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2019 Movies

TM2YC

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This looks so damn good:


Director Bill Condon and Ian McKellen's last film 'Mr. Holmes' was one of the best films of the last few years IMO, hope this is too.
 

TM2YC

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^ Yay they've listened to the fans and made some minor cosmetic changes to the character, it looks 1% less terrible now!  :D Are we quiet sure this isn't a film from the 90s that was shelved and is only now being released?
 

Masirimso17

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TM2YC said:
^ Yay they've listened to the fans and made some minor cosmetic changes to the character, it looks 1% less terrible now!  :D Are we quiet sure this isn't a film from the 90s that was shelved and is only now being released?

Let's just hope it's just harmless family fun and not completely cringeworthy & mediocre.

Also I think the whole design controversy was a huge marketing ploy.

EDIT: https://screenrant.com/sonic-hedgehog-movie-redesign-original-design-artists/ Lol I knew it
 

asterixsmeagol

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The character design looks better now, but the lighting on the character doesn't quite match the scenes he's in. And the plot still looks awful. Why not just make the whole thing a CGI movie set in the Sonic world?
 

TM2YC

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Roberto Benigni is in another Pinocchio movie:


My eyes are already welling up.
 

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If anyone likes/loves the Pinocchio story, I highly, highly recommend the 1972 version by italian director Luigi Comencini. By far the greatest, most poetic version of the adaptations.
It originally was developed as a six-episode miniseries that aired on television, but it turned out to be so successful they decided to capitalize on it with a shortened, 100-minute edit of the series for the cinema. Even though I prefer the series, the movie is great as well and I believe you can find both on YouTube. I don’t know about the subtitles though!

Everything from the characters, to the performancss, to the design, the costumes, the screenplay and the music, is all absolutely wonderful and is a joy to watch.
 

TM2YC

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^ Sounds good.

This trailer played at the cinema the other day, the casting looks spot on:

 

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I truly can't tell where Charlize Theron ends and Megyn Kelly begins.  The makeup on this film is fantastic and will likely run away with the Oscar.  Its the same team that made Oldman into Churchill so its not too surprising, but some truly great craftsmanship.
 

TM2YC

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Hellboy (2019)
Sadly this suffers from that same 'Suicide Squad' "Let's take what was probably a decent movie by a talented Director, get him out of the way, then throw all the footage into a wood chipper" type of editing. I liked the flavour of the universe this lays out but it feels like they took a whole Season of a TV show with a different story each week and condensed it all into a 2-hour film, keeping all the exposition. Every second David Harbour is just being grumpy Hellboy is great, his character design looks way better than in the other films and the bit where he rises from a pit with a flaming sword and crown is a memorable image. If this was totally terrible I'd be fine with it, it's the flashes of a better movie that are frustrating.

 

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I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment.  The film is a jumbled mess, with a few memorable pieces but the idea that its a tv show condensed into a single movie is pretty strong as there are just so many ideas that start and stop the film, its as if they really didn't know what to do so they came up with a bunch of short stories and just jumbled them together in the edit.  The try-hard rock inspired soundtrack certainly didn't help matters much.
 

Gaith

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Little Women (2019)

191219195319-little-women-exlarge-169.jpg


I haven't seen nearly enough movies directed by women, nor can I count anywhere near enough of them among my favorites. Hell, I'm afraid I have a hard time even naming movies I've seen directed by women, and I've seen hundreds of films to date. I mean, I really like Kathryn Bigelow's K-19: The Widowmaker, and Winter's Bone was rock-solid, but I haven't seen most of the entries on this list of the best female-directed movies of the 2010s, and the only women-directed movies in my home media collection were made by two individuals who identified as male at the time. Diversity fail! Anyhow...

I somewhat loathed this adaption of Little Women (my first encounter with the story) in the second half of its first 20 minutes, and gritted my teeth for a long screening of enjoying the cinematography, production design, and not much else. But then the sisters who make up the core of the cast were pressured into performing an act of kindness, and I started to warm to them. And, as the story progressed, I became genuinely compelled. The film's last few minutes are a bit indulgent - one can practically see director Greta Gerwig taking several bows in the editing suite, but this is a minor quibble to a very strong picture. (Apparently several of the lines that struck me as unnecessarily modern are taken straight from the 1868 novel.) Of this year's five Best Directing nominations, I've only seen Tarantino's effort, so I can't really say whether Gerwig was robbed of a nomination, but it's definitely a shame she wasn't. Louisa May Alcott wrote two book sequels to her signature work, and, if Gerwig were to adapt those after an appropriate amount of time, I'd be keenly interested in revisiting the tale.

Grade: A-

(Trivial note: it's kinda weird that these four American sisters are played by two Englishwomen, an Irishwoman, and an Australian, right? I never doubted their accents, and all four actresses are terrific, but it's still a bit strange, eh? Also, just how much longer will Emma Watson play a teenager? She's almost 30!) :p
 

Moe_Syzlak

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Interesting. Though I think I was vaguely aware of the female directors at the time, I didn’t really think much about it. A lot of those films made my best if the year lists. I liked all of these quite a bit:

Zero Dark Thirty
You Were Never Really Here (I loved this movie and have avoided her “We Need to Talk About Kevin” because as a father the subject terrifies me)
Selma
Winter’s Bone
Wonder Woman (I don’t really like superhero movies but this was at least in the upper tier of the genre for me)
The Rider
Leave No Trace
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
The Farewell
Lady Bird

And now I’m even more motivated to seek out the titles on that list I haven’t seen. IMO, if all the movies I listed were up for Best Picture in the same year, it would be considered a damn fine year for movies.
 

