I ended up getting sidetracked last night after
The Nice Guys, so I decided to put off
Looper until today. I still wanted a doubleheader last night, though, so after
The Nice Guys, I checked out
Dirty Grandpa. What a mixed fucking bag of movies.
The Nice Guys kind of stunk. There were some cool and funny parts, but anything good about
The Nice Guys felt like leftover good shit from
The Last Boy Scout. Shane Black was digging deep into his trunk of "I did this once and people thought it was cool" but that can't sustain a movie. Crowe was cool enough to have deserved a much stronger character and Gosling was funny enough to have deserved a more coherent arc. And the plot basically just ripped off
Lethal Weapon and replaced mercs smuggling drugs with Kim Basinger and something vaguely political.
Compared to
Dirty Grandpa, however,
The Nice Guys was a fucking masterpiece. I love De Niro, I will watch him in literally anything, but
Dirty Grandpa was an enormous piece of shit. Shockingly so. I would never have expected De Niro being in a movie to be so ineffectual against a negative judgment, but the script was that fucking bad. Just that opening at the funeral, I knew instantly that if De Niro wasn't in that movie I wouldn't have made it five minutes. But I powered through and watched the whole thing and it was just garbage. Cheap, infantile, pointless garbage. It hurts me to say that about a movie starring Robert De Niro, but sometimes the truth hurts.
Don't worry, though,
@Flemmy Stardust. I have no vitriol for
Looper. I may not have remembered much about the movie itself, but I do remember thinking after I first watched it that, for as great as it was, something seemed to be missing. I didn't know if it was my expectations or what, but the way everything clicked for you, that's not the way it worked for me. This viewing, totally different story. I actually thought it was much better. Everything clicked for me on this viewing. It's a brutal fucking story, I feel for every last character, but Willis' arc is just heartbreaking. I wasn't expecting to see Emily Blunt (this was probably the first time I'd seen her in anything, and when the movie faded in my memory, her character faded, too, and I wasn't even able to go back and put two and two together) and I forgot the poor bastard who introduces us to The Rainmaker was Garret Dillahunt, both pleasant surprises to add to the mix.
That said,
@Ricky13, I'm still sticking with the
Logan hotel scene over the Dillahunt scene. It's kind of unfair, though, because I was so much more invested in Jackman's and Stewart's characters than in any of the characters on that farm. All that emotional mileage, it's going to carryover so much to each scene, and you add on top of it how cool the scene was in general and it runs away with it. Nevertheless, in terms of reveals, I think The Rainmaker's reveal is much better than Laura's reveal because, even though you know where it's going (i.e., you know you're dealing with The Rainmaker), you don't know what you're going to see when it gets there. You know the Wolverine deal. Yeah, when it gets confirmed and you see this little girl fucking people up with her Wolverine claws, it's bad ass, but the bad ass-ness has a totally different dynamic. With The Rainmaker, you really don't know much at all. You know, thanks to Blunt taking cover in that safe, that whatever it is it's serious shit, but you don't know what the name means or what his deal is. With the slow-motion and him falling down those stairs, it's like the fucking Hulk. You're ramping up because you know Dillahunt made him angry, and then when you finally get it, the cherry on top is getting to hear Willis whisper it. The Laura reveal is pretty much exhausted in, "Little girl Wolverine! Awesome!" The Rainmaker reveal has so much more behind it and the reveal itself has so much more to it, it's just a different beast.
Now I'm going to get some dinner and watch Kevin James in
True Memoirs of an International Assassin. I remember thinking the trailer looked good. Here's to hoping the movie lives up to it.
I just couldn't care about the whole parenthood issues of the film (Hoffman taking a fostering role). The whole time I was pretty callously thinking, "get over it". So I guess I just wasn't drawn into the plight of his character.
Perhaps the film seems dated now? After all, a woman walking out and leaving a dad to raise his kid doesn't really make for a movie plot in 2017. In 1979, it's quite a different story.
The last time we talked about this film I remember you getting mad when I said that I prefeered the wonderful Meryl Streep in it. So I won't point that out again.
Black Rock is awesome but I don't think most people even think about as a Western it since it's set in modern times. And you do love Sturges to an... abnormal degree, with the whole Seven controversy that isn't fit for polite society.
If polite society can't recognize the superiority of
The Magnificent Seven to
The Seven Samurai, then polite society can...
Ive Seen all of those except Last Train from Gun Hill.
Love all of them except Gunfight at the ok corral.
What didn't click for you with
Gunfight at the OK Corral? I thought Douglas killed it, as he always does, and Lancaster was a commanding Earp.
