My hopes going in were a Zardoz-like fever dream
Maybe it’s really the mean-ness that turned me off more than any pacing because in general I don’t care about coherence or pacing at all
Interesting. As glib and silly as it can be with its pseudo-historical take: “one great musician channels the libidinal power of music to gain personal influence while another watches, learns and co-opts said power to lay the groundwork for fascism” it didn’t strike me as particularly mean, though it doesn’t have any special love for its characters either I guess. It’s no Zardoz though, that’s true!
saw the adaptation of one of my favourite comics, helter skelter
it’s gaudy and awful and gorgeous and i kinda like it, tho i feel it’s not as strong as the comic. liliko’s internal thoughts just aren’t really there, and those are all of my favourite parts. also having a hard time forgiving that the dale cooper ripoff changed from always smiling to never having any expression whatsoever.
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My favorite thing by Peter Watkins (the Punishment Park director) is Culloden. I discovered it when Dracko recommended The War Game years ago and it happened to be on the same DVD that I got from the library.
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yeah the reason i watched punishment park was cus you told me about culloden! im watching it next i just had to see punishment park the premise got me
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I watched The Cotton Club. It’s okay. The third tap dance number bored me. Richard Gere plays the coronet. Nick Cage says the N-word a lot. It made me go to spotify and listen to the real Cotton Club performers and they are fucking great.
Like God Damn! Our country is a real racist shit hole to keep people like this down.
But the thing that will stick with me forever is towards the end Tom Waits the MC comes out and says “we got a lot of celebrities here tonight,” and it cuts to Charlie Chaplin doing the fucking dinner roll dance. Coppola. Coppola. You don’t think people would know who the fuck Charlie Chaplin is the second most famous performer of the 20th century? It follows it up with two names I did not recognize and I went, “I guess those are famous people in 1930.” But Chaplin. Had to let the audience go “that’s Chappie.”
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I always forget about this film, gotta try it sometime. Did you watch the director’s cut?
Nah this was just the original on J-Prime. It really expects you to know the history of The Cotton Club already while it staples A-B-C plots to that. The plots are so…performative to that premise that you think they are also historic facts.
Maybe the director’s cut fixes this. It did not fix Apocalypse Now!
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Apocalypse Now didn’t need fixing! I’ve heard the d-cut of The Cotton Club is much better (Coppola spent half a million of his own money on it lol).
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You and I (2011)
Two teenage girls, Janie who is American and Lana who is Russian, fall in love after meeting at a t.A.T.u concert and are swept into a dangerous world of obsession, drug abuse and murder.
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continuing my quest to have the most boring taste and choice in the thread:
Bill and Ted Face the Music: I guess the keyword here is “pleasant”. it’s just a pleasant movie that’s trying to be positive and pushing a message of unity and being righteous to each other and it’s mildly funny and just high-concept enough to be fun
if this were released in any other year, I would be like “yeah, no, that was okay”. 2020 though? fuck man, I needed this shot of optimism (although my initial response to seeing the movie was shot in scope was “man, it sure would have been nice to have seen this in a theater”)
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I sure did not like Robocop and sure feel like I will be crucified for not liking this sledgehammer as a film.
sorry, Rudie, you will be missed
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t.a… T.u…
that’s a name i’ve not heard in years
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I watched Terrified. It starts off really interesting, and for the first like, 30 or so minutes, it’s pretty cool, but then it reaches a point where it has no idea what it wants to be – a ghost movie? paranormal investigation movie? a marebito-like? – so the movie will shift away from something and you’ll be like, hey, what you just shifted from was way more interesting! And it does this several times. I’d love to see fan edits of this.
Definitely worth checking out, and it almost teeters on being creepy sometimes, but its lack of focus makes it more of a goofy fun horror movie than a creepy horror movie.
The poster is real bad, though.
To be honest I’ve never been able to even begin to design a mental model of what a Rudie will like or dislike and it’s one of my favorite things about a Rudie, I couldn’t possibly be mad about it
I mean obviously you’re tragically wrong about Robocop but that’s ok
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Since you asked: i do not like the sledgehammer style commentary. I don’t think it is serving anybody in fact cops look at it and go Awesome. The action scenes are garbage unless you are a 9 year old and go awesome. The pitch black cruelty and evil this world inhabits offers no redemption or kindness.
Like on the merits of is this the film they wanted to make sure they succeeded.
And then like the cartoonish stupidity of running into Toxic Waste and climbing out so they can explode. Who enjoys this over the age of 9?
I said it better to booji: “like here is where I am with this. I feel like this sledgehammer commentary doesn’t say anything particularly anything a thinking adult doesn’t already know. So that side is sort of Steven Colbert style masturbation. Alternately the “awesome” parts (working to influence any further messaging) undermine that messaging because ultimately we are supposed to enjoy the film (even if they are poorly handled.) i think the actors do a good job all around. But I do not give a shit about Murphy’s journey and the villians are so vacuumed hideously evil that I find them simultaneously cartoonish and repulsive to experience.”
Saying the world is horrible isn’t brave. The older I get the more I think kindness and caring is bravery.
So I don’t think it is socially salient, the action scenes are bad, i did not like any of the characters or care about them.
Two nights ago I watched Sailor Uniform and A Machine Gun and that would be an interesting film to compare. I got a crying baby so that’s all for this. I had a better time with that one even if it also has some cartoonish villiany.
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It’s that Paul Verhoeven thing, where he uses movie magic to lure us into that worldview while the text of the movie is a condemnation. He read that line about how hard it is to make a war movie that doesn’t valorize war and decided to swim upstream – make it as cool as possible and undermine it. He fully expresses the seduction of power and violence in an honest way.
It works for me but it’s full of landmines (wow, Flesh + Blood is sure an interesting way to present rape!). Robocop is harder to read than its parent Judge Dredd; the humanization of Murphy makes us work even harder to reject its portrayal but I think that’s an important reflection of cop stories that it needs to take into account.
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i don’t have anything new or interesting to say about Robocop that hasn’t already been said a billion times. but speaking of Verhoeven and war movies, i really recommend people checking out his Dutch film Black Book. it’s simultaneously a completely absurd over-dramatized historical action picture while also somehow feeling way more accurate and true to life than others in the well-worn genre of WW2 Holocaust-adjacent movies.
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