ambulance was fun, i think the politics are bad, but it’s so committed to them it’s pretty easy if you want to read it as critical (or at least project your critical views onto it). heat x unstoppable is a pretty good pitch.
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Baahubali 2: The Conclusion was pretty fucking good. If anything, it’s hurt by continuing the story about his dad (also named Baahubali), so by the time it wraps back around to the present day son, it’s kinda hard to care about him. Can’t imagine the two year gap when it originally came out helped much.
Anyway, the final fight kicked ass. Those movies were a pretty good time.
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Double feature: Jennifer’s Body followed by Teeth.
Jennifer’s Body is fun but about every ten minutes the dialogue is mortifying.
Teeth looks beautiful, lots of practical effects, and it does comedy through everything but dialogue.
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Did a double feature of The Road Warrior and gremlins 2
I was really really surprised by how much Road Warrior still holds up on it’s own even after Fury road. It’s low budget extremely dangerous stunts have an appealing visceral physicality to them, and it’s rejection of nihilism and embracing the idea of communities coming together staving off a harsh world keep it fresh still.
Gremlins 2 is a masterpiece that predicted the real future to a staggering degree. It is still incredibly funny.
…and weirdly almost the same film as The Matrix Resurrections in a lot of ways. I think both movies would make a great double feature because it’s surreal how often they’re playing in the same conceptual space right down to killing their respective franchises and having tons of easy to commercialize in theory tie ins to Warner Bros that also feel like call outs. What a weird pair of movies.
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you could write a twitter account about this
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Triple feature last night: Son of the White Mare, the Soviet era Secret of the Third Planet and René Laloux’s Time Masters. A total mind blow. To have expectations transcended and still find ideas about animation stretched beyondwards after all these years, feels good! Son of the White Mare was particularly impressive, psychedelic is an understatement, some fully immersive trance-inducing heavy metal ensorcellment. And brother-on-brother bare ass spankin’ action. It owns so hard! Secret of the Third Planet wins best soundtrack of the night, reminded of lying in bed drifting in and out of an afternoon nap while a pyche band jams in the basement. As for Time Masters, I’ll be thinking about those floaty lil gremlin droids with the voices of two French children and their conversations about smelling “stinky human thoughts” for a while.
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A Better Tomorrow was great. The visual composition was sharp throughout. Great use of color–many scenes were shot with deliberate contrast between the stage elements and costumes. The first half hour was really confusing because the subs I read were pretty bad, but I was able to piece it together in the second half. Very strong character acting. I like how Chow Yun Fat is an unyielding hardass while getting his ass thoroughly kicked. When he gets shot in the leg in the first act he just goes through the rest of the film in a splint. The ADR was really distracting and IDK if that’s just how Hong Kong movies are made or if it’s a John Woo thing or if it’s simply that Cantonese is foreign to me but I got used to it.
Anyway this was my second John Woo film and I’ll probably check out more. Maybe I’ll watch the sequel idk
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The Killer and Hard Boiled are the twin peaks of his ouvre, a real Demon’s+Dark situation, everything else is at best A- work by comparison
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Does that make Hard Target the Dark Souls 2?
Whatever Face/Off might be, definitely watch Face/Off.
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It’s 2022, I first saw the movie in like 2003, and I still have yet to have ever watched A Better Tomorrow with subtitles that weren’t trash. I see there’s a 7 month old 720p hybrid rip on ptp of the remaster that has the laserdisc mono soundtrack and what seems to be improved subs though, I should look into that next time
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Exactly, and Red Cliff is Sekiro
Any Almodovar fans around here? I watched Talk to Her last night and connected with a lot of scenes. There are lots of connections between this and Happy Together: same Veloso song, same focus on loneliness. They’re not in Argentina but Dario Grandinetti brings Argentina to his scenes. I’m a huge fan of his performance and I’d really like to steal some outfits, makes me feel more comfortable with going bald.
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the 60fps stuff i’ve seen from the recent ang lee work is so intense, i really love it (even if i’ve not got round to watching any of those movies in full)
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some of the stuff I’ve heard re: Gemini Man is that because they filmed in 120 fps (120 is the master, the 60 and 24 versions are the wide release derivatives), the things that usually fly w/r/t stuntwork and choreography that work when shooting at 24 fall apart at higher framerates, probably because your mind no longer has to fill in the gaps. I’m not saying they didn’t shoot coverage because they couldn’t, but they probably couldn’t get coverage that looked any good, especially in the setpieces in the middle with more CQC
but also goddamn did you see the way that convenience store got tore up by that minigun at the end
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I kind of love Ang Lee’s blockbuster auteur thing. Bill Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a fascinating movie.
