fantastical/surreal Czech films became a mainstay of our movie night group, Mysterious Castle of the Carpathians recently landed on my radar cuz of Tulpa and Zeman is good stuff! some others we’ve enjoyed:
The Girl on the Broomstick
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
Morgiana
Lemonade Joe
When the Cat Comes
Daisies
Fruit of Paradise
Alice/Jan Švankmajer stuff generally
gonna add Visitors from the Galaxy to the queue 
Showed some friends Helvetica. They were not as into it as I was, but they did love the part with Hermann Zapf. They thought the whole other people being super into something you are not, but you are happy for them was the vibe, like how I am not interested in cosplay, but I am interested in THEIR cosplay. It made me want to track down the tv show Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations again.
Morgiana is so good and such great makeup
Watched Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. Not nearly as good as the first one (what I expected), kinda just more of the same (what I expected), still pretty enjoyable (what I expected).
Watched 1996’s Picnic by Shunji Iwai, thinking maybe it might be a good screen-saver of a movie, but eh. The scenes of them wandering the city were the highlight of the movie, but it was too often broken up by some torture or terror without much substance to make it worthwhile.
I wanted to like the characters but they all acted like they were from an anime, more there to pose than to experience something. The movie didn’t know if they wanted to make a realistic movie or one that worked on the dream-logic of a montage. I maybe get the sense Iwai’s movies are all like this.
Sometimes pleasant, probably something I would’ve loved as a teen, but yeah, more of a music video than a movie.
I saw G.I Samurai recently. It’s got Sonny Chiba as a SDF Lieutenant whose regiment gets randomly sent back in time to the Sengoku era, and then they decide if they commit as much mass murder as they can, it might cause some kind of Time Shockwave that will send them back to the present.
I was a bit unsure of what to make of it while watching it, because at times it seemed like it was trying to say something like “This goddamn pacifist Article 9 bullshit has neutered our True Men and their Warrior Spirit”. But by the end it felt more like it was about how training people to be killers for wars that never happen leads to pent up violent frustration and itchy trigger fingers. Or something like that, I could be reading it wrong.
Only one woman in the movie has a line of dialogue, the rest are all weirdly silent or screaming because they are being assaulted. Surprise blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances by Hiroyuki Sanada and Hiroko Yakushimaru
Also watched the 2000 live action Uzumaki. I assumed it would not be good but I think it was even worse than my expectations. The tone is completely off, everyone acts like cartoon characters and it is full of those early 00’s Japanese edgy camera angles / editing tricks like extreme close ups at weird angles, quick cuts, and everyone talking directly to the camera in conversation scenes.
I think as an analogy, the movie is basically like the character who likes to jump out and scare people: thinks they’re being quirky and surprising but ends up being mostly just off-putting
I taped Uzumaki off of IFC’s weekly Asian horror block back in like 2002 and I watched that tape so many times. That movie rules.
I grabbed Uzumaki from the foreign films section at Blockbuster Video based on the cover art alone, knowing nothing about it, when I was like 16. I loved it! Got me into Junji Ito before he blew up in the US. The movie doesn’t exactly fit his vibe, but the horror comedy goofiness is its own fun thing.
They Will Kill You is a movie where Zazie Beetz has a knife fight with Satan. It’s deeply stupid. The fights are better in concept than execution and the extreme violence is maybe one notch too cartoonish to have any impact, but it is a movie where Zazie Beetz has a knife fight with Satan. I am a simple shrug. Sometimes this is enough for me.
Yeah the opening twist + fight were the best and it got dumber from there. I guess if your movie gonna be uneven you should frontload it.
Three Days Of The Condor. Robert Redford looked very handsome.
The Furious (2026)
After Raid1, Raid2 — exactly what it says on the tin, lots of beatin’ and uppin’ in well-choreographed setpieces and probably more fun the second time round’ when you can enjoy watching the choreo play out.
However, the Raid-loving friend I’ve watched it with still thinks Raid2 is def better, so ymmv.
Castration Movie Chapter iii.ii Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage
My local theater showed a 2 hour segment from upcoming 3rd chapter of Louise Weard’s anthology project.
I was blown away and wanna see the other two now. I’m just amazed at how well Weard writes terminally online characters, seeing someone use weaponized therapy speak in a movie was honestly upsetting.
Well, that was a hell of a circus.
Pretty much all of my predictions were correct in that everyone is a brain scans and they connect to the internet to find their real identities, and eventually happen to hang out.
The episode was a pretty deep dive into Jax’s character, it was really interesting to have Pomni go that deep with someone. although, I’m pretty sure it means “abstraction” is not reversible. I did not expect Caine to come back but that was really nice, I like his character a lot. I got spoiled on Jax abstracting thanks to youtube previews, but it happens offscreen and not like how the thumbnail depicted it. I did like seeing that the humans behind characters are in the real world and thriving, I think that’s about the best kind of ending possible given that everyone’s simulated consciousness is stuck in a simulation.
My partner and I just watched Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World for the first time and hot damn! Peter Weir directed the hell out of this one! I wish we still got blockbusters like this.
we watched it for old movie night last week, what a cracker. first time I’d noticed Lucky Jack’s blown-off earlobe
I would’ve watched like 6 more of those if they made them
there’s another better world where instead of 5 Pirates of the Caribbean movies we got 5 Master and Commanders
