Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is better than all of the Wide Screen Anderson movies, but it still fumbles all over the place. Trying to make RE1 and RE2 take place at the same time was a mistake. I’m not sure why they swapped Jill and Claire’s personalities. This movies takes the “rookie” aspect of Leon and interprets it as “complete fuck-up”, which I’m fine with because Leon’s transformation from rookie cop to supercop presidential aide is never something I liked (he’s the character it makes the least amount of sense with – even Rebecca would’ve been a better fit), so him being incompetent is fine.
The fanservice is a bit too much. There are dozens of references, and that’s only counting stuff I recognized from the original games, I’m sure there are references to the remakes that went over my head (aside from the burger).
I assumed the guy on the left was going to be Wesker, but he’s actually Richard (and yet, for some reason, Barry, Rebecca, (and Joseph, Kenneth, and Forrest) are completely absent from the movie). The guy on the right is Wesker. The guy in the center that looks like Kevin from Outbreak is Leon (he’s even wearing black like Kevin as opposed to blue like Leon).
Watched Takashi Ito’s 1985 short Grim (on youtube)!
Immaculate haunted camera movement, especially for the time period. I love what seems to be the combo of stop-motion and on set projection to create the ghostly imagery. Big Silent Hill 4 vibes. Fucked up and maybe nauseating. Would recommend.
For a couple of months now, I’ve been doing something that’s been really rewarding for me and energizes me to watch things off the beaten track. I’ve been watching .1%* of films from every decade. I’m trying to include films from as much of the world as possible. I don’t think I’ll have the time or energy to remark on everything that I’m watching, but it’s been really cool to dip into cinemas I had never really looked at before, cinemas like Mexico’s, Brazil’s, and the Philippines’.
in every scene you can feel his coworkers looking around helplessly, wondering if he’s planning on doing the entire movie like that, realizing there’s no one they can ask to stop him
My recent watching of the first season of Ultraman has me similarly excited there because there is a lot of messed up shit just under the skin of that show.
The last few episodes I’ve watched with my kid have had a few good moments for the guy who is easily our favorite character on the show, Matsuhiro Ide.
Ide is…a freaking doofus. He has the blind enthusiasm of a kid who is determined he can save everyone and nothing can stop him, and the raw incompetence to almost always fuck up while doing that. He is also, somehow, the chief weapon designer for the SSSP, which hot damn if that isn’t ripe for some military industrial complex commentary. Dumb as a bag of rusty doorknobs, but capable of making handheld guns that can blow off the limb of a monster? Yeah, sure. This also makes the Netflix sequel anime hilarious, because Ide ends up a the head of the SSSP, failing his way up like a true boss.
So like, in light of Shin Godzilla, this seems like one possible way to go here. Though from what is out on the movie now, the SSSP are not the same people, but I still hope for Ide to show up somehow, or some similar person to be around.
I mean, there also is Ultraman’s amazing capacity for just spontaneously being incredibly violent. The last episode featured a monster who had swallowed some nukes, so Ultraman couldn’t just spacium beam him to hell, so he instead made what has gotta be the inspiration for the Destructo Disc and sliced him into chunks, then threw the chunk with the bombs into space to explode.
So we might get both governmental bungling and horrific violence. I have hopes.
I watched John Wick Chapter 2 and it was fine I guess but seemed to lack a sense of… immediacy(?) that the original had. The opening section hitting a lot of the big lines from the first movie in a jokey sort of way I think maybe encapsulated what was up. That said still loved Lawrence Fishburne in it and will catch the third movie sometime as I still enjoy the gunfights enough, plus it has Boban.
Watched Clearcut, a very Canadian film directed by a Polish exile. Tremendous performance by Graham Greene as an ambiguously supernatural figure who forces the lib lawyer that represents a tribe in a land rights dispute against a saw mill to truly understand the desire (and justness) for anti-colonial violence through wilderness survival and psychological torture. If you really enjoy Dead Man, this feels like a less comedic antecedent in a lot of ways.
