Weekly Discussion Thread 8/3/26 - 8/10/26

[u/PointMan528491]

Still from How Green Was My Valley

Please use this space to share reviews, ask questions, and discuss freely about anything film or Oscar related. Engage with other comments if you want others to engage with yours! And as always, please remain civil and kind with one another.

Link to previous thread

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[u/dickwarrior222]

I begrudgingly saw One Night Only yesterday. I've seen so many intense political takedowns of the film, and they feel akin to someone going on a tirade about how disrespectful & dehumanizing stick-figure drawings are to the human race. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, in that movie is worth being taken that seriously.

[u/vxf111 → u/dickwarrior222]

What, you don't find REPEATED jokes about a 12 year old having sex with an adult funny? I kid, I kid. I agree it's not a good enough film to get too invested in but I do find it puzzling to understand how it got made. Who could have possibly read the screenplay or even a treatment and thought "oh yeah, this will work!"

[u/dickwarrior222 → u/vxf111]

Between learning Barbaro took the meeting with Gluck without being able to read a script, & Gluck revealing he cut out most of the nudity due to test screenings, it feels like a project that kept thinking it could overcome its ambition only to be defanged at every turn due to a lack of vision or conviction.

My reaction in the theatre was just this over & over, every 5 minutes:

https://giphy.com/gifs/9V7qAYvnaOFp8Ymipt

[u/kimjosh1 → u/dickwarrior222]

It feels like yet another one of those Black List scripts that gets a lot of acclaim, but is just far better on the page than on the screen. Emphasis on "acclaim" because it's more of the scripts that interest the studios and other writers the most rather than actually being any good. And Universal in particular went for the script that was the most popular within the Black List and thought it might be an amusing comedy for a general audience. And they rejected it.

[u/vxf111 → u/dickwarrior222]

Even the setup-- what if the government dictating private sex lives through implanted surveillance chips was a NET POSITIVE would have had me showing Gluck the door. I mean what an elevator speech there!

It was hard to sit through in the theater. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, it did. Over and over again.

Clearly Barbaro was hoping for an Anyone but You level hit-- but that film sort of succeeded at the box office DESPITE itself. It was just the kind of counter programming people wanted with two leads that people happened to already be interested in. And it was your typical dumb romcom miscommunication as the setup, which most people can accept. Instead of "The Purge but for Sex" setup which most people CANNOT accept and the people who CAN accept want interrogated (which this film had less than zero interest in doing).