i cant find the tv thread so i guess ill post about it here it’s ok it has the a24 logo
but yes i am loving the curse, this feels like the twin peaks red room version of nathan fielder
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it’s TV Afterparty btws
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The Charlie Day movie Fool’s Paradise is a Being There style movie about Hollywood making a guy who doesn’t talk and perhaps does not even really understand English into a movie star via pure momentum and the problem is that it is a really good 30 minute short film that unfortunately is trapped in a 99 minute movie. Because the Charlie Day character is sort of semi-sentient in practice, all of the emotional weight of the movie hangs on fucking Ken Jeong doing his usual schtick as what is basically the true lead of the movie and it really doesn’t work.
It occasionally gets very close to the appeal of Southland Tales for me, there’s an unhinged John Malkovich monologue about how being in the illuminati is really about spritually jizzing non stop and Common plays a bizarre homeless version of Wesley Snipes who used to star in a series of action films called “Dagger” and if Day was not such an anonymous visual stylist or the weirdness was turned up across the board it might work better.
That said it is an incredibly fascinating vanity project and it does delight me that it exists even if it is miserable to watch sometimes.
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Real Steel (2011)
Over The Top: This time with robots. Hugh Jackman plays a deadbeat dad who fights with robots. He’s an incredible dumbass. The first fight is against a bull and his robot loses. Then he spends money he doesn’t have to get another one, which he promptly loses. Nowhere in the film is the ethics of making robots fight each other to the death brought up, it’s actually a little gruesome because they lose limbs and leak “blood” everywhere.
This is like the perfect movie for a 10 year old boy, kind of a lot of robots smashing into each other and the protagonist “child” being smarter than the “adults”, plus a little bit of swearing. The robot VFX are really good, this film got an oscar nomination for them.
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Tár
well well well, how do you unpack that movie?
easy
tar -xf lydia.tar
didn’t think watching Cate Blanchett bully a schoolkid would make me go ‘yeah OK, that Oscar is well deserved’ and despise her alter ego Lydia so viciously.
Movie’s wild, and the ending nets the movie another 0.5 
s.
Makes it 4.0 out of five then, just — wow.
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Watched In the Shadow of the Moon, one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time.
spoilery rant
It’s a time travel movie with the grand idea that maybe if you kill people in the alt right before they start a movement then you’ll prevent a civil war, but places the blame firmly on normal people writing bad newsletters rather than politicians stoking flames for self gain. It’s fucking insultingly childish and neoliberal bullshit. I hated it.
It also offhandedly throws away a BLM-like movement (which in the movie is an annual protest about a single black woman being murdered by a cop that’s been going on for 9 years) with the line “Some people are only happy when they’re mad. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
The incident is shown in the movie of course. The main character gets beaten by her and handcuffed to a bench. Instead of letting her go or doing anything else, he uses the device she’s been using to murder people to stab her in the ankle. Notably he knows that this is “some sort of isotope” that nobody can identify and will definitely kill her was she not also hit by a train moments later.
So yeah, a cop killed an unarmed black woman using a mysterious murder device that he knew would murder her. She was dead before the train hit her. And I’m supposed to feel bad for this guy, or like him at all? They really show the gore too - she’s in pieces in the coroner’s office. It’s gross. Why would they do that if I’m supposed to like the dude?
Besides the politics, it’s also one of the worst time travel plots I’ve ever seen. Turns out that’s his granddaugher, for some reason, I guess, and he meets her every 9 years. She’s going backward through time so it’s like that Doctor Who thing except shit. The granddaughter thing is completely unearned, and it’s supposed to be this redemptive moment for a guy who’s been so obsessed with this woman for 27 years that he’s destroyed his entire life.
I just love when movies have like, 4 important people driving the entire plot for literally decades. No wait I actually hate it.
Anyway, i hated it. Also the moon was way too big in every shot it was in. Zero stars. Minus one stars. Do not recommend.
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I saw Tsui Hark’s Green Snake and that movie is simultaneously perfect and regrettably badly constructed, haha. It is gorgeous and full of incredible slapstick gags and contains An Amazing Romcom, and it is edited like a dream. But there are some mega dumb fight scenes near the end which feel like he was reaching far beyond his budget and shoulda known better. I would have preferred the movie to end about two thirds of the way through, when the romcom concludes… I want these snake ladies to be happy!! They deserve it!!!
