it’s on IA
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Finished Megalopolis. what the fuck
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I do like how Megalopolis will just go crazy with the composition and cinematography every once in a while and actors will just drop the most bonkers lines. Even if most of it makes absolutely no sense.
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I’m going to be thinking about “Do you like my boner?” for a very long time.
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One Battle After Another, what a Overton window show on the Fox Channel.
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This was a busy movie week:
The Company of Wolves
Spooky, dreamy, morbid, and a little on the nose but it’s cool to see a girl coming of age story that has some bite to it. The practical effects are peak, and the constant back and forth of exactly how many layers of framing device you’re on every second makes it feel extremely disorienting…but in a good way. It’s comfort with getting folkloric and just plain weird in a way I don’t think any modernish movie I’ve seen has except…maybe the Lighthouse a little bit? It just feels so utterly unlike anything I’ve seen from a movie in a minute, and I immediately want to see it again.
Rollerball
It was on Tubi, and while sadly, there have been many better times to watch Tubi, they did have Rollerball. I kind of expected this to be an over the top slightly goofy but straight-faced future dystopia movie like a Logan’s Run or something. It’s not. It’s super grounded, depicts a terrifyingly plausible fictional sport with unflinching brutality, and makes a bunch of called shots at what the future will be like that it actually lands. “We only have versions of books edited by computers available for you” is just plain wild. It’s like watching a golden age scifi novel about the TRIUMPH OF A MANS WILL AGAINST THE SYSTEM but on screen. Actually pretty dark and brutal, but if you think about what the moral of the movie is too long you’ll get a headache. Happy I watched it.
The Badguys II
I’d actually seen this one before but a friend and a boyfriend hadn’t so this was my second viewing. This is a perfectly acceptable kid’s movie that has incredibly well staged comedy action scenes and at it’s best moments feels kinda like Furry Lupin the 3rd. It’s interesting to see “Good for what it is” material elevated with some of the best looking CG animation in anything.
…also I’m not immune to Mr Wolf, Diane Foxington, or Kitty Kat, but I still think this movie functions well at being a kid’s action comedy caper movie despite my bias.
Wolfwalkers
I’ve been on a werewolf kick recently, and a local theater decided to play this a bit ago. Gorgeously hand crafted animation, constantly pushing it’s own art direction to the limits. The story is straightforward in some ways but extremely well put together and does stuff I don’t really expect a movie like this to do? Loved the look, loved the soundtrack, loved every lovingly crafted animated wolf moment. Finding out Soul of all movies beat it for best animated picture at the oscars in an actual literal crime. (I know it’s a sham award but it’s still infuriating).
Also: Basing the villain of your ostensible children’s film on Oliver Cromwell is a flex.
I need to watch more movies again, this was fun.
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lupin iii the immortal blood - it turns out this is the last in a series of 5 lupin movies and is the one where they all go fight the mastermind of the previous ones, so sorta did feel like the last 10mins of a movie miraculously stretched to feature length. i like that the way they made the bad guy a threat for lupin is not by making him super smart or competent or anything per se but just by making him so weird looking it sort of feels like they’re all stuck in a completely different kind of genre piece. he looks like a dragonball alien x custom soul caliber character in assless chaps and a lot of the movie is spent just looking at him be weird while waiting for some other shoe to drop. i liked it
since it was a film screening w the director there they also showed one of his previous films “redline” which was amazing. they did a q and a with him afterwards and he still visibly seemed chuffed by it, as one might be. really enjoyed that of all the weird little sideplots, character dynamics, background bits they throw in to make the race more interesting they don’t really slow down to resolve anything, like obviously the stuff with political tensions on the robot world (called “roboworld”) is only interesting bc its another crazy thing to put on screen during the big fzero race, we dont need to see how it plays out after that. favourite racers were the weirdly ordinary seeming dudes in the beetle car who hate the gorilla cop and who iirc were based on some real life commercial directors. i like when theres some oddly understated characters in a big lineup of flamboyant weirdos and you wait on tenterhooks to find out what their deal is.
100 meters - this was the last one i went to at the anime film screening, its the next one by the guy who did “on-gaku: our sound”, i loved that one. this one is a little more straight feeling, maybe bc the sports theming kind of insists on a narrower idea of success than music allows for, but i liked it, it was fun to see the sports anime beats filtered thru moments of more idiosyncratic sensibility and the animation was really good.
touch of evil - wanted to watch this again mostly for that opening but the last act was what ended up sticking to me more, people floundering in this vast inky blackness that feels like the surface of the moon, heston climbing through weird oil rig machinery as welles stumps along in the background and seems big enough to pull the whole frame out of whack. marlene dietrich as the ultimate version of the “bellhop dressed in black” askew perspective character. kind of funny to imagine that after doing that accent all thru lady of shanghai welles was like no we need even more distractingly fake ethnic stuff this time.
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Redline really is incredible… the power of love…
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Redline is one of those ‘only comes around once in a decade’—kind of products, and serves as a reminder why we shouldn’t take it for granted that the dedication of so many creative people manage to come across in their work.
Yes, it really is that good.
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I need to watch Redline again
The fanservice is annoying as always but, otherwise, unimpeachable
Its me the person who found redline disappointing because it has a good 30 minutes of nothing happening in between the wacky races
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I also thought Redline was like four cool music videos between some real boring stuff.
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I liked Redline but I was a bit disappointed that the races were very stop-start. I didn’t might the stuff between the races as much, but once they’re going they keep getting interrupted and it kind of stops the momentum dead repeatedly
The pacing misunderstanders have logged on
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Is hundreds of beavers worthwhile? I’ve been avoiding it for like two years but it’s become an annual event here and that time is coming around again this weekend. People with questionable taste have recommended it.
It’s a strike against it that it’s eaten up the evening slot for the annual classic animation festival, so I’ll be stuck watching Popeye cartoons in the morning with a bunch of kids instead of nighttime with a couple weirdos.
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it’s good
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I’m the least warm on it of anyone I know. Especially if you haven’t seen it I would take the chance to see it in a theater.
it is inventive and slapstick and non-stop and yet also I did not laugh or even get emotion out of it. I am a far far minority and still glad I saw it.
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It’s not classic animation festival good, but I liked it. It does capture the anarchic spirit of an old cartoon decently well.
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Leave The World Behind … it kinda sucks. great cast, great cinematography, very poor writing
it did confirm what everyone already knew, which is Ethan Hawke >>> Kevin Bacon