Movies You Watched Today: Return Of The Thread (Part 1)

this spectacular dipshit has completed his heel turn and is doing like NFT stuff now

Jean Paul Belmondo has left this earth, though lives on through his action driving:

rocking a Fiat 131 Supermirafori vs a Peugeot 504, and shows us some wheelinā€™ that would have brought him to fame in NASCAR, for sureā€¦

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I went back to the cinema for the first time since February 2020 (Sonic the Hedgehog yikes) to see Paul Schraderā€™s The Card Counter. It was alright. Oscar Isaac really holds it together. Some chilling story elements but also clunky dialogue/clunky delivery. Like, I think Tiffany Haddish is great and she has her moments in this but her character didnā€™t quite gelā€¦and Tye Sheridanā€™s part was so nondescript it felt like anyone could have played that roleā€¦there was also some eyerollingly heavy-handed music throughout, enough bum notes to make me question Schraderā€™s taste (but thatā€™s always been the case to some extent now that I think about it).

Itā€™s cool to see him still working and managing some interesting results but he feels very much like an old dog refining old tricks at this point, to diminishing returns perhaps. I liked First Reformed but it does feel like it would have been an appropriate last word after this one.

Anyway, having gone in blind, it was a weird watch for the 20th anniversary of 9/11!

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Oh dang I kinda wanted to see that. I assumed it was a Netflix movie lol I guess it will be there soon enough

Was curious about the score - a score that is bad enough to be noticeable is still kind of a good thing IMO. Music in movies is usually so bland these days

Turns out it was composed by a guy from black rebel motorcycle club, whose dad did the score for another Schrader movie, light sleeper. I learned in an interview with the son that he was a teen when his dad was doing the other movie, and he helped him out with some parts of it. So when Schrader was doing this movie, which apparently has some connection to light sleeper, he deliberately sought out the son to get him to do the music. Paul Schrader is so cool

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Definitely recommended then. On first viewing, the themes and characters felt a bit too undercooked to get away with how mannered and mechanical it was, but something Iā€™ll revisit out of theatres and see. The music drops (with lyrics) border on teen drama with how insistent they are to make things soar (and felt like intrusions beamed in from another movie considering his Bresson obsessions) but they donā€™t dominate the movie.

My three favourite Schrader films include two he outright dismisses most of the time (Blue Collar and Hardcore) so what do I know. I really need to see Light Sleeper though!

had no idea david ayer had it in him to make a movie as good as fury

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yeah, this should be more of a thing.
i watched Weā€™re All Going to the Worldā€™s Fair this week, which has a score by Alex G. i was not expecting that going in, and his work for it just sounds like his albums - not just an artist getting hired to then go do some bad john carpenter synth lines. cool movie.

yesterday i finally got to see all 8 hours of The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin). been anticipating this one for a long time, their first feature The Anchorage is a high point of ā€˜slow cinemaā€™ and just seems to not be part of the general canon there. this one is absolutely beautiful from start to finish, knotty in itā€™s relationship between fiction and documentary, and a very calm look at ageing/death/life moving on. it has Grasshopper distribution so should be available online in the near future and will hopefully hit a bigger audience than their debut.

Bottom Line: Malignant is James wanā€™s Shinji Mikamiā€™s Sam Raimiā€™s The Crow

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Shang Chi was fun until it fell into the MCU cgi fight zone hell at the end. Especially with CGI straight out of Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil.

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You can find Prisoners of the Ghostland on torrent sites right now! I had plans to watch Song of the South tonight but will probably watch that another time, Iā€™ve been waiting too long.

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I put on Pontypool last night because I remembered not liking it much and figured Iā€™d fall asleep, but I watched the whole thing and liked it a lot more this time around. The doctor slinking in and out of the building via the same snowy window was pretty funny. Will definitely have to watch it again in October.

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Pontypool is a personal favorite of mine. a psycholinguistic horror movie that could easily be a stage play

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I was expecting a comedy when I turned on Lowlife and aside from a few humorous bits thatā€™s sure not what I got!

But you know what, I liked it.

I thought Pig was pretty good. I went in expecting a Nicholas Cage John Wick. There are shades of Wick in there (beloved pet revenge quest, a legend returning to a criminal underworld, unnecessary but delightful worldbuilding). All physical combat, however, is replaced by emotional combat. Cageā€™s character has a photographic memory that he uses to completely dismantle the psyche of everybody he has to get through to reach his pig. This results in some of the most entertaining acting Iā€™ve seen in a while, and not just from Cage! Thereā€™s also a sort of self-conscious arthouse vibe the film tries to cultivate, but it keeps undercutting itself tonally in a way I found very enjoyable.

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Good Lord, Malignant is an irredeemable pile of shit. Itā€™s boring, not particularly weird just lame, feels like it was filmed in 2007, and the dialogue sounds like it was written by two people during a car ride. I donā€™t think thereā€™s anything here worth experiencing unless you want to be bored. Also, it keeps playing this remix of the Pixiesā€™ Where is My Mind but itā€™s too on the nose and doesnā€™t really work. I can see this being popular with younger teens, but this is like, way worse than some of the stuff out there actually meant for them (like Fear Street, which isnā€™t great, but is easier to follow by virtue of not being so goddamn boring).

eta:2021-09-25 19.16.43 letterboxd.com 634623d9b3fd
are you fucking kidding me?

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People seem to think that it is endearingly half-baked, like itā€™s just strange enough. Which is kind of like a really, really depressing metric. No one expects to be delighted and surprised by a James Wan movie is what it really comes down to I think. But I get the sentiment.

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Iā€™m escalating Vince McMahon mugging at these last two posts lol

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People were acting like it gets crazy and weird, but it doesnā€™t, really. Thatā€™s the whole reason I bothered. Like, I can sit through The Conjuring or Insidious (I couldnā€™t tell you which is which), so I was expecting something passable, but this is just agonizing!

not really a movie, but the korean ā€œTVā€ ā€¦ netflix-licensed show ā€œInto the Ringā€ first few episodes have been blessed by a DP that really tried giving it a good shot, misc-en-scene-wise, at trying to find some new shots for staging scenes we have seen too often before.

At first, I thought that someone watched Mr Robot or Homecoming, and went crazy trying to replicate the effect.
Three episodes in, I am enjoying how the camera is playing with the scene, actors and space, since you never know what weird angle or setup itā€™ll throw at you next. In between the odd shots, you get perfectly staged shots that would easily pass off as A-tier material/movie-material, and I am still not sure whether thatā€™s a deliberate choice to reflect e.g. a characters intentions, role or thoughts, or ā€˜just because it looks cool!ā€™-randomness.

If you like that, give it a shot.

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