Watched Nemesis, Albert Pyun recently passed and I’ve heard really good things about his work.
Nemesis is the story of a cop slowly realizing he sucks and then quitting his job. Along the way a bunch of dads with guns come after him. Things blow up.
There really is a heart to this film. The whole cyborg thing. The lady in a nintendo DS. All the outrageous guns. All the scenes in smokey abandoned buildings. I miss this kind of film.
Jugular Wine was really cool for me as a teen, but now it’s not aged super well. It’s super obviously lifting from the White Wolf vampire RPG, and a lot of the characters I sort of remembered turned out to have just been cameos. The whole thing was written and directed by one of the FX guys who worked on Robocop 2, and that got connection that allowed him to bring in Frank Miller. Anyway the movie is mess, mainly of interest to people who were into White Wolf games in the 90s.
Oh I forgot to mention that the context for my post was that I just watched his episode of gdt’s cabinet of curiosities and it was by far the worst episode in an anthology that rarely rose above ‘mid’
I predicted, when I saw that he wrote his episode, that it would feature a bunch of characters doing drugs followed by their heads exploding. Little did I realize that that would be the entirety of the plot, done with all the visual panache of a mandalorian episode.
OnePerfectShot is the perfect description of his style. Film-making as nothing more than visual cliches designed to be cut into the 5 second pre-trailer of a youtube trailer.
Albert Pyun reading the then-complete works of William Gibson and deciding the only way he could do them justice was by making a world where everyone is sweaty despite being mostly robot, have gender neutral names, and goons wear the sega master system 3d goggles to smart link their man portable heavy machine gun to their brains is such a baller fuckin move
Some friends are watching the Tomb Raider movie while I’m at work and to offset the missing out feelings I am posting this again and reminding people that movie kind of rules
both tomb raiders are like. Nu-metal cinema. I saw both of them in theaters, I think the first one came out around the time my favorite movie was The One. they kind of own!
every time i try to picture jon voight as lara crofts dad i just picture him making the evil face from anaconda instead
I don’t mind Mandy. He definitely just rides off vibes and ~style~, but I thought it worked for that one. It’s p vapid and blown over the top, but that kinda trash paired with that nic cage was fun. plus, iirc, there’s some anti-reagan sentiment in there and I will basically always eat that up.
mandy is def one of the actual worst movies ive seen besides the green knight in recent memory tbh… no such thing as too much hate for 2 of the biggest fucking pseuds in the game rn
given that Stranger Things took most of its plot and aesthetic directly from Beyond the Black Rainbow (released 5 years earlier) I find Tulpa’s statement puzzling
I can’t credit btbr for being first to the 80s synthwave nostalgia fest with ep 1 of elfen lied as a plot summary. It is not a novel enough idea for either to claim originality, but only one of them attempts to elaborate on its ideas and bothers to have characters, as broadly drawn and generic as they are. I hate cosmos because he has zero ideas beyond his entire M.O.: to make synthwave reefer madness over and over again.
Stranger Things is also bad, but at least it tries new things that usually fail instead of repeating itself
there is honor in doing one thing and doing it well, as opposed to the seriously creepy pop culture hamburger helper vision of the Duffer Bros (please somebody check their personal hard drives).
synthwave reefer madness is a funny turn of phrase but doesn’t do justice to BTBR at all
See, I think he’s just as guilty of pop culture hamburger helper, in exactly the same direction, he’s just got less of it.
BTBR is literally, according to interviews with him, about how LSD destroys people’s minds and ruins lives not just for them but for everyone around them. And so is Mandy, and so is his terrible short film for GdT’s netflix anthology show. It’s all the most simplistic DEA propaganda packaged in hipster neon. He’s the filmic equivalent of a cop going undercover at a rave, except film bros are trying to tell me that this dweeby ass cop is cool and countercultural.
The Duffer Bros are dweebs jerking off to 80s nostalgia too, but no one is trying to convince me they’re not dweebs.
In short, I think he does one thing and does it terribly. The duffer bros do a lot of things terribly but they sometimes approach mediocrity. I know which I prefer.
can you point me to where he says this specifically? from what I am finding his take is more of a like, reasoned critique of 60s flower power nostalgia. LSD can be a beautiful thing, but we shouldn’t forget the first acidheads were cops who, after they spent years torturing/experimenting on people without their consent, figured they could use it to try and derail the burgeoning anti-war movement. that the post-acid post-60s post-Manson spiritual vacuum led directly to the rise of Reagan-era reactionism is not a particularly controversial idea.
also bad trips happen and I have never seen a bad acid trip expressed so purely/beautifully as in BTBR. it is as much a love letter to LSD as it is hatemail. at least that was the feeling I got from watching it (w/o knowing anything of the author’s intent).
