Beats Momus’s review:
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The Sea Beast is a kids movie about combination whaler-privateers hunting cutesy kaiju. the antagonist captain looks like he just just finished a tour of duty with the COG. great monster fights, surprising lack of any sort of ecological/environmental message, wonderful nautical chatter, lots of strong colours (in lighting & monster design) and strong character design. the end conclusion was weak, they should not have bothered with explaining or resolving why humans and kaiju were fighting
1 Like
I put on the Eyes of Laura Mars again last night as background noise but wound up watching the last like, 45-ish minutes of it because I saw Brad Douriff being kicked out of a birthday and was like, “Oh yeah, Brad Douriff is in this”, and then Father Mulcahy showed up, and then Tommy Lee Jones and his unibrow, and then Raul Julia. But the real standout was Laura Mars’ obscenely large New York skyscraper apartment (my favorite subgenre of 70s diet horror). Audrey Rose also features an absolutely disgustingly-large apartment (their apartment has fucking stairs). I don’t even think you can call their apartment a “unit” when it’s a literal entire floor or two in a fucking skyscraper.
I need to find more movies that take place in large apartments.
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I remember being appalled at the apartment in Serpico. it was half a floor, windows on three sides only
The Great Yokai War concludes my yokai movie watching (at least for now - this Arrow set doesn’t have the latest sequel).
It was alright! In some ways it maybe felt too dark (I had enough of seeing that poor little yokai oozing orange juice blood), but the apocalyptic ending being somewhat averted because a bunch of yokai thought there was a party and one errant bean…pretty good, haha.
Didn’t recognize Chiaki Kuriyama, but she went all in on that role. Some of the most enthusiastic lever throwing I’ve seen in a movie.
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the cool thing about the great yokai war is how miike subverts the nationalist/right-wing politics of spook warfare into something much more… intelligent, all while still being absolutely a kids movie
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it’s Erotic Thriller Sunday, i watched Femina Ridens and Eyes Wide Shut for the first time, to be honest i preferred the former if only for the part where it turns out the weird looking car the sadist guy drives is actually an amphicar and we see it floating around in the water while go-go music plays. other good parts: when he pulls out the rubber version of himself and makes her kiss it, possibly a reference to this story from the life of howard hughes:
mostly the film was about the back and forth between this misogynist sadist guy and the lady he kidnaps who eventually gets him so bought into his own virile strongman routine that he keels over. it goes back and forth between skeevy in fun and unpleasant ways but does get a lot of points for representing his final moments by a scene where he walks into a giant fiberglass crotch, a set of spiked teeth shut and open, and then a skeleton falls out. also for the part where oral sex is implied by a scene where the guy stops his car at a train crossing and the train turns out to be full of grinning lady saxophone players. i liked the gleeful unravelling of the sadist guy’s “mystique” and the extremely thrown off revelation by the end that the heroine is a kind of hyperspecific james bond for killing guys like this in needlessly drawn-out ways.
my eyes wide shut review is that you can tell it’s based on a book from the 1920s as that’s the last time “officer of the navy” could have been considered a glamorous and sexually threatening occupation. idk i liked the creepy emotional coldness of it but also found myself pining for an aesthetic moment that could put the stated themes into a new and unexpected light as opposed to just underlining them. i liked that all the kidman/cruise conversations sounded like silent hill 1 cutscenes.
6 Likes
since i learned that people are just walking cumbucha scobys i decided to watch a futuristic movie about spermjacking
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I went to see that new Thor movie because my wife was having a party for neurologists and I had to get out of the house.
I’ve watched a lot of Taika Waititi stuff lately and I’ve determined I do not like him and his smug yet earnest theater kid energy. He’s like prestige Lin-Manuel Miranda for people with slightly better taste (and, crucially, no obsequious musical numbers). Watched What We Do In The Shadows movie + all of the first season, and also the first 3 or 4 episodes of the pirate show, and while some jokes are more successful than others taken as a whole I laugh very rarely. His work is so… mannered, and curated. It’s an uncanny valley for comedy. “This seems like something that should be funny, but it’s just not quite…” My other comparison point has been: Wes Anderson without irony.
Anyway this new Thor is the worst thing of his I’ve seen, at his most self-indulgent and gratingly twee. Of course in theory yes we all agree that taking a Marvel character and making him a locus for wacky space adventures is a good idea and yes the contractually obliged “oh I have to save the universe” plot is a huge drag on every Marvel product, and these things both remain true in this movie, but even beyond those two points it is very much less than the sum of its parts. Also Natalie Portman is not a comic actor (except in the hands of pre-Brooklyn 9-9 Lonely Island). Casting Russell Crowe and directing him to do a vaguely homo Greek accent is really something I both never expected and never wanted to see. A steady, bite-sized stream of writer-room jokes delivered by Hollywood royalty. It’s bad out here folks.
9 Likes
yeah the pirate show did nothing for me, my wife got it in her head that we’d like it and we bailed after 2 or 3
shadows gets funnier and funnier though
having watched one episode of shadows and one episode of pirate show my conclusion continues to be jemaine clement good waititi bad
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yeah i kind of view WWDITS (movie and TV show) as just sort of an anomaly and that nothing else he has done is or can be that good
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it’s a combination of extremely eastern seaboard producers and career british comedians basically at the top of their game, v little of his DNA at this point
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New Thor also ratifies the new tradition that every Marvel movie have a villain who has completely understandable motivations and morally correct goals but they just make him cartoonishly evil for no reason to delegitimize his position and it’s basically impossble to argue that the MCU isn’t anything but a self-conscious liberal anti-left psyop from the Disney corporation.
11 Likes
So far my policy of just watching highlights of these movies a few months after they come out on YouTube seems to be working for me
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i just read the clickbait articles where they explain who the guys from the post credits scenes are
i used to like watching these movies to get out of the house and be in a movie theater but the risk/reward ratio on that one has changed significantly in the past couple years.
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is it rude when watching a film with a friend to ask them to stop playback and switch sources to your Plex, which has a higher quality encode and non-opensubtitles.org utf8-interpreted-as-latin1 subtitles?
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yes, and I would do it at any opportunity
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i absolutely hate it every time i have to do something like that but like i said i do have to do it
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i on the other hand get the yify files and poorly synced subtitles from opensubs
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