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Annihilation (2018)

The premise: Natalie Portman is a soldier/biologist who is part of a group investigating this bizarre occurrence. There's an area of the world surrounded by a weird shimmering effect. Within this area, reality is broken. Teams that have entered this area have not returned. The area is growing and unless we figure out how to stop it, it will grow at an exponential rate and probably swallow the world.  Inside the shimmer, it's an acid trip.

I enjoyed it a lot. There are a few great mindfuck moments. I don't want to spoil anything, but if I had to put this in a genre, the box says "sci-fi thriller" but I'd call it "cosmic horror" - like, the phenomena in this movie is never completely explained, and it doesn't fit neatly into human expectations or tropes. CAN we understand the universe? Or are our cognitive facilities only equipped to process the stuff that happens on our planet? If there's life elsewhere in the universe, would we even recognize it as life?

Seeing this movie in the theater felt like a rare event. The third act left us pretty shaken, there's such a sensory overload that reality gets all soft. I read later that the sound designer actually had the ambient music rotating around the theater speakers to disorient the audience.

My favorite, and the most accurate review of it I read was "Alex Garland has created an atom bomb of a movie."

Apart from the third act though, and the bear scene, I didn't feel like it was that strong. I haven't rewatched it since release and it doesn't call me back like Ex Machina did.

Knives Out

It's a classic whodunnit murder mystery movie. It was super-fun! It had the right mix of suspense and lightheartedness and drama that kept me at the edge of my seat the whole time. Great cast, great characters, great concept. Daniel Craig doing a foghorn-leghorn southern accent is a little weird but they lean into it real hard. Definitely worth a watch if you want a fun two hours.

Total agreement. Loved this. There's been some rumor that Benoit Blanc might be a recurring movie detective and I think as long as it's still done by Rian Johnson it'll be fun every time. I also had the pleasure of watching it with a die hard Last Jedi hater and getting to say "look, see, I told you this guy was good!"

Supposedly a lot of the mansion shots were filmed at a state park near me; I think when the weather warms up I'm going to go take a tour.

 

Very fucking cool, Roger, congrats.

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On the one hand, conspiracy theories are more mainstream than ever, are propagated by the President of the United States, and are a weaponized political tool. Illuminatus has never been a favorite of mine (it did, for example, lead me to you spags, for which I've never forgiven it), but I think the silliness it treats conspiracy theories with could take the piss out of some of that.

On the other, the chances of this being done well are pretty low and even if it's an exceptional show we're well beyond the point where TV is going to have an effect.

I think the best part of this is that we're going to be dealing with some real shitnecks finding this board.

When Cramulon Enterprises first moved into my home city I thought, Great! We could really use the industry in this run down mill town. The city council waved them into the biggest industrial park plot they could find, way over in the North End, where the waste treatment facility was supposed to be. We just about had a parade.

I was down on my luck myself, having recently been deposed by unlawful coup from my position as a certain Central American nation. Thinking with my tail brain I figured they'd want some new employees. I went straight to the shop. The line was around the building.

After the fourth day, we started getting a little suspicious. I was warming up a can of beans around the Line Section 12 trash fire when it happened. Cramulus himself was making the rounds or, more appropriately, the straights.

Cram! Hey Cram it's me, EoC! Remember your old pal? I cried out.

He stopped and said, Well sure, of course buddy good to see you again. Hey be a trooper and hand out these new hiree packets to the rest of your section for me? I gotta run I'll be right back.

He slapped a wad of strangely wet papers into my hand and ran off. I haven't seen him since. Anyway things turned out okay. I met my girl in that line, pretty thing from Section 11. They said our love was forbidden but I'd like to see them say that to our daughter. She'll be 4 soon and one day our spots in line will be hers. Damn fine man, that Cram, doing this for our community.

Oho I see my lizard person opponent has come crawling out from his heat rock again. See how he lies with cricket legs still stuck in his teeth!

The People need a Mexico with eons of experience. Someone who can smash Juntakenstein with a spiked tail of Justice. Now you might say EoC, that sounds an awful lot like what the last surviving stegosaurus might say. But even baseless accusations such as these are permitted under the protective ridged spine of Free Speech. And besides, even if I were, for example, a literal dinosaur well, being a dinosaur is not a crime.

