Mandy (2018): cool visuals and soundtrack. plot is a very one-dimensional revenge fantasy. kind of a skin-deep exploitation movie with the somewhat self-important slow pace of like a Tarkovsky movie, which is kind of frustrating. but still… cool visuals. lol
Don’t Let The Riverbeast Get You (2012) and Local Legends (2013): Matt Farley is a guy who lives in Manchester New Hampshire and is famous for releasing like 40,000 songs on Spotify, but he also makes movies with his friends. most of them are like intentionally awful Tim and Eric-esque “horror” movies that are intended to be kind of funny and i thought it was kind of interesting though i wasn’t fully convinced about its merits, though Local Legends is sort of a Woody Allen-esque faux-documentary about his life that i enjoyed a lot. i was recommended both by a cinema podcast i listen to called The Important Cinema Club and i feel like it was worthwhile. you can rent a lot of his films for cheap off Amazon also.
i’m thinking of ending things (2020): there was a snowstorm here in NYC on Wednesday night so i thought it was an appropriate time to dive into the latest, very snowy, Netflix film by Charlie Kaufman. my verdict: it’s a Charlie Kaufman movie! lots of depressing themes about aging and bodies decaying, the usual psychological mindfuck stuff, etc. it’s a bit lower budget than his usual stuff but i didn’t really find it to detract from the movie. still not something i want to rewatch any time soon though because… it’s fucking depressing, as you might expect. but i do think it was worth my time to watch.
I am very fascinated by will sloan as a media figure because he seems exactly like an alternate universe version of the kind of person I thought I was developing into at 17 before I lost confidence in both a) the worth of my aesthetic judgment and b) my financial stability (and my ability to tolerate said lack of stability)
I like him in general but I find him both excessively torontonian in tone and also just kind of eerie
don’t let the riverbeast get you really grew in my estimation on a second watch and i think that will likely hold true for all the motern films, but yes, local legends was the most outwardly “good” movie on a first time viewing. i don’t even know if calling them intentionally awful is accurate though. the films all have this very specific cadence that is somewhere between detached irony and insufferable earnestness.
I watched a Finnish film about a budding relationship between a dom and an emotionally traumatized sub called Dogs Don’t Wear Pants. The poster brought me to it, it’s very pretty.
For some reason I can’t understand about myself I am very interested in books and film adjacent or directly about BDSM or power play, like Venus in Furs or The Piano Teacher or Gravity’s Rainbow. This was the first movie I’ve watched that is explicitly about BDSM and going into I actually felt really weird because I was like what do I expect to find in a film about this sort of thing that doesn’t treat it as just a metaphor for something else? I don’t know was kind of weirdly existential for a second there, out of sorts lol. Obviously the subject is rich with the potential for human drama, and Dogs Don’t Wear Pants was full of that but also a lot of humor as well. Like those other works I already mentioned, it would make for a good foundation for some conversation if you can get others to watch it with you. Oh, and it’s very beautiful looking too? Excellent color and composition. Highly recommend!!
watched the UFO documentary “The Phenomenon” tonight. regardless of your feelings on UFOs, the segment at the end with the children in Zimbabwe who claim to have seen one land at their school is…really compelling.
What a trip that is if you are not well-versed with indian action cinema tropes… but tbh, it was actually fun? Kinda recommended if you are looking for action to switch your brain off.
watched first part of memories (1995), magnetic rose, and i really enjoyed this take on a haunted ship in space.
admiring a lot of the art and animation. can’t convey in shots how enjoyable it is to see this spaceship fly around lighting up surfaces with its lamps
the interior of the ship starts out gaudy and magnificent but deeper in it’s all more and more decrepit with the underlying, worn out machinery showing through more often. this stuff is just really beautiful to me and i love the progression through the first beautiful halls into these pieces of metal and pipes and stuff forming the approximations of more luxurious architecture and statues.
I also watched these recently because of the Important Cinema Club podcast. Riverbeast really worked for me. It’s stupid in an extremely specific and consistent way. With other filmmakers, this kind of intentional stupidity is sometimes bogged down by cynicism and ironic distance, but these Motern Media guys are just a bunch of friends goofing around, and that affection for each other and the work counterbalances the irony. It all gels for me in a way that similar films usually do not. It’s one of my favorite comedies I’ve seen this year.
I thought Local Legends was great too, and unlike Riverbeast it does have some real pathos. It’s all about the experience of dedicating yourself deeply to very small-time creative work. As a hobbyist filmmaker myself, I could relate to a lot of stuff the film depicts – fielding extremely uninformed but confident advice from family members, having almost nobody in your life take your work seriously because it doesn’t make money, trying stupid schemes to get people in your town to watch your movie… I really enjoyed seeing this very silly portrayal of such melancholy stuff.
nobu kanaoka, i wish she had been in more stuff.
