Last night I watched EXORCIST 3. And that was amazing I like it pretty much as much as the first, but it’s def a different movie. Love the dialogue, any time George C. Scott had someone to talk to or started monologuing is just wow!! And Brad Dourif is terrifying. Who’dve thought a sequel to the Exorcist would ever come close to the first one in goodness?? But, anyway, tonight I am watching The White Ribbon.
Also here are some choice pictures I saved while I was watching Serial Experiments Lain and haven’t got around to posting. What a show!
I watched the “Director’s Cut” of III last year and both versions have their merits, not sure I have a clear preference. Also I’m partial to films in which George C. Scott loses his mind (Hardcore, The Hospital). Have you watched The Ninth Configuration? One of my favs.
I haven’t, but now I want to watch anything Blatty directs. Was seriously impressed by the talent for editing and pacing in III and The Ninth Configuration seems like a bit of a genre change. I’d like to see how he handles that.
Bigoted yakuza lackey is told he has one week to clear out all of the foreigners from a slummy apartment building the yakuza purchased to destroy and build something else over. The first floor is apparently haunted by an evil spirit, though! Tries to say something about xenophobia but doesn’t do a very good job of it considering most of the foreigners are played for laughs (the Filipino character, especially).
Woah, there’s a lot to unpack here considering Japan’s history with pan-Asianism. I’d be interested in reading or watching something that explored that topic in a thoughtful way.
The movie was directed by the guy that created Akira, and written by him in conjunction with the writer of Cowboy Bebop, based on a story by the guy who did Perfect Blue and Paprika (and who did the manga adaptation). Wikipedia is confusing because it implies both that the manga is an adaptation and that the movie is based on it.
I mostly watch horror, so I don’t have too much experience with movies about Japan tackling xenophobia.
rewatched gozu (after forgetting all of it) and the opening is absolutely wild. completely deadpan execution of stuff that comes off comical, but with music entirely in vibe with a serious horror film, and a punchline of grotesque, cruel and insane violence.
i don’t know how to describe the rest. it’s gross. very unsettling. sometimes hilariously absurd comedy. decreasingly real. i don’t understand it, but i definitely enjoy it. i think one of my favourite miike films.
Kinda curious about what other people’s favourite Miike films are since he’s made so many and I’ve barely scratched the surface. Watched a bunch in the early 2000s and the only ones I’ve revisited recently are Happiness of the Katakuris, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q. I also like Audition and Gozu and seem to remember enjoying The Bird People of China. Did not enjoy Sukiyaki Western Django. Been meaning to check out 13 Assassins and Hara-kiri (which is a remake? I dig the original).
thinking about it i actually haven’t seen most of the well-liked ones! i saw audition only recently, and i’ve seen the first dead or alive before. i’ve seen parts of ichi the killer but not the whole thing. other than that, zebraman, yatterman and izo, which may be my other favourite.
izo is due for a rewatch too, it grew on me in my memories but i didn’t think it was great when i actually saw it
When I was in college, I worked at my library’s Multimedia Center, which meant that I was responsible for setting up a bunch of film studies class screenings just like this. It was fun to see which movies actually drew students to attend. I recall the Godzilla class’s screenings always got huge attendance. The Akira Kurosawa class did well at first, but there was a lot of drop-off as the semester went on and people had to watch some of his slower ones.
There was a nazi propaganda film class that did screenings like this, and I hated setting those up. The library actually owned a bunch of really obscure old nazi propaganda shorts on shitty VHS releases from tiny South American companies (pretty suspicious if you ask me!). Nobody ever came to those (can’t say I blame them). The policy was, even if nobody was there, I still had to set up and hit play on the movies, to account for the possibility of a latecomer attending. So for one semester, once a week, I had to go screen nazi propaganda films in a dark, empty classroom and just leave them running. Felt pretty bad! Imagine someone just walking by and seeing that, through the window, you know?
watched ju-on the grudge (second of these movies?)
i really enjoyed this and the previous one as they are kinda structured like horror anthologies, despite having a cohesive haunt being explored throughout. i just like the way short horror stories tend to play out so these play to my comforts while still being terrifying at their best.
but also i enjoy the goofy dumb stuff, like the fact that kayako can materialize under your bedsheets
Would recommend Ju-on the Curse (the first direct-to-video ones). Cool gritty low-budget shot-on-video feel and gets pretty bleak at the end as it pretty much cuts to the end-point of the franchise, the Saeki family is shown to be what the later movies were getting at, an all-consuming world-eating force.
After Twilight came out (which came out only a few months after The Happening), Mr. Night Shyamalan called the movie like, “tonally perfect”, and how he’d like to direct a Twilight movie. And if you watch both of those movies back to back, it makes complete sense why Shyamalan liked Twilight. They both feel like their actors were mannequins that only spring to life when somebody says “action”, and the only time they have to learn what human beings are like is between action and cut. I’m really surprised Shyamalan never got to do a Twilight, because they seem perfect for each other.
I watched this week’s Friendly Fire Movie The Sea Wolves (1980). Which has Greggory Peck, Roger Moore, Trevor Howard, and David Niven. You might be going what the fuck I haven’t heard of this ever.
Because the film is a boring slog. It’s a get the team together and do a raid movie except putting the team together is at 70 minutes in and the raid is the last 20 of two hours. It’s interesting because you can put incredible actors with unstoppable charisma on screen and the just fail to do anything with them.
And then look at Peck’s fucking eyebrow. I have for 12 hours.
i watched Godfrey Ho’s Ninja Thunderbolt and took a bunch of clips, posting them to twitter as a little project. Really dull but also stupidly inventive ninja movie, bookended by what is obviously a different movie.
Rollerblading ninjas! Bizarre car chases! Ski resorts! Synchronized swimming! Ninja claims adjusters! This movie’s got a lot of charm if you are okay with how boring it can be.
Full film is on YouTube. It’s the same transfer quality that I saw on Amazon, which is to say: terrible. Part of the charm.
