neverseenitpodcast

Christopher Nolan does what Christopher Nolan does best: make something so massive in scale that it feels like cinema is trying to swallow you whole. The cast is ridiculous, and whatever they spent on salaries was worth it. Everyone brings their A-game. John Leguizamo absolutely broke me. His character's tragedy genuinely made me cry, and I was so happy to finally see him in a Nolan film. Anne Hathaway is acting her ass off, Tom Holland completely surprised me (I've only really known him from the Marvel movies), Himesh Patel continues to quietly elevate everything he's in, and poor Matt Damon spends the entire movie getting the absolute shit kicked out of him. The technical craft is phenomenal. The sound design makes you feel every impact, Ludwig Göransson's score is deceptively simple but incredibly effective, and the production design is breathtaking. I honestly couldn't care less whether it's historically accurate because it looks incredible. The set pieces are unbelievable. The Cyclops sequence is nightmare fuel, the witch sequence made me wish Nolan would just go make a full-blown horror movie, the Sirens scene is haunting, and the final battle where Odysseus takes on everyone is exactly the kind of epic spectacle you want from this story. Nolan only knows how to think on a colossal scale, and it shows. That said, it isn't without its flaws. Like most Nolan films, the dialogue mix occasionally feels like he's actively daring you to understand what people are saying. There are also a few repetitive story beats. The Laestrygonians sequence feels a little too much like a repeat of the Cyclops encounter: everyone runs for their lives, scrambles back to the boats, rinse and repeat. Some of the dialogue early on is also a little clunky. It's not the American accents that bothered me; I got over that pretty quickly, but some of the line deliveries felt oddly cheesy. Thankfully, that issue mostly disappears as the film goes on. Zendaya is an interesting thematic presence, but she's ultimately underused. She drifts in and out of the movie almost like a vision, which is funny considering she played a similarly ethereal figure in the first Dune.  Ironically, the film's greatest strength, its relentless epic scale, also creates its biggest weakness. The pacing sometimes suffers because the story has so much ground to cover. Major events arrive and are gone before they have much time to breathe. The whirlpool sequence is probably the clearest example of this. Even so, The Odyssey is another reminder that nobody stages spectacle quite like Christopher Nolan. It's overwhelming, occasionally messy, emotionally resonant, and filled with images that will stick with me for a long time.

I mean what more can you realistically expect from a Minions movie? It was great, dumb fun. A clear love letter to old Hollywood and making movies. I was pleasantly surprised by how funny it was at times, and there's a clear arc for at least 2 of the minion characters. I'm also a sucker for movies about making movies so I thoroughly enjoyed this one. I noticed the minion "language" seems to be an amalgamation of Spanish, English, Italian, and...Portuguese? Not sure but either way I appreciated them blending multiple languages together. Good stuff. Especially if you have kids. It's a riot.

Sam Rockwell is amazing as always. The way he can go from funny to serious shows the serious amount of range he has as an actor. But Haley Lu Richardson is the true standout for me. Talk about a sleeper hit. I had no idea where the story was going with her character and she ended up being the true heart and soul of the story. The entire film was a tour De force. While some of the backstories could have been cut down a bit (Susan, for example), the satire was biting, and the social commentary on Al and the kids definitely not being alright was palpable. Verbinski pulls no punches here. And that third act. Wow. That third act made me cry I'm not gonna lie. Talk about an emotional sucker punch. The ending leaves it open for a sequel, which I think is unnecessary. The best sequel is the one I can get in my own imagination.

Am I dumb? I didn’t understand this movie. What did I watch? Nic Cage being weird is par for the course, but what the hell was this story? The main character has the personality of a manila envelope. It starts as a slow-burn investigative thriller about tracking down a serial killer who covers himself in white powder, then suddenly the twist is that her mother was his accomplice the whole time? …What? I’m flummoxed. You're telling me some young person like Maika Monroe's character is an FBI agent who has this ability to decipher things but she and Carter completely missed the fact that Carter's daughter's birthday lined up with when the killer was making his next move?   This was 1 hour 40 minutes of a nothing burger of a story. It was Black Phone meets Sev7en but bad. Awful.