I haven’t seen anyone positive about it, so this is a relief. Unsurprisingly I think this one will be less zeitgeisty than Crimes of the Future, and could shock some people who show up in the wake of that. But I am eternally on board. And I even liked it.
not sure if people will see it this way, and i don’t wanna bias anyone, but come back to this if anyone else ends up watching it: my thinking on it was that it was a movie about how easily your desires and fears can be exploited, how vulnerable we are made by grief, and maybe just generally speaking, which we see through the specific subjectivity of a billionaire artist who knows nothing about the implications of the technology he is developing or how it can and may be used by the people he is getting funding from. people predate on his idealism and ignorance, and he’s willing to buy into anything because he’s visionary and also going through a loss. basically, he’s a useful idiot.
I was left very perplexed by the Shrouds, though I like it more the more I think about it. I might go see it another time since a second viewing cemented Crimes of the future as my fav Cronenberg
The dreams were very powerful.
Am I correct in that the oncologist death doesn’t really get resolved, pretty much as Cassel stops caring about his dead wife entirely once he learns she had an affair? And that Guy Pearce was behind everything else?
watched “mama, i’m alive”, the 1977 movie by konrad wolf.
it’s about four german POWs who defect to the USSR during WW2. it’s filmed in such a sweet, tender way. even the harsh parts. all the characters have such interesting, subtle, raw feelings about themselves, the war, their country, socialism. i almost jumped when i realized margarita terekhova was in it.
I chewed on this a little and I think the intention is that the Klan are also vampires, as they also can not get into the building unless allowed in. All in all I really enjoyed Sinners, very pretty. Delroy Lindo will bring lighting in a can on demand, and my dad got a kick out of the epilogue including Buddy Guy.
I tried watching it tonight with a friend but it got really strange and bad, in our opinion. Just bad sexual energy after a pretty solid Italian Catholics v Commies start - disappointing. I asked my friend if he had seen Italian Spiderman and he hadn’t so we watched that instead.
saw the last few minutes of the Uncharted movie on tv last night, it had tom holland and mark wahlburg dropping a pirate ship on a black woman who was trying to steal their gold doubloons, it felt like bizarre racewar shit from an alternate universe. there were like three fakeout endings and they were all so insubstantial i wasn’t sure if it was the end or the start of the movie or if there was some old timey issue with reels being shown in the wrong order. it seemed to be trying to set up a sequel but given how often the Playstation Movie Studio appeared in the credits it might have been crossover stuff for other games i know nothing about, like maybe knack is in there or the one eyed guy is meant to be the scientist from crash bandicoot or something.
holy shit the boobox guy is Glenn Close? I am always reminded of one IGN forum reviewer’s somewhat controversial review of Hook as one of Spielberg’s worst efforts, and his phrase 'Never Never Sets 1 and 2"
a samurai in time. was waiting on this to get uploaded online somewhere a while now and I really liked it. I really get a big kick out of fish out of water stuff for some reason. I don’t know why my brain thinks that shit is hilarious but it does. the part in that thor movie where he storms into a pet store and asks them to bring him a steed, that piece of shit dark tower movie where roland is doped up on pain killers on a bus and some girls ask him for some pills and he tells them they’ve forgotten the face of their fathers. this was an actual good movie though.
there’s a web-dl that’s out there that has bad subtitles and at least missing some bakumatsu era infographic thing at the beginning, I watched a just released bluray rip that I don’t think is uploaded on any public trackers yet
Watched the incredible William Shatner vanity project The Captains last night. Such an insight into that person. So uniquely ambling and cutesy, while most of the runtime is Shatner more or less coercing people into coddling his own ego as he comes to reconcile that he is a camp icon. Avery Brooks’ interview is popular because he talks jive and responds in piano the entire time, but I think that is by far the most interesting rebuttal to the basically coercive advances of a presence like Shatner, this fragmented 20th century man who has seemingly never found a way to be comfortable with himself or the various contradictions one finds themself comprised of as we age. Brooks is playful seeming but I think he’s being quite tough on Shatner, in a way he needs. By the end of it I don’t have the sense that Shatner really heard anything Brooks was playing. Which in turn makes the extreme graciousness of Patrick Stewart in his interview segments both somewhat heartwarming and also misguided: it’s great that Shatner has supposedly had an epiphany that camp is serious and the love people have for him is authentic, but for a man in search of meaning in his life I think that’s a bit too tidy of a message to be really useful for him.
Would be interesting to see a Sofia Coppola or The Wrestler type movie which looks really emotionally into the inner world inhabited by a character who is basically William Shatner. He’s like an early Don DeLillo protagonist we never got to meet.
Watched Godzilla Minus One with some friends, and a toddler. The toddler’s attention was only captured during the 6-7 minutes Godzilla was onscreen, and he was inconsolable when Godzilla died at the end. Refused to believe that Godzilla would come back until he was handed a bluray case for Godzilla King of the Monsters.
Anyways it was a shit movie. Lost Cause military glazing that would have made Bruckheimer go “I dunno, can we maybe not go with a We Would Have Won If We Tried A Little Harder message?” Only two heroic soundtrack swells in the movie, and it’s for the CGI corpse of the Takao limping out of its watery grave and for the prototype Shinden airshow.
And what the fuck is with the final shot sequel teasing Godzilla is also people now. How the fuck am I supposed to interpret that metaphor? Is it saying post-war Japanese people aren’t real Japanese? I just keep getting madder about this movie the more I think about it.
