Still thinking about these phones and this car after watching A Taxing Woman last night (thanks for putting it on my radar @daphaknee (I crib a lotta movies off of SB activity on Letterboxd!))
Also Nobuko Miyamoto playing Super Mario Bros.
Gonna watch more Juzo Itami in the future for sure (Sweet Home next week, he produced that one and the somewhat infamous video game adaptation?)
same i steal everyones taste from here
I saw Turning Red, movie was fine. Iām amazed by how good CGI cartoons can look now if they have a distinctive style. Everything in it looks like a little plastic toy. Itās a weird mashup of Aardman and Ghibli that works very well. Super Mario is going to look amazing once games catch up with this
Saw the Canadian big screen premier of New York Ninja and this weirdo movie is really fun to watch with a crowd thatās into it.
I hated Doctor Sleep so much I think I retroactively like Scream (2022)
Bar has been adjusted.
I still prefer the Babadook.
Seen a couple things recently.
Turning Red: hey this movie is genuinely amazing. I was also 13 in 2002, and this one gave me my fair share of powerful flashbacks, haha. This is frankly the most expressively animated big budget animation Iāve seen since Spider Man or or The Mitchells Vs the Machinesāit proudly admits its magical girl inspirations and uses all sorts of visual language from anime and 2D animation. I had somehow stopped expecting Disney/Pixar movies to play with their material in this way, and Iād stopped expecting them to have a point of view and a sense of personality in the way this movie does. Theyāve been using animation in the most boring way possibleāto simply show a cartoony reality that the characters live in. That is boring!! Anyway, this one is super cute and I really, really enjoyed it. I actually liked it a lot better than TMVTM because it frankly has less to say and is a lot more focused. Itās about some of the same stuffākids doing things their parents canāt relate to, embracing pop culture that their parents fear and distrustābut instead of trying to wade into the āshould children use cell phones so muchā question, which is frankly only interesting to actual parents, itās more focused on more basic shit about individual identity, privacy, letting your kids go, etc. I think TMVTM was pretty good but I also think it was so preoccupied with memes and cell phones and shit that it will feel dated pretty quickly. This one wonāt.
Evil Dead II - Why the hell did I watch the original first? I actually kind of disliked it. This one ruled. Sam Raimi leveled up hard for this one. Itās fantastic shit. Bruce Campbell is basically the most advanced clown I have ever seen and the entire movie is just him slapping himself in the face with pies. Iāve never really understood why people give a shit about him until I saw this version of the story. Absolutely virtuoso comic actor.
Stargate - forgot to mention this but I watched Stargate last week for the first time in like 18 years and damn itās hard to not notice how racist it is now. Thereās still a lot of great old school sci fi filmmaking hereāthe teleporters are fun and the transforming masks are great tooābut the beginning of the movie in particular, when theyāre trying to make you LIKE James Spaderās character by showing him ruining his reputation insisting that humans did not build the pyramids, is really grating now. Also, why is the evil space alien like, so specifically a femme man space alien surrounded by tiny kids with weird haircuts? Am I supposed to think that this character is an evil gay child abuser alien or something? You already got a bad guy whoās an immortal overlord body snatcher, and now youāre trying to make double sure I hate him by also hoping that I am homophobic or something? I dunno. Roland Emmerich certainly made some decisions here.
Happy Feet - oh my god I am so glad I finally saw this. itās a terrible movie but it is terrible in a fascinating way. Thereās a garish art style shift in the third act which demonstrates, I think, enormous guts, and itās actually used well?? Thereās like 15 minutes in the third act which are so surreal and weird that theyāre actually good. Then the movie goes back to sucking. The penguin singing makes no sense (nobody thinks of pengins as singers) and the penguin tap dancing is visually low-energy and forgettable. One of the reasons I watched this movie is that I used to work with a guy who was involved in the filmās production, and he told me some truly unhinged stuff about various tech art tests they did on this movie, different looks for the penguins that they tried out, etc. For example, they apparently experimented with having the penguins lift up their fat bodies in order to expose long, long legs which they then tap danced with, like a woman lifting up a ball gown to reveal her skinny legs. I have blurred this in order to SHOCK you with the reveal of this horrific brain image. Think about it!!!
