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BREAKING BAD


Jay

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Just watched it

 

I dunno. I'm gonna need time to let this one sink in. Storywise, it's pretty thin. Makes for an okay modern Western, I guess. Jesse looks badass in this with his leather jacket. Feedback from everyone else would be appreciated.

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I watched the film this morning, too.

 

SPOILER-FREE thoughts:

 

I thought it was pretty good, if ultimately... inconsequential.  It's a nice epilogue to the show.  It's nicely shot, nicely directed, nicely edited, nicely scored.  All those are top-notch, actually; the cinematography is on point, it seems to me they used the same digital cameras they use for Better Call Saul, the ones that can capture nice images even in very low light conditions, so a lof of the indoors shots really ooze with a nice moody atmosphere.  And then the occasional big outdoor wide shot, like of the desert, or of the city transitioning from night to day, look great too.  GIlligan's directing is on point, with a bunch of interesting shot compositions, a nice classic BCS-style montage, and the editing by Skip gives the whole movie a nice pacing.  Dave Porter's score is basically the same as how he scored Breaking Bad, it doesn't really use the increased musical landscape he uses now on BCS; even a BCS-style montage is scored more like a BB montage than a BCS montage.  The needle drop songs peppered in are all nice too.

 

In essence, this has the feel of a random Breaking Bad episode, but also quite different, because any Breaking Bad episode for the most part was anchored around the huge lead in Walter White and his empire building. This main narrative has a very different feel, being a much more personal story about Jesse without all the weight of drugs and cooking and empires being in the background, just his own goals he's trying to achieve in this movie.  I loved that the various flashbacks peppered in enhance THIS story, none of them are there to change anything about what we already saw in BB, no cheap tricks or retconning that changes anything about BB if you were to watch it again.

 

It's a fine film worth 2 hours of your time to check out, but if you never watch it and want to leave it to your imagination what Jesse gets up to after he drives away, that's fine too.  You won't be missing out on any brilliant kind of ideas Vince had about that or anything, just a nice story that is perfectly entertaining and very well made.

 


SPOILER FILLED THOUGHTS:

 

Spoiler

I liked that the only characters Jesse really interacts with after driving away are Badger, Skinny Pete, the Vacuum guy, and the 2 new bad guys.  And I also liked that the various flashbacks peppered in all took place during various different times in Breaking Bad's story, and all enhanced THIS story, either in plot ways (like Jesse knowing where to get money), or character-building ways (like how the previously unseen conversations with Mike, Walter, and Jane give insight into his current motivations and thought processes).

 

I thought Aaron Paul was really good as THE main character of this movie.  I mean, I think he appears in literally every scene?  And he did a fine job in all of it, not only playing a version of Jesse we hadn't seen before (the main narrative), but sliding back into how Jesse was during the various different times in the BB timeline we see in flashbacks.

 

Opening with the conversation with Mike was kinda neat, I guess we never knew before that it was Mike's idea for Jesse to want to relocate to Alaska?  Did Cranston actually shave his head again for the Water flashback?  If not, that was a good bald cap.  And speaking of wig stuff, I thought the only time in the entire movie anything looked bad at all, was the bad wig and beard Jesse had for the flashbacks to when he was in captivity.  BCS is full of great wigs every week, what happened there?

 

Jesse Plemons was also very good as Todd.  That character was always an interesting one, and I loved that this one showed us even more weirdness in him.

 

This movie had some very suspenseful scenes that I liked a lot!  Jesse in Todd's house with the two cops that turn out to not be cops had some awesome suspenseful moments.

 

I also liked all the little things Gilligan peppered in to keep you thinking and engaged in the movie.  Like when he tears a page from the phone book out you wonder what it is, then later you find out.  When he asks Skinny Pete for the El Camino keys and takes something off before giving them back, you wonder for a while what it was, then you find out.  I love stuff like that.