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watched “Sniper: Rogue Mission” with my friend so we can be free of this series soon. in the process of foiling EVIL HUMAN TRAFFICKERS who stab and shoot and execute camgirls, our heroes excitedly crowd around a monitor to gawk and high five an offensive stereotype of an autistic guy named “Intelligence Pete” for showing them a snuff image of a dead woman in a bath tub where you can see up her pussy. Earlier in the movie one of these characters was almost visibly in tears because he saw 9 dead women in sexy spirit halloween costumes. I don’t think I like movies anymore.
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This and the one that apparently came out this year are the only ones in the series without their own Wikipedia page, I think you should make one for it that is just this post word for word
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I’m watching the one that came out this year and their new mission is to take down the founder of a cult called the STATE OF ARAGON which has I guess occupied Malta, and he has like 6 far cry lieutenants with their own aesthetics, and he himself is a mix between Karl Marx and Charles Manson. The only dialogue so far has been a marvelpilled nightmare where chad michael collins (who is also a reactionary operator man in the new Modern Warfare games, lol) and the other guy bicker about him being friends and hanging out with the other guy’s ex-wife and her dopey new husband. Sayaka Akimoto has been recast by a lady who looks nothing like her. It’s the same director as the last movie, and he’s still doing the Wes Anderson knockoff shit.
All hope is lost…please remember me, because after this I will be dead and gone…
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check out the cast on the director’s debut also WOW I WONDER WHAT MOVIES THIS GUY HAS SEEN
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Saw six string samurai for the first time in my life. I feel like I understand No More Heroes much more now.
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Can’t have shit in the fucking Sniper franchise. Lady Death, the japanese ninja assassin because of course, is probably the only thing close to a high point the last movie had and here we get to see her character assassinated at the hands of the woman hating director. Sure, I guess it’s interesting that it is basically her story instead of beckett’s son, who continues to be a perpetually boring character, but they infantilize her so much…and considering the source it seems like an attempt to eroticize the fascist violence these movie have been peddling for so long. He recast her with a more conventionally attractive actress with extensive gun and martial arts training because the assassin girl is an object of desire, and because it is her story it is more important that she be perfect than it ever has been before. She’s the only one who gets into any real physical fights, gets the shit beat out of her by lots of guys, has to seduce the evil karl marx/charles manson gross cult leader, and then has stuff cut out of her in the most painful way possible, plus all this personal trauma. It’s all literally shit the male leads do not deal with at all, they just drift in and out of this movie purely so the ryona fantasy can play out as it needs to. Depressing cinema.
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Watched Haunting Soul From the Dark Building, a 1989 horror movie from the PRC which is all about a bunch of really normie horror tropes but manages to have a unique take on them anyway.
It goes back and forth between being a cartoon soundboard ghost-cackle goofy ass movie… and a movie with a bunch of genuinely fun shots and weird ideas. The most fun thing about it IMO is that it is actually just a detective mystery. The first couple minutes are a Columbo-style setup where we see an evil man, with his face obscured, perform a horrific crime; we see him remove the evidence and arrange the scene so that in all likelihood he will never be caught by the justice system. Gradually over the next half-hour, our heroes–a young actress and a sound engineer working on her film–meet three separate older men who could have been the murderer. They accidentally release the ghost, which begins revenging herself on these three men. They race against the ghost to figure out who killed her… and figure out what to do about that.
The most interesting scene in the movie has the sound engineer go down into the basement with his long-barrel mic to record the ghost and demand evidence so that they can solve her murder. He tells the ghost something like: “Hey!!! Stop killing guys!!! I believe in the law and we need to take these guys to jail! help us find the proof they did this crime and we’ll take care of it! thank you and please behave!!!”
Almost immediately afterward, the ghost gets so mad that everyone is in extreme danger and eventually they decide that thwarting her ghostly revenge with this gesture to the criminal justice system was A Bad Call. Justice is impossible, so the true morally correct move here is to let the ghost do what she wants! If the movie was produced under a different censorship situation I think they could have done more with this perspective, haha.
