ok i was WONDERING about this coz that’s exactly what the marketing makes it look like but everyone really seems to love it
two hours of Michelle Yeoh seems a fine value proposition in any case
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verifying all my worst expectations from the directors of that stalker apologia movie, Swiss Army Man
the irony! of “if I cut these together it will reveal the truth!” when it’s showing the audience exactly how movies are a compelling fiction
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Just watched Vortex. It’s a slow interminable movie about an old couple at the end of their lives, like Haneke’s Amour. It avoids being boring by having a split screen for almost its entire duration. (not that a movie being boring is necessarily a bad trait) There’s a sense of playfulness that comes from choosing which side to focus on, since there often isn’t an intended side to look at at any given moment and your eyes are free to wander.
I think Gaspar Noe played fucking Brothers a tale of two sons because for most of the movie, each screen focuses on either the husband or the wife, and once one of them dies, their side of the screen goes black
Dario Argento plays as the father and he’s pretty good, his character is much more flawed than I’d expected from the themes of the movie. Only the son’s performance really brought me to tears though, and that might be because I’m closer to his age group
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they should graduate you from college just for that take
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gaspar “no thanks”
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i liked painted bird a bunch! the first half was like 1:1 with the book and they didnt have everything horribly explicit (the horny woman, the bottle, the rat pit man) shown on screen. like the things happened but it was cut in a way that you couldnt gawk at the horror happening on screen and instead watch how people react to it
the second half kinda goes off and does its own thing which i ALSO really liked because holy shit the come and see kid grew up and he is SO. FUCKING. HOT. oh god. his shoudlers, i want him to sack me and then knock the wind out of me with the butt of his gun. yes i know this is the worst time to leave snail trails everywhere but HES REALLY REALLY HOT. also his part in the movie is perfect
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for the hagfish that’s just a defence mechanism
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It’s been a long time since I posted so I’ve seen several interesting movies:
- Black Crab. Has a great premise (what if a ragtag bunch of expert ice skater soldiers had to ice skate across frozen sea ice) but the execution is weird. Thematically, this is about what happens to civilians who get mobilized into a defensive war and suddenly become soldiers, and about how their values cannot be the same as the values of the career military institutions they find themselves working for. The beginning and end of the movie are REALLY focused on these themes, but the middle of the movie totally abandons them. Instead of examining what these people think about the career military guys ordering them around, they waste a lot of time with a who’s-the-traitor plotline that goes nowhere. Apparently this is based on a Swedish novel which I’m now really curious about, but there is no english language writing about it easily findable on the internet, haha.
- Napoleon Dynamite. Showed this to my husband as he’d never seen it before. I hadn’t seen it in like 12 years. Turns out Napoleon Dynamite is a really really good indie film about three men trapped in a generational cycle of cruelty and physical abuse! Wild! All I remembered about it from watching it like 10x as a teen is that Napoleon says a lot of wacky stuff. I think now that it is genuinely fantastic moviemaking. So glad I took the time to watch it again.
- Mortal Kombat 2021. It sucks! However the main character is actually some kind of Mortal Kombat OC… incredible. Lots of wild choices here. My husband knows all the Mortal Kombat guys so this was a fun trashy watch for him. For me it was incomprehensible, haha.
- Everything Everywhere All At Once. Perfect movie. Incredible experience watching this thing. Michelle Yeoh does an incredible job and she deserves every accolade possible for this role–but what really blew us away was how good Ke Huy Quan was, given that he hasn’t been acting for years. Everyone in this movie has massive range and the tone shifts between comedy and dark/emotional shit are so, so well done. There is a sequence where they are cutting back and forth between an extended Ratatoullie joke bit and an In The Mood For Love sendup where the characters have suddenly all transformed into straight up Wong Kar Wai guys and it works. It’s great!
- The Night House. I expected this to be some kind of cosmic puzzle box story but it’s super not. I dunno. Glad I saw it but it’s basically just a real straight-shootin’ metaphor story and it’s marching right down the middle of the road you’d expect a movie like that to take. Rebecca Hall being absolutely out of her mind with misery is fun.
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i rewatched the tale of princess kaguya for the first time in awhile. at first i was annoyed that it was only the dub but it’s mostly tolerable ( as ghibli dubs tend to be ). there were things i noticed this time that i did not on my first watch. it was all very emotional toward the end which helped me tear up a little and feel a bit more human.
all my friends are rewatching howl’s moving castle and that’s cool but i guess i wanted to go for a less obvious choice. ( i watched howl’s at least 7 times last year ) we were all asking each other what our favorite ghibli was and i said spirited away at the time but kaguya hime is def up there and may steal the spot. i don’t feel like actually doing a review for this because i feel like i don’t know enough technical terms to really depict what i liked ab the movie besides the animation and sound.
watch the tale of princess kaguya again if you haven’t.
maybe you’ll notice some subtle detail that made the movie all the sadder on rewatch.
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i wanted to catch both of these, but probably missed them too. only ever saw one rrr screening listed locally, and ambulance was relegated to one screening a day at either 2pm or 11pm after the first week.
not reallt watched any feature films recently… but a few james edmonds and larry gottheim shorts that have been wonderful.
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I watched The Man with The Golden Gun and it sucked so badly. I hated it.
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a better Bond trapped in a murder maze movie: Golgo 13, 1983
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Watched Everything, Everywhere All At Once last night and Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan are fantastic! I was so on board for the first 20 minutes or so. Then the movie spends the remaining 2 hours LOUDLY tripping over itself to get to the next obnoxious gag, slamming on the brakes every now and then for a #poignantmoment (my brain was still ringing too much for most of these to resonate). Ultimately left feeling annoyed and robbed, that these characters had such heart only to be drowned out to the point where I couldn’t care less halfway through. Still. Would probably recommend this to people…99% of those who see it seem to find it revelatory 
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may I suggest my father’s approach to classic Bond. he is a man with:
- a complete collection of all the Bond films (including Never Say Never Again)
- no time for bullshit
anyway the approach is simply to fast-forward to the next action scene whenever there’s a lull
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the Roger Moore stuff is at least half bad but which half depends a lot on who you are
my favourite bonds are probably… OHMSS, A View To A Kill, Live and Let Die, Casino Royale, The Living Daylights (I can never get enough of late 80s manners), and Diamonds are Forever
From Russia With Love is an inferior Hitchcock imo, the way that License to Kill is an inferior Mann
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I purchased the entire set of films sans No Time to Die on Blu Ray and picked golden gun at random. I will take this under advisement.
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these are also, in my opinion, the kitschiest (a category that Casino Royale is often wrongly excluded from, and You Only Live Twice wrongly included in).
Octopussy isn’t kitsch as much as like, an interminable number of B-plots strung together. Quantum of Solace is underrated but still not really recommended to a novice
oh and Goldeneye is alright but it takes itself too seriously in a way that only works some of the time, it would probably be in a top ten but only for nostalgic / sentimental reasons, and I still feel more strongly about Timothy Dalton’s milieu in hindsight
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