What movies are you watching?

[daft twat]

Sicario. Man, amazon prime really pays for itself. Love Benicio del Toro.

[daft twat]

Sicario. Man, amazon prime really pays for itself. Love Benicio del Toro.

Oh, and A Man Called Ove the night before Sicario. Again, prime. Any other suggestions from there?

[epilogue]

Sicario. Man, amazon prime really pays for itself. Love Benicio del Toro.

Oh, and A Man Called Ove the night before Sicario. Again, prime. Any other suggestions from there?

How was A Man Called Ove? I read the book and really loved it.

[contamination]

This pretty much summarizes my feelings about Fury:

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 ... ury-review

Fury Worships WWII for All the Wrong Reasons

The new tank battle movie Fury is too lovingly made for something so brutal.

The first thing I’ll say about Fury is this: When I read things about actors going to bootcamp, toughening and butching up for a long shoot playing brothers in arms, I can’t help but roll my eyes. It’s all so silly, the idea of a pampered group of highly paid actors going off to play army guys, thinking that a week spent together in a nice tent in the mud is somehow going to prepare them to go to fictional war. All the actors involved have graciously conceded in interviews that real soldiers, obviously, went through much worse. But you can tell, while watching David Ayer’s torturous movie play out, that they think they’re doing something pretty tough, pretty macho, pretty cool.

And therein lies the problem with a movie like Fury, which tells the story of a tank squad fighting the bitter battles of the last days of WWII. There’s no real historical searching being done here, it’s all male posturing, a bunch of “tough guys” fantasizing about how badass they would have been in World War II if only they were alive back then. A movie like Fury, which is grueling and brutal and bleak for the wrong reasons, is almost an offense. It pretends that all its annihilating violence is there to illustrate just how terrible war is, but in truth it’s thrilled by the violence, it relishes in it. Ayer films each new nightmare with a reverent, fascinated awe, finding crude, shallow beauty in the most terrible of images. If this movie was about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars it would be irresponsible. But because it has the buffer of a 70-year remove, it’s just dumb.

Of course you could say that a revered movie like Saving Private Ryan, which is Fury's obvious influence, was also a too-beautiful illustration of war. But I’d argue that all of that movie’s aesthetic grace was at least in service of something broader—that movie plumbed some depth, tapped some vein, that Fury is too clumsy or lazy to find. Ayer’s script moans and grumbles about God and honor and all that clichéd war-talk bullshit, but that’s all a cover, an excuse to tread further into the obliterating destruction that Ayer fetishistically loves.

There’s no real plot to Fury. Brad Pitt, doing a muted variation on his Inglourious Basterds character, leads a ragtag tank squad through the German mud. There’s Shia LaBeouf’s religious trigger man, a riff on Barry Pepper’s character in Saving Private Ryan, only he fires with a huge tank gun instead of a sniper rifle. Jon Bernthal, who seems bound and determined to only play detestable characters, is a rotten-toothed ape whose savagery is supposed to teach us a lesson about what men become in war. (He is, of course, decent at heart.) Michael Peña is the, um, Michael Peña guy. And Logan Lerman, our secret lead, is the shaky newbie whom we get to see nearly ruined by war—this is meant to be some somber lesson about innocents in combat, but really Lerman’s wide-eyed noob exists to be the vessel through which we discover just how tough and cool these other tank guys are. We’re supposed to enjoy watching Lerman become one of them.

Much of the film is fiery violence, as out-gunned American tanks are destroyed by high-tech German death machines. Smaller characters, played by the likes of Xavier Samuel, Jim Parrack, and Scott Eastwood, die gruesome deaths so that our heroes can seem all the more heroic, and inexplicably lucky. And then there’s the big final battle, just like at the end of Saving Private Ryan, only with the action-movie antics dialed up and any meaning behind it all near invisible. Pitt and his tank crew entrench themselves for a suicide standoff, meant to be a sign of valor but looking more like sociopathy. Fury, it turns out, doesn’t value anyone’s life, Nazi or otherwise.

Ayer has also populated his movie with a few civilians who are treated terribly and ultimately punished for being bystanders, because their pesky, fragile humanity gets in the way of his orgy of death and awfulness. As Private Ryan showed, there is a way to capture the utter terror of war without being onanistic. Ayer hasn’t found that way. He’s a blunt filmmaker whose taste level tends toward the cheap. I liked his intimate, rattling End of Watch, even if it ultimately felt pointless. But that was two modern cops in L.A. battling drug lords, the stuff of many an unassuming action movie. In Fury we’re talking about a global conflict that killed tens of millions of people. I suppose there might be some merit in how Fury so crassly addresses the war that it unsettles our comforting, noble delusions about it. But that glancing swipe at deeper meaning is, if anything, purely accidental. The obvious intention of Fury is to out-miserable all other war movies, plain and simple. Because then Ayer and company, safely back home in Los Angeles, can brag all the harder about how they survived.

Besides this it was totally predictable and had, like someone said "unconvincing stock characters in place of people". I literally started to laugh when the Shia Lebeouf's character quoted the bible and the Pitt character - to everyone's surprise - knew the exact chapter and verse. Also the ending

Spoiler: show

where Pitt's character gets shot and still continues to kill the evil nazi's was pure comedy gold.

Maybe I am being too harsh but it was just one war movie cliché after another.

[LoathedVermin72]

That review misses all the nuance. It's ignoring that virtuoso scene in the dining room of that building before it gets destroyed. The movie is way more complex than "macho posturing" or "war worship;" look at the way the facade of machismo is stripped and deconstructed in that scene. It's kind of doing the opposite of what that review accuses. Yes, it has some healthy, old-fashioned war movie heroism as well, but that's not a bad thing. And I'm top of that, the final character is only saved by the mercy of an enemy soldier at the end. He is completely vulnerable; not "badass" at all.

