I love the way Pulse goes far over the top towards the end
It surprised me the first time, too, but on repeat viewings I came to really enjoy how protean kiyoshi kurosawa plots can be
The more of his movies you see, the more it becomes clear that he loves to finish his movies on a note of nonrational spectacle — something outside of the norms established by the preceding film. The jellyfish in the canal in Bright Future, the burning city at the end of Charisma, just about every plot beat in Before We Vanish…
The way he introduces these elements into the back half of his films feels more like nightmare logic rather than non-sequiturs to me. They’re contrasts that often go against the grain of what you thought you were watching. They are an inflection point where the problems of the characters end up being far greater in scope than they could have ever imagined.
watching cure and then pulse was crazy bc for as much as cure feels like a y2k end of the world movie (to me anyways… also belly and strange days give me that vibe too) pulse actually just Goes There in a way that makes it feel like a sequel to cure in a way
Went to a screening of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind… The film is good, people. Looks great on the big screen. I think the last time I saw it was on VHS. Maybe I didn’t even watch the whole thing idk? Got me once again to think about finally reading the manga but you know what I probably won’t
I’ve only got bits and pieces on broadcast. The same is true for a lot of Ghibli movies…I should fix it, but I also like having some media in reserve for when I really need to see something spectacular and new (to me).
It’s a movie about a 64 year old man doing trick shots and john wick shit w sniper elite killcams and insane melodrama. Within the first 6 mins a guy gets blown in half and a boston dynamics dog owned by the skull unit trots around a van killing everyone inside with a minigun. The banker from deal or no deal pays an American guy who talks like all his dialogue was AI generated to make a sonic cannon by kidnapping scientists named Vladimir Vladimir and Old Buddha like some Metal Gear on the MSX shit. Every time someone gets shot there’s Sam Peckinpah squibs. It felt like I was watching a feature length recruitment ad for one of the MGS4 PMCs while waiting for the game to install.
i had to venture more into the patrick mcgoohan post prisoner universe with HYSTERIA and i was NOT LET DOWN WHATSOEVER. basically patrick mcgoohan plays a doctor who comes up with a way to meld crazy peoples minds in an actually therapeutic way (ESPECIALLY FOR THE NINETIES) and the crazies run the nuthouse. its SO WILD THOUGH. like its got freddy 4 power absorption stuff, and then shared pain gags (a guy gets hit in the nuts and so twenty other people all mime like they got hit in the nuts) with no less than three prisoner refrences peppered throughout because the fucking man cannot help himself i guess
I branched out from Douglas Sirk films starring Rock Hudson to his other pictures with Imitation of Life, and discovered in doing so another heart-wrenching affair but operating at a level of realism that is the most ambitious I have ever seen him. It wasn’t the most astonishing technicolor thing, or the most gothic, like Written on the Wind. But it is remarkably complex, almost like a post-modern handling of melodrama as a genre, and it left me so sad. Just so sad… Waiting for my friends and closest loves ones to slum it with me, watch a sappy “woman’s picture” from the 50s, give this man’s work a chance, and discover some of the fucking best Hollywood pictures ever made.
I also watched John Water’s Cry Baby again, as a redemptive second chance favor for a film all my friends like but I can’t seem to enjoy. Except for the line where Johnny Depp throws his pointed fingers from his temples, violently yelling electricity makes me insane!!! I just think this movie is so monotonous and never reaches the lively energy it clearly needs to carry in order to make a raunchy Grease parody fun or at least bearable. They should have wrote better songs, they shouldn’t have had any songs, the musical choreography should have been kept but everyone would just be doing John Waters dialog through all of it anyway. It’s reaching for the kind of manic genius Waters finds again in Serial Mom but I think he wouldn’t have reached that pitch until a year later. Hatchet Face rules, the segregation commentary is disturbing for how strong it is and how quickly the camera moves past all of it, and yeah it’s just filled with awful music and the lady love interest is boring as well as an idiot. I think it’s maybe his worst.
saw some like it hot on 35mm and loved it… whole crowd hooting and hollering at the ending. the two most down bad guys in the world and their relentless pursuit of pussy takes them some very queer coded places
saw Decision to Leave (OV with subs) yesterday and think that having a decade of watching korean OV w/ subs experience under the belt really helped on picking up some things that didn’t get explained in the subs at all (in two cases at least misleading to some degree), thus making it easier to concentrate on most of the things going on at the same time. Also wondering how they handle the leads switching in and out of their Mothertongue/secondary language (or if that gets normalized in translation and it’ll lose its context, which would be a shame)…
anyway, there’s lots more to unroll and check in a re-watch, but I am sure now that I liked what I saw.
Especially LJH
was awesome in her role as head of family, Nuclear Power Plant tech expert(?) and counter-point to Tang Wei’s character.
