GDT’s Pinocchio oozes style, and when you find out (Netflix also has a making of 35min docu available, make sure to watch that as well!) it is a real stop motion movie, for gods sake, galaxy brain exlosion moment. Watching a few animated sequences and realizing they weren’t CG, but real sets have been used and CG was there to just to fill in the background blanks … just wow .
Just wish this gets one day a proper disc release so more people will have the chance to watch it, because it is so impressive to be reminded there’s handcrafted animation surviving in the 21st century.
also if you haven’t seen 3000 years of longing, the arguable worst and strangest part of that very underrated film has some weird pig in the city callbacks
decided to watch the 2009 motion picture “avatar” for the first time. fun movie
i guess the retroactive reputation as forgettable is both unearned and understandable. like the idea that the names and characters are forgettable is bogus. i mean they are but only to the degree of like a mission impossible or fast and furious or whatever. i guess people were trying to understand why it wasn’t star wars when it made that kind of cash
“blast a crater into their racial memory” is one of the most fucked up lines ever in a blockbuster movie
3 hours of james cameron is way more digestible to my short attention span ass than 90 minutes of so many other people. that said it should be illegal to release these in theaters without an intermission.
cameron’s love of sweet murders of the cops and the military and general hatred of america almost (almost) but absolutely do not make up for the fundamental patheticness of the white boy body swap fantasy. it’s so fucking stupid
anyway fun to plug in that cultural blind spot looking foward to watching the way of water in 2035 or whatever
did anyone else notice in Ava2ar the mute Dwayne Johnson lookalike on the whaling ship? I am pretty sure that whole scene was an allegory for Hollywood’s relationship to China
A parade of horrors. A portrait of the most shallow man, enabled by an endless supply of steroids and a society that values looks over everything. A living breathing Tim Heidecker character, with a living breathing Tim Heidecker eseque operation, beyond the valley of parody. It probably did not help that earlier I watched a bunch of Channel 5 videos. I could not tell if the documentary was meant to promote or condemn the subject, because the footage and testimony is so damning, yet delivered in such a deadpan way. As if it were the most normal thing in the world.
This whole “nobody remembers” narrative hat sprung up makes me notice that I don’t have any recall of Avatar ever coming to TV. That’s surely got to be a huge part of why it didn’t manage to stick in to the consciousness. It’s a film that you have to watch on purpose. It’s never just been there on SyFy channel when you flip by or HBO. It hasn’t autoloaded after somebody was done watching Gone in Sixty Seconds on Hulu. It never got memed on the way that “inception sound” did to the point that having never seen Inceptionn I have a mental concept of the sound.
Anyway, I’ve never seen the film so I know nothing about it, and im probably not going to learn.
I watched Repo a Genetic Opera instead, and it got the not liking musicals part of my brain active but I was watching it with someone who was really into it, and it was fun to share something they enjoyed with them
It got me thinking again about why I don’t really like musicals, and how “rock” musicals don’t really seem to rock, they’re just the same old theatre music with guitars. Or how Lin Manueal Miranda is NOT A RAPPER, or if he is he is a rapper to the exact same degree that Barney Rubble is in a 1980s advertisement for Fuity Pebbles
I also finally watched Avatar and basically feel that it only really suffers in comparison to other James Cameron movies - from the guy who popularized Ripley, built the foundation of Schwarzeneggers whole 90’s persona, minted Leo and Winslet, etc it was a little disappointing that not one character really popped, but then again it’s a pretty broad movie with a lot of world building to get through by design so I’m not even sure it’s a fair criticism even in that context.
Weaver and Ribisi probably come closest to leaving an impression, but even they don’t really rise to the levels of like Billy Zane as Cal Hockley or any of the marines in Aliens.
Parents put on Outbreak and despite being a very cheesy film it’s very stressful to watch. According to my mom a bunch of ex-military students of hers said Cuba Gooding Jr played his part pretty realistically, and also Kevin Spacy dies horribly, so it isn’t a total loss
laughing so hard i’m crying at ed norton’s character in glass onion dressing exactly like tom cruise in magnolia in a flashback. intentionally so, per rian johnson
knives out 2 glass onion: rich people are idiots, they dont deserve their wealth, kill the rich. also, here’s an endless parade of celebrity cameos, isnt that cool. check out this huge glass mansion we constructed for the movie on an island. did you know the main character also had a tough covid lockdown, he was bored playing among us with celebrities in his city penthouse, very relatable.
didnt rian johnson get paid $100 million dollars by netflix for this? can he, at minimum, just cool it with the “anti-rich twitter takes” and learn how to write a compelling mystery movie first
it felt like ready player one if it was for twitter rather than for video games
I actually didn’t despise it the way some people seem to because the premise and the scope of the film was so a priori bad that I thought he salvaged a lot of it with visual gags, it was basically too dull to seriously dislike. definitely representative of some lousy filmmaking trends but I think it’s so on the nose that it actually threatens to seem more representative than it is in practice, which is a weird problem for a mediocre movie to have.
these movies are fine, they’re amusing. I don’t think they really rise to the mystifying level of the backlash they seem to receive online. and I think people who criticize the dialogue for being “too online” are out of touch old timers. if anything it’s subtle compared to how teenagers really talk. this is the world now
thought it was an amusing take on the detective goes to pieces when he doesn’t have a case trope, didn’t think it was that big of a deal or that I was supposed to be personally relating to the super brain genius detective. I’m pretty sure kareem abdul jabar at least was in there cause he’s written a novel about mycroft holmes though
why should anyone ever do that. are we really doing the bernie sanders 2nd home shit for this movie. does he need to live in a box to criticize the rich
why wouldn’t he want a possible alibi aid
anyway I enjoyed it a more than the 70s adaptation of the Inugami Curse/Family/Clan I saw recently, some beloved japanese detective story that was just kind of dumb I thought.
Yeah they’re fine movies, a good thing for rian johnson top be doing with his time and creative blank check. I forget where, but in some interview he talked about how they are his attempt to reverse the trend of mysteries being seen exclusively as a period piece genre. Like most of Agatha Christie’s novels were set in the present, but as adaptations they’re locked into these specific character types that don’t really exist anymore, or are just so heavily tweaked to feel relevant to modern viewers that the historical setting just becomes kind of immaterial aesthetic mush.
Anyway, I think trying to read these movies as like biting leftist social commentary and satire is bound to be disappointing, it’s just like light hearted but mildly cynical takes on types of guy that exist today, mining "the discourse"of the present to create dumb little action figures that are charming enough to spend two hours with but loathsome enough that you don’t really feel bad when any of them inevitably die. I feel like it’s almost preferable that they don’t have ironclad politics. It’s like reading an Us magazine issue and then coming up with an elaborate back story in which everyone who appears in the issue is involved with a needlessly complex murderer
Yeah I follow too many people on Letterboxd who immediately went “Rian Johnson doesn’t understand the REAL problem with billionaires” because obviously that is not the point of this movie. It is a breezy seaside nothing comedy that exists to create a corny but temporarily fun universe where Daniel Craig is implied to be fucking Hugh Grant
You know what movie really sucks though?? A Christmas Story Christmas. Loathed it. Because it is supposed to be a nostalgic vision of 1970s American childhoods I feel very justified in bringing all sorts of cultural criticisms to bear against it, namely that it is copaganda and a prison of nostalgia. The true meaning of cringe. To hell with the original too
