I watched The Wild East. It’s a Mad Max style take on The Magnificent Seven made in Kazakhstan. A town of little people is besieged by a motor gang and ask for help. Among the seven defenders are a drunk, a marksmen, a motorcyclist, a woman with a car, a Soviet veteran, and a man who comes from a steppe culture and fights with a rope dart; no one understands his language. I’m pretty enthralled with how strange it is to see these influences combined.
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Hachi Machi I should hang out with this?
New Verhoeven.
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it’s very beautiful, but im not quite sure it’s a “rudie” movie. i suspect you might find dennis hopper’s performance more unsavory than tender and vulnerable as i did.
yes! yes! YES! this speaks to me!
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duel to the death rules. one of the most energetic last half hours in martial arts film history with a series of escalating bad ass action set pieces which ends on an incredible high note. definitely in the contention for greatest directorial debuts.
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the first one unfortunately ended with her being rendered helpless (her dagger breaks) in the final raid and ken takakura running in to stab the final boss. in this one the honorable drifter who throws in with her at least take turns stabbing the final boss with her
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i was about to come here to post this.
movies are back, baby!!!
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ptp is down so I’m unable to get anymore of these movies I’ve been watching but I’ve learned my lesson and when the site comes back up will immediately go on a tear and trash my ratio getting everything I can think of. you can’t trust the internet to always be there
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also despite having like a 19tb upload and 1.6tb or so download and still feeling a need to improve my ratio makes me constantly think how damaging and deranging an addiction wealth accruing must be. why would anyone ever think wealthy people would do anything but horde
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Having seen several (?) posters talking-up Mitch Mitchell vs Skynet I can confirm it made my face hurt from smiling for two hours straight and was certainly more satisfying than Soul: A Film Not Made For Children
Just can’t seem to square Joe’s flowery playing as anything remotely jazzy or jazz-like; perhaps he was just jazzin’ all along…
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Yeah one of the many things I don’t like about that movie is they made Joe less Herbie Hancock and more George Winston specifically to appeal to the bourgeois bores that they are
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i watched the mitchell’s movie too. i didn’t hate it, i think when judged on the level of “movies that your children insist on watching over and over again” it is probably pretty tolerable, but other than that i don’t really get the hype.
a lot of the voice cast is ridiculously underutilized, and all of the jokes are ‘cute’ but not funny.
it really bothered me for being yet another movie ostensibly for kids that is actually about how What a Dad Needs is to have women manage his feelings for him.
and also how the family kept obsessing over how ‘weird’ they were when they are really just the most normal family imaginable. i mean i know that is supposed to be relatable, but i feel like the obvious model for this is the griswolds from the national lampoon series.
clark is also obsessed with being normal but only ever monologues about it when he is at his most unhinged, which is funny. this version of that is just irritating to me. like, if you’re going to make a movie about a “weird family” at least make the family…actually weird? an 8 year old who likes dinosaurs is not an anomaly.
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I thought they wrung a ton of good set pieces out of “kid wants to go to cal arts” and they were very thorough with all their callbacks, it felt aggressively well executed to the point where I didn’t even mind, but I guess the family dynamics were kind of cheap, idk
I was fascinated to learn that this is what one of the gravity falls leads went and did when 75% of the production staff wound up working on the ducktales reboot instead, because you can see the same really studious nostalgia there
(I also thought the family dynamics in s3 of ducktales were pretty cheap after loving the first 2)
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I would probably define Forced Quirk here as ‘scrappy cartoon sketch inserts over frequent use of punk rock’ as the creative shorthand for Not Normal but yes; probably just as tired as yourself when it comes to emotionally-clueless dads and their unassuming Warrior Queen mums (who was also done dirty by idolizing the supposed Perfect Family without much resolution other than I’m Worthy of Being Followed Now on Social Media)
EDIT: I’m not tempted to watch it again any time soon (or possibly ever) but it really didn’t do much about taking technology to task, but perhaps that’s asking for too much from a product such as this
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yeah the gravity falls influence is probably much stronger here than into the spider-verse, other than aesthetically. i think part of my high expectations for it were from how well i thought the spider-verse movie handled the family stuff as just one of like far too many spinning plates in that movie. it may not hold up on retrospect but i thought despite the very formulaic nature of the source material they managed to do some interesting things with it, and i hoped a whole movie about a family would be able to improve on it even more.
plus, i mean, i know it’s a kids movie so there’s only so much they can do, but it sort of felt like lord and miller already used up all their good ‘post apocalypse, but funny’ ideas with ‘the last man on earth,’ which i found surprisingly endearing. i think it kind of got overshadowed by the good place in terms of sitcoms with very high-concept premises.
anyway i still think national lampoon’s terminator 3: rise of the machines is worth watching if for no reason other than to demonstrate yet again that cgi movies don’t have to look like shit. the animation is really great in it and the dog is funny looking
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The Hotel Transylvania movies also have very boring standard kids movie family dynamics with really excellent, stretchy Looney Tunes animation.
