Wait, this goes into the whole Count of St. Germain deal? That’s an amazingly specific thing to toss in there.
1 Like
he’s playing Barabbas apparently, but I wonder if they’re mixing in details about Apollonius of Tyana into his character’s story.
2 Likes
Got a criterion channel sub and caught a 50s noir movie on the leaving soon list. Can’t think of a better example that I’ve seen of that idea that the screenplay or source can be bad but the movie still well directed, but that was really apparent watching The House on Telegraph Hill. It’s a noir film set in post-ww2 san francisco, mostly within a really lavish house on telegraph hill. It’s got a strong gothic ambiance at moments and really decent acting from all its characters. Good editing and decent pace. But the character motivations are so weird.
The protagonist was in a concentration camp in Poland when she befriended a woman with a rich aunt in San Francisco. Had she survived, the lady told the protagonist she would take her there to live with them. But she doesn’t, and the protagonist assumes her identity and comes to pretend to be the mother of the dead woman’s child, marrying a cousin of hers too.
This sound sinister, something almost as fucked up as like the Birds, but the protagonist is so frankly kind and well-meaning… it would be hard to fault her even if her secrets became known. There’s hardly any pressure on her to play the dead woman’s life, no one knew her. But there’s this insisting noir tension through the whole thing. It’s confusing. Additionally, though she has literally just escaped the holocaust, her first moments in America are swoony dinners with a man and wearing lavish clothes she just got at the shopping mall. There’s zero attempt to depict her trauma and she’s basically all forgotten the past, save for the fact she is pretending to be someone she isn’t.
There is a hilarious prat-fall like conclusion to a runaway car scene. And they imply that an aunt was exploded with a nitroglycerin science kit before the events of the film, and there’s just a huge crater in the house where it happened to her.
The director made the sound of music and star trek the motion picture. So it’s well-made and enjoyable, basically. And the ending is pretty fantastic! It just really seems like the plot was kind of bullshit lol
9 Likes
I blame video games and the discourse on satire due to Helldivers but I sat down and watched the other 2 live action Starship Troopers in the span of the past few months.
Movie 2 was helmed by Phil Tippett who did effects for the first one and many other films and also made Mad God a film that’s been on my to watch list for a while. The whole movie is a fairly acceptable syfy channel film were most things feel borderline passable. It’s a little confused on if its playing it straight or subverting the facist ideals the first film built off of. The gruff McHero dude is laying down some lines pointing out the waste of war and how expendable he is but is still ultimately the hero for acting in the Federations best interest. The movie ends with a bit were the final girl makes it back to earth and is watching a hype trailer of an in universe propaganda movie of what we just saw and is then horrified when a recruiter says her baby in a stroller will make an excellent infantry fodder despite looking proud that she has the hero’s child. Definetly a step down but not complete garbage. Confused messaging but some nice effects shots like a guy ripping another guys head from the mouth up and unleashing hundreds of little bugs.
Movie 3 is an uncontestable dud. They got Van Dien back and hams it up appropriately but most I remember of the movie was a lot of trench sequences where the camera is fighting to not look up and show the studio lighting. Actually, the in universe news feed/pop up interstitials are of note. They have more satirical bite to them than the rest of the movie and do more world building than the rest of the movie. The other half of the movie is watching a group of people run in a dessert until the low quality CG Power Armor suits land and shoot at bugs as if they were playing a turret section of a video game.
And because I’m insatiable I started reading the actual Starship Troopers book so I can finally know first hand how much piss Verhoeven was taking out of it with his film even knowing he gave up on it and had an assistant summarize it for him. I can understand as the first chapter is just a fairly neutral prose description of carrying out a terrorist attack as if it was power fantasy but our POV character is emotionally stunted to feel anyway about it.
1 Like
monkey man fucks extremely
4 Likes
is it worth watching? i was interested until i saw some tweet about how they color-edited it so it doesn’t seem critical of the current Indian government, anymore, and that uh…turned me off. probably a petty thing, but stuff like that always feels ick to me.
rewatched straub-huillet’s chronicle of anna magdalena bach and first-watched mani kaul’s duvidha and kiyoshi kurosawa’s retribution
5 Likes
I just got back from a screening of The People’s Joker and I really liked it! Deeply personal passion project with fun use of surreal lo-fi 3D and 2D animation and a wicked sense of humor. I don’t know enough about Batman to get all the references/détournements, but the ones I did get were deployed in extremely clever and sophisticated ways. I’m glad it’s getting a small theatrical run and I hope it can be distributed further without Warner Brothers dropping the hammer on it.
1 Like
Here’s my review of DunC Part 2:
“In August 2023, Villeneuve said the third film would serve as the conclusion of a trilogy.”
3 Likes
Damn…
1 Like
yeah it’s like what if you took a movie that’s all about hitler but you made the nazi flag green instead of red. it’s pretty obviously still about what it’s about lol
yeah it’s extremely good in a way that doesn’t even seem worth the trouble of dissecting, like uh, it’s not a normal type of movie you get in a normal year, it’s a real blood sweat and tears movie that comes maybe once every 20 years
4 Likes
you’re right, how dare i ask if a film that compromised a minor thing made any other compromises to its vision
I think you’re misreading the tone here, I thought stylo was answering your question in earnest, because you asked a totally fair question
4 Likes
i found the first line of the response pretty hard to parse, but i am always open to being wrong and misinterpreting a dangling lol
and after the week i had of dealing with a difficult person at work i’m also open to the idea i’m reading condescension where there is none
1 Like
It’s just that the movie is, from everything I’ve read, literally about the evils of far-right fascists that only stops being overtly about the BJP because they changed the colors of flags from saffron to red, literally what stylo meant when she said its like a movie about hitler but all the flags are green.
3 Likes
yeah i have read nothing about it, actually. like the first hint i had that it was “about something” was literally from a tweet saying the movie had been shelved for years and then they made some edits, so my question was really “what else did they change,” and figured it made sense to ask here rather than reading a synopsis or something. i like to go into things knowing as little as possible!
2 Likes
watched The Reader which is a bonkers movie to have come out and been well-received. one of the ultimate 2000s accidentally tasteless Oscar bait movies. right up there with Haggis Crash and Notes on a Scandal for misguided grossness pretending to be a serious story. had a lot of fun watching and laughing with my friends.
3 Likes
Really really liked Jonathan Glazer’s movie Birth, which is about a woman confronted by a child who insists she is her dead husband. Really intense and sad!!
3 Likes
watched The Sound of Music that wasn’t a 4:3 VHS on a CRT tv for the first time. holy crap you can see everybody’s eyes flicking about expressively
told eldest there would be Nazis and an escape + car chase & they stuck through the whole thing
4 Likes
saw mikio naruse’s when a woman ascends the stairs at a local repertory theater and cried at the end. i’ve never seen a movie so ruthlessly materialist in its treatment of money as a totalizing and determining force of gendered constraint and oppression, and so sadly attuned to its effects on human inner life.
9 Likes