after midnight we had when harry met sally on and i only kinda half watched it but wow, that’s dogshit
this specific world of romance is so completely alien to me
like i can’t stand this type of romcom because it’s like… kinda unbearable and they always have some kinda foul smelling sensibility to them. can’t take a moral high ground on it tho considering what does get through to me, but you know, the fucked romantic arts usually work on an acknowledgement that none of this is ok where as here it’s like, yeah, of course the movie will move on the trajectory that they can’t just be friends after that whole opening. it’s the world as the most obnoxious people you sometimes are forced to hang around during christmas sees it. it’s so dull. these people are annoying to even listen to.
Watched a whole lot of movies this year over the holiday:
*The Hobbit: barely an hour long and still the best adaption of Tolkien to the screen. The spooky soundtrack periodically punctuated with cheery folk nails the vibe of the book, and I love how fucking weird everything looks.
*Babylon 5: The Gathering: straight guy horny FMV and 6/10 PS3 game energy, radiates charisma and enthusiasm enough to compensate for it all being a nerdy garbage fire. (We can do it ‘cuz we’re all CG!)
*Tokyo Godfathers: Best Christmas movie, Hana is one of the best trans women in anything ever. Satishi Kon was truly the greatest.
*The Night is Short, Walk on Girl!: Big OVA energy (positive). So many cool sequences and playful ideas. Watched it right after Tokyo godfathers sharing a Sapporo with my GF, good vibes.
*Stalker: Boring in a way that forced me to think about what I was watching to the extent that it stopped being boring. Gorgeous shot after gorgeous shot, and the appropriate feeling of slow moving apocalyptic inertia. You can feel the toxic chemicals seeping out of every scene, and now I get where so many visuals in ‘liminal’ shit come from.
One of the most critically acclaimed movies of all time is good, who’d have thought?
(Bonus shoutout to binging Brave Hero Yoshihiko, not a movie at all but delightful)
roadhouse (gyllenhaal edition): actually kind of liked this one tbh, it has probably the strongest ‘they don’t make em like this anymore’ vibes of any movie i’ve seen recently. most movies that illicit that kind of reaction are actually not much like the old school films that purportedly inspired them, but this one has the plot and pacing of a true VHS c-movie classic. doesn’t hold a candle to the swayze version, but expertly captures the energy of the inferior mid budget action movies of the 80s-90s, especially the way the climax of the movie is just like… a bunch of things happening for no particular reason. they do all this build up about gyllenhaal’s guy’s dark past and remorse over killing a guy in the ring in a fight, but rather than actually reckon with that and commit to a life of non violence it is resolved by basically becoming his super power… like ‘i’m such a tortured soul… when i get angry… i lose my mind… and become a super hero… i’m just too powerful’ is that how the original road house ends? i don’t care.
saturday night: didn’t get to watch all of this one but i kind of liked what i saw. i was most surprised by the guy playing garrett morris, and by the fact that garrett morris is in many ways the second lead of the movie (?). i would probably have enjoyed it even more if it was just a garrett morris biopic starting that guy who plays him. worst part is every female character seems incredibly underwritten. other than lorne and garrett morris there’s nothing particularly deep about any of the characters, just a series of impressions and vignettes, but it still manages to capture a kind of engaging backstage-at-a-high-school-theatre-production energy in all the scenes that aren’t lorne worrying about various things. except all the women are just like… cartwheeling around coquettishly and never really get to do anything. real bad vibes for a 2024 movie that has a character based off gilda radner in it. certainly you could have thought of something interesting for her to say or do! but, again, i only saw half of it so who’s to say.
hit man: another ‘they don’t make em like this anymore’ movie with an ending where characters solve their problems with violence despite the thesis of the first 2/3 of the movie being about how violence is bad. i guess the moral of the story is that you can change your personality from nerdy to cool, and you can also change it from lawful good to chaotic neutral. idk i think people liked this one more than roadhouse but they’re wrong. the main guy is pretty cool. in fact, he would probably be able to do roadhouse in a more true to the spirit of swayze way than gyllenhaal. that’s something to ponder. but anyway this movie is… bad, folks. has the most egregious examples i’ve ever seen of the film trope where a character is a teacher and gives a lecture to their students that happens to be telling you the theme of the movie. this happens multiple times throughout the movie. it feels like it’s practically every other scene. like the main characters will do something, then the next scene is him in front of his class telling you a philosophical interpretation of what you just saw. then more stuff happens, then he explains it to the class again. it’s really over the top and doesn’t seem to be self-aware enough to read it as some kind of like meta cinematic parody of that trope (which i’m sure has been done before, i want to say like in a david wain movie? idk)
megalopolis is so beautifully embarrassing. a bizarre golden record to the future legacy written by an incredibly out of touch zillionaire pervert. southland tales on melatonin. shot like a bank commercial. held my attention better than almost anything i was absolutely on its idiotic wavelength
One of my resolutions I’m acting on now is to not just eat art, but actively verbalize a reaction to it. Get used to reading some posts, I guess.
