r/moviecritic

I don't even know what to say, was mesmerized with this till the very end. Exceptional craftsmanship combined with a well structured, thought provoking and emotional premise at the same time. It's an ever relevant reflection of our society and what ultimately drives us forward, HOPE.

The scene where they walked through the warzone with the baby, how everything went quiet. That was one among the best scenes I have ever seen.

The Cinematography and production quality was through the roof, even putting recent movie juggernauts to shame.

A movie which aged like fine wine!

When it comes to found footage horror, I’m always an open book. It’s a very inventive style of filmmaking. That being said, what’s your fave?

Mine is Rec (2007). Still holds up to this day. One of the most anxiety inducing and terrifying found footage films ever made. The night vision sequence will never not scare me.

What’s your favorite?

I don't even know what to say, was mesmerized with this till the very end. Exceptional craftsmanship combined with a well structured, thought provoking and emotional premise at the same time. It's an ever relevant reflection of our society and what ultimately drives us forward, HOPE.

The scene where they walked through the warzone with the baby, how everything went quiet. That was one among the best scenes I have ever seen.

The Cinematography and production quality was through the roof, even putting recent movie juggernauts to shame.

A movie which aged like fine wine!

So I just got around to watching JW4. Yeah I know I'm like 2 years late, but I'm so pissed at what could have been.

The first John Wick was such a magnificent, kick ass movie - fantastic hints of a bigger, mysterious assassin-universe, awesome stunts and choreography, fairly-realistic gun fights, a simple but compelling story. Genuinely one of the best action movies of the last 20 years or so....

And then we get this magic-bulletproof suit, 10 minute gunfight, total lack of story-ass bullshit that I couldn't even finish. I mean after 2-3 minutes of non-stop shooting and the 7193-th double tap kill, there's only so much fks I have left to give.

The second and third movie are no better. Realistic gun fights? Replaced with choreographically cool, but totally unrealistic slop. The assassin society? Non-sensical and silly, the more is revealed about it. Storyline? What storyline - just keep shooting.

I mean don't get me wrong. I'm happy our boy Keanu is getting paid and had a resurgence, but jeez - not everything needs to be a franchise...

Can I talk about drive? There was a lot of hype with it and I watched it for the first time.

I’m in the minority when it comes say I didn’t like it. It wasn’t terrible. The cinematography was excellent, the acting was great. Maybe im just not the target audience for it

Honestly I just watched a recent clip from the upcoming Michael Jackson biopic when Michael is performing Billie Jean, and I’ve got pretty mixed feelings about it.

Like, credit where it’s due, the actor actually kills it. The look, the movement, the little mannerisms, it’s all there. You can tell a lot of effort went into capturing Michael Jackson’s energy and stage presence, and it genuinely comes through.

But man, the editing kinda ruins the vibe for me. The editing is so fucking bad lmao. There are SO many cuts crammed into that one performance that it starts to feel weirdly overproduced. It’s like every couple seconds it jumps to a new angle, and instead of pulling you in, it kinda takes you out of the moment.

I just wish they’d let the shots breathe a bit more instead of chopping it up so much. Right now it comes off a little cheesy and overly polished, when it could’ve been way more impactful if they just kept it simple.

I don't remember much from it apart from the fact I used to watch this movie in my childhood and really enjoyed it for some reason. Pretty sure I have rewatched it a couple times like a decade ago. Why do critics, IMDb, Letterbox users hate having fun? 😭.

Anyways since I can't remember much of it apart from the fact that it was enjoyable can someone enlighten me on why its rated so low everywhere?

The fact that they’re in 3 movies together this year is kind of crazy. With The Drama coming out this weekend, it got me wondering which one will be the best. Obviously The Odyssey and Dune: Part 3 have the most commercial appeal and scale but The Drama might be great too.

I love the film Broadcast News. I never really cared for Network but I think I need to revisit it.

That Oscar was so deserved.

What’s your favorite movie with amazing score?

So I just finished 2001: A Space Odyssey as part of my little sci-fi marathon. The movie left me quite confused, not just about the movie itself but also about the reception it received.

I will start with my thoughts on the movie itself. OPINION ALERT

I have heard warnings about this movie being slow, especially after my post about Annihilation, which was slow paced for me. The first half of the movie took "slow paced" to another level. I know that this is fitting me perfectly into the stereotype of gen Z having no attention span but just hear me out. I have liked slow movies but most of those did it differently from 2001. The ones I liked technically had nothing happening, but all the silence and scenic shots served to let viewers stew on their emotions or reflect on the message. 2001 from the very beginning seemingly relied on cool visuals and music to keep every shot going for longer than it should. The repetitiveness and frequency of these long shots really got to me. The main purpose of these, I would assume, was to show the vast expanse of space. I don't think that single idea would require this much of the run time to establish, so maybe I was missing something. I think the pacing for the first half of the movie was slow and drawn out in a bad way. Most of the shots could've been shortened a bit. The remaining shots should be shortened by a lot. I don't feel like a spaceship being lowered into the base should've taken anywhere near that long.

