rivette rocks, it’s been so rewarding getting immersed in his films and their influences at the ica retrospective season on him that’s ending soon. i just got back from their screening of mizoguchi’s akasen chitai as part of it and next week i’m going back for bresson’s les dames du bois de boulogne and rivette’s don’t touch the axe.
some notable non-rivette recent first watches: these encounters of theirs (straub-huillet), rebel without a cause (ray), nomad (tam), lo sguardo di michelangelo (antonioni), germany year 90 nine zero (godard), aim for the ace (dezaki)
MI 8 makes 7’s weird tonal shifts make a lot more sense in hindsight and they work much better here – it really embraces a kind of camp that goes all the way back not just to the De Palma movie but to the TV show. Also, I think scientology may be evolving into calvinism.
Still not as good as 4-6, the ensemble and the pacing are not nearly as effective without Vanessa Kirby and Rebecca Ferguson and Henry Czerny, but it’s fun in a weirdly Clintonite mode.
i’m replying to this quote reading the rest of the thread so maybe i’m repeating someone but all the pussy-eating stuff in the film felt entirely homosocial? like even when young mate was getting into it, that was so his mentor could be like “heyyyy good on him”
the homosociality was very well-realized and i found myself having the exact same reaction to the lord’s prayer as the guy did, so i’m calling it a success on those fronts
At least stuff happened in 7, the first half felt like endless loops of exposition of how about how much was at stake. The sub and the plane chase were great. The villains are God and some guy and we barely see the guy until the plane chase.
really enjoying the awesome like 70s - 90s american cinema stuff i’m watching lately like alien, king of new york, ricochet, to live and die in la, deep cover… some great decades for like crime and horror stuff imo… need to watch something that good tn… scrolling thru my letterboxd and thinking about how runaway train, extreme prejudice, and the hitcher were also all really good times… any suggestions im thinking about “sorcerer” or “body snatchers” or “predator” or something along those lines (i have never seen any of these…)
lmao I watched this recently upon finding out its by abel ferrara and it sucks so bad
the good guys save the day by blowing up the aliens with a stolen attack helicopter, and the movie is creepily horny about the teenage girl point of view character (I wouldn’t call her a protagonist, she exists to narrate and to be the object of the male gaze), the aliens all do that scream thing from the end of the 70s body snatchers constantly and its like a superpower or something
couldn’t be a worse adaptation of the novel or either of the previous films
The only bad thing about Sorcerer is when you try to recommend it to someone and they refuse to watch it because they think you’re talking about some rip off of ‘The Craft’ or Sword in the Stone or something
speaking of abel ferrara, i watched the heavily maligned zeros and ones from 2021 and i can’t stop thinking about it… barely narrative, ghostly covid-era digital darkness that takes place over one night and ends like mgs2. pure abel, minus two distractingly eventful and inane scenes it would be close to perfect (though i’m sure critics wouldn’t like it more). spotted my friend michelle in the credits and made an alert noise.