The Films of 2020

[DarkImbecile]

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the place to post your musings of anticipation for and reactions to films released in 2020 that don't already have a dedicated thread in the New Films sub-forum. If enough posts accumulate discussing a particular film, they may spontaneously ignite and leap from the fuel tank of this thread like a jet of flame onto a deranged cultist in a swimming pool and start burning away as their own dedicated thread. Please limit yourself to one film per post — even if that means a few consecutive posts after a day-long trip to the multiplex — as the mods have hard enough jobs already without having to try to split your 1,000-word treatise on Bad Boys for Life and Disney's Jungle Cruise into two different threads.

It's a new year, a new decade, and an American election year all wrapped up in one, so let's all hide from our collective march toward inescapable mortality together in the womb-like darkness of movie theaters for such comfortably familiar delights as:

• An adaptation of Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted from Dee Rees
• An adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth from Joel Coen and only Joel Coen
• An adaptation of August Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" from producer Denzel Washington
• An adaptation of Broadway's "In the Heights" from the director of Step Up 2: The Streets
• An adaptation of Man Booker-winning The White Tiger from Ramin Bahrani
• An adaptation of the best-selling News of the World from Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks
• An adaptation of the racially-charged classic Passing from first-time director Rebecca Hall
• An adaptation of the Green Knight legend from David Lowery
• An adaptation of a British soccer documentary from Taika Waititi
• The first-ever adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma, starring Anya Taylor-Joy
• Yet another adaptation of the viral twitter thread about strippers on a road trip
• Zack Snyder's return to the zombie genre with a spiritual sequel to his Dawn of the Dead
• Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall's return to America in an actual, non-spiritual sequel to Coming to America
• Jon Krasinski, Emily Blunt, and a white board's return in the sequel to A Quiet Place
• Tom Cruise's return in a sequel to Top Gun
• Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter's return in a sequel to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey
• Margot Robbie and Viola Davis' return in a sequel to Suicide Squad
• Honor Swinton Byrne's return in a sequel to Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir
• A remake of 1996's The Craft [error: 5,000-word appreciation from domino harvey not found]
• An English-language remake of 2014's Force Majeure with Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus
• Ben Wheatley's remake of Rebecca
• Niki Caro's live-action remake of 1998's Mulan
• The Eyes of My Mother's Nicolas Pesce's remake of the remake of The Grudge
• Robert Zemeckis' remake of Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches
• Steven Spielberg's remake of the adaptation of West Side Story
• Guillermo Del Toro's remake of the adaptation of Nightmare Alley
• Denis Villeneuve's remake of the adaptation of Dune
• Leigh Wannell's remake of The Invisible Man with Elisabeth Moss
• David Gordon Green's sequel to his own sequel to/reboot of Halloween
• A sequel/remake/reboot of Godzilla vs. Kong from Adam Wingard
• A sequel/remake/reboot of 1992's cult horror Candyman
• Chris Rock's sequel/remake/reboot of the Saw franchise
• Jason Reitman's sequel/remake/reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise
• George Clooney's Good Morning, Midnight, which I can only assume follows the continuing adventures of Edward R. Murrow
• And a few lame original films from the likes of ::kogonada, Tomas Alfredsson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Leos Carax, Scott Cooper, Gia Coppola, Sofia Coppola, Josephine Decker, Andrew Dominik, Bruno Dumont, Sean Durkin, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, Mia Hansen-Løve, Todd Haynes, Michel Haznavicius, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Miranda July, Charlie Kaufman, Spike Lee, Adrian Lyne, Terrence Malick, Tom McCarthy, Mike Mills, Kornél Mundruczó, Christopher Nolan, Sally Potter, Gina Pryce-Bythewood, Paul Schrader, Ridley Scott, Steven Soderbergh, Aaron Sorkin, Paul Verhoeven, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Edgar Wright, and Chloe Zhao.

