aggressively stupid & beautiful
I have been liking Ian’s series of videos because they’re close to how my imagination works, they’re a little bit Heavy Metal but without the dumb edginess, a little bit Simon Stalenhag, a little bit of Jean Girard. It beats the pants off most hollywood cgi, but it’s relentlessly unconventional in plot and setting, which is what draws me in.
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feels a bit like an entry in a hardware extended universe. i’m into it
as part of our m night retrospective we watched the 2004 sci fi channel “documentary” THE BURIED SECRET OF M NIGHT SHYAMALAN which exists as some kind of bizarre attempt to market The Village by talking about how “strange occurrences” seem to consistently happen around him as part of like this half assed conspiracy that keeps him from making his movies anywhere but philadelphia. it’s 2 hours long which seems excessive for an absolutely stupid, obvious lie about how he fell through a frozen lake as a child, died for 35 minutes, and then was revived with a permanent connection to the spirit world, which he will lose if he leaves pennsylvania, all in service of promoting a movie that is NOT EVEN ABOUT FUCKING GHOSTS OR THE SUPERNATURAL!!!
It’s so boring in spots that it’s almost not worth watching, unless you love seeing shots of guys stepping around in the woods or pacing back and forth. Theres a part where they go to the cornfield where the house from signs was and this guy is like “They built the house for the movie, so it’s not here anymore, what are you gonna do, stand in a cornfield?” and honest to god the director proceeds to stand in the fucking cornfield for 10 minutes. however an m night acolyte might actually think it’s kind of a funny joke or mildly interesting. He’s not in it a lot because he’s making, yknow, a real fucking movie but every time the crew interviews him the director asks a bunch of normal questions and then hits him with a swerve at the end that’s like “I found your house on mapquest and asked the local teenagers outside if you can talk to the dead” “I investigated your childhood and found out you fell through the ice and were dead for 35 minutes” “All of your movies are autobiographical and you are David Dunn from Unbreakable!!!” so m. night can storm off and his publicist can start doing john waters acting about how in her whole career as a professional woman she’s never seen anyone act this rude and out of line and all you had to do was read the questions we went over because NIGHT IS FRAGILE!!! One of the Hooded Teens takes the crew back to his house and when they fuck with a ouija board in his basement by asking “do you have a spiritual connection to a man named Night…” and the teenager interjects saying “No…call him by his other name…M,” it’s almost kind of amazing. One of the most m. night touches by far is how often the documentary crew relies on Javier the pizza guy (???) to get them into weird online chats so a guy named like nightfanatic3 can say “I can see what you are wearing…” while everyone turns to the camera and soyfaces. All the stuff where they’re like filming the set from the bushes, lurking outside of his house, following people’s cars like intrusive weirdos or releasing crows inside of houses so they can yell “Ahh!! There’s that crow again!!!” while it freaks out is really funny, but it’s like…an hour of content at the most. I did like when they got cheesesteaks with him though.
The best part is at the end when the director sits pensively on the set of The Village after minutes of more fucking pacing around because M. Night sweats him for an hour before refusing to appear, delivering this monologue over the phone in full villain mode:
“Let me tell you some realities…no matter what you show, people are gonna think it’s fake. They’re gonna think someone made this all up. That’s what this is gonna be in the end, some funny piece of entertainment. And when that’s done they’re gonna switch the channel and watch their favorite sitcom. No one’s gonna understand why you’re doing this. They won’t take it seriously. Not one single soul. I mean, think about it…what could you possibly show, that they wouldn’t think you made up?”
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The Dungeons and Dragons movie was dumb but fun. I appreciate that they didn’t try to make it the first of some epic trilogy.
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I finally saw Nope! I loved it!!
I love Jaws and I think this movie touched on many of the things I love about that movie, and added a lot more. It’s got a bunch of shit going on. It’s crammed with Stuff To Say, but it still manages to feel pretty straightforward, which is a big accomplishment.
Enemy design is top notch, I adored it. Genius shit. Last 15 minutes were great.
The uhh Digestion Scene is going to stick with me haha
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still haven’t seen this but i’ve read some comments on this scene and man i’m really glad i did. everything else i had read up till this point was like ‘Nope isn’t even really a horror movie, it’s more like a sci-fi adventure film!’ and i was like hell yea i need to see this one. then i read about that scene and now i’m just like. idk… can probably skip this one. don’t need that memory in my brain.
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For what it’s worth, it’s scary because of the audio–the visuals were not particularly gnarly. They are frightening for sure but it’s the audio that really did it for me.
The horror in this movie is very heavily carried by the audio. It’s straight up horror in about 4 scenes tops? But one of those scenes is like 10 mins long and is back to back with the digestion scene lol. And the audio in all of them is really well done. They used a lot of silence effectively, haha.
