Aw, I love Santa Sangre… That actress actually is deaf if that makes any difference, and it’s her only film role I think. The second half has a funny Invisible Man bit and I like the ending but yes fair enough, if you didn’t like the first half it would probably be more of the same.
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the shot for shot stuff from santa sangre recontextualized in dance of reality is so eerie
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I watched ten movies from 1992 so now I’m moving to 1993. Before I talk about the movie I watched yesterday, I figured I would post my semi-arbitrarily ordered list.
1992
- Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
- Rebels of the Neon God
- And Life Goes On
- La vie de Boheme
- Lessons of Darkness
- Malcolm X
- Orlando
- Porco Rosso
- Basic Instinct
- El Mariachi
I’m fairly satisfied with these ten and I’m excited to update it in the future whenever I see something new to me.
Cronos is a film from 1993. It is the first film directed by Guillermo del Toro. It features Ron Perlman as a shit-eating henchman who is obsessed with getting his nose fixed. I love it.
When the film opened with the story of a 15th century alchemist, my mind immediately jumped to Shadow of Destiny and the alchemy story in that. At this point, I assume all alchemists are various shades of beige and I am beginning to think their Faustian bargains aren’t worth the trouble.
The film is powerfully grotesque, but my wife thought it all looked silly. Maybe I’m just sensitive to seeing skin rot off of people’s bodies or gluttonous insects slurp the blood from people’s hearts. My wife thought it would be a good idea that we eat cheese and crackers with wine while I watched and now I’m not sure if I can enjoy those things the same way.
These:
Are now connected to this:
After seeing this and Pan’s Labyrinth, I’m beginning to think that Guillermo del Toro does his best work within the limitations of horror. The flamboyant details here and there lift the work and grant it some levity where they might cause me to roll my eyes watching something else. I appreciate how he doesn’t cut away from grotesque action, whether it is a metal tine sinking into an old man’s skin or the same old man lowering to the floor of a restroom to lick up someone else’s blood. It hits and I can never eat Ines Rosales again.
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Still think Harold and Maude is phony and sucks and is so smug and in love with it’s novel premise that it doesn’t care to develop characters that feel or act human let alone say anything meaningful about life or death. Maybe I should have listened more closely to the Cat Stevens lyrics. There’s too much Cat Stevens telling me how to feel though. All affectation and gesturing and platitudes with attitudes which if anything sure does make it easy for people on Letterboxd to list all the lovable high concept quirkiness, back of a box-style.
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i like how the boy pranks his dates and then is served the ultimate prank at the end. lol epic
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This was really good. Early (1971) Dario Argento thriller about a blind man and a reporter working together to solve a murder. Just excellent all around, much more realistic and relatable than his later stuff like Phenomena and Opera etc. Sweet car chase.
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Watched Batman Begins, a movie I liked a lot when it came out. What a garbage boring stupid nonsense movie lol. The idea of “crime” and “criminals” being this elemental part of human existence is bullshit. This movie is pro-fascism.
Watched The Dark Knight, a movie I liked a lot when it came out. Heath Ledger is the only good part of that movie. The joker in the script is nonsense, but Ledger treats it with the proper levity and menace that every moment he’s on screen is fun to watch. The rest of the movie sucks shit. The last third is like, a series of disconnected scenes of Stuff Happening? The moral of this tale is Batman is Right, and also ???. Barely a film.
I refuse to watch the last one, unless Alicia wants to. I remember not liking it at the time.
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these are correct opinions! F C Nolan for real, overrated to the extreme, even though i kind of liked Tenet
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I thought the movie was pretty clear that Batman is Wrong; I remember being annoyed at how didactic then ending with the panopticon coming online and Batman riding off felt. I wished it was more ambiguous.
Given how much it’s a masticated version of Heat I think it’s fair to argue that it incorporates the tonal language of compromised agents of the law without being in control of its application to Batman; seems like Nolan scripts want to leave hard problems unsolved like a real film but they don’t have the control to frame them problem; they come off as contradictory and fighting against the movie instead of considered and difficult.
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all I can think of when I think of nolan batman is rob brydon as michael caine saying “I’m not burying another batman. I buried three batmen last week”
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oh god i forgot how stupid tom hardy sounds in this
i think this sums up my problem with these scripts
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That scene is so weird, in part because it depicts someone doing something nonsensical and then getting called out for it. But on a meta level it is also nonsensical and there is only the audience left to puzzle out their responsibility, “am I the dumb ass who gets called out, or is the movie the dumb ass and I am the one who calls it out?”
Also the mixing on Bane’s voice just drives me nuts.
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I could not stop laughing at this dumb monologue when I first watched it.
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“You merely adopted the X. I was born in it” has become a staple snowclone in my vocabulary
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I have never heard of snowclone. It’s a very good descriptor.
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I uh didn’t know there was a fandom centered specifically on this one scene but their wiki is comprehensive Plane Scene | Baneposting Wikia | Fandom
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The magic trick bit in Dark Knight is still the funniest single thing I’ve seen in any of these superhero movies outside of Raimi and Blade, Ledger really is great.
Everything else, well.
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definitely a broken record thing with me here but the first two installments of the Nolan Batman trilogy are basically just competent bruckheimer-era 90s blockbuster pastiches, and then the ledger joker and the third one convinced everyone they were some kind of epic, deep cinema and it ruined the whole thing.
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The Last Bolshevik is a memorial to Russian director Aleksandr Medvedkin. Airing first on Finnish television in 1993, it is also a memorial to the idealism of the recently felled USSR.
I had never heard of Medvedkin before starting Chris Marker’s film essay. I had seen several Russian films and knew of even more, but Medvedkin was a name I never found on the lists of great Soviet directors. There are reasons for this. His creative peak came in 1935 with Happiness, right as Stalin’s absolute dominance of Russia was being solidified through purges. Medvedkin, as Marker puts it, was a true communist. His passionate idealism is seen as breeding a certain naivete. Many of his films were quietly shelved or outright banned. And yet, he survived.
Chris Marker is one of my favorites. His personal approach and weaving of narratives is poetic and socially conscious. This is a complex story with many actors. I’ll need to watch this film again and the prior essay, The Train Rolls On, to get a better grasp of all the figures. But first, I’ll need to watch Happiness.
One of the most fascinating sections looked into Medvedkin’s Kinopoezd. This was a series of train cars that contained a film laboratory, editing room, and screen. He would travel along the railways, filming people’s and locales, and then show people what he had just filmed. Even more interesting is that some of the footage still survives.
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