I watched Dead Heat on the 4k vinegar syndrome transfer and it was a lot dumber and grosser than I expected. It was pretty fun.
Wes Cravenās New Nightmare - i liked this altho realistically most of what i liked was in the first 20 minutes, where itās not quite clear where it stands on the genre spectrum of āhorror movieā vs āmeta horror movieā and so all the scenes of people casually living and working around decontextualised bits of horror iconography feel charged and strange. pt1 nancy heather langenkamp plays herself and thereās a great scene where sheās on a talk show and the host suddenly announces they have a Very Special Visitor and then robert englund as freddy carves his way through the wall and lurches in to start yelling movie reference jokes to the cheering audience, who are also wearing horrifying misshappen rubber freddy masks. and you can see her looking queasy and unsure of what role sheās meant to be playing in this situation but also trying to laugh along with it, and focusing on that reaction is such a funnier and better way of invoking the strangeness of this stuffās presence in the culture than just leaving it all at the joke of āeverybody loves The Child Murderer.ā feels like it intensifies rather than defuses the unsettling-dream-becomes-real thing to play around with the ways a movie itself is an unsettling dream that becomes real and manifests in the world as piles of grinning plastic freddy bobbleheads.
after that it becomes more like a drawn out melodrama, be careful about casting child actors in something in case they gradually take over and moppetize the rest of the film i guess, and the āmetaā stuff gets more rote, like people finding scriptst that describe whatās happening onscreen at that moment etc. there are two more parts i thought were good:
an unnecessarily drawn out part about the lead lady and her babysitter butting heads with passive-aggressive paediatric nurses that got totally redeemed when the babysitter abruptly yelled āYOU BITCHā and punched one of them in the face. then they get into a standoff with used medical needles!!
the climax of the film has our heroine wandering around eating yellow pills she finds on the floor like ms pac man while exclaiming āyessā.
see when an owl does it, itās threatening and ominous and imperious, as an owl should be
Because of this post and because of a conversation I was having with some friends about Stephen King-alikes (Midnight Mass mostly) I decided to watch this one today and I agree, it wasnāt very good.
I liked a lot of the psychic battling. Really hated the final sequence in the Overlook hotel. Bafflingly, there are no camera twisty cosmic things in the Overlook. There are no high energy running ghost fights. The ghosts mostly stand around and donāt do much. The mind palace hedge maze in Danny Torranceās brain does not overlap with reality in any surreal or interesting ways. The villain does not pursue our heroes through the Overlook while having a cool fight. The bad guys are generally unthreatening! I dunno. Not the greatest. Extremely fanboyish and sedate final act.
Not that bothered by it though because I knew what I was getting into and I got to eat a tasty stir fry while I watched it
Been on the Indonesian action movie kick the last few days, so:
The Raid Redemption: Iād seen this before, but I figured I ought to rewatch it before watching the sequel, in case I forgot any of the plot. Turns out - no real plot to forget! Still pretty damn good.
The Raid 2: Itās funny how much harder they lean into plot on this one. But hey, it works? Just absolutely insane fights in this thing. Really enjoyed it.
The Night Comes For Us: I really shouldnāt compare this to the Raidseses, since apart from having Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim, thereās nothing else in common with them. But I guess itās impossible not to make the comparison and, I dunno, I just wasnāt feeling this one as much as those other two. The violence is shocking and horrific, but the choreography feltā¦off? Maybe the actual direction and camera work? I dunno! I feel like Iām being nitpicky on this, but something about it kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was the bit with the assassin attacking Joe Taslim with a butter knife, with every swing and stab making the same shing noise as like, a knife or sword or box cutter or whatever.
Iām really happy that I saw the two Raid movies back to back, instead of seeing Raid 1 in isolation for a period of time. My only problem with Raid 1 on its own is the ending that implies that the brother can be good at crime the way the main character is good at being a cop. Raid 2 opening with his brother being very wrong about this in its first minute is what told me that Raid 2 and I were on the same wavelength.
