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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2936 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 19, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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On Sunday evening, I watched Southern Comfort.

Which is a film about how @hydroacetylene spends his weekends.

No, seriously - Louisiana Nat'l Guard in the 1980s. This film is, essentially, an attempt to re-make Deliverance with, I guess, a more military patina. It doesn't do a great job and mostly survives on a sloppy thriller plot and some competent to good performances by a very young Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine.

It isn't a great film, but it is an okay-to-good film that wants to be great.

So, my low stakes question for Sunday is: What are other films that are good, not great, but really want to be great?

I would say Christopher Nolan's entire career after the Prestige (maybe bar Inception. I think it's held back by Leonardo DiCaprio, but I recognize I'm in the minority in not thinking he's a very good actor). I've really liked all his movies since, but there's always been something that held them back from being great (the Dark Knight's disjointed third act, the general sloppiness of TDKR, Insterseller's "love is the greatest force of all" cop out, Dunkirk and Oppenheimer's focus on practical effects to the detriment of their stories and Oppenheimer's reliance on an unnecessarily elaborate non-linear structure. Tenet was just a swing and a miss.). It feels like Nolan's always one glaring issue away from making a great film, and really wants to be more than just another action director, but can't quite recapture the magic of his early career.

Another one that's closer to my heart is Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. I really love the director's cut, but the combination of a miscast Orlando Bloom and overly on-the-nose War on Terror commentary makes it impossible for me to recommend it without reservations. Scott was this close to making an all-time great historical epic, but it's just too incredibly 2005 to ever be a timeless classic.

It's amazing how stacked a resume Orlando Bloom built off of a couple year span after Lord of the Rings before people realized his limited range wasn't just an acting choice for Legolas.

I really love the director's cut, but the combination of a miscast Orlando Bloom and overly on-the-nose War on Terror commentary makes it impossible for me to recommend it without reservations.

That’s actually something I love about historical epics. Over time it becomes a double period piece, for both the period it was set in and the period it was made.

Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs, penned by Aaron Sorkin, was a transparent attempt to recapture the magic of The Social Network, Sorkin's earlier film about a brilliant tech entrepreneur whose arrogance and single-mindedness ends up compromising his relationships with his loved ones. It was slated on release, but I thought it was actually quite good, with an interesting narrative structure, great performances all around and some clever cinematography to reflect the passage of time. What was lacking compared to the earlier film was the propulsive force of Nine Inch Nails's score and a strong narrative through-line: Steve Jobs just ended up feeling too episodic for the audience to feel consistently engaged throughout. Each of the three "acts" could have been broadcast as an instalment of a three-part miniseries without compromising the emotional effect one iota.

It was slated on release

Slayed? Panned?

To slate:

  1. (transitive, chiefly British) To criticise harshly.

I would nominate Dark Blue and Street Kings two films penned by literary crime novelist James Ellroy. I think had a few things gone differently they could have been up there with LA Confidential and Training Day as some of the best neo-noir movies of last half century. As it stands they are still very underrated and well-made.

LA Confidential might be in my top ten movies of all time (definitely in terms of the number of times I've watched it). But I've always considered Training Day a terribly overrated film. Denzel deserved his Oscar, but I don't know that the film has much else going for it.

I don’t like it that much either, but its always on the lists of best neo-noirs so I felt I had to mention it. Honestly I think it’s one of Washington’s weaker performances (it’s a bit hammy) and I think a lot of people were just reacting to the novelty value of him playing a villain, which he hardly ever does.

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