[E.H. Ruddock]

How is a movie like that supposed to be "unpredictable"? It is a movie about a stranded tank in enemy territory during WWII. You knew that going in, not sure what you expected to happen...

[epilogue]

I still haven't seen it but I fear that these conversations about the film will be more entertaining to me than the film itself.

[contamination]

How is a movie like that supposed to be "unpredictable"? It is a movie about a stranded tank in enemy territory during WWII. You knew that going in, not sure what you expected to happen...

By predicatable I also meant the characters, they were such an archetypes that you could see miles away what they were going to say or do.

[tragabigzanda]

Whenever there's active promotion on the part of somebody else, whenever I see somebody all dolled up for a fancy photograph and someone's handing out flyers or whenever there's active promotion for something like that, as an imposition on my day, I hate all those people and I want them to fail. I have a visceral reaction to advertising and promotion. There's just something about salesmanship that grates on me on a very base level and I react very negatively towards it. I want those people to suffer and I want their enterprises to fail.

[bune]

Sicario. Man, amazon prime really pays for itself. Love Benicio del Toro.

Oh, and A Man Called Ove the night before Sicario. Again, prime. Any other suggestions from there?

How was A Man Called Ove? I read the book and really loved it.

I think it depends on the translation of the subtitles. I watched two versions and the subtitles were different in both. The part at the train station when Ove makes a grammar 'joke'? Literal translations don't work for that, you need the nuance for the joke to work.

Still an excellent movie though. One of my favorite books, and I can't wait until Hollywood screws the remake up.

[contamination]

I still haven't seen it but I fear that these conversations about the film will be more entertaining to me than the film itself.

So you haven't even seen the movie?

[epilogue]

Sicario. Man, amazon prime really pays for itself. Love Benicio del Toro.

Oh, and A Man Called Ove the night before Sicario. Again, prime. Any other suggestions from there?

How was A Man Called Ove? I read the book and really loved it.

I think it depends on the translation of the subtitles. I watched two versions and the subtitles were different in both. The part at the train station when Ove makes a grammar 'joke'? Literal translations don't work for that, you need the nuance for the joke to work.

Still an excellent movie though. One of my favorite books, and I can't wait until Hollywood screws the remake up.

But maybe they'll get Jack Nicholson to star!

[epilogue]

I still haven't seen it but I fear that these conversations about the film will be more entertaining to me than the film itself.

So you haven't even seen the movie?

Nope. I'm just goofin' around. It is true though that I haven't heard anything bad or really negative about the movie. So, I was surprised to see your initial post about it. But, no, I haven't seen it and have no opinion of the film, myself.

[bune]

Sicario. Man, amazon prime really pays for itself. Love Benicio del Toro.

Oh, and A Man Called Ove the night before Sicario. Again, prime. Any other suggestions from there?

How was A Man Called Ove? I read the book and really loved it.

I think it depends on the translation of the subtitles. I watched two versions and the subtitles were different in both. The part at the train station when Ove makes a grammar 'joke'? Literal translations don't work for that, you need the nuance for the joke to work.

Still an excellent movie though. One of my favorite books, and I can't wait until Hollywood screws the remake up.

But maybe they'll get Jack Nicholson to star!

You are an unkind person.

He's a little too old for Hollywood, they'd probably go Will Ferrell or something.

[epilogue]

Sicario. Man, amazon prime really pays for itself. Love Benicio del Toro.

Oh, and A Man Called Ove the night before Sicario. Again, prime. Any other suggestions from there?

How was A Man Called Ove? I read the book and really loved it.

I think it depends on the translation of the subtitles. I watched two versions and the subtitles were different in both. The part at the train station when Ove makes a grammar 'joke'? Literal translations don't work for that, you need the nuance for the joke to work.

Still an excellent movie though. One of my favorite books, and I can't wait until Hollywood screws the remake up.

But maybe they'll get Jack Nicholson to star!

You are an unkind person.

He's a little too old for Hollywood, they'd probably go Will Ferrell or something.

I was referencing the Toni Erdmann remake that Jack's starring in.

[LoathedVermin72]

Will Ferrell > Jack Nicholson

[epilogue]

You're adorable, verm. Never change.

[contamination]

I still haven't seen it but I fear that these conversations about the film will be more entertaining to me than the film itself.

So you haven't even seen the movie?

Nope. I'm just goofin' around. It is true though that I haven't heard anything bad or really negative about the movie. So, I was surprised to see your initial post about it. But, no, I haven't seen it and have no opinion of the film, myself.

Well obviously you have to watch it now

[epilogue]

I still haven't seen it but I fear that these conversations about the film will be more entertaining to me than the film itself.

So you haven't even seen the movie?

Nope. I'm just goofin' around. It is true though that I haven't heard anything bad or really negative about the movie. So, I was surprised to see your initial post about it. But, no, I haven't seen it and have no opinion of the film, myself.

Well obviously you have to watch it now

I know, right! Is it on Netflix?

[bune]

Sicario. Man, amazon prime really pays for itself. Love Benicio del Toro.

Oh, and A Man Called Ove the night before Sicario. Again, prime. Any other suggestions from there?

How was A Man Called Ove? I read the book and really loved it.

I think it depends on the translation of the subtitles. I watched two versions and the subtitles were different in both. The part at the train station when Ove makes a grammar 'joke'? Literal translations don't work for that, you need the nuance for the joke to work.

Still an excellent movie though. One of my favorite books, and I can't wait until Hollywood screws the remake up.

But maybe they'll get Jack Nicholson to star!

You are an unkind person.

He's a little too old for Hollywood, they'd probably go Will Ferrell or something.

I was referencing the Toni Erdmann remake that Jack's starring in.

OIC.