had to check you weren’t talking about bojack horseman when I read this post out of context
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bloody pit of horror - this was pretty fun, i can’t say “haphazardly paced” since the version i watched was actually some youtube guy’s attempt at cutting together a definitive english language version of the film from the several different cuts and audio tracks out there and so part of the appeal was actually stuff like the constant sudden changes in sound quality or bits where the same second of music repeats over and over to fill an interval. the main characters arrive at a castle to shoot horror paperback covers and there’s a really fun sequence where they’re all setting up or posing for these shots of, like, being stabbed with an axe or grabbed by a skeleton, set to chirpy library music. unfortunately the castle they went to is the previous haunt of “the crimson executioner” and is now owned by a crazed filmstar muscleman obsessed with screaming about his “PERFECT BODY” and channelling the executioner’s spirit into purifying the modern age, which is made a lot more fun by the way he dresses sort of like a cross between the phantom and scott steiner and is giddily leaping around and exclaiming the whole while. one of those things where somebody is so into their work that you can’t help but support them.
sherlock jr - i half-watched the general on tv once but wasn’t into it, this one was delightful, extremely crazed stunts that were a little more horrifying when i found out keaton nearly died doing some of them. but there’s a similar sense of constant one-upsmanship going on with the different trick shots and camera effects which is also very refreshing. sometimes i think i’d be more into movies if they’d never moved past the stage of just being delivery systems for optical effects.
friday the 13th part iii - case in point, i finally got around to watching the full movie of this instead of just disconnected clips and it was infinitely better than i could have expected. maybe the best movie i’ve ever seen in my life? this is the “3d” one so every five minutes there’s the most gratuitous, tactless use of “3d” effects you’ve ever seen, just totally arbitrary baseball bats and washing poles lurching vertigiously out of the screen, people flipping yo-yos into the camera or thrusting a snake towards you or passing a joint straight out to the audience or whatever. constantly, with no provocation. absolutely marvellous. there are some good incoherent 80s movie biker punks in there as well.
in terms of horror it is charmingly perfunctory. i never watched a jason movie before and never really got what his whole deal was but now i kind of get it - just this totally abstracted goofy character, who basically has the speed and fighting ability of one of the putties from power rangers except for being inexplicably impossible to stop or get away from. the unreal feeling makes it feel more unsettling, sort of like the parts of Night Trap where the vampires are very cartoonishly creeping around the suburban house.
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I knew it
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yeah sin city is so bad it actually kind of made me like robert rodriguez weirdly? like you just have to admire the chutzpah of making a movie that looked like utter shit in a totally unique way, and then releasing it into the world very proudly and happily. i just respect that it is so willing to just be whatever the fuck it is, against all better judgment from anyone. he was making george lucas moves with that one.
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over the last week i’ve watched jackass 1, 2, 2.5 & 3.5. all classics.
also a new classic from a friend, Worlds
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Have you seen equilibrium? Feels like it would fit into your current “self torture but maybe good movies” theme
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a dangerous method - this was fun, i was kind of dreading the period-biopic elements going in but it turns out they’re what makes it work - the sense of a stylistic framework that can’t really acknowledge or deal with any unconscious elements, or the possibility of history taking a new and unexpected turn, mirrors the sense of discomfort of these kind of aspirationally staid characters as they’ve started pulling at the same threads. mostly psychoanalysis itself remains offscreen, appropriately kind of circled around with no particular moral valence. any kind of medical thriller aspect is pushed out when keira knightley’s “hysteria” is painlessly cured in the first act but after that the question of what does or does not even constitute psychic health becomes more unnervingly hard to decipher. for example the freud/jung scenes were very enjoyable in part because of the instinct for crazed lucille bluth melodrama that both parties seem barely able to repress (disappointed that the scene where freud refused to describe his dream to jung didn’t end with him saying “no, i’m withholding. look at me, ‘getting off’.”) also a lot of fun is had with the fact these characters spend the entire movie casually sucking on things. there were some instances of particularly extreme Period Drama Writing (“hm, just had a weird dream about a tidal wave of blood crashing down on us all. oh well, probably nothing important. time to get back to being european in 1912”) but i guess that kind of stuff is an expected feature of the genre rather than a bug.
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yeah that movie was more fun than you’d think given that casting high profile actors in period pieces around then was almost always a drag, good character work
top tier Cronenberg, probably the closest he has come to Crash (both in content and quality).
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I have a big soft spot for a history of violence but now you’ve said that I don’t really disagree
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Poor videodrome
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yeah, i love that run from history - cosmopolis. yet i have still never managed to get round to watch maps
wow yeah basically forgot about dangerous method somehow. don’t think i’ve seen it since launch. now i want to watch it again!
Eye’m watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Considering my childhood memories of this film and the long intervening years in which they blurred, it lives in a Venn diagram where one circle is “comforting” and the other is “deeply discomforting” and they are almost entirely overlapping.
EDIT:
- I can’t imagine wanting to watch this again…for a while. My memory needs to re-blur.
- The part where Bob Hoskins enters Toon Town for the first time is still the shit
- They shoulda had a “The Dip” (aka anti-toon acid death juice) flavoured drink at some point in the late 80s/90s?
…
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still has one of the more clever puns in its title (even to this date) , which totally got lost in the localization here.
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ended my yakuza watch with Yasha from 1985
ken takakura is a fisherman in a small town. we see in flashbacks that he was formerly a big time gangster in osaka years ago. but wait, a young girl from osaka has recently arrived in town to open a bar and who is her wild man gangster boyfriend selling heroin to all the fishermen
anyway, you know how it is, next thing you know beat takeshi is running around your town with knife on a rampage
ken takakura stops him but during their fight his shirt gets cut and the villagers see his back tattoo.
ken left the yakuza world for his wife to be fisherman in this village but he falls for this bartender and later her boyfriend shows up again deeply indebt to people in osaka and ken being ken, he’s going to go back to osaka and try to settle things his way. it doesn’t really play out the way you might think it would though, it’s mostly a quiet movie about a fishing village with ken takakura taking the opportunity to use this beat takeshi bullshit going on in his life to have a midlife crisis.
the top review of this movie on letterboxd is some insufferable 17 year old “No, I am not a fascist nor a communist, or whatever other radicalist labels you might possibly have for me” prick rambling on about demon’s souls before ending his review with “Also yeah movies are boring and so?” And so, after watching about 50 of these things since the end of march I finally have an answer to the question
and the answer is no
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I watched Willy’s Wonderland
The only thing I had seen/heard regarding this prior
was the trailer from six months ago which I had conveniently misremembered slightly
I misremembered it as Nick Cage saying “I’m not trapped in here with them, they’re trapped in here with me”. All the way up to the actual line, I was waiting for him to bust out that line and for his backstory to get revealed.
Almost everyone and everything in this movie has a backstory that is revealed.
The main character does not talk.
He does weird shit that is never explained.
He seems to also have a backstory, but the movie never gets into it.
After watching it I watched the Red Letter Media Half in the Bag episode where they are savage toward this flick, and I get where they are coming from,
but I liked it.
