succccch a good movie… have u watched heat / miami vice (2006) / blackhat. . . ?
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nope! well, i saw heat 15+ years ago on a DVD someone loaned me and it didn’t stick with me at all, but i’m a different person in almost every way so i’m likely going to try it again sometime
gonna try and work on my woeful lack of michael mann knowledge
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I find one of the best entry points to Mann is just looking at his colors…Miami Vice or Manhunter or Thief are gorgeous as surface objects until you’re in conversation with his themes of real work done well and the self-propelling values and destruction it creates.
I should think more about the differences between Mann and Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, First Man), who I’m similarly drawn to for his self-regarding portrayal of alienating drive. A similar focus on the meticulous portrayal of the subject and its details in order to sympathize with the mindset of work, but his figures are institutionalists working within a laid path. Not as interested in boundaries between sanctioned and outlaw paths and why a commitment strays between them.
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I watched the american Death Note (2017) which I had only seen before in memes of Light’s hilarious scream and the actually amazing monster work for Ryuk. Ryuk as a combination of practical and cg is maybe one of the best looking movie monsters ever for the 3 or 4 minutes of screentime he has and I mean Willem Dafoe playing a scary monster man is you know…it’s that…it’s good. Lakeith Stanfield as L is actually inspired and does an excellent job of harnessing his weirdness. (I guess maybe Adam Wingard is just an Atlanta fan since Brian Henry is in his Godzilla movie). They really should have leaned way harder into the Joker/Harley, Natural Born Killers, Hot Topic gothness of Light and Mia because there is so much juice to it. There’s a sex scene intercut with them killing (not)Kim Jong Un and (not)Osama Bin Laden and the movie’s tone can’t really match the insanity of the text of the script. There is almost none of the ridiculous cat and mouse/shonen dick measuring that is the manga’s meat and potatoes which is a shame. The worldwide worship for Kira feels like the cheapest element. It comes into play in the end but throughout the movie you don’t really get the sense that the world has changed like you do in the original and it’s other adaptations. If they had just made this functionally an episode of Columbo with dangerous lifetime movie teens it would have worked out great. All the ingredients are there but the scope is so broad that it can’t really bring it all together. Like an actually watchable and entertaining version of Shayamalan trying to cram a season of Avatar into one movie. They got so close. If the movie could all have the tone of this dumb picture…
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my michael mann take remains that in his likeee mature works (from idk… mohicans and on) he comes to resemble kar-wai wong more and more as this director of incredibly lush and sensual movies—sensual here taken literally like its all about textures visually and aurally. i mean yes hes also directed some absolute banger thrillers but
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Thanks for someone else on the forum watching this. I had a really great time with it and loved how it threw Death Note into the trash to tell a similar but different story.
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Yeah I watched it right when it came out and nobody anywhere would believe me that it was actually really funny and enjoyable.
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watched weiner-dog, a todd solondz movie I haven’t seen before! I didn’t like it too much, shoulda taken
as an omen
its in three parts, a dachshund gets involved in different people’s lives and the movie features whoever the dog is hanging out with
I gotta get this out of the way first. for the beginning credits they put the dog in a mesh floor cage, and in the like two minutes the dog is in there you can see how horribly uncomfortable the dogs feet are. don’t use mesh floor cages for any animal ever thank you
the first part (up to the amazing intermission song) is alright. a tiny cancer survivor child gets a puppy and his parents are psychotic (HIS DADS MANNERISMS MADE ME THINK I WAS GONNA LOVE THE MOVIE) and weird, like the French mother tells her son about an evil aids dog named Muhammad that went around attacking all the forest animals to convince her son the weiner dog needed to be fixed. that was a good burn on the french
the dog gets sick and they go to put it down. dawn weiner doesn’t actually kill herself, she ends up being a vet tech. she steals the dog and reunites with Brendan (the three pm you get raped bully from dollhouse), who’s played by mculary culkins brother. they eventually hang out with his disabled bro and his wife, and Brendan (lies?) tells his brother about his dad dying. this entire conversation is confusing. I’ve never been just straight up confused by solondz dialogue so it just comes off as this really mean spirited scene about lying to people
second part is danny devito being pathetic? or maybe being the only one to stand up to shallow film students. I can’t tell. Danny devito is a washed up screenwriter who is an aging professor at a university and he’s in trouble for being too negative, he yells at someone to PLEASE JUST NAME A MOVIE that’s dodging questions, but he also completely blows off a queer film student for being too queer in his filmmaking? is he an asshole or cool guy? super weak writing again
third part is ellen burstin being old and self aware and pathetic and seeing ghost children while her life slips away. not as good as her old pathetic self in requiem for a dream and that was like 20 years ago!!
