General Movie Discussion - **please mark spoilers**

[mae]

[Still Servant]

I thought Seth did a nice job, he was in a brutal position hosting that show last night. Not that the host has a whole lot to do after the opening.

I will say this, I'm really hoping Greta Gerwig is nominated for an Oscar for Best Director. I see something brewing here and I really don't want the whole show and the entire world to be consumed by it. I haven't seen Lady Bird, but I hear Gerwig is more than deserving, but if she's not nominated for Best Director we are in for absolute chaos on a level we haven't seen since #OscarSoWhite.

Anway, I don't put a lot of stock in the Golden Globes, mainly because their category breakdowns are so different, but I think Three Billboards has gained some steam. MacDormand is probably going to be the frontrunner. I also think Oldman is on track to win the Oscar, although I think Franco will now definitely get a nomination.

But seriously, we all have to hope Gerwig gets nominated.

[Heather19]

I really need to see Lady Bird. I hope it comes back to theaters prior to the Oscars. As for Greta Gerwig, I wasn't paying attention who got nominated for the Globes, so I was really surprised she wasn't one of them. I'll be shocked, but also not shocked if she doesn't get nominated for an Oscar. I really hope that with everything that's going on, that in the near future we'll see a lot more women directors. It really has been a predominately boys club in that department.

[Ricky]

Heather, get off your science-y butt and direct a movie already! Even if it sucked, we'd still nominate you for stuff.

[Heather19]

[Still Servant]

Heather, get off your science-y butt and direct a movie already! Even if it sucked, we'd still nominate you for stuff.

Are you kidding? If Heather directed a film she would win an Oscar easy. She can't be beaten.

Anyway, Gerwig sounds like she is more than deserving to be nominated, but I want to give a shoutout to Dee Rees for Mudbound, which was fantastic. Like Heather said, hopefully we are starting to turn the corner with the amount of female directors. Of course, there was also Patty Jenkins who directed Wonder Woman this year and Ava DuVernay, who directed Selma a few years ago and has A Wrinkle in Time set to release this year. There's still the queen of them all - Kathryn Bigelow, whose film Detroit kind of came and went this year.

[Still Servant]

Mae, I'm not sure which 2017 Mash-up videos you have posted already, but I've been pretty much binging on them over the past few weeks. The Jo Blo one you posted on this page is my favorite. Prior to posting that one, my favorite was the Screen Junkies one. Do you remember if you posted that one?

Anyway, I love those things.

[mae]

I love them too, they’re usually very artistic and use some cool tunes, but that’s one I missed. Feel free to post it, though!

[Still Servant]

I want to do one of these so bad, but I just don't have the time.

Here is the Screen Junkies video. JTE did a great job. Awesome use of David Bowie's Man Who Sold the World at the beginning. It's sung by a female, but I'm not sure who.

[Tommy]

This might be a good place to dump this....

[Still Servant]

Fuck that. There has to be worse films than Mother. I know people hated it, but that's only because it was so odd.

[Tommy]

If a Clue remake must be done, it had better be perfect because I adore the original and re-watched it just this weekend. Please don't fuck this up!!

Ryan Reynolds Could Star In ‘Clue’ Remake!

[Heather19]

I just heard about this. I really am not a fan of them doing a remake. The original is amazing and we don't need a new one.

[Still Servant]

If a Clue remake must be done, it had better be perfect because I adore the original and re-watched it just this weekend. Please don't fuck this up!!

Ryan Reynolds Could Star In ‘Clue’ Remake!

Love the original Clue. No reason for a remake.

"I had to stop her screaming."

[Still Servant]

I don't know about anyone else, but at the end of long day I have to do my baseline test:

[Still Servant]

The new Eastwood film, The 15:17 to Paris, is getting slammed. For those that don't know, the film is based on the true story (the only kind of film Eastwood makes now apparently) of off duty American Soldiers that stopped a terrorist attempt aboard a train headed for France.

The catch with the film is that Eastwood decided to not hire actors and instead cast the actual men who thwarted the attack. I haven't read any reviews just yet, but I have to think this is one of the complaints. You wouldn't get an actor to perform a surgery, then you probably shouldn't hire a soldier to be an actor. Even if they are the actual people who experienced the events.

I'm sure Clint doesn't really give a shit at this point. Hell, he's pushing 90.

[Ricky]

This was way more entertaining than it had any right to be. A full movie is in the works, too!

[Girlystevedave]

This was way more entertaining than it had any right to be. A full movie is in the works, too!

That was pretty fun.

[mae]

[Still Servant]

This is the kind of shit that drives me crazy about major studios.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...etflix/551810/

Alex Garland makes a cerebral sci-fi film with Ex Machina and garners tons of acclaim. A big studio like Paramount comes along and scoops him up to make a sci-film for them, then they get bent out of shape when it's deemed "too intellectual" for mainstream audiences. Well, no shit. That's the guy you hired. Leave him alone and let him work.

Nobody has ruined more films over the years than studio execs in suits.

[Ricky]

I heard about the international Netflix dump, but not that the movie was too intellectual. Interesting because that's definitely not the vibe I got from the trailers.

[Still Servant]

I heard about the international Netflix dump, but not that the movie was too intellectual. Interesting because that's definitely not the vibe I got from the trailers.

Well, that's a whole other topic. The studio knew they had a film they couldn't sell to mainstream audiences so they did what a lot of studios are doing nowadays (especially when it comes to horror films) and that's make a misleading trailer. With Annihilation, they wanted people to watch the trailer and say, "Holy shit! This is going to be like Aliens!" Then people will hate it, not because it's bad, but because it's not what they thought it was going to be.

They did this with Mother too. They sold it as a horror film and people thought that's what they were getting. Neither film is meant for mainstream audiences.

