My friend and I really enjoyed See No Evil in the theater last night She is recovering from a surgery and just wanted to get out of the house and there wasn’t anything else interesting. So, we weren’t expecting much. I had spoiled myself by reading this Polygon article lampooning the decision to change the ending from the original Dutch version but spoilers don’t bother me (I don’t think spoilers are a big deal in this movie in particular) and otherwise, had not read any opinions.
Unexpected jokes had us and the whole audience laughing frequently and a diegetic needle drop pushed me over the edge from like to love halfway through. Despite this, I’m finding it uncomfortable to consider recommending it because it’s so dark. I’m not sure how it fits into the current psychological horror landscape either so I may be oversensitive to it in context. At the very least I feel like my rec would need a parental abuse trigger warning.
As for my feelings on the ending change I would need to admit that I wasn’t mad about it walking out of the theater with my buddy all smiles. I don’t think the quality of the movie as entertainment dropped off at any point. After a bit of consideration today my opinion has changed a bit and I feel the newer ending betrays the genre to an extent depending on how you are measuring.
Spoiler-ed explanation:
Paddy, who is the main antagonist played amazingly by James McAvoy, at one point defends his fox-hunting hobby as predator control while ceding they are weak prey to humans. Throughout the plot we are shown that he sees the protagonists (the Daltons) as both predators, as they are upper-class fake-ass fuck-ups who fail up and soak up resources from the lower classes, and as very literal prey for what essentially his and his wife’s business. Calling what they do a business feels weird but they employ accomplices, have a place of operations, and repeatedly do the same act to support themselves.
I’ve not seen it but I know the original 2022 ending has the bad couple winning, leaving the Dalton’s unfairly punished for their bourgeois sins. It is super dark especially that their daughter has her tongue cut out and replaces the son who suffered the same punishment from the previous family to fall victim. Despite that, it follows horror logic and clearly marks what the storyteller wants the viewer to see in themselves and feel unsettled. I want to see this version at some point.
In the 2024 ending the family escapes along with the child of the bad couple who was actually their prisoner and child of the previous victims. What has changed for them through this harrowing experience. The dad hurts his leg pretty bad but he walks and then drives them away after all is said and done. The daughter, who experienced crippling anxiety only sated by a plot leading stuffed bunny has overcome her childish attachment and shares it with the boy she has helped save from a life of horror. The mom (who is the stealth main protagonist played excellently by Mackenzie Davis) had even mentioned earlier in the film that they had tried two kids at one point but had miscarried, but look, now they they even have that. From a cold logical perspective they have only gained, and that bugs me a little. I feel like the gods of horror need some kind of real sacrifice, like a limb or an eye or something. I mean c’mon.
With Paddy as the last baddy standing, it is actually the kids who take him down in the end with the parents essentially as witnesses. I think the coolest ending would have been this but with the parents having died heroically or not at some point. In my mind this would would tie in beautifully with a poignant but dangling string of statements Paddy makes earlier in the film about how parents fuck their kids up. The girl handing the bunny to the boy in the back of a social services vehicle and they could just both of them hold it until the cut to the credits with my favorite needle drop of all time. That would’ve been sick.
I saw Final Countdown on the big screen. This time I clocked there is a reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs The Efficiency Expert. The plane and men footage was truly beautiful. There is a scene where an F14 does a dive towards the ocean and then swings back up towards the heavens in a spiral and my heart leaped to my throat.
It’s still a movie about picking up your dog from the sitter. Sure a couple of men needlessly died but we all took a real hard philosophy lesson. 4/5 1979 Rations. To be stressed it is barely a movie.
The wormhole scene has just like Tron gone from Wow to look how corny this is to Wow! As time goes on. The sound design is maybe what imprinted on a 3 year old Rudie so he loved 90s screamo his whole life.
The audience for a Japan Showing on Monday Afternoon was of course the most broken 70year old men. Kojima probably went to the Saturday showing (this was a double bill with Wild Geese (which is Phantom Pain: The Movie (and is just on youtube)). Also the Theater Attendant open mouth coughed on me so if I get sick in the next day that’s why.
man, Wizard of Oz in 4K is a mixed bag in terms of seeing the seams of the world, yet watching the amount of care put into extras and costumes is just mind boggingly bizarre … and it almost makes me tear up when considering that it is 85 years old.
Up next, either Pearl or the Megalomania-FFC-Bankaccount-Buster.
just realized the god kris kristofferson died on the day between the day i watched his episode of larry sanders and the day i finally watched the new pat garrett cut… i was just thinking maybe it’s time for me to head on back to heaven’s gate soon too…
Rebel Ridge was great, a solid little genre picture about how fucking awful cops are. There was an unexpected quantity of law stuff which was all remarkably solid, probably among the best I’ve seen, and the main guy, who is unknown to me, is a gorgeous hunk who plays a pacifist Taylor Sheridan character, which is delightful an oxymoron as it sounds. What if you took a tier one operator asshole and made him Vash the Stampede?
i’ve read only praise for it elsewhere but it is a little suspect that it shares the body horror cosmetic product premise with catwoman (2004) (also french-directed)
i want to go to ~the movies~ as a post-booster ritual but it’s actually hard to choose for the first time since like 2017
The thing I keep coming back to is the well-publicized fourth-wall breaking scene where the aspect ratio changes and Adam Driver looks downward & screen-left so he can have an eye line with a real-life person in the theater who’s meant to ask him a challenging question, which is expressing as literally as possible the idea of a work “Being in a dialogue with the audience”. But this is within the context of a film that has almost no interest in conventional dramatic storytelling, which is meant to be densely allusive, oblique, poetic, etc. To be challenged by it you have to completely buy into it, when a lot of it is within a mode of cinematic expression that’s only comfortably explicable to someone who’s watched Ballet Mécanique a dozen times. He had to have known he was making a movie for five people.
s/o to the sb tokusatsu thread because every time a character referred to ‘megalon’ i could only think of the kaiju
add to that a few stylistic choices which feel pretty
‘uhmmmm?’
like Caesar snooping around New Yor—Rome a Citroën DS (never caught a glimpse if it was indeed a top-spec ‘Pallas’ trim version, but the godly name was obv a casting choice.
