“Feel good movie of the year” Life of Chuck popped on the plex so why not. Well I’ll tell you why not. It’s boring and not very good is why not. What a sad little Oscar grab.
At the end, the jumpscare: “based on a story by Stephen King.” Ah. Well.
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The Flanagans are intolerable hack saps. Them making basically what looked like The Secret Life of Walter Mitty or the most retired lady’s book club selection of a film seemed like it would actually kill me. We had to turn down my partner’s mother’s offer to go see it when that came up, as a matter of survival.
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following up Nosferatu with Companion:
well well well. Went into Companion w/o knowing a trailer or teaser, which did help a lot w/ having fun with some of the wild guessing where the plot will go based on the kinda awkward dialogues that Iris has in the beginning. W/o that, feel like it would fall flat quickly though 
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after Morbius and Mdm Webb, my expectations for Kraven have not been the highest… but in good ol’ Sonyverse tradition, yet another solid 0.5 
performance that makes you acknowledge that a simple plot and rudimentary dialogue are not a given in this day and age.
otoh, it enthusiastically encourages you to riff on the stupid plot, characters and lack of entertainment, that’s at least worth half a star.
the only saving grace here is that there won’t be a new spinoff/prequel in the medium term, which is good.
I wasn’t as into The Shrouds as I thought I’d be but I was proud of myself for noticing the missing fingers during an early closeup of him typing weirdly. I watched it with all my rowdy friends so maybe that colored the experience.
In tune with the themes laid out up thread, the protagonist’s Tesla was a correctly deployed character piece and not a bit of out of touch off the shelf futurism like i initially feared.
One of my friends said there would have been a Cybertruck in Crash if they were around back then.
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Naked gun rules
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Can’t believe I’m gonna have to check out the new Naked Gun
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i’m mad that the director’s cut of rocky 4 actually is a better movie that makes more overall sense within the greater franchise because i am a staunch defender of the stupid robot
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give us the sleazy cut of rocky iv
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Isn’t the robot in 5
maybe in the background or something but 4 is The One With The Robot. speaking of 5 though cutting out the robot also helps rocky 5 make like 1% more sense because by cutting out the robot scenes they also cut out most of rocky jr which makes it slightly less jarring for him to suddenly be 14 out of nowhere when they land back from russia.
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Sorry, Baby was wonderful. You can tell its writer/director/star lived in that story for a long, long time with all the nuances of her performance and in the way it depicted things. truly a great quiet but devastating film. very funny too.
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Eddington - Kinda funny and pretty watchable but not the definitive covid movie I was hoping for. Seemed promising at the beginning with that great grocery store scene and pitch perfect depiction of 2020 era right wing social media conspiracy stuff… But all the interminable satire of woke teens fell flat for me and then the big idiotic A24-core twist at the end left me cold too. Ari Aster isn’t as clever as he thinks he is. Kind of wish he’d go back to making “elevated” horror movies with a perverse edge. He was good at that.
On the whole I liked it though. One thumb up, one to the side. Better than Beau is Afraid.
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I’ve had most of this movie spoiled for me by some Op Ed written by a “liberal” that said this is the ribbing the right and the left needed and when they got to the “brilliant” description of online leftist I went Wait A Fucking Second.
Watched the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Frame story was pointless and felt like studio meddling, everything else was great. 1950s america was an alien world, I don’t think any other movie has so fully conveyed the sickness in the mind of the 1950s white american: the paranoia, the pressure to conform to a mccarthyist white picket fence ideal, the way everyone reflexively gaslights everyone else, the copious use of drugs and alcohol to get through the day, the silencing of any dissent. The scene where a massive crowd silently converges in the center of the town square is still chilling today.
Still prefer the 1978 adaptation but I was impressed.
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it was. people have pointed out that it takes the subtext of the story from anti-mccarthyite to anti-communist. the movie was originally supposed to end with kevin mccarthy hysterical on the highway.
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Rewatched True Stories (1986) as has become a bit of a personal tradition. I’ve always found it really difficult to describe why I find it so affecting. It feels so huge and all-encompassing despite the 90 minute runtime. Regardless, I’ve tried to do my best below.
there's a city in my mind...
I love the inherent artifice of this film, composed of different “true stories” compiled from tabloid newspapers and repurposed as fodder to decorate a fictional town in Texas. David Byrne starts us off by backgrounding the complicated history of the state’s formation. Dinosaurs, indigenous people, slavery, the seizure of land, the construction of the railways, and then suddenly the founding of computer companies, all whizzing past as slides in an accelerated presentation, too fast to fully process the ramifications of, before Byrne abruptly steps through a screen entering the imaginary world of the movie.
What’s uncanny is how close this make-believe town can feel to the real thing. The fictional tech company building that Byrne introduces moments later immediately brought to mind the Apple headquarters located in my own hometown, itself also a nondescript box in a mostly featureless landscape, the employees of “Varicorp” sharing much in common with the larger-than-life characters that populate Cork, projecting an exaggerated positivity as a means to cover up the repressed loneliness that nonetheless finds itself on display in quieter moments when the mask inevitably slips. The curse of the small town is truly universal…
Byrne seems to feel a certain kinship with these characters, their profound delusions representing a kind of shared human ability to conjure up the impossible and yet there’s also this sense of longing for something far better than the current dream they seem to be trapped within, a replacement that can somehow reckon with the fraught history that preceded its inception and the ongoing contradictions that remain unresolved as a result.
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Weapons isn’t perfect but it did rip when it got going.
watched the best Disney movie: Cool Runnings
John Candy “what have you got in there?” “gimme that” & tossing the hot water bottle without a glance is pure cinema to me still. new appreciation for Malik Yoba’s (bald) character angrily introducing his character’s name as Yul Brynner
wow these stunts are fucked up!! go crash a bobsled and scrape your heads on the track trapped between the sidewall and the sled!! footage from multiple takes…
I understood the antipathy from the rest of the competitors to be be exclusionary elitism as a child. with adult eyes and mind, the unspoken racism is more apparent.
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