I was just about to post that oh hell yeah
I got distracted rereading all these bits I highlighted where Bogdanovich got humiliated
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Lot of hate for it out there but I thought Th4r was a big colorful fun goofy weird time. Didnāt take itself seriously. A sweet little cartoon movie with a nice message. Russell Crowe as a frilly, horny Zeus was a highlight.
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Paul Schrader is the one person who didnāt find this interesting
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My IQ has a hangover from watching Robocop 2 and Predator 2 back to back. So much cynical āsocial commentaryā and glib commercial āsatireā and N.A.R.C.ade drugisms and Frank Miller and reactionary racial shit. 1990. George H. W. Bush-brained blockbusters. They paired nicely.
Robocop 2 felt like being in the crossfire of like three different screenplays. Too many characters with too many subplots. It was all subplot! Theyād just drift in and out. Felt like Take Your Kid to Work Day sometimes just aimlessly tagging along with Murphy but then heād be gone for stretches tooā¦ Tom Noonan is no Kurtwood Smith but also they didnāt give him much to work with. The leader of a Drug Cult pushing NUKE onto the streets should be given more to work with! His removed brain with the eyeballs still attached was sick though and his robo-anguish conveyed through polygonal Andross projection mounted onto a Phil Tippet heavy metal gorilla with guns for the final boss battle, I meanā¦there was a lot of cool shit for sure. The voice of Little Foot says āFuckā and deals drugs, a guy gets his face shattered into an arcade screen, the ubiquitous graffiti is like Day-Glo gorgeous and Robocop is supernaturally shiny and blue and thereās a violent gang of little league baseball kidsā¦but that also plays a little forced in a way the first film didnāt. Like this scene feels like a pale echo of the gleeful dark humour of the first film but also itās still cool and how could you not love this?
re: kids, I imagine they loaded the grade schoolerās action pantheon with 'em (T2, Aliens, Robocop 2) knowing where their bread was buttered (merchandising)?
Predator 2 didnāt have a kid though. Iām too tired to talk about that one. My friend and I said āThis is better than the first one!ā in unison right as it cut to the naked lady gyrating in bed. And that did nothing to shake my pronouncement. But then they introduced the Evil Jamaicans and we took it back. The whole idea of The City Is The Jungle is kinda wack, atmospherically itās compelling but thematicallyā¦yikes. If Iām generous Iād say that the Predator is karma for the U.S. meddling in South/Central America and now itās come back home with the drugs to wreak vengeance on a corrupt and hypocritical government/society and maybe the movie is aware of that but I donāt think it has the chops/attention span to do anything admirable with it. Good looking movie though. Danny Gloverās good, Busey is Busey and Bill Paxton feels like a Disney sidekick deep-faked in from a wildly different TV edit.
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these interviews are canon
(posting again on the off chance someone here still hasnt seen it the first 100 times i linked this video)
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Saw Gallants tonight. Itās a 2010 Hong Kong film about two older, physically disabled martial arts students who have been caring for their master since he fell into a coma during a match 30 years previously. Theyāre trying to keep everything the same in the hopes that their master can take the school over again once he awakens. A pushover office boy youngster from the company that holds their lease comes to visit them, and sets into motion a series of events that cause their old master to awaken without his memories, or any awareness that time has passed. The rest of the movie is a cute story about these folks coming to terms with their age, studded with some really fun fights where the old guys do a lot of extremely inventive footwork.
The coolest thing about the fight scenes however is that the big strike impacts often transition seamlessly to these highly stylized cartoon x-ray illustrations that strobe wild colors and sell the drama hardcore. While I was watching it I was thinking: this looks SO fucking cool! Why havenāt more people stolen this idea?
Later it occurred to me that a lot of the cast were in their late 60s when this movie came out and they actually couldnāt do amazing impacts. The cartoons are a perfect disguise for that imo.
Other cool fact: the guy playing the comatose master, Teddy Robin, also did the music, which is fun stuff and extremely spaghetti western at times. According to Wikipedia this man was the first Chinese rock band frontman in Hong Kong in the 60s. Pretty neat!
Really enjoyed it! Definitely check it out. We had to acquire it on the high seas
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i heard āknown on Earth as BLOOD.ā in my head as i reached the end of Polygonzoās post so thanks
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guilty pleasure evening watch:
Michael Bayās Ambulance.
itās really just non-stop
and
and I canāt help myself being
all the time, even though the dialogueā¦ yes, there is some ā¦ was straddling the line to absolute irrelevance way too often, jesus does he love drones (have i mentioned how he loves drones?) and what the hell is going on in
ā¦ who cares!
Itās 5 bayhem at its best.
I thought it was his best movie in a long, long time! hit all the notes!
