watched wings (1966) and oh man when her plane is flying all around the plane that’s about to crash it’s like they’re fuckin alive. like one plane is worried about the other and panicking. first time planes made me well up! it was reminding me of stanley and stella in breaking the ice
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Gonna show some of my friends the classic film
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky tonight
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Caught the remaster of Queen Rock Montreal in IMAX, less because I love Queen but because where I live (Korea) is having a wave of concert movie rereleases in theaters and they’re never disappointing. That Roger Taylor fella can sure beat the hell outta those cans huh??
My gratitude to the small army of sound engineers over the years who have all taken turns doing their best to dial down high-pitched screaming Canadians
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I saw Project Hail Mary yesterday. Not in IMAX unfortunately because theaters here decided it’s more profitable to show Detective Conan than something that would actually benefit from being in IMAX.
It was excellent. I went in almost completely blind, just knowing that it took place in space. An emotional roller coaster throughout, with lots of varied conflicts.
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Just watched Yojimbo for the first time in many years. There’s a handful of names to keep up with but it’s never anything too overwhelming and it’s always cool to remember that the ‘I’m not helping you because I’m nice’ anime archetype ur-text is Toshiro Mifune’s character here (I’m sure there’s earlier examples but he plays it so well)
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Priest (1994)
I firmly believe that the catholic church fiercely protested this movie because tom wilkinson portrayed a positive version of what a priest could be (a tireless advocate for social justice and left wing causes that actually cares about the people in his community) so well that it made the real church look bad by comparison.
Also made me appreciate how all the homosexual subtext in Ravenous was definitely not accidental. Antonia Bird knew exactly what she was doing.
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I saw the Mario Galaxy movie, it was alright.
I’m surprised no one’s calling out Fox for that racist comment he made about Slippy, saying that he fell into a wormhole because “that’s what happens when you have a frog as an engineer.”
Friend of mine was streaming Running Scared, a Gregory Hines/Billy Crystal buddy cop movie from 1986. Generally not great, ACAB as hell, but it had a few clearly improvised lines here and there that were funny.
This bit killed me:
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watched some eurospy ones
kiss kiss, kill kill (1966) - first in the kommissar x series, basically bugs bunny level romp with one slightly cloddish cop guy and his annoying private eye friend who’s always one step ahead, tricking him, knocking his cops over the head and handcuffing them to cars as a joke, etc. has one of those really good italian spy villains like in operation double 007, the kind who always seem to be swanning around in a dressing gown with a big cigar while cackling. the main interest in this one is that nearly every woman in the first half is wearing the same enormous, lilac-colour bouffant wig:
we watch breathlessly to see what the deal is with the wigs, which are never remarked upon, what it could mean, if it means they’re cyborgs or mars attacks style aliens or what. it turns out they’re the brainwashed henchwomen of the main villain who i guess just has very specific tastes. there’s also a blonde attack variant:
the kommissar x theme song (no, not that one) announces “i love you, joe walker / just as every woman loves you”. this turns out to be strictly literal, as the private eye overcomes the main plot by making out with the main lilac girl, which turns the rest of them good(?) so they start picking up their weird guns and fighting with the red sweatered male henchmen on the island base.
my favourite little touch in the movie is in the epilogue, where we see an off-duty lilac gal and ex-henchmen casually having lunch in the background of a shot, presumably discussing new employment opportunities now the base blew up
marie-chantal vs doctor kha (1965) - a claude chabrol movie from his own quickie eurospy period, done when everybody seems to agree he just needed the money. this is one of those where a random civilian accidentally falls into a web of intrigue, but in this case it withholds any particular reason (revenge, love, concern over the fate of the world, etc) - incurious-seeming upper class french tourist marie-chantal manages to escape various colourful spies and assassins because nobody can work out why she does anything at all. the only explanation we have of her motives for staying involved is some mix of wilfulness and spite. in the end even the all-knowing dr kha is baffled.
i like this one, there’s a slow and distanced feeling, like you’re watching someone sit at a coffeehouse trying to work out how the scenario should go in real time. the sense of distractedness extends to the ending, with dr kha and his henchmen left driving around trying to remember what our heroine’s name was while she ends up on yet another plane fulla spies, holding a world-endin mcguffin she can neither get rid of nor do anything with. but the movie’s main aesthetic achievement remains: lots of shots of bored looking henchmen with cigarettes dangling from their lips that look straight out of Danger 5
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You might be into this piece of shit. Great cheapo cinematic 60s-isms throughout.
