Rate the Last Movie You Saw

[Martin]

Thanks Martin and fair enough. I am not sure if I was trying to convince anyone about the movie's overall "goodness". I was sharing my thoughts after a second analytic look at the movie. I hope I didn't offend. I respect you way too much to try and strong arm you into liking a film. You are the nicest person I've met through various forums and I consider it an honor that you speak to me at all.

I certainly took no offense. I read it as you providing your thoughts on a movie you really enjoyed. In retrospect I see several of the points you make, which was interesting.

[Tommy]

Thanks Martin and fair enough. I am not sure if I was trying to convince anyone about the movie's overall "goodness". I was sharing my thoughts after a second analytic look at the movie. I hope I didn't offend. I respect you way too much to try and strong arm you into liking a film. You are the nicest person I've met through various forums and I consider it an honor that you speak to me at all.

[Martin]

Tommy. I thoroughly enjoyed and see the points in your analysis of NOPE. I would have enjoyed those things if I had been able to watch without checking my watch every few minutes to see how soon I would be released. A second watch will not help me as I am unwilling to try. I have yet to see Maverick but may try it soon. At the moment Where the Crawdads sing is calling me back for a second watch,

[Tommy]

I saw it again this weekend because we couldn't decide what to see. I want to see Maverick but he wanted to see the dinosaur movie again for the sixth time so we saw NOPE (Not Of Planet Earth) again. I enjoyed it more the second watch. The Word spectacle is the key to that film.

Spoiler!

The real villain is the little boy who witnessed the Gordy incident but didn't learn from it. He reveled in it and did the same thing to the life form essentially. You cannot train a wild animal. Siegfried and Roy were mentioned, also numerous shots reminded me of The Birds by Hitch. One over head shot with the creature coming to the gathering is like the overhead shot of the birds descending upon the town. Spectacle, Oprah moment they mention, Oprah interviewed a woman who had her faced ripped off by her neighbor's pet chimp. That episode of Oprah is still the craziest thing I've seen in daytime TV. She now wears a veil much like the disfigured woman in the film. TMZ, nuff said. Gordy, the name, might suggest the straight to video knock off of Babe. Another example of animals being exploited for entertainment. The flags that get hung in the creature's whatever reminds me of the flags we see towards the end of Charlie Chaplin's The Circus, again spectacle (exploitation of animals). The RUN OJ RUN line comes from the biggest spectacle of last century really. The OJ Simpson trial. One shot with Emerald in shadow looking out of the window reminded me of Norma Bates standing by her window in Psycho. That was the first gigantic spectacle due to it's marketing and a film that changed the world. The world of show business, again spectacle with nods to other alien sci-fi flicks of old like the mantis on the lens as a shout out to The Deadly Mantis. Even the ending where Emerald is trying to get the pics, almost makes me think of James Stewart taking flash pictures of Raymond Burr at the end of Rear Window. The first two things we see, after the Gordy clip, are the insides of the alien and it fades into the black man on a horse footage and the final shots we see are OJ on the horse and the shot of the alien Emerald managed to get, some nice symmetry there.

Of course this is all supposition on my part but that is what I see and I did feel like a second watch helped tremendously.

[Martin]

Understood. The pacing is possibly a result of it being edited down from a much longer cut.

That is possible but based on the two movies I have seen from him I suspect it is a stylistic choice.