Continuing to make my way through Paul Schrader movies I haven’t seen yet, I watched Blue Collar recently. I thought it was good.
Another thing I watched recently, on a friend’s recommendation, is a 1964 movie called The Naked Kiss. I liked this one as well, and I just noticed that the Letterboxd description is kind of a spoiler.
that’s a fantastic summary
monte hellman just passed away :((
“two-lane blacktop” was one of my favorite movies as a teen . . . rip
it’s one of my favorites as a me right now 
rip
Bluray rips came out so I finally watched this NOMADLAND. Wow. What a fucking movie. Frances McDormand cosplays as a poor person and drives her van around Windows 10 wallpapers. Film has almost no political message at all beyond “capitalism fucks over old people” (no shit). This movie uses scenes with actual poor non-actors! (what the fuck?). In a scene McDormand’s character uses a fake story of grief to cause a non-actor to give a heartwrenching story about his son’s suicide who was apparently unaware he was just lied to. How could you put that in your movie without feeling shame for the rest of your life. The fact that a bunch of rich people made this movie and inserted dialogue calling working for Amazon “good money” is downright sickening.
Watch Wendy & Lucy instead (by Kelly Reichardt… whose incredible First Cow got no oscar noms at all)
thanks for confirming it’s exactly what i expected.
wendy and lucy is great
Have been watching some classics of world cinema lately on the Criterion Channel. But tonight I am rewatching Black Panther for class, and I just don’t see a reason why a movie like this has to be twice the length of basically most film from the 20th century. It’s 136 minutes long!
I watched Local Hero which was a real emotional response rollercoaster but I liked it in the end. Dennis Lawson was a great surprise. Old Man Burt Lancaster. And Peter Capaldi “speaks Japanese” and sucks toes.
It is a film about an oil company buying out a scottish fishing town so it only barely tipped over into like because of it’s overwhelming charm. But also at this point I just like staring at the 80s.
watched The Iron Rose, a jean rollin one about a couple getting locked in an enormous overgrown graveyard after dark. the graveyard is great! the film itself sorta starts dragging at the point where the two leads are just wandering around and fighting with each other and you think, ah, this is… the entire rest of the film i guess. but then at a certain point it’s like the script’s occasional rhetoric about the kingdom of death and the graveyard as a sculpture garden finally manages to overcome the vestiges of relationship drama and push things into a weirder and more energized direction. there is a wonderful eerie sequence where the lady character herself starts resembling a graveyard spook as you glimpse her climbing around behind the walls and poking her staring, grinning head through the crevices into the frame. and her sense of glee at roaming around the graveyard as visionary landscape is also what somehow lends weight to the veer into more traditional horror for the climax.
i ended up enjoying it a lot and would also like to shout out to the narratively functionless wandering graveyard clown from earlier in the movie. MVC most valuable clown.
Eric Andre’s new Netflix movie which I found by accident last night when I was feeling too lazy to put anything else on is fantastic
it’s actually like less hostile than his other work too, it’s weirdly affectionate for a staged jackass type deal with a loose movie length plot? they manage to be complete morons without deliberately going for cringe the way that Nathan For You turns me off, all the bystanders wind up being like hilarious versions of their best selves. really good editing.
Example: at one point Eric Andre is being dangled off a building by the film’s villain in front of a bunch of taco truck customers and everyone freaks out but no one has any idea what to do other than ineffectually eat tacos, and this one fat guy’s wife yells at him to “go stand under them.”
It’s definitely like, as much a mid-2000s dipshit culture revival as much as a lot of other stuff lately, but it is actually better than my memory of that stuff. two thumbs up
I watched that too after I saw you tweet about it. Was really interested in how they did movie plot beats with unstructured out in public skits, and they do a good job! One of the funniest moments was this reaction shot of kangaroos looking alarmed when a gorilla starts to sodomize Eric lol
if you watch the apology reel during the credits it’s clear that they cut tons and tons of material and reshot a few of the sketches until they got the right crowd, I think projects like this really benefit from being able to cut a ton
I’ve still got the face Eric Andre kicked me in when he was crowdsurfing covered in chicken grease and someone dropped his head on a railing
oh my god i have to see this
watched The 5000 Fingers Of Dr T. have never been that big on elaborate stage sets but something about the goofily menacing parody expressionism of these really got through to me - i think it’s the way the cartoonish elements are offset with a degree of blank emptiness which makes them more mysterious and threatening. maybe it’s obvious but i had not realised the extent to which the neverhood was indebted to dr seuss until now!! the creepy hand motif is also a lot of fun.
the movie itself starts fun and zippy but sort of burns through some goodwill with a few extremely soupy musical sequences and much family bonding stuff. weirdest part to me: the controlfreak piano teacher Dr T is an obvious fascist surrogate and much of the plot revolves around getting America (the friendly plumber focused on just trying to make an honest buck) to recognize his evil and intervene. and the way he and the main kid end up fixing things is - they construct an atomic bomb with stuff that’s in their pockets and use it to frighten him away!! and then it goes off anyway, but it’s OK since it was all a dream. moral: watch your ass.
everyone else looks like a silent movie era person, musidora looks like a time traveler from the present or maybe I’m just twitterpated?
Musidora totally looks of a piece w like the star of filibus
