I’ve always liked Werner Herzog’s documentary work better than his narrative work (except for Lo and Behold, which sucked). The White Diamond is so underrated!
2 Likes
I have a massive soft spot for this movie because it was my introduction to both Herzog and to “a theatrical documentary” and I tend to assume stuff from the mid-2000s was generally not as good as it seemed when I was 17 but I should probably rewatch it
i saw grizzly man in theatres and a big part of the crowd went AWWWWWWWWWWWWWW when herzog listens to the tape and is like ‘throw it away no one should hear this’
i think about his complete made up fanficiton about those albino alligators in cave of forgotten dreams all the time too
white diamond IS underrrated
9 Likes
I have rewatched it every couple years and it still holds up. It’s really interesting to watch now, cause my partner was pointing out, it would be a completely different story had Tredwell lived to see YouTube and Tiktok, and actually had a role of an influencer.
One thing I really like about Grizzly Man is that Herzog is just as much an editor/archivist as he is documentarian here
2 Likes
also count me in as being surprised by Jay Kelly:
Adam Sandler almost low-key steals the show here (which 50% is due to the role, OK, but he nails the persona of someone who’s being painfully ruthless with his own affairs to steer George Clooners through the waters), while we are watching Jay re-live his dreams/roles, yet him being comically out of tune and unable to engage meaningfully with the people around him.
Love how the movie is almost clowning around with some tiny bits (like people telling Jay how he’s never really alone, and someone from his entourage immediately handing him a water) and most importantly, knows when to wrap it up.
1 Like
it was so good!! it was way more of an explicit 8 1/2 riff than I expected (honestly kudos to them for avoiding the trap that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine\_(2009_live-action_film) fell into and not assuming that “Netflix and Noah Baumbach do Fellini!” was anything that anybody would want to see), but “8 1/2 if the main character’s best friend was Adam Sandler” is, in hindsight, a real winner
2 Likes
The ensemble cast includes Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Fergie, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman, and Sophia Loren.
talking about wasted potential, huh. Goes straight on watchlist then!
(also love how the more i think about it(Jay Kelly), the more things i catch/realize, like how the first scene mirrors a later one… gotta re-watch it these days just to check out if my memory serves me right)
1 Like
White Noise might have worked with Sandler instead of Driver… You got the wrong Adam you fool
1 Like
Does it have the fortnite scene ?
It does but at the very end after the credits. It still feels very half baked and cash grab. I’m glad they didn’t shove it in the middle.
1 Like
I never liked early Park Chan Wook when everyone else was into Oldboy but I’ve adored his last two— he creates these wonderful three dimensional characters with complicated lives and then pushes them into totally Looney Tunes circumstances and makes them do violence to each other that any lesser filmmaker would cheapen.
Highly recommend the newest one (No Other Choice) as well as his previous film (Decision to Leave), they’re both so fun and have such elastic pacing
10 Likes
Based on a Donald Westlake novel too! I can’t wait to see this. Decision to Leave was fantastic.
1 Like
I watched it last night and I was worried because a friend of mine described it as his most focused film. I thought, “what does that mean? Are we not going to meander? He meanders so well though… I hope my friend is wrong.”
I was really excited to see the result was, to use your word, “elastic.” So many others working right now can start with a concept like No Other Choice but very few can deliver with an execution as thoughtful as this.
3 Likes
I though my memory was just hazy but there’s a whole extra chunk added during that animated interlude in the first one too.
Finally finished Sean Combs: The Reckoning. It’s weird that after I kept watching and reading so much materials about the case of Tupac during so many years, this new documentary doesn’t left me with the impression that bad people vs good people, but rather that all the celebrities are just scums. Those so-called culture should leave alone with youth. And using Superfly as a role model for kids by playing it on TV is the cruelest childhood story I’ve ever heard, almost like No Life Shaq was playing King Von for his 3 year old son.
The story wasn’t particularly special, Puff basically used almost every tricks in real that mentioned in Ballers: winner loots others, if got caught, just lying. So he succeeded as heck.
Fortunately, I don’t have a Netflix subscription and I watch for free. I’m going to empty my playlist and go to Output category and replace to some music made by yours to cleanse my mind.
