SEPTEMBER WATCH PARTY - 1917 (2019), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), Wind River (2017)
Get ready to learn some things with these movies.
"April 6th, 1917. As an infantry battalion assembles to wage war deep in enemy territory, two soldiers are assigned to race against time and deliver a message that will stop 1,600 men from walking straight into a deadly trap."
- IMDB
Watch this movie with people either interested in film making or are actually involved with film making.
As a hopefully someday film editor and average fan of one-shots - this movie was for me. In terms of production and all the technical difficulties that come with it, I don't usually pay too much mind. Even as an editor, I don't often think of editing when watching anything either. But this film made me think of everything. I was constantly trying to pinpoint any moment that could've been a cut - as this movie was made to feel like one big one-shot, the actual longest one-shot was 8 minutes or so. I was also constantly wondering how certain scenes were filmed. I know steady cam was involved but there were scenes where I just couldn't tell.
This was a filmmaking experience that was already being studied when I was going through film making classes in 2020 & 2021. It will surely be studied for years to come.
Also...... Thank the gods for radio and telegrams. I'm so used to WWII films & seeing electricity be a norm - never thought about how in the 1st World War was essentially fought in the dark ages. Electricity in bunkers was a luxury. Without technology, we would've been cooked by the Nazis fr fr. Man in the Castle said who?
My Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆
"In 1985 Dallas, electrician and hustler Ron Woodroof works around the system to help AIDS patients get the medication they need after he is diagnosed with the disease."
- IMDB
Man, I must've watched this like a million years ago back when Matthew's Academy win was still fresh. I just had to do a double take and see if it still holds up after all this time.
Matthew has such an iconic persona of being this silly dude from Texas but damn.... He went to work on the set of Dallas Buyers Club. This movie made him an actor. He gave an emotional portrayal of a man struggling with his mortality as he dies of a disease attached to offensive stereotypes. Being a hetero man in a Republican state with AIDs is a death to your social acceptance and masculinity. Ron and Rayon dynamic also added an unlikely-pair dynamic while also providing a story of LGBT acceptance as Ron goes from being super homophobic to ready to shank anyone who verbally assaulted Rayon.
"I prefer to die with my boots on." That's it. that's the movie.
It's crazy to analyze the difference between now and then when looking at the lives of AIDs patients. You just were not able to live your life and it was hard to trust your treatments as this whole disease was new with so many unknowns. 40 years later, you're able to live up to full life expectancy with treatments. We've come so far but we never need to forget where we came, how harsh the stigma used to be, and how important medical research is to all the diseases and cancers out there.
My Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆
"A wildlife officer helps an FBI agent investigate a murder on an American Indian reservation."
- IMDB
While I watched this movie for Jeremy Renner & Elizabeth Olsen, I got much more out of this film experience.
I am not proud to be an American - our history of slavery, violence and displacement of Native Americans at the hands of the White Man, and all of the longing effects and racism are still very much felt to this day because of both of these acts. Check out this fact from IMDB:
"During the course of the shoot, writer-director Taylor Sheridan was visited on set by some Shoshone tribal leaders who astonished him with the revelation that, at that very time, there were 12 unsolved murders of young women on a reservation of about 6,000 people. Due to a 1978 landmark government ruling (Oliphant v. Suquamish), the Supreme Court stripped tribes of the right to arrest and prosecute non-natives who commit crimes on native land. If neither victim nor perpetrator are native, a county or state officer must make the arrest. If the perpetrator is non-native and the victim an enrolled member, only a federally-certified agent has that right. If the opposite is true, a tribal officer can make the arrest, but the case must still go to federal court. This quagmire creates a jurisdictional nightmare by choking up the legal process on reservations to such a degree, many criminals go unpunished indefinitely for serious crimes."
Apparently, Obama signed a law so that Natives can seek justice for victims of domestic violence in an effort to protect Native women. A small step but not enough. Roe vs Wade was overturned no problem and this country has been so focused on our immigration system, but THIS! This is such a backwards law and I can't stomach it. How is this still in effect after EVERYTHING the White Man has done to the Native people?!?
The film itself is your basic FBI drama, but the message is much more.
My Rating: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