Went to see Poor Things at the cinema today. Movie is pretty good but the music playing in the foyer was so loud that Girls Just Wanna Have Fun was basically playing over the entire opening
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On the modern zero budget SOV front, I finally got to check out A Corpse for Christmas last night. A down on her luck woman bounces from one scumbag musician boyfriend to another who turns out to be a necrophiliac serial killer. Aside from everything being pretty heightened, the story about awful dudes lurking around the local music scene is eternally relatable. There’s also a wild sequence where two victims to be just start rapping at the camera.
The whole thing has that great diy movie feel where they packed in as many of their friends’ bands as possible. Everything is shot in the filmmakers actual homes so everyone has piles of video tapes and movie posters on their wall. I think it was shot in Philadelphia, and a scene takes place at this bonkers Christmas attraction where there’s animatronic off model Ninja Turtles working in a pizzeria.
It looked like they were using some analog video glitch gear to disguise some jump cuts or moments where the effects might have needed a bit of extra haze. To do that they must be digitizing the tapes, getting everything lined up in their editor, exporting it to a DVD or something to add the hardware effect, then capturing that output and blending it back into the original timeline. So much extra work to maintain the low tech aesthetic!! I love it.
In the special features, there’s a clip where the director hops down a hole in a ice fishing shack that they were unsuccessfully trying to drop a brick through to break the ice below, and I thought for sure he was about to die.
I didn’t know going in but one of my out of town friends had a small role (as Santa) at the end, and I was in a movie a couple years back with the local guy credited for supplying a prop vulva.
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seems kind of like an appropriate soundtrack tho
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my favorite part of this is “Hostile” instead of Hostel
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haha i thought he was talking about this mildly deep cut
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Feels like the last 40 min of Death Wish 3 is a Charles Bronson and a cop moving through the streets and shooting any punk wearing denim and chains emerging from an alley or scrambling out from under a truck like they’re role playing they’re Time Crisis cops
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Whoever edits this into a video with Virtua Cop UI will win my heart
that amazon jigen daisuke movie which i guess is technically a spinoff of the 2014 lupin movie is extremely weird because it’s bad in the same ways that lupin part 5 and 6 can be bad but that is kind of novel to see done in live action
the plot is that the blood of very sad and traumatized children can be made into a drug that makes you young forever and the boss of this crime district who is a lady in a wheelchair is planning to sell it to the elites to become even more powerful
her henchmen is this guy who has instead of the lupin style scooby doo mask, a hologram machine to change his face and voice and they try to act like this old dude is fucking shadow the hedgehog zooming around the screen but in practice it looks like jigen cannot shoot a dude at a brisk jog who is kind of blurry
the movie is all over the place, it’s maudlin, it’s sitcomy, it’s incredibly dark with scene of bloody domestic violence and child torture/murder, it looks like a youtube video, it looks like it was shot on 35mm film, the acting is the worst shit you’ve ever seen and incredibly naturalistic and affecting, just a weird movie
the action actually is what you want from a live action lupin which is incredibly stupid and cool it’s john wick with the looney tunes meter turned up 50%. there’s a lot of action towards the end but most of the movie is kind of a slow paced slice of life stuff with the citizens of the crime city and jigen watching over the miracle blood child who has enough ptsd to produce the anti aging hormones in a sort of (not really) leon the professional riff
this movie is zero percent horny (for women) which is pretty unique among lupin products i suppose
it does accurately portray him eating and smoking an being in love with his gun in the same way as the cartoon jigen and the character is basically accuraate so i appreciate that
you can probbaly just watch the incredibly good wheelchair fight scene and skip it though
https://twitter.com/TimesSqKungFu/status/1714478554371543373
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was not expecting to see an adrenachrome reference in a Lupin-related work
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i watched two films this weekend, one at home, and one in theaters.
at home: Gran Turismo
i forgot this was by the Chappie guy, but watching the film, i don’t think one would be able to tell, really. that said, we thought it was pretty good for what it was. it has a 90s sort of feel to it, even down to the flesh racers vs sim racers aspect, although our biggest complaint was the portrayal of racing. i mean i know the FIA has gotten a lot more strict in recent years than they used to be, but i find it hard to believe that just over 10 years ago they were allowing racers to physically ram into each other’s cars without any penalty. i guess maybe the thinking is that audiences who don’t watch racing wouldn’t be able to tell what is compelling wheel-to-wheel action unless it looks like Mad Max, but this really took me out of the film, as it just read as bullshit to me.
other than that, though, i think it’s the best-case scenario for a film tangentially about a game. the PS5 and Grant Turismo 7 sound effects throughout the movie are hilarious.
it also, bizarrely, is the first time i came to realize that the Team Prinicipal of F1’s Red Bull Racing’s wife is Ginger Spice. i mean i guess she has not really been on my radar for a long time, but i somehow never made that connection before seeing her acting in this movie.
however, reading her wikipedia led me to this quote: “I saw a lot of what Mrs. Thatcher did. She was definitely the original Spice Girl…”
and while this isn’t a surprise, i suppose, i wish i hadn’t read it
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in theaters: Migration
we like ducks; they’re cute and they know how to have a good time. so, it stands to reason we might enjoy a cartoon movie about ducks flying south for the winter, and so we more or less did. there is nothing groundbreaking about the movie or the plot, although the rendering of the trees as they fly over Jamaica (oops, spoilers uh, i guess) was really impressive. all of the actors basically play their usual selves, although Keegan-Michael Key gets to speak in a fake patois throughout the movie, since he, of course, a parrot.
the film is mostly fun to watch and has some familiar and expected beats, and it made me chuckle a few times. i got what i wanted out of it, which was to watch ducks do things. and they do, indeed, do some things.
the only other Illumination film i’ve seen is Super Mario Bros., so i get the sense that their main goal is to make competent, albeit tried and true and predictable, kids entertainment. honestly, i’m fine with it. not everything needs to be profound, and it’s even ok if things are kind of dumb, sometimes.
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yep, this is despicable me. it’s good slapstick! decent jokes! that’s about it
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the movie opened with a Despicable Me-related short. i appreciated the sentiment of continuing to have a short before a kids movie.
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saw poor things but it was more like poor things saw me. movies need to stop pinning me to the fucking wall and screaming THIS IS YOUR LIFE at me. its gotta stop. things are easier when you think you suffer uniquely
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any recommendations for like more movies with this vibe lol
have you seen To Live and Die in LA yet? I feel like you must have but if not definitely check it out
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yesss i love it… rip billy friedkin. might be a good time for a rewatch tho
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At first I was finding it hard to identify any consistent “vibe” here, but then I just realized it’s dad movies, and I am extremely qualified to identify this genre.
I mean you’re an action liker so I’ve got to assume you’ve watched a lot of the meat & potatoes basics already, but then you include like Aliens and Predator in the list so I dunno. Being as inclusive as possible and shooting totally from the hip (and leaving out Carpenter and Mann which I know you must have seen),
Die Hard, Commando, Terminator 2, Total Recall, Way of the Gun, Sicario, Dollars trilogy, Last Man Standing, Fifth Element, Pitch Black, Hell or High Water, A History of Violence + Eastern Promises, Ghost Dog, Leon / The Professional, Four Brothers…
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excluding things i know you know already has left me wondering how much time you’ve spent with walter hill and peckinpah (not that they’ve ever reached the heights of gamer (2009))
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watch extreme prejudice
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haven’t seen God of Gamblers (2?) in forever but it think it fits
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