Deadpool: Whatever. Cgi fight scenes bore me. Shout out to all the comic characters I loved getting their time on the screen though.
Deadpool + Wolverine: Less whatever, more consistently funny, too long, bad fight scenes.
Logan: Genuinely good?! Can’t believe they made a cape movie that was actually like… a real movie.
Dreamscape: Boring but has two extremely cool dream sequences and Sydow as a psychic researcher so in the end it was just okay.
Dinner in America: Starts by following a repugnant asshole and gradually morphs into an effective love story. The two leads are incredible.
Hundreds of Beavers: The most inventive movie I’ve seen in decades AND an instant part of the game developer’s canon. Looney tunes ridiculousness from frame 1.
Rewatches:
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2: Give them the chainsaw wiggle, Bubba!
Serial Mom: Fashion has changed! Beverley is the best.
Escape From NY: They don’t make movies that look this good anymore. The lensing on the fire light!!
Big Trouble in Little China: The best kids movie ever made, absolutely non stop fun front to back.
Sleepaway Camp: All timer slasher, the best in its sub genre (summer camp horror) with an effective undercurrent of gender and sexual commentary. John Waters does F13.
Naked Gun 2: Before these directors stopped being funny, but you can see the brain rot creeping in.
Hudson Hawk: Another “simply fun” movie. “Stop, you’re being a disgrace to your country!!!”
finally got around to give Civil War a spin, watched it today.
noticed i kinda forgot why people were complaining about it in the first place. read later that the A24 ad campaign led people to expect something different than the movie delivers, so ymmv if you haven’t experienced any of that, i guess?
was in the mood for a downer movie, and didn’t expect a roadmovie tbh! When they set off in NYC, thought that the cast was assembled like a ‘past,present,future’-triptychon, with the driver (Wagner) being a bit of an outlier. Guess he filled in for a modern day dad-role.
Reckless young journalist becoming more and more daring made me expect a plot-twist that never happened. Was wondering if it is a statement on Social Network Etiquette (re: fifteen minutes of fame) but in the end it doesn’t fully lend itself to that. However, strong statement stands that for That One Good Shot, humanity/cameradie/compassion is figuratively killed/literally left lying on the floor… like, not even checking if your companion is still alive was brutal to watch, that resonated with me.
Kirsten Dunst becoming more human during the journey also threw me off for a bit, until i remembered exposition dump earlier in the movie. Kinda liked that angle more and more the longer it went on, especially as you could map it to next generation taking over the baton and Mdm Dunst being able to relax … this happening in the worst moment tho felt a bit like a subtle (or not-so-subtle?) stab at The Message the movie is missing at face value, namely that current journalism is Sleepwalking Into Danger because it falls asleep during point blank shootout, while next gen is trying to get the edgiest shot, when ‘shooting first, asking later’ has become a viable political discourse? Probably just me thinking too much though.
Just for kicks i watched the opening scene right after the end again, and it only clicked then that the opening scene was Garland trying to be clever … tbh the fact that I didn’t catch on means he succeeded, so kudos to him.
Generally, i feel more and more that i kinda like what this movie does, probably just me trying to see things when there’s none … so will wait for a rewatch to see if it changes my impression.
the substance has such fun grossout shit. a real blast. also has the weird indiana jones 5 thing where the hot elderly actor is playing someone ten years younger because honestly it is more believable. incredibly french view of what life in the united states is like almost feels GTA like in it’s over-the-top get-the-details-wrong version of L.A. sometimes but it’s such a fairy tale that it doesn’t matter anyway.
Watched nuDune on the flight home and it’s genuinely one of the worst films I’ve watched in recent memory. Poorly shot, plodding, miscast, underutilized master actors, ugly, stupid, just generally fucking terrible. Villaneuve is a hack. Maybe in another forty years we’ll get a good adaptation.
I think like the last 90 minutes of the first villeneuve dune and the middle hour of the second one are pretty good but overall hard pressed to say I really liked either of them
the first 40 or so minutes of lynch’s are great and have fantastic vision but I can’t really defend the rest. his cast is mostly better too
It’s fair to look at Civil War and pick at the way it doesn’t line up to reality. But I really don’t think it’s meant to be viewed as sci-fi or speculative at all. It’s just a movie about how alienating it is to recognize oneself as a disconnected observer of atrocities, which is a more and more common subject position these days, and war photography is just a unabstracted subject to explore that idea through.
But it’s fair to think we don’t need more stories like that or that it’s navel gazing. It is and maybe we don’t. But I appreciate the film.
