Since we’re talking czech animation, check out Jiri Trnka if you haven’t!
7 Likes
Lady snow blood part.2
–
Just finished part.2, have to said as the ‘origin’ of Kill Bill, Lady snow blood is far deeper than Quentin’s fetish, they all start from a revenge, full of blood, nude, and sword. But Lady snow blood more discussed the politics of the period of social change, not isolated crime organization or thug brutality, all the tragedy was also the result of poverty and systemic corruption in Meiji period.
The great sympathy is the main theme of Lady snow blood, violence is became more realistic not only an art style. If you both love Kill Bill and Italian neorealism, that’s a movie you must see.
9 Likes
just look up is obviously bad, but there’s nearly half of a good idea if they had just played it straight as a horror film. broad satire is the absolute wrong mode for this sort of project, but if you ignore all that (which is 90% of the movie) there are moments that do capture the existential anxiety, depression, and denial of climate change/covid/whatever. of course, first reformed and melancholia covered this ground with 10x the finesse.
2 Likes
It’s amazing how many comedies there are that rich people make about how utterly powerless they are to stop disaster and always make that disaster a meteor to absolve themselves from the fact that they could probably actually concretely help someone.
Like the fact that shitty twee comedy about inevitably apocalypse is a cliche at this point sucks.
2 Likes
If i knew that ‘Last Christmas’ was going to ram home “Look Up” as its core theme, i would have watched it back to back with “Don’t Look Up” for the lulz.
Wham OST alone should cost the former one star, and the best bit about it is that it made me retroactively enjoy Don’t more.
What a giant waste of time.
I watched this the other day on the strength of your recommendation, and I really enjoyed it! I tell you what, it’d been too long since I’d watched a fun little unpretentious farce like this. It has a perfect community theatre vibe to it. It also has that distinct flavor of over-the-top Japanese comedy acting, which is corny but very lovable.
1 Like
Amish Abduction (2019) - felt in the mood for a Lifetime movie so after a while on youtube watching trailers for films called like “The Single Mom Conspiracy” (check out the trailer for what i can only describe as a “lesbian music sting”) ended up settling on this. you can’t go wrong with a good Amish movie and this one is about marital discord: the wife is happy and devout, but all of a sudden for some reason the husband starts acting like whatever their equivalent of a wrestling heel is - he starts to eat without waiting for his son to say grace, then tells the kid to “make it quick”, says working on the farm all day is “boring”, and complains that “all i do is work and plough”. also he kills someone but that seems kind of unconnected, after being admonished for his wife for “devil talk” he goes off to drink with a trucker in the woods who’s been secretly bringing back whiskey from the big city, but the guy keeps calling him “farmer ted” and tempers flare up. there’s actually a scene break and a change of lighting which implies they all spent like three hours in the woods together yelling “my name is JACOB” and “FARRRMERRR… TEEEDDDD” back and forth at one another before bad amish husband hauls off and punches the guy, thus killing him instantly. He drags the body from the woods to the side of the road and drapes a few leaves on it before walking away… in his defence this is a man who has likely simply never been exposed to a single episode of CSI, Columbo, Murder She Wrote etc.
actually speaking of unconnected there’s a part where the wife is complaining about him to her parents and says that “he seems so… disconnected”, which seems to me like a weird term for an amish person to casually use but whatever. maybe it’s foreshadowing because in the next scene he both pulls his son out of school to go to the fair and witness balloon animals, and also pulls his wife into the bedroom to secretly show her something: “it’s called a smartphone”! he got one for her too but she resists the temptations of the world of the english, noting correctly that “it’s a world of pain and impurity”. however smartphone rot evidently sets in fast as when she wakes up the next morning he’s already taken their son and gone to live in philadelphia.
she teams up with his more morally upstanding and coincidentally more dreamboat brother to go to philly and attend custody hearings. there’s a part where they break into the house he’s staying at (?) to just kind of creep around and marvel at appliances. but the brother, at least, remains firm: when she says “it’s very beautiful” his response is “i guess, if you like gluttony.” there’s a tense sequence where this woman in a bonnet has to crawl around behind an Ikea kitchen counter to avoid her half-nude husband who’s wandering around out of the shower. after she escapes we see another tense scene, where bad husband berates the son to stop wearing farmer clothes and dress up in Baby Gap gear or something. the son is played by “Current Affairs” editor Nathan Robinson.
anyway eventually they go to the hearing, the mom gets full custody because the dad never watched enough movies to know you’re not meant to yell at the judge, they beat a retreat back home just in time for a tense sequence where the dad breaks in and starts chasing them around. i have to mention here the music, which is like the generic thriller library music sound pack (backwards strings, ominous electronic drones, etc) but plays very weirdly in this context - like how should we score a chase scene among the amish, i’ve got it, how about with fucked up industrial circus music or similar, well i’m not complaining. there’s another bit where the wife and the brother undergo the very fanficesque contrivance of both having to stay in a hotel room with only one bed, and while checking out the digital clock the wife accidentally manages to play like a 2010s r’n’b track for several seconds, during which both she and the brother start unconsciously moving their heads and generally vibing. these people, they are just like us.
at the end of the movie the husband makes the incredible rookie move of chasing his wife and kid into the barn and then standing just underneath the same rotting, precarious beam he’d been putting off fixing earlier in the movie as a tangible symbol of his laziness and neglect. he gets conked but not killed, which makes it weirder that at the end of the movie the wife is living with the brother instead and everyone seems cool with it, displaying a surprisingly tolerant attitude to divorce or else just general cohabitation.
anyway top character in my opinion is the one guy in the background of this one shot who looks inexplicably like neo from the matrix. what’s his story??
