cherrysunday

I really really liked this movie. It's very well acted, paced, directed, composed, and is overall one of my favorite movies of the year. Joaquin Phoenix steals the show again with what I think is the best performance of the year. The pacing is slow but the movie still manages to keep you entertained and on edge. All the camera work and music and sound design and set design came together really well. The script and the dialogue was also pretty good though it's not what makes this movie so great. It's just a very well executed movie.

But, it's not a perfect movie, and there are some noticeable problems. The biggest complaint I've seen with this movie is that it's very similar and takes a lot from Taxi Driver and other Martin Scorsese films. And though I also wanted a more originality in the writing, I think it still works really well for this movie and for the characters. One thing I also noticed was the sometimes in your face feel of the movie, I definitely thought movie a bit more subtlety in it's presentation. The thing is, I think all these problems stem form the fact that Todd Phillips is very inexperienced in making these types of movies. But for every moment that highlights that, theirs a moment that shows his and potential once he becomes more experienced.

There's also some other things that I liked that I think make this a 9/10 rather than an 8/10, particularly how violent and disturbing it was willing to be. And overall it's just a really really good movie.

Now, I know a lot of people really don't like this movie, and for good reasons. But I kind of enjoyed it. Most of the acting was good, the jokes were alright, and the idea of one big shootout for a movie was pretty interesting and I kind of wanted it to work.

But the reality is, having a movie just be a shootout doesn't for the most substance filled and interesting movie. And you can tell that it doesn't work in a lot of ways. Mainly, the movie kind of gets drawled out padded with what feels like the same scene happening over and over again. Hence, the middle chunk of this movie is kind of boring. Basically, the movie's shootout starts and it's pretty interesting, some characters switch sides and you think some of the characters could die, but then all the characters get shot like once in like the knee or something so they're injured but not dead, and then the rest of the middle chunk of the movie is just people shooting and crawling with no underlying substance or change in plot. The movie also does this thing where like a character will pass out from an injury or blood loss, and some of them come back later and some just die, so you're kind of confused like is eh dead or not and theirs no clues to help you figure that out either.

Overall, it wasn't an awful movie, and it had it's moments, but it just was missing something that movies of it's genre like reservoir dogs had that ended up leaving the film kind of empty.