Close to You by Elliot Page, It’s a good movie for straight, and like Horse Girl by Alison Brie for ‘normal’. Both of them need you have very familiar with their personal lives out of the screen. Also needs your attention and love on their performance in the past. So when they give you a unfamiliar detailed of some vision you never thought too much, it feels very rich than other story. But they have the same issues, after you make new connection of the character in story, new adventures story-line is always somewhat unsatisfactory. But a fictional story can never be more beyond than reality, so I guess this can’t be resolved by writing skills.
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P-p-p-p-Plane Movies
Black Widow: a bad stopgap Marvel movie that turns out I have more thoughts about it than expected and saw multiple people lean in as I described its more outlandish elements. I guess the whole world knows ScarJo is an AVENGER (the absolute best of us in all forms) and a trained from child deep-state-assassin who somehow escaped the Soviet Union to work for America.
One of those other assassin’s gets sprayed with red-mist and suddenly her mind control is broken. She can think for the first time since becoming a murder assassin trained from childhood. So she steals the red mist capsules and hides till ScarJo and her fight. Then they make up, because turns out they were SISTERS, uncover fake sisters in Iowa for three years but other girl was so young she didn’t know they were fake. So she was just torn from her family then sent to become a murder assassin.
Their Dad was The Soviet’s Captain America and is a constant running joke because he wants family bonding or he’s a little fat, or no one remembers him or he has a complex because Captain is famous and he got thrown in a gulag. So the fake sisters have to bust him out because only he knows the location of the secret evil mastermind behind the Black Widow program. They do this while causing an avalanche and killing everyone. They also destroy the streets of Budapest. Do not consider the cost of human life please.
they meet up with evil scientist mom and then have a bunch of scenes about how the family was fake and it was fucked up they put little sister into that program and then the two girls were brain-washed assassins that were great for the country. Spoilers for the end of the movie: everyone thought the family was real. See the true message is Family.
The evil Toby Jones but not guy’s never-found base is a ludicriously large air fortress. Like bigger than a Football stadium. I was in awe of how huge it was. After all the searching the only way they locate it is…for some reason the black widows do not put a bullet in the family’s heads but take them up there.
To my surprise they have a big stupid plan to knock down the ludicrious sky fortress but instead they do the simple thing: destroy a single turbine because have you seen how stupidly big this thing is? Gotta be powered by multiple iron-man hearts.
There is a cool moment where ScarJo breaks her own nose to disable the phernome programing so she can not just murder the evil mastermind. Then she fights all the Black Widows and the red mist gets used (glad they were all in one room) and it suddenly breaks their stupid programming so none of them want to murder. I would think years of indoctrination and training and isolation would do it, but yeah fake mind control, sure.
The thousands of technicians and crew on the airship die along with the evil mastermind. Everyone in a way that implies “We can’t have the GI Joes kill someone with a GUN.” The giant airship crashes somewhere over Russia and we are not meant to think about the debris.
then ScarJo turns herself in to Julia-Louis Drefuss for reasons that are not establish in this movie. Then we cut to ScarJo’s grave where JLD recruits the younger sister. Insert I guess 5 other Marvel movie/TVshows we were supposed to connect those 2 scenes together. THE END
All the Black Widows got in a hoverjet to start their new life probably running a volunteer animal hospital or teaching at-risk-youth the danger of Mind Control Drug usage.
one more because this is too long
Ballerina From The World of John Wick: a trained from young age tightly controled murder assassin lady tries to resolve the death of her father. She does this by going to a small village and murdering every man woman and child there. But she rescued Norman’ Reedus’s kid so…it is okay? John Wick is there a lot to remind you of a different movie.
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I saw Bugonia at a preview screening last night and I really enjoyed it. It’s a stealth remake of Save the Green Planet, which I haven’t seen in ages but really liked back in the day. I don’t remember all the details from the original, but I think this remake hits most of the major beats. It sort of budgets it up but also directs that money at times in ways that enhance the whole wild psychotronic nature of the story. Loved the way the ending was done.