TM2YC

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Gaith said:
I haven't seen most of the entries on this list of the best female-directed movies of the 2010s, and the only women-directed movies in my home media collection were made by two individuals who identified as male at the time. Diversity fail! Anyhow...

That's a great list, thanks for posting that :) . Sadly, I've missed out on 10 of them but have recently watched two from the list:

Destroyer (2018)
Nicole Kidman gives an amazing performance as a washed up disaster-area of an LA cop out to find her nemesis, a bank-robber called Silas. I had expectations that this would be a classic revenge thriller in the 'Point Blank' mould but it's actually a deeper study of self-destruction. The narrative constantly shifts back and forward in time from where it started to go wrong, to Kidman's desperate attempts to put things right. I promise you'll be surprised at the depths her character will sink to get info on her quarry. I didn't think Toby Kebbell had the necessary menace for Silas in the flashbacks and maybe it would have worked better with a linear structure.


The Farewell (2019)
From the trailer, I thought I was going to love this film and I really did. Awkwafina plays Billi, a 30 year-old slightly depressed New Yorker, who joins her family on a trip back to China to say farewell to her dying grandmother "Nai Nai" (Except nobody has told Nai Nai about the diagnosis). It's about immigrants trying to keep connected and reconnecting with their heritage and about savouring life. Oh and it's really funny too! I instantly fell in love with the grandmother played beautifully by Zhao Shuzhen, in what I believe is her first film role at the age of 76 (she's been a successful stage actress through). It was fortunate that I'd had a Chinese takeaway the night before because several of the film's scenes feature the family talking over tables filled from edge-to-edge with delicious looking Chinese food!


I made that Collider list into a Letterboxd list so I can make an effort to see the other 10: https://letterboxd.com/tm2yc/list/the-top-20-female-directed-films-of-the-decade/

I've also just watched 'Little Women' too:

Little Women (2019)
Writer/Director Greta Gerwig wisely makes subtle, yet impact tweaks to the source novel to make it feel fresh, like putting more focus on Jo being an aspiring writer. She also successfully plays with the time structure, which further modernises the piece. Her direction is really classy, one of those times when the camera always seems to be at the perfect angle for the best composition. The Cinematography is gorgeous, using what looks like just natural lighting to evoke the past. You couldn't ask for a better all-star cast of young actors including Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, Timothée Chalamet and Emma Watson. I feel bad for saying it because his performance is excellent but I couldn't help finding it distracting that Bob Odenkirk was the dad, when he has done Civil War sketches in Mr. Show.


 

asterixsmeagol

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It seems I'm the only one who didn't like Little Women. I found the timeline confusing without any real indication of where in the story we were with each changing scene. The actors all look the same the whole way through without any changes to makeup or costume (except at the dance).
 

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TM2YC said:
Farmageddon: A Shaun the Sheep Movie (2019)
The plot to Aardman's latest film is basically a copy 'n' paste of 'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial'. I didn't really mind, the dialogue-free clay-mation is delightful as always and there is lots of fun to be had spotting all the references to every Sci-Fi thing ever...


(US Netflix!)

"Delightful" is exactly the word. I had no belly laughs, but I did chuckle here and there throughout, and wore a big smile on my face the whole time. It may not be quite as clever as the first movie, but it's a big step up from the merely okay Early Man. An exceedingly gentle watch that could hardly have come at a better time.

Grade: A-
 

Gaith

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Gaith said:
Little Women (2019)
191219195319-little-women-exlarge-169.jpg

To re-iterate, I did end up very much enjoying 2019's Little Women, even if I wasn't entirely sure why Jo March/Louisa May Alcott was being presented as such a fantastic writer if she was really just telling a straightforward narrative about her own family history. That doesn't mean Little Women the book (as in, both the actual book I haven't read and the actual-ish book that is made at the end of the movie) isn't genuinely great, but the end of the movie had me wondering how many other stories Alcott had in her.

Well, according to this Cracked article, the real Alcott was a bit of a... genre enthusiast:
 
The Fatal Love Chase, for example, features a young woman offering her soul to Satan in exchange for a year of freedom from her daily drudgery. This freedom comes in the form of a lover, who our heroine eventually discovers to be a cruel adulterer. She flees to Europe, and the title kind of gives away what happens next.
 
In Agatha's Confession, Agatha is set to marry a rich nobleman while her jealous friend, Laura, plots to steal him away. After some increasingly bitter romantic drama, Laura comes down with a fever and Agatha, figuring that her friend is already mostly dead, has her buried alive. The guilt then drives Agatha mad, and all of this would be difficult to work into a movie that also features a wacky Bob Odenkirk role. Murder plots, psychological manipulation, and hauntings from beyond the grave were common tropes in stories like Fatal Follies and The Mummy's Curse.

All this is both amusing in of itself, and also reminds me of why I disliked the movie's first 20 minutes so strongly: when both the editor and the professor guy criticize and disrespect Alcott's pulpy short story, we've been thrown into the movie so quickly I had no idea if the movie agreed that her story sucked, or if we were intended to conclude it was a good story for its type, and the blowback she was getting was purely sexist.

Anyhow, gotta love this quote of Alcott's: "I think my natural ambition is for the lurid style." So, a Little Women sequel about the March sisters training a secret society of demon hunters at their school might not be as inappropriate as it might first seem... :p
 
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