i watched mad god. i wrote a big review about it on letterboxd, pasted below
it’s an orgy of disintegrating violence, viscera and oil and acid and countless bodies mulched by an incomprehensible machine; which feeds into more repulsive destruction, another cog in an evil so vast it cannot be mapped, only experienced. caught in many monstrous microcosmic cycles that serve nothing. reality’s war against itself.
every scene is oozing with detail, most of it disgusting. there’s a lot of great material work here (duh! it’s miniatures!), emphasizing the wet, dusty, slimey, leathery, and just plain gross. very purposeful shot framing that alternates between snippets of random happenstance, close-up hyperfocus, and slow voyeurism. incredible audio work too! there’s not a line of dialogue in this movie, everything is communicated with gutturals and well-crafted sound effects and music
the miniatures work is at its best when it plays with your sense of scale. there’s repeating motifs of a small organism consumed by a larger one, which is consumed by another larger one, and so on, until some great cog or slab obliterates them. ants being stepped on by progressively larger ants.
feels to me like the definitive miniatures movie in a way, because it’s about the very act of making a movie like this - the clockwork meticulousness necessary, the physical qualities, the confusion of large and small - and relating that act to a larger meditation on war and capitalism and survival. a world of endless rot, a decay that lasts forever. you see everything, beginning to end, but can you hold it all in your head? can you understand something so vast?
i really loved it. for a movie with no plot it sure has a lot to say, and in my kind of language too. seems to be very well-received which is a blessing because there’s a lot of gross stuff in this, enough to make cronenberg turn pale. dante exploring the layers of hell, each one a vast machine created to make literal shit and cum. loved it, it’s just a perfectly evil vibe.
Also watched Mad God. Nothing much more to say about it that y’all haven’t already said, other than - holy moly it’s nasty. Like a lot of blood and guts but I think the thing that bothered me the most was that one fighting ape that had a dangling drop of blood from its dick. Also the uh guys who are constantly getting electrocuted and just shitting nonstop.
It’s incredibly impressive and I appreciate the absolutely fucked world it brings to fruition and I will probably never watch it again /
Watched Edge of Tomorrow, which took me forever to find in my little digital library because I forgot that it’s “LIVE. DIE. REPEAT. Edge of Tomorrow.” I dunno, I guess it was fun. Didn’t really “get” the ending, feel like they kinda fumbled it, but fairly entertaining nonetheless!
Watched Election for the first time. Incredible movie. I love how good Johnnie To is at making gangsters seem pathetic and embarassing. I’m so glad that every time I’ve watched a Johnnie To movie recently, I’ve also been treated to an incredible Louis Koo performance. The man is anxiety personified. Throw Down is his most intense role in this domain but he had a couple bug-eyed moments in Election that I really enjoyed, too.
I love how good Johnnie To is at these big, complex scenes where large groups of people communicate everything about their lives and their shared expectations through how they relate to one another as a group. There are a ton of good scenes like that in the bar and the arcade in Throw Down–most notably the big judo fight with the enka singer providing background music. There’s also a few scenes in Drug War where the detectives react to unexpected chaos that worked this way. In Election there are a couple scenes where the crime boss uncles are debating their election together, and they move and react to events as a group in a way I found completely entrancing. There’s a scene where the oldest uncle announces that the tea is ready, all the crime bosses stop arguing, stand up simultaneously, drink a tiny cup of tea, and sit down simultaneously, equilibrium restored… amazing shit.
Final 15 minutes of the movie blew me away. Lok is a wild character. He spends the whole movie fully committed to the ritual of the election, and he rallies his supporters in defense of those rituals because the rules help him disguise the violence at the heart of his search for power. But the violence eventually leaks out anyway! Wild shit. Tony Leung Ka-fai is also incredible in this one. Big D is the messiest criminal of all time. The scene where he squats on top of the hill to take a phone call after rolling his enemies down it inside large wooden crates was the scene where I realized what kind of movie this was going to be.
Thank you to @anonymous for providing the opportunity to watch this one! I’d been planning on it for a while but hadn’t had a good prompting to do it until recently.
Election 2 is next! We took a quick break to show my husband First Blood for the first time because I told him earlier this week “yeah First Blood is pretty anti-cop” and he did a quadruple take and shouted “whaaaaattttt???”
So when that one is done (we’re watching it in bits during meals) we’ll be queueing up Election 2, haha.
Election is one of my favorite movies! It’s such a good film at everything it does, including the complexity of its political analysis. That movie, more than any other, really convinced me that the differences between legal institutions and criminal ones are technical distinctions
and so on and so forth, the exercise of rituals to reify the legitimacy of power as the true heart of politics, where any number of unspeakable things can be done in defense of this structure
absolutely! I think the huge cast and all those chaotic shifting group scenes really add to this. You see the impact on everyone at every level, how weak and powerful people are all kind of steamrolled into a homogenous carpet of damaged and dead souls beneath this lust for power. They’re all just laying themselves on the line for ancient symbols of authority and ritual that their bosses treat like toys… For me, the most incredible moment in the movie was that pivot in the middle where Kun is bludgeoning Big Head to death, and suddenly they both receive a phone call, and the shifting of the political landscape forces them into a new alignment… and later, that scene where they all become brothers is so fucking dark, haha. All these brutalized men standing next to one another vowing to seize power together because what else can they do? Their new boss Lok will kill em if they don’t!
Can’t wait to see the sequel. I know Louis Koo gets a bigger role in that one and I am rapidly becoming a stan
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