Little Women is also super great! I don’t normally go in for this kind of classic period drama stuff, but I really liked it. It helps that my celebrity crush Florence Pugh is great in it too.
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Good picks!
I also very much recommend Proxima, the Dead don’t die and Les Miserables
Color Out of Space fucked me up for a week, it was good
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Tops in my mind:
OUATIA
US
Parasite
Uncut Gems
I really need to watch High Life and Atlantics. I even watched all of Mati Diop’s short films on the Criterion Channel! They are made with a deft and caring touch!!
Uncut Gems is the one that will stay in my mind for years the way my head shouts “First Reformed!” whenever it feels topical. It’s always topical.
cos i’m in purgatory for the next 2 weeks i have been looking through the couple of big hard-drives i have which contain a bunch of movies and tv shows my family has collected over the years (whether from tv recordings or dvd rips or w/e), and i came across something called “The Spiral - Japanese Horror” which i assumed would be some Junji Ito inspired film or sth. Turns out the actual title of the film was “Ring: The Spiral” which is the second in the Ring series, and cos i quite liked the first Ring i figured i’d watch the whole thing, even though i have my reservations about horror sequels in general and kinda expected it to be trash.
It was trash, but it was compelling trash. By the end of the film it had done a heel-turn from the grounded horror of the first Ring to completely wild shit like resurrecting Sadako (the girl at the centre of the previous film) in the body of a psychic by impregnating said psychic with a curse virus that causes her to give birth to herself and then die, and using this virus to birth a new race of psychic humans for the betterment of mankind like… wow ok.
anyway it was weird and silly enough that maybe i might even watch the next one just to see how mad it gets, or if i’m feeling really keen i might even read the books!
The film wasn’t particularly beautiful to look at or listen to, but because the version i watched was a digitised VCR-recording of a CRT (hence the SBS watermark in the bottom-right of all the screenshots), it was extremely aesthetically aligned with the rest of the film, and made much of it far more beautiful than i suspect it might otherwise have been:
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I didn’t enjoy Uncut Gems much despite the craft because Sandler was too much of a trumpian figure (wealthy, tacky, foolish, selfish bullshitter)
As a result I had no empathy towards him and felt no anxiety. And this movie doesn’t work if you’re just rooting for him to fail
I can empathize with garbage humans in movies but not this one. Too soon
I can see that, but I reckon he had some critical differences in his personality. He seemed to legitimately care about his family but addiction warped his judgement. By the end, I felt this really bizarre mix of hope and disdain for him. I was very impressed how the smaller characters still felt like whole people.
Trump is empty. Howard is full.
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I think this is actually an observation about how Trump is, like, the negaverse form of an outer borough Jewish guy (and that’s arguably been a big part of his success historically, realizing he could be the only wasp in Queens or whatever), and Uncut Gems is such an aggressively affectionate portrait of an idealized form of this guy that if not for the present associations with Trump I would almost expect it to scan to non east coast Americans as antisemitic
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yeah Uncut Gems is a character study about a hyper-specific type of guy and i can see how easy it would be to go the other way like “fuck this guy” but like, embracing your inner degenerate gambler and rooting for someone to win is a lot more fun. howard is like the hyper-reality form of the guys I used to play scratchers with and I love it
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Just watched Uncut Gems and yes it is very good and now I’m exhausted.
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Alternative review: My dental hygienist didn’t like it because they said “fuck” too much.
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watched Phantasm for the first time, was great, sort of felt like the american suburbs version of an argento film, just finding these weird settings and having people slowly walk around them to threatening organ music. and then either just find their way out or die horribly. loved the shot of the kid just emerging from behind the curtains of that weird beige funeral home. also enjoyed the entirely unnecessary 2 minute long guitar jam on the porch, the boogie version of the main theme that plays in the bar, the older brother being interrupted during graveyard sex and yelling “WHAT the HECK”. looking forward to the further adventures of Horrible Death Balls.
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Phantasm is really weird to me because I played Blood II: The Chosen before I ever saw it and that game has THE ORB as a usable weapon that drills through people’s heads. I guess FPS designers really liked Phantasm because for like two years in the '90s like every shooter had a weapon like that.
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revenge is a true “problematic” fave
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the thing is
I never wanted to be forced to think about the fact that kevin costner has touched another human butt
gah I forgot up til now that the brain gun from turok 2 is obviously doing this too. it even does the little directed blood spray out the back! someone pushed to put that in the game.
there’s a fighting game where you can play as the tall man but it excited me more because it also had pumpkinhead and maniac cop in it… icons of horror movies I’ve never seen but used to spend ages looking at the boxes of in the video store in hopes there’d be a really fucked up thumbnail screenshot on the back. anyway it’s kind of funny that here the ball is just the kind of wimpy looking generic ranged attack that you’d find in a clayfighters game or similar.
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the first level of Blood 1 is literally modeled on the mortuary from Phantasm, too
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watching bad boys for life in the tub and I gotta say I really like Kate Del Castillo in everything after that El Chapo Sean Penn clusterfuck, just find her presence very endearing knowing about it
oh shit Pantoliano is in this! right!!
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JOEY PANTS!!!