Yeah, I loved Spring Breakers! This feels like a much more slight movie with less to say, but if you liked Spring Breakers then you’d probably like this.
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i watched the live action Ghost in the Shell movie with dongle this weekend to satisfy our morbid curiosity and it was just so bad. i was tempted to write a long post explaining exactly why it’s bad, but it’s not worth it. just a garbage film that misses every point of GitS. in that way, it’s almost remarkable.
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All plastic shell no ghost to tell
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The supporting cast is excellent.
idk how one could even tell that lol. i think it’s neat that Beat Takeshi obviously negotiated to never have to be standing for more than 2 minutes total throughout the whole movie, though.
without undermining how dumb it was to cast Johansson as the major, i’m going to say that, after watching it, i think the casting ends up being one of the least of the movie’s issues.
i just saw us and the last time i felt the way i feel rn was after i saw good time. it was beautiful and cathartic. the white yuppie daughters wearing black flag and dead kennedys shirts was crazy
the tethered are those stuck inside the cycle-prison of poverty and being labeled as “other” by those who are allowed to see the sky. fuck
my dad needs to watch the beach bum because its just him
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Aquaman is great. Everyone talks about how Hollywood blockbusters are made for Chinese audiences now but aquaman is the only one to tap in to the specific mode of camp you see in really schlocky fantasy martial arts shows. i like how much of it was about finding powerful weapons and mastering special moves your tragic mentor taught you
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I watched all of Prospect last night and loved it. It’s clearly a short film stretched to feature length, and it really doesn’t need to be as long as it is, but it’s one of those movies where you really enjoy the feel of it, and it want it to keep going.
Climax and ending is eh. Not bad, just, nothing really that leaves an impression.
If you’re into this aesthetic, definitely check it out:
(here’s the only trailer I could find that doesn’t spoil the full, beat-for-beat entirety of the movie)
I really enjoyed Aquaman while I was watching it, then instantly could not recall a single detail about it the second it was over. It was like slamming a Dew.
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Yeah, I agree. Prospect is stretched out a bit, but enjoyable all the way through. I love the depiction of moon-mining as extracting crystals from booby-trapped subterranean Cronenberg creatures in the deep woods.
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Us had the exact same dumbass opening shot as Climax, lmao. A TV in the center with VHS tapes of the film’s biggest influences sitting on the shelves to the sides. What is in the air in 2019 that directors think they can get away with a shot like that!
But Us was overall fantastic though. It had a lot to say and a lot to chew on, which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for Climax. There is such density of meaning in there, and so much one can read into it. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading The Society of the Spectacle, but it feels like a Situationist parable in a way.
The underground tunnels are this empty nightmare pastiche of visual motifs from shopping malls, schools, and prisons… The people above ground are going through their glamorous privileged yuppie lives while the underclass below mirror their actions exactly, but in this barren and nightmarish void. They mime interacting with objects that aren’t there. They mimic social interactions without any speech, without any social content. They seem to believe they’re living those real lives we see up above.
You could say those prisoners represent all of us, transfixed by the Spectacle, the constructed reality that engulfs all of us, “capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.” While we live within the spectacle, it is impossible to have a genuine relationship with reality and with each other. We’re stuck mirroring the images that capitalist mass media constantly bombards us with, but we mirror those idealized images in a squalid reality. We think we’re at the carnival but we’re really whacking invisible moles in an empty room. We’re rabbits in cages. Our horizons are already so tightly circumscribed, our range of actions is so limited on such a deep level that we can’t even perceive it until a major rupture happens and suddenly we’re out in streets acting on our own for the very first time.
But of course it’s unlikely Peele had this interpretation in mind, and it certainly doesn’t cover the full range of ideas and imagery in this movie. But the film is so rich with meaning. I love that you can bring so much to it and take so much away from it.
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Also had a pretty clear homage to Funny Games that I enjoyed.
Oh, and despite laughing my ass off at that opening shot of the TV, the long opening credits shot of the rabbits in cages fucking kicked my ass, I absolutely loved it.
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Definitely need to catch Us this weekend.
Also when/if it’s started, really doggone curious about the new Twilight Zone
esp. since SB’s own @Faithless is a writer for it!
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Huh, very cool!
I saw the new Jia Zhangke movie “Ash is Purest White” and even though it was good I felt like the ending really did not work. I went into it expecting like some kind of weird arthouse take on a gangster movie and got… something else entirely. The middle section is incredible, and while I kind of get what they were doing with the last segment I just found it kind of disappointing. IDK hard to talk about without being more specific. I guess I still recommend checking it out as it is a really beautiful movie and Zhao Tao is great as always, just don’t expect a satisfying resolution at the end I guess.
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where are people seeing this movie. been waiting on a quality web-dl forever
why do I feel like I’m the only person who saw Aquaman and thought it was bad except for the part where Mary Poppins was a giant eldritch sea monster
Dumbo is a remarkably faithful adaptation of a barely there 60 minute cartoon filler that was shown in between shorts except for the part where Tim Burton makes it about how giant corporations who try to absorb all entertainment around them are actually evil, which is a thing I’m glad Disney apparently didn’t care about putting out into the marketplace a month out from Ultimate Crossover: 20 Movies of Plot
also he managed to sneak a pretty obvious reference to the crows
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it was showing in the artsy movie theater here, i was feeling burned out and wanted to sit in a movie theater in silence for a couple hours and saw that it happened to be playing this weekend only. lucky!
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I’m very belatedly watching Spider-Verse now
I have made some mistakes
I need a website that tells me if a movie has a mech in it for these situations
Gods forgive me, I saw Death Race: Beyond Anarchy on Netflix the other night.
I have a soft spot for Death Race 2000, despite never actually seeing the full movie; I’ve seen parts of the Jason Statham “reboot” of Death Race, and Roger Corman’s Death Race 3000 (which is, surprisingly, a remake of Death Race 2000 and not a sequel). I’m intrigued by the (often very light) social commentary these movies try to use to frame Carmageddon but for realsies.
Beyond Anarchy could have easily not been a Death Race movie. It doesn’t follow the plots of either 2000/3000 or the Statham reboot. A chunk of America has been converted to Prison: The State (called The Sprawl), and Death Race happens in there: it’s illegal, but it gets streamed on the dark web, and folks like Danny Trejo make money by letting folks gamble on it. There’s a Frankenstein, but he’s a nobody; he has no motivations other than “keeping the Sprawl from falling into anarchy”, which he does by winning Death Race, because winning means he gets to be leader.
The movie is actually about a rando hired by the warden of the Sprawl to infiltrate it as a prisoner and kill Frankenstein during Death Race, ending his winning streak, which will somehow cause the Death Race to stop being profitable and force it to close down??? In the end, someone else kills Frankie and our “hero” puts on the mask, becoming him, because anyone can wear the mask. It’s the same message as Into The Spiderverse, except terrible.
The movie has an open disdain for women, and sex workers in particular. Lots of pointless nudity. Despite showing some graphic violence, the movie actually cuts away while a white supremacist literally named “Nazi Bastard” is attacked by a group, showing him later to be hanging from a sign in a very brief cut.
Also Danny Glover is a major character in it?
It was a terrible movie all-around, and I’m baffled as to why it’s a Death Race movie.
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