Yojimbo
High and Low
Throne of Blood
Highest 2 Lowest
Vick & Tarstar’s Scarecrow Factory
The Emasculator
Sanjuro
Ikiru
and Red Beard
I hadn’t seen Sanjuro before (despite having the disc for a year or so), and I like it more than Yojimbo. It moves really really quickly, the scope is perfect, and it got some legit hilarious moments.
Loved Vick and Tarstar. It’s kind of a fictionalized version of the making of my favorite movie of last year, Busted Babies. Some scumbags are trying to make a movie about a service where scarecrows give people haircuts in their sleep, amid behind the scenes dumpster diving, selling fingernails to internet people, actors quitting, and Elmer glue sniffing. The best running gag was that the whole film crew has scabby hands in every scene that go completely unremarked upon. One of my friends got really upset about the movie and complained that it wasn’t “cinema” to me over dinner afterward.
Emasculator wasn’t really my thing (its in the mold of Last House on the Left), but I was surprised it was locally made. The lady who made it seems like a character. During the Q and A she said she was disappointed the male actor didn’t want to film actual insertion shots, but I guess the actress in that scene was down? This was a double feature with Scarecrow Factory and my friend mentioned above had zero complaints about this movie. Hmm.
Not gonna say Ballerina was a good movie, but I guess it was better than I expected.
The fire hose vs. flamethrower fight was too goddamn dumb for me, that sucker looked like it had no pressure in one of the closeup shots.
But the bit where she wrapped that grenade belt around that guy’s neck and jumped behind that steel table as he blew up was pretty good. Lot more, uh, gibs in this one, than I remember in the other John Wick movies.
showgirls is the best narrative film i’ve seen all year, glad i waited to watch so i could show it in my movie discord server and marvel at it with a bunch of friends
I watched that new netflix mystery movie The Thursday Murder Club and it’s not great. I shouldn’t expect much but still. There are too many actors and too many dumb mysteries and the ending is very stupid. The actors are pretty good but again, the ending is so dumb. Further comment under spoiler.
Everyone is just really cool with a murder suicide and letting a human trafficker get away?
Been watching some Wong Kar Wai stuff recently. Saw “In the Mood For Love” at the theater today, and it was followed by a short film called “In The Mood For Love 2001”. It is the most aggressively 2001 thing I’ve seen since I was physically living in 2001. The entire thing is slathered in a teal tone with blown out highlights, and Maggie Cheung is wearing huge oakleys with bushy, unkempt hair like she’s either starring in Mission Impossible 2 or is going to direct the game Dead or Alive. It’s story is the kind of meet cute you’d see in a normal summer blockbuster and then would get reevaluated years later when future generations see it and say “isn’t this guy a creep?”
But apparently this isn’t widely available, so hey, guess I got to see something neat for once.
Watched the recent Candyman at long last. I liked it. Invoking the BLM “say their names” thing was ballsy but also right there—it sort of felt like one of those chess moves you’re just forced into making but I could also see that coming off as disrespectful. The returning characters factoring into the plot also felt like one of those elements that they absolutely had to use—when they first announced it I knew we’d be meeting the grown up version of that baby.
Got a kick out of the girl who just talked in Joy Division song titles, and the high school kid in the Naked Raygun shirt. Someone also gets murdered in the Wilco building, but if there was a nod to Good Times, I didn’t catch it.
my internet went out and i had a file of aquaman on my computer so i watched aquaman and all my friends who told me i would like it were unfortunately right. atlantis rules and it had all the best parts of tokusatsu shows and it was so good and dedicated to taking all the fish and crab and octopus people stuff seriously and there is a hidden sea at the core of the earth and all the fights were so cool and hit their splash panels so hard that even scenes with ugly flat lighting and zero chemistry quips during the romancing the stone ripoff stuff didn’t bother me because at least they were trying.
he was in batman v superman as the president’s voice over the phone and when i heard him speak i said out loud in the theater “they made the pedophile from hard candy the president???” a more innocent time
The sequel was dull. I can’t even remember anything about it. Aquaman 1 was really fun and the water world was imaginative in a way so many comic book movies aren’t. 57K views!
This place was going to get its own spin off movie called The Trench (as much as any side movie in the DCEU was going to be a thing, anyway) until it got canned. Bring it back James Gunn!
Speaking of Oceanmaster Rudie, Rudie watched POOLMAN, directed, written, and starring Chris Pine, one of the Hollywood Chrises.
I would not call it a good movie. It is a strange movie. Chris made dozens of decisions in making his first movie. It is an idiot detective story, which is my favorite kind of story. I don’t think these dozens of decisions add up to anything. It is not a cohesive whole. I would just be listening stuff in the movie that isn’t really connected to anything else. It takes place out of time, everyone dresses from a different decade, it is obsessed with LA in a way that LA Comedian Podcasts have prepared me for, that said ever scene takes place in a little bubble far from The Real LA (LA plays itself screams in my head.) They literally watch Chinatown, which is a huge redflag and yet it feels like such a decision that it has to mean something.
Which is what all these little decisions add up to. It feels like it must Mean Something. All the characters are lovely human beings.
It feels like I was handed a beautifully decorated present marked “Moral” and I opened up the box and it was empty and yet Chris is standing there with a loving smile saying “Do you like it?”
I went to see The Long Walk today. I thought it was pretty good, but the old guy at the back of the cinema obviously wasn’t as positive, because as soon as the credits rolled he called out “Borin’ as whale shit”
