I mean, I had already seen it, so passing out during it didn’t do much (though the same thing happened during Triumph of the Will, which I hadn’t seen and it’s kind of surreal to black out to endless shots of city roofs and coming to only to see a goddamn Nazi rally)
the rest of the not-crazy parts are good too (I mean, compared to flying head tunnel, they’re not too crazy)
it’s good because it finally reveals to the world how depraved jimmy stewart is
counterpoint: Harvey came out 9 years before Vertigo
I saw Climax.
Is there a more Baphomet movie? I liked it a lot. It has the two best dance scenes I’ve ever seen, including one entirely from an overhead PoV. My jaw hit the floor.
The rest of the movie is usual Noé horror. It captures the sort of raw, pointless violence of, like, a fight between drunk losers behind a club, partly thanks to a love of transgression of natural cinema rules (rotating camera, ill-fitting, diegetic music, long shots) that add some unpredactibility
TBH Noé reminds me of Van Trier and I feel like we might found out soon that he’s a huge asshole too. In any case this is his best work
A Grande Arte/High Art/Exposure/The Knife is a movie where peter coyote is an american photographer in rio who has a sex worker friend he sometimes photographs that gets killed after she stumbles onto some conspiracy, and then they think he’s involved so he gets stabbed and an outrage done to his girlfriend. He wants to do more than remember his sex worker friend with a photograph, so he tracks down a guy in a photo he had taken of a knife fight on the street and asks him to train him in knife fighting. his girlfriend just wants to move on with her life but she comes home and he’s training with giant man tcheky karyo in his living room, making stabbing motions with a ruler, and she’s all “what the hell” and he says “Oh that’s Hermes, he’s a persev” “a persev?” “perforate and sever, he’s a master of the technique.” “perforate and sever WHAT?” “Perforate and sever, that’s all.”
Knives are a true horror
The Birds is really boring and dull and the it takes way way too long for the first bird attack to happen. And the first bird attack is hilariously bad. So is the second.
The school attack almost works. I hate they keep cutting from the beautiful outside shots to the shit soundstage/rear projection. With 50 years between then and now I can think of a dozen ways to build the tension better than a thousand crows are immediately behind her and silent. Like almost certainly a lot of horror grammar comes from this and yet I immediately connect in my mind the years of innovation in shot and tension composition.
I said the school scene almost works but man it really looks like amateur hour.
Then that following restaurant scene and attack scene is completely crazy and I loved it. And almost everything following it is great. Except for the scene where Hitchcock punishes his leading lady because he’s a fucking monster and will ruin his own tension to do so.
I really liked Chunk Broadside and absolutely the inspiration for Audrey.
There has to be like three Birds remakes that could absolutely do better than this and are all bad and boring right?
Edit: oh and the mom talking about her dead husband scene was too fucking real and came out of a different film.
el auge del humano / the human surge is so good
nobuo nakagawa films are the best tales from the crypt adaptations
I watched “Body Snatchers” (1993) the other night and it’s stuck with me. I typically stay away from 90’s genre cinema because it just hasn’t aged that well for the most part, compared to the 80’s and 70’s. However, I heard on good authority that this was an exception. I also didn’t know that Abel Ferrara was the director and I’m always down for auteurs doing trashy genre stuff, which is kinda what’s he’s known for anyway but whatever.
A lot of the concerns of 80’s horror movies were basically some form of gentrification. Pet Cemetery and Poltergeist are two that stick out off the top of my head. Both movies are concerned with gentrification broadly and have a healthy skepticism of what constitutes a community in the wake of Reagan’s America. Ultimately I believe these films have a cautious optimism that we’re all going to dig ourselves out of our societal rut and reform into unified communities centered around mutual understanding and shared experience.
Body Snatchers completely shits on this late 80’s optimism with a bleak depiction of neighborhoods as nothing more than bleak reflections of our own military industrial complex. Body Snatchers suggests we lost the culture war, the difference between a community and a lynch mob doesn’t exist anymore. The conflict is over, and not only do we no longer have a say on where we are, the concept of identity is now under assault.
Please excuse the cliched writing but I’m dashing this off at work while looking over my shoulder to ensure I’m not caught. Body Snatchers is legitimately terrifying, bleak, and does not fuck around at a brisk 90 minutes. If you want to watch it, rent it on itunes because the Amazon one sucks.
Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a great piece of cinema. I should rewatch that and Carpenter’s The Thing as a double feature because 'tis the season.
i just watched Ghost in the Shell and like, idk how much i care for the plot but the dumb philosophy stuff was fun and the Mood of it all, mg
just ticks every box of what i’m after in 80s-90s anime. those intermission scenes especially. the music (fuck em up Yoko Kanno), the sound effects (like, the footsteps, and that one ringing collision/piercing noise all anime from that era used), the glow and the rain animations, yes yes ok thnku. the version on the streaming service even had the shitty dub which was perfect
The music in the movie was by Kenji Kawai, Yoko Kanno only did the Stand Alone Complex Series
lol thanks for the correction. fuck em up Kenji Kawai
Esky doesn’t care as long as SOMEONE gets fucked up
Torn Curtain has Paul Newman and Julie Andrews in there prime. And Julie is given very little to do and Paul has to play mostly “man tired of dealing with a woman’s shit.”
It features great dialog like “East Berlin but that’s behind the Iron Curtain.” Thanks screenwriter writing a 1966 film during the height of the cold war and after James Bond showed up to be an idiot moron in at least two movies.
James Bond is real stupid in those early films when he isn’t being a sexual predator.
I guess this film had three standout scenes. One echoing the mom scene in The Birds of an Older Polish Woman begging for our heroes to be sponsors for her American Visa. Lady gives a hell of a performance.
Then there is the very long scene where Paul has to kill a gru agent. It’s kind of cool because it goes on for a loonnngggg time. And only real scene of danger the rest of this film has this sort of false danger where it turns out all of East Berlin trying to capture them are easily thwarted.
The third standout scene which made me clap and scream was Paul Neuman with his shirt ripped open in the Jeff Goldbulm pose. Cool job movie.
I am 10 hitchcock films in and I couldn’t tell you what the heck makes a film “hitchcockian”. Audience participation? I know I slammed on Vertigo pretty hard and I stand by how I feel bit I heard and remembered it was number one on the sight and sound list and I’m just going man what?
I don’t even want to knock it for how it looks but we can start with all the rear projection stuff looking like garbage. Hitchcock sure does love that rear projection and set switching which looks about as bad as Episode 1.
I am going to spend a day looking at that S&S list and having emotions about how much of the list I strongly dislike.
Man, Citizen Kane is better than Vertigo any day, what in the heck man
