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Brendan Hodges

@metaplexmovies

Jun 18 • 15 tweets • 7 min read Twitter logo

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I’m home taking care of a sick girlfriend, come at me twitter

ngl.link/metaplex815

Mostly! Luckily it isn’t Covid, tested negative and no fever. Just a nasty cold. Lots of soup, Gatorade, etc. Hopefully she recovers in a few days.

@studiotstella

I am the biggest Kurosawa guy, and and I have this gorgeous print of him (and Toshiro Mifune) from @studiotstella hanging in my apartment.

Too big a question for tweet, but Netflix and streaming trained audiences to be less inclined to go to the movies, from short theatrical windows to so much novel programming. Dumping so many movies on D+ / HBOMax was the final nail in the coffin. Things are recovering, but slowly

LOTR (Tolkien)
Blood Meridian (McCarthy)
Underworld (DeLillo)
Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky)
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Murakami)
War and Peace (Tolstoy)
2666 (Bolaño)
Moby Dick (Melville)
Infinite Jest (DFW)
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Calvino)
Pale Fire (Nabokov)

Lots of book questions!

East of Eden (Steinbeck)
The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)
The High Window (Chandler)
Gilead (Robinson)
The Temple of the Golden Pavillion (Mishima)
Fifty-Two Stories (Chekhov)
The Moonstone (Collins)
The Savage Detectives (Bolaño)

@BilgeEbiri

I’d say MIAMI VICE but I’d have to hand that off to @BilgeEbiri, but:

MINORITY REPORT
HEAT
PRINCESS MONONOKE
DUNKIRK
YI YI

Steven Spielberg. I know how this sounds, but I genuinely believe most of his work has been under-appraised and not treated too seriously as “art” worthy of rigorous study until relatively recently in his career. Movie to movie the strongest filmography of any guy to do it.

Do I always come off as cynical? Would love to hear from others in this. Most of my published writing and threads are on popular genre film, and if anything I think I’m easier to please than many critics / writers. 39% of my LB ratings are a 4/5 lol.

I don’t really have a single favorite, but here’s some I adore and my favorite of each

Gena Rowlands (favorite: A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE)

Maggie Cheung (favorite: IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE)

Ingrid Bergman (favorite: JOURNEY TO ITALY / CASABLANCA)

Cate Blanchett (TAR)

pushy! Sadly no pets, the apartment building doesn’t allow dogs, but here’s the last one I had: he was a very arrogant corgi named Bob. When he was being bad: simply “Robert.” But when he was being a Good Boy: King Robert, the first of his name.

I loved DECISION TO LEAVE. It made my top ten last year, including a screenshot of the excerpt in the tweet and link to the full piece here:

nextbestpicture.com/nbp-top-10s-of…

Here’s a bunch of filmmakers I love who don’t get enough attention, at least on twitter:

Robert Siodmak, King Hu, Costa-Gavras, Tsui Hark, Nicolas Roeg, Hideo Gosha, Fred Zinnemann, Seijun Suzuki, John Frankenheimer, David Mamet (the stuff he directed), Henri-Georges Clouzot

I get asked this more than any other question. My brutally honest take is this: as it stands, film criticism is a hobby that for lucky and/or talented people can supplement your income. For the vast majority, it is not, and never will be, a career. It’s sad, but it’s the truth.

Korean cinema has been a huge cultural import for 20 years. They make a lot of subversive, stylistically daring genre movies that deal with heavy and often universal themes, and more recently, class struggle. There’s an easy accessibility there not all international cinema has.

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More from @metaplexmovies

Brendan Hodges

@metaplexmovies

Jun 19

https://twitter.com/FlashFilmNews/status/1659522381910798337

Something weird is happening with box office tracking. Others have pointed it out, but ~all~ live-action superhero movies are underperforming tracking, while most non-superhero movies are making more. Something is broken. I made a list of most major releases so far this year:

https://twitter.com/FlashFilmNews/status/1659522381910798337

Tracking always has a certain margin of error. It's rarely perfect. But two things strike me as especially unusual: the discrepancy of what movies over or under perform (IE, live-action superhero movies), and when movies fall outside that standard deviation, it's WAY off.

