At Once - I know this is going to win BP, and it definitely deserves it in an absolute garbage year for nominees. It’s a very good movie. But I’ll stop short of calling it “great”. It tries way too hard as if it’s trying to be Rick and Morty: The Movie. It wants to be deeper than it is. That sounds like a lot of complaining for my #1 pick, but I’m really just pushing back on a lot of the overdone praise it’s getting.
So yeah, this was an absolute horrendous lineup of BP nominees, probably the worst since they expanded the list (it’s definitely either this or 2017). RRR is better than all of these movies. Argentina, 1985 is better than all of these movies.
So, yeah, good luck to EEAAO at the Oscars on Sunday. I’ll mostly be watching for the Naatu Naatu performance.
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Yeoh deserves a lifetime achievement Oscar. Crouching Tiger was one of the WOAT Oscar snubs.