This is tragic. I hope he’s found ok.
8 Likes
I watched the movie spinoff of the TV show “Kingdom”, the historical Korea zombie political thriller. I think the show rules but the movie, Ashin of the North, was kind of un-fun and confusing.
The comic this IP is based on is very short and spare; this gave the show a lot of room to create a really complicated and interesting Zombie Ecosystem. The TV show takes you on this journey with these characters where they use the science and medicine available to them in their historical period to figure out the entire life cycle of the zombification process. It’s a pretty confusing zombie system but the show makes learning about it a lot of fun.
However, the movie has a character who kind of inexplicably understands how zombification works, and uses this knowledge to her advantage. I spent the whole story trying to figure out how she knows this shit, wondering whether I’d missed some scene or was just a dumbass or something. Then at the end they FINALLY reveal everything to you and I was just thinking, “damn, this would have been way more fun if you’d slowly given me the details bit by bit, like a proper mystery.”
I also didn’t like a specific plot beat that showed a poor and disadvantaged person using a zombie outbreak to her advantage. The TV show spends forever constructing zombies as this very direct metaphor for the uncontrollable consequences of state corruption and war. It’s full of like, powerful men misusing zombies in order to oppress people and then going “oh no, I thought I could control zombies, but zombies are bad!!! they represent the decay of the immoral state, and they are caused by me, a bad guy!!” Watching the protagonist cause a zombie outbreak to hurt the people who hurt her, then personally teaching the bad guys from the TV show to use zombies–like it was literally originally her idea to cause the problems the characters experience in the TV show– just felt really philosophically misaligned with the content of the show.
I never felt the urge to watch Kingdom because I saw Rampant first and I’m not sure what ground Kingdom covers that Rampant hadn’t already. I just googled “Rampant vs Kingdom” because I wanted to see a breakdown of their differences and I stumbled upon a very strange webpage: Did kingdom copy rampant?
The page starts with an answer to that question and then pulls up 27 or so “related questions.” The series of questions that follow are bizarre and associative which makes me think that it’s all created by AI.
Here’s a sample:
Is Rampant positive or negative?
Unrestrained or unchecked, usually in a negative manner.
What does now Rampant mean?
Rampant means wild or out of control . Unruly children might run rampant at the supermarket, knocking cereal boxes off shelves and thoroughly annoying the customers. If you’re running rampant, you’re on a rampage.
What is the controversy?
A controversy is a prolonged dispute, debate, or state of contention , especially one that unfolds in public and involves a stark difference of opinion. … The adjective form controversial is used to describe someone or something that causes people to get upset and argue.
Anyways, much like this site, I can get back to the topic at hand. I have been watching a Korean zombie series called All of us Are Dead. It was created in the midst of the COVID pandemic so there are a lot of discussions about virology, mutations, and spread. I’m enjoying it quite a bit!
2 Likes
I really enjoyed the new Steven Soderbergh movie you can watch on HBO Max, Kimi. It’s a tight 90-min thriller, sort of a retread of Blowout with Siri but set in Seattle and following a character whose agoraphobia has been exacerbated by the past two years of the pandemic. That character complication makes the film feel like Hitchcock, and it definitely has Rear Window vibes. It all felt very natural and like no one element of its premise was desperate to get your attention, like I think a movie like this would be full of if directed by anyone else. There is lots of realistic but high-tech feeling acknowledgment of how interfaces and devices work with each other, and scenes with fun sound engineering stuff going on in them. It’s got a really smal cast and scope, so it has this low-budget feel and look, but the cinematography is just so fucking lively and creative at almost all parts. Soderbergh is really like a science-fiction writer in that he is using the tropes of film and the language of film to create new visuals that describe something totally contemporary, I think.
It gets bonus points for actually being shot in Seattle too!
7 Likes
oh that’s out!!! thank you!!!
1 Like
Watched Nobody finally. It was played so much straighter and more subdued than I expected and in the end I didn’t think it was goofy enough to do what it was trying to do. I might be a wuss but I found the serious parts much too serious and the serious violent parts much too boring and disturbing to work with the absurd social commentary stuff they were trying to do. Made odenkirk’s character feel too “respected” by the movie, if that makes any sense. Whatever! Glad I finally saw it but wasn’t impressed.