One of my favorite books! I’ve read it easily dozens of times. Part of why nuDune is so bad I suppose. Completely discards everything human about the book in favor of self-important grandiosity.
read cordwainer smith’s norstrilia instead. It came out around the same time, has a lot of surprising surface level similarities (immortality drug harvested from giant animals on an arid planet patrolled by ornithopters, messianic bildungsroman that is actually the manipulations of ancient political orders constructing a narrative, computers are illegal), but catgirls instead of fremen. The power of sci fi.
Being stuck in bed with a 103.9 fever I thrashed around and tried to sleep.
When it finally started going down I watch To Live And Die In LA. Had a good time with it. I like Friedken just made a thing. I like when a movie has convictions. No lessons. Go Home.
Before my fever I had watched Malcom X which was a truely excellent movie the best you can ask for with a bio-pic. I really didn’t know anything about the man. You really understand is positive and negative qualities. Feel like between this and JFK I’ve exhausted actually good bio-pics.
With that setup I then watched the George Lucas classic American Graffiti. Boomers really had a grip on culture even when they were too young to have grip huh? What the hell. This is 1973 being nostalgic for 1962? As the child of this exact age of Boomer Parents (born in 50 and 52) I grew up with all these songs in my ears all the time. So that creates warm feelings. George Lucas wrote this script on a dare from Coppola to write something that would appeal to a wide audience while he was writing his bizarre sex-sci-fi THX1138.
Lucas was always gonna fuck over culture huh when the hotrod’s license plate says THX1138? Anyways George should have made more things cynically appealing to normies because this is a real human movie filled with idiot teenagers. It does show what I think Georgie though 1962 was like as a white suburbanite who saw Rebel Without A Cause. There are the themes he wanted to express in it and the themes that are actually present which hey, good contrast. It’s like a good movie despite itself.
It completely ignore race. There is like a latino coded gang which says they killed a guy last night and threaten to kill one of our heroes unless he comes along on their adventures. Another hero has to drag along a unknown 13 year old (George…). Richie Cunningham is such a sack of shit in the modern lense it is impossible to reconcile how he got the longest running sitcom of all time from this. But it’s the strength of the female performances that he’s shown to be a sack of shit. God he’s gonna ruin his girlfriend’s life. I’ve seen her cardigan in so many repro amekaji brands so I know that’s from this stupid movie.
Wow I didn’t think I’d have this much to say about American Grafitti either!
EEPHUS probably my favorite movie of the year… caught it the last night of the film festival with 4 friends before flying back home, I don’t think it’s getting a wide release until March but see it when you can
i went and saw Megalopolis on tuesday bc i was certain it wouldn’t hold another week at my local theater. it did, weirdly, because there were four of us at the screening
not much to add beyond what was already said above and probably better than i can articulate. i wholeheartedly agree that the film is silly but i also cannot dislike it in any way shape or form. it feels like a film devoid of overt cynicism, so certain of itself and its impact that it plows through with the theatrical dialogue and blunt messaging. it’s been said probably dozens of times but it feels like a movie that’s going to flop now and become a cult classic later.
in many many ways it reminded me of Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland, but in a different genre. everything relating to the city in the title especially, and all the considerations around the power of positivity, of belief. i loved both for the same reasons.
i haven’t dug an Adam Driver performance this much since Midnight Special too. it’s nice to see him as leading man and stretch all of his acting muscles to cartoonish degrees sometimes. the whole dream nightmare sequence at the coliseum is eye-candy. there are multiple shots and scenes that will visually stay with me for a very long time (that visual of the characters standing on that giant clock face overlooking the city is one among many). i can’t fault it on a stylistic level.
i’m glad Coppola made the film he always wanted to make. i walked out of the screening thinking that he’s very likely happy with it, and in some ways it’s probably the most important thing as an artist, despite how much an audience will reject your work.
I also did not really like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice mostly because like 2/3 of the movie was just the characters doing shtick on their own and not really bouncing off of one another in a meaningful way. good production design and everyone is individually good in it but it was a weird way to waste an ensemble. was feeling kinda grumpy about having disliked both that and the substance since those were the only movies I’d gone to regular non rep screenings of in months but some better stuff is about to get a wider release
Balto is average, Steele is too malevolent to take seriously. was impressed by the bear fight art and looney-tunes animation
Bob Hoskins voices the snow goose with a russian accent. he described the role as: “What is going on?! I used to have a career! Now I’m playing a goose!”
surprised that the animators clearly did not want to fuck the dogs while making it clear that the dogs wanted to fuck each other