Probably the animated kids movie of the last 15 years I thought had the best “moral” was Paranorman, I never see anyone talk about that movie
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I watched Baazigar. It is the first Bollywood movie I have seen and it feels like a rite of passage. My life has now split in two. There is the me before Bollywood and the me after Bollywood.
I have heard a lot about Bollywood films. They’re long; this one spans almost 3 hours. They have music numbers; I like this one in particular. They have a little something for everyone; I had severely underestimated what that meant.
The film is three hours long and it’s paced like a Hong Kong action film. It is everything all of the time.
I hadn’t read a synopsis or watched a trailer before starting this, so I had no idea what to expect. The film opens with a portentous prologue. A boy fetches medicine for his mom on a rainy night. It’s unclear if she will survive. One title sequence later and we see the boy grown into an incredibly handsome man, still caring for his mother. She is alive but mentally absent due to some kind of shock. Later we see our guy meet his incredibly beautiful girlfriend in secret. Their love is secret because she comes from a wealthy family and he does not. They dance and sing. It’s amazing. His girlfriend mentions that her sister has just flown into town and now I’m beginning to predict how the plot is going to progress.
We are introduced to the sister as she scolds the servants with a whip in her hands. She seems like a dangerous foil compared to her sister. She meets our protagonist at a racetrack as we learn that he leads a double life. Half the time, he is at university; the other half, he plays at being a famous race car driver. Of course, she is smitten by his charms. I am almost an hour into the film and now I really feel like I have a handle on the plot: our protagonist is going to juggle these two relationships and shenanigans will ensue. I can’t wait.
Trouble is, I am dead wrong. What happens next is so beyond what I could have imagined that I nearly screamed.
What happened next
Our protagonist’s girlfriend is worried that she will be engaged to another man soon and pleads with him to reveal the relationship to her father. He first suggests that they commit suicide and gets her to sign a note. Then he reveals that that was just a test and what he really wants to do is get a civil marriage. On the day they are going to register the marriage, the two of them think wistfully of the future as they look from the rooftop. Then our protagonist pushes her off the building to her death.
Now we begin to unwrap the many layers to the plot. Our protagonist is on a quest for revenge. The girl’s father had ruined his life by driving his family into destitution. Now he intends to do the same. He puts on colored contacts in the most dramatic way possible and sheds his true persona. What follows is a cat and mouse game between him and the girl’s sister, now his fiancee. He murders several links that could give away his identity.
In the end, there is an incredible fight scene between the protagonist and the father who is the object of his revenge. Our man drops an aquarium on a dude’s face. This movie is unreal. I’m trying not say too much because so much happens, but I thoroughly recommend the film.
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I didn’t recognize him but this is tomisaburo wakayama, aka ogami itto in the lone wolf and cub film adaptations, shintaro katsu/zatoichi’s brother etc. this character apparently gets his own 2 film spin off the “silk hat boss” series
all of these 60s japanese movies have like 10 sequels each and for all you know the best one will be number 6 or 8. and it’s hard to find any information on the chivalrous yakuza films in english. everyone just cares about the battles without honor and humanity ones, which I haven’t seen yet but calling crime movies with more ruthless and cutthroat characters more “realistic” is legalist propaganda to erase even the idea or possibility of a chivalrous criminal from the public consciousness. all movies are fictive exaggerations and look at what cop media has done for cops, peoples entire imagining of the workings of cop lives is entirely from bullshit movies and tv. as long as they have theirs, crime should get it’s own.
I saw it mentioned on a blog that the brutal tales of chivalry series was popular with leftist students despite being about “traditional values” and old fashioned guys in kimonos fighting off guys in suits, I guess cause they’re still fighting off capitalists and exploitation. They didn’t really elaborate on it, I would have liked to have read more on that
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Second time someone posted about this movie without @'ing me!
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