I had a great time going to see Marcel the Shell tonight. As someone who loves stop motion, assigning personalities to household objects, and is dealing with aging parents it felt pretty laser targeted.
It was my first multiplex experience in a long time going back even pre-pandemic (maybe all the way back to the Joker or that American Destroy All Monsters?) and those giant seats make nice buffers.
i saw the top gun film and like … idk jets go nyoom but it was REALLY goofy
It is a dumb assed movie
it DID make me think more than anything else that i should try out that ace combat vr yeah
Watched The Maltese Falcon. It was great! Just a bunch of assholes lying to you the whole time and it never stopping to explain the plot.
My asshole criticism is this is like the Christopher Nolan of the time in that both are pretty straightforward, actually, but for some reason people do need the plot explained to them. I’d say the falcon is much smarter than say Inception.
Nice to know real films exist.
I take it you watched the Humphrey Bogart version?
Great movie, tenouttaten peter lorre content, I love peter lorre.
I stopped myself from going “that’s peter lorre.”
There’s a remake!?
the bogart version IS the remake! There’s a pre-code version from 1931!
Oh it’s the remake!
I had no idea there was an earlier adaption. I assumed that book was pretty new when that came out!
I saw the doc “Persistence of vision” which is about the 30 year production of Richard Willaims “The Thief And The Cobbler”, a film I became obsessed with after learning that it took 30 years to produce.
First off it’s a great documentary and it’s worth watching, and you can watch it on the Internet Archive although I am tempted to throw the directors a couple of bones for the DVD, which contains 3.5 more hours of footage.
The film starts off by introducing the animation studio and the work they do. Thankfully all of the exposition is done through the interviews with the individual animators, and it paints of picture of someone driven to what amounts to perfection. I really get a game studio director vibe out of the interviews, especially with regards to not giving animators time off at all, lots of crunch time, and rewriting entire scenes without much planning.
All along the film you see footage of Richard wanting to making the film and making hints at it, from the 50s and 60s to his oscar acceptance speech where he declared “the best is yet to come” and it’s sort of twinged with this ultimate heart break that it isn’t going to work out. As you watch the film and the years go on, Richard appears older and older, but the enthusisasm is still there. You can see hints of the restlessness as production goes on forever.
Having seen the “ReCobbled” edition in 2019, the doc contains a lot of unused footage and sequences, a lot of it is really good (if out of focus or just pencil tests). One can compare this to Mad God, a film that ALSO took 30 years to make. Is ALSO the product of a film maker who mastered a specific craft. Is also kind of a sequence of very dazzling visual sequences with maybe a plot strung together.
This makes me wonder if there’s a 30 year game project that’s out there somewhere getting made right now that’ll never see the light of day.
It’s so good and it’s hard to say Thief & the Cobbler isn’t better for its tragedy.
Having seen animation showpieces for years, I was really worried that Thief & the Cobbler would be just an indulgent animation showpiece. And it kind of is, but it’s saved by committing to cartoon short gags all the time. It’s still got some of the unfocused, overly fussy energy that I don’t really like in the Roger Rabbit intro, but the cleaner, more abstracted character designs are a better low-energy base.
The insistent camera swoops and dramatically animated backgrounds are way more fun when they can drop any pretense of reality and they get so much play out of Persian geometric art.
But it still wanted to be a children’s animated movie. Just a children’s animated movie with the highest craft production, in a way that only a few cared about. Married to its tragedy, the craft can’t be ignored and it communicates its true values so much more strongly; every unfinished shot screams out what was thrown away or ignored in favor of the virtue of fifty-two distinctly animated playing cards.
Craft is a very distinct niche that is now, in all fields, studied, automated, and then discarded for more efficient production. What we have of Thief & the Cobbler makes the strongest statement it could on how craft is valued, its limits in organized, group production, and its insular and inward-turning tendencies.
watched The Man From Toronto, which had one of those single take fight scenes that were trending like 5 years ago, but it had “disguised” cuts every…3-7 seconds? but they were so fucking obvious. God it was awful, and disorienting, and distracting. Just do a normal fight scene if your fake single take is gonna look like shit. Fuck you netflix.
Anyway I should know better by now, everything Netflix produces looks like shit garbage and sounds like it was written by someone who has heard of scriptwriting but never watched a movie
Netflix for the past several years has been in the Microsoft realm of “not bad when they throw money at people especially internationally where they can’t micromanage, but woefully tasteless in-house”
I watched Cat People (1942) and a lot of it was very compelling—the pool scene ruled, and Simone Simon’s close up shots in the final 15 mins made me ask “why wasn’t this movie just close up shots of Simone Simon being mad???” There are also some very sharp scenes of her character being mistreated that I was pretty impressed by, but also DEpressed, so there you go. Unfortunately there was a lot of stuff that felt visually underbaked, and a lot of it didn’t hit for me, so I feel mostly very middle of the road about it. If the ending had had a higher body count I would have liked it more.
I think if someone made this movie today it would be a lot more horny and violent which is why I cannot wait to see the 1980s remake, which is subtitled “An Erotic Fantasy”
what i know about Natassja Kinski:
Yeah the other reason I want to see this is that anyone who survived having Klaus Kinski as a dad deserves my attention. I still gotta see Paris, Texas!