One day, tired of the mundane LARP sessions playing an NPC, Cram decided to really challenge himself. And so Cram LARPed. He LARPed so hard he became the setting. Players still wander his labyrinthine inner halls, his twisting passages, hoping for the saving throw that will let them escape. And in the backs of their minds the thought gnaws at them, do they even really want to escape at all?

I'm kind of upset that my highly relevant and accurate post in the first went totally unheeded. EOC is now one of the top 3 threats to global stability.

For shame. All of you. For. Fucking. Shame.

EOC is just doin' what we hired him to do.  Stop your fake news.

Howl,
BURNING MY HOUSE DOWN TO PWN TEH LIBS

Junkie I didn't remember that post but 

Hey new-ish folks posting in this thread for some god damn reason,

Fly, you fools.

-EoC, nothing if not magnanimous

Yeah I like Dags. I like caravans not falling off of mountains more though

If you do get on the school committee, I hope someone starts specifically leaving golden apples on your desk/office space.

Sadly, this is not a situation that comes with a workspace. In fact, we don't currently have a city hall at all. A couple of buildings in downtown have office space being rented out temporarily for stuff like the Clerk and city council and school committee meetings are all happening in the senior center while a new building is under construction.

Our mayor is possibly the first and only one to run and win on a platform of "I will tear down city hall -- LITERALLY."

Sounds like the only logical next step is to run on a tearing down the school platform.

Also, good going QG!

Hi fp. Thanks for that invite to google wave in 2009.

I'm feeling guilty because I have spent too much time posting posting about superhero films in crams thread.

I'm going to try and add some of the stuff I have watched over the last year that I've enjoyed:
The Killing of the sacred deer. Going to get this one over with fast. Relentlessly uncomfortable to watch this is the opposite of light entertainment. The film is about a surgeon wracked with guilt over botching a heart surgery, and trying but tiring of being a surrogate father to the dead mans kid, the kid then places a curse on his family, a similar curse to the one Artemis placed on.
The whole thing has the same stilted talking past each other dialog of his other film The Lobster, and over time a sick sense of humor fills the story, though not to the extent it ever becomes comfortable.
His other film The Favorite is slick and nasty Victorian intrigue and is good fun and worth watching just for the three lead actresses performance.

After watching The Lobster, catching up on Yorgos Lanthimos' backlog is a soft project of mine. I'm going to watch these other two once they're readily accessible. He strikes me as someone who you need to be in a certain mindset to enjoy and I'm not always in that mood.

My backlog excursions in the last year were Taika Waititi and Denis Villeneuve. I just caught Incendies the other night. What strikes me about his style, and why I think he was an excellent choice for Bladerunner 2049 and Dune, is there's a kind of absolute confidence behind it. Title cards come up in huge, screen sized, bold red lettering. Landscapes and cities burst onto the screen, overwhelming, and they stay until it just kind of makes sense to move along. You're definitely the viewer in these movies, you're along for the ride, it's like being a kid again without the critical lens that just naturally gets in the way over time.

There was a comic store near my school called American Mythology and I've always thought it neatly captures the wide appeal of superhero stories. We don't believe in Superman like the Greeks used to believe in Heracles but can't you just picture some little kid thousands of years ago gushing about a monster with twelve heads that grew two more every time it was chopped off? You should be thankful that all we do is make movies about ours instead of making statues and building shrines.

I will say that for as ubiquitous as the movies have become recently, there is one small part of it all I like. Disney is giving some big time work to small and interesting directors right now. Taika Waititi, currently one of my favorites, went from directing a mockumentary about modern vampires living in New Zealand to directing a Thor movie. It wasn't bad, as far as superhero movies go, but it was successful enough that he could come off of that and do pretty much whatever he wanted creatively. So he's choosing to make a Hitler Youth camp comedy where he plays the protagonist's imaginary friend Hitler.

I'm a little interested to see what happens when the draw of these movies wanes. Are we going to start getting weird with it?

Guy's got a really good point, people might want to do some additional reading on the subject to form their own opinions. We should put a link on the main page to the rest of the internet.