episode 8 is great but that makes me wish we could have had a whole episode 8-themed movie that’s double or triple of the length of that segment. like a weird Kubrick Space Odyssey/Night of The Living Dead hybrid. that would have been great. but i know the whole reason any of it got funded and made at all was it’s attached to the Twin Peaks universe.
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barb and star go to vista del mar has such a specific comedic tone that it feels like someone wanted to do a thought experiment about what a movie made after austin powers 3 but just before anchorman would be like? like studio comedies are barely even made at all so it feels extra weird to have one this specifically early 00s feeling. i can easily see it becoming a weird cult object like popstar
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I’m still watching movies from 1992 but I decided to take a wide turn from trashart Hollywood. I watched And Life Goes On. It’s a movie from Abbas Kiarostami and it melds documentary with fiction. It takes place in a region affected by a large earthquake that had happened in 1990. This is the region where Kiarostami had filmed Where is My Friend’s House? and it focuses on a man searching through the area for the boy who played the lead part. The film uses footage of real victims and damaged houses and blends them seamlessly into this staged, fictional narrative.
The narrative is interesting because there is no climax and hardly any development. The man travels with a boy, they talk to some people and observe the wreckage. It ends on an ellipsis. We never know for sure if the boy is okay. But because of its neorealist-inflected methods, we see that each person, from characters with lines to people walking in the background, has their own interior life. Despite focusing on a cataclysmic event, the film is full of life.
A strange thing happened when I watched this film. I might only be making this connection because of how I have tied my recent movie watching to the chronology of my own life. Early in their travel, the boy is told to sleep in the backseat of their yellow car. He lies down on this thinly cushioned seat, and I instantly remembered when I was a child, lying down on a similar seat in a similarly yellow car. I had this small thought, “car seats aren’t like that anymore.” I also remembered the stale, artificial pine scent that I would smell in that car. It occurred to me that I had inadvertently timed this project well because, in 1992, my mom would have been the same age as I am now. I wonder if she would’ve like this movie if she had seen it then.
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Where Is My Friend’s House has been a favorite of mine for years, and I just last year learned that there was a “sequel.” I liked that one as well. I intend to see the rest of Kiarostami’s films eventually.
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Do you have access to the Criterion Channel? They have nine of his movies up right now. There’s still so much i want to see from him.
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i’ve watched both The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons in the past two weeks. I’ve seen both before.
Da Vinci Code is so incredibly, amazingly, stunningly stupid as a film that it works for me. The idea of this old, dying man running around a museum for what must have been an hour while he slowly bled out is incredible. He’s naked at the end!! he strips down and bleeds everywhere in secret code, it’s absolutely fucked. And the rest of that movie makes exactly as much sense as that, it’s lovely. Plus getting to see Paul Bettany self flagellating in the nude is a striking image, even if it’s poorly filmed (thanks ron)
Angels and Demons is fucking terrible, what a boring film. Not nearly as stupid as the first, lots of going into the vatican archives. Also the entire film is very dark!! as in, literally hard to watch because I can’t see anything (thanks ron).
And the plot twist is obvious from like, the first second, so the reveal isn’t interesting at all. It’s just not nearly as stupid.
Although the idea of a vial of antimatter just like…floating around, is extremely funny.
The author’s intentions of being like “Religion, but what about science also” is just…deeply “end of history” brain I guess? A pointless argument to be having, but also it’s 2021 and a plague has just wiped out a significant portion of the population so maybe it felt more relevant at the time the movies were released.
Looking forward to watching the final (for now) entry in this extremely stupid trilogy. I hope it’s as dumb as the first one.
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if you enjoyed a sheet of printer paper with ILLUMINATI written on it somehow being a key plot item in Angels and Demons then you might be interested to know you can purchase a replica of the same bit of paper from a prop store. a great thrill for the ILLUMINATI fan in your life.
i will probably always have a soft spot for that movie for following through on the supreme piece of plot foreshadowing that is the pope mentioning offhand that he’s also a licensed helicopter pilot
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Angels & Demons is the worst book I have ever read, and I read the Shadow Warrior novel series
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a bit captivated by this short documentary from the year i was born about my childhood mall.
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Wait, do you talk like this?
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as a little kid, yes, a bit, but it was something i gradually sort of unlearned. you can hear traces of it in certain words, still, or when i’m drunk.
these days i do sort of wish i just kept the accent, though.
but this is basically what my parents/many people i grew up with sound like.
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my mom pronounces “quarter” like the second syllable of “kumquat”
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i wish i had any accent to speak of sometimes. i’m from the midwest but i used to go to New Hampshire every year because a lot of my mom’s family is from there and i remember being really amused by the accents i’d hear sometimes… because hearing a different accent is very exciting when you’re a kid. i vividly remember walking by this woman at a rest stop and hearing her say “no you can’t have a Fresca!” to her kid and she sounded exactly like Fran Drescher… i was very captivated by that for some reason. lol.
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grocery delivery yesterday didn’t have fresca in stock and omitted it from our order 
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I have the Cleveland one. The one nobody here thinks we have, but everyone outside of Cleveland notices. I mean, I know the rest of Ohio doesn’t have this accent, but it’s totally there for Cleveland.
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yeah i could 100% tell someone from Cleveland because of that accent. it’s a little like the Minnesota one but not as exaggerated. no one where i was from talked like that though, even though i was only like a 90 min - 2 hour drive away from Cleveland. if anyone around had an accent at all it was the one where they say “wuff” instead of “wolf” and “warsh” instead of “wash”
yeah the Cleveland one is really just “every short vowel becomes a schwa”. there is also the much less prevalent but way more powerful Parma accent, with the ridiculous nasal short A. That one is hilarious to me.
yeah, sadly, i made efforts around the age of 11 or 12 to start actively unlearning my accent. not realizing that it was a mix of inherited classism via media and my own unresolved feelings of alienation from the Italian-American/Long Island community at large, i specifically tried to go for the “neutral” accent. according to people i’ve met from SB who are from the south, i still sound “northern,” though.
these days, i mostly wish i had it for egotistical reasons; as some kind of marker of being a “Real New Yorker.” i mean, i could start talking that way all the time now, but it would be an affectation and everyone would probably be very confused lol.
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My extremely serious, nose to the grindstone wife trained herself out of her lovely Appalachian-border accent after correctly deducing that yankees would assume she was stupid upon hearing it and I’ve been mad about this for a decade
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I couldn’t speak clearly as a kid b/c all my words would run together faster than I could articulate them so I basically wound up relearning what I perceived as an accent I should have from my background when I was in middle school and it came out sounding slightly artificial and still does
oh well, frankly not even that high on the list of small alienations in my life
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