It's a fun movie and Jordan does a good work.

That's it.

It's not Godfather level or anything.

rsmurphy wrote: Mon Mar 16, 2026 4:44 pm Watching the live performance from the sequence of "I Lied to You" on the Oscars was the business. Exceptionally moving.

I thought it was really good too. As I did the movie.
The incredibly dense, almost chaotic Oscars thing was a good distillation of the experience of watching the film.

He is not afraid to be messy, and he's not super concerned with literal coherence.
But his stuff has a vibe 100%, and I guess you're either on it or you're not.
I think it's passionate and audacious, there's a lot to see and think about.
But it's like being hit by a series of waves. The details are only important in the way they add up.
Whether every bit of it "works" or not, I have just ended up not caring about that at all.

It was a little corny the way Christopher Nolan is corny.
I don't mind that at all in the service of a lofty ambition that they can pull off basically completely.
There's something almost comforting about it. It's a sign of vulnerability.
My very favorite directors are basically never corny, but almost everyone else is at times, with much lesser works overall.

It was a fun, flawed film. Basically a Dusk till Dawn rehash. I get the Oscar bait thing. Any well made, successful film that addresses topics like this does are always get a nod.

Dollars to donuts that that the movie-watching public writ large has never thrown-out A Fistful of Dollars is basically a rehash of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly; or, A Bronx Tale is basically a rehash of Goodfellas. Those comparisons are as half-baked as critiquing Sinners to the b-movie exploits of From Dusk Till Dawn. Total surface-level readings like postulating Rusty is a rehash of Spiderland. Inspiration isn't tantamount to biting, and I would successfully argue that Sinners goes deeper than Robert Rodriguez's pulpy vampire flick.

rsmurphy wrote: Mon Mar 30, 2026 5:24 pm A Fistful of Dollars is basically a rehash of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

That’s actually a remake of Yojimbo, Good Bad Ugly was the third in the Eastwood trilogy.

Thanks for explaining that trajectory of a cowboy soap opera to me! I would hope that the point came across save for my ignorance of the genre.

rsmurphy wrote: Mon Mar 30, 2026 6:06 pm Thanks for explaining that trajectory of a cowboy soap opera to me! I would hope that the point came across save for my ignorance of the genre.

No worries, in today's information addled world innocent ignorance is a beautiful thing....I just happen to like Samurai movies so I had to pedantic. Actually the older I get I think I might move to an exclusive diet of Samurai, Wuxia, and martial arts movies and leave the modern world behind. If anybody is amenable to boring art cinema, I recommend Hou Hsiao-hsien's The Assassin (2015) which is like Tarkovsky meets Wuxia, plus you get Shu Qi thrown in. For fans of Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time. No vampires though.