probably watching it tomorrow…!
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finally got around to watching Better Luck Tomorrow, and I’m glad I did, that movie was a ride
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To follow on this I also think The Devil’s Rejects is a really worthwhile movie, it humanizes the psychopathic killers without absolving them of their crimes. Also it’s pretty funny. Something only a guy with real Faygo energy could have made. Rob Zombie’s got the juice imo, it’s the same mix of brute force stupidity, manic electricity with an edge of cleverness and humane sympathy that makes his music fun
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I’m getting used to having no idea where the critical reception to Nishijima’s roles comes from — he seems to be in every high profile Japanese property these days, which is good for him, but I thought Drive My Car and Kamen Rider Black Sun were quite melodramatic and dull, whereas Shin Ultraman, which people had been saying wasn’t as good as Shin Godzilla, is great! it has the same civil service-core vibes, the same great, dramatic-but-gently-mocking tokusatsu soundtrack, and very fun pacing
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Watched The Shallows on the plane… mostly it was pretty OK/mid but the seagull was very good so now I know why nobody would shut up about the seagull. I also liked the extremes the first half of the movie went to in order to avoid showing the shark. A lot of the shark shots were after effects ass blurry shadow shit passing across the camera, and the shot of the protag crying while watching an offscreen shark attack was also good. The best instance of this however is the very first shark attack on the protag, which handles the whole thing with her acting, weird audio, and a red filter on the screen, haha. You’re just watching someone pretend to be shark attacked. I was surprised how much I bought it
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Watched The Boy, B- movie, but decent twist at the end. Cannot fucking believe there is a sequel
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continued my koji shiraishi run by watching Cult as recced by @skelephone, which was very goofy and a lot of fun… i think i know why i’ve been watching so much of shiraishi’s stuff lately, there’s a sense that they’re rooted in and playing around with a distant-to-me jp media context of like endless “cursed photo” themed tv variety shows and dvd packages and stuff, and all the repetitions and variations between films feel like they’re exploring different ways to organize and make something off this immense heap of haunted source material. they all feel like movies meant to be discovered on late night tv in the context of a million other less distinguished haunted footage shows - Noroi as an unusually charged version of a familiar template, Cult and Occult as versions of it that have kind of been invaded and contaminated by competing tv formats (political thriller, filmed manifesto, tokusatsu show??). there’s kind of an addictive quality to seeing all the ways this sort of similar material can be put into different configurations, drawing new things out, always the prospect of being just one more freeze-frame and zoom away from the truth.
also happy to say the ridiculous Neo character from Cult actually returns in shiraishi’s recent tv show Welcome To The Occult Forest which is even goofier fun, almost more on the level of a Xena type show in places, but still manages to get somewhere unexpected and unsettling by the last few eps. has been really driving home how much more boring, tonally and in material, all those glossy netflix horror shows feel in comparison.
there’s been a film festival here so i’ve also caught up on some other movies
Troika / Godmonster Of Indian Flats - these were both directed by fredric hobbs, a visual artist who briefly got to make movies as part of the post-easy rider search for a new voice of youth culture. he seems like an unlikely pick!! Troika is more straightforwardly an art film but it’s quick and funny, with lots of visual texture - the first two segments are kind of ubu-ish, ghoulishly made up figures with patterned black and white faces engaging in strange or offputting activities. the third feels a lot stranger and dreamer and involves someone in a huge, elaborate ultraman-ish lobster costume wandering around a desert, being variously tormented and venerated by blue and red painted people, to a slow pulsing drone soundtrack.
Godmonster is more of a straight b-movie thing featuring both Cowboy Intrigues and also the roaming mutant sheep of the title. but it still has some of the same pleasure in visual noise and sense of humour of Troika so feels a lot more dreamy and compelling than most of the other monster movies i’ve seen, and the monster itself is even better - a weird lump of shuffling rubber that sort of resembles one of the early Shin Godzilla stages. there’s a really delirious climax which takes whatever political parody was in the setting (a western mining town turned into an unchanging simulation of a boom-years heyday by a mogul historian) and amplifies it to JRPG levels.
