gonna lean over to my wife and say “that’s barbie” every time barbie appears
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i had to bite my tongue so many times in order to not lean over to veronica and explain exactly which playset/outfit the props came from
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okay the climax of Ponniyin Selvan 2 had me transfixed. this movie is so so so so
So
good. mani Ratnam is so fuckin good at his job
copy pasting my letterboxd review: “brilliant costume design, cinematography, color grading, dialogue (you are missing out if you don’t speak tamil seriously), music (AR Rahman GOAT), set design, etc. very interesting ideas on religion and interplay with the history - the events but also the ideas of the time, E.g. what makes a good king” in a very Hindu scripture and classical sense.
this movie is unapologetically medieval, i found that the most interesting part, it neither says “we should all be monarchists now” or “monarchy is bad mmkay” or passes modern judgment on medieval custom it’s all just exploring these terms thru the lens of a contemporary with greatly magnified empathy, and refuses to play the game of telling you what to think in the present.
I love the tamil dialogue, is 100x more subtle and witty, nuanced, adds so much depth compared to the subtitles.
anyway just watch these movies you will most likely not be disappointed
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Ok I watched Bloodlust. It’s fine! It’s good. It looks expensive and it’s well-crafted. However I really did miss the unexplained surreality of the original movie. Bloodlust’s higher visual fidelity and greater production expense makes its world seem much more textured, logical, and traditionally “worldbuilt” in a way I enjoyed less. And I think it wasn’t as good at framing its shots or picking interesting ways to show the world. Bloodlust had some great combat anime bullshit in it but it had nothing like those unhinged blown out vistas I loved so much, nothing like this moment (bad screenshot but in the 1985 movie it’s so striking):
I dunno I guess the original just feels alien and tremendous and fun in a way that a traditionally “well-crafted” movie never could
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watched Network (1976) the other day. incredible film, great stuff. don’t have anything to say that it doesn’t explicitly say itself, save for the fact that obviously a lot of the stuff it attributes to the nature of TV is true of capitalism more broadly
seeing this film also means i finally have context on That One Scene which a million billion hardcore bands have sampled and holy shit that makes every single use of it in punk very fittingly ironic. truly nothing cuts to the heart of the vast majority of punk like a scene of genuine outrage at the system which is actually being distributed by that system itself to benefit said system
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i need to watch that movie as an adult
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Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) and Arnie Rogers (Jerry Mathers)
The Trouble with Harry (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)
Scene (time linked):
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one of the v best 'cocks
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watched a history of violence, i saw it once before as a teen and didn’t get it - the death wish vigilante stuff seemed to be played so strangely straight, the mob guys so broad, the double identity thing such a blunt version of the butterfly dreaming it’s an etc thing that it didn’t really do much to unsettle the other parts. and now i’m like idk what movie i was watching! how could i have not have noticed those faces, all those weird grimaces and stares of people caught between expressions. or viggo mortensen’s weird plasticity which seems to build scene to scene until the last shot where we don’t really know what we’re looking at. or his increasingly threadbare mr ed routine or the way when maria bello finds out she accusingly yells “you didn’t grow up in portland!” and all the death wish mob guy stuff turns out to be pretty funny actually. a really nice surprise.
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I still don’t get it but I love when viggo tries to explain that he took joey (his old self) “out to the desert” to his wife who looks like she wants to throw up like it’s the most normal reasonable thing in the world
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the way the camera lingers on the consequences of violence, its so unforgiving. On rewatch I was startled by how much Viggo’s character seemed like a nihilistic monster bursting through his human facade right from the start. Amazing performance.
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yeah like the teen son subplot wasn’t my favourite part but i do love all the shots from the son’s perspective of this grimacing, cipherlike, sporadically violent Thing lurching around the house trying to look normal and relaxed and in control… i feel like among other things it’s definitely a movie about having a dad
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I saw Oppenheimer last night, second row, reclined at a 135 degree angle. Its funny how little it plays to Nolan’s strengths and swings for something else just outside of his reach. Still, I found myself giddy on multiple occasions: every time he made a honey-rimmed martini, boning to “I am become death,” Einstein’s impish appearances, the Orson Welles-esque impersonation the Murphy puts on. I enjoyed it. When the credits came, my wife said “I liked Tenet more” and I guffawed.
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fuckin Barbie
somehow better than I expected, mostly because I was assuming it would be a straight “fish out of water” thing
I don’t know if all the commentary lands but I respect the hell out of it because Greta fucking goes for it and also the movie is as a subtle as a Barbie movie would suggest it needs to be
mostly I want to talk about how Greta made a studio summer tent pole that’s like
Barbieland is a fucking masterclass of production design, somewhere between a plastic hyper reality and some German impressionist, Dr. Caligari shit
I hope execs see this and realize mass audiences don’t care too much about the artiface
(they won’t)
anyway, congrats to Greta for making a movie that’s gonna be the cultural touchstone of the year that features Kens doing a pose off beamclash
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Yeeeee saw the Barbie
Thought it was pretty great
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am running out of child-friendly animation and don’t want to watch the Ratchet & Clank movie again
April and the Extraordinary World is a ligne claire-style animation. an alternate history take on “what if the Age of Steam never ended and also was extremely French?”
was weird to see it hit the cliche beats of an anime movie except with French notes. Avril is a capable protagonist but barely has a chance to interact with her family & mostly is around to participate in the set pieces; those set pieces are fine but could be much more showy and ludicrous (piloting her grandfather’s secret lab out of a warehouse along the bottom of the Seine to a secret research base is one frogman sight gag and searchlights on the water); the plot has the potential to be an incredible tastelessly pulp work of art but the Silurian masters behind the abduction of all the 20th century scientists are played like mercenaries instead of megalomaniacal villains.
also it’s too dark and there are too many explosions(!)
2 Likes
I liked April and the Twisted World (its non-Christian name) but Gkids has put out better movies over here
have y’all watched Ernest and Celestine? that’s a fun, light movie and it has a pretty good English dub (Forest Whitaker!)
the Town Called Panic movie is also good even though it’s best described as a 90 minute non sequitur. also I don’t know if the movie itself has an English dub (the shorts do IIRC)
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good recommendation, that movie ruled
my moaning is mostly about the lack of things to appreciate as an adult watching these movies when they’re not fun enough to get my inner kid to buy in. every kids movie needs the comedy relief to make a poop joke in-character & then warn that it’s just the first one they’ve been working on, watch out for number 2
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is the answer really that I just start going to pantomimes? please tell me it’s not
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