Steve McQueen's WIDOWS (2018)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN2yBBSRC78

well, this looks like a change of pace

we'll see... a genre film w/ some subtext, I would expect.

First heard about this 2-3 months ago...stoked for it. It has the Liam Neeson Action Trash Imprimatur.

hmmm, can you name the directors of those Neeson actioners?

loved the Scorsese one where he goes on a mission to Japan and two Portuguese bounty hunters track him down

George Lucas

weirdly, this is a remake of a british tv series from the early 80s.

Original series was great, much-loved at the time. Avoid reading up on it if you want to avoid spoilers, as various places are playing pretty fast and loose with the details of the TV show.

i will be avoiding this movie tbh. i dislike steve mcqueen and his films.

Why?

early reaction pretty good

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/09/widows-review-viola-davis-steve-mcqueen-tiff-2018-1202000529/

Underwhelming for me

Makes sense that it was a TV series. Felt like they were trying to cram too many arcs in a two hour movie

Really hated it. Glacial pace, poor script material, and some bad acting.

Really hated it. Glacial pace, poor script material, and some bad acting.

Oops.

3 separate stellar reviews in the Guardian:

Peter Bradshaw – Steve McQueen's brutal heist thriller delivers the swag ****
Benjamin Lee – Steve McQueen dazzles with masterful thriller ****
Mark Kermode- Steve McQueen delivers an outstanding heist thriller *****

The major heist of the movie is too ridiculously easy

hmmm, can you name the directors of those Neeson actioners?

I've only seen two Neeson actioners but I can name the writer/director of one, the writers of three and the director of two of those, and the director of another four, though I'm extremely racist and have to check the spelling on that one.

yeah, this is mediocre. Particularly bad performances from the Irish lads

The Guardian chalks up another 4**** review:

Guy Lodge - Widows: why Steve McQueen's slick thriller is an art-pop triumph

Original series was great, much-loved at the time

Was it? It was Lynda La Plante, how good could it be?

it's part of that working class gangster mythos that Eastenders leans on heavily (and may be responsible for that) i.e. it was shite.

turns out there was already a remake in 2002 with Mercedes Ruehl, Rosie Perez and Brooke Shields. Looks pretty dopey

Here's the problem I had with the movie, overall. *WARNING, SPOILERS!!!!*

-Daniel Kaluuya playing a one-dimensional heavy - if anything, he and Manning should have switched roles.

-Main baddie (Manning) outright disappears for large chunks of the movie.

-I don't require realism, but four awkward widows go about their heist planning with little stealth or skill, manage to muck it up as badly as possible along the way, and still pull it off.

-way too many scenes of the awesome Viola Davis just being lonely in bed after her husband is dead.

-LOL Lukas Haas

This is tepid as fuck

saw this a couple days ago. this movie is essential to understanding what makes Michael Mann great: Widows is superficially very similar to Thief, Heat, even Collateral - but with NO style or flair. McQueen's films are so dull looking. the comic book logic and one liners work in his cinema because of his post-impressionist cinematography. McQueen shoots like a TV movie.

work in Mann's cinema*

steve mcqueen is bad imo

i enjoyed hunger, a lot tbh, but it's so relevant to my interests so I'm probably predisposed to enjoy it, and the best scene is a static camera on a great performance by two actors in dialogue for 15 minutes.

shame and 12 years are actively bad - the former hilariously so.

this looks shit

I've only seen this and Shame and that had the same desaturated, bland cinematography and was just so plodding - and iirc a very stupid and borderline offensive turn toward the end

yrc

loved the Scorsese one where he goes on a mission to Japan and two Portuguese bounty hunters track him down

― omar little, Wednesday, August 15, 2018 9:01 PM (three months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it delights me that i have no idea if this is a joke post or not

Lol sorry to spoil it but it's a ref to silence which u should def watch

Robert Duvall is so bad in this.

