Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-27 (Monday)

On 1/28/2025 5:33 AM, anim8rfsk wrote:

Ubiquitous <weberm@polaris.net> wrote:

I watched:
>
>
What did you watch?

 Hey, thanks for asking!
 THE TRANSPORTER
 It was all I could find on STARZ
  

Thunderbird pretty much died on me today.  It's been limping along for a while now.  But it suddenly came back to life.  I don't know how this will last.  Anyway, I watched:
Southland Tales (blu-ray) 2006 sci-fi movie written and directed by Richard Kelly.  The movie stars Dwayne Johnson as a movie star who is at the heart of a blackmail scheme by a group of anarchists trying to take down a fascist police state in Texas following a nuclear bomb being detonated a few years earlier.  The movie is wall to wall famous people.   Too many to list.  I have no idea why they all signed up to be in it.
I watched the longer "Cannes cut" yesterday.  It was an incoherent mess!   None of it made sense.  Yesterday, I watched the theatrical cut with the director's commentary.  This is a totally different edit of the movie with scenes in a different order.  Randomizing the order the scenes came in really didn't matter much.  Though, in some ways this made it harder to follow because I had just watched the movie the night before and now, I'm watching it again but it's all different.
But some things were cleared up in the theatrical cut thanks to the commentary.  Two things that came out early in the commentary was both Dwayne Johnson's character and Seann William Scott's character were time travelers from the future, but had amnesia because of the time travel. This detail was vague at best in Cannes cut, and not explicitly shown for either character until the very end of the movie.  But even in the theatrical cut knowing they are amnesiac doppelgangers from the future didn't clear much up.  On the commentary the director kept going on and on about "reading" "chapters" and at one point he straight up said, "Read the graphic novels, it's all there."  And I'm thinking if you have to read some outside source material for your movie to make sense, then you've failed as a director.  The director mentioned Sarah Michelle Gellar's character having psychic abilities.  That was news to me, I must completely missed that detail in the Cannes cut.  And it wasn't entirely clear in the theatrical cut either.  If he hadn't explicitly said it, I wouldn't have known.  He admitted on the commentary that he intentionally made the movie confusing so no one could figure it out in one viewing because that's just the type of movie he likes to make.  I probably should have stopped the movie at that point, but I stuck with it.  My having to watch this mess twice in order to make any sort of sense of was intentional!  :-/
Don't Blink (Amazon Streaming) 2024 thriller directed by Zoë Kravitz and starring Naomi Ackie as a waitress who along with her friend are invited by a billionaire (Channing Tatum) to his private island.  But things get weird as she and her friend have trouble remembering past events and eventually people forget the friend was ever there.  I've been looking forward to watching this for a while.  Mainly because I couldn't figure out the plot from the trailers.  Although I had some good guesses, and my guesses were more or less accurate.  What happens in the trailer is what happens in the movie.  The rest are spoilers.  It's worth checking out.