I've heard both fans and detractors of the movie suggest that the movie is essentially criticizing and/or mocking the audience members watching the play and, in turn, us viewers watching the movie. The idea is that the play "Fossil Fools" is essentially just a means of distracting the residents of this dystopian world from the bleak reality they live in, and is aimed at diverting the anger they should have towards the ruler of this world towards long-dead figures who they can't do anything about. It's like people cheering an SNL parody of Trump instead of actually doing something substantive to protest Trump.

But I don't see it that way at all, and I suspect it has something to do with my own values regarding art and civic responsibility. In my view, the production of Fossil Fools is a legitimate piece of art serving a valuable purpose. Entertainment and escapism are important to retaining our sanity, and giving us levity and enjoyment in trying times. I don't criticize the people clapping at the end of the play, I don't hold them responsible for changing the world they live in, and most importantly, I don't think that enjoying Fossil Fuels and working towards positive change are mutually-exclusive. I know I'm in the minority here, but I read Jesse Plemons' speech as a sincere, hopeful and inspiring testament to the power of art.

Did anyone else read it this way, or is it just me?

My main pick is Clue (1985). The game is pretty ass iwl. It's a good time a couple times but has not much in terms of longevity. I was also gonna say Captain America: Civil War (2016), but I haven't read Civil War in full, so I can't really judge.

Let’s drag this felonious asshat through the mud!

I grew up in South India watching Spiderman in my own language. I knew what pancakes were years before I ate one. I knew what a steak was, what Americans pour in their cereal bowls, what their slang meant, why you wear a tie to a formal dinner. I moved to the United States at 23 for my Masters, I'm 25 now, I work in high finance, and almost nothing here surprised me, because I'd been studying this country my whole life without anyone asking me to. I know everything about you. Very few of you know anything about me.

Then the new Ramayana trailer dropped today, and I went through the comments of IG, YT and this sub. A lot of it was the same stuff I've read under Baahubali and RRR for years. Cheesy. Cringe. Bad CGI. AI. “Is this an advertisement for their street food, I can smell them”. Why is everyone dancing. Some of it wasn't even dressed up as criticism. It was just contempt, pointed at brown people for building something big.

I'll be honest, it hurt. This sub/letterboxd is supposed to be where people who love movies go to take them seriously. If the verdict depends on whose face and whose passport is attached to a fantasy epic or a blockbuster, that isn't taste, it's a reflex.

Now look at what gets a free pass. A Marvel movie isn't a story someone spent ten years aching to tell. It's a calendar date. The release slot is announced years in advance, and the story is built to fit it. I work in finance, so I know margin optimization when I see it. Which demographic, which rating, how many screens in which country, which languages to dub into so a few million more people buy tickets. That's how I got Spiderman in my native language. It wasn't a gift, it was a line item.

Then they rerelease an old film to advertise the new one, and you're expected to have watched like 70 fuckin movies and 20+ shows before you're allowed to follow it. That is homework, and somehow it counts as serious cinema.

Meanwhile, a purple alien collecting glowing rocks to wipe out half the universe is science fiction, and a brown man climbing a waterfall in Bahubali is unrealistic. A song and dance number is silly, but we're supposed to nod along to a talking tree. Everyone on earth wants to entertain their OWN PEOPLE. Most of them are doing it with a fraction of the tools. 8 fuckin billion people and only 300 million from American get to voice their culture, their opinions, their lives, their political views and rest of the 7.7 billion people should stfu and not take risks??

Consider the numbers. Hollywood has a hundred year head start, the IMAX cameras, the VFX pipelines, the sound stages, the mixing suites, all concentrated in a few cities and built for people who already have access. Both Baahubali films together cost around 430 crore, roughly 65 million dollars. RRR cost about 550 crore. Gemini Man alone cost 138 million, spent another 100 million on marketing, and lost Paramount an estimated 111 million.

Nobody sneered at an entire culture, race and country over it.
And this is where the colonial part comes in. I can write this post in English because English was pressed into my country for generations, and Hollywood now sells to that same audience, dubbed into Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and whatever else the spreadsheet says will move tickets. The same history that built their budgets drained ours. Indian carved temples we still can't fully explain and wove saris that take months of handwork. We never lacked art. We lacked the money and the megaphone.

I'm not asking anyone to love Ramayana, RRR, Baahubali, Varanasi, or any film that doesn't have a Hollywood studio's money and approval attached to it. I'm asking you to watch before you judge, and to judge what's on screen. But when you catch yourself laughing at a shot, ask whether you'd laugh if the same shot had a different face in it.
I don't expect this to move a single rating. I just needed to say it out loud once.

Just got out of the theater and have nobody to discuss with. This is what I’d call the final form of the genre for documentary. And like the only frame of reference I can give to it is F for Fake by Orson Welles. Uniquely complex with many layers you are unlikely to predict from the trailers. I also think this is the zenith for what can be done with Nathan Fielder’s style of work. A genuine masterpiece.

Literally what half the movies say on Google

I’m not much of a horror movie person so instead of trying to fill October with horror movies for the season I’m trying to add in some thriller movies instead. More so crime thrillers involving murder or something like that so it’s still “scary” but in a different way than a regular horror.

I’m looking for something similar to Se7en or Wind River.

Thanks :)

Maybe not the correct place to post this, but it was pretty exciting to me and I wanted to share. I started the series and the game a week ago, and I started the book two days ago.

