My shifts are 6:30-9am and 2pm-12am, if you’ve got something that can work around that schedule
I watched Robocop again on a whim and I’m pretty sure it’s gotta be a perfect movie.
Edit: I gotta admit that the Robocop rewatch was inspired by these two posts…there are a ton of reasons the first Robocop is leagues better than its sequels (better script, better director, better plot, Kurtwood Smith), but I’m gonna say that Mary Louise Parker’s older sister was the secret spice all along…
7 Likes
Went to a new cinema! I am really fortunate that there are literally hundreds of beautiful cinemas in this city.
We watched The Seed of the Sacred Fig which is a slow burner about the family of an investigative judge during the Mahsa Amini protests in Tehran.
Genuine footage of the protests is woven in and serves as a window into the outside world with characters frequently locked inside a claustrophobic apartment.
It reminded me of later Hitchcock in terms of pacing and structure. The parallels to something like Vertigo are most apparent in the final section of the film where paranoia and distrust is through the roof and to top it off there’s a nice rendition of the hide and seek chase set in ruins of an ancient village.
Recommended! Here’s the trailer.
13 Likes
Oh and I just watched an interview with the director. Apparently the film was passed to an editor here in Germany to cut and he did it without any knowledge of Persian. Fascinating how many hoops they had to go through just to get this made.
5 Likes
animated spin-offs of non-animated works
The Animatrix, the differing animation styles for the shorts kept my attention, “another one that looks like Peter Chung” then Peter Chung’s section, “ah, not quite so much”. Beyond was the most interesting, with the most banal conclusion
Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim tied-in with Games Workshops’ latest edition of Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, you can buy minis of all the characters. animation is nothing remarkable, lots of 2D characters over 3D scenes. story is great pointless war stuff, Brian Cox as Helm Hammerhand is flawlessly played, racist against Dunlendings & angry enough to punch each one to death in the head
both these raise the same end thought “there should be way more animated adaptations of films, it’s so easy to get faithful, artistic renditions of setting + locations + likenesses + the same actors doing VA years after they age out of their characters”. I would watch a hundred Middle-earth adaptations covering all the Silmarillion. give me Hugo Weaving sonorously describing the destruction of the Two Trees and their offspring in dramatic episodic form, Ungoliant powering up for multiple episodes
5 Likes
Watched Dolemite for the first time in probably almost 20 years, this time without being an irony poisoned “I’m gonna watch bad movies and make fun of them, lol” young adult. It’s a good time! Absolute mess of a movie but they went for it, gotta give 'em that.
5 Likes
The latest Hellboy movie written and directed by the guy who made Crank seems at first a refreshingly straight forward horror movie take on the character we’ve really only seen rendered on screen in an epic blockbuster fashion, but all things considered The Crooked Man sure does drag and look ugly as fuck and hardly surprises. Was hoping to have something nice to say about the movie in the end, but I don’t. It looked like a fan film distributed via the internet but lacked any of the amateur charm that some people might find in those. It was also too literal of an adaptation of the story it’s based on, with poor additions like a characterless human sidekick and a sketch of a b-plot about Hellboy’s mom.
1 Like
Was searching around old posts a bit for Reasons and I found something I have no memory of saying:
hmmm…
brb phoning my lawyer to sue Disney for back royalties
4 Likes
watched hou’s flowers of shanghai, probably my favorite movie i’ve seen since costa’s vitalina varela and the daughters of fire 2 months ago. gorgeous and oppressive, i love the way shots fade in and out like heavy eyelids opening and closing and the hypnotic score and the yellow-orange hazy candlelight which reminded me of fassbinder’s querelle. i was surprised because i didn’t like millennium mambo when i saw it years ago but i was really into this.
8 Likes
dai-bosatsu touge is amazing. just peak meaningless violence. gorgeous. bleak.
also when hyoma is practicing stabbing the beam of dayligt peeking into the dojo i thought “he’s doing this a lot what if they show the floor all worn out from him stomping it a billion times” and they did
1 Like
Self Reliance
A pretty good film about paranoid schizophrenia up until the ending which is really weak.
Perl — was kinda expecting more(?), guess the visuals alone don’t carry this for me.
Bad Boys Ride or Die … uuuh, the best thing in this was the Bay cameo, what a waste of time.