Before Midnight.
Mixed impressions.
The main characters sure do have some boring takes on gender.
I like the ending.
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this is the best part of the movie! they got old and normative
well maybe not the best part
it might be my favourite movie except the dinner party scene is 15 minutes of nothing, like everything from the 20 to the 45 minute mark (I just checked) represents the only effort in the entire trilogy to show any other characters from those 2 and it’s a total waste of time, but oh well
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That seemed like the point of the dinner party scene.
It’s purely performative and nothing.
The young couple talking about falling in love is both relatable to them and kind of eye-rolly because it’s relatable. Everyone talking, and no one really connecting.
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Watched a movie on tv called Super Cyclone which I guess is the derived version of all those weather themed disaster movies like uh whatever one has a new ice age happening, this one was a lot more charming and I watched it til the end bc the cheapness necessitated a lot of compelling decisions and effects. like randomly changing levels of destruction and chaos on the same oil rig depending on whether it was a full cg shot or one that actors had to be in. Many scenes carried wholly by people doing the star trek throw yourself around in a chair to look shaken bit. People have long inane conversations and the camera circles around them for visuals or whatever but the conversation keeps going and so the camera is stuck spinning, spinning, spinning on and on… problems which exist and are solved wholly on a fake computer interface, so it’ll say WARNING and show a graphic of a collapsing oil rig and then one of the actors will type wildly while music stings play and then the computer screen will show the oil rig lerping back upright and say STATUS NORMAL or something instead.
The two plots are some meteorologists driving around arbitrarily in a jeep being hit by cg weather effects and the oil rig in the middle of the titular super cyclone, which is on fire and also people keep falling off of it, and whenever they’re in the water they just sort of wiggle around going “ah… ahhhh”. Idk if the water was meant to seem really hot or poisonous or what but it was very funny to see this keep happening while nobody actually dies. At one point two characters have an emotional conversation while standing with arms folded over a railing while beneath them there are still more people aimlessly flailing in the water. And then they jump in to help and start aimlessly flailing too and that’s the last we see of them or anyone on the oil rig which is then destroyed I guess… subplot terminated. There’s also a good shot where the super cyclone throws an airplane carrier at the rig and the two guys duck.
John turturros little brother is in it as one of the meteorologists and he looks and talks like he’d be Mob Guy #2 in any other movie but since here he’s the closest thing to a marquee name he gets to put his arm around the main scientist lady at the end, an abrupt but welcome turn.
I also watched Commando which is good and has possibly the highest level of Cocaine Music I’ve ever heard. Any time there was a chase scene and the fucking steel drums on the soundtrack went into overdrive I was very delighted.
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I saw The Northman and really enjoyed it. It’s not really a sell-out Eggers but it is kind of big and dumb in that, as the movie goes on, Alexander Skarsgard begins to spend more and more of his time doing the specific things that I have done in Assassn’s Creed: Valhalla, including stealth kills and hiding from guards on rooftops. But Eggers’ weirdness is still fully on display, particularly in the beginning. There’s a great scene where the main character takes a lot of drugs with his dad and Willem Dafoe, and after that I was like “hell yeah more nightmarish supernatural shit please,” and the movie definitely continued to deliver that, so I was pleased.
The thing I like most about Robert Eggers is that he only tells stories which fully take place in the reality of his characters’ belief systems. All of his movies are about people with absolutely wacky, painful, self-destructive points of view, living in a world where the absurd shit they believe is actually true. During my history degree I took a lot of classes which focused on reading old cultural artifacts–I did a class where I read like 300 old newspaper articles from colonial America, and another where I read something like 10 “autobiographical novels” written by World War 1 survivors too cramped by social expectations to own the reality of their experiences in a memoir. So basically, a lot of writing by people who were all tied up in specific painful hierarchies that no longer exist in the same form today.
The most interesting part of all that reading was learning how to see the people of the past the way they saw themselves, and to hold that in my mind alongside the knowledge of how and why my values conflict with theirs. Eggers’ movies are also trying to both express weird ancient people on their own terms, and provide the audience with enough room to critique the characters’ behavior. That’s the good shit. This is a big dumb muscle man fight movie but it still fulfills that goal pretty well.
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