movie spin-off from the Wakfu TV series & the two respective games. all French, all produced by the same company. despite the number in the title, no sequels were made as it lost all its money
a fun enough children’s movie where Joris (who lives in a magical sentient shop) discovers his incredible (magical) backstory & teams up with an assortment of characters of various loyalty & allegiance to defeat the most treacherous and evil threat to civilisation (Julith)
extremely French. the magical sport is 5-a-side rugby, they kind-of understood that fan service means including gratuitous close-up of characters but pandered mostly homoerotic
The 90s American Godzilla is such a piece of shit. I can’t cope with just how Americans turn Godzilla into either a meaningless spectacle on the level of a 70s disaster film or into some garbage atomic family war propaganda. It is honestly triggering for me. Combine that with the stereotyping whenever anything Japanese comes up in this film, and it’s a real worthless endeavor best avoided since the film is also 2 hours long.
It did help me realize that Roland Emmerich made his career following a genre template established in the 70s with like Towering Infero, Earthquake, Poseidon Adventure, and its derivatives, almost completely, which is context I didn’t have when I saw most of his garbage movies as a kid.
A lot of things happen in those scenes, and you’d think I would remember something like that, but I don’t. I do remember them pregnancy testing Godzilla with bodega-bought tests.
Watched The Defiant Ones, the 1958 Sidney Poitier / Tony Curtis film about escaped convicts chained together, and aside from its largely cringe-free depiction of contemporary racism, what’s probably most noticeably about it is how astoundingly brisk it is, establishing its core premise within the first three minutes and often just cutting to the protagonists in the middle of a particular tribulation or scene. I’d not heard of the film before the friend I watched it with recommended it, and I wish I had.
Watched the Princess Mononoke 4K release with a friend on the weekend. Was as great as ever and good to finally see it in something other than the old slightly fuzzy DVD version.
Main reason we watched it this weekend though was my friend gave me three choices of movie he wanted to see, the other two being Life of Chuck and Eddington. Both of which sound unpleasant and/or dull and boring so I went with the safe choice. He tried to make it a double bill but I said one film is enough. Pretty sure he’s going to ask which of the other two to see next weekend though.
Hopefully the 4K Angel’s Egg release comes to cinemas here so I can try to force him to watch that
Just saw Highest 2 Lowest and while it’s not the post Luigi remake I anticipated, I think there’s a lot to chew on just beneath the surface that’s carried in performances (shout out to Jeffery Wright) if not dialogue. I also can see it putting lots of people off for not being so overt with those ideas.
I love him to death but spike lee is way too much of an old man to go in any other direction I think. however he loves to make movies with exciting casts and great performances so whatever. we’re blessed every time he gives us a movie
Spike Lee is a weird filmmaker because just about every movie he’s made since about 1990 is like a B+ but his first three 80s movies were so good and he’s so personally likeable that every time everyone has to pretend they might be better or worse than that
I respect him more than all those other like 80s boomer auteur guys because he’s still so prolific and every now and then is not afraid to make something that’s just like bafflingly bad. When scorsese makes a bad movie it’s just kind of bloated and smarmy, he’s not capable of the same heights of brazen catastrophe
Like Coppola saved up all his horrible ideas for one grand swan song but Lee keeps you guessing, you might get brilliance or you might get horrors beyond imagination
Spike Lee is simply better at directing than most people so he’s allowed to do whatever he wants. his 90s shit is crazy good between Malcolm X, Crooklyn, He Got Game and Summer of Sam what else could you want. Summer of Sam rules because you can picture Christopher Moltisanti hunched over at his computer punching out the script on that shitty laptop. And no one else could’ve ended Jungle Fever like that!!
saying he basically peaked in 1989 is doing one of America’s great directors a massive disservice
His 1997 documentary 4 Little Girls was pretty good too. Well, I saw it in high school so who can say, but at the time I liked it a lot.
That crypto commercial he did a few years ago was one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever seen a director of his caliber do… But the man made Do the Right Thing so I’ll let it slide.
Watched the first two Naked Gun movies for the first time since…probably high school?
First movie is great, fantastic shit. The second one, well, I laughed my ass off at this joke, and then…that was it.
I started the third movie, but ehhh…I’m probably good (also wild the entire…OJ Simpson saga happened like two months after the third movie came out).
Also weird was finding out the lounge singer in the second movie is, uh, Vitamin C? The lady collecting royalties for every high school graduation since 1999? Weird.
Hard agree, Bamboozled and 25th Hour may not be perfect movies but they are essential parts of the u_u adolescent canon. The closest any of those other old timers got with stuff I actually saw in theaters rather than from the video store was Bringing Out the Dead, which might be scorsese 's most Spike Lee esque movie
Like I’d put him in there with the Coen bros in terms of decades long streaks of making interesting movies, and if the new one is any good I feel like he may have even outlasted them at this point