I can tell the difference between amateur or “porn-acting,” but I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is exactly they’re doing that makes it “poor” acting.

I can also tell the difference between Keanu Reeves acting versus Leonardo DiCaprio; but, again, I can’t give specifics on why.

What I really struggle with is seeing a difference between actors like Zendaya (who people say isn’t that great) and actors like DiCaprio or Gary Oldman (who many people say are great). What is it that you’re seeing in “decent” versus “great” acting on TV/movies besides range? Gary Oldman can obv play anything and everything, but I feel like Zendaya has also played a range of characters and done well. Her portrayal of Rue on Euphoria felt really authentic, but the internet doesn’t seem to agree? Why not, specifically?

I feel obligated to give it half a star due to the ai

Is this just something us plebs can't get? I thought your banner was just based on your favorite movie.

need some help, based on my recent movies what should i see next ?

Many people say the ending ruined the whole movie, that Brian didn't deserve this kind of tragedy, but they're wrong. Brian's explosive ending is actually a catharsis for the audience. The Umbrella Corporation is an extremely cruel, utterly inhuman evil megacorporation, and most of its employees are just as cold-hearted, greedy, and cowardly. When Brian finally reaches the lab after enduring countless hardships, none of the scientists inside care about him. To them, he is just a tool for delivering the antidote, a talking delivery robot—nothing more. In their eyes, they are elite biological scientists from prestigious science universities, the cream of the crop, while he is just an unnoticed courier, a nobody, not worth wasting the antidote on. In particular, the scientists' real goal was probably to use the antidote as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the company, so that the company would send someone to rescue them—and maybe even get them promoted and given a raise. So when I saw the protagonist slaughter them all, I felt an immense, deep satisfaction.

And think about it: such a dangerous and important task was handed to a lowly delivery worker. This is precisely a metaphor for the layer-by-layer outsourcing of work under the modern capitalist system. The protagonist is an ordinary person who follows the rules and never questions the system of his job or his life, yet he is completely destroyed by a zombie disaster brought about by a runaway corporation and elites who never cared about him. This is exactly the social commentary the director wanted to express.

When I first saw the trailer - and poster - for DIGGER, I was appalled. It looked horrendous. Bad acting. Bad humor. Washed out colors. Nothing interesting. . . . . What I saw in the cinema was something altogether different. Yes, I know there is a "reveal" but what's the point of a "reveal" if the theater is empty? This was a massive miss in marketing. I think if DIGGER were sold as an ensemble piece, NOT playing it as a Cruise vehicle, NOT leaning into the humor and actually featuring some of the tremendous visuals in the film, it could have been more successful.

Possible Spoiler Alert:

Maybe a tagline like: "A Dying President . . . A Deluded Millionaire . . . A Suffering Scientist . . . A Mystery Man . . . A Troupe of Actors . . . . They Face the End of the World - And They Feel Fine!"

What went wrong - beyond the budget - and how could it have been salvaged?

With You Can See Everything being released this week and getting rave reviews, what are the best documentary films you’ve ever seen?

I love making lists on letterboxd. ( benny1324 )

I love David fincher as well. I have finished his filmography. Here is my final rankings. I’d love to know your thoughts.

My pick comes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

It's such a batshit insane movie through and through, but the scene where Raoul Duke leads into talking about his time in San Francisco during the mid 60s truly took me by surprise. Maybe it was the fact that I was really stoned at the time I watched this film, or the fact that I lived in San Francisco all my life. Whatever the case may be, this scene right here genuinely moved me to tears.

It's such an unexpectedly calm and introspective scene that arrives at an already chaotic point in the film. It's also just a testament to Hunter S. Thompson’s gift as a writer and how he's able to describe the atmosphere, the collective mood and the cultural climate of mid 60s San Francisco in a way that just immerses you and pulls you under.

The way he's able to channel all these feelings of:

• wild, prevailing youth
• resilience and hope for one's own generation
• being part of something far greater
• being caught in the middle of rapid social/historical change
• remorse and nostalgia over a bygone era
• quiet satisfaction with being at the right place at the right time
• being lost and weary in the present

...all in such a gentle and tangible way through his writing alone makes this scene just so damn powerful. It just completely blindsided me the first time I saw it.

Combine that with the distant, ghostly sound of Get Together by The Youngbloods playing in the background, the use of archival footage showing people protesting and dancing in the streets of San Francisco, and the way Johnny Depp channels so much emotion and conviction as a narrator, and what do you know? The end result is just simply intoxicating, and it made me shed the heaviest single tear I can muster.

I didn’t know much about the film before going into, so I was fully set on it being an insane drug-fueled head trip all the way through to the end. While it was for the most part, this scene right here will always stand out to me for being the one scene that genuinely moved me in an otherwise zany film. Take it as a brief, sobering period of pure bliss and clarity; a short break from sheer madness, if anything.

My only regret is that I wish I got invested in Hunter S. Thompson’s work at an earlier time in my life, so that when I watch this film at a later time and witness Thompson’s writing unfold on screen in the way that it does here, it would probably hit in a much deeper way than it does now.

“There was madness in any direction. At any hour, you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.

We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke…

…and rolled back.”

They both have the same rating. Is it because one was a movie that didn’t get flak when released while the other was adored? One was a conclusion and the other isn’t?

Personally, I like Revenge of the Sith as I’m not a huge fan of MCU movies. ROTS isn’t perfect like Episodes IV and V but I thought it was a great conclusion.