thedeadbody

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For the love of God, Please Look up - A Don't Look Up Movie Comment (4/5)

There's so much hype about this movie from the social media promotion to the stellar casting. Who wouldn't be intrigued to check this out when they have Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, among others in their belt?

I usually have a problem with too many big-time celebrities in a movie because in my experience, big time celebrities in a movie have their own arcs, and having a number of A-listers in this movie made me wary if they will compress the story to give each artist their own story line.

In the film they didn't have to give each celebrity's character their own arc but enough to give us an idea about who they are and how their characters would end. But the main focus of this movie is on Leonardo Dicaprio and Jennifer Lawrence's characters. The other A-list celebrities play secondary.

There are two things that I love about this movie:

1.) Comedy reflecting the current events - It mirrors what's currently happening. The movie did that by exaggerating an event (in this case - a comet hitting the earth) and they showed how the media and politics would react to it. Initially, I find it comical how the two subjects reacted, thus I thought it falls under comedy. However, vis-a-vis that to reality, it makes me think how relevant it is today even though how comical it seems. Even the characters and the role they play are somewhat reflective of the kind of politicians and influential media personalities we have.

I couldn't help but wonder, would they react the same way when a comet is reported to hit the earth?

I also appreciate that they highlight how women are being treated vs men here. They showed it by how Jennifer's character got treated. She didn't get much credit and isn't celebrated when in fact her character discovered it first.

There's really a lot of element in this movie that reflects what's happening today, I don't want to mention them one by one but there's also a depiction of: corruption, cheating, social media, etc., they are brutal in showing this in the movie that you'll hardly miss them they just made it comical but it sends the message across - and as an audience I received it clearly. The movie didn't have space for ambiguities. It's very straight to the point.

2.) The ending - It's horrifying but I particularly love how the ending was shot and how meaningful it is. I found myself almost fighting back the tears. I imagined if that's happening: They are seconds away from dying - the table is shaking and they know that any moment they will be gone. Leonardo Dicaprio says, "thing is... we really...we really have everything, didn't we?"

That made me think, when we are in brink of annihilation what really matters? How could we show the people we love that we truly love them? How can we hold on to them?

I felt a sense of hopelessness and frustration that things could have been resolved if only they have a functioning government and a media that doesn't sugarcoat/manipulate the event.

In the end, I couldn't help but reflect after. This isn't just any comedy but it could possibly happen (it has a slogan on its poster that says: based on a truly possible event) and we could really die under the hands of idiots.

I think this and Children Of Men are the kind of movies that makes you think of what future we really have and how closer we are in a dystopian world regardless of how exaggerated and comical it seems.

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[thedeadbody]

The Mosley Review: Don’t Look Up

What if you took a plot point from Armageddon and then mixed in the best dark comedy of the real world? Well, you have this huge satirical mirror of a film. There are some dark comedies that hit so true to home that it is almost shocking and not funny. This film nailed the superficial nature of how the world would react if there was a comet heading towards earth. I think it was almost 10 years ago or something like this had happened and it obviously missed us, but for a time there was some real fear. I loved that this film captured that fact of real danger and yet everyone is oblivious. This film was at times a brilliant social commentary on how quickly society is to not believe in something even if the facts are there. Conspiracy, lack of trust and terrible leadership is all on display here and you can draw the simple comparisons to modern day politics and theorists in the world. I honestly had a good time laughing at how true alot of the story seemed even if its a comedy.

Jennifer Lawrence was excellent as Kate Dibiasky and she delivers alot of the more real reactions to the impending doom. She delivers some amazing levels of sarcasm and nihilism in many great scenes and I especially enjoyed seeing her character except the inevitable. Leonardo Dicaprio delivers a growing anxiety attack of a performance as Dr. Randall Mindy. He is determined to prove the science, but gets sucked up into the high life of celebrity. The friendship between him and Kate was great and I loved when he finally snaps. Rob Morgan was great as the straight man Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, head of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The 3 of them together made a fantastic team and I loved the chemistry between all of them. Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry were excellent as the stereotypical talk show hosts Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer. They both come off as the “Ryan and Kelly” of this film, but Janie represents that completely overqualified person to be doing such a job. Meryl Streep was excellent as President Janie Orlean. She was the perfect example of a completely detached bureaucrat whose vanity mirror’s our own former real life President. Jonah Hill was despicable and brilliant as her son and Chief of Staff Jason Orlean. He was trying to make everything so “relatable” to the current generation, but comes off as a seriously drugged out buffoon and I loved it. Timothee Chalamet was good in the film as Yule and you can tell he was just there to have fun. His character does touch on the religious side of things for a bit. Ron Perlman can steal a film if he choices to and he almost did as the irreverent, hilarious and surly character Colonel Benedict Drask. Mark Rylance was great as the tech CEO Sir Peter Isherwell. He comes off to me as the less humane and very disturbed version of the James Halliday from Ready Player One. I liked that he highlighted the rich priorities of monetary gain over human life.

The score by Nicholas Britell was excellent, fun and heart breaking as well. It does follow the standard sound of inspirational and epic in the right moments, but quickly pulls back to have fun with its comedic cues. In the pantheon of dark comedies, this was a fun satire that does hit so close to home. It was hilarious, scary and sometimes a great mirror to our society and what superficial crap we shouldn’t care about. Let me know what you thought of the film or my review in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

[thedeadbody]

Folks.