13 Likes
lost it
1 Like
Watched Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3, and Scream 4 back to back last night. The first is too iconic to imply it’s insufficient in any respect, while 2 is a solid sequel but just less classic or necessary to recommend. 3 is just stupid as hell I can’t think of anything much to say about it that’s good. Parker Posie. 4 is way better than you’d expect but on a third viewing and after all this context, a little annoying? No idea if 5 is gonna be worth seeing but I might as well after all this.
6 Likes
Venom: Let There Be Carnage - are you telling me that in the year 2021, Hollywood made a superhero movie that’s actually an extremely gay buddy action comedy and that it’s only 90 minutes long?
am I back in the good timeline?
3 Likes
I spent the last month visiting my family on the other side of the US. There wasn’t much to do because of omicron, so my husband and I camped out and watched movies pretty much all day for a while. The best stuff we saw on our trip was:
-
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Brilliantly funny and bizarre stuff. Goes back and forth between being this parody mob movie thing and this tender friendship story. Ghost Dog’s relationship with his friend who only speaks French is very good. They believe they cannot understand one another, but the audience knows they’re in perfect sync… it’s weirdly adorable. So glad I finally saw it.
-
Jackie Chan: My Stunts. This 90s documentary is just Jackie Chan wandering around various stunt-dense prop rooms and movie sets and just rambling and ranting about whatever he wants, demonstrating stunts, making his team demonstrate stuff, etc. It’s so good. Lots of bizarre little segments covering things from his various movies. The version on the Criterion Channel is actually missing some of the content–seems like they only got the license for the Police Story clips–but it’s still incredible.
-
The Plague Dogs. Looks great. Story is brutal. Knew what I was getting into because I had read the book, but yeah, heavy stuff!! I love how Richard Adams writes animal characters–they speak with fully lucid adult-british-man voices but they have animal brains so they’re actually dumb as shit. Turns all his work into this persuasive argument that humanity sucks ass, because you got little dogs and foxes and rabbits saying things like “a door is a horrible creature created by Man, my eternal enemy, to Thwart me!” and so on. Plague Dogs has a lot of this stuff and it’s gorgeous too.
-
Son of the White Mare. Mindbogglingly good animation from Marcell Jankovics. Every moment blew my mind. The scene transitions alone absolutely floored me. Whole story is Hungarian strongmen wresting everyone they meet and finally they meet Modern Society and wrestle that too. Loved it.
-
Various Matrix stuff. Rewatched the original Matrix, saw Resurrections. We really enjoyed revisiting the old stuff and had a great time with the new one as well. The game dev sequence was brutal to watch but extremely funny. I, too, get incredibly depressed when I have to make videogame in an office
10 Likes
there’s another doc about jackie chan that’s more about his family and early history, i think it might be called Traces of a Dragon (That is definitely the name of a Jackie Chan doc, but I don’t know if it’s the one I saw), that is also pretty wild. It was once on Netflix but I’m not sure if it still is. Worth watching.
Not sure about Netflix but it looks like Traces of a Dragon is all on Youtube! I found the first chunk here.
1 Like
fuck I literally had this thought a few weeks ago, then annoyed nika with a bunch of workshopping of some twitter joke i wanted to make about how i thought don’t look up wasn’t that bad and that henry golding sure is a charmer, ain’t he
somehow it’s become our christmas movie so now we watch it every year during the holidays and I couldn’t tell you how this happened
1 Like
Absolutely, hands down.
omg daisies is still so good I was wondering if it’d be cheapened by me seeing tumblr out of context posts about it for a decade after I watched it, but that was silly to think. it was still perfect
banned for wasting too much food but actually banned for being a movie about women shitting on beuracrats who’s biggest scandal is seeing people not keep off the grass
5 Likes
they finally confirmed House of Gucci is out on streaming in 2 weeks, couldn’t be bothered to sit through this in a theater but I’ve been waiting so long for this Pacino performance
1 Like
i appreciate that the sparks documentary is literally just talking heads going through every sparks album in chronological order, but i also wish it was… a little more adventurous.
there is a scene towards the end where the mael brothers are like making tea and playing their home pachinko machines, i feel like the whole thing should have just been that type of shit
1 Like
the Todd Haynes Velvet Underground doc was also like this and it felt like not enough despite being stylishly made.
Last night I watched Dave Made a Maze which feels like it was film festival kinda stuff but I can’t resist a good bigger-on-the-inside-labyrinth or papercraft stuff so I found it charming. The acting was kinda bad but it didn’t matter much to me. 80 minutes of fun set design and a couple of funny running gags, that’s basically what this was.
Followed this up by watching You Were Never Really Here, which is 90 minutes or so of Joaquin Phoenix being miserable and occasionally pausing to murder a bad guy. I actually liked this quite a bit. Very focused. Maybe the protagonist’s flashbacks fell a little flat, especially with repetition.
Damn it’s refreshing to watch movies that don’t overstay their welcome.
3 Likes