I watched Fast X and I thought it was really bad.
Re-watched Transformers Rise of the Beast, and can confirm my first impression:
This movie has the most tsundere of all Optimus Primes, and i’d love to see someone greenlight an animated movie/show that totally leans into this 
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Optimus Prima Donna
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directed by the creator of Garth Marenghi himself
I kinda didn’t dig it because freudian horror misses me just about 100% of the time but I liked seeing something serious from holness
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Interesting, noticed it’s available on Tubi as well.
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ive been watching horror movies all month and watched nope (2022) ln it was pretty good. at this point im not watching a lot of like… recent commercial english-language films but i liked it more than a lot of things in that category ive seen over the past few years.
i dont really like to criticize a movie on the basis of its screenplay but given how central a role plot has to so many popular english films it’s kind of hard not to sometimes, so i was kind of let down by the big climax and some of the narrative events that occur there, like i see a thruline from the monkey sitcom subplot, which has this message of like, animals are exploited for cheap entertainment but we should respect the nature of animals to avoid incidents which are tragic to animals and humans alike
nope (2022) spoilers
to the scene where steven yuen’s character, family, friends, etc. are all eaten alive (which was genuinely horrifying!) by the jean jacket creature bc they don’t respect its existence as a carnivore. this is why the characters of keke palmer and daniel kaluuya are able to wrangle the creature, because they’re professional animal handlers…
but i guess that felt like a half-finished thought when the climax of the film involves a motorcycle chase where they defeat and potentially kill the creature? with a series of shots to let you know the protagonists are ok and they achieved their goals idk the whole thing felt so triumphant in a way that felt contradictory of other vibes in the movie
also not really sure what the point was of the cinematographer randomly going crazy during the climax, provoking the creature, and then dying (and risking his footage!) and i thought one of the points of the movie was that they basically train / condition jean jacket not to eat large plastic objects so why do they defeat it by feeding it a large plastic object…
but it had a lot of things i appreciated… i love the idea of a movie based around this dynamic of observing, trying to point cameras at something that doesnt want to be seen and which kills you for looking, and how much of the script was about people involved in various la-area media industries (minor child stars, on-set animal handlers, paparazzi) when it’s written by someone who has obviously worked in those industries like tv production and comedy before directing narrative features
but obviously i would 100% rather english pop culture consist of movies like this that feel original and inspired even if they are beholden to certain conventions
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i thought the ending was really bleak, like I took it as a pyrrhic victory where they’ve only really succeeded in recreating the dynamics explained in the first scene re: the black jockey, but as filmer rather than filmed
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it isn’t really a movie about the exploitation of animals, it is a movie about the exploitation of people in service of spectacle and about how the experiences and knowledge of people of color are consistently marginalized and minimized in ways that are directly and indirectly scarring
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Last night I watched The Hustler (1961). I basically knew about the Newman/Gleason pool faceoff and that they made a sequel in the 80’s that also starred Tom Cruise and thought I was signing up for, like, a feel good sports movie. Instead I got 2 hours of alcoholic grifter Paul Newman at absolute rock bottom, haunting the grimiest, saddest spaces known to man, and shacking up with a woman who seems to understand him basically because she also starts drinking bourbon at 8am. Even the final showdown between Newman and Gleason is a real fuck you and comes after a major gut punch. Great movie.
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I watched Paris is Burning after meaning to watch it for ten years. What a movie, incredible.
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there’s a documentary from 2019 about life on christopher street and I think it pairs SO WELL with paris is burning, also i think people actually might be more open and frank in pier kids prolly cuz the movie was made by a black queer man
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oh yeah of course i think the movie has a lot of themes and text and subtexts in general
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House III: The Horror Show is basically just Shocker but with Lance Henriksen.
My favorite – gaping hole turkey. I can’t imagine turkey being anybody’s favorite food – it’s like chicken but worse and it smells bad.
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i know this has been remarked upon a million times, but it is really funny how much better any random 80s movie looks than 95% of what is being produced now
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“damn they used to frame shots” - me at any garbage film. At the same time I’m like “films these days can’t be that bad? I must be curmudeony” but they’re films from like before I was born or films I didn’t grow up on. Nostalgia is so exploited these days it’s hard to tell if it’s coloring my opinion.
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It’s probably a mixture of having shot on celluloid filmstock (which has a texture/grain that gives the image and color you’re looking at a satisfying sort of “depth”), different lightning techniques, color grading, framerate, and practical effects and set constructions.
There were a handful of episodes of the original Twilight Zone, I want to say season 2, that were shot on videotape due to budget, and they look and feel very different and odd; this was eventually abandoned because they weren’t really saving much and it just sort of ruins the atmosphere of the show when it “feels” like you’re watching an afternoon soap opera.
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I watched Something Weird, a movie about a guy who gets electrocuted and becomes an ESPer but his face is badly burned, so a witch offers to give him his face back if he’ll love her. He then involves himself in a case to solve a murder which attracts the attention of the government so they send one of their playboy agents who comes bearing LSD. It was OK – a lot of stiff, 60s acting.
Orson Welles in the background watching disapprovingly.
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I saw this days ago but it gives me just the same kind of nightmare stress that seeing the guy who died standing up in Blue Velvet does. It’s just like an inexplicable image to me. I have no idea why this person looks like that, what they’re doing standing in that way, their face looks subtly wrong unmatched to the rest of the body… I am haunted randomly by an online image again
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Watched Kaurismaki’s latest, Fallen Leaves, last night at the AFI festival thing. It’s lovely. He really knows how to tell a nice story without it becoming too saccharine and his characters are never sanctimonious. I was dreading having to leave the theater.
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It’s a witch, but she’s played by a younger actress because she has a cloaked form that’s a younger woman. The pose is because this is a lower budget 60s movie so people are either hamming it up or completely stiff.
I’m watching The Keep.
Ian McKellen is terrible in this – his acting is the worst thing about the movie. The soundtrack is good but totally inappropriate for what’s going on most of the time. It feels like nobody in Tangerine Dream saw the movie, and then whoever set the tracks to the scenes also didn’t watch the movie. Apparently, this was originally like, three and half hours long, then two hours long, and now it’s an hour and thirty-five minutes. I want to see the original cut, or even the two hour cut because I’m at the hour and six minutes mark and now stuff is making less sense. (Now I’m at an hour and thirty and there’s no sense to be found here)
I thought this was going to be something a lot goofier based on the cover, though, it does often feel like somebody edited together an 80s movie about WW2 and an episode of some 80s Sentai show.
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