It’s kind of funny how all of Paul’s movies are about dads. Whether he’sin the foreground or the background, a bad dad is there.
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Really makes you think things about the America’s Funniest Home Videos announcer/Ghoulardi, yeah.
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absolutely shocked by this take, I think it’s a masterpiece, probably my 4th favorite PTA after phantom thread, Licorice pizza, and the master
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Watched and enjoyed Nirvana (1997)
It’s a cyberpunk movie about a programmer who has made a game where the main character has gained sentience and is aware of every cycle. The game character tries to convince other game characters that it’s all just a game. The programmer meanwhile has to hack into his company’s system to delete the game to free the character from endless loops before the game goes up for sale at which point it would be nigh-impossible to delete every copy of the game.
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i guess i would sum up my reaction by saying that i thought it was aesthetically and technically great, very interesting to watch, but ideologically confused and emotionally empty/facile. once i realized that despite the setting the movie wasn’t really going to be ‘political’ like that i started enjoying it a lot more. but i was still kind of surprised by how shallow most of the characters felt, when this is usually something pta does really well even when the rest of the movie is not my cup of tea. like i think comparing sean penn’s characters this movie and in licorice pizza (a movie i overall did not love as anything other than a funny rejoinder to ‘once upon a time in hollywood,’ which i’m not sure it was intended to be) is uh pretty instructive.
even though he’s barely in licorice pizza (and this is true to me of all the kind of one-scene characters in licorice pizza, inherent vice, etc) the writing/performance just feels like it has more basic interest in who this person is than anything that happens in this movie, i guess with the exception of some of the stuff w “bob ferguson” and sensei, which imo is the only example of this thing where a character with a limited amount of screen time still ends up feeling very complete and well realized. (on that note, one thing i’ll praise this movie for is having the least annoying example of the ‘non-japanese character obsessed with stereotypically japanese shit’ character he for some reason keeps putting in his movies lately)
i get that it’s an action movie with way less dialogue than most of his earlier stuff so maybe this is an unrealistic expectation. but i think it really hurts the film overall to both open the film with that sequence focused on teyana taylor’s character but still not really figure out how to give her any interiority, and then just let the one moment with her that felt emotionally honest (her sincerity about continuing to be a revolutionary despite also being a parent or w/e) get undermined by the letter she writes to her daughter at the end of the movie being like ‘i guess after all, family is really what truly matters most…’ or something. like i was half expecting this letter to be revealed to have just been written by leo’s guy just to give his daughter some sense of closure, maybe that’s implied? idk? but i would maybe have let that scene play out a bit more rather than cut away from the actually compelling characters to show sean penn’s guy getting killed again, which seemed pointless.
idk i guess my snarky review is that a gritty reboot of the big lebowski should still have been more fun than this
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I also watched One Battle After Another, and I liked it, it was fine.
But, when I went to book the tickets for the Sunday afternoon screening it was sold out at the nice theater, and then the good seats were taken at the regular theater, so I purchased tickets to a later, early evening showtime, at the regular theater.
I had two extra hours to kill, in the meantime, so I decided…why not watch 1991’s Shattered after sitting in the watchlist for years. Damn, wow. The only Holywood picture Wolfgang Petersen both wrote and directed?[1] What a hero. What do you think the glass budget on this production was? ‘68 Dodge Coronet vs mid 80’s 911 Targa chase scene.
Revive the Pet Detective cinematic universe and give the first one to this Bob Hoskins character…on the search for a mysteriously missing Ace.
And shot by László “Ghostbusters” Kovács?…guess I will have to try to finish watching Copycat at some point. ↩︎
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my most favorite part of any john woo movie is the end of bullet in the head where it’s cutting between them on the docks wrecking their cars into each other spraying uzis at one another and them riding their bicycles as kids together on the docks
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saw the OBAA matinee today not realizing it was a showing with subtitles, you can count me among the haters but all the old timers present seemed to love it, especially that part with the phone operator complaining about their space being violated. i think it might be the least funny pta movie? benicio is great, leo is wasted, so glad they included a nonbinary character just to be the butt of a joke & sell out the protagonist. still, better than licorice pizza.
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new Shane Black is extremely mediocre
like there are levels of “phoned in work for a streaming service” and this is about as far down the line as it gets
They added so many good things to Criterion Channel this month: John Carpenter, Tsui Hark, John Woo, Ringo Lam, Kira Muratova…every Edward Yang film? I am losing my mind over here.
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Change of Fate is so good. Criterion viewing series where you make people watch nothing but Shepitko and Muratova would go hard. Minty….watch Wings…
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I really should! I watched The Ascent and I thought that was also going to be about pilots but it turns out the title is a bit cheeky.
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It has one of the most striking and unforgettable sequences with a plane I’ve ever seen in a movie. The only thing that I can compare it to is a scene in William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress. Wings is some real shit.
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You know what, I should run a Rohmer Fan Club-style stream based on that.
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van helsing (2004) is like somebody made a bad shot for shot remake of an anime OVA that does not exist so pretty fun
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watched Dirty Play on prime. Mark Wahlburg as sb’s favorite hard boiled gangster, Parker. It was a lot of fun, had a sort of made for streaming so the accounting for returns is nebulous and budget is meaningless kind of vibe to it. Bunch of old actors because people who pay for subscriptions recognize old names, but also had young stars that wouldn’t be supporting cast if theatrical release mattered.
Hard to hold that against it because the opening setpiece featured a car busting onto a track at a horserace and lots of digital horses being believably thrown around. A good heist goes horribly wrong adventure.
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24 hour party people - firstly it’s erasure to have howard devoto played by a tall guy with full hair but they make up for it by having the real person in the same scene as a bathroom attendent. very funny that the two bands the movie revolves around are joy division and the happy mondays, more dissimilar groups i’d have a hard time imagining - - i feel like it’s to the movie’s credit tho that the latter come across as exciting but ambiguous in terms of anything they might possibly ‘mean’ or ‘represent’, as though all the rave stuff were still too raw in recent memory to easily be glossed into any feelgood stories abt capturing the moment or being yourself or whatever. steve coogan as tony wilson is real good… really gets at the overlap of light entertainment nullity with mysterious avantgarde instinct that characterises british pop music (eg d. bowie).. i like that when he whines “its like you havent even HEARD of situationism” its simultaneously goofy and completely correct.
the mark e smith bit had me thinking, wasn’t there some 1980s american graffitti knockoff where little richard or someone appears playing themselves and is visibly far older than the narrative would account for? it’s an effect i really enjoy
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I love this movie for several reasons, namely that it’s one of the only theatrical dvcam releases that imo doesn’t look like shit, that it was maybe singlehandedly responsible for the cooganissance (it was his first collaboration with Brydon and Winterbottom before Tristram Shandy and the trip), because I adore early new order and because it’s really just a ton of fun in ways it shouldn’t work but does
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Yeah I avoided it forever cuz I figured I’d just hate it but I finally watched it last year after reading like half a dozen books about Factory acts and I loved it, had a great time, many laughs, can’t believe I doubted Coogan
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The bit where eccleston cameos to talk about boethius is one of my fav moments in movies
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