rewatched Karnan, it’s better the second time ‘Karnan’ review by nat_stylo • Letterboxd
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When I was sick a couple weeks ago I watched 3 movies I’d been looking to get caught up on… and for me 3 movies is usually what I manage a year. I’m at 5 so far.
Anyway.
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Mortal Kombat (2021): Fun action movie, suitably gory, funny enough. Props for not trying to shoehorn in every fucking character from that setting. Would’ve been perfect with some popcorn and someone to watch it with and laugh along.
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Transformers: Bumblebee: Ended up liking it a lot. Definitely likes pulling on heartstrings. Fight scenes were… pretty okay, honestly. Did seem to get that the bots are “people,” so that was a nice touch.
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Transformers: Rise of the Beasts: Really stretching that ensemble cast a bit much. Had some fun moments, but I feel like the final battle was about 10 minutes too long, tbh. The stinger with a ||teased G.I. Joe crossover|| at the end was done well enough, I guess. Overall movie just drives home how much I feel like these properties that have extremely large casts are just kinda destined to waste them (along with my time) if they’re trying to pack them all into a sinle movie experience.
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In 2001 Bill Paxton directed and starred in a Hunter: The Reckoning movie for some reason. Just the concept of him reading a White Wolf book is really funny to me. it’s called Frailty but it literally has the same premise as the tabletop game. Bill Paxton would probably be closest to a Judge. He wakes up one day on that old testament shit and tells his kids that an angel visited him because the end times are beginning and they have a sacred duty to destroy demons as part of the final battle. The whole time you have no fucking idea if this is bullshit or not
it’s fucking amazing because its basically a feature length episode of Millennium, contains deranged levels of child traumatization and looks like this
I read that bill paxton always wanted to direct but became an actor as basically a last resort to stay in the business and it really shows…the movie goes hard as fuck beause his commitment is strong. its free on youtube so check it out
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still thinking about this absolutely stunning sequence, Santosh Narayanan music omg.
"don’t give up, dad
don’t give up, mom
the khaki-shirt beast is coming
ask him where our wings went"
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How long has it been since I was in a theater? There’s this friend I used to see a lot of movies with and it was just his birthday and his wife bought us movie tickets to see Gran Turismo. I got a text out of nowhere saying “you’re seeing Gran Turismo with my husband.” So I drive 40 minutes to a particularly inconvenient theater (no idea why she picked a particularly inconvenient theater) to watch Gran Turismo. I’m pretty sure Gran Turismo was written by ChatGPT and edited by someone who doesn’t much like looking at cars. I hesitate to say the editing was bad because I always knew what was happening, what they were trying to get across, etc. It was just flaccid? Seventeen cuts that are mostly tight closeups of driverface to see a supercar pass another supercar or just round a turn, bleeding out the energy.
Of course it was a commercial for Sony, for Playstation, for Nissan, but we knew this going in. Gran Turismo.
Was surprised to see Neill Blomkamp’s name on the credits. I don’t know if he meant to produce a piece of slick, generic product totally devoid of any of his directorial trademarks, but if so good job.
He lifts a needle drop from HEAT for the end. That was kind of funny?
In conclusion Gran Turismo.
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Maaveeran review: way more fun than it has any right to be. honestly felt like this was kind of a middling script but a film that feels like each cast member cared a lot about the story being told, and executes really excellently at the end of the day
Probably the best comparison points are Kung Fu Hustle in narrative, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies in sensibility. They way that the “hero” dovetails with the community, and the working class resistance.
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as moffatpilled as it is, star trek into darkness isn’t remotely as enervating as rise of skywalker ten years later
spock hotness inflation is real. by 2033 spock will be like a flawless kpop twink and smirk instead of scowl
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I watched The Batman
It was OK
I am amazed I managed to go this long without really knowing what it was about other than The Riddler terrorizes the good people of Gotham
Coincidentally caught a few minutes of the Keaton one on TV the other day, I had totally forgotten that one has a police corruption/lower level crime guy rises to the top subplot too. They all do this ! They cannot stop just remaking the same movie over and over again
Anyway I thought it was funny how Bruce acts like an angsty little twerp to Alfred. Like he literally says “you’re not my real dad!!!” They should have put more of that kinda stuff in the movie
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What’s this from?
Ah ha, good movie.
SOORARAI POTTRU (2 stars) – trash movie, capitalist propaganda honestly, they try to draw you in with touching relationship portraits and then by the end it’s Air Force bootlicking and shouting Jai Hind and woke capitalism and then you find out the guy the main character is based on isn’t even lower caste irl he’s Brahmin and also he sold his airline to the main villain after like 5 years and it got completely erased
The film was inspired by events from the life of G. R. Gopinath, founder of Indian low-cost airline Simplifly Deccan, as described in his memoir Simply Fly: A Deccan Odyssey .
yeah anyway it’s wack, not even 100% trash but I got negatively polarized even more after reading some gushing reviews. Please Be Marxist
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Got really high and watched Akira. I have no idea what was going on but there sure was a lot of debris flying around. TBH kinda got sick of looking at debris fly around. But on the whole, very excellent and weird.
Amazed that I did not know the Akira Slide shot was immediately followed by a clown. Honk honk.
I also had no idea this movie had weird zombie kids in it.
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Those are the kids who say “Akira, Akira” before he goes “Aggggggh”
Y’know
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cuz of that tiktok meme every time i have a cringey memory of something i did (often) the ‘LEAVE ME ALONE’ clip plays in my head
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VIKRAM VEDHA (2017) - three stars
feels like a 90s American action thriller, basically a cat and mouse between a killer cop and the gangster who his squad is committed to executing. Basically it’s based on the Vikram Betaal stories, the cop Vikram (played by an appropriately violent Madhavan) is in place of king Vikram as the guy who has to hunt down the demon/gangster Vedha (Vijay Sethupathi does great as the ‘zaddy’ ambiguously gay coded villain) who tries to distract him by telling him a series of stories and then demanding he answer a riddle. In this movie, the stories Vedha tells are essentially vignettes from Vedha’s own life and his rise from small time gang underling to running the city with his own crew. And the question at the end of each vignette: what should Vedha have done differently? there’s sort of a meta story that evolves too: what is this police investigation really about?
The philosophy of the whole thing is pleasingly shallow: cops are gangsters, gangsters also have honor, you and I we’re not so different, etc. The craft of the sequences is quite nice. It reminded me a little of Run Lola Run: you have this thriller with a non linear narrative (since we have so many flashbacks) and Vikram has to use the clues and hints Vedha drops to piece together his investigation, and ultimately, his role in all this. Is it searingly critical of extrajudicial police executions? Not really but I don’t mind that here - it’s taken for granted that this is a fallen world, the good guys act evil etc, we don’t need to harp on it. Rather it’s more interested in telling its story stylishly and making everyone wanna fuck Vijay Sethupathi. which is all good. it’s extremely watchable and uses its runtime very well. really good fight choreography. by the end they really lean into camp which I think is for the best rather than best us over the head with Themes.
I saw this got on some IMDB top rated list which means a lot of white people in Letterboxd watched it and started leaving shallow and blithely racist reviews like “India can’t direct action films”, “Bollywood just isn’t for me” (wrong film industry, chump), “typical lack of subtlety” “odd muscial numbers” etc. People just can’t seem to appreciate an enjoyably mid thriller anymore.
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i need to watch thisss i love a mid thriller
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Welcome to the Human Race
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there are parts of the manga that are just like 4 straight pages of debris it rules
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the first half is mostly cop centric but it gets better
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