I dunno, his movies usually have me really empathetic towards complicated characters but this one had me feeling not much about simple but motivationally confused characters. at least I can tell myself it’s non canon
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yeah, I was let down by that one too
it’s one of those the more I think about it the less I like it movies
pardner and i picked up alamo season passes to escape the unbearable los angeles heat wave. $30/mo gets you into a movie a day which isn’t too bad for 2 hours of cold AC washing over you. in the past week we’ve seen saloum, nope, and barbarian. have never really been into horror movies, too scary, but something about them has been clicking lately. think i like how it can grab you and you’re just like… living in this world/atmosphere for a while with the nervousness that comes from riding big ol’ rollercoasters. also been playing phasmophobia with some buds as like a late night hang out game which has maybe upped my threshold for scary stuff. anyway, those movies were fun dumb! guess it should be said that i watched all of them pretty stoned, but imho don’t think that takes away from the experience.
had a lot of fun with saloum which had style all over the place and was very fun to look at. think that it sits at just over an hour long and is fun all the way through. that yann gael is very charismatic and charming. i didn’t know anything about it, just watched the trailer and said sure. think that’s probably a good way to go into it.
had little to no expectation for nope. pretty lukewarm on jordan peele in general, but this one felt very fun. some parts of it felt like it ran a little long and probably could’ve cut out the whole steven yeun thing and i woulda been fine with it, but really like the silliness of the other story and the whole dynamic between bro and sis. freakin’ loved fry’s employee dude, super funny to me. also, really like how handmade the alien looked? the tube thing that was suckin’ people up just looked like a big vacuum tube attachment and like a kite in its full form. just fun stuff. also! the camera sis uses to take a picture of it at the end feeling like a cannon and the analog camera to get the perfect shot being like a big machine gun is so dumb and cute
barbarian was just okay. felt like he was comin’ on a little strong with the whole grlpower business but the scary was very scary and i like justin long getting thoroughly owned.
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This sounds like a good deal and I never knew it existed. I got a Cinemark membership because I hoping to watch more South Asian movies but that hasn’t materialized yet.
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i forgot the alamo was a movie theater chain and for one brief shining moment thought that you had bought season passes to visit THE alamo (so that… you could …remember it, i guess?) as many times as you wanted for a full season
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It’s a thing.
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THERE IS NO FAT ELVIS IN THAT BAZ LUHRMANN ELVIS MOVIE ALSO NO NIXON OR TOILETS OR KARATE INSTRUCTORS OR PREMATURE EJACULATION BUT I WAS FORGIVING OF ALL THAT UNTIL THEY DIDNT SHOW FAT ELVIS, FUCK!!
Ok wait they’re doing unchained melody but he is NOT fat enough this is NOT canon!!!
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It is! Also like that it forces me to watch things i wouldn’t normally watch but tell you what that brad pitts train movie still has little to no chance of being seen by ne.
I should check out other theater subs, the alamo is fancy and fine but would like more interesting options. I sure wish i could get rid of my streaming service subscriptions and just rely on the media collection and theatre subs, but my parents still use them
also a nice thing about [rep] theater culture outside the US is that we normally pay less if anything for theater tickets (because there’s a little less monopoly consolidation) but more for streaming services (because their bottom line is US tech platforms), big incentive to steal whatever you watch at home and get out to the big show otherwise
I don’t need a reason to steal because it makes me feel good inside but seeing netflix or whatever list its canadian price as like a dollar fifty higher than the US makes the kill bill noise go off in my head anyway
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Woah, Godard died. Wow
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That brad pitt movie is getting pushed hard in Tokyo and just cannot imagine there is anything redeeming or not offensively racist.
Wonder Woman with crappy TV motion smoothing is hilarious. It’s Dr. Who but everyone’s too pretty.
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