Daphny showed me Wake in Fright yesterday and it is one of the most harrowing and evil movies I’ve ever seen. Also it’s perfect and incredible. Gonna be chewing it over in the ol’ brainpan for a while I think.
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I love how Australian New Wave uses empty spaces and empty time and can push it between comfort, contemplation, and sickness
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should have made a silent hill game about kangaroos
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wake in fright is so fucking good, and its on tubi!!
it has my favorite fucking distillation of the downfall of gambling ive ever goddamn seen, and donald pleasance is a GODDAMN MANIAC
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a timeless favorite, i show it to everyone
yeah like obviously i’m extremely biased but i don’t think anyone does desolation in cinema better than Australians
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Must come naturally to folks who live on a gigantic continent with like 14 other people
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@daphaknee you gotta get some Two-up going at the SB meetup.
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Recently watched AI (last seen back in 2001, one of the last relics of pre-9/11 films). The opening hour is unbelievable. This portion is blatantly filmed as a horror movie from the perspective of the parents managing their creepy robot surrogate child. However, the movie gradually flips the horror perspective over the hour, shifting from the parents’ fear of their child being an unpredictable alien to the perspective robot child’s (eventually just seen as a child’s) fear of replacement and abandonment by their parents.
This is Spielberg at his best, deftly controlling tension to generate empathy. I’m reviewing his filmography now and AI really fits with his pre-Schindler’s List work (especially Jaws, ET, and Close Encounters - and I mean this tonally, not just in terms of it being sci fi). These are stories that perfectly match his skillset, movies with childlike sensibilities but told from a mature perspective. Since AI’s release, he really hasn’t re-captured this level of mastery. There’s clearly a post-9/11 Spielberg period that somewhat derailed him along with most of the creative world in the early 00s. And for the past decade he’s been in a weird pseudo-retirement mode. Pseudo as he’s still reliably releasing movies, just not at the incredible pace he was pumping out films in the 90s and 00s, and the current movies are all light adult dramas, CGI kids movies, and movies I wonder if he half-directed. (An aside, Ready Player One is the most interesting movie he’s released in the past 10 years. What drew him to this fairly large project and how involved was he in the production? It has very few of Spielberg fingerprints beyond some of the “dystopian real world” portions and maybe having some fun recreating the Shining. There’s also the uncanny resemblance of the main character to a younger Spielberg.)
Anyways, it’s too bad AI ended up being the end of the road for one aspect of Spielberg’s career. The movie does sag a bit in the middle but even at it’s worst it is filling time with novelty (there are no boring sequences). It is critical for the movie to feel like a long journey for the ending (everything from Manhattan onward) to land.
The elephant in the room is Kubrick’s contribution. The big joke now is many of the portions originally attributed to Spielberg (the opening family sequences, the largely misinterpreted “bittersweet” ending in the far future) are suspected to have been at least outlined and partially storyboarded by Kubrick’s team. It was silly when people suggested back in 2001 Spielberg softened Kubrick’s “cynical vision of humanity” and it’s silly now when people try to give credit to Kubrick for AI’s best parts. AI, a movie about childhood and the failures of parenting, is clearly a Spielberg movie.
EDIT: I also meant to add two other thoughts:
- Spielberg’s visible CGI work recently has leaned into the cartoony aspect (intentionally so, as things like the BFG and Ready Player One were designed for children and teenage audiences), but his CGI from Jurassic Park in the mid-90s through AI and War of the Worlds is among the best in class. I’m not sure how much the drowned Manhattan environment is CGI vs models, but it looks outstanding. The sequence in Rouge City (AKA sex city) is clearly most CGI and is Spielberg taking George Lucas’s Prequel obsession with all CGI environments and utterly surpassing it. This sequence also a major antecedent to much of Blade Runner 2049 (and far better).
- I wrote above AI is one of the last relics of pre-9/11 cinema, but show someone AI and ask them when it was released and they almost certainly will say post-9/11 (only clue is the robots fly past the twin towers when they enter Manhattan). Spielberg’s movies took a very cynical view of humanity after 9/11, but AI suggests the sensibility predates 9/11. Parts almost fit in more with movies from the later Bush years – the movie is mostly cynical of humanity in general but there is some cynicism toward American-specific patriotism with the Flesh Fair (though directed toward lower class Americans). Add in the movie opens with a narrator explaining how humans caused climate change and have already essentially ruined their world – this is treated as an inevitability in a 2001 blockbuster.
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So far this week I’ve watched
Leprechaun
Leprechaun 4: In Space
Leprechaun in the Hood
I’m finding the series enjoyable.
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I was considering showing this along with Jason X and maybe Hellraiser: Bloodline.
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Finally watched “I’m thinking of ending things”, and it really deserves the ‘tour de force’ attribute sometimes brought up. Kaufman likes to churn out weird movies, and this is no slouch at being uncomfortable to experience, either.
Still not sure what i saw, tho!
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yeah everything turns to shit in ai after the kid gets dumped in the woods
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Bought a BD collections of 日本の首領 at the beginning of the year, and arrived now. Too late.
No longer feel cool about childish story from gangster.
I got fucking owned not knowing I was the first poster in this thread lol
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It’s a great thread.
Damn, how have I still not seen Drive?
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yeah! you were so excited about the new thread title we spammed the thread so it would end and you could make it
I watched Elvira Mistress of the Dark for the first time last night. I would have gone crazy in a good way if I had seen this as a teenager.
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