I watched The Cameraman’s Revenge, a Russian* animated film from 1912. This is way too good. They used real dried insects. I’m always so tickled when a 100 year-old trick works just as well today as it once did. I’m seeing Mr. Beetle carry his suitcase home. I’m hooting and hollering as he takes his hat off. It’s just too much.
*The director, Władysław Starewicz, was Polish and grew up in what is now Lithuania.
I finished watching La Flor. It was so good that I immediately began watching Extraordinary Stories after it. There’s a big long post I could make about the two films but I’m not sure if I have it in me to do it. Just watch them, in your own time. Watch them especially if you like the narration in Wong Kar Wai or Rivette’s revelry of long and windy plots.
I’m going to miss hearing those Argentine accents, with their Italian cadence and [ʃ] substituting for [j]…
I recently watched Trenque Lauquen at a film festival: the latest from that film collective, El Pampero Cine. Hope that one makes its way to you too. It’s just as good as La Flor imo, and has all the same confidence with formal structure and shifting between genres. The best late-act pivot to sci-fi horror I’ve seen since the first Uncharted game.
Haven’t watched Extraordinary Stories yet. It’s nice to have that as a special treat saved in my back pocket.
finally watched ponniyin selvan 2 it was great!!
it opens with a flashback of the characters aaditya karikalan and nandini, expanding on vikram’s pre-interval monologue and reminiscence in ps-1, this one is more focused on their tragic relationship… as with the tragic relationship they played in raavanan vikram and aishwarya rai have fantastic chemistry
dreamy digital video textures
vallavaraiyan vanthiyathevan excels at being held at swordpoint by beautiful women
also love the youtube lyrics vids produced for this duology
ptp pls come back i want to watch chekka chivantha vaanam
I saw A Haunting In Venice because I am 75 years old and a sucker for Agatha Christie adaptations. Miles ahead of Death On The Nile in terms of quality. A reasonable way to get out of the house on a Monday night by yourself.
Crazy to me that no one seems to be able to stop Branagh from doing these
I somehow didn’t realize that it was an Agatha Christie movie. I just watched the 70s films not too long ago and loved how wild Death on the Nile was. It made me wish that there were more made at that budget and level of spectacle.
Written in exactly the same grammar as when the state department claims a North African dictator is making threats to expand his military
David Suchet will always be my Poirot but KB does better in this one. There is nothing as bonkers as the moustache origin story scenes in DotN.
Rififi (the 1955/original):
Epic 1st half heist movie that can take it up with the best in class (because you see the template that’s been used by many heist movies since then), 2nd half shows its age with some involuntarily comical events and poorly aged SFX.
All in all, worth a watch just for the heist scene 
Shin Kamen Rider:
No reason to be so effin’ good, but Anno just knows how to make seemingly cheapo shots that pay hommage to 1970ies production techniques look brilliant nevertheless.
Can therefore wholeheartedly agree w/ (stealth-edit Rudie’s some SBer end-of-stealth-edit) recommendation a few months(? year?) ago, everyone should watch this masterpiece.
Might actually be my new fav Splatterfest anime-but-it-is-actually-real kind of movie 
Wasn’t mine because I watched it about a month ago on Japanese Rainforest Prime and I thought it was bad.
A friend asked if I wanted to go see a movie called The Creator which is in cinemas now but I had no idea existed and seemingly nobody is talking about that I can see. Which is a bit surprising since it’s a kinda bit budget sci-fi movie from the director of Andor.
I’m a bit conflicted about it, because on the one hand it explicitly paints the US military as fascist villains invading another country on a flimsy pretext, which is good, but on the other hand this is a movie released in 2023 about AI being the next evolution of mankind where people on the wrong side say things like “they’re not real, it’s just programming. They just seem real”.
The other thing is this movie is set primarily in some futuristic conglomerate of Asian states called New Asia, which mostly just felt like an excuse to just handwave the depiction of various Asian cultures into a broad mishmash of stereotypes. So you’ve got Ken Watanabe as a rebel hiding out in a fishing village, woman with chopsticks in hair, big busting Blade Runner city full of neon lights, scenes of people in pointy hats with oxen tilling the fields etc.
Other than that it was a pretty solid sci-fi thriller, though once you know the setup, you can guess pretty accurately where it’s going. It doesn’t really do much new with the AI theme that wasn’t already done in Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell etc. The robots looked pretty cool.
i liked the creator quite a lot. i think the explicit depiction of us imperialism makes the new asia stuff work a lot better than similar things in other cyberpunk aesthetic sci fi does. the main plotting is incredibly by the numbers, but it generally hits with enough empathy and sincerity that it doesn’t matter too much.
This hit hard when I first saw it back in the early 2000s and it still does today