Everyone is encouraged to offer their thoughts on any 2020 release that provokes a reaction, whether it's a hidden art house gem or a big budget studio disaster — you never know when you'll be the one to start a vigorous conversation on the merits of 2020's version of Lucy in the Sky.

[knives]

Always the best annual post though that Emma bullet would make more sense without the comma given Goop's history.

Also yeah if that Carax actually gets released.

[big ticket]

Always the best annual post

A welcome sight every new year!

[aox]

[*]An adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth from Joel Coen and only Joel Coen

Interesting. Is this a straight adaptation or something more akin to Oh, Brother! Where Art Thou?

[swo17]

Everything we know about it is in the dedicated thread

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

And a few lame original films from the likes of... Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Not to be a killjoy, but I've seen no indication that Hou has even settled on his next project, much less begun production (and recall that The Assassin started filming nearly three years before it finally premiered). Still lots of exciting Chinese-language possibilities for 2020:

• Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, a literature documentary by Jia Zhangke
• At least one and potentially up to three films from Zhang Yimou: a contemporary urban crime drama in post-production, a WWII espionage thriller called Impasse that just started filming, and One Second if it finally escapes the censors
• Cry of the Birds, an adaptation of Ah Cheng’s The King of Trees and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s first directorial outing in over a decade
• A new Tsai Ming-liang film—no English title or details on length, theme, etc.—with Lee Kang-sheng (naturally) and a Laotian newcomer named Anong Houngheuangsy that Tsai discovered on the streets of Bangkok
• An undercover cop movie from Johnnie To, which will hopefully mark his true comeback after the false start that was last year’s Chasing Dream
• Love After Love, an Eileen Chang adaptation directed by Ann Hui and photographed by Christopher Doyle
• Wang Bing’s Shanghai Youth, or perhaps something completely different that we haven’t heard about yet—either way we’re overdue for something from him
• Stephen Chow’s sci-fi sequel to The Mermaid
• An omnibus film from Johnnie To, Ann Hui, Patrick Tam, Yuen Woo-ping, Tsui Hark, Sammo Hung, and the late Ringo Lam
• Two based-on-fact sports dramas from Peter Ho-sun Chan: Leap (about the storied Chinese women’s national volleyball team, starring Gong Li as player-turned-coach Lang Ping) and an untitled biopic of tennis legend Li Na (featuring Vincent Cassel and a still-unidentified newcomer as Li)
• A semi-autobiographical film from Fifth Generation director Liu Miaomiao inspired by her struggles with bipolar disorder
• Love Song 1980, the second directorial effort from veteran screenwriter/regular Lou Ye collaborator Mei Feng, whose Mr. No Problem was one of the unsung greats of the 2010s
• The Neo-New Adventures, an experimental period story about Sichuanese opera from brilliant up-and-comer Qiu Jiongjiong (Mr. Zhang Believes)
• Song Fang’s long-in-the-works followup to Memories Look at Me, starring Qi Xi
• The Weary Poet, another wuxia film from The Final Master’s Xu Haofeng, starring Zhou Xun and Chen Kun—hopefully The Hidden Sword (which had its commercial release abruptly canceled last year for seemingly censorship-related reasons) will finally emerge as well
• Stars Await Us, the sophomore feature of The Summer Is Gone’s Zhang Dalei
• Surveillance-themed thriller Stranger Eyes, from Golden Leopard winner Yeo Siew Hua (A Land Imagined)
• An in-name-only sequel to the monument to excess that was Shock Wave, reuniting Herman Yau and Andy Lau
• The 1970s crime drama Theory of Ambitions starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai—director Philip Yung’s first film since Port of Call in 2015
• This doesn’t quite fit with the others, but maybe we’ll see Do Fish Sleep With Their Eyes Open?, the new film from Nele Wohlatz (of the wonderful The Future Perfect) that continues her exploration of the Chinese diaspora in Latin America

[DarkImbecile]

Not to be a killjoy

Hou's Shulan River project (which has been discussed as a possibility since the release of The Assassin) popped up on enough of the various "Most Anticipated Films of 2020" lists that I threw him in even without any specific new info, so — while you are in fact a killjoy — you're not wrong to be skeptical.