2 Likes
The bus fight scene is v good in isolation and as far as I can tell the praise for the movie is completely downhill from the goodwill that scene generates, everything else is scattered tonal whiplash with no particular weight or purpose
2 Likes
I think it benefits by just being a wide-release Hollywood action movie that isn’t Marvelshit. I find a lot of recent movies that fit that description are overpraised. People are hungry for anything that resembles an actual movie
1 Like
also some actually creative shots of downtown winnipeg, which fans are hungry for
1 Like
i watched the first Scream so now i’ve seen Scream. from now on when i watch something that decides to do a Scream parody my enjoyment will be enhanced i guess. i will now be able to appreciate all the nuances and am updating my character class to [WISEMAN] as result.
it was fun, very amiable feeling to have the back and forth between the movie saying what it was going to do and then still try to do it in an effective way. imo all the references pall after a while but i do like the part where they ask the one girl to get some beer and she says “what am i, the beer witch”. every other character is so earnest about namedropping horror things that it’s funnier by contrast when one of them completely whiffs it. a weird effect that would not have been present at the time of the original release is that whenever characters stood around making circuitous movie references it just made me feel like i was watching a videogame cutscene.
it was maybe too classical to be scary but i did get a kick from the two dumbass teenage murderers taking turns stabbing each other while giggling. there’s also a good part where henry winkler is threatening two kids in his office while waving a pair of scissors around and the scissors make the craziest most obtrusive “knife sound” whenever he moves them around.
9 Likes
since 2007, audiences have been asking, “what about our winnipeg?”
4 Likes
I regret to inform everyone that the execrable Disney product Jungle Cruise begins with a montage of a conquistador abusing some indigenous South Americans of uncertain provenance set to an instrumental/orchestral version of Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters. Where was Lars when it actually counted
7 Likes
I’m gonna miss seeing this on a plane.
I saw your post right as my wife began the movie. I immediately closed my laptop and began splitting my attention between the movie and building IKEA furniture. I wish I didn’t have to build that IKEA furniture, but things like that happen. My Alex/Anfallare wasn’t finished by the end, so we made it a double feature with Disturbia. Incredible late-2000s vibes on that one. David Morse has an earring, Shia plays Ghost Recon on his blades UI-ed 360, children watch pay-per-view porn…it really has everything I remember from that time.
4 Likes
I was extremely late to this one because pretty much every other big release last year was either streaming-first or played the festival, but wow licorice pizza was unbelievably great
I think I dragged my feet so long because I knew it would be fantastic either way, like, no hurry, but even so
1 Like
I haven’t seen it yet because it has an Haim which is an automatic veto for my wife.
1 Like
I’d never actually heard of them before but she’s incredible in this
I watched The Taste of Tea on Saturday and goddamn, what a bizarre and… peaceful??? movie. It’s a movie all about how wonderfully weird strangers can be, and how delightful and fun that is, and how lucky we are to live in a world filled with such strange clowns. It’s so kind to people’s eccentricities. The family in this movie is weirder than most, but the little visions we get into their lives are so kind and intimate. I love it!!! So glad I finally saw it.
The posters/marketing materials for this movie lean very hard on the more surreal elements, but the vast majority of weird shit in this movie is not surrealist or “magical realist” at all. Almost all the weird shit is just normal people choosing to live their lives in the most eccentric way possible. I really appreciated the balance they struck. Almost all the “surrealist” content in the movie is actually coming from the young daughter, who’s maybe 7 or 8 years old, or it’s the fanciful imaginings of other children of the same age. At any rate, the surrealist stuff ends up being more about children’s imagination than anything else.
Highly recommend tracking this one down. I can’t wait to watch more movies from this director, too–I think I might try Funky Forest next.
13 Likes
I watched Ghostbusters Afterlife with absolute rock bottom expectations and - it was OK.
It’s weird to see a movie treat a past entry with so much reverence, like it’s a holy text, when…it’s Ghostbusters. The movie with the ghost blowjob and the marshmallow man.
It’s rotten with its share of “well this is happening” and other shitty modern snark humor, but I dunno. As a thing to watch it’s…largely inoffensive (minus, y’know, CGI puppeteering the late Harold Ramis - at least they don’t make him talk)?
Of course they leave it open to another sequel because the same old shit must continue in perpetuity.
(Also it’s funny how even under a wig, costume, and makeup, Gozer is still immediately recognized as Olivia Wilde)
2 Likes