Working Man is an absolute jumble of dangling story threads and lacks anything resembling action choreography, easily ranks among the bottom 50% of netflix original action dtv schlock, and is yet another black mark on Statham’s terrible record as an action star (I keep telling y’all). Junk of the lowest order. Taken is a better movie with the same premise by a country mile, and that is not praise.
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night moves - couldnt believe this wasn’t based on a crime novel series, it turns out i was confusing protagonist “harry moseby” with “hoke moseley” and possibly with gabriel knight character “detective mosely”. but like it’s really structured like it should be part 3 in a series even with the exposition sequence where a minor character explains the detective’s founding trauma and how it was wrapped up in an earlier offsceen case? not a complaint, the extremely lowkey anti-grandiosity of this one is what i liked about it, along with getting to watch gene hackman do things. it did remove some suspense from the ending bc the whole time i was thinking “oh well nothing that bad can happen he’s in like twelve more books after this one.”
paris texas - i watched this as a teenager and remember disliking the score and finding the story kind of stagey and unbelievable and not being into the moppet and general pro-family theming, but still finding it very moving as a whole somehow, and not being sure why. so i watched it again and somehow had the exact same experience. stanton and stockwell and kinski are great but i think just the cinematography adds a layer of mystery that makes the whole thing work, the colours, characters sitting uneasily against this huge background frame, the script is heightened by a visual sense that these people could get lost so easily and that all the interiors feel like little outposts in the vastness. love the shot of houston as terrifying chrome hell emerging from the desert.
the last seduction - i dont think this was best expressed through the medium of film. it NEEDED to be an adventure game where two of the puzzles involve linda fiorentino persuading two different characters to get their dicks out and you need to convince someone you love them by writing their name surrounded by hearts on a notepad and hiding under the bed when they find it. they track down her character bc her assumed name is “new york spelled backwards” which is also puzzle game, or possibly dracula behavior. mostly fun with some very stupid parts and she’s fun to watch in it but idk if i buy it’s about femme fatales or something, it feels like a cautionary tale about the terrifying power of an adventure game protagonist to destroy everyone around them via complex inventory puzzles. legislation NOW.
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night moves is one of those movies where I want to be cool with it but it unfortunately falls into the genre of movie from the mid 70s where they really want you to think about how awesome it is that 16 year old melanie griffith is down to fuck old guys
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yeah like it was bizarre how much of the plot was about how sad it was that all these guys were leering creeps around her and then the rest of the movie was about being, uh, a leering creep around her. and the rest of the film doesn’t really seem aware of any incongruity…??
i did like the dolphin trainer lady who flirts by asking him where he was when kennedy was killed. 70s garden state behavior.
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a similar movie I saw that was a bit better was “Prime Cut” where lee marvin plays some chicago outfit shitkicker with a badass machinegun he keeps in a suitcase who has to go to kansas city, hell on Earth, to shake down gene hackman and his opium sex slave farm operation after they turn an enforcer into literal sausage. hackman’s character is named mary ann and has a strange vaguely incestuous gay relationship with his goon brother WEENIE. even though theres also a gratuitous amount of nudity sissy spacek is an adult at least and her incredibly bizarre relationship with lee marvin is sort of anime and fascinating. just kind of a nasty movie but not completely offputting
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Rewatched Frankenhooker. Wish we spent more time with the Frankenhooker instead of the Dr Frankenhooker
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Michael Ritchies filmography is fascinating. From one of the all time weirdest midwestploitation sicko nightmares to cool runnings. Hollywood doesn’t make that kind of guy anymore
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it’s actually called Frankenhooker’s monster
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Warfare:
Summary
Warfare is completely neutral to a fault, totally unwilling or afraid to make any kind of statement about the subject matter.
It feels like the climax happens in the first 20 minutes and then it tries to sustain that for the rest of the runtime, so it kind of fizzles out and becomes a bit of a blur. Then it just sort of ends. Before credits it shows comparisons of the actors to the real people but the majority are blurred out because i guess they didn’t want to be identified so I’m not sure what the point was there.
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hahahhaha fuck oh my god thats just great news for when my friends drag me into watching this
I guess the movie does actually make a literal statement about thanking the troops, so I guess if it’s trying to say anything about war it’s “this is what war is like, so you’d better respect them troops”
Except it’s one specific cherry picked incident where nothing particularly war-crimey happens
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I spontaneously remembered Freddie Got Fingered exists last night for some reason and so when they did a kind of rubber noodle effect on the wounded soldiers’ legs i immediately thought “look at my hooOooves”
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That is so fucking funny because you have no idea how many times we thought of Freddy Got Fingered during Civil War.
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Guessed this was an Alex Garland movie from your post alone
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Sounds like The Mind Behind DMC: Devil May Cry Has Done It Again
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there was a debate before old movie night about what exactly is the cutoff point for ‘old’ and ‘the 90s were 35 years ago’, so: The Mask of Zorro (1998) is a family-friendly action film of the dime-a-dozen sort that were so popular back then. the bad guy is bad, the good guy conflicted between avenging his brother’s death & wooing the love interest, the mentor shady and reclusive & fixated on revenge.
think there was too much editing of lines, and the plot suffered lightly as the action scenes dragged on. plenty of costumes sets acting to like in this, a solid “it’s good, don’t bother/don’t change the channel”
some standouts:
- the plates
- picking a location + employing hundreds of extras to have a party in the background for a couple of scenes + a 5 minute scene of the leads dancing a fandango
- generally all the ‘old’ hollywood best bits: gigantic practical sets getting blown up, stunt guys dropping 3 stories onto cobbles feet first, lighting, camera movements
- really dumb jokes about an antagonistic horse
you can see Antonio Banderas using his acting skills in every scene. Tony though seems to have received 2 bits of direction: “you are filled with life” then “you are filled with death”. the sudden switches to soft focus whenever Catherine Zeta-Jones had a head shot were distracting, but I was surprised at how demurely they handled her décolletage
they exist elsewhere, maybe you know one right now. was amazed when checking director Martin Campbell’s other works:
- Casino Royale
- GoldenEye
- Edge of Darkness miniseries (!)
- Cast a Deadly Spell (!!)
- 1970’s London slap and tickle sexplotation movies (!!!)
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Mask of Zorro rocks so hard.
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Rewatched Nope for the first time since release. It’s such a grisly and fun Jurassic Park blockbuster thriller, but I hate how squeaky clean it is with its subtext. There’s no grit. Rather than genius and piercing, it feels more like a finely honed product, a patch console with everything routed neatly and no tangles or sloppy porting, each object presented screaming with an overwhelming aura linking it to a future call back and deeper theme. Impressive but kind of in the most disgusting way that things in and of the spectacle really are, ironically enough.
The subtext is really worth talking about. But I much prefer my horror movies to be about things in the way Texas Chainsaw Massacre is instead of a didactic bonk on the head that seems to be the way of these things since Babadaook.
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The end credits BTS footage makes the position clear, it’s military worship
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a movie thing i think about is we’re approaching the era where the pre 21st century american cinema is closer chronologically, but also probably in terms of feel and technique to the old hollywood period than it is to current cinema… 80s movies already feel more like old hollywood movies to me than they do new releases idk
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