Brilliant performance from Emma Stone. It weirdly resonated really hard in a few moments with The Curse.
Stavros Halkias has a minor role in this and he plays it well. When his character is first introduced there are certain implications that are played pretty subtly in a way I thought worked really well, but then later the movie basically highlights and underlines it unnecessarily, but it didn’t take me out of it.
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I also saw a great 1977 Portuguese documentary at the Harvard Film Archive, A Lei da Terra (The Law of the Land).
It was made by a leftist film cooperative in the Alentejo region of Portugal in the aftermath of the 1974 Carnation Revolution. It’s about land reform, but that’s not as dry as it sounds! Shortly after the revolution, peasants began to occupy the land they farmed on and collectively work it for themselves rather than the landowners, who were incredibly exploitative and often didn’t even live in the country. In that revolutionary period, a number of different groups and parties were vying for power, and there was a fierce debate over whether the provisional government would legally recognize these new cooperatives, allowing the land to officially, legally move from the hands of private owners to those who worked it.
The film is extremely effective and watchable political agitprop in support of these cooperatives. You see a lot of compelling interviews with some of the farmers where they talk about how they’ve suffered under the yoke of the landowners their entire lives, tales of malnourishment and illiteracy and struggle. You see the fire in their eyes as they talk about the way things have changed for them since the revolution, and their pride in their collective management of these liberated fields. You watch them work and you learn about how they’ve organized things and the ways that productivity and yields have increased significantly since they kicked the landowners out.
At this point, their cause hadn’t yet been suppressed. In the back and forth of revolution and counter-revolution in the late 70’s, eventually Portugal settled into a liberal democracy that was insufficiently radical to allow for this level of agrarian reform. But this film is a fascinating and exciting look into the precise moment where anything seemed possible. In the stagnant and depressive time we’re in today, this was so refreshing to watch.
That’s the full film on YouTube, but sadly there are no English subtitles. The version I saw was a recent restoration with subtitles, which is apparently very difficult to see.
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Stavy in a Lanthimos movie… Greek culture is ascending
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im pogging over that one
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Promising Young Woman, not a good storytelling and too much useless detail but lost the backbone of character’s motivation. Also though the powerless shows the realistic gap between man and woman, but still hard to focus when they try to send that revenge emotion. There is a bit of a contradiction between the delicate hesitate and revenge in it. The ending trick is alright but not enough for me.
But I watched this movie for Alison Brie, she’s still good, so no need to complain too much.
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Saw the silent version of The Cat and the Canary earlier tonight, and the love interest guy sucked. You don’t gotta settle on the one person you’re not related to in the haunted house.
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I guess they were supposed to be distant cousins, which makes it even weirder.
The opening scenes ruled and some of the stuff with the “monster” later on was more out there than I expected, but the rest of the thing didn’t feel as adventurous.
I dug Frankenstein. I have a feeling it’ll get shit on here though.
The story is well trod territory and none of the adaptations even play it straight so the game is always to see what’s added, what’s deemphasized, and what’s borrowed.
Given how Guillermo lives in a house surrounded by Boris Karloff statues, I was kinda surprised that the ‘30s movie wasn’t the main touchstone. There’s the window overlooking the university operating theater that’s highlighted as his scene’s main light source, the knock at the castle door, and the wrapped ribbons sleeves of the wedding dress, but that’s about as deep as he dips there. The mirror scene of the Edison film gets a little nod though.
The role of capital in bankrolling the experiment is a bigger focus than past movies. I haven’t read the book since I was like 13 but I didn’t recall that being a big thread there.
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I saw it this weekend and while I wasn’t a big fan, I did like how it kept the nesting frame-stories. The science scenery was great, too.
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Watched Michael Mann’s Heat at like 12 am this morning. I really really loved it tbh. I have a thing for the vibes of grimy crime movies where everybody is kind of an asshole. Killer film, banger ending. I loved it a lot.