The second half was much better paced in my opinion, from the start of the time skip to the Jupiter mission. The actions are still slow but at least now it felt more purposeful and the slowness helped in building tension really well. I did feel like the acid trip near the end overstayed its welcome a bit but it was still visually interesting enough to be worth the time. Overall, this movie's pacing was just unnecessarily slow but that is just me.

The other thing I would like to talk about is the story. My favorite part of the movie was the Jupiter mission and everything with HAL 9000. It felt much more like a normal space story than anything else in the movie and I thought it was quite well executed. As mentioned before, I thought the use of the slow pacing to help build tension was quite excellent. HAL was the only character in the movie that felt like an actual character. Now I do understand the intention was to make the story cold and emotionless, but I think it would still be better if we had gotten more interesting characters (emotionless does not equate to uninteresting).

About the message, I think I understood the core of it being human evolution and the way we use our tools. These are very effectively conveyed through the beginning with the hominins and the Jupiter mission. That still didn't make me any less confused with the ending. I just straight up didn't understand it at all. I mean I understood what happened (aka some weird alien stuff) but I didn't understand what it meant or what it was supposed to convey. By the end I was just mostly left confused rather than mesmerized. The message also didn't leave me as much to chew on as compared to Annihilation which was the one I watched before. Maybe this one was too grand for me to fully dive into.

I'm starting to think that this was supposed to be more of an audiovisual experience rather than a story being told. I must admit I am not as good with the latter unless the experience is brainless excitement like Mad Max: Fury Road. I think this movie looks incredible even by modern standards and the soundtrack is iconic for good reasons. I just don't think that is enough for me to have a good experience with a movie especially when there were points where I thought the shots and music got too drawn out.

Now to the question being asked in the title: Do most people immediately fall in love with 2001: A Space Odyssey?

I would like to think of myself as having a pretty wide taste in movies. If most people liked a movie and/or it is critically acclaimed, I most likely also liked it or at least understood why it was popular. That is why 2001 is a weird case for me. I do see how people would love the movie. The message about humanity, the visuals, the music, the story that is very thrilling in parts, great artistic vision. That said, it does not seem to me like a movie to be this widely beloved by general audiences. It felt like the kind of movie to be VERY highly rated by artsy cinephile people but most of the public would find it a rough watch. I feel like my initial reaction and thoughts on the movie is pretty close to how most normal movie watchers would feel. A potential explanation I can see is the movie growing on viewers as the ideas behind it start to stew and linger.

Another theory I have is the phenomenon where after you have finished the film for a while, whenever you think back, only the best parts come to mind. It is actually happening to me right now. As I am writing this, I'm starting to forget how bored I was for a good portion of the movie and how confused it left me. What remains in my memory most vividly is how great everything around HAL was and some of the multiple incredible shots in this movie.

But hey, I am most likely wrong and maybe people just really loved how the movie looked and sounded and/or how thrilling some parts of the movie were while not minding or even liking the slow pacing.

I'm a big Nintendo fan, even though they are due some fair criticism. They nuke anyone involved with emulation, even though their mini consoles have ~20 games and use emulators. Amiibo's have artificial scarcity. They sell you decade old games for $40 or $60, the list goes on.

But damn do they know how to make great games and absolute S tier music. If you play a Nintendo game, you know it's going to be stylish and sound great.

Coming in to this movie, I had seen that the critic scores were hovering around 40%, with the audience around 90%. I was going to see it either way, but it definitely "peaked" my interest. Besides, everyone's a critic these days so I don't even know what that means anymore.

I think most of the criticism is around two topics - the pacing and the story.

The pacing - it's lightning fast and you only get around 30 seconds of exposition before the next event starts popping off. Given it's a kids movie that must maintain their attention, I didn't really see this as problem. The runtime is just under 90 minutes so they don't have time to muck about.

The story - it's Mario. He's either going to be saving someone, or stopping a bad guy from doing something bad. You already know the premise, so I don't think they need to waste time to explain to you again. It's one of those Nintendo situations where they're in a unique position such that everyone knows at least something from the company.

If anything this movie gives me hope for a Smash Brothers / avengers style collaboration event (ZSS / Fox main here). From what I've seen there are 15 characters seen in the film, so roughly 18% of the smash roster.

Do you think it deserves varying scores?

Here's the full review if you're interested.