the thinking man’s “dark side of the moon totally syncs up with the wizard of oz”
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i spent xmas eve watching black narcissus, umbrellas of cherbourg and rewatching fire walk with me. i was almost moved to tears by the technicolor and stagecraft beauty of black narcissus and the melancholy of cherbough’s ending. fire walk with me continues to be an incredibly devastating film. merry christmas everybody.
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Turning him into Sean Connery was an inspired choice
White Snake II: Green Snake (or just Green Snake in Netflix, because they didn’t care to get the rights for part uno) has quite the budget behind it, and seemingly endless sponsors, so no wonder why it looks so pretty
Rough edges at the beginning, but after 15 minutes or so, it worked for me. Meta game of matching Warriors Orochi characters/mythical figures to what’s shown on screen has been part of the fun, a few were easy to guess, some are best guesstimations i cannot confirm.
A Lot Going On though, if you disliked Transformers style action sequences, just go with the flow and don’t try to over analyze everything.
powell and pressburger forever
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have you watched Terrifying Girls’ High School: Lynch Law Classroom yet?
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Not yet, I’m focusing on Naomi Tani now, but Reiko Ike definitely worth to be the next direction.
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Every Christmas, I go see a movie with my sister and her husband. My sister has very narrow taste in movies (nothing violent or scary allowed), so we usually end up seeing whatever disney/starwars/marvel crap is trending at the time. This year, we saw Spiderman: No Way Home.
I only watch superhero movies when I’m socially obligated, so I had very little context for this movie. It really expected me to have done my homework. It starts in medias res, with Spiderman grappling with the fallout from the ending of some other movie. Apparently he did a Collateral Murder, and the video leaked, along with his secret identity. I’d heard that these Marvel movies position their superheroes as essentially representatives of the American power elite, but it’s still really funny to see that the entire thrust of this movie is that Peter Parker of all people is a well-connected celebrity trying to rehabilitate his media reputation after committing war crimes.
The parallels continue, with Parker visiting other elites from his address book to see if they can help him with his PR. He visits Dr. Strange, who is essentially a mentor/co-worker, to see if he can cast a spell to make everybody forget about Spiderman’s secret identity. He shows up at Strange’s mansion (which is essentially a really nice NYC brownstone) and finds himself in the middle of a workplace comedy – due to a technicality, Dr. Strange’s appointment as grand wizard or whatever has been relinquished, and now his understudy (some other superhero) has the job. Due to a mishap with portals, the apartment has been filled with snow, and now they have their interns cleaning it up. The whole scene has this annoying West Wing vibe, like we’re seeing a governor visit a high-powered senator to ask for a favor, and we’re getting to see the senator let loose in private Just Like Us.
Due to a weirdly complicated but handwavy mishap with that spell, classic spiderman villains keep warping in from parallel universes. The idea is, these villains were all pulled in right before their deaths at the hands of spiderman, so our protagonists are going to cure them of their neuroses and send them back so they won’t need to be killed. Parker and his friends spend the whole movie trying to rehabilitate them, fixing their mental illnesses through the use of magic Lockheed Martin technology. Luckily, you can eliminate someone’s sociopathic alter-ego by injecting him with glowing green goo from a military contractor’s 3D printer.
Eventually, other spidermen from parallel universes start warping in, and this is kind of the central gimmick of the movie – you get to see the lead actors from the other two recent spiderman movie franchises, and they mug for the camera and make a lot of 4th wall breaking jokes about the corny parts of their movies.
The ending of this movie is really funny to me.
Dr. Strange’s spell goes haywire and starts pulling in everybody from every parallel universe into our universe (they do not go into the implications of this weirdly Goosebumps-ish surreal childbrain twist, it just hangs there as a Bad Thing To Stop). In order to avert this, Parker asks Dr. Strange to make everybody in all universes forget that Peter Parker exists. This stops the problem and causes all the other spidermen and villains to warp back to their universes.
We then get a surprisingly sad ending. Parker is now all alone in NYC with no friends, family, or home. His girlfriend doesn’t remember who he is. The movie ends with him renting an apartment (I guess he still has his bank account?) and sewing a new spiderman suit so he can start from scratch. It’s the ultimate nightmare of the upper-middle-class people who write these movies: all of your LinkedIn contacts have been erased and you have to restart your career without any connections.
What’s really funny to me is that there is absolutely no followup on what’s going on with the other spidermen and the villains they’d cured. Presumably, Parker’s wish ALSO erased everbody’s memory of those other Peter Parkers too, so he totally fucked them over without their having any say in it. And after we’ve watched two hours of these villains getting cured, apparently they are reverting back to sociopaths.
I’ve never seen a movie like this completely invalidate its own stakes this hard. It’s bizarre.
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Oh and by the way, Dr. Strange’s spell went haywire, leading to the bad ending, because Peter Parker decided to try and cure these villains instead of letting them die. So I guess the moral of the story is that the death penalty is preferable to rehabilitating prisoners?
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This is the most insane excuse to put Tobey Maguire in a movie I’ve ever seen
I watched Jan Švankmajer’s Alice. As a story about coping with boredom, it’s fitting that I watch it now. I’m on week 2 of my winter break and feeling more like a homebody than usual. Like Lewis Carrol’s original, the film answers the question of boredom with a single word “create!”
It’s somehow playful and disturbing at the same time. So many of the creations in here are amalgamations of taxidermied animals, skulls, and old dolls. There are little bits of sharp metal in nearly every food bowl and jar. I’m also a compulsive eater, so I sympathize with Alice’s desire to taste everything she sees. I think what makes it all playful rather than unbearably frightening is Alice’s reaction to everything. Sure she gets sad and surprised, but overall she’s just curious to see what will happen next.
Thanks again SB for the recommendation.
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Thanks for this. I feel like I was right there.
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it’s me the person who thinks alice is his worst movie!!!
I mean I also don’t like alice in wonderland at all, and someone was like THIS WILL MAKE YOU LIKE IT but it ends at the part I wanted to see done with creepy stop motion
conspirators of pleasure is the movie I would show aliens if they asked what people were like
and if youre into eating his breakfast lunch and dinner series are pretty funny and maybe disturbing I have no barometer for that anymore
also lunacy is just plain hilarious
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y’all stop-motion freakers know about this?
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I could watch this if it was 10 minutes
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I enjoyed it while mostly talking with a friend and occasionally going “woah look at that”
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It’s the only one of his I’ve seen but I can tell it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
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i love Lunacy for how well it conveys the horror of meat
the main story is pretty good too yeah
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I’m a huge Švankmajer fan. I’ve been meaning to see his latest film, Insects, but I have no idea how to go about acquiring it. I haven’t heard anyone talking about it either… I wonder how it is.
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