watched 5 episodes of vivy from sb2 recommend. Really good show and I will keep catch up.
I watched Annihilation today, in my personal VR theater. It fell of an internet truck so itâs not beautiful but itâll do.
It wasâŚfine? Weirdly unaffecting. It 100% tracks as being from the guy who wrote/directed Ex Machina, a movie i should have liked in theory and despised in practice. It lives mostly in the brain, a little in the gut, and not at all in the heart. Itâs a bit soulless somehow.
Natalie Portman is great, as always. She does a lot with posture in the early parts of this movie, and is generally blank/sad enough that I can project a lot onto her that Iâm not sure is actually there.
The scene where she and Oscar Isaac (who I somehow did not recognize at all) have foreplay involving talking about cell death and aging was so on the nose and bad though. In fact, she and Oscar Isaac have so little chemistry, which is totally shocking. How is that even possible
But yeah, I dunno!! A couple of the scenes were horrifying and the visuals were really, really nice. I donât think it had anything that interesting to say about identity or grief or anything though. Honestly feel like The Babadook did a better job of incorporating themes of grief into a fairly standard horror movie.
I dug that the cast was overwhelmingly women though. It reminded me of The Descent in that way, in that the point was not that they are women, yâknow?
Beyond that, I have shockingly little to say about it. Iâll think about it for a little bit, but Color Out of Space did the Lovecraft angle better so even that part isnât exactly blowing my mind. Mostly it was just the visuals that were dope as hell, especially near the end.
This demoscene shit made me laugh though:
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I think this film is better than the book it is based on. But the third book in that trilogy may be better than this film.
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On reflection it is probably not normal to watch the movie and desperately want to go into the shimmer and be rewritten into a tree
This is my Avatar
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Cease to resist, enter the Shimmer
Drive my car into the Shimmer
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Tbf the closest this got to touching me was Tessa Thompson turning into a tree. Relatable content.
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yeah like my experience of watching this was seeing most of it in a room of people several years ago while also running around helping my partner-to-be to cook and serve food and whatnot so the fact it maybe wasnât an emotionally totalizing experience didnât really matter to me, audiovisually and conceptually itâs 100% my shit though. the books felt grimmer and more oppressive to me somehow
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the big weird cgi climax of this movie has one of my favorite soundtrack / image pairings in any movie. like, i really love how you canât tell if the soundtrack is supposed to be diagetic or not. itâs brilliant. but other than that it left me kind of cold. i saw it immediately after like mainlining all three books in that series though so i was kind of distracted by that aspect of it.
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hellraiser 2 is fuckin bad
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iâve never read the book but i really liked the movie. actually⌠found it quite affecting? was kind of surprised by the amount of people who donât seem to care for it. one of those movies that seems to have a weirdly polarized response. maybe itâs like Blade Runner, another one of my favorite films, in that the visuals are really cool but itâs very understated and a lot of people canât connect with the characters (which i absolutely do not find to be the point of either of those films at all but whatever).
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pretty good summary of the book, too
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I guess I found it hard to connect with the ideas emotionally if that makes sense. I liked it a lot in the moment but afterwards felt a bit cold or disconnected from it. Blade Runner gets to me emotionally as well as intellectually with its ideas about identity and humanity. I wish I could explain why Annihilation didnât!
I guess I might have liked it better had I not seen Color Out of Space and The Lighthouse first.
But for the visuals alone it was worth it. Itâs hard to convey how much I liked this movie as I watched it compared to my reaction afterwards. It looked and sounded amazing.
i think Annihilation suffers because of how clear itâs influences are. Blade Runner is a cold movie, Annihillation grasps at warmth but in doing so misses what made itâs influences (Stalker) work. it really feels like a film thatâs trying to be a more populist version while having all the gravitas of the original, but never really lands either of them.
i think a good comparison would be like 2001 vs interstellar. interstellar is working in a similar space as 2001, but for a much wider audience. thereâs about half of interstellar i donât like, but it really manages to hit the spielberg family drama emotional notes for me, and that makes up for it not having the space to visually or intellectually dig into things as deep as kubrick maybe did.
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another evil (2016) - featuring mark proksch as a ghost hunter, about half the movie is basically just what youâd imagine from that description, i liked it but itâs one of those things where most of the jokes and scenes are so underplayed you kind of wonder why they bothered to make it at all. but there are a couple of good weird moments involving variously a ghost and a story about breaking into a funeral home where youâre not sure where things are going anymore. thereâs also a weirdly conventional thriller ending which is redeemed by the horrible sight of prokschâs staring fish eyes. i regret to say the tone undercuts what could have been a very funny bit involving sexy playing cards.
hellraiser 3 fuckin sucks
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I kept falling asleep the only time I tried to watch Annihilation, but I had taken a bunch of melatonin on a plane right before watching it, so who knows? Book was enjoyable enough, though I liked the second one in the series much more.
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Again, these criticisms apply to the book just as well.
Jeff Vandermeer always gives off the vibe that he doesnât want people to acknowledge his obvious influences, at least in part because his writing pales in comparison.
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watched Dune last night. it was fine i guess. cool visuals
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Watched Pig today. Nicholas Cage has still got it.
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