1 Like
old movie night will continue until moral improves
Hellzapoppin’
an adaptation of an unadaptable stage show. theatres would balk at holding prime seats for patsies, shills, and plants that would take part in the show by heckling, fighting, selling tickets for rival shows
the film adaptation has so many gags, you can trace a line from vaudeville to Zucker, Abrahams, & Zucker straight through this film. some might say they’re corny, but even the most tired ones are delivered with vigour & enthusiasm that I bought in and matched my response to
the fourth wall breaking happens mostly in Ole & Chic (the creators) being walked through the planned adaptation by the scriptwriter as a frame story, arguing with themselves from the narrative back to the frame story, and then again with the projectionist (sometimes all at once)
the (proposed) narrative is originally a boring romance, but Ole & Chic mess it up into a Shakespearean comedy with mistaken identities, deliberate sabotage twisted into unintentional success, recriminations, celebrations. plus the dumbest slapstick gags. some singing (a musical?? the narrative story is one), broken up by title cards directing specific audience members to immediately leave the cinema
one song (Watch the Birdie) impressed me, the visuals of partygoers diving into pools, bouncing from pond to pond, freeze-frames & reversed footage would not have looked out of place in a music video for a shoegaze/indie electro song. or a youtube poop.
Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers put on a hell of a performance (& are the only other original cast members from the show besides Ole & Chic)
am skimming through it now for screenshots and trying not to laugh too much
11 Likes
I’ve been wanting to see this one for quite awhile
2 Likes
make this +1 from today on, never heard of that one before and sounds good, thanks for the recc @falsedan
1 Like
I saw the Robbie Williams monkey music bio pic despite knowing nothing about him. It ruled.
2 Likes
I was worried with the start of The Human Tornado that it might not be as good as Dolemite, but it very very quickly just ramps everything to an absurd degree and is just so fucking wild.
The scene where Dolemite is eating a woman out and it suddenly cuts to footage of him eating a big piece of ham in a restaurant and then immediately back to the sex scene is…incredible.
The fight scenes in this one are also better. Just Dolemite nonstop making weird noises, all the moves carried out at like 3x speed, lots of instant rewinds and replays. He manages to strangle two dudes to death somehow by putting pressure on the back of their necks? I don’t think that’s possible but if anyone could do it…
5 Likes
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I (what a title!) showed up on Netflix today so I finally watched it and, wow, did this past observation on the trajectory of MI and Brosnan/Craig-era Bond really become a dark prophecy
I really felt like, if that is where they wanted to go with this, they needed to do more than just a few half-assed flashback retcon stuff, or at least not hold so much back for the Part 2. Esai Morales is fine as the villain, but really does not have enough personality to be both the human agent of a rogue AI as well as some kind of evil spectre from Hunt’s never-before-alluded-to pre-IMF past. In movies like this in particular I really don’t buy it when any antagonist’s motivations are just “he is obsessed with being wicked and doing crimes… and is particularly obsessed with ending the world and also most of all killing the main character…”
Like, one fairly obvious direction to go with this is that Gabriel is not actually the guy Hunt thinks he is, whoever that is, but has just been made to look like that by the rogue AI to unnerve him, but I feel like that’s not a dramatic enough reveal to save for part 2 so maybe they aren’t doing it
Anyway I didn’t mean to get so deep into the Lore here, posting about it mainly to say how much I appreciate a movie that can have the lines “Whoever controls the Entity controls the Truth”
Anytime anyone says anything about The Entity I got super hyped, but other than that they did this gimmick in this movie maybe 2-3 to many times, where like the characters finish each other’s sentences but it’s just more exposition/plot dump stuff. Like I’m sorry a million dutch angles and distributing the dialogue among 3 different characters does not make that stuff any more interesting. I also thought it was funny that they would have a few minutes of rants about The Entity that feel like they could have been ripped from some kind of critical theory reader on cybernetics or simulacra something and then a very obviously inserted pull back down to earth, like “The entity now controls the outward manifestation of reality, but reality itself establishes the preconditions for the entity’s manifestation…So that means we need to steal the key from this man in the airport?”
The movie works best when it feels like watching a Buster Keaton movie while listening to like Marshall McLuhan weiner audiobooks. I had a literary theory prof who was like obsessed with Terminator 3 for this kind of reason, and I feel like this is probably his new favorite movie ever made
4 Likes
yeah 7 was definitely the worst since 3
still excited for 8 though
1 Like
i think i just like these movies a lot, like even when they are bad they are bad in a way that feels very loopy and high-minded in a fun way. a weird thing i sort of half-appreciated about this was that mcquarrie seemed to really want to try to pay homage to de palma in a sort of ‘full circle’ kind of way, but this is really not a strength of his. like de palma was playing with a very strange kind of alchemy combining death drive erotica and chemically induced diarrhea as a narrative device. not anyone can get away with that. all you are left with is a bunch of dutch angles of sweaty guys reciting dialogue in an empty room
5 Likes