It’s been a while but I think I thought yesterday once more was a weaker one. but that’s with just running out of time as another not so great one and linger as his one actual bad movie. throw down, sparrow and romancing in thin air are some of the greatest movies ever though
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sparrow is an absolute joy, basically a minnelli musical
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i saw day of the jackal (1973)
really incredible examination of state power masquerading as a procedural
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The pleasure of food and drink satisfy men’s baser senses and open the way to more refined sensation, like crime, for instance.
Interesting premise: a group of unscrupulous bandits betray a group of people they were working with, then encounter an even more unscrupulous town who kill them and steal their gold and then they encounter an even more unscrupulous group of bandits. Also also, a guy (I assume Django) is going around shooting people with gold bullets and occasionally he has two party members, but they come and go. Also, I guess this version is uncut so it alternates between being in English and then Italian for scenes that were cut out of the English release, which is kind of jarring.
I was getting kind of over it by the hour and ten mark, though.
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The Undertaker And His Pals - nothing to do with the wrestler, good cheap 60s horror comedy where the “comedy” is more often than not just totally bizarre tonal incongruity in the editing. for example the introduction is a very direct sequence of masked bikers climbing into a woman’s room to murder her and saw her legs off, and then there’s a sudden closeup of the portrait on her dresser making a shocked face.
the plot is kind of a mashup of two pulp standbys at once: the cheap diner chopping up people for meat is in cahoots with the scammy undertaker’s salon charging people to dispose of the remnants. there’s a good part where the nominal hero manages to strongarm his way into the cheapest option for his murdered secretary without any add-ons and the “basic funeral” turns out to just be a comically battered crate with leaking blood and THIS WAY UP printed on the side.
there are some comical hijinx where the snooty undertaker slips on a skateboard or something and then he goes back to chopping up women with basic and horrible gore effects that suddenly cut away after a second to show where i guess the censors took a whack at it. the ending is surprisingly compelling - the guy who seemed like the main character is hastily blown to pieces offscreen, and the undertaker starts stalking secretary #3 through the building - it plays comical Perils Of Pauline piano music when she’s running, and cartoonish plodding organ sounds when he follows, and then goes back and forth over and over again until it really does feel like some horrible unresolvable dream situation. the credits show all the different murder victims resurrecting to give the camera sassy winks.
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Which Pickpocket? Bresson or Jia Zhangke?
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I watched a ton of Bresson when I was too impatient to enjoy the movies. The most recent film I’ve seen by him iss L’argent, which was very good.
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bresson rips
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watched marebito
pretty effective, kinda ridiculous horror film. maybe i’m becoming a takashi shimizu fan? beautifully shot, often maintaining a kind of indifferent distance. don’t know why that in particular works so well with horror? the ending is also really satisfying, the way it flips the relationship of our pervert cameraman and his captive subject.
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the way you know a movie like this was effective is that you laugh at how goofy it was but then you still go and turn on the lights
last night i saw films projected on 16mm for the first time in 15 months, it was healing. i needed this back.
every time i get to see more of Dorsky’s work it is a blessing.
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I watched the recent Tomb Raider movie last night. It sucked but still might be the least bad video game movie ever made, ironic classics like SMB notwithstanding
the castlevania show is pretty darn good
90s street fighter is honestly a great time, fantastic pacing, great character actors
the SMB movie is pretty damn likable imo, it doesn’t come together at all but it makes a lot of inspired choices
I guess I’m also judging in terms of how effective they are as adaptations. But that is probably the worst possible metric to go on, esp since most AAA games these days are already just mediocre movies
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Thanks for reminding me of castlevania though, I saw the first season and then kinda forgot about it. It gets better after that I assume?
yeah I also forgot about it after the first season and watched the whole rest of it end to end the past couple weeks. it is very good! well-embodied characters, good action, actually fun and sparing callouts to the games. my main complaint is that they basically put the big climax of the show in season 2, which made season 3 perfectly interesting as a sort of aftermath, but then left them to try to do another climax in season 4 which didn’t really work for me. but the first 90% of it is honestly very good and likable.
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did the Monster Hunter one ever get released? It looked like it could be pretty great. The concept is like Operators get sucked into the Monster Hunter world right?
Conversely, the first resident evil made me turn it off halfway through, and Alien vs Predator was just as bad if not worse, but I was watching it for A Project so I skipped forward every few scenes to get the gist of it.
I consider both amongst the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
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Pastoral, To Die In The Country - very enjoyable avantgarde coming of age movie which i watched for the silly reason of it being listed as an inspiration for Siren 2. lotsa heavily treated Hausu-type shots and abstracted makeup in i guess effort to get away from the cloying naturalism that is more usual to film versions of country life, but also a circular framing narrative about art as the effort to rewrite memory that i’m a sucker for as well (and a good soundtrack with some fuzz guitar for bonus). the Siren 2 worm people cameo as mean old ladies.
Eyes Without A Face - have been trying to figure out why the ending to this one hit so hard, maybe the claustrophobic sense of dread and obligation that leads up to it, in what is otherwise to an extent a stock horror narrative, the sense for everyone involved that none of this will end well but they still gotta go through with it for the sake of the other two involved. and then once that dynamic collapses the sense that what’s left is even eerier and less intelligible than before. i did get very nauseated by the big operation scene so maybe the emotional stakes for the rest of the movie depended on that brief window of gore.
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Y’all ever seen the movie Red Rock West? I hadn’t, until a few nights ago, when I did had. Good ass movie, I think.
Upon arriving to a small town a drifter is mistaken for a hitman…an opportunity to see Lara Flynn Boyle, Nicolas Cage, Dennis Hopper, and J.T. Walsh go toe-to-toe in all their early '90s glory.
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