The Fall Guy:
Gosling & Blunt 1-upping each other and such a love letter to stunt team(s), it’s endearing how honest it is about how the story doesn’t matter at all. Cool stunts that turn out to be real-and-not-CGI festas.
i saw the tv glow is out on VOD now
it’s much less a vhs/crt filter pastiche thing than it seemed in marketing. the most striking effects were in lighting, composites, and (simulated?) print damage/scratches/splices
it’s not a horror horror movie but it’s so sublimely uncanny and familiar that it freaked me out anyway
a horror movie for people so afraid to take up space they don’t use a cart while grocery shopping
don’t die wondering
this is some real Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game business
btw @OneSecondBefore i know you couldn’t get into buffy (admirable) but it’s wild that tv glow explicitly parallels buffy ending on the WB with buffy’s death in season 5 and coming back on UPN with the gang performing necromancy that brings her back from (what’s implied to be) heaven. of course we must conclude this is a movie about how fucked up moving to UPN is.
Watched Nausicaa and the Valley of The Wind again, the first rewatch in like 5 ish years and the first rewatch since reading the entire manga a while ago. I’m still blown away by the scope and the animation. While I still haven’t seen every Ghibli film it’s still my favorite. I can see a bunch of Miyazaki’s obsessions in the movie: there’s gotta be a tank, there’s gotta be huge airships with people running around inside em, meticulous mechanical designs everywhere. Individual shots tell a lot: like when the huge airships are about the leave the valley there’s an overhead shot of the tire treads they’ve left behind when landing in the pristine green fields. I do wish there were some way to translate the rest of the manga into a film or game, because it really goes places.
The english dub has the talents of Patrick Stewert, Uma Thurman, and… Shia LaBeouf
casting the Beef in the dub makes way more sense (especially alongside fellow Disney kid Anna Paquin) than James Vanderbeek in Laputa
(James actually does a perfectly good job acting but he sounds way too old)
Saw Hit Man in the theatre and it was pretty good. Very charming.
Watched Cinderella (1950) with the kid. Those “early” Disney animated movies are such barely movies. I’d say 40 minutes of this movie are just mice being chased by a cat. Another 20 minutes are the King being scared he won’t have grandchildren before he dies. Like Bippity Boppity Bo isn’t even a song! I was shocked. It’s just something the Fairy Godmother says like 4 times.
We’ve also watched Peter Pan which comes with a warning before it and oh boy when the warning part happens my jaw dropped. I didn’t think it would be that racist. We had to turn it off because Neo Rude said Captain Hook and the Crocodile were both too scary. Disney bought off the license to Peter Pan from a Children’s Hospital that was gifted it by the creator.
Peter Pan is like a movie though.
Both these movies feature dogs being punished for crimes they didn’t commit. I wonder how many Disney movies I could find this theme in.
You gotta have someone for kids to feel a sense fraternity.
okay yeah I finally got around to seeing this and thought the same, it feels incredibly shallow, kinda like a nicholas winding refn thing. seems like they want you to believe it was made by some Real Freaks (all that bulging and swelling!), but you can’t really achieve that when everything reads like “how do you do, fellow freaks?”
edit: so one of the things I keep coming back to is like, why is this movie even about bodybuilding? (to the extent that it is, I mean). is it just one of those things that feels distinctly 80s, and every serious lesbian movie has to be a period thing? it doesn’t ever feel interested in bodybuilding as such, the discipline, the pageantry, the eroticism of repetition, it gestures at body horror but never really gets there, it barely even uses it as an excuse to gawk at buff ladies. I was thinking about this when I was out running earlier and reread Kathy Acker’s Language of the Body when I got back. love lies bleeding you will never glimpse the unknowable laws of the body!!!
i’m too tired after just finishing another A24 flick (Civil War (“Fallout: New Yorker” (sorry to my letterboxd friends, I had to repost that one liner here I just woke my dog laughing at it again))) to maybe make a coherent point about this but: a lot of A24 films feel like internalised commercialism among millennials/millennial adjacent filmmakers to me, like they’ve honed their bullet pointed selling points and hooks but the actual fucking characters/cultural insights are seriously undercooked (sorry to fans of I Saw the TV Glow but this was another case for me but maybe I’m just getting old and cynical (likely!))
Im kinda curious how a24 has been raised to become this brand with like a particularly ignoble middlebrow image. Like we don’t really talk about other movie distributors that way, do we? And like i kinda get it, i hate a good handful of their movies that i’ve seen too, but if you actually like go down the list they aren’t quite as homogenous as that right. I’m not trying to like defend the state of movies like we all feel the deadness lately but yeah idk i feel like this company is spoken about how videogame publishers are spoken about. There is a corporate focus in its discussion that I don’t usually see when people talk about movies, and I think that’s one of the things I like about movies! Idk ggg i feel bad posting this like its not interesting to talk about
I’ve never got it, maybe I haven’t seen enough of them to make sense of it. what’s the common thread between ballad of lefty brown and first reformed and spring breakers. people make it sound like it’s a specific genre of film. what makes these a24 movies and other movies just movies other than the logo at the beginning.
is this really new though? it seems like a redux of Annapruna or Participant, production houses with a pretty clear image of the kind of movies they want to make or the subjects they like tackling
hell, A24 probably has more in common with Miramax than those or others like them at this point
also if I was drunk enough I would probably talk up Sony Pictures Classics like most people do to A24. those motherfuckers know what movies to buy
Oscilloscope Laboratories, though, now there’s a distributor that deserves all the praise
throwing A24 around as a pejorative catchall is kinda lazy and painting with too broad a brush and sometimes I don’t resist that temptation to conflate what is a conscious effort in branding (like Magnolia Pictures or IFC or whatever isn’t on the same level of social media or merch game (see their online shop (The Lighthouse Grooming Kit! (not the fault of the film and not even a bad thing just saying))) with its yeah quite diverse output and I’m personally making a leap that’s subjective and tenuous that: as much as A24 is a more generalised brand itself, it has seems to me to draw certain filmmakers who are a good fit with high concept/quirky/meme-ably casted/easy social media sells baked into their creative process (many of the ones I lump into this both write and direct and I have been wondering if that has anything to do with this as well but that’s another tangent that’s not A24’s fault either) while also dubbed “arthouse” while also often feeling undercooked and shallow, to me. it would be better to focus on the individual movies and whatever generational self-branding trends that I think I detect than A24 itself (but then, is the arthouse + market hooks + auteur stuff something A24 is specifically supporting more than other distributors even though it’s just a fraction of their output?) and perhaps its actually the social media soup we all swim in now, filmmakers and audience, and whatever effects that has on process and consumption that’s really what I’m turned off by (and getting old and cynical, of course)
Magnolia isn’t really an distributor, it’s Mark Cuban skirting the Lowe’s Act so he has movies for Landmarks
yes I know Trump killed the Lowe’s Act so he can go mask off, and I know he has because the local Landmark that usually booked nothing but indie fare always has at least 3-4 tent pole releases in rooms now
Me yelling about this like it isn’t cool that I can see Bad Boys and Robot Dreams in the same building
yeah i judge movies on a case to case basis, but like in the same way i can say ‘dreamworks face’ i can say ‘a24 magical realism’