jmkosinski

This movie was much stranger than I expected and is definitely not just another movie where Liam Neeson kills 50 people. Okay, he still probably kills like 10, but he's not the sole focus of the movie and the tone is more dark comedy than revenge thriller.

The movie has a very, very mordant humor to it that feels very Scandinavian - Fargo might be another point of comparison, though Fargo is a far superior movie. The biggest problem with this movie is it just doesn't feel like America - it's very clearly a foreign director trying to imagine what living in the Rockies would be like. Denver is portrayed as this futuristic modernist dystopia a la Geneva or Oslo filled with all-glass houses and world-class disco clubs.

I've never seen the Dario Argento film so I can't judge but I feel like a lot of critics are hung up on the fact that it's not very faithful to the original. Did they really think a filmmaker as interest as Guadagnino would be content to just do a remake?

Dakota Johnson is stunning. Choreography downright disturbing. Gorgeous, creepy score by Thom Yorke. Genuinely repulsive, dream-like imagery. Cool setting in Cold War Berlin. Great friendship chemistry between the two female leads. Overall a stomach-turning feast for the senses. I didnt find it to be as confusing as the reviews made it seem. The plot may be a bit predictable, but this is a film about a creeping sense of dread and the almost inevitability of sacrifice and the succession of power, not whether good or evil will win out.

On the downside, even I have to admit the ending goes completely over the top, and the story of the old man and his wife either takes up too much time or isn't developed enough for us to really care like we do about the girls at the dance school.

Much better than expected. I'll be honest, something about the promo campaign turned me off, and I really only started watching bc it's HBO and it seemed like a better bet than some random Netflix series. I quickly got hooked. It is very much in the style of the Big Short, minus any attempt to understand business and economics.

I don't understand the reviewers complaining about the likeability of the characters. They're meant to be hated! This is after all a thinly fictionalized version of the Murdoch family, a group of people most to blame for the current state of the world. Characters don't have to be likable to be interesting and/or funny. Like many reviewers, I have to shout out Tom as both the funniest and the scariest character on this show, often at the same time.

Whether you watch it as a hilarious, grown-up version of Arrested Development, or as a searing indictment of the men-children who bestride our society like medieval kings, this show has a lot to offer. The only thing I wouldn't say it has to any depth is a real understanding of business - this is definitely a family/character affair, and not in any way a realistic look at how a corporation this massive is run.