Thanks for the Asia-centric additions!

[Mr Sheldrake]

The Rhythm Section

A gloomy and disorienting experience for a globetrotting action film, the first of an expected trilogy. Blake Lively de-glamorizes to the max, she goes scrawny and bruised, on a road from a drug addled prostitute to an improbable assassin. To be charitable, she’s miscast. She adopts a specific (in)expression - call it blank, dead, hollow - early on and she never lets it go. The score is emphatically funereal but at inopportune moments of suspense it breaks out in jarring snippets of pop music like Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” and Elvis’ “It’s Now Or Never”(!) The movie appears to be a box office disaster so I’m guessing no sequels.

[barryconvex]

Horse Girl

As stories of schizophrenia go this is nowhere near Friedkin's Bug but the last half hour of this is so good I can forgive the preceding one hour and change of rote character development and the uncomfortable scenarios Brie finds herself in: her deteriorating mental state as it goes from socially awkward to fully removed from reality is often painful to watch. Brie shares an L.A. apartment with another young woman and works at an art supply store. She has no real friends outside of one of her co-workers and a girl who suffered severe brain damage after a fall from a horse when they were both in their early teens. Her immediate family members are all deceased with the exception of her step father who periodically checks in with her, throws a stack of cash her way and excuses himself. All the supporting characters are nicely realized but the time it takes for the movie to reach its obvious destination could've been filled in with more of what made the last chapter so effective. That final half hour, when the film sheds the predictable story beats of a woman in decline and devotes itself solely to showing reality as Brie's character sees it, is a brilliant shift in perspective, equal parts surreal and dreamlike and giving Brie's character an added weight. Seeing things from the point of view of a schizophrenic, something handled so poorly by a movie like A Beautiful Mind which could only imagine those things ultra realistically and as something to be banished, especially how they're presented here- non judgmental in their strangeness and with an affection for the character's imagination, was revelatory.

[therewillbeblus]

I’m curious if you’ve seen Madeline's Madeline which applies the diverse tools of the medium to create the most disturbing idea of a representation of what it might be like to experience a psychotic disorder- and if so, how this compares? The use of sound was key in that film as auditory hallucinations are more common than visual, and the disorientation was nausea inducing at times. I didn’t love that film as much as I wanted to, but it deserves all the accolades in the world for that and the lead perf. I might see this since it’s a topic of interest but I don’t know how a film can top that as far as attempting authenticity to its subjective narrative around mental health. It sounds like they rely mostly on surrealistic yet clearly formed visuals from what I’ve read?

[barryconvex]

I haven't seen Madeline yet so I can't compare, but it's on my radar. Horse Girl's first two acts are pretty standard territory. Watching Brie drift towards psychosis is frequently painful and several scenes are just unnecessarily uncomfortable, such as when Brie enters her place of work completely naked- a scene that I fast forwarded through. I just didn't want to see her like that. In the last chapter the imagery becomes abstract (but still recognizable) ** as Brie wanders through her subconscious until it begins to collapse in on itself. It sounds like Madeline (based on your brief description) is much more experimental in presenting a fractured and/or disturbing portrait of a person suffering from this illness. Horse would've been a much better movie if it explored more hallucinatory ground and might've gotten there had it allowed itself more time to wander through Brie's headspace. Honestly, I'm hesitant to speculate on how much you might get out of it. I liked Brie a lot, and she continues to prove she's as talented as anyone else of her generation (despite the third season of GLOW being an unholy abomination), I liked the rest of the cast and I really liked the last half hour. I'm not sure that makes for a glowing recommendation but there it is.



