Comment by ignoramous
19 days ago
> can barely name one good movie a year these days
Not really.
Of the recent movies, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a storytelling masterpiece. Since you mentioned it, I personally rate it alongside Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
Everything Everywhere All at Once was the last time I sat in a theater where, for the first half at least, I thought I was watching an instant classic.
But that movie just dragged on, and now I look back and see it as a bungled opportunity. It could've been so much tighter in the edit. They could've cut a third of the movie and made the whole thing so much better.
This has generally been my experience with most highly acclaimed movies over the past 10 years. Most recently had this w/ Marty Supreme... last year had this w/ The Brutalist and The Substance.
The first half has me thinking instant classic, my hope is sky high. But then toward the end I find myself looking at my watch and realize it's simply not going to the stick the landing.
OTOH, many acclaimed streaming series have generally done this well. My take is that as long-form storytelling has evolved, movies have transitioned into this post-modernist phase as directors/writers don't feel they have the runway to tell something truly cohesive that doesn't end up being trite. It's much more about saying 'something' or imbuing a feeling than telling a fully fleshed 3 act story.
I did like how The Brutalist at least included an intermission the way long movies used to do.
> They could've cut a third of the movie and made the whole thing so much better.
I feel that way with Inception. That out of nowhere 30-minute snow action part dragged on forever.
> They could've cut a third of the movie and made the whole thing so much better.
It would become just an action movie with crazy plot then.
> Everything Everywhere All at Once is a storytelling masterpiece
I thought it was so awful I gave up half way through. Maybe it gets better after that. But I agree on Pulp Fiction.
Same here. I got extremely annoyed with the constant ridiculous fight scenes. About halfway through I gave up.
It's Children of Men crossed with The Big Lebowski, with Pynchon instead of noir characters. When you get what it's trying to do, it gets better.
I bounced off of it at first, but I bounced (hard) off of Lebowksi as well.
I don't think it's PTA's best film (or that I will come around to that opinion eventually), but it's pretty good.
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Me too. Extremely loud, lots of flashing and fast cuts.
I genuinely didn’t really think there was a story, just spectacle.
Agreed. Not as good a film as it was advertised to be.
Me too. And love pulp fiction. Just used Mr. Wolf to reference a situation at work.
The "OK, let's not start sucking... yet " is the one that comes to mind during production fires but can't use that one at work unfortunately
This was a good movie, but what was it up against. Were there 4 or 5 other movies of comparable goodness that any of could have won the oscar? So 'can barely name one good movie' is apt here. There are some, but way fewer and farther between.
Everything Everywhere... is a much better movie than the incredible Pulp Fiction. Some of the visual effects are actually psychedelic (I've "seent" them), and the storytelling is exceptional.
The scene where the antagonist is walking down a hallway while the background keeps changing — is among the best fight scenes / visuals in any film, ever.
I think you're going to see more and more people saying things like that as the audience gets younger and more people see the antecedents of Pulp Fiction before they see Pulp Fiction itself. There wouldn't be an EEAaO without Pulp Fiction.
Even setting its influence aside, Pulp Fiction is the better movie.
I wouldn't even rate pulp fiction highly on Tarantino's filmography. I tried watching it recently and found it to be incredibly pretentious and overwritten.
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> There wouldn't be an EEAaO without Pulp Fiction
How so? This is an intriguing statement and I want to hear more.
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Here are the only notables I can think of since Everything Everywhere
Triangle of Sadness https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7322224
Coming Home in the Dark https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6874762
You can only think of 2 notable films since 2022?
* American Fiction
* The Holdovers
* Oppenheimer
* Perfect Days(!)
* Nosferatu
* Conclave
* Challengers
* The Mastermind
I can rattle off more but those seem pretty hard to argue with. All of them are better than EEAAO.
I just watched "Frankenstein" (by Guillermo del Toro) from last year, and thought it was pretty fantastic.
"Flow" in 2024 was also fantastic.
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I found Nosferatu to be a snooze fest (watched it in the theater by myself so I could take it all in) but maybe it needs a rewatch.
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Goodness no. It was such a drag! That movie became famous from the hype. I couldn’t finish it. I am really wary of famous + acclaimed films now. These days this combo almost always disappoints. Like Nolan films. I know he has a massive “fan base” now and anything he churns out will become crazy famous and an instant classic. Anything!
Last year's winner Anora was also excellent.
YMMV. I found Anora quite tiresome - all of the people depicted were awful and stupid, and the point that it made was so basic that it could have been made in 10 minutes flat. I'd call it "preachy" but that's overselling it.
Fair enough, not everyone needs to like the same things. In fact, I had a rather negative view on Shawshank Redemption, but it's been too long since I saw it that I barely remember why.
> > can barely name one good movie a year these days
> Not really.
Not really meaning you can't really name one good movie a year (i.e., agreeing with OP)? Because your example of a good recent movie was 4 years ago.
EEAO was four years ago now.
That’s only one movie.
Funny, I thought it was absolutely terrible.
YMMV. I found EEAAO to be engaging but shambolic. It was an experiment that kinda worked, kinda not. The chaos of it can't be cleaned up, it's intrinsic to the concept.
It's not going to a template for lots of similar films. It's more of a one-off.
But anyway, that was several years ago, it stretches the meaning of "recent".