Tho mostly cos they gave him an archetype to play

Duvall is 87 i think, he gets credit just for showin up

Silence is Scorsese at his best

I almost saw this on Friday but stopped halfway on my drive when I realized the running time.

Instead, I had an excellent lunch.

No Shame in that. No Hunger either

some of you ppl go to 150-min Marvel movies, right

I can't imagine many people on this thread do. you should choose your targets more discreetly.

ok, some of you ppl go to 9-hour Wang Bing documentaries, right

lol

fwiw, I found Hunger either torture porn on one hand or signaling its artiness far too flagrantly on the other.

12 Years a Slave was worth watching for Sarah Paulson's performance but that was it.

Shame is his only useless movie -- a movie for and by people who dislike sex.

All these years later I can't figure out why I didn't respond to 12 Years.

it may take 12 years

the problem was that it didn't feel like 12 years had passed, it felt more like 6 months a slave.

I liked it fine, second to hunger in his oeuvre i think

apparently he saw the Widows series as a youth, made a big impression

I didn't see 12 Years - movies about slavery have never been a draw for me really, maybe Glory is the closest - but one of my favorite podcast jokes is about that movie, from a podcast host, also African-American, who didn't go to see it either.

"My sister went to see 12 Years A Slave. She texted me from the theater: '30 minutes in, still a slave.'"

Shame is the only one of McQueen's movies I've seen. I have no memory of it. I'm planning to see this on Friday. I enjoy heist movies as a rule, so I'm looking forward to it.

Shame is the only other one I'd seen. I'm not sure I 'liked' it exactly, but it probably made the strongest impression on me of any film I saw that year (I saw it early 2012) and I still think about it from time to time. So quite an impact.

Saw this last night, a competently made movie where every character is an uninteresting stereotype and nothing unexpected happens (except for maybe one lame twist).

I liked Shame a lot, and enjoyed 12 years a slave, so I thought I would like this, considering it was getting pretty good reviews. I feel bad for having suggested to my friends that we see this.

Saw this today; it's about a 2.5 out of 5. It's a half hour too long, with a lot of pointless digressions (Lukas Haas's character should not have gotten a second scene, and Viola Davis and Liam Neeson didn't need a dead son, never mind Carrie Coon's "role"). And how do you make a heist movie without one montage? Davis is good, but Elizabeth Debicki gets most of the best scenes.

I thought she was great, don’t remember seeing her in anything before

Lol at all the 5 star reviews quoted upthread, like if this kind of chemistry-free boilerplate impresses you I have some shit that will knock your socks off *goes to Netflix, cues up 17 DTV movies about art heists all starring Morgan Freeman*

She was very good in The Night Manager with Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston. They're both 6'2", so her height (she's 6'3") wasn't as startling as it is here.

i liked this... i think the posts itt snipping at it for not fulfilling the conventions of a heist movie are being a bit uncharitable. it's a heist movie only as a bait and switch no? ultimately my problem with it is that it constantly returned to pick at really large themes -- feminism and race -- but really only just picked at them. i thought the inclusion *SPOILER?* of their son being killed by police was pretty cheap and not really necessary. i did like a lot of the performances tho... i thought kaluuya and brian tyree were great even if one dimensional. colin farrell was the star of the movie i thought, and his character was well rendered to me.

i didn't know it was a series but that makes a lot of sense. brian tyree's character was basically stringer bell condensed into like 15 minutes of screen time and you could really see the seams there... that character was really only saved by the acting and that's debatable.

but idk i was chewing on this for a bit after i left the movie, i thought it was pretty enjoyable if too knotted for its own good.

saw this a couple days ago. this movie is essential to understanding what makes Michael Mann great: Widows is superficially very similar to Thief, Heat, even Collateral - but with NO style or flair. McQueen's films are so dull looking. the comic book logic and one liners work in his cinema because of his post-impressionist cinematography. McQueen shoots like a TV movie.