Not sure why an 1980ies Civic Hatchback was so prominent in the movie, but Elvis did thank everyone in japanese in that one scene, so idk, I missed something, I guess.
Still wondering if there’s a reason why many characters are wearing black, when Mama Cicero & Julia wore red dresses. Style over substance or signifiers? They even call her Red riding hood in a scene iirc.
Who knows! Shia Le Bœf is uh, there.
Also, no mobile phones at all in that movie?
Wild one, but i enjoyed watching FFC having a good time burning 100m for an artsy fartsy flick that will become a cornerstone of 2020ies cinema, for good or bad.
There’s lots of stuff like this throughout the movie because it was largely conceived of prior to 2001 and iirc from reading the script half a lifetime ago, it didn’t really change all that much in the interim lol. Nick Pinkerton said something that stuck with me about how the infamous trailer with AI generated pull quotes was itself an anachronism because it imagined that in 2024, film critics can still be kingmakers, arbiters of taste, etc.
Re: the thing before about Megalopolis positioning itself as socially transformative agitprop while being highly esoteric, the most quaint thing of all might be Coppola thinking any movie could do that now, that theatrically released feature length movies still possess that kind of cultural capital. In the end the “Loose Change” videos have probably had more of an impact on society than Megalopolis ever will. But if this movie gets even one kid to read Goethe…
It’s October so I’m trying to make an effort to watch horror movies I haven’t seen before. Only two so far, probably don’t have it in me to do 31 like a maniac.
The Cabin in the Woods was fun. I grit my teeth when I saw it’s got that Whedon touch, but it’s alright. You can sometimes hear Chris Hemsworth’s accent desperately try to break through. Not scary in the slightest, but goofy fun.
You’re Next was alright, too. Much more of a black comedy at times than outright horror. One very good and satisfying kill near the end, though a pretty gut wrenching “oh wait shit oh no” payoff for a trap set up earlier on.
i watched frogman, a found footage horror about the loveland frog. positive points:
the frog looks pretty cool
they adhere to one of the more obscure elements of the loveland frog mythos by giving him a little wizard staff that shoots sparks out the top
it’s pretty funny whenever the main character, who accidentally filmed the frog on home video as a kid, solemnly announces something like “i’m gonna catch that frogman” in his quest to show the world the truth
when they get to loveland they find a tacky souvenir store selling a “frog flute” that’s just like a child’s recorder with a clay frog on the end which can supposedly summon the beast. and later they see a presence in the woods and chase it, and it turns out to be the proprietor in a frog costume trying to drum up business. but even after this reveal there’s a point when they’re wandering around in the woods and the main guy silently pulls out the flute and tries playing it while looking intent. that was pretty good.
otherwise… idk i didnt hate the non frog related content but having the main character be the sub danny mcbride vainglorious loser archetype only works when it’s more specific about the ways he’s a loser and also when the chaacter isn’t able to also do things like effortlessly pull out a thousand dollars(!!) to pay his friend to tag along for a weekend and film everything, or have his ex decide to postpone her big break in hollywood so she can follow him around like a dog on the basis of a five minute conversation. and then on the car there they do soulful bits abt how they’re childhood friends and secretly in love and slept together and both pretend it was a mistake so as not to get hurt again etc etc. it’s not what you want.
i know the question on everyones lips is how do they make the loveland frog a horror monster if he’s basically just a bipedal 3ft high frog walking around doin his own thing. well it brings me no satisfaction they take maybe the worst approach by just making it a lovecraft thing, cults and rlyeh and kidnapped virgins and the ultimate terror that is miscegenation etcetera. in my opinion it is doing a big frog dirty to suggest it would basically behave like a human celebrity. the celibate gay friend touches frog cum(?) and gets death boils but the girl gets close to full deviantart vored and ends up fine. at the end it suggests the true tragedy was the death of their relationship but there’s also an inexplicable mid credits scene of the main guy pulling out and regarding the frogman’s spark wand like it’s some signifying marvel movie thing before a dramatic cutto black.
overall opinion: some good shirts. whoever created the unity asset store vhs filter has a lot to answer for.
… well, had to refrain from doing the obvious joke of adding h,i,s,t and stars inbetween. Found footage at least has a concept, this doesn’t, but has charmingly low-key opener where def-not-KingKong fights a dead shark and toyboats.
Also loving the random shots of South Korea where you can see how fast things changed for them to become a global powerhouse. Sneaking Kong became my favourite character, because who wouldn’t turn a corner and be surprised by a 15 meter high ape just appearing out of thin air?
Dungeons&Dragons:
people seem to really love this, guess i am a cranky old grandpa. got a few laughs out of me, but main draw was Hugh Grant having a great time there.
Money Monster rewatch: Clooney also has a great time there, and some shots of them walking out to groundfloor NY look almost too good for such a movie, but then it is Jody F at the helm, plus Roberts and Clooney, someone seems to have a knack for that (not the game, but i would DEF watch Clooney doing a Knack Let’s Play )
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