both Troika and Godmonster have a central image of some kind of indecipherable corpse monster standing on top of a car and acting as a locus of both worship and revulsion. in Troika it’s being driven around in a popemobile-esque religious procession, while in Godmonster the caged mutant sheep on top of the car becomes a symbol of the grotesque future of the town as alternately reactivated mining hotspot and tourist destination. it sort of reminded me of the fixation on jfk in the atrocity exhibition and i wondered if it was meant to be playing on a similar image, but maybe thats just me…
Crime Wave (original version) - john paizs’s Crime Wave restored with the original ending it had at the very first showing, before the director recut it in favor of a more consistent tone. Crime Wave is maybe one of my favourite movies - after seeing both versions, i gotta go with the second, re-edited one as my pick, if only because the great ending is something the first version never really lives up to. but seeing the original one is interesting, all the stuff in Kansas is greatly expanded and less chopped-up and elliptical, there are some great extra shots in there, and it ends up going somewhere else entirely. in the end it feels a bit more optimistic than the recut one but also in more of a staid way - the steven penny character becomes a bit less of a cipher, it even hints at something like “personal growth”, but the way the narrative narrows in the process makes it feel like an overall loss. in the revised version by comparison he only gets less scrutable and more unsettling as an individual but the film as a whole feels so much more charged and open as a result.
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watched the thing ln… cool movie 
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got introduced to Kung Fu Hustle last night and I was not expecting it to be like if The Matrix was set in the Roger Rabbit universe
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I watched Wolfen and the vibe was cool but it was too long and didn’t go anywhere interesting in the end
i enjoyed all the madcap maneating of jennifer’s body but woof diablo cody really can’t write dialogue. lotta slurs but not in a “how they talked back then” way and more the writer’s lack of imagination way. all of us were booing when chris pratt didn’t wind up eaten
also i guess i made a letterboxd to thirstpost about filibus but then hey being more intentional about watching movies is cool so let’s try that. friend me? infophysics’s profile • Letterboxd
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I’m not sure if the new AGFA disc of Godmonster has the same bonus features as the old Something Weird DVD, but The Geek is an experience…
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Watched Wendell and Wild and they let you know the trans kid is trans by having someone deadname him. He’s also a trans boy going to an all-girls school so they made some decisions on that one lol
Movie isn’t great but I’m glad they’re making children’s movies that are just absolutely bonkers so there’s that. Animation is gorgeous and it doesn’t look like CGI like Laika’s worst 3d printed impulses. It seems to be a studio made specifically for the film? Not a lot of details on a casual google
Shout out to the ‘parent trying to raise a cool kid’ soundtrack
i haven’t seen that and don’t have either disc, but this sentence from an imdb review has me sold
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we watched it, questionable. no real moral except “ignore your parents who are dumb” and “Tim Burton grew up in a suburb in the 60s”. there’s Tim’s famous tolerance of non-white suburban culture with a stereotypical Japanese high schooler who’s only in the film so when his pet turtle is transformed it’s a Gojira reference
once again surprised (not really) by character designs copying other actors: Victor is child-Johnny Depp, his science teacher is Vincent Price (but voiced by Martin Landau). the teacher is far and away the best character, spouting off about lightning strikes as dreadful intentful entities.
it felt like it would have been a tiny amount of effort to put some themes about loss grief mourning acceptance: Victor’s teacher is run out of school for IFLSing too hard, no one cares. Victor’s dog dies, he morosely looks at his favourite ball, sheds a tear, boom he’s back. lazy writing. thinking about The Little Prince and the Eight Headed Dragon
black and white looked great! the clueless spooky girl’s pet’s transformation is wonderfully offputting. nothing else in the movie really matters, meaningless references to other works
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dang! I guess Tim Burton still sucks 
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Finally saw Point Break all the way through in one sitting and for the first time I was able to appreciate the absolutely unhinged pacing escalation at the midpoint of the movie when the first FBI raid occurs. One moment you’re watching Keanu lie to girls and stare with gay desire at the sea, and the next moment you’re watching someone press his face towards whirring lawnmower blades. I hadn’t previously noticed how absolutely out of control this leap in violence, nudity, peril, etc. is compared to the first half of the story.
It’s just good! It’s just a good dumb movie. We watched the trailer for the 2015 remake after finishing this one and it looks extremely cowardly and dull. I was thinking about watching them both to compare but now I can’t bring myself to do that.
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The remake is another one of those movies I watched on my Chinese DVR while I lived in Chongqing, along with Shooter and Vanilla Sky.
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I forgot to post about it, but on the flight home from the meetup, I watched Greed. I watched a reconstructed version that used production stills and intertitles to add 100 minutes to the gutted theatrical release. There is so much brilliance in it. I wish it was in a more coherent form. The final act is legitimately harrowing. Gold coloring is used throughout in ways that don’t obviously signal greed. There’s such a variation in deep focus, close-up, long takes, and montage editing. I understand now why people compare him to Welles, beyond the mythos of his personality.
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