also Elvis was in a dumbass Eurospy, which isn’t as bad as you might expect
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body heat - really funny version of double indemnity, played comparatively straight until the deed occurs - at which point it becomes obvious that every single other character in the movie has already clocked what happened and is happening and it’s left to the dumb horndog lawyer protagonist to try to catch up. gets delightfully roadrunneresque in the scenes where his arsonist friend is like oh yeah your lady friend asked me to make a kind of bomb that goes off when someone opens a door and all of a sudden he starts getting urgent Objective Added calls from her about going to retrieve items from an isolated boathouse.
i like that after he has sex he immediately shows up to work the next morning like this
i also like when he sees a clown driving by and seems to recognize it as the patron figure of all film noir protagonists. the foreshadowing clown.
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Finally saw Looper, so I think I’ve now seen the full oeuvre of Rian Johnson. Gonna rank it at the same level of Star Wars 8 where it shoots for something, and almost all comes together, so that still ranks it above Brothers Bloom because at least it was trying for something. I think the original premise was “Guy who’s too stupid to understand time travel gets wrapped up in a time travel story.” but they had to include the diner scene where Bruce Willis says he kind of understands time travel because the audience got mad that the time travel (a thing that does not exist) wasn’t realistic enough. Rian Johnson would run into this problem again with Star Wars.
I also suspect that in an earlier script the child was also another loop of Joseph Gordon-Levett, which would explain that his seemingly psychic ability was just him sharing memories the way that JGV/BW characters would. I further suspect that the child was then supposed to have both telepathy and telekinesis, but Rian was told “No, you can’t have that much magic in a sci fi story. We’ll let you have telekinesis and time travel, but mind reading is too much.”
And maybe that producer pulling him back was right, because I watched this with a friend and two of his co-workers. One of those co-workers was on his phone 1/3rd of the way through the film reading a plot summary because he didn’t understand the story. 2/3rds of the way through the film he suddenly exclaimed “Wait! I think Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis are the same guy!” He was also unclear if JGL, a cleaner for the mob who disposed of corpses, was a “good guy” or “bad guy”. As much as I like the concept of a guy stuck in a sci fi story who has no knowledge or curiosity about the sci fi elements, it seems like that concept is a step too far for genre fans.
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getting increasingly baffled as I read this, thinking “that’s not what I remember from watching it in the cinema” before eventually remembering I saw Jumper
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The best Young Ladies of Rochefort song is the one where two guys (one with a red shirt and red tie, and another with a blue shirt and blue tie) sing that they like happiness more than sadness, fun more than pain, good people more than cops, beautiful girls more than ugly girls etc
There’s a weird side plot with people reading the news about a mysterious murderer in town who killed a woman and cut her to pieces (in this otherwise entirely jovial movie)
Turns out the murderer was a minor character. We learn about it from the newspaper. The end.
Checking the internet, the woman killed was the star of the director’s first movie. That’s cool! More movie protagonists should be killed off-screen by a serial killer in another unrelated movie for no discernable reason IMO
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I am reading many histories of criminalized underclasses and “vagrant wars” is just human history whenever the dominant classes create the conditions for the formation of an itinerant underclass
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It’s always been hilarious to me that Rian Johnson thought this was a cute world building idea. Like the only thing that stuck with me from that movie and it’s cuz it’s fuckin dumb as rocks
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using @daphaknee s signature posting style for a moment, because it fits so well here:
THIS MOVIE IS SO GOOD.
I know i shouldn’t love it so much, but it manages to catch lightning in a bottle twice (because there’s Cherbourg, which is totally different tonally but more the same if that makes sense) and is a blueprint for many things La La Land did. It also has two wonderful actresses chanson’ing their way through the movie, where all dudes are written in a ‘we’re belmondo cool here, ain’t we, fellow lads?!?!’-but-actually-endoringly-dorky-lost-puppies kind of way, and the steadfast characters in control turn out to be the ladies — something still find impressive for the time it was made in.
And it has gorgeous sets. And wonderful time capsule setting details (architecture, clothes, mise-en-scene details etc etc) — and it is auch a good movie for getting you out of a ‘i got dumped again’ slump, which rocks.
Also also,
even snuffles (my sister’s 
) had a great time watching it (actually 
ing through it, but didn’t bat an eye with all the french singing going on non-stop).
tl;dr:
still is 
, 
and 
all at once.
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the one thing I remember from Jumper is JGL drives around in a Miata
there’s like a jet bike in there and I was like “what the fuck, come on man”
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