 

I do wonder what Jesse's plan was when he called his parents.  Did he think they might have $1800 in their safe, and if they did, he would have just taken it and gone back to the vacuum guy?  Or was he only expecting to find a gun (or two), and was planning on getting it from the welding guys all along.  I suppose we'll never know and it doesn't really matter.

 

Incidentally, this scene is not in the finished film at all:

 

 

 

 

It's clear where it could have been placed where it kept in, and the way the trailer cuts off here, I kind of think there is more to it and this trailer only shows a part of it.  I think if they kept it in the film, it really would have slowed the pacing way down, and it would have been unnecessary entirely - I'm glad if it was cut.  Although, I wonder if it was never intended to be in the movie, and it was shot just for the trailer?

 

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Oh yea and I forgot to mention - when you start it on Netflix, a very nice and very lengthy (felt like maybe 4-5 minutes) recap of Breaking Bad plays, in full 16:9 HD, and then when that ends, if you have a 4K TV w/ Dolby Vision HDR, the film itself is 4K Dolby Vision HDR in 2.35:1 ( I believe), and looked great!  Netflix 4K is still too compressed for my liking, but this was probably the best HDR I've seen from the service yet.

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1 hour ago, Jay said:

I thought it was pretty good, if ultimately... inconsequential.  It's a nice epilogue to the show. 

 

That seems to be the general gist of most of what I've been reading on the matter, yeah.

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Off the beaten path question, but can anyone who's watched it tell me if there is any suicide in this movie or significant gun violence?  Trying to figure out if we're in the mood to watch it tonight or to wait for a while.  Feel free to reply in spoiler tags.  Thanks!

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I'll answer for you Troxy

 

The presentation on Netflix begins with a recap of Breaking Bad which recaps plenty of gun violence from the show, including the machine-gun-in-the-trunk scene

 

As for the film itself,

 

Spoiler

There is no suicide or anything close to it.

 

There is one lengthy scene towards the middle of the film where multiple characters have guns drawn on each other, but they never fire.

 

There is one scene at the end of the film that has people shooting guns at each other and you see blood, but it doesn't linger on any of it

 

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It was enjoyable but not really necessary. It doesn't feel like it adds anything much of substance in the same way BCS does. But there's nothing wrong with it either.

 

Karol

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More or less my thoughts (you can read them up above)!

 

Some of the shots were exquisite at least, like that overhead shot of Todd's apartment!

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Ok, you know what's really weird? 

 

Spoiler

When the movie got to the part where Jessie was shown as circling and checking out vacuum cleaner places, I thought to myself "it's too bad he won't be able to find the same guy, since Robert Forster died", and then when he turned up, I realized I must have been thinking of someone else! 

 

I love Robert Forster and he was great in this, so happy he got two big scenes. 

 

Bummer that he passed :( another Sheriff Truman for Lynch to have to replace! 

 

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Question:

 

Spoiler

When the junkyard guy is searching for bugs on the titular car, one activates, he skedaddles, and the whole police force arrives. I don't remember anything about this bug being on the car or understand how Joe activated it. The flashbacks show it getting a truck cap but little else.

 

Is there a specific episode from the last season of BB that explains this? 

 

 

I did like that Jesse was able to say goodbye to his parents, and I thought his final goodbye was more of that, but the letter was for the last character he loved. 

 

 

This movie was a love letter to Jesse and a nice way to wrap up his story arc. It might have felt unnecessary as a two part episode tacked on after Felina - - the series was Walter's story and ends with his end - - but I'm glad that this was produced. We need to see more of Aaron Paul in things! 

 

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He wasn't looking for bugs, he was checking to see if it's LoJack was activated, and it got activated right there while he was scanning, which is why the police showed up. 

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Oh. I wasn't familiar with that tech so if he mentioned it, it didn't register with me. So it was a legal "bug" designed to track stolen cars. 

 

It makes sense: the cops at the crime scene knew the identities and could cross-reference the vehicles registered to them, especially if they could identify the tire tread of the car that got away. Then it's just a matter of time. 

