damn well now im curious
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Your mileage may vary (itâs no Sweet Movie or Holy Mountain). A lot of the movie is doing a very very specific homage and reactions seem to hinge on how vulnerable you are to that. My barometer is a little hazy since my friends who id expect to connect to the trans allegory more are all younger and seem to have not dug it as much, where as one of my older straight dude friends texted me to proclaim itâs âan all timer.â
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i thought tv glow was neat just way too heavy-handed lol
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This is one of the biggest âeveryone online is talking about this movie but I still have no idea what itâs aboutâ movies ever
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I think that helped it for me. I went knowing nothing other than my best friend told me donât read anything about it and donât worry, youâll love it and I was expecting a more traditional horror movie and was relieved it wasnât.
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Starburned and Unkissed continues to grow on me
rewatched Flux Gourmet with old mate the other night, he found it pretty viscerally challenging but thatâs comfort viewing for me i think. YES a bunch of fucked up little guys CAN learn how to look out for each other over the course of a month on a noise music residency!! love is real
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Also saw that Brian Eno generatively sequenced doc a couple days back and Furiosa seconds ago.
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got to see solaris for the first time in a theater screening and enjoyed it, liked a lot of the workarounds they used for the slime planet esp the great sequence at the end and the horrible discomfiting part where she returns for the first time.
at the same time⌠i feel like i always bounce a little more off art films than i expect, and sometimes wonder if itâs bc their âhumanityâ feels too easy, a technical tendency rather than an arrived position - when so many of filmâs most powerful effects are related to watching people emote on screen then âthe power of emotionâ is maybe less of an actual idea than the placeholder these things always start to slip into the orbit of whenever they lose steam⌠not to say this movie is abt this particularly but i did miss some of lemâs distance and reticience during the back sections. maybe itâs just that the default representationalism and emotionalism of movies makes questions of âis this robot/clone/bug person/hologram Really Human?â feel even more smugly redundant when it comes up than it is in a world of second-order textual ciphers
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yea i had a similar feeling watching the film after having read the book, that the film was caught up a bit too much in that sort of arty humanism power of emotions stuff where the book had a less romantic approach.
ive been thinking about this kind of thing a lot lately, just like how a lot of consciously Artistic /âtastefully experimentalâ things (a lot of indie rock, things described as like âheartfeltâ and âexpressiveâ, âgood filmsâ) come off way more like conservative/ operating off a received image of the Human than say the ââcommercialââ sides of the same medium (pop music, franchises etc), which feel way more liberating but not in that like cliche rhapsodic let people enjoy things way, but through their anonymising quality that lets you access a lot of the prized affect of High Art without having to wade through all the muck of individualised pathos and Emotion. the earnest emotional high art stuff seems to lock in place an image of the human condition as if things have to be that way forever, which makes a lot of these like Power of Emotions films/games/music/art come off way more depressing than they intend to be to me lol.
itâs funny that a common complaint is always that things in general arent emotive, expressive, heartfelt, earnest enough but i feel like the opposite is true, that everything is totally swamped in all of that and itâs really hard to find things that donât involve themselves in those things so directly. even the traditional strongholds of resistance to it like pop music and idk serialised movies seem overtaken by it lately, ie taylor swift type hyperreal pop (vs someone like britney), âdarkâ reboots of franchises, the whole âearthbound fangame about depressionâ trajectory or whatver.
i feel like itâs seen as a kind of defect for someone to prefer supposedly âemptyâ cultural products, as if it reveals some sort of fatal lack of empathy and intelligence (leading to ppl having to shore up defences by making conversation abt those âempty productsâ all like actually, itâs really deep and secretly depressing and messed up), which i just think is so off base but seems to undergird a huge amount of cultural criticism and attitudes to how ppl talk abt art.
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I like The Cloon version better!
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for me itâs less of a high/low thing - the âartâ modifier once meant antipathy to 19thc ideas of romantic humanism as much as it now means, like, movies about beautiful poor people learning to dance, and a lot of commercial culture isnât cold so much as lukewarm⌠i think we would be more unsatisfied with commercial art if we didnât have a selective and underwhelming tradition of art works to bounce it off, like a wrestling heel. iâm not really a film guy and do feel like maybe film as a medium itself, always held up as the example form of the 20th century, the ultimate aspirational mix of meaning and industry, is responsible for some of these tendencies - the emotionalism, the cult of âpowerfulâ (immediately readable) images, the use of the human face as final site of emotion and truth, human scale as unthinking default, the idea of their own audience and imagination of that audienceâs role (to sit there and be moved!)⌠and ofc both commercial and art films are equally likely to be guilty of maybe the worst image cliche of the last 100 years: the loving shot of a filmâs own audience, sitting enraptured, laughing as they have their souls lifted by The Magic Of Cinema
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yh defo agree that itâs not like commercial stuff is cold unemotional etc rn anyway, is defo the case that itâs basically all just been mashed together into a more homogenous soup where there is no distinction between high n low (aka why everything is like, emotive confessional pop tracks or post-taste ironic âlow cultureâ as gallery installations). also yeah ive had similar feeling about the weird privileging of film esp after reading a bunch of those like verso theory books, always seems to be an excuse for someone to write abt how much they like Hitchcock or something more than anything else lol
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I didnât like Furiosa as much as everyone I know seems to. Happy to have more George Miller stuff but it took a while to get going.
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Furiosa was completely unnecessary but Iâm glad it exists
I should stop seeing movies though because both of the summer movies Iâve seen (Furiosa and The Fall Guy (fun but almost entirely coasting on a combination of Goslingâs charisma and Leitchâs familiarity with the craft)) have underperformed at the box office
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i feel like every movie not named Dune 2 has underperformed this year. i guess godzilla x kong: code white and kung fu panda did okay.
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Civil War somehow did well
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I agree but like a lot of Jackie Chan movies charisma and stunt craft are pretty much all I need to have a very good time, so I really liked it. Though Iâm still 50/50 on Leitch as a director overall.
I also left Furiosa a little cold but I dont want to be the guy who poo pooâd Beyond Thunderdome in 1985 so Iâm going to catch it again and see if my mood changes. The crowd at the theater I was in was absolutely dead silent the whole time which probably didnât help. Not even Hemsworth got a single pop. Tough crowd.
Been watching a bunch of latter day Gerard Butler movies. Feels like no one else is putting out these kind of solid b-level action movies like he is.
Hunter Killer was pretty great, keeping Butler and Gary Oldman in rooms yelling at people while putting all of the physical action in an operator b-plot with the strike back guy and ninth-billed actors from Chuck and Battlestar Galactica. It kind of felt like a @parker movie, I liked it a lot.
Kandahar was alright and I wonder if it was a dueling scripts thing with The Covenant.
Found Copshop a little too precious to enjoy even if Iâm rooting for Grillo and Carnahan in general.
Plane was fun as hell but Iâm worried Butler is entering his Neeson phase a little too early. Would really love to see him get a crack at the big time again before he wanders off into dad-fantasy world permanently.
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Hasnât he always been in this field with The Banker and Shoot-em-Up ?
Edit: I am thinking of Clive Owen.
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This movie is finally available as VOD if you wanna watch my favourite film of 2023.
Or you can just watch the whole god damned thing on Dailymotion.
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the fall guy is like the chris pine dungeons and dragons: platonic ideal of a saturday afternoon cable tv movie to watch in a hotel
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