I’ve been watching many silent films over the past few weeks. Not the technique-rich silent films of the 1920s, but the nascent form that cinema began taking in the 1910s. Today, I watched The Child of Paris from 1913. It was directed by Léonce Perret, an artist working under Louis Feuillade. I had actually just come out of watching two of Feuillade’s serials, so it was easy to make comparisons. Feuillade tended to keep his camera still and mostly cut in order to show us a bit of writing or change scenes. Perret makes more liberal use of POV and tracking shots. A man looks through binoculars and we see what he sees. A girl leaves the kitchen and walks to her bedroom; the camera follows her and cuts through the threshold separating the two rooms. Figures are sometimes silhouetted against a bright landscape or city skyline.
This is one of those old films that is watched to understand what state-of-the-art meant back then, but there are affecting moments. The story centers on a girl who loses her father in a Moroccan uprising (bad start). Her mother dies of grief and her uncle gets drafted to fight in Asia. Now she’s left to an orphanage that barely seems to care about her. She runs away and gets kidnapped by an old swindler who works with a young man. The heart of the film, really what gives the film any heart at all, is the young man’s relationship with the young girl.
Not all films from this time period are mere history pieces. I think Feuillade’s serials are still really entertaining and Lubitsch’s early work already bears his trademark wit. One trivia piece I learned after watching The Child of Paris is that Perret moved to Richmond, Virginia to start his American film career. I never would have expected that. Now I’d really like to know if there is some trace of his time here.
There are a lot of great deep-focus shots in his serials, but my favorite moments are like when five cops unload their pistols into an anaconda in Fantômas.
I like all the Licorice Kid bits in Judex the most of Feuillade’s stuff. The most lovable little urchin behavior they could come up with was ‘this kid will pick up half smoked cigarettes off the street and start smoking them!’ and its amazing
I remember seeing this as a child & being unnerved by the menace in it. I suppose being a child in the late 19th century was a terrifying time with the same kind of capricious violence of Oz similar enough to the non-fantasy world
was a little shocked as an adult to see it started with Dorothy being sent to a mental hospital for ECT to dispel thoughts of Oz.
the first wheelers were as terrifying as I remembered
I liked the Nome King’s claymation minions, and his unannounced transformation from claymation to puppet to made-up performer as Dorothy’s companions were eliminated
makes me think I’ve been exposed to too much violent media. my wife called it “heavy” for its casual portrayal of callous death, and while I rationalised the action of the monster easily, the scene of Hans carrying the corpse of his 8-year-old daughter through the wedding festivities in town was striking and moved me.
heavily staged & chatty, clear play adaptation. I though Karloff would be taller than the other cast. a healthy disregard for incidental continuity and nonformulaic dialogue was sometimes uncanny
Saw Nosferatu in the theater the other day and the more time passes I think the less it sticks with me.
Granted, I was also super sickly that day and felt like shit, but it didn’t make the same impression on me that The Witch or The Lighthouse did (I still haven’t seen the viking one…heard it got meddled up, though).
I also worked my way through The Substance over the course of several hours across two days (I’m very squeamish) and holy shit. Now there’s one that’ll stick with ya, like it or not.
I have been deathly sick and trying to watch movies to take my mind off of it.
Today I watched The Zone of Interest, On The Waterfront, and Shin Kamen Rider, in that order. I really loved all three films. The Zone of Interest was pretty haunting. I appreciate how you can’t really enter the work without integrating the framing. On The Waterfront is just a whirlwind tour de force, Brando is incredible and Bernstein just cooks all film, audacious and lush. Shin Kameo Rider was a blast, the soundtrack was magnificent. And that pacing! They really just did a whole tv season in a movie, huh
oh yeah, i also rewatched 1917. not nearly as good as the three i mentioned above, but it has its moments, and the oner conceit + deakins means the cinematography is excellent. mainly i’m just a sucker for WWI
I watched Once Upon a Time in Anatolia last night. @TooManyCookbooks and I had agreed on it after watching a couple of trailers. 1 hour into the movie, she declared, “We should’ve watched Emilia Perez.” This is because the entire first part of the movie has very little external action. It’s all middle-aged Turkish men talking in cars. The protagonist, a doctor, looks vaguely like @Felix when the lighting and angle hit just right.
A few more superficial things, the photography captures that perfect HD digital night-lighting that we have all grown to love and adore. We’re out here in a rural Turkish plain that works as a stand-in for Leone’s Spain which had worked as a stand-in for Ford’s Arizona. It is frequently beautiful even though we understand the conditions of the humans that live in it are miserable.The conversations that fill up the barren valleys are spoken by wearied but self-sure professionals. Their job isn’t to bring justice per se; it’s to check off all the boxes of bureaucratic routine so that we can say justice is upheld. If flattening the truth makes the process smoother, then so be it.
When we watched the trailer, we were promised a police procedural. It is literally that; however, it chafes against genre conventions to such an extent that anyone hoping for a taut psychological thriller is going to be very sore. This is not tight. It’s languid and natural. The killer isn’t a sadist, mocking the police as he puts them off track. Actually, the suspect spends most of his time staring silently 1,000 miles away. Occasionally, he puts his head in his hands and cries. Meanwhile, the prosecutor, police officers, and doctor talk about yogurt that is so thick that it needs to be cut with a knife. When they find the corpse, they remark on how he looks like Clark Gable. Wait, prosecutor, you look like Clark Gable. Often, it feels close to the black comedy of Coen Brothers, but too much happens in their movies for the comparison to stick.