― flappy bird, Monday, November 19, 2018 2:36 PM (five days ago) Bookmark

this is a good point tho. the colors in this movie were all blue, grey, brown, black, brick red and some dull green. very industrial kinda but yeah nothing really pretty or stylish about it... you could imagine a director with a much better eye for saturation doing some pretty cool stuff with a movie about four widows pulling off a heist.

One scene in particular sticks out in my mind - when Lukas Haas's character invites Elizabeth Debicki's to come with him to Shanghai, the only logical answer given everything else we know about her would have been "LOL you think I have a passport?" And that one line would have said as much about class in America as anything else Flynn and McQueen were throwing down. A small miss but an important one, in my opinion.

xxp sure, speaking for myself I realised “the heist isn’t the point” but if you admit the political stuff feels like window dressing... what are you left with

I feel like all of us were expecting something a lot less insipid, from the cast if not necessarily the director

i loved this and am baffled by the generally negative reactions here

well not baffled but surprised to see the consensus be so negative

ya this was good

needed a better director / cinematographer

I found this exciting and not terrible but have never seen a heist movie on big screen before so that might account for it.

I'd prob have preferred the women to be more capable and hard because I assume real life wives of career criminals must be, right?

this movie rocks!

can see some of the criticisms above, but I thought the acting was good all around, and often sold some of the less sketched-out characters, like Brian Tyree Henry's. I liked it a fair bit though probably would have preferred it as a miniseries where they could better draw out the political storylines, which felt nearly dropped in the last third of this movie

The bonus for Chicago folks is that the locations are untouched and un-designed. I worked for both the hotels that get featured and can say it is as if they just brought in the cameras and shot. Same with the Union League Club, Fireside Bowl, and so on.

Best Chicago movie since Risky Business and would make a good double feature with that one.

No reason for this to be 120 minutes + or why so much of it plodded or why the dialogue was so overwrought, including every scene in which Colin Farrell was the focus. A slick, intelligent hack like Harold Becker or Joseph Ruben might've given this more flair and tautness. Agree that Kaluuya was underused, but I assume the film went into production while Get Out was in release.

I would so have watched this as a mini-series.

A miniseries would presumably have been dragged out a lot longer than 120 minutes though.

It might've breathed with more space. I don't mind a movie with several plots, but this one hinted on "Meanwhile, back at Justice League headquarters" transitions.

hinted = hinged

The fact that they used Liam Neeson in the movie kinda gives away the big twist, doesn’t it? Like I spent a lot of the first half wondering why they’d use such a big name actor only to kill him off in the first minute...then Viola says something like “30 years...and he’s NEVER made one mistake...”

Btw was there any explanation as to why Robert Duvall was still in the house the night of the debate?

maybe because his son told him he couldn't wait for him to die

This was amazing! Sorta reminded me of The Town but better. Zimmer’s most interesting score for a while too.

I was a little disappointed, expected/wanted more about the women's relationship and less about the machinations of powerful men. Got the feeling it was trying to be somewhat Wire-esque but without the scope of a series it bordered on muddled and unfocused. Nicely shot, acted etc, the heist was quite exciting.

I thought this was great, also surprised by the negative reactions, particularly this one:

"Saw this today; it's about a 2.5 out of 5. It's a half hour too long, with a lot of pointless digressions (Lukas Haas's character should not have gotten a second scene, and Viola Davis and Liam Neeson didn't need a dead son, never mind Carrie Coon's "role"). And how do you make a heist movie without one montage? Davis is good, but Elizabeth Debicki gets most of the best scenes."

Almost every sentence in this is wrong! It's hardly too long, and Neeson and Davis' dead son and Carrie Coon's part are basically reason everything happened the way it did. I do agree that Debicki got a lot of the great scenes and she was really good in it. I kept wondering also if she was incredibly tall or everyone else was just short (she's 6' 3" it turns out).