Ok, having had a good night's sleep, I'll ask the obvious question. JoJo Rabbit and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood both came out in 2019, so they are just outside the "new" window that I proposed at the outset of this thread. But still, both are quite recent. You like them both.
I understand if you simply don't watch many movies, but if your recent experience with "new" films is so positive, I'd expect you to be a bit more optimistic about the films that are being made today.
So I'll ask: where do you get your leads on films that you DO watch? (Aside from FR movie threads, of course.)
I ask the question because of my own experience. I had tuned out tv and movies almost entirely. I was a "nuke Hollywood from orbit" type. Perhaps three years ago, however, I stumbled across a spectacularly good film on a subject of considerable interest to me, on which I already knew the backstory. One thing led to another, and I came to realize that I had developed a huge blind spot. That's when I started poking around and discovered that there are plenty of good films to watch, if we can find them.
Most of us aren't as young as we used to be, and aside from the trolls, everyone at FR is conservative or at least conservative adjacent. On both counts, we aren't Hollywood's target demographic. When it comes to our kind of movies, we are looking for the needles in the haystack. But they are there, hiding in plain sight. Finding them is the trick.
Reasons I chose those two:
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was about the Manson murders. Long ago, when I was young, a dentist I was dating had wonderful red curly hair. He went to celebrity barber, Jay Sebring, who invited him to a party with “real movie stars.” He came over and invited me. I felt as if 15 guys with a battering ram had hit me in the gut. And I shouted, “NO!” He said of course we won’t go. Jay was killed that night and we might have been too. So, I decided to see the “sendup.” Laughed a lot. My daughter and son-in-law saw it the same night in a different town, said the whole theater was LTAO.
JoJo Rabbit was about WW2. I’m old enough to remember that war. In fact, I was 5 , and at Sunday afternoon dinner with my parents at a neighbor’s house. I finished early and went into the living room, where radio was on. A few minutes later, “This program is interrupted” and there was Roosevelt announcing war. I told my parents. It was an amazing, unforgettable moment. So a movie about a little kid involved in that war really appealed to me. Went with a friend who was not old enough to remember it and she had ZERO clue what the civilian population went through. Thought movie was lightweight and funny. I had to explain to her how serious it was for the civilian population.
PBS has old movies on most Saturday nights, and I watch many of them. Email info to friends who might enjoy them too. Lots of us, both liberals and conservatives, are disgusted with new movies. And the “actors” who don’t know how to act, they’re just “personalities” in expensive clothes.
And of course, theaters were locked down for a long time.
So how do you pick new movies?
ALL!
(Unless you count the dead ones that post here.)