BP Movie Journal 2/1/18

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7 Responses

  1. Yonah Paley says:

    I’m very glad that you guys loved Phantom Thread so much. Can’t wait to hear more about it during the end of year episodes! Anderson remains on top of his game, and definitely goes to some new places.

    I’m happy that y’all enjoyed The Greatest Showman, as it seems millions of people are, but I cannot stop thinking about how bad of a film it is. Perhaps it says something about the current state of musicals, that people are going head over heels for such utter nonsense, but fuck that movie.

    There is a good way to make a musical (case in point, La La Land, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Singin’ in the Rain, etc), and a bad way to make one (The Greatest Showman). Case in point, TGS fails in nearly every way a musical can. It has piss poor songs, terrible choreography (with exception of the trapeze sequence), a contradictory message (Hugh Jackman is an exploiter of others, yet somehow he comes off as nobly “saving” these people), and characters that are so thin, you can put your fist right through them.

    Do I disproportionately hate this movie? Probably. But I love movie musicals, and when the only notable one of 2017 disappoints so strongly, I cannot help myself.

    Looking forward to some good 2018 musicals, as well as your end of year coverage!

  2. Ryan says:

    Did you think Kristen Scott Thomas’ middle name was Scott?

  3. FictionIsntReal says:

    I’m one of those people who liked Tree of Life but not Song to Song (making me Wrong to Wrong). I also didn’t care for Thin Red Line or The New World, so maybe Tree of Life is the exception in terms of post-70s Malick for me. I’m much more of a prude than David, so while I didn’t feel let down by Malick expressing such sentiments, I was surprised he opened the movie in that way and was surprised no critics dinged him for that. Someone could make a good movie arguing against non-traditional relationships and in favor of the remnants of Victorian morality (I’ve heard that Trainwreck sort of qualifies), but I thought this was so hazy with everybody so thinly characterized that it didn’t do a particularly good job of it.

    • Battleship Pretension says:

      I think most Hollywood romance movies advocate for traditional morality.

      – David

    • Alexander Miller says:

      It took me a long time to warm to Malick’s post Tree of Life work, after a while I found myself in love with his newer style and accepting them as these freewheeling elliptical life montages.

  4. Steve B. says:

    Welcome to Letterboxd, David. It is indeed great fun to keep a movie watching diary. I use the site but I don’t write a lot of reviews these days. I do maintain ranked lists of films I watched from each year back to 2010, and decade and thematic lists as well. Some were created to build my response to a BP poll – it is fun to drag and drop the “posters” when reordering a list.

    You can also use tags for anything you make, log entries (with or without a review) or lists. That makes it easy to look up all your star ratings or reviews for a franchise or sub-genre (i.e., “bond,” “alien,” “mcu”). You can even keep a list private if it is only meant for your own benefit. I write a lot of notes and hyperlinks into my lists, mainly for my own benefit (since I haven’t gotten a ton of list likes). Here is my list of public lists: https://letterboxd.com/strybeck/lists/

    I actually usually prefer to look at Letterboxd in Chrome, even on my phone, since you can’t do nearly as much on the app.

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