I’M SO EXCITED I’ve said it before but I hoot and holler at happiness like a sports fan
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Me and my partner are on a Derek Jarman kick. Last night: the brutal and erotic Sebastiane (1976). (If anyone wants files of Jarman films let me know).
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I really liked his adaptation of the Tempest
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Cool, we’ll put it on the docket!
we watched green snake and it’s gorgeous and fun and an important reminder semen retention isn’t good for anyone
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i didn’t go ballistic over Fury Road but Furiosa is my kind of movie. feels real in a way movies usually don’t, where it just shows you a sequence of events without trying to tie things in a bow or hammer in a takeaway. it’s gratifyingly weird and kind of random.
shockingly minimal soundtrack; i wonder if that was a contributor to the poor performance cause early on it did feel the story was too simple for how slowly and quietly it was being portrayed. definitely didn’t need to be 148 minutes.
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oh i was constantly drawing comparisons to videogames in the last decade. a rippling, tentacled-looking parachute/kite resembling an eldritch being from bloodborne, scope views and over-shoulder shooting like PUBG/fortnite, furiosa assembling her bionic arm like sekiro, motorbiking over dunes and crags like in death stranding. i love how many vehicles don’t make it when they attempt to surmount some intractable piece of geography. and any scene set on a catwalk i was in love with.
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the substance was pretty bad
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Have we had a thread about the most video game brained films and filmmakers? Like things that feel influenced by games but aren’t directly referencing them or adapting anything specific
it’s such a shame that Blomkamp still hasn’t made another movie as good as district 9
Did you mean to write Chappie there
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I watched Hundreds of Beavers the other night and while I realize that it’s just a live action Looney Tune it turns out when you extract that sensibility through to 2024 it’s actually just a videogame. He has a score counter, draws a map, does an MGS stealth mission, has a minecart level…
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It’s definitely his second best but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as visionary or surprising, it was more of a reminder that he could still work with that setting
starting th ramp up to halloween
XTRO (1982) - i know people were talking here abt the alien sequels so my pro tip is to just ditch them and assemble your own “alien franchise” comprised of Alien, Dark Star, this one, about 15 mins of Prometheus, uh, maybe the monolith AVP game, some of the funnier kenner toys, the weird licensed comic they had jim woodring write… anyway this one gets kind of goofy and bad outer limits episode in the back half, which is still fun, but has such a good mix of nasty ass effects and weird psychosexual stuff at the start and end that i’d sort of recommend it to anyone still bothered that they turned the xenomorphs into bug things with a known life cycle instead of just being unknowable glimpsed protean Things all the way down
SHIROME (2010) - more koji shiraishi found footage horror, this is a pretty slight one but still very charming for that reason. it’s actually sort of a promo for an idol group called momoiro clover (they did a pokemon theme! and a collaboration with KISS…??) and follows them as they perform a ritual in a haunted shrine in order to gain supernatural assistance in appearing on the variety show they like. there’s some play with whether or not they know whether the horror stuff going on was faked, which i’m not that interested in, but the odd flatness of tone in squeezing horror stuff into the very sterile promo format is fun. i like that whenever the ghost expert appears to deliver more backstory they all just start wailing immediately while he stands there looking awkward. the live idol performance in front of the death shrine was a beautiful bit.
CREEP (2014) - does some fun formal things with the found footage structure but the most memorable and terrifying thing is how well mark duplass channels the “indie small business owner hiring you to code his emotional platformer game” energy, abrupt uncomfortable disclosures and forced bonding and all. it’s like the hannibal x will graham thing if neither of them had taste.
YAMI DOUGA (2012) - collection of japanese “found footage” shorts, the same kind sort of pastiched more memorably in Ura Horror. there’s a crazy part in that one where they get the director of Ju On to appear in a fake news story about investigating sightings of the little ghost kid from the grudge (spoiler: it is absolutely not the little ghost kid from the grudge)… nothing in this one was as memorably crazed but you’re kind of watching for little slice of life details as much as the ghosts, and they’re both kind of fun although also unsatisfactory and more-ish enough that by watching just one of these, you risk becoming one of the people who watches the other 20+ movies in the same series just to chase some sense of actual payoff… perhaps they truly are cursed videos in that sense. but i liked the one where someone basically gets hired on fiverr to perform a grave ritual on film, and has to shuffle back to bonk his camera holder whenever the latter starts asking the obvious questions abt this by reminding him “the camera’s on”, and there’s also a memorably tasteless and dumb one at the end abt harakiri snuff films.
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) - crazy sound design, really memorably sparse and foreboding in ways most other found footage things i’ve seen still don’t get close to - notably missing the kind of “figure walking around the background just out of focus” type antics which i always enjoy but whose absence here gives the emptiness of the house at the end a real weight by the end. i’ve been curious abt checking out the sequel bc kim director’s in it (from Dying For The Crown!!) but considering the nu metal reputation that one has it’s kind of touching that the dumb college kids in this one spend their time driving around listening to kind of a pavementlike track instead. the last gasp of the 90s…
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I do remember this was my dad’s main complaint about Dredd after we had watched it together.
It was like she knew that it wasn’t going to be plausible or make sense no matter what so she didn’t even try and just used it as a vehicle for some fun scenes she wanted to shoot with specific visuals and wild practical effects.
And if you’re not going to trust the audience with the slightest subtlety anyway I guess you might as well exaggerate everything while you’re at it. It was interesting how many scenes echoed Revenge.
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Oh my god, I thought Felix was referring to the substance of Furiosa and I was scratching my head thinking what was wrong with it.
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yeah, agreed. there was some occasionally great imagery in there, but it was a pretty lousy excuse for a 2 and a half hour long movie with almost no real characters! it was a decent stunt, but death becomes her is a much better movie
My mind wandered a lot during this because it’s very tedious and shitty, and at one point I got on a track of mentally tabulating how much longer it was than any of the movies it rips off and realized the difference in running time between The Substance and Tetsuo The Iron Man is longer than the actual running time of Tetsuo The Iron Man. The only thing I liked about it is that Randy Quaid has a movie where’s playing Harvey Weinstein and a movie where’s playing Ronald Reagan out in theaters at the same time.
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Surprised I’ve heard absolutely nothing about that Reagan movie. Figured I’d hear lots of groaning in the lead up, at least. But maybe it’s just because I don’t hang out in spaces where people think something like that is gonna be worth talking about. I just remember how weird it was to go to the theatres a while ago and see a poster with Thomas Jane on it in a cowboy hat, and big text that read REAGAN.
Might see the Substance just cause I got some gift card money. Weighing if my disappointment with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as a post-Ed Wood movie by Tim Burton would be more entertaining to sit with than whatever amount of frustration The Substance has to offer.
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