Re: censorship… the last 15 seconds of the movie are clearly a censorship dodge. After the movie effectively ends, it suddenly cuts to showing the entire cast sitting in a mental hospital in pajamas. and then the leading lady walks in dressed as a nurse and shouts “time for your medication!!!” and the ending credits play instantly. At first we were like “this is so fucking bad and strange lmao” but then we found some stuff online about how this was probably there to get around prohibitions against certain treatments of spooky shit and spirituality etc.
Was not a great movie but it was super interesting and I was glad to see it!
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The Fourth Kind (2009) - kind of sucked!! not really found footage except for a weird gimmick where it will show the staged “original footage” that the movie events are supposedly based on in a splitscreen with “reenactment footage” starring milla jovovich and elias koteas from crash… it keeps doing this whenever anything interesting is happening and it’s endearing how much the filmmakers like the effect despite it never really working… it has fun with the weird freudian terror of alien abductions and their language of like buried memories and repression (aliens are parsed in memory as “owls” which was a cool touch) but overall was sort of too self serious and too dumb simultaneously for me to get much of a kick out of it. does the cardinal sins of ufo movies which are (1) dorky ancient-alien and god-as-ufo history channel lore and (2) you dont see any little alien guys, like i think for this kind of film you need the integrity to at least show a guy in a rubber mask… i know its artier not to but for a whole subculture based around the appeal of charged glimpses and finally getting to see something that feels mysterious and forbidden to duck the subject entirely is imo an unforgiveable omission
The Last Broadcast (1998) - jersey devil themed found footage thing that due to the time period feels more like someones media studies final project than a “horror film”, lotsa voiceover speculation on media self-cannibalism and the unknowability of truth and similar 1998 things, but felt kind of refreshing and fun as a result… lotsa stuff that would become de rigeur decades later but are a bit more offbeat here, like the guys livestreaming themselves going into the woods are doing it for an obscure local occult-themed public access show, and they communicate with the audience through IRC… also if not managing the Slacker level of having a real Butthole Surfers member in there the main four guys definitely seem like they could be which is also a plus.
Willow Creek (2013) - directed by bobcat goldthwait of all people. it does have a good slow build… i think the appeal of all the found footage stuff to me is that it both always feels at risk of just dissolving into a heap of raw material, like the more distracting the better, all these go nowhere conversations and weird characters who walk on for just one scene and little incidental details, and then horror stuff buried somewhere in that mix… the early scenes of the characters wandering around berserk bigfoot kitsch and like commenting on weird murals and stuff were very good for this reason, and theres a good drawn out scene later on playing on the, to me inherently terrifying situation of being in a tent at night and then You Hear A Noise. but the ending sort of feels like such a blair witch cover band that it makes you wonder what the point was
The Alien Report (2022) - now THIS is what i want from a found footage alien movie… incredibly liberal application of weird little grey guys peering into the camera all throughout. you see their little ass cheeks as they waddle away, there’s a “hybrid” alien with breasts and hair, there are functionless little cgi spheres and liquid things just sort of floating around in the background… maybe for this reason it’s sort of impossible for me to imagine anyone finding this movie like scary or gripping so idk if i’d say it was particularly “good” ultimately but theres enough sense of gusto about it that it feels p charming and certain scenes that made the whole movie worth it to me with the feeling that the whole thing is going off the rails, like when the protagonist has his little gopro stolen mid monologue by a 40yo skater guy named Polo with an amazing mullet who then tries to get the main guy to do his homework for him (?) or an amazing scene of a hooded heavyset guy rising from a ufo table and very slowly doing the, like, spinning-his-arms-around-to-attack you move at nobody in particular while kind of wandering towards some greys in the foreground, while the voiceover is chanting “getim! getim, frankenstein!”. for this and also for the very lawnmower man ass cgi i can forgive the goofy lore dumps at the very end. my favourite twist: at the end Polo finds the alien footage on the guys phone and calls him to say that he, Polo, can “help him out” re the omnipotent serial torturer aliens. what is he planning to do???. theres a part where the protagonist is talking about how he keeps the psychic aliens out of his mind by mentally replaying 1999 psx game Driver and its set to footage from Driver. also a good freesound dot org shoutout in the credits
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Oh Yeah, even more weeks ago I watch The Great Escape for the first time. Times must’ve been different for an American movie about world war 2 to be weirdly chipper and sporty about people escaping a German POW camp before it got under full Nazi management.
