i watched the trashmaster, which is a feature length pile of shit made in gta4 by the guy who directed steven seagals arthouse film Attrition. which is also awesome because seagal stole a scene from a wong kar-wai film for it (the opening fight from the grandmaster case your wondering)
this is the opening speech:
“my grand father always told me, respect the trash man, he is as human as you are…even if he lives in the trash, you dont have to think of him as trash…if one day he stopped working, the city would disappear under a mountain of trash…so respect the trash man!”
its 88 minutes and literally feels about triple that long. niko keeps musing about how “in an ideal world, id be stepping out of a cop car before i open fire…” because as they only kinda sorta establish, the trashmen have formed a vigilantes union to do what the cops wont…? theres an entire montage where niko has sex with prostitutes the three different ways u can in gta4 while a shitty kate bush cover plays. he zooms in on a strippers pussy and then fades into the back of a garbage truck…its like if david cage directed gta4. it looks like heavy rain half the time. brain is leaking out of my fucking ears
I have also been on a detective/mystery movie watching spree the last month or so, and watched some of Blow Out and all of Devil in a Blue Dress. My gut feeling is that Devil in a Blue Dress is the second best Denzel Washington movie right behind Ricochet, goes down real smooth what a fun movie.
venus in furs was fun, the entire opening sequence with the guy digging his trumpet up on the beach and then wandering around honking until he stumbles on a corpse and delivering mangled hepcat narration the whole time was truly sublime but i felt the back half of the movie dragged a bit - it would have been perfect if the ghost lady’s revenge on her old lovers(?) had been as inventively weird as the rest of the film but she just kind of wiggles at them until they keel over from lust or regret. as in life. not much relation to the book but i hope the person who left the only comment on the archive dot org upload i watched still had a good time with it.
i actually kinda really like basic! i saw it a few years ago on netflix in a 4am fugue. it really isn’t any more complicated than you said but the vibe fucking rocks, travolta being a spooky creep and skulking around in the rain. i watched that and the joaquin phoenix movie buffalo soldiers where he plays a sleazy guy stationed in west germany in a double feature lol. a bunch of that movie takes place at night too and i have this very vivid recollection of both now…so there’s my enjoyable mediocrity story. detective shit fucking rocks!
Remember, the 90’s was the decade of X-Files, Deus Ex, conspiracy theory out the wazoo. With all historical enemies conquered and Pax Americana destined to rule from a boardroom forever, there was nowhere for people to look for bad guys but inward. The phrase “New World Order” entered the popular lexicon because Bush I said it out loud, approvingly, in the nationally televised 1990 State of the Union.
i think i’ve realized that i might just be a Soderbergh Guy in the way other people are like Michael Mann Guys. i just feel like the way he shoots stuff is so interesting, and it’s like just the right level of flashy and clever to hold my interest, even when the scripts are either just crappy (like the laundromat one i just saw) or totally inscrutable to me but probably actually good (like high flying bird)
he’s also one of the only 90’s auteur bros that it seems like it would actually be fun to make a movie with
and (at least w/ kantonese OV) it sounded like they’ve used the original samples for john doe soldiers, this flick celebrates its source material and does the series justice.
Terminal is bad although shooting in Budapest really does manage to give the sets a bit of flair (though it is drenched in neon and CGI signage to give it kind of a cyber-noir feel that is… not really relevant to the setting or the plot at all).
One of my friends is probably going to eat it up though. Dialogue is reminiscent of Snatch a bit but maybe that’s just the British thugs snarking at each other more than the writing itself.
I’m not recommending it to anyone here, though. It’s legitimately sort of shit, even if it managed to entertain a little.