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To me, the highlights of the BB movie are:

 

1) The entire Jesse/Todd part.

2) 'The vacuum cleaning store' scene

 

All in all, it's better than Deadwood The Movie. It really feels like a double Jesse solo episode. We're getting the same quality of the TV series.

 

Slightly negative points:

 

The Walter White and Jessica Jones appearances warped me out of the movie. I definitely wouldn't have done those.

 

18816630-0-image-a-26_1569230781017.jpg

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3 hours ago, Jay said:

The part with Jane was so short, I wondered what the point was

I suppose the only point was for Jesse to see all the ghosts of the past before he moves on. Or whatever.

 

Karol

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Answering one of Jay’s questions: 

 

 It was a bald cap, Aaron Paul said in an interview that Bryan Cranston took a few days off from his broadway show to shoot his cameo. 

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Pretty good movie, although it didn't quite have the slow, suspenseful pace that defined both BB and BCS. Felt a tad more 'mainstream'.

 

Spoiler

 

Don't know what all the spoiler fuzz about Kim Wexler being in it was about, because she wasn't (nor is Saul, for that matter).

 

When is the conversation between Jesse and Mike at the shore of a river supposed to have taken place? I thought the movie would end on this point, but it obviously didn't.

 

 

It seems to me the film was a pretty good closure, but also had several open-ended questions that could easily spawn more films. I have no idea if any are planned.

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Robert Forster's scene at the vacuum store is the best part of the whole thing.

 

Other than that, not entirely sure why this movie exists. But it's fine. Any excuse to put Aaron Paul on screen more is fine by me.

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3 hours ago, KK said:

... not entirely sure why this movie exists. 

 

 

10 hours ago, Thor said:

 

It seems to me the film was a pretty good closure ...

 

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1 minute ago, Thekthithm said:

Any news on a blu-ray release of El Camino?

 

Just buy PlayOn and use it to record yourself a perfect mp4 of the Netflix movie. It's legal DVR technology.

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Show of hands: who here immediately went online to find out just where the hell Haines, Alaska is?  *raises hand*  Personally, I expected it to be more in the northern wilderness rather than the lower panhandle.  

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4 hours ago, woj said:

House of Cards was released on media. So was Orange Is the New Black. 

 

Rest easy. It will get a release. 

 

It just won't be talked about three days after its streaming debut. 

 

The Haunting Of Hill House has just been released as well.

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9 hours ago, Matt S. said:

Show of hands: who here immediately went online to find out just where the hell Haines, Alaska is?  *raises hand*  Personally, I expected it to be more in the northern wilderness rather than the lower panhandle.  

 

Hmm, Haines is a weird place to take Jesse. Or actually, someplace 40 miles from Haines is weirder still. It does suggest that instead of driving the box truck up through British Columbia and Yukon, that the vacuum guy used a ferry from Washington through the Pacific to get to Alaska. Haines and Skagway are both ports that receive such ferries, but the road south of Haines is 8 miles, not 40. Then Mr. Driscoll needs to cross into Yukon, cross it (it's a good day's drive), and then have his credentials checked at the Alaska border, if he crosses using Highway 1. The northern route is really out of his way. If they meant Haines Junction, that's deep inside Yukon. 

 

Hmmm. If he actually did take Driscoll past Haines, then pointing it out is backtracking, a bad idea. 

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Vince Gilligan's original idea for this movie featured Jessie saving someone (a new character), then going to jail as a result, and finally being at peace once he's there.  His girlfriend, Peter Gould, and the other BCS writers talked him out of it

 

Quote

I didn’t get super far down the road, but it was probably going to be a young woman who needed some help,” he says. “He was hiding out by the Canadian border, and this woman was working at a motel as a housekeeper or something. [He] goes into the process of saving her, knowing full well that he’s going to suffer for it, he’s going to get caught for it, but he does it anyway. And the last scene would be maybe him in a jail cell but at peace for the first time since the movie began. I think there was going to be this component where he couldn’t sleep. He wouldn’t get a single night sleep for a week or so upon escaping. The police are looking for him and he’s too haunted and he’s too adrenaline-charged. And at the end of the thing, he’s in a jail cell, and ironically he can fall asleep like a baby. And I thought, ‘Ah, that’d be kind of cool.'”