This isnāt something Iāve spent time trying to articulate but thereās something smooth+corny about TNCFU that screams āDTVā to me where thereās a grit and grain to The Raid that makes it seem like an actual movie film
Saw the newest Spiderman movie and Iām baffled why this one got so much praise. It was fine! It was fine. My favorite part was Tobey Maguire constantly doing his grotesque bug-eyed Peter Parker face. Truly a throwback
I think itās uncomplicated and not clever of me to just say that this was a bloated fanservice experience, so Iām really surprised that so many people I know seem to have had an emotional time with this movie.
I also found the ending baffling. If everyoneās memories of him had been deleted why not just show people all the TV spots and phone photo library photos and birth certificates and school grades and stuff that exist of him? āWho the fuck is this man in my photo library? What can I believe? How do I want to begin rebuilding our friendship that I guess we definitely had?ā is a much more interesting problem for characters to be solving than Peter just going āguess Iām gettin soft rebooted!!ā
Thereās just somethingā¦I dunno. Like thereās a lot of really goofy tracking shots, like when Ito starts fighting at the docks, but especially a little while later, when Ito dodged and the camera tracks Arianās leg as he kicks a beam. And hey, maybe thatās fine! Itās such a brutal movie, maybe throw in some Looney Tunes to mellow it out a bit.
I just, I dunno! Didnāt really do it for me. I kept wondering āis it just missing that Welsh guy director touch,ā but maybe itās because Iko Uwais didnāt choreograph the fights in this one (it says he coordinated them, at least, but thereās a sort of fluidity and believability to the fights in The Raid, where this feels a lot more stilted - needed that desperate Raid/Raid 2 touch of āprotagonist desperately hurls some shit mid-fightā).
Ah yeah, I thought the same thing. They make too big a deal out of the higher ups for him to have all that slide. And, well!
Someone brought up the Kingsman series somewhere on SB and it prompted me to watch The Kingās Man which I thought I would find more interesting because of the time period and
hoooooo boy
What a stupid movie. Historical figures, liberally sprinkled throughout and turned into cartoon characters/members of a big global conspiracy. Politics that are absolutely all over the place (read: characters being portrayed as probably too progressive for the era, England being portrayed as Kind of Shitty but then also at the same time Hooray for Upholding the Status Quo).
Is one of the only female characters immediately killed off to help the character development of two of our protagonists? You bet! The secondary protagonist is also killed which is not much of a surprise except in the way that it happens which was a good gut punch.
Oh my God. Okay, listen, I really like the work of Wilfred Owen so when they have the secondary protagonist pen a poem (which is just Owenās āDulce et Decorum Estā), a poem about the horrors of WWI, before he even sees a single battle. I just. Cāmon. Itās a great poem and if you want to use it to add a little gravitas to the proceedings sure, but at least have the one character who deploys to the front actually get into a battle first. God damn.
I suppose there were probably Easter eggs for the fans of the series but I havenāt seen the others so I didnāt know what they were. There is a mid-credits scene that reveals Lenin and Hitler are also part of the ongoing global conspiracy toā¦ do what, I donāt know. The guy behind the initial conspiracy gets killed so I donāt even know what the motivation is anymore. He wanted to destroy England because heās Scottish which, that tracks, sure. But the other guys? Guess they just wanted to see the world burn.
Mother of God. Some fun action sequences I guess.
Rhys Ifans as Rasputin was probably the best part of the whole movie.
Watching Evil Dead 2ā¦ I wonder if horror videogames (RE and House of the Dead) go green blood options from the surprising swap from red to green blood when Ash kills that womanās boyfriend with an axe.
In general though, it canāt be said enough how kinetic and inspired this movieās style is. Even actually the premise and the nature of the demons (cartoon evil) is just insane almost to the level of Texas Chainsaw Massacre being something that no one should ever have imagined up. Sam Raimi is great. I still donāt have much hope (but, impossibly, still some) for that Doc Stranger movie heās directing.
If you havenāt yet, I recommend watching A Chinese Ghost Story, which is what made me realize that there was a lot of stylistic exchange between American and Chinese film even in the 80s. Sam Raimi was obviously a heavy influence on that film just as Sam Raimi took influence from Tsui Harkās films.