** "surrealistic yet clearly formed visuals" is an apt description.

[therewillbeblus]

I like Brie a lot which would be enough reason to watch this (though I am seemingly the only person on the planet that didn't like GLOW so I stopped halfway into season 2), along with Baena who I also like more than maybe I should (The Little Hours and Joshy were far better than I expected). However, the description and reviews I've read make me wary, and this kind of subject matter necessitates a lot of compassion and humility for my barometer to appreciate rather than become offended, even if that's not the film's intent.

[Mr Sheldrake]

The Invisible Man

An effective Elizabeth Moss vehicle, she delivers emphatically as a terrorized woman in peril, escaping the clutches of spousal abuse, and then struggling with the invisible force of its memory. The film is at its best in the early slow building tension, Whannell teasing the audience with potential scares and then pulling back.

Once the battle erupts full scale, he gets a bit carried away with the gruesomeness, too much collateral damage. It overwhelms the abuse metaphor while upping the ante on the scares. I nearly jumped out of my seat a couple of times. Moss is superb here in her resilience. There’s a vast modernist mansion used as a setting that is as eerie as the proverbial haunted house of old, Whannell demonstrating how to dramatize interior space. A terrific looking film considering an 8 million dollar budget.

[Mr Sheldrake]

Emma

Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma is technically proficient but her large darting eyes clash with Johnny Flynn’s sad eyed Knightley, who lacks the authority Jeremy Northam brought in the better cast ‘96 version. There is still considerable chemistry between them, how can there not in Austen’s second best revelation of love.

Other charms include evocative traditional folk songs that pop up to ease the duller moments. I chuckled at the the boarding school girls in crimson cloaks marching in formation about the neighborhood like priests at the Vatican. The pastel shades of the cinematography are lovely to behold.

Most adaptations are faithful to Austen’s invisible servant class. They’re ubiquitous here, comical robots instantly attending to every need of their privileged masters. None has a line of dialogue. It’s a lily white production in contrast to recent historical movies that have embraced diverse casting.

[Mr Sheldrake]

Greed

I laughed much more than I expected, some of the satire is sharp and many jokes are akin to the best of those in the Coogan/Winterbotton Road movies. Isla Fisher is very good playing the ex-wife, the brains behind the billions, a role not much different to that in The Beach Bum.

Coogan’s billionaire however is too broadly drawn, he’s all toxic arrogance, and the film doesn’t earn it’s grisly finale. Before the end credits roll we’re given the grim world-wide statistics of inequality, stuff we’ve known for decades.

The statistics are depressing enough, the grim fact of what little is being done about it, or even recognizing a realistic path out, more so. Piketty’s new book, Capital and Ideology, is soon at my doorstep, hopefully he’s got some workable ideas.

[Nasir007]

Emma

Costume designed and production designed to within a inch of itself, this is a relentlessly pretty and visually appealing adaptation of Austen - bordering on Wes Anderson levels of exactitude.

Emma has been designed to be a more prickly protagonist as well. She's really unlikable for much of it.

But the movie works. It is overall breezy but does begin to show its length at 2 hours. The casting is mostly nice save for - well more on that later.

A lot of it has a totally ridiculous air - specially in the overcooked performances of Josh O'Connor and Miranda Hart though Hart does get to leaven her broad caricature with some pathos late in the game.

And now on to the adaptation -

By some measure, people think of Emma as Austen's magnum opus - her very great masterpiece - greater perhaps than even Pride and Prejudice. And you could come round to that view if you actually see how clever this novel is. So for starters - and this based on my reading of the novel very long ago but here you go -

The two ostensible leads of the story are or should be Emma and Frank Churchill and NOT Emma and Mr. Knightley. For the central drama to work, you have to invest in the possibility of Emma and Frank's relationship and Mr. Knightley must feel like a left field choice. This is the construct in the book and it more clearly illuminates Emma's expanding worldview.

To that end, it is also necessary that there be substantial age difference between Emma and Mr. Knightley - another thing not clearly established in this version. And another miss in this version, again simply going by how Emma is represented in the novel - Emma has to be goddess level beautiful. It might be scandalous to say so (but more scandalous things have been said in the recent past) but I don't think Anya Taylor Joy is that. She is very good here but she's not the outrageously beautiful woman that Emma should be. I am thinking Vivien Leigh or Emma Stone or the likes. But that's just the impression I got from the book - based on Emma's sense of vanity and self-worth.

