ghosts are naturally drawn to glory holes, they’re like black holes for the ghost world. If you ever see any mysterious stains near a glory hole, it’s probably ectoplasm
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Been watching more movies lately. My buddy told me that Challengers was like a live action shoujo manga and having now watched it on a plane ride and enjoying it quite a bit I was like “damn should i be reading more shoujo manga”
Also I slept on Guadagnino until now but went back and watched his Suspiria remake. I don’t have a ton of nostalgia for the original (I like it bit it’s never been one of “my” movies) but I also really liked this one! May keep working my way backwards through his filmography.
Watched The Eyes of Laura Mars. I was expecting a prestige-y new hollywood movie but it turned out to be really pulpy (it’s about a trashy fashion photographer who can foresee murders so I have no idea what about that discription led me to think it was going to be prestige-y) and I liked it a lot. I checked and Tommy Lee Jones was in his early 30s in this movie but the dude must have come out of the womb looking 60 years old.
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did your showing have the 4th wall breaking interaction? looks like there are a couple of showings that will in Seattle, trying to see if I can make one of those
it did! I went to the simulcast NYFF premiere at the chinese theater, so I’d hope so… I want to stress though that it really doesn’t add much beyond the sense that this is barely an ordinary film at all and more of a strange farewell tour for FFC… like, nothing will make this rise to the level of the sublime or of an unmissable experience, it more so just justifies the mess
if I had to describe it I would say it is like Batman Forever x Cosmopolis, directed by the Wachowskis
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am I getting my hopes too high for Boomer Southland Tales vibes?
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not at all
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emphatically yes
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I watched “Songs of the Earth”. A movie about people and nature. There are more interesting things in the same genre out there. This one revolves a bit too much around the director’s own family for my tastes. Very pretty though. I’d give it a C.
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What are they? Cuz this sounds right up my alley. Koyaanisqatsi, I guess?
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Right on cue.
Felt like this movie was trying way too hard with the constant extreme close up slowmo and the editing etc. Way too on the nose. At times i found myself thinking “its like if Zoolander didn’t realise it was a comedy”.
like Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway collabed on a conan the barbarian by way of liquid sky
absolutely deranged and gross and captivating
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Megalopolis is pretty incoherent and seemingly lacks any real depth, with lots of introduced ideas that go absolutely nowhere, but…i’m still kind of happy i saw it in a theater. it does some stuff pretty well, and at times seems to be in on its own joke, but not consistently.
some really incredible dialogue at the end involving a crossbow
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Hmm, it’s not quite Koyaanisqatsi-like. It’s more of a nature montage with some environmentalist and nationalist undertones. Koyaanisqatsi has a much more universal feel to it, and a dramatic tone that is completely absent here. There also isn’t much of the sentiment that modernity is a mistake, or at least can go wrong.
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Finally saw Lawrence of Arabia and loved it. Reminded me a lot of Dune on many levels, suddenly that story feels less imaginative.
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this seems like an ideal time
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It is kind of funny how, on top of everything else, the Spice making people’s eyes glow blue is so obviously inspired by O’Toole’s glorious sky blue technicolor eyes
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Yeah, it’s a giant mess, but having just gotten back from it, I’m glad I saw it.
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watched megalopolis in a half empty suburban imax as jove intended. during the opening scenes i was like… what is this weirdly familiar mixture of declarative acting, blunt and artificial cosmic scene-setting monologues, kind of half assed fantasy setting stitching together a bunch of existing cinematic signifiers, leading orchestra music etc… and i sorta wondered, is this him taking his surely kind of resentful relationship to george lucas and doing a star wars?? like not directly but the idea of “star wars” as a loose, epic-shaped container you can strip out and fill with whatever you’re interested in instead… which i’m sure is a dopey read but it did make me more sympathetic to a lot of the parts that just didn’t work at all but which i found kind of rewarding nevertheless. like this sense of slightly mismatched collage where yeah none of the pieces quite fit but you’re not really trying to make them, more interested in what new thing they produce when you put them together… what DOES happen if you take your fantasy tammany hall politicos and make them all wear italian grampa hats and gladiator film hair and it’s sort of allegorical but to several different periods at once and you’re more just watching out of curiosity abt whether any of these fragments do really illuminate each other. sometimes they do!! even though for a lot of the running time the movie is dumb in both the ways films abt “modern babylon” are condemned to be dumb AND ways films abt visionary geniuses are condemned to be dumb. but i had to accept i was on board by the time of the colusseum bit featuring a vestal virgin pop singer who leads everyone in a chastity pledge. the shia lebeouf stuff successfully evoked the “bland failson” eras of both classical and contemporary politics. aubrey plaza is fun and gets to wear a snake bra like the lady from Panorama Toh. as mentioned there’s an all timer scene with an arrow. parts of it reminded me of the quibi sam raimi thing about the woman with the golden arm.
i do not think the movie works at all in terms of the political epic it seems to want to be taken as at points, more like an epic of variously talented or horrible italian rich kids who are all related to one another and about the place of art in their lives, which is probably a subject nearer to coppola’s heart at this point. but i did find his gestures out of that to be kind of endearing bc they were clunky but ultimately goodhearted, like the david graeber stuff, or a utopia which seems to be pretty much the present but with more gardens and moving walkways. there’s some genuinely cool visuals in some of the hallucination scenes and i liked the running joke that every time the mayor shows up people just go booo. overall winner of the coveted “glad i saw it at the imax” award.
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I was kinda sad that I barely remembered any of the Cicero I translated in high school.
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the end of megalopolis essentially being one of those lawn “In this house, we believe: all ____” etc. signs cracked me up. Mixed feelings about how transparently it was the product of an old man mindset attempting 2 channel contemporary life. Odd to see 70s horny guy film sleaze collide w/ ‘commentary on the present’. Coppola being lecherous on set + Shia’s history + Shia in the movie + the obv discomfort with gender transgression was the opposite of endearing. Shia running a nazi kid gang w/ a Nintendo switch and the love interest messing with a remote controlled star wars hover orb on the other hand…
Total ‘it is what it is’ vanity project. Felt like a similarly interesting time observing transparent id as a lot of direct 2 video stuff (praise). I liked the freeform dipping in & out of visual analogy. Fun way to portray “New Rome” as distinct. Coppola’s a real old wealthy cali guy now w/ all the hodgepodge Eastern Mysticism stuff, about as blatant as it gets when Adam Driver rejects everything in the material world and then walks around muttering “creation…destruction” w/ that headwrap and sitar moment. My fan theory is Adam Driver portrays the secret favored Coppola, Jason Schwartzmann, one hint being that he has no real reason to be in this film other than good will. A fun thing to see in theaters
(& funny to think Coppola believed this would be a popular success.)
I wish Kevin Costner’s, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter Two had come out as intended one month after the first one…i was on board for that as well. all i see in theaters these days are old directors deranged passion projects & occasional indie films, honestly not bad time for the movies.
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