6 Likes
Same deal here, a formative movie 20(!) years ago in its original release. I rewatched it a few years back and walked away feeling like it was one of Herzog’s best/richest movies. In his documentary work there is often nothing outside of his own interpretation (as in the woman in Encounters at the End of the World whose interview gets cut off mid-sentence by Herzog’s VO, “Her story goes on forever.”), but in Grizzly Man, you can tell he can’t completely reconcile his feelings about Treadwell. Herzog is fully aware of Treadwell’s ignorance/naivety/stupidity/recklessness, but there’s an undeniable affinity there, a kindred sentiment, for a guy who was intrepid and who was enthralled by nature, even if he didn’t have the proper respect for it.
There’s also the recognition of one filmmaker analyzing and appropriating the work of another would-be filmmaker. Shades of David Holzman’s Diary in the stuff Treadwell recorded but clearly wasn’t ‘acting’ for and never intended for public exhibition. Herzog then applies this to himself with the scene where he listens to the recording of Treadwell’s death and recommends its destruction.
5 Likes
Plane movieeeees
Mission Impossible Whatever: The Final Reckoning - hate to admit it but the series peaked with Fallout. I think this might be my most admired blockbuster franchise at this point, but this one left me somewhat cold. I know watching it on a plane removes most of its power but I’m honestly not a fan entirely because of the spectacle. I just feel like the older ones managed to give a little bit more juicy scenery chewing stuff to the supporting cast, and I’m sorry but letting the Severance guy do one really meaty line read is not a substitute for all the crazy bullshit they let Alec Baldwin do in the ones he was in, not to mention telling Philip Seymour Hoffman “you are the most evil man alive” and just letting him run with it. That being said, the submarine wreckage sequence was great and my postmodernist ass clapped my hands like a circus seal every time they said anything about The Entity. Imagine what a real actor could do with that shit! The other thing this movie has is something I call the Pirates of the Caribbean problem, where when a franchise goes on so long that you gotta make your character who is literally just A Guy into some kind of legendary chosen one type thing. I thought it was weird that they didn’t go all the way and make the connection between Ethan and Esai Morales’s guy more specific. Like is he supposed to have been the guy who did the murder Ethan was framed for? Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention to the last one but I was kinda confused by that
Naked Gun:
honestly pretty great. No notes. I can’t help but feel they could have got someone better than Neeson to do this, but I don’t know who and also thought he was fine. I haven’t seen the originals in a long time so while everything felt vaguely familiar I can’t tell which bits they just shamelessly lifted. Joke/filler ratio is fantastic, movies like this can be so good if they stay just annoying enough to not piss you off and just gross enough to feel absurd but not like scatalogically obsessed. I think the Farrelly bros dug the grave of “gross out” humor (maybe even more so than the avalanche of Scary Movie style parody films that followed) and the Apatovian approach to cinematic comedies buried them
Jurassic Park: Rebirth
Put off watching this one for so long and I can’t believe how much I didn’t hate it. This movie is obviously not as good as the actual Spielberg ones (even the second , which is underrated) and if being objective is not better than the last mission impossible. But in relation to how bad the Jurassic World phase of this franchise has been as a whole, it’s a god damn masterpiece. Still has horrible characters with the most obvious “these guys are gonna get killed” supporting cast ever, the mutant hybrid dinos are the stupidest idea they’ve ever had in this series, and the structure is basically like… Here are the three levels in this video game. And then you go through the three levels. But. But!!! Everyone involved with this is really putting their whole ass into trying to make Steven Spielberg style intricately crafted and staged action set pieces, and… It works! You can tell where stuff is. You can tell what is happening. You understand the stakes. The audience gets just enough cheeky information that is denied to the characters to create a pleasing sense of anticipation and release. It shouldn’t be that hard to do this type of shit but it is! If you gotta do huge cash grab franchise entries do it like this. Just come up with three good action sequences, hire some competent people to execute them, and then idk let someone’s kid come up with some words they can say to link those sequences together. This is how they did the mission impossible films iirc and I’m certain it’s how this was made. In fact I may have read that the inflatable raft sequence literally used leftover previs from an unused sequence in the original Jurassic Park? It feels like it. In a good way. The more I think about everything this forgettable c tier summer movie did well the more pissed off I get about how fucking worthless the fantastic four movie was. Those characters even have interesting powers, unlike Shang Chi or whatever. You’re killing me with this bullshit!!!
6 Likes
no question
1 Like
I sometimes think Rogue Nation might be better, but Fallout has a lot of cool shit in it, and no Renner. I didn’t really like Rogue Nation until I had seen it a couple times though.
1 Like