So while this adaptation does contain most of the familiar incidents and beats, it does not lean into them for the central drama of them all - namely the Frank/Jane shenanigans are just sketched over without really bringing to life.

Thus you have a story where Mr. Knightley emerges as the right choice for Emma from the get go without her or the audience arriving at that insight organically.

Overall, a decent adaptation but I would like to see an adaptation which really leans into what makes the novel clever and great rather than just another romantic comedy of errors.

PS: If I were to offer an example of the dynamics at play here - perhaps think of the Philadelphia Story. Stewart emerges as a genuine match for Hepburn and there is genuine fire there and seems like the two could and should get together. With the late in the game left field choice of Grant. Something like that - though even this film I saw ages ago.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Greed

I laughed much more than I expected, some of the satire is sharp and many jokes are akin to the best of those in the Coogan/Winterbotton Road movies. Isla Fisher is very good playing the ex-wife, the brains behind the billions, a role not much different to that in The Beach Bum.

Coogan’s billionaire however is too broadly drawn, he’s all toxic arrogance, and the film doesn’t earn it’s grisly finale. Before the end credits roll we’re given the grim world-wide statistics of inequality, stuff we’ve known for decades.

The statistics are depressing enough, the grim fact of what little is being done about it, or even recognizing a realistic path out, more so. Piketty’s new book, Capital and Ideology, is soon at my doorstep, hopefully he’s got some workable ideas.

Not sure if you're British or not, but Coogan's character is clearly modelled on Philip Green, who (along with Mike Ashley perhaps) is the personification of UK capitalism at its grimmest. If he's not partying with the likes of Kate Moss, he's avoiding tax, being accused of bullying, racism and sexual harassment, using sweatshops, asset stripping, trying to weasel out of his pension liabilities whilst paying himself huge bonuses, and despite his billions, he's furloughed his staff so the government picks up part of their salary. I can't think of any more depths he can descend to.

[Persona]

The way 2020 is going, Sonic the Hedgehog will probably be the best movie I saw in the theater.

[Reverend Drewcifer]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/a ... n-features

That's enough internet today.

[therewillbeblus]

Damn, I was sure that Peter Berg was gonna beat the pack to make the first movie about COVID

[Never Cursed]

Josh Trank's Al Capone biopic Fonzo is now called simply Capone and has a first trailer. In a move that shows that the distributor (the same as of hit films Billionaire Boys Club, The Professor And The Madman, and Gotti) has nothing but confidence in the pic, it will be released May 12 directly to streaming

[colinr0380]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/a ... n-features
That's enough internet today.

Corona Zombies is the subject of The Cinema Snob's latest video and somehow is even worse than could be imagined. It is a little bit of new footage but the rest of the film is a re-dubbed 'comedy' version of Bruno Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead(!) and the terrible mid 2000s film Strippers vs Zombies. Apparently it is 'directed' by Charles Band, but this is a far cry from Trancers! Or even the Gary Busey starring The Gingerdead Man!

I mean even disregarding the insensitivity in the current situation, it makes one feel sorry for Hell of the Living Dead as well for not deserving to be treated in such a manner!

[Mr Sausage]

I mean even disregarding the insensitivity in the current situation, it makes one feel sorry for Hell of the Living Dead as well for not deserving to be treated in such a manner!

Seems fitting for a movie that's 30% stock footage to become essentially stock footage in another movie!

[colinr0380]

I suppose the Cinema Snob is correct then by terming it the Inception of bad movies as we dive deeper and deeper into layers of stock footage!

[Calvin]

Lav Diaz's new short film, Himala: isang dayalektika ng ating panahon (Himala: A Dialectic of Our Time) can be viewed here - from 1:44:04 of the recorded live stream.