Part of it is surely that tracking is getting less reliable data. I'm guessing that's partly how telemarketing surged during the pandemic, and phone carriers now constantly flag spam (it's called STIR/SHAKEN), but that doesn't explain the full picture of what's happening.

Read 4 tweets

Brendan Hodges

@metaplexmovies

Jun 18

With THE FLASH, ELEMENTAL and TRANSFORMERS underperforming, the hardest lesson for studios is if an audience isn't given a strong reason to see something, they simply will not go. "Let's just go to the movies" does not exist. We need movies that demand the big screen experience.

There's a reason ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE is crushing it: it's a true audio-visual spectacle that rewards the biggest screens. Movies need to justify the big screen experience more than ever, and I hope Hollywood takes the right lessons to approve visually bold programming.

This summer is proving studios can't throw money at franchised projects and bank on a return: many of the biggest hits cost a below-average 100 million (MARIO, SPIDER-VERSE, JOHN WICK, the upcoming BARBIE & OPPENHEIMER). It's not about cost, it's about appeal, artistry, or both.

Read 7 tweets

Brendan Hodges

@metaplexmovies

Jun 17

This is obvious to say, but the color and stylization of design, movement and creativity that's only possible in animation nearly never translates to live action, and in the process mostly reaffirms the beauty and possibility of animation as a medium. I wish they'd just stop.

It speaks to how incredible the animation was in ATLA that Joaquim Dos Santos––who directed half the finale, and a bunch otherwise––just co-directed ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE. This show's look and rhythm is so animation-specific, live-action will always struggle to do it justice.

I genuinely believe adapting animation to live-action is harder than adapting literature: it's a transposition between totally different visual mediums. That requires a ground-up reimagining of how things should look, move and feel like, and its a near impossible balance.

Read 4 tweets

Brendan Hodges

@metaplexmovies

Jun 17

https://twitter.com/BattyWanderer/status/1669763346130956290

There's some truth to this, but we’re also living in an age of the most softball, amenable criticism maybe in the history of writing about movies. If you think there’s a “binary” or “no nuance,” please seek out more criticism. Review scores keep on trending up, not down.

https://twitter.com/BattyWanderer/status/1669763346130956290

I keep seeing talk critics "like superhero movies less" or critics have more and more of a love / hate relationship with movies––there's no data to support this. Even THE FLASH has a mixed-positive 67%. That is the definition of a "tepid" response.

globalnews.ca/news/7947449/m…

Phase 4 is getting a softer reception than earlier MCU movies. But look:

Guardians 3: 82%
Ant-Man: 46%
Thor: 63%
Doctor Strange: 74%
Spider-Man: 93%
The Eternals: 47%

The majority earned positive reviews. There's a lot of lukewarm responses here, not "love and hate."

Read 4 tweets

Brendan Hodges

@metaplexmovies

Jun 16

I love what INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY wants to be: a rousing, elegiac reflection of an aging pulp hero, and a surprising caution to nostalgia. But man, Mangold's direction is the dullest, ugliest, least kinetic in series history. It's just a huge missed opportunity.

The saving grace of THE DIAL OF DESTINY is how committed Ford is to playing Indiana Jones one last time; he brings a lithe physicality to Indy that grounds the movie in something real and even affecting as it juggles ill-conceived action scenes and plot noise. I loved him in this

I'm a James Mangold guy. He brings a thrilling tactility to his movies, and plays with genre in smart ways. This is the worst directed action of his career, with none of the kinetic lucidity of FORD V FERRARI. I was shocked at how awkwardly assembled, murky, and uninvolving it is

Read 6 tweets

Brendan Hodges

@metaplexmovies

Jun 10

Rewatched RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and still in awe by how fucking fast this thing is. Spielberg directs every scene like a set piece, giving dialogue and exposition nearly as much visual energy as chases and getaways. The pace is almost hypnotic, unlike any movie before or since.

My favorite example of Spielberg turning exposition into magic is Brody telling Indy he can chase the Ark; in a 97 second oner, he evolves the staging with a clear beginning, middle, end, with shifting visual cues to highlight intrigue, drama, and finally, danger. It's perfect.

I also love how Spielberg (and Kasdan) have characters interrupt eachother in the big Ark exposition scene, heightening the urgency of what each has to say, and uses punchy alternating angles to turn a "low energy" act of speaking––or listening––into pure visual excitement.