[Ricky]

Hmm...then maybe I will like Annihilation after all. I was avoiding it because it looked exactly the opposite of intellectual.

[Heather19]

I'm really worried about Annihilation. I absolutely loved the book. But the trailer doesn't really look much like the book at all. I'm worried they went in and took tiny bits and made their own story out of it, which will be a shame. I'm hesitant to go see it, even though I'd probably rank the book in my top 10. I'm waiting to hear some reviews about how similar it is to the book, but my guess is I'll just wait for it to come out on dvd.

[mae]

I'm really worried about Annihilation. I absolutely loved the book. But the trailer doesn't really look much like the book at all. I'm worried they went in and took tiny bits and made their own story out of it, which will be a shame. I'm hesitant to go see it, even though I'd probably rank the book in my top 10. I'm waiting to hear some reviews about how similar it is to the book, but my guess is I'll just wait for it to come out on dvd.

Check this out, Heather:

https://filmschoolrejects.com/annihilation-review/

With ‘Annihilation,’ filmmaker Alex Garland has created one of the most challenging science fiction films of the decade.

One of the more fun tenets of the search for extraterrestrial life is that, if we ever were to actually make contact, their intelligence would be nearly impossible for us to comprehend. Like something out of a Lovecraftian novel, extraterrestrials could belong to a plane of existence – or adhere to laws of nature we have yet to even discover – that would make them unknowable to humanity. This concept has spurred some of the most exciting science fiction films of the past few decades; movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Interstellar have offered a vision of the future where mankind sits far below other lifeforms on the evolutionary scale. And with Annihilation, filmmaker Alex Garland throws his hat into the ring of high-concept science fiction that will surely delight and confound audiences in equal amounts.

It’s been over a year since Kane (Oscar Isaac) went missing during his latest tour of duty, and Lena (Natalie Portman) is still stuck in her grief. She sleepwalks through her lectures on microbiology at Johns Hopkins, forgoing colleagues in favor of endless requests for information from the United States military. So when Kane appears at her door one day – confused and unable to answer any questions about where he has been – Lena is understandably concerned, a concern that grows to a full-blown panic when Kane’s body violently begins to shut down. Lena soon finds herself in a military base on the edge of the Shimmer, an inexplicable and expanding barrier that threatens to soon envelop the entire Southeast. At the behest of military psychology Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Lena enlists to join the military’s next expedition into the Shimmer, hoping to find both an answer for what happened to her husband – and, just maybe, a cure.

In most movies like Annihilation – supposing, of course, that there are other movies like Annihilation – the scene where the protagonist is enlisted to join the expedition plays out as a series of strong emotions. Anger. Disbelief. Grief. What’s so striking about the first scenes between Lena and Dr. Ventress is how quickly both characters discover candor as their common ground. Lena is truthful about the circumstances of reuniting with Kane and, eventually, her desire to head into the Shimmer; for her part, Ventress does not duck Lena’s difficult questions nor shy away from her culpability in the disappearance of Kane and his squad. Their early interactions set the tone for the remainder of the film, one where competency and experience supersede the broad emotional beats we expect to find in even the smartest soldiers-vs-the-unknown science fiction. At its best, Annihilation demonstrates why so many sci-fi movies fail their characters by not allowing them to be, and remain, intelligent.

It also doesn’t hurt that Garland has enlisted a quartet of powerful actresses to play the leading roles. Portman has never shied away from more difficult projects, leveraging her hard-earned Hollywood clout into films like Black Swan and Jackie; she anchors Annihilation from the first moment she appears onscreen. Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson, playing more conventional roles as the unhinged and neurotic teammates, make Anya and Josie more than just the expected redshirts of the expedition. Jennifer Jason Leigh, now 40 years into her marvelous career, also provides a welcome inversion of the corporate suit. She and Portman imbue their characters with a sense of finality – a desire to see this through, though not at the unnecessary expense of human life – that propels both Lena and Ventress through to the film’s important final scenes.

And Garland needs every ounce of that acting talent, because Annihilation is endlessly, breathtakingly complex. Often playing out like a National Geographic documentary from some alien planet – with Lena and company meticulously observing and cataloging the various permutations of human, animal, and plant life they find within the Shimmer – Annihilation moves with a freedom unseen in most studio science fiction. The Shimmer is a kaleidoscope of known biology and botany; throughout their journey, Lena and company encounter an astonishing array of human-plant and plant-animal hybrids, there to be observed by the audience more than understood. The closer they get to the lighthouse at the center of the Shimmer, the more Garland also veers into territory typically reserved for directors like David Cronenberg and Clive Barker. Even the best horror directors may go their entire careers without visualizing a concept as terrifying as Annihilation‘s skinless human-bear hybrid, one cursed to perpetually give voice to a character’s dying screams.

But as Lena closes in on the answers she seeks, one question remains for us: will Annihilation find its audience? Earlier this week, ScreenCrush critic Matt Singer tweeted that he was breathlessly anticipating the CinemaScore for Annihilation, a sentiment that also kept bouncing through my head as the film pressed fast-forward on evolution heading into its finale. It’s not enough that Garland grounds his film in difficult concepts like astrobiology; the writer-director also seems determined to avoid any singular interpretation or theory about his narrative. Annihilation is a movie of questions, not answers, and while the characters and arresting visuals ensure that the film is fully accessible to everyone, this opacity will certainly spark resentment on behalf of many moviegoers. For as much hand-wringing as we did about Annihilation’s international Netflix distribution, it seems this is the rare studio move where both parties were proven correct. Annihilation is a science fiction journey the likes of which we rarely see in theaters. Enjoy it, American audiences, while you can.