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Been on kind of a dad movie kick (not sure that’s the best term any more but it’s like mainly legal thrillers and sports movies, also a lot of movies that heavily feature alcoholic catholic main characters) and watched Field of Dreams last night.
What I knew about the movie through cultural osmosis:
- A guy hears voices and builds a baseball field in his cornfield
- There’s some dream sequence or fantasy elements where he watches old timey ballplayers play on his field
- He plays catch with his dad at the end.
So basically what I was expecting was like a movie where Costner resists the call but eventually gives in and probably has some conflict with his wife or the locals or something until people are happy there’s a ballpark in the town, and he probably at the end has a dream or maybe the movie plays it as a waking fantasy where he gets to watch all of the greats play.
The movie is totally different and has one of the weirdest internal logics I’ve ever seen:
- Costner immediately buys into the voice he hears, has a vision of Shoeless Joe Jackson playing on his field despite being dead for 30 years, his wife has zero concerns, and he plows half of his crop and blows his family’s life savings on the baseball field like 10 minutes into the movie.
- The ghost of Shoeless Joe shows up right away, and Costner, his wife, and daughter immediately buy in. Zero questions are asked by anyone about how weird this is.
- The entire second act is a road trip with Costner and James Earl Jones, who is playing a thunderous 60’s counterculture author / baseball fanatic who can also hear the voices
- There’s a very sweet subplot with a weird time travel element regarding a guy who got to play one half inning in the majors and then went on to be a beloved small town doctor but always kind of regretted not getting at least one at bat in the big leagues. He died like 15 years before the movie so at one point Costner walks out of his motel room and travels back in time (doesn’t bat an eye) to meet him before he died, and then at a later point runs into the same guy as a young man in the current day who travels with him and James Earl Jones back to Iowa to play baseball. It’s a very cute subplot that I liked a lot.
- There’s a fairly minor financial subplot where the family is out of money and Costners piece of shit brother-in-law keeps trying to force them to sell the land to him. Also the BIL can’t see the baseball players until he throws Costners daughter off the bleachers by accident. Then he can suddenly see the baseball players and is like “oh wow this rules forget about selling the place”
- I was right that the ending of the movie was Costner playing catch with his dad but what I didn’t know is that his dad is dead and it’s a younger ghost version of his dad. Also they constantly use the phrase “have a catch” i.e. “hey dad want to have a catch?” which I’ve never heard before but I like a lot
- The ending of the movie is a line of cars 10 miles long coming to see this weird ghost baseball stadium and the idea is that they will charge people $20/seat to watch it, resolving any financial problems.
In all it’s is a very sweet story about worrying about becoming a parent/becoming older and also the idea of being able to recognize that your parents were once young people with dreams and hopes and their whole life ahead of them too. I was surprised how much I liked it and also what a hit it was considering how bizarre it is!
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Next check out, “Angels in the Outfield”
I think there’s a pretty sizeable population of reactionary boomer guys whose main actual gripe is just that they don’t make weirdly spiritual sports fantasy movies anymore
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In the spiritual baseball vein, I watched Damn Yankees the other day, which is a musical with the rough premise that a baseball fan whose team keeps getting walloped by the Yankees makes a Faustian bargain to become the best ball player of all time and beat the Yankees. It is fine, there are a few notable lines and dances and otherwise it’s an old fashioned movie about baseball from the 1950s. Probably mostly for the Bob Fosse or Gwen Verdon heads, and Sweet Charity’s generally more interesting for both.
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Mommie Dearest was as good as I’ve always heard. I’m glad I waited so long to watch it. Don’t think I would have been ready to appreciate the absurdity and Dunaway’s extremely camp performance just a few years ago. We just happened to double-feature it with Polyester, which turned out to be a surprisingly good pairing for a number of reasons. I didn’t know John Waters made a audio commentary for Mommie Dearest, or expect Joan Crawford to act like someone in one of his movies like 90% of the film.
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