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Watched Hello Dolly with my mom. As expensive to make as Cleopatra, and you can tell, massive sets filled with extras. kind of drags at 2 and a half hours, but Barbra Streisand is excellent at making chaos happen.
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I watched the 90s Sonic OVA on my 3DS
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Nerve (2016), finally watched it after 10 years, we into a worse situation, sadly we have ishowspeed and Mrbeast now, and we can only bomb the server to shut it down. I consider that it’s a prequel to Mr. Robot (2015). The Social Network (2010) is a prequel to Nerve. Now we have an Internet Documentary Trilogy.
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hell house llc lineage: ok i know saying “yeah i watched the fourth sequel to a found footage movie about haunted clown mannequins that Get you, and it turned out not to be very good” may seem kind of redundant. but! i did kind of like the earlier hell houses!! the first one at least was pretty funny at capturing Horrible 2010s Coworker Energy, the clown mannequin bit where it’s obviously just a guy in makeup standing very still as people creep towards it is always a lot of fun, and i would say all the movies up til now at least had standalone sequences that were very entertaining (it was maybe the sequel i disliked most, next to this one, but i have to give credit to the part in #3 where the girl takes a bet to make out with one of the clowns). plus what little “lore” the series had was always very, like, whatever the horror version of “chuuni” is, i kinda liked seeing this very half-baked idea inflate to like grandiose suburban catholic mythology about angels vs satanists and corny piano songs and secret cults etc.
this one is not a found footage one and fwiw the clown stuff at least doesnt totally deflate outside that context as i thought it might. but as far as i can see, the main rationale behind the change of formats is that a traditional movie can encompass enormous amounts of like dopey conversations and lore callbacks and references to previous characters(!? did the previous movies HAVE characters?) that would be far more summarily rejected if it was like, spoken into a camcorder or something. they really go all in on making this totally unintelligible unless you’re able to spot the returning non-characters from previous entries and care what their deal is. it ends on a fuckin CLIFFHANGER with someone slowly turning around in Dark Kermit hoodie, and the heroine says “mitchell?!” and then roll credits and you can almost hear the sound of a thousand people typing “mitchell hell house who is imdb” into search browsers.
i will say that it does bring back my favourite part of the previous movie. in that one there was a recurring thing of like red rubber balls bouncing sinisterly at people from the dark, and i was never sure if they were meant to be clown noses or something. here they’re big red baseballs but there are still like 3+ scenes of people discovering red rubber balls and looking at them in fear. Clown Spoor. there’s also a good bit where the priest slowly advances on one of the clowns while holding a crucifix - do those work on clowns? - and i liked the part at the start where a guy is lured in by a comically large and videogamey stack of money that may as well be hovering and spinning around. i wish that when the clown tried to get him afterwards he’d thrown the cash at it to bribe it but alas.
i always make fun of these movies for coming out on streaming services on halloween as if anyone in the world is gonna pin their halloween plans around the new hell house movie. and then i always watch them the day they come out anyway. but having it end on that fuckin nothing cliffhanger TOO was a bit much even for me. between this and alien earth it sort of feels like the monkeys paw curled on someone wishing 2020s culture would be more confident in itself.
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After randomly rewatching a few scenes from The Wicker Man the other day, I went looking for other things the main guy has been in. (I also liked him in The Appointment.) I found that Breaker Morant seemed to be highly regarded and I watched it last night.
It’s based on the true story of some Australian soldiers during the Boer War, and it’s good. Primarily a courtroom drama but with flashbacks to the events under discussion.
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When I was a cashier at Wegmans, I would sometimes ask people what their favorite movies were to pass the time. One older dude told me about this. I think he also mentioned he cried? Still haven’t seen it though.
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Hard to Be A God is basically Idiocracy
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if you haven’t seen Khrustalyov My Car it’s another masterpiece of blocking in Russian cinema, probably my favorite of that era
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