 

https://ew.com/tv/2019/10/14/aaron-paul-vince-gilligan-breaking-bad-el-camino-alternate-endings/

 

Quote

After Breaking Bad ended, you said that Jesse Pinkman was free, that he successfully got away. All these years, you maintained that. But I wondered if you had second thoughts as you started to write the movie. Were there other possibilities you considered?  

 

Yes, I did. I like irony in storytelling. I love ironic twists. Once I had set about coming up with this movie, for the longest time I had it in my mind that the thing we wanted most to see was for Jesse to escape. And the thing he wanted most to do was escape. So I was trying to concoct a plot in which, hero that he is, he saves somebody else — somebody I would have introduced as a new character into the movie. Because he’s such an innately heroic character in my mind, he saves someone at the end of the movie and he willfully gets himself caught knowing that it’ll save this other person. At the end of the movie, he’d be locked in a jail cell somewhere in Montana or someplace. And he would be at peace with it. It was all this very interior, emo-type, very dramatic stuff.

 

I pitched it to my girlfriend, Holly, and she said, “Are you out of your mind? You can’t have him in a jail cell at the end. You got to let him get away. People will riot.” I said, “No, don’t you get it? It’s art. It’s artistic.” And then I said, “No offense, you’re not a writer. I respect you, of course, and I love you. But you’re not a writer.” And then I went the next day and pitched it to Peter [Gould] and the writers of Better Call Saul, and they all looked at me in silence. They said, “Are you crazy? He’s got to get away at the end.” [Laughs.] As the saying goes, if enough people tell you you’re drunk, you need to sit down. So I dispensed with that idea.

 

Had you worked out who this new character was going to be?

 

I hadn’t quite worked it out. To my credit, I was kicking this idea around, but I didn’t get too far down the road with it. I didn’t actually start writing it, but I had some pretty definitive ideas. I spent a couple of weeks on that. But I’m glad I discarded it. Sometimes you succeed by giving people the opposite of what they want, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes you just got to give folks what they want.

 

https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/el-camino-breaking-bad-movie-vince-gilligan.html

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Soooo glad they did not go with that story idea, I definitely enjoyed the story that was.  I had almost forgotten how much I hated Todd and how evil he was, but I was certainly reminded!  

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49 minutes ago, ATXHusker said:

Soooo glad they did not go with that story idea, I definitely enjoyed the story that was.  I had almost forgotten how much I hated Todd and how evil he was, but I was certainly reminded!  

 

I kept waiting for Todd to make a pass at Jesse when he had him in his apartment. Even though he had the hots for Lydia. 

 

I know that's not very PC and it would anger the alphabet people, which is why they couldn't go that route. The show has never flirted with that type of behavior, and a one-off movie isn't the place to introduce unnecessary controversy.  Besides, it wouldn't jive with the ultra-conservative philosophy of his uncle's gang.

 

Maybe twenty years ago, you could get away with associating that behavior with being evil, but here's a guy who doesn't know the boundaries between right and wrong, who casually shoots the little boy on a bike, who treats his housecleaner like it's no big deal. Nobody would ever believe Jesse, so I just kept waiting in fear that Fat Damon would cross the line. He did not. Whew. 

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So this was Genesis of Sunken Containers 2.

 

A boring and pointless addition to the Albuquerque Chronicles, I actually expected something a lot better and more worthwhile than this. 

 

It was fine I guess, if you're big on "fine" as a practical way to spend two hours. Personally I'd rather watch something more interesting.

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