But apparently everyone dies in Infinity War, so it won't happen and I watched this movie for nothing? Man, no wonder it got snubbed for Best Picture. You think they're going to make a sequel to Green Book where an alien kills everyone?
Downsides: the action scenes are way too long and I found them hard to read for similar reasons to Armageddon. Like Interstellar, this movie continually reminds you of the better movies it's ripping off, and in fact it's the same movies, plus Gravity. Special caution to doesthewhaledie.com premium subscribers: there's a dead whale in this, but it's been dead for a really long time. Like, are we upset by a whale fossil? There's got to be some limit, right?
Old video game watch: the black market guy is playing Contra
on a Famiclone. Yes, even in post-apocalyptic deep space, the 80s
classics never die. Also, Zhou Qian has eight Zelda heart stickers
on the chest of her spacesuit. It's never explained, but talking it out with Sarah afterwards, I speculated that it's like the kill marks on your fighter plane, except Zhou Qian hates killing, so they're tally marks of the lives she's saved.
The McGuffins are real nonsense, though, and the film has some ghost jokes, a la Clueless. Sandra Bullock's character buys pizza and plane tickets online and we were like "hmm, yes, an interface such as that would have required Javascript, which wasn't around yet" instead of "damn, what a NERD!"
Overall, this was the expected cheesy fun, and it reminded us of The Parallax View (1974), a much better thriller that's also a better metaphor for the destructive power of the Internet.
The choreography is incredible, all designed to point out how ludicrous the human body is. The "Big Spender" number looks like something Bertolt Brecht or Fritz Lang would do. One of them Weimar guys. I guess it makes sense since Bob Fosse would go on to do Cabaret in 1972.
Sumana and I were disappointed by the ending, which the best thing
you can say about is it's faithful to the musical and not the cop-out
alternate ending that was filmed in case of studio interference. While playing our frequent game of "fix the bad media thing" (most
recently deployed on a terrible Star Trek: Discovery
episode) Sumana came up with a much better ending: bring back
Ricardo Montalban's character, not to swoop in and provide replacement
romance but to pull Oscar aside for a man-to-man. It's the sixties, brother, Women's Lib is on the way, and Oscar needs to get over his hang-ups and just marry the girl.
Don't sleep on the elevator scene. Pure comedy niobium!
The final blow: the poster for this movie says "Presented in a real new dimension
in motion picture entertainment". Are they trying to trick people into
thinking this is a 3D movie? Cause it's not. Although there is a scene where someone throws spools of cloth at the camera, a classic "gratuitous 3D" technique.
Thu Feb 28 2019 23:39 February Film Roundup: