Was really relieved that Anatomy of a Fall didn’t devolve into a sensational story. In fact it is actually about fighting against a taste for sensational stories in a fun and interesting way. Not dry at all! Really good.
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The Insider. What a movie.
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I agree, a whirlwind, the king of directors at the height of his powers paired with his old friend / Hollywood’s greatest living actor, turned loose,
चल छैय्याँ छैय्याँ छैय्याँ छैय्याँ
चल छैय्याँ छैय्याँ छैय्याँ छैय्याँ
छैय्याँ छैय्याँ छैय्याँ छैय…oh? we’re not talking about Inside Man (2006)? oh i see well i’ll just see myself out over here then thank you
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i watched it a couple months ago but i was thinking about Wake in Fright just then. love how this man flirts with, is brought low by, struggles against violently and eventually grimly accepts Australian settler masculinity. ever-thankful i learned about trans dykes from sb before that happened to me
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i watched the raid 2 berendal the other day and really liked it… i probably havent seen it in 10 years. i liked that there was more shot on location stuff and a wider variety of sets (also i liked that they kind of looked like videogame environments)
also really like that rama and uco get a weirdly romantic vaguely gay feeling moment at the end of the mud fight
i definitely prefer it to the first one in a lot of ways i like the maybe overly twisty script and how they give yahya ruhian’s character his own entire plotline. also i think it was a much larger production than the first movie which i think gave them the opportunity to shoot more filmmaker-type ideas such as axial cutting on the impact of a guy getting beaten to death, a lot of them feel like these sort of obvious vulgar dumb guy gestures (not entirely different from something zack snyder might do idk) but i vibe with that sort of stuff sometimes lol…
the way the huge car chase combines actual stunt driving with greenscreened interiors of the cars feels like the kind of low-budget filmmaking i can really admire sometimes and also like something that has been imitated in at least a few action movies since but almost certainly not done better!!
some of the violence is a little more cartoonlike and over the top i think like the guy getting shot in the face like 8 times feels sort of in the sam raimi spirit very funny tbh
i also just generally liked that the characters were more fleshed out… also my appreciation for movies such as eastern promises and casino has only increased and this really takes after some of those ykwim. also the ending is weirdly beautiful 10 years later in the context of there never being a sequel…
a great fight scene ive been thinking about recently: donnie yen and colin chou at the end of flash point (im sure its on youtube). also i think the raid 2 has a lot in common with spl2 (starring tony jaa and wu jing in what are probably the best dramatic roles either of them have had) which is another martial arts film im quite fond of
stuntmen-actors 
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Yeah this one goes crazy ! Redeems the entire mostly boring movie that precedes it, its like the dumb jock version of a Johnnie To movie, not that there’s anything wrong with that I guess it’s Donnie Yen’s whole vibe
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Watched The Color out of Space. I guess it was supposed to be a cringe and meaningless B movie but what it ended up evoking was feelings of utter powerlessness as all possible human meaning disintegrates, which were familiar to me as a victim of protracted abuse. Trying to work up the nerve to shower now.
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the beekeeper is a really good piece of shit
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I have recently been coincidentally catching Disney movies on TV as we leave the channel running to entertain the baby with pretty colors and movement. I guess fatherhood has left me sentimental and vulnerable because I am getting choked up by all these stupid movies, namely Coco (pretty sad concepts about the afterlife), Brave (vicarious experience of conflict with overbearing Mom), and Onward (accidentally hyper specific plot point which maps to my lived experience).
The latter especially basically fucked me up for an evening. God help me what a mess I’ve become
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rewatched the night comes for us
i would watch a whole movie about white boy bobby aka bobby bule aka bobby
(pictured above: the night comes for us stars zack lee and hannah al rashid)
im often criticizing the way a lot of current action movies use mostly bad-looking digital blood and gore effects so this is a great example of one that’s mostly in-camera, a lot of the kills feel like they could be in a [i was going to say rob zombie but i know that makes people mad so just insert your choice of Horror Guy who made movies with in-camera gore effects here] movie (or story of ricky 1991) also u know its not often you see a movie that simultaneously even has hardcore analog horror-slasher gore scenes AND martial artist-stuntmen-actors fighting and falling for the camera to begin with, so that’s pretty novel (another example that i thought was good and tapped into something similar was avengement with scott adkins)
i probably dont vibe with the action direction as much as that of the raid 2 (mostly i think i have seen enough low-budget martial arts movies with fight scenes shot with short lenses on handheld cameras bc as much as i think that can be excellent sometimes i was quite fond of a lot of the shot compositions and framings and such in the raid 2 (on the other hand its like yeah ok sorry the camerawork in all the hyperviolent indonesian martial arts films coming out all the time (sarcasm) isnt completely to your liking lol)) but there are a lot of shots / kills / stunts that are completely awesome obviously
also i love the use of like action / martial arts cinema iconography, if the raid 2 made julie estelle a breakout star in the role of hammer girl this is huge for white boy bobby and the lesbian assassins i think. they dont get a lot of character development via dialogue or whatever but are characterized thru certain physical gestures and fit into certain martial arts / action cinema cliches (tho i personally would more readily call them archetypical or iconic perhaps)
(a great example would be the character of fatih lighting up a cigarette before his epic death scene)
this is how a lot of genre movies function of course but sometimes one comes by where it feels like the director is themselves sort of a genre fanboy who really admires those cliches (as i often do)
there’s also a nice kenji kawai / john carpenter -style score, a lot of scenes shot on-location and b-roll footage, i like that the sets are colorful too, they got some rgb lights in there lol
ive been more interested in how martial arts films are paced and structured, this one feels like it’s split into 2 halves, where each half is a buildup (establishing personal / emotional / financial / political etc. motives for the various people about to murder each other to death really hard) to a series of intense action scenes crosscut between each other (the first half involves joe taslim fighting cops and gangsters while the white boy bobby gang fights off another gang, and the second half involves joe taslim killing a bunch of gangsters while julie estelle and the lesbian assassins fight)
ALSO besides bahasa indonesia you hear characters speak mandarin, english, and a little bit of french. so you have to admire what a multi-talented cast they got here
i havent had a Martial Arts Cinema Phase in a while but i think it might be that time…
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Once you have kids any story with Sad Parent shit instantly hits. Don’t be ashamed, it’s not you, it’s a cheat code.
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Grave of the Fireflies destroyed me for similar reasons when i saw it
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yeah coco hit me hard as well. the lullaby makes me sad any time i hear it. also was a very simple movie about generational trauma, which always fucks me up. i think its the best out of all the disney/pixar movies weve watched in the past year (though for best movie in general i think its spirited away). but, uh, admittedly, im not a huge disney fan lol
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i saw about half of Wonka, which i think is about all anyone needs to see of Wonka
the music’s better than that shitty tim burton johnny depp slop from 2005, at least, but that’s a low fucking bar
everything else is perfectly forgettable / ignorable
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it’s a shame to see paul king succumb to forgettable slop production, lived long enough to see himself become the villain
god that movie occupies like 0.5% of my permanent ongoing thoughts
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I’d meant to see Godzilla Minus One in the theater but I never got around to it until I was too late.
And then I suddenly learned that it had returned to the theater for one more week, and that today was the last day in said week.
So I saw it tonight, and I’m very glad I did. It’s definitely something to see in the theater. The gimmick for bringing it back to the theater is that it’s a black and white version. Not having seen the color version I can’t say whether that’s an improvement but it looked great in black and white.
Like the 1990s Gamera movies or War in the Pocket, it focused on normal people. Which was the right move, as typically the talking parts involving the military or bureaucrats are major weaknesses in these films. I can even overlook one aspect of the ending that cheapened the story, I think.
Easily my favorite of the Godzilla movies I’ve seen (which admittedly is only 5 or 6 of them).
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I almost resent The Plague Dogs manipulating me into a sobbing emotional wreck by the end (RIP Tod you were a real one) but no it’s a beautifully horrific statement on human cruelty (period. but in this case towards animals) visually (among many other more significant instances - they didn’t have to make the chain-link rain droplets that exquisite in an interstitial scene but they did (and the strange swirling camera movements how!?)) and musically (soggy synths, lusty jazz sax, avant-anxiety swells) I am still emotionally raw from it…and another exhibition of English cruelty with its trailing class dynamics etc…dang…and then we watched All Dogs Go to Heaven that movie sucks!
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More Sidaris garbage. The trailer makes it look more exciting than it actually is. It’s mostly boring as it becomes soft core nineties cinemax filth.
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Asiapol Secret Service
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