Still, a lot more to unroll after a re-watch
i watched both wolf warrior movies and i wish the first one did more with the concept of China having a shadow army that trains exclusively in western tactics to make the real army better instead of turning into a steven seagal movie once the foreign mercenaries show up and everyone has to put on their awesome I fight for China patch. the part where the PLA did the full metal jacket sniper scene but with 8 people wounded was really funny. wolf warrior 2 however seemed like a lot of wasted effort just to tell me “China follows the law, OK? We do exactly what the UN says” by showing me a scene of like 100 african civilians getting killed while chinese sailors ugly cry for 5 minutes until they get UN authorization to save the day, of course. the action was better but I liked the first one being straight up “if you invade china you fucking DIE” a lot more than 2 being sort of paternalistic about african cultures. and what am i supposed to think about the CCP removing him from the wolf warrior detachment for standing up for the poor and destitute against the land mafia???
Puss in Boots, my wife asks “why do the characters with faces look like that?”. baby that’s just how Dreamworks do their thing, yes it’s ugly, yes I’m complaining too. they must have saved a bunch of money on the environmental artists in this, there’s like 4 locations including ‘road in canyon’ and ‘clouds’. a heartwarming tale about nurturing deep-seated resentment for years until you finally take revenge on your childhood best-friend through an elaborate scheme enabled via a childhood whimsical heist daydream. no good jokes, the dance fight was ok, nothing else notable about the animation
Ernest et Célestine (yes I made my family watch it in French). did you know that in French, there’s no tooth fairy but instead la petite souris scampers into your house to snatch children’s baby teeth from the night stand. Célestine is one such mouse tasked with procuring loose bear teeth for the rodent dentist she’s apprenticed to. She meets Ernest, a deadbeat bear aspiring to perform in the theatre but hungry for any morsel. But Célestine’s dream is for bears and mice to live not in fear of each other but as friends. Through a series of mild vore scenes and then plans that have no concept of responsibility or legality, they become friends and simultaneously on the run from their respective police forces in the traditional French farce chase scenes. Eventually they are caught and face trial in the opposing judicial systems at the same time in adjacent courtrooms, climaxing in the typical way as each community realises they are themselves prisoners to their fears and prejudices.
extremely fun, beautiful watercolour artwork (to evoke the children book illustations of the source material), animation with a lot of violent energy, wonderful. “Bears are heavy sleepers” remarks Ernest over Célestine’s desperate pleas to be less noisy as he slams his way into the shop they plan to burgle
I watched Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, a movie about Alexander Skarsgård going on resort vacation to a country where, like a season 1 episode of TNG, any crime whatsoever gets you the death sentence. He then proceeds to run over a homeless guy, sentencing him to death. But! You are able to get out of this if you are rich, by having a clone made of yourself (the clone has all your memories and experiences) and having that clone killed, which satisfies the law (though a loophole maybe? Never explained).
The movie then proceeds to be a series of torture porn scenes where Alexander Skarsgård either watches himself be tortured to death or tortures himself to death. At one point he attempts to escape and a bunch of fellow tourists follow his bus in a convertible and shoot at the bus with pistols until he is chased off the bus and put into a forced march with the car behind him as the woman lays on the hood eating chicken from a KFC bucket and chugging wine until Alexander Skarsgård tries to flee into the woods, is shot, recovers at a farm in one day, returns to the resort, where the tourists force him to battle himself to the death. The movie then just ends.
I think I was banking on everyone who cares following me on letterboxd, but I just realized I never hyped up No Resistance in this thread. It’s an early 90s zero budget shot on video cyberpunk movie and it was one of the most memorable things I watched in 2022.
The protagonist is a pink haired world war iii vet turned hacker who wanders about with a spray painted TI-99 slung over his shoulder taking jobs from a Mr. Johnson who hangs out in a grody Chinese restaurant, and having run-ins with themed street gangs straight out of Frank Miller comics.
I think if this thing had gotten a bit more attention way back when, this guy would have gotten proper writing gigs, but as it stands his pitch to the Sci-Fi Channel went ignored and his YouTube channel is just ads for a family member’s lemonade stand. Glad it just got a nice BD release.
the happening is a lot better than people say. i love the stark contrast between the 1950s killer plant movie mark wahlbergs character is from with the post 9/11 bush era psychosis of everyone else (its really funny how they all keep blaming terrorists even after multiple reports say its not and that they all buy plants afterwards) and the incredibly over the top violent scenes of people committing suicide or child murder are just fucking hilarious to sandwich between all that.
I love the M. Night reappraisal happening right now. He has always been a very funny director. I’ve had the dangerous idea to watch Lady in the Water, which by my memory is when popular consensus started to think of him very poorly. Doubt it’s good but… could it be something other than what everyone told me to expect!??
the only movie of his ive seen (which isnt many tbf) that i really dont care for is the sixth sense. ive always thought that shit was stupid since i was a kid. it always felt like alot of people were hating on him for stupid reasons and the happening was extremely entertaining so idk??? i dont have high hopes for shit like AFTER EARTH or anything but my friends wanted to watch like lady in the water and the village and the sci fi channel hoax documentary about him