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i didnāt catch ambulance but i am pretty enthusiastic about the fact that it exists. to me, this is one of the perfect reasons for direct to streaming movies to exist. i know this one got a theatrical release, but i am excited in general that there is now another reason to let people make, like, big dumb action blockbusters that donāt rely entirely on some kind of huge science fiction premise, or, more simply, that always have to end with the protagonist fighting some kind of massive cgi blob. iām so done with cgi blob movies!! just show me sweaty dudes running and jumping through explosions.
i have been thinking about this a lot due to the way the ryan gosling/chris evans netflix movie is getting panned. i accept that the movie itself might be bad, but i am willing to tolerate it just because the natural ratio for these type of movies is to only get one good one for every ten or fifteen that get released.
other people are clamoring for the days of the āerotic thriller,ā i guess iām just nostalgic for the days when a movie could be a box office smash hit even if the premise was just āthese two guys donāt get along at firstā¦ but by the end of the picture, they will form a meaningful bondā¦ and punch a lot of guys in the head.ā Like, the highest grossing movies of 1992 and 1993 were batman returns and jurassic park, but the number twos were lethal weapon 3 and the fugitive. think about that! think about what weāve lost.
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my mentor worked on it and told there was a 35 minute take of Kevin Hart just improvising a bit and I would have lost my mind on set trying to get notes on the dialogue changes.
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did you ever see the one with russell crowe and ryan gosling? i donāt regret watching it. i liked it.
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i tried to watch kiss kiss bang bang afterwards and had to turn it off
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Yeah they are a good duo. Shane Black is like 80% great and 20% cringe on a good day and he hasnāt had many of those in awhile. Iirc the worst part of the Ryan Gosling one was the opening scene, but after that it is good. Also a rehash/unnecessary escalation of the dead hot lady cold open in, I wanna say lethal weapon 2? But maybe itās a different one
Edit: itās lethal weapon 1. Idk maybe all his movies begin that way
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universal soldier regeneration / je tu il elle double feature tn bc jcvd and chantal akerman are both belgian
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Finally saw Bacurau. Itās very fun. Hard to say anything about it without spoiling some fun flips and twists or whatever so if you were putting it off like I was, Iāll just say: watch it!! One of the biggest things that impressed me about it was how many damn characters are in the story and how clearly each personality comes though. Long live Lunga and his Final Fantasy shoes.
I also watched Game Night which is like, too much flips and twists for me actually, thanks. Or more accurately: they are too corny? At least I must admit that it was better than I expected it would be. Maybe the actual problem is that I wasnāt interested enough in the situation or the characters to really appreciate the flips and twists. I was interested in seeing more of Jesse Plemmons, who is the best thing about the movie. Even though he is pretty key to the plot he feels shockingly underutilized. I have always enjoyed his stuff, but Iāll admit I have a hard time remembering his name, so in my head I refer to him as āphillip seymour hoffman damon.ā I have decided to try and not forget his name now, since Iāve liked him in too much stuff. It would be rude!
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iirc lunga is pretty pointedly not gendered!
bacurau is so great, always feels like it has big sb energy tbh, surprised it hasnāt taken off around here more
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Watched Incantation, that Taiwanese horror movie that recently went up on Netflix. Itāsā¦fine? I guess? I dunno, the first half hour was scarier than the entire rest of the movie.
As āparent trying to help their afflicted kidā stuff goes, I think The Wailing does it far better. Though I guess the found footage conceit of the main character deliberately hiding the truth from the viewer in order to ācurseā them, thus helping cure her kid was an OK twist of sorts.
Also guess that as horror designs go, the gross void face of the demonic Buddha statue was kinda neat.
Not a movie for folks who have that fear of lotus pods or whatever, anyway.
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I got very emotional watching Marcel the Shell with shoes on. Please watch it. It is very charming and devastating
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I think you might be right about this. Lungaās self-expression and the communityās level of respect is a fascinating detail to that world. For what itās worth, the actor says the character identifies as male.
In this interview, Silvero Pereira, who is also a drag artist, talks about how he convinced the directors to make the character a queer man rather than transgender as originally planned. He did this because he wanted the character to reflect the actor.
From Interview Magazine (I guess thatās a thing?)
RUBINSTEIN: Lunga is queer. And you talked the directors of Bacarau out of writing him as a transgender character, as he was originally conceptualized, for purposes of representationāyou wanted the identity of the actor playing Lunga to match the character, and you donāt identify as transgender. You personally prefer an identity not confined to a label, though of course you recognize their productive power. Do you extend the fluidity that you practice in life to your dramatic work?
PEREIRA: Yes, for 17 years Iāve been doing this specifically in theater. I am part of a collective of artists in my city of Fortaleza that is called As Travestidas which translates as āthe Transvestites.ā And we just discuss issues of gender. Itās a collectiveāitās not just a theater group because we also do dance and music. And we also have a Carnaval parade that we do. So we question and provoke on these issues of gender and what is right and also what is in tension or disagreement with this. And I think when we build this with respect for differences, we have a better society. So Iāve been working with this for 17 years.
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