I am a big wuss about horror and I found this one much more watchable than maybe every other horror movie I’ve seen in the last several years because so many of the scenes are just like, adventure scenes. I know why they marketed it as a horror movie, I think the Branding was probably important here, but I personally think that until that pair of shocking scenes it’s more like a thriller
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Oh that is reassuring. I am the same way about horror movies in general and that’s why I’ve enjoyed Jordan Peele’s earlier movies–they manage to be scary in both momentary and like, very deep ways, without actually having that kind of repulsive quality that turns me off most modern horror movies. Anyway I will still try to watch this after all haha
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this is definitely the biggest accomplishment of the movie imo – very maximalist in its metaphors while straightforward in its staging. I think it led critics to feel like it wasn’t as razor-perfect as get out, which is probably true, but I’m really glad he went as far as he did
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yeah in the end you may actually find The Scene With The Monkey more frightening on a traditional horror level than the Digestion Scene lol. I did.
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Did your showing have that bonkers PSA at the beginning with the cast sitting on barstools and calling the audience “the real heroes for going to see the movie in theaters”? It looked like Hugh Grant was going to have a stroke while gutting out the line “now, heroes, please enjoy the movie dungeons and dragons honor among thieves”
Putting the portal gun in a movie was fun and the movie used it in fun ways and now I’m trying to think if any other movie had done that before.
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Yes, I saw that preroll ad where Hugh Grant is so visibly uncomfortable. I go to the movies a lot and the past few months, I have seen ads in front of Babylon and Marvel movies where Margo Robbie and James Cameron tell me I am a god person for going to the movies. It was a really fun movie.
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That’s interesting. I remember Tom Cruise giving me a little pep talk before Maverick but I can believe that he would want to personally thank every person for watching his movie in the theater.
I also really liked the DND movie for what it’s worth. I really liked the directors’ first movie Game Night too which is why I went to see this one and was pleasantly surprised afyer being extremely turned off by the marketing.
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went to see the Mario movie at the local ancient family-run luxury theatre. absolutely covered in photos of the owners with various stars attending premieres, with Brian Cox in matching tartans, standing next to the Bond Aston Martin & grinning like a madman
the movie was nothing special, DK’s showboating was pretty good. wish they’d made it more New Yawk
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enjoyed the Mario movie so much i’ll now only refer to it as the Mario Film
ok but actually i did have a good time watching this, for real. idk - it’s what it is, nothing more, nothing less. i understand that naming businesses stuff like “Disk-Kun Hardware” or having an entire separate dude who is carpenter Mario aka Jump Man is meant to directly appeal specifically to weirdos like me, but whatever, it worked. wife enjoyed it, too, probably more than me.
the feeling i had watching it is that while i did, indeed, enjoy the 1993 Super Mario Bros., this movie is the kind of thing that would have really made me lose my shit, i think.
call me a sucker! do it!!!
i also kept thinking about some of the criticisms i had been reading on twitter or whatever and while everyone is entitled to their opinions, i cannot fathom how anyone could think the Sonic movie was better than this. just feels like pure cynicism
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two “free” movies today
dr caligari (a mediocre rip), a surrealist erotic stage comedy with constant wordplay and scenery-chewing and fun visual quirks.
and class of 1999, a mark l lester joint where gangbanger teens team up to kill cia death camp androids repurposed as teachers
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I saw the DnD movie and it has the funniest animatronic I have seen in ages. Regé-Jean Page pulls an animatronic baby tabaxi, which looks exactly the right amount of shitty, out of the mouth of a giant rubber fish while a huge crowd cheers. This moment kind of underpinned for me how much the movie felt like an old school bullshit fantasy adventure movie… which is exactly what I wanted I guess. It’s nothing special, but it has a lot of rubber animal suits, and practical effects bird-men, and magic VFX that look kinda silly, and right now it isn’t burdened by any shit ass duty to some top-heavy story continuity, so I appreciated all that.
I also really liked how the whole story operated on the nonsense momentum logic of a real tabletop campaign. Every time The Party solved one problem, another silly obstacle hurled them forward toward a new goofball Forgotten Realms reference, and the characters take all the and-then-and-then-and-then bullshit in stride because it is dungeons and dragons. I hope they never make a sequel to this. It would be a shame to follow this up with anything that takes itself even a little bit seriously!!
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more dumb jokes + scenery-chewing by the comedy villain + egregious fan service
imagine a Mario where Peach & DK get trapped in NY and Mario has to return them to the Mushroom Kingdom before idk they lose all their lives. “now if you were a bee-yutiful dame an a giant ape in this town, where would you go?” ::poignantly framed Empire State Building in the background:: (both) “Naaaaah”
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