I have had a bit of time to mull over Don't Look Up. Given the demographic of this site, this may not be the most useful place to post this, but honestly I just want to talk about it. This will contain spoilers. I also want to be clear that when I talk about the older generation here, I am talking about specific people, the older members of my family, not those generations as a whole.

This is a movie that will garner fundamentally different reactions from myself and the other younger members of my family (early 20s) and the older ones (mid 50s). It's not that the older ones don't get it - a lot of older people do. My older family members certainly think they do, and and be fair to them, they do what they can to help. They recycle. They buy ethically-sourced fruit.

But their emotional connection to this issue is just not there, compared to myself and my siblings and cousins. They don't understand that the comet is hitting right this minute, that it's been hitting for decades. Or rather, they understand this - but only academically.

The problem is that, for them, this is only ever going to be an academic issue. This will sound harsh, but, given where we are, most of my older family will live out the rest of their lives unaffected by this. They will see the impacts of climate change on the news and the TV screen, but even if they make it to the extreme upper limits of the human life span, the odds are this will never really touch them. It doesn't necessarily feel real for them, and that's not necessarily their fault.

We, the younger ones, don't have the luxury of that emotional distance. By the time our kids are in their 50s, it's likely that massive sections of this country will be underwater. And that's the least of it.

This has consequences for the way I think about this, compared to our older family members. At the moment, I think I probably will not have kids, and the environment is a large factor in that decision. I mentioned this to one of the older folk last year, and she was shocked.

"This doesn't have to factor into everything you do," she said. "You're allowed to make some choices for yourself."

This has stuck with me because, on the one hand, there's very little that I, individually, can do or not do to make a palpable difference to this situation. I am small, and the corporate and national responsibility for this problem is very, very large.

On the other hand, this does factor into everything I do, and everything I will do for the rest of my life. I don't have a choice in that. I wish I did.

To be clear, this is a post about my own family and my own emotional reaction to a film that hit pretty damn close to home. For my older family, this is just another film, with a nifty little metaphor. For me it's a suckerpunch, a deeply satirical and accurate reminder of exactly how the end of the world is going to go down. We knew this anyway, but it still hurts to see it so plainly depicted. I would love it, I really would, if Don't Look Up makes the difference it's so very clearly aiming to, but I'm not hopeful.

In this moment, we are at the section of the movie where the comet is already well and truly embedded in the seabed of the Pacific, and we're just waiting for the tidal waves to reach us.

We're at family dinner now.

[thedeadbody]

I just watched Don’t Look Up and it’s a movie that gives a lot of feelings. I want to comment on something the movie portrayed darkly accurate: academic politics. People think that science is something selfless and value-free, but it isn’t. it’s riddle with drama, ego battles, scientists spending more time writing grant requests and researching what the journal editors want to listen than actual research is terrible. It’s amazing anything is done at all.

I studied sociology of science in my PhD. and when Leo DiCaprio’s character joins the corporation project after he heard that prestigious scientists, with Nobels and so on, joined the project, I knew the movie would be a tragedy.

Every day I read that some newspaper announcing scientist made a revolutionary breakthrough or some visionary tech-billionaire announced some miraculous Mars project or VR/crypto product, I’m reminded of my economics of science and technology classes on how the transmission process happens and it might be slow as hell. The market, with its mechanism of supply and demand, may ensure a quick spread – “selling like hotcakes”, right? But it’ll only go through if the people in power are sure it’ll turn a profit and until there it might be too late, like anything related to climate. If COVID vaccines were left to market alone and weren’t subsided, the death toll would be the double or triple.

Economics is especially like that. I had luck of studying in a center that teaches an unpopular discipline such as economics of science and innovation, but the Nobel prize of 2018, William Nordhaus, won for his climate change research. Mind you that it’s not even a real Nobel prize, because the Bank of Sweden paid Nobel Foundation to use the name. Nordhaus is responsible for not giving tepid reports on the economic impact of climate change, claiming that humanity’s science will save us in the future, so it’s okay to not try to solve climate change now because it’ll lower the GDP. He’d totally be on the movie’s US president scientific council.

I’m glad the movie ended that way, because sometimes we need bad endings.

[thedeadbody]

Don't Look Up... to Harvard

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CATE BLANCHETT as Lou in Ocean’s 8

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#power stance

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Ocean’s 8 (2018) dir. Gary Ross

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I’m the kind of lesbian that collects memes of Cate Blanchett, Sarah Paulson and other middle aged actresses

[thedeadbody]

Cate Blanchett in Nightmare Alley

[thedeadbody]

Cate Blanchett in Ocean’s Eight (2018)

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Cate Blanchett as Lilith Ritter in Nightmare Alley. 

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Cate Blanchett as Lou Miller ↳ OCEAN’S 8 (2018)

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Are you looking for this? There must be quite a story to go with it. Won’t you tell me?

CINDERELLA (2015)

[thedeadbody]

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY (2012) ✧ dir. Peter Jackson

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Brie Evantee — co-host of must-see morning show, The Daily Rip. She has three master’s degrees, been divorced twice, slept with two former presidents. She speaks four languages, and owns two Monets.

[thedeadbody]