edit edit i guess its not really editing if i doublepost is it
too bad, prolly gonna watch it wednesday
2 Likes
Yay! But be warned, it has some pretty intense depictions of sexual violence. I saw it in a theatre with a friend, and it surprised her hardcore. Did not leave the theatre feeling good!
1 Like
Claire Denis is top shelf. Best for sipping, not shooting.
2 Likes
another one for the rate my rape podcast that only exists as loud discussions between me and veronica. a podcast for my apartment building
2 Likes
re: claire denis, a 1080p copy of lāintrus is finally online. a fucking classic.
3 Likes
I watched that five and a half hour neil breen self-retrospective over a couple of days, as a fake fan whoād only seen ātwisted pairā I liked getting to watch fragments of the others presented out of context and with no commentary other than āhere we used a light patternā, having to guess at what movie each scene was even from and how the parts could possibly fit up. Iām not really a movie guy but I like whatever genre it is includes stuff like this, after last season, birdemic, me you madness, the room, etc, none of these things are āoutsiderā or whatever, theyāre just films made by rich people who seem to have made the jump from āI always wanted to make a movieā to āI made a movieā without any of the interim self-critical parts. Which is not exactly sympathetic but sometimes I like things that are unsympathetic. Everyone has their own little goofy clump of interiority and in culture spaces itās expected that you drag it out and show it to people on demand, and so over time that inner self definition becomes sleeker and more presentable and likeable and internally consistent ā but outside of those spaces nobody really cares, āwants to make a movie somedayā is often enough self definition to get by, no further detail requested or desired. So at best you get things that feel wonderfully unintegrated and not fully cooked through. Crazily grandiose daydream identifications ā as a god, a genius, an incredible lover, an unstoppable girlboss serial killer ā coexist with a petty kind of emphasis on mores and etiquette: this is how you behave, this is how you dress, this is how you know X is a good guy, this is how you know Y is an untrustworthy person. It means this stuff can frequently feel more real as like a psychic snapshot of that particular milieu than the more managed version that the same class hires screenwriters etc to compose on its behalf.
So what does a āretrospectiveā even look like from one of these guys, the answer is pretty much as youād expect: happily uninterested in any kind of explication or self-reflection, less happily invested in passing on soundbites of conventional wisdom, weirdly self absorbed ā the ācastingā section mostly just consists of shots of neil himself, whenever another person shows up theyāre not remarked upon at all, I think the only other named individual the whole five and a half hours is the video editor he works with ā and inscrutably laid out, like the exact same repeated comments and footage are replayed again and again at different points. Thereās some good fun in the props section while heās blandly reciting lines like āhereās the Black Cubeā¦ hereās the interior of the Black Cubeā¦ another shot of the Black Cubeā¦ā and also a beautiful romance in the Lighting part where he falls in love with like, a board with a horizontal slit cut through it, used for projecting dramatic beams of light, and evidently decides to use it in every single shot from now on. You learn to cheer when it shows up, like the one flashlight cookie in unity games. You also learn he uses the Nabokovian index card method for assembling plots. Otherwise the length and repetition and sheer volume of generic behind-the-scenes slideshows made this one kind of gruelling. Strangest moment: having two different parts where he showed the below shot and insisted āthatās a REAL tiger ā not greenscreen, not cgiā. my other favourite part was any bit where heās wearing the Planescape Torment mask.
8 Likes
I just realized that Avengers: Endgame is the last movie Iāve seen in a theater, and there is a nonzero chance it might actually be the last one I ever do see in a theater.
How strangely appropriate and yet faintly embarrassing.
3 Likes
Sonic 2 should still be on, thereās a chance to correct thisā¦ 
7 Likes
i mean itāsa very nasty film but the ending was so gorgeous i felt great after
well maybe i didnāt, i vaguely recall thinking i wasnāt about to watch it again anytime soon, but i still think about ā youāve never known cruelty in your life ā
Over the weekend we visited my husbandās parents. Theyāre great people and I love listening to them talk about the stuff theyāre interested in. Today the conversation turned toward Donnie Yen, and my father in law just walked into the other room and came back with a DVD of Donnie Yenās second-ever starring role. He just slapped it down on the table in front of us and was like āyou gotta watch this.ā
The movie is called Mismatched Couples but the DVD case was titled āMisnatched Couples.ā It was directed by Yuen Woo-ping, a director and choreographer who made a lot of kickass martial arts and hollywood action films and eventually went on to choreograph the fucking Matrix. It looked like this:
My husband and his sister were so excited about this movie because apparently they all watched it together as a family on vacation years ago and were all mesmerized by how strange and bad-but-good it is. My husband and I took the DVD home and because our playstation was unable to handle the DVD, he spent the afternoon ripping it, converting it to a better file format, and transforming it into something we could actually watch.
it is out of control. The plot is that Donnie Yen is a cool teen who lives at home with his sister and his cousinā¦ who is also his love interest??? He is very cool and dances everywhere all the time impressing the ladies, but also heās obsessed with RC cars and drives them around inside his room alone for fun, which is the behavior of an uncool nerd, but whatever. He goes out on the town one day and runs into an unemployed Chinese opera performerā¦ who is played by Yuen Woo-ping himself. This character, Mini, is a fucking awful dude, just completely nasty for no reason all the time, but the teens kind of adopt him and sneak him into their house, eventually persuading their sister to hire him to work in the family restaurant.
