Episode 622: Top Ten Films of 2018

qwertyuiop says:

Reese Witherspoon turned a LETTUCE LEAF, not a dragon. Bad movie.

Andrew says:

I understand that the Clam Bake song is stupid, but you two need to stop dragging Carousel, since it’s a deeply moving meditation on the post-WWII national mood. STOP IT!

FictionIsntReal says:

I really enjoyed Sorry to Bother You and picked up the comparison to slavery, knowing radical leftists call employment “wage slavery”. I didn’t think to compare it to communism, even though I knew Riley is an avowed communist. Now that you mention it, I am reminded of early pro-slavery apologists who criticized the industrial capitalism of the north, decrying it as insufficiently paternalistic toward workers. I suppose the “gig economy” of today would be the more extreme version of that detached relation between employers & employees.

I disliked Infernal Affairs, having seen The Departed first. I just found so many aspects hokey, and the supposedly conflicted nature of the undercover criminal unconvincing, as it was relayed through his fiance’s thudding description of a character in her screenplay rather than through his actions. The Canon set them against each other and the former one (the guest who proposed it was advocating for it), and I argued against it here.

I also didn’t care for the Suspiria remake, and some of that may be because I saw the original first, but this film still fails to present a real throughline with a protagonist. Suzy Bannon basically drifts off during the middle of the film, there’s material on the internal politics of the coven but not enough to actually center a film, and the psychologist really seems tangential for all the focus he gets.

I doubt either of you have seen the really original adaptation of Solaris for Russian tv, or read the book. I sometimes read people saying that version is closer to the book, but the content isn’t that different from Tarkovsky’s (the main thing I recall is that Tarkovsky adds a prologue on earth). Soderbergh’s is the version I’m unfamiliar with and can’t comment on.