MUWT 2: The Quickening

but they trotted out the dementia-ridden body of Robert Loggia

that’s all the good will they needed

With Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, they basically went Resident Evil/Dino-Crisis.

There was of course, a bunch of cliches. But, it was still a pretty fun watch.

that movie Zoe is the worst of the growing “sad 40 year old man wants to fuck a robot” genre

it’s so formless and capital-I Indie and un-selfaware it’s like something you would hallucinate inside of a starbucks

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man I sure did enjoy Valerian.

i wasnt sold on valerian but the rihanna interlude is tight

blackkklansman is not entirely surprisingly for white libs and intro to film studies lecturers/ tutors

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but im enamoured enough w the ambiguity of holding things in proximity that the parallel klan and black student meetings bit kinda almost not really interests me, it holds the “wait, are they comparing these?” discomfort long enough that it’s something to marvel at even tho any generous reading will just shortcut the whole thing and say “yeah nah it’s to contrast”

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Yeah, the more I think about that movie the less impressed I am with its politics. It’s so weirdly pro-police and subtly anti-communist. Boots Riley’s critique of it was really on point.

I don’t know if I would call it pro-police, the script as presented has the same kind of duality stuff going on with it as Ron does, where the identity of the film is so closely attached to being “positive” procedural but at the same time trying to go, “no, either the cops are bad, the system is against the minorities in the city or the system is so inept as to be ineffective”

some of that is coming from the whole shutdown of the department after the case closes, like “good job but you have other bullshit to take care of where you can affect no progress” but most of it is the FBI literally spiriting into the plot for 2 minutes. like, hey, we’ll help you out and take your info but fuck if we care what you’re doing (Boots’s critique is tapping into the background of this but, to some extent, I think Lee is implying it in the film)

anyway, I’m more concerned that large chunks of the script are straight up invention seeing as the real case is much less… exciting

I saw a free screening of Repo Man with Alex Cox present today. The movie was excellent as ever. Cox was incredibly well-spoken and generous with stories and details in the Q&A after. He said this was the first time he’d watched the film with an audience since the 80’s, and he was glad people still thought it was funny.

He shared with us something that he said he kept secret for many years. Apparently, when he first met one-on-one with Harry Dean Stanton’s agent to give him his first leading role, the agent told him “Oh, you don’t want Harry for this. You want Mick Jagger. Trust me!” Cox didn’t tell Stanton because he didn’t want to hurt his feelings, and because Stanton was grumpy enough on set as it was.

One thing that sort of surprised me but made complete sense in retrospect was that among all the film’s other critiques of societal institutions, he even intended for the film to show the failures of punk culture. It makes sense, right? Though the film is clearly in love with the music, it also depicts its punks as shiftless low-lives and criminals, privileged suburban kids who fail to take their rebellion anywhere useful.

Cox threw a lot of leftish barbs into his answers, talking about how today’s liberals are trying to build Russia up as the great national enemy the way they were at the time Repo Man was created. And he went on a tear about how different presidential administrations in the US don’t actually behave any differently from each other, their policies and agendas are largely the same.

He seems like a cool guy.

@Tulpa will be glad to hear that some film professor in the audience did bring up Death and the Compass and recommended it.

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Oh yeah, and he also said that the copyright ownership of Repo Man transfers to his control next year and he intends to shop around a Repo Man TV series to streaming networks. He’s currently writing a series bible.

Let’s hope it’s better than Repo Chick, which nobody in the audience nor Cox himself were tactless enough to mention.

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I blame society, society made me what I am

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I watched Borg vs McEnroe last night instead of sleeping (and wound up like, 4 hours late to work consequently), it was good. I would’ve liked a bit more focus on McEnroe’s history, I feel like he’s just the more interesting personality and they don’t really go as in-depth with him as they do Borg. I don’t really have any frame of reference for either Borg or McEnroe outside of owning a FILA jacket and having seen Mr. Deeds, respectively, so I had no clue who actually won the match prior to seeing the movie, which made the watching the final match in the movie a lot more tense and enjoyable.

edit: also there’s a lot of radical tennis jackets in this movie.

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Rear Window is like a perfect old movie. What if we made the theater a giant window? What if we made the female lead stunningly beautiful and perfect. So much of the film is carried in Stewart’s eyes.

The little sub-stories must have inspired RPG sub-stories in some way. That was as good as I could hope for.

I have more appreciation for the Hitchcock exhibit I went to in Universal Studios when I was 11.

] It closed on January 3, 2003, and was replaced by Shrek 4-D in mid-2003.[

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Fruchhhjkj I saw Akira on 35MM.

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BlacKkKlansman was great idk what ppl are on about wrt that movie and also don’t get how you can come away from it thinking it’s pro cop with that ending

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i think there’s an awful lot to like about it and with one or two tweaks i could really stretch my benefit of the doubt far enough to be into it but unfortunately it’s definitely pretty pro cop, come on

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yeah I swear to god I try real hard to avoid mentally putting people with good-in-principle politics in the “humorless and either unwilling to or incapable of perceiving ambiguity” bucket but the criticism I’ve read of this has been utterly braindead

Lord knows Spike Lee has had some borderline messaging in the past but I just don’t see how this is that

the scene where the good guy cops have a good laugh over arresting the bad guy cop is bewilderingly dumb and the spike lee shot at the end implying cops and radicals must band together is straight fucked up

on the other hand i do love and respect spike lee enough that i think he should do whatever he wants without having to worry what slimy little white boys like me have to say

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He’s always had a way of doing, like, magic realism without the magic, and he does it with archetypes that people treat as a weird kind of unearned wishful thinking

It’s just the pizza parlour in Do The Right Thing over and over and I’m into it

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