The rest of the movie is just an uninterrupted stream of absolutely out of control visual gags that often have little or no relationship to the actual plot. There is a dance battle with an old man in an airport with so many genuinely good visual gags that I could not stop yelling. There is a sequence where the bad guys throw an entire party in an attempt to try and collect video footage of Donnie Yen shitting himself. The bad guy is a bodybuilder named Power who sees Donnie Yen and is so impressed by him that he spends the entire movie plotting to arrange a battleā¦ but the good guys never notice Power doing this and he literally just follows them around cackling from the shadows. The most dangerous stunt in the movie is something Power does while nobody is looking at him, and the JOKE is that nobody sees this incredibly dangerous moment, nobody remarks on it, it just passes and the movie moves on. There is a sequence where Yuen Woo-ping pretends to be a table for like 5 straight minutes. This movie is ridiculous. Thereās also a lot of unbelievably sexist shit in here, including a scene where the protagonists torment a woman bodybuilder for no reason. But on the whole itās incredibly watchable nonsense.
The copy my husband made is kind of fucked up, as the audio tracks combined and we had to watch the whole thing with the mandarin and cantonese audio playing simultaneously. Hopefully he can fix that and then weāll have a perfect version of Misnatched Couples we can enjoy forever.
14 Likes
that sounds incredible i want a copy right this second
3 Likes
Me too!
The other day I went and saw the new internet horror film Weāre All Going to the Worldās Fair. I mean, how could I not? Even bad internet horror films are great.
Well, my friends had mixed reactions, but in my opinion this is excellent internet horror. Except itās not entirely a horror movieā¦ Itās more of a sad, creepy art film. I guess in that sense the vibe is kind of like a more naturalistic, much less abstract Kairo. Big difference being that everything that happens in this film could easily have happened in real life (and similar things HAVE ā I kept thinking of that story from several years back where a couple of middle school girls killed a peer and said that they did it for Slender Man).
Itās interesting, the film feels like an extremely in-depth portrait of the internet of like 10 years ago. It feels distinctly pre-Qanon. I found a very thorough and insightful interview with the director where they talked about how they wanted to get across the feeling of what it was like for them to grow up trans on the internet, so that makes sense.
I thought the lead actress was incredible, and her character was very well-drawn as a lonely abused 13 year old who is deeply immersed in this youtube creepypasta movement and participates in it, but doesnāt realize that everybody but her knows itās performance art. Her connection with this pathetic older internet guy also felt very real, and realistically ambiguous.
For me, by far the most effective scene was when the main character snuck into her dadās storage unit in the woods and tried to soothe herself to sleep on a couch with an ASMR video projected enormously on the wall in the dark. Itās this very sad and tender moment, but then the video ends and the next one to autoplay is a horror video someone made targeted directly at her, where they warped her footage of herself to look terrifying, with text overlaid: āYOU ARE IN DANGERā. That instant shift from the saddest and most alienated moment of the film into the creepiestā¦ Fantastic stuff.
8 Likes
I love that movie. Saw it last year and have been waiting for a broader release so others can go see it. I donāt love every part of it, but itās a unique film that does justice to a thing most attempts have failed at.
2 Likes
I rewatched the first and third Hangover movies.
I liked The Hangover Part III more on this rewatch than I originally did.
Itās a bizarre series.
The second one is a remake of the original.
The third one is a sequel to the original.
Part III barely references the second movie so the best way to watch it is immediately after watching the first one.
Itās a good sequel to the first one and a terrible sequel to part II.
3 Likes
Back in my āhot couchā days I hung out a lot with a bunch of perpetually stoned golf dudes who loved nothing more than COD, Entourage, and searching āpeople falling downā on you tube. One of them was incredulous that I hadnāt seen The Hangover yet, so he got me ridiculously high and then put it on. I have to admit it was very effective. The first one at least has this slightly ominous but sincere vibe that makes it land somewhere between that other Vegas black comedy Very Bad Things, Farelly Bros. comedies and like Judd Apatow bromance, which I believe (?) it predates. Kind of underrated movie imo
3 Likes
There was a bar around here that just closed recently that was called The Hangover 2. It opened around the same time as the movie.
7 Likes
YOOOO you really DONāT know spermjack
until you see high life!!
I just realized the fetus injected girl wasnāt leaking milk she was covered in fuck machine fluids. that makes way more sense it was just too much milk and it bothered me
2 Likes
idk if a film has ever been simultaneously more horny and less erotic
5 Likes
gotta support sex negative cinema
4 Likes
One of the big reasons I have been neglecting schoolwork lately is that Iām now watching a movie every day. Some days it feels like itās all Iām thinking about, that Iām just sleepwalking through the day until I can watch another movie. Itās not healthy!
I would write more about the movies I watch but I sometimes skim through boring letterboxd reviews, and I get worried that I would be recreating the same thing.
On the positive side, Iām getting a lot of exposure to movements and movies Iāve never seen before. The 70ās were a great time for film.
8 Likes