what did you think of While We’re Young
loathing
speaking of movies starring beauty queens, i watched two films starring aishwarya rai recently, jeans and ponniyin selvan 1.
she has sooo many cute outfits in this one!!! also looks great in glasses
this is from a song poovukkul where they fly to like, the eiffel tower, the pyramids, the empire state building, the great wall of china, to be like “aishwarya rai ur the 8th wonder of the world 
”
anyways i adorrred ponniyin selvan 1… i love when a historical epic is shot on high definition video and mani ratnam and his camera departments seem as adept at shooting video as they are film (raavanan was just immediately one of the most beautifully shot movies ive ever seen)
it’s maybe a little hard to keep track of the specific contours of the Courtly Intrigues and Backroom Schemes since this is an adaptation of a cycle of five novels from the 50s with about literally 15 named characters (the director called game of thrones the english ponniyin selvan) but scene to scene it feels a lot more focused on the subjective experiences of characters than any strategy or military victory for example. the pre-interval sequence was an astonishing example of that… chiyaan vikram is rapidly becoming one of my favorite actors, he is such an inimitable presence!!
also love how karthi is like “madam… hello…” to every woman he meets, excited to watch part 2 soon, i would be surprised if a movie i liked more came out this year
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Ponniyin Selvan
everyone watch this movie it whips
i also found Vanthiyathevan simping over every woman he meets to be HIGHLY relatable lol. some fantastic scenes with him going gaga over princess and when she leaves immediately he starts simping for the handmaid
Vikram has such Aragorn meets Mel Gibson in Braveheart vibes in this movie
also all the song lyrics are fantastic i was pumping the soundtrack on my commute yesterday banging on the steering wheel. def look up the translations they are all like YES WE ARE CHOLA WE WILL TAKE YOUR LANDS AND SEDUCE YOUR DAUGHTERS. THE TIGER RIDES AT MIDNIGHT, THE DEER COWER. THE TIGER SHALL TAKE THE HIMALAYAS
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more ponniyin selvan thoughts
this is the 10th century, i appreciated depiction of medieval hinduism with the vaishnative, shaivite, kali worshipping, murugan worshipping… i dunno if you caught this @drastic_bb but in the devaralan dance scene when they refer to muruga, they intentionally use these archaic rig-veda 2000 BC era Old Tamil names, like Ceyyon (‘the red one’) and Vellon (‘the spear one’)… gives it that sort of dark ancient vibe that underlies all of the more ‘civilized’ hindu religion… i thought it played super well with the intent and vibe of that scene. I thought it was really interesting as a reclamation of the ‘barbarian’ aspects of history, contrast for example Baahubali where the barbarian thing is very orthodoxly played as an aspect of foreign low class invaders, rather than part of our own psyche.
names at 2:28
Kartikeya has been an important deity in the Indian subcontinent since ancient times, worshipped as Mahasena and Kumara in North India and is predominantly worshipped in the state of Tamil Nadu and other parts of South India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia and Mauritius by Tamils as Murugan.
Murugan is widely regarded as the “God of the Tamil people”.[13][14] It has been postulated that the Tamil deity of Murugan was syncretised with the Vedic deity of Subrahmanya following the Sangam era. Both Muruga and Subrahmanya refer to Kartikeya.[9][10][12][15]
AR Rahman greatest living composer
also yeah Aishwarya Rai is stunning in this AS ALWAYS
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been in my barbie era before it was cool!!
i will visit a theatre tomorrow evening and watch this film
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Oh it had nothing to do with picket lines. The impression I get is that Robbie has been out there full-throatedly talking about how Barbie isn’t stupid and is actually art and etc, probably also with some decent gender politics mixed in there. My point is that even if that is all correct, she’s still advertising the studio movie she herself is in so who cares lol. It didn’t go over well
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x
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there is some of this, especially in the early going, and the editing is pleasingly elliptical, but it’s actually more straightforwardly made and more grounded than I expected.
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A day later and confirming it with Lady Rude she conceded that I could be right and the る on the poster itself looks like ろ which change the title to “How Will You Live?”
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there was no preparing the cinema cum hen night full of women in pink gear this evening for the brechtian oddness of the Barbie movie
the very Online voice is spooking the normies hard
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I think this was easier when it was the Lego movie
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god I wish this made by europeans but maybe the absolute didacticism is the point
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tbh i wasn’t interested in this movie until being promised “absolute didacticism”
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it is the least subtle thing and it compels like popcorn In a hair iron
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watched hard boiled and adding “has a guy in it called Mad Dog” to my how do you know if a movie is good or not checklist* (*not fact checked against 1993’s Mad Dog and Glory)
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Mission Unpossible 7 pressed the right buttons for easy-to-please me, and it was the better 80ies spy movie than James Bond:Reshooting For Branded Product #5.
Pleasantly surprised by Yin Yang Master, guess the chinese cinema VFX workshops have used up all the colored assets pipelines there were, thus forcing the western VFX-festas to be all drowned in brownblackgreyish muddy colorgrading 
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oh no i think i just decided it reminded me a lot of i love huckabees 
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someone gave me the soundtrack for that mixed in with a hard drive of mp3s in 2005 so i listened to jon brion harpsichord music without context for 18 years until today when i’m going to watch it to understand this post
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the fox searchlight logo still stirs contempt in me
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