showed a friend of mine Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters for the first time the other night and he loved it, so that was nice.
today, i checked out that new Tom Hanks movie, Greyhound, because i have a free year of Apple TV+ and i haven’t used it once and it looked like a movie i could put on during the day and not have to pay much attention to.
good coats and good lighting, but not much else. pretty much your standard WWII “the Allies pull through” endeavor.
Decided to get back on my “watch random westerns uploaded to YouTube” grind, as I do – forever searching for those diamonds in the rough. Can’t much say I’ve found any today, but there’s always some scenes of note or cool duels to be seen nonetheless.
My Name is Pecos (ITA: ‘2 once di piombo’) is as fine a piece of formula work as any: Mexican gunslinger (played by American Robert Woods) stumbles into a town occupied by bandits, kills some of them off, gets captured, and eventually breaks free to craft a scheme to save a handful of hapless villagers and kill off all the rest of the baddies. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it knows exactly what it is; doesn’t waste time, has some half-decent action, and sneaks in a couple neat shots here and there. I quite like this sequence where a girl keen on our hero discreetly lowers him a knife through a hole in the floorboard, like a sword slowly descending from the heavens.
pecos
I’m the number one time loop story fan and the time loop stuff in Palm Springs is fun but the writing between the two leads is so good that I wish it had been a more traditional romantic comedy? Like they actually had such fun chemistry I wanted to enjoy it a little more. If anyone did like a Lonely Island film retrospective I think that this would hold kind of an interesting place.
So good.
Yeah the huge amount of hate directed towards Schumacher’s movie is wildly undeserved. I see them as a modern version of the campy 60’s series, in all its flamboyant, doofy glory. Certainly not meant to seen with a humorous light.
The Old Guard is the new netflix Charlize Theron action movie and it’s kind of like if Only Lovers Left Alive and John Wick joined forces to become a DTV action movie
worth watching imo
There are so many westerns! I think that’s why I am moving into old War Movies because they have a higher level of base quality.
I still have not seen a Western that feels like a Zane Grey novel.
what movie?
Haxan
it’s very beautiful!
That guy reminded me of Gilbert Gottfried so I read the line “I see clearly that you are a witch.” in his voice.
Gilbert would love this movie
I’m on a horror trip atm so i watched Ghost Ship (2002) and it kinda rules? absolutely eclectic soundtrack with one of the best credits transition tracks (a song that starts playing in the final shot and then becomes the credits theme) i think I’ve ever encountered. the pacing and tone were all over the place to such an extent that it almost balances out i think. almost.
I also watched Good Manners which is a Brazilian… horror? It’s more like a supernatural drama imo, but w/e. It’s pretty horrific. Idk if i’m quite clever enough to leave any particularly incisive remarks about the film so soon after watching it, but I think I liked it, even though it left me rather sad. It struck me that it was more like two distinct films shown back-to-back; two singular stories with differing tones, pacing, and arcs. idk. I’m not sure why that strikes me as important, but it does. I think it’s good. I think the sadness that it has left me with is evidence that it was well made.
Anyway if you’re in Australia (or have a vpn) u can watch it for free here: https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/1744990787771/good-manners
MORITURI
The films that are just on youtube. Here is Marlon Brando playing a German demolitions officer that went AWOL at the beginning of WW2 being conscripted by the British Secret Service to impersonate an SS Officer on a boat travelling from Tokyo to France.
See the boat has 7000 pounds of rubber which is very valuable to the nazis and would just be a big ole help if the allies get it. The plan is to intercept the ship 15 days in, have Brando disarm the charges that would scuttle the ship (standard protocol.)
The ship is piloted by a civilian played by Yuel Brenner! He’s a patriot but no nazi (isn’t that always the way.) his first mate is a due-paying party member.
And it was Trevor Howard (OF THE KEY WATCH THE KEY) who gave Marlon the job in the first place. Marlon will climb a lot of ladders which is crazy because a year later he made The Appaloosa where he was clearly too fat and drunk to do anything. These two movies are like the inflection point of early and late era Brando.
Anyways the movie ruled it had a bunch of cool twists. Warning there is a pretty graphic description of rape and then an attempted rape. Outside of that and you know the whole story is about Nazis and Germans it is a dope film.
Also about 30 minutes in they mention the first Allie Bombing Run on German Soil which I went, “Hey I just saw a whole film about that with Greggory Peck.” Watching a pile of war movies to build a picture of the war is fun.
I also found out A Bridge Too Far is just on youtube so if you haven’t seen that you should block out 3 hours and watch that bummer starring literally everyone.
oh, i guess this must be where that musician got his name from (The Haxan Cloak)
It’s also Swedish for “witch”, I think.
Yeah I raise you:
Tonight was Zulu and Gallipoli.
Zulu shows off the South African Countryside but outside of the colonialism in the film I have to think this film was made during apartheid. The war chanting being real impressive doesn’t change that it feels like a bunch of LARPERS at the end of the day.
Gallipoli has a super 80s soundtrack and has wildly different filming styles and pacing throughout. It also has human trashbasket Mel Gibson. You could watch everything from the hour mark as a self contained film. There is some real buck wild stuff there that is gonna stick in my mind. It had more emotional weight for me than 1917! Whoops spoilers for the final act of either film if you’ve seen the other.
In short I’m glad I watched Gallipoli and am ambivalent about Zulu. But they are both on youtube.
