Hacker Cinema
Poor Things
2023 · Film · 141 min
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Brought back to life by an unorthodox scientist, a young woman runs off with a lawyer on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, she grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.
3 positive6 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
Recent good movies, just going in release order off my letterboxd, although I have to be careful to include only "Hollywood" here:
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - beautifully shot and a beautiful theme about what humanity is
- One Battle After Another - it's PTA, all his movies are good
- Bugonia - incredible dark comedy
- Weapons - fun little horror comedy movie
- Sinners - just won an oscar for the soundtrack, not a perfect movie but a fun watch with some incredible scenes
- Companion
- Nosferatu - incredibly atmospheric
- The Surfer - total trip with good old Nicholas Cage
- Love Lies Bleeding - just a fun, a bit crazy movie
- Dream Scenario - another trippy Cage movie
- Poor Things
- Oppenheimer ...
- Renfield
- The Menu
- The Banshees of Insherin
- Barbarian (same director as Weapons)
- Prey
- Bullet Train - fun action movie
- The Northman
- The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- The Invisible Man - most effective horror movie I've ever seen
- The Gentlemen
- Joker -how close can you get to looking like Taxi Driver without being Taxi Driver ...
- The Vast of Night - some scenes that really draw you in and pretty nostalgic
in 2019 now, so I won't continue, but there are plenty of good movies made nowadays, and I won't say I've seen even a close amount of them from the past few years. Of course I'm watching these at home, not in theatres, so that's certainly an argument.
Banshees of Insherin is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. The understatedness is critical to the humor and story; it’s a juxtaposition of boring people in a boring town and the batshit plots that develop.
Other recent greats are maybe Poor Things, Challengers, and Conclave.
You wouldn’t mistake any for Shawshank, but that’s ok, it’s 30 years later. Shawshank is also qualitatively different from great movies in the mid 1960’s, like Dr. Strangelove or The Graduate.
Probably depends on how one defines "blockbuster"...
Yes, the highest-grossing movies (Marvel, etc) tend to be mostly sexless (aside from tight-fitting costumes and dirty jokes).
But, there are always plenty of critically acclaimed Hollywood movies with lots of sex. Poor Things being a recent example.
How did this article get so many upvotes? Even among articles that pine for the good old days, this article is trash. Like 80% of it is just saying “remember that movie? And the things we thought were meaningful back then?”
The idea that modern movies don’t take risks is absurd. Have you seen Poor Things? Have you seen Zone of Interest? Mickey17? OBAA? There are more movies taking more risks in this era of film than there has ever been before. You’re just not watching them.
The real story here is the way lighting has changed and how it makes you feel when you watch the movie.
What kind of movies are you going to to? I witnessed zero bad behaviour at Dune part 2, Godzilla Minus One, or Poor Things in theatres. It's not even that high brow stuff. Just not the typical marvel shovel ware.
The film Poor Things recently reminded me to Flowers to Algernon a lot
I said YouTube isn't a net negative. Even then you have to think globally, what about children who grew up consuming AI generated abomination animations made with 0 oversight of even its greedy creators?
Netflix was the cause for current slate of tax writeoff cancellations (no Netflix no overinvestment by Warner etc and no clumsy Zaslav cleanup), terrible shows being greenlit, homogeneity of camerawork, casting, identity-politics pandering that nobody asked for, oversaturation of the market with streaming services that is almost as bad as cable etc. It's basically a cancer overgrowth, good short-term and terrible long-term. Binge-tv model is also not a good thing, in terms of how much time it takes up, how little it brings in terms of pleasure and validates our growing impatience. I could go on and on. Does anyone even remember Mank or The Killer? Imagine Poor Things being Netflix-only release. Nobody would even say a single peep about it outside of niche film twitter accounts.
Generally speaking, if you've read "Seeing Like a State", then you can apply the same logic to companies and the entire industries, or really any aspirations of "man". We crave control and fear uncertainty, so we make environments far more deterministic, which brings more short-term profit but ruins the environment (be it nature or film itself). Look at Disney, Iger created the superhero movie boom (by making it super deterministic and boring: every movie is part of a giant puzzle so that each piece brings money) but in the process killed Star vehicles, killed experimentation (by directors, actors), and now Scorsese and Coppola need to throw around their weight to reverse the course. Sure, A24 exists, but before this all movies were A24 movies essentially. Now a major star being in a horror movie is an "Event". (Who is even a star anymore? DiCaprio, Cruise? These people were around since 80s. You think Chris Evans will have the same longevity?) Yeah, there were similar periods of dominance (80s action movies) but they weren't so precisely fine-tuned and featured greater directorial freedom and less emphasis on being non-offensive.
I guarantee you none of you will quote Avengers (Ultron onwards) in next 20 years. People still quote Terminator 2 or Predator or Lethal Weapon, despite them also being brainless flicks (some not so brainless actually). Look at Dr Strange 2, they forced Raimi to stop being Raimi basically (the first movie has some good moments), and made him fall in line with the "agenda", because the plan™ is too important to compromise on. In reality the plan™ is the money perputuum mobile lol. Sure, these people were always greedy, but stochasticity of the system allowed for good stuff to pass through their Eyes of Sauron lmao.
Tbh I don't even know why I'm responding a "throwaway" account.
Asteroid City. Beau is Afraid. Dream Scenario. Medusa Deluxe. Poor Things. Saltburn. Skinamarink. Smoking Causes Coughing.
Barbie. Oppenheimer.
Soon, The People's Joker, which has been stuck in purgatory since last year given its unconventional telling of a mythos that (on the surface) seems similar to Batman's.
You don't have to like any of these movies, and they're all challenging, but all of them were unconventional and innovative and released to theaters in 2023. This has been a wildly unconventional year, and a fairly exciting one in mainstream cinema.
Oh, wait, what am I arguing against? I read the study, and it says that cinema remains innovative despite discourse arguing otherwise! Indeed.
Such a fantastic book. One of the most interesting novels I've ever read, from a structural point of view, not to mention it's extremely entertaining. I've got a signed first edition which I'm pretty proud of.
With Poor Things being made into a movie, maybe this book will get the attention it deserves.