racketboy.com

No THAT'S a review!

watching LOTR which I didn't since release...
The CGI is amazing on this movie considering it is a 2001 release, they could have released it today and would still be praised for the cgi and special effects. It has aged seriously well, which makes me wonder did we really gain any technology advantage over the past 20 years?

I can tell the producers were not aiming to decrease costs while maximizing profit, their aim was to make the best possible LOTR adaptation, something unfortunately we see almost the exact opposite of today.

samsonlonghair wrote:I finally watched midsommar last night. It's a beautifully shot movie... which I absolutely hated.


Midsommar is incredibly well made from a standpoint of production values, artistry, cinematography, and sound design. Every shot is a painting. Every sound the audience hears is intentional. The young cast of actors are all believable in their roles. Ari Aster is without question a brilliant film maker.

I'm having a hard time putting into words exactly what I hated about this movie. I guess it's... thematically disgusting. Suicide is used for shock value over and over again. All rural people are secretly violent cultists. A person with birth defects is dehumanized. Mental illness is romanticized. Anyone who tries to establish personal boundaries with a mentally ill person must be awful.

Each and every scene in this film is a triumph of cinematic arts buried under twelve tons of cognitive dissonance.

Midsommar is the most beautifully made piece of garbage I've ever seen. Thanks, I hate it.

i tried watching this. it looked interesting at first but i got bored halfway through and turned it off. acting sucked, dumb plot, just plain boring. When it went the cult route i just wasn't interested anymore to keep watching. those aren't "scary" to me.

Ack wrote:No THAT'S a review!

Thank you much, sir.

stickem wrote:When it went the cult route i just wasn't interested anymore to keep watching. those aren't "scary" to me.

You're right; it wasn't especially scary. If you had watched until the end, you certainly would not have been scared. The ending, in particular, was just so over the top oddball that I wasn't sure whether to laugh or groan.

Then again, I'm not sure that it was trying to be scary. More like... unsettling maybe? I guess I should give credit for that much. Midsommar certainly is unsettling, but maybe not unsettling in quite the way the filmmakers intended.

I read a very brief synopsis and it sounds like a modern take on the Wicker Man, Children of the Corn, etc.

I really liked Midsommar.
I thought it was a unique take on the "cult" subgenre and thought it did a good job of balancing the horror of the cult with the forbidden allure of the cult. I thought it was unsettling in how it guided the viewer into some unbelievably dark territory while bathing everything in light. I liked Hereditary a bit more but Midsommar is a worthy follow up. Both movies feel like a long drawn-out gut punch.

My takeaway was clearly different from samsonlonghair's. I feel like the movie don't wasn't trying to suggesting that all rural people were secretly violent cultists, just the ones in this obviously fictional story. Maybe because it was taking place in Sweden, I felt like it wasn't trying to paint a generalization the way a lot of "hillbilly horror" movies that take place in the US do. How was mental illness romanticized? That's something that may have gone over my head...

As for the character with birth defects being dehumanized... yeah, I don't know if there's any excuse for that one. But I personally was able to roll with it. Same with the suicides.

Are the Atlas Shrugged movies that bad?
I would like to learn about the story, but I am not up for reading a 1000+ page book.

My understanding is the movies do not rise above the source material.

...and the source material is garbage.

RCBH928 wrote:I would like to learn about the story

No, you do not.