MUWT3: Return Of The Thread

[vodselbt]

Watched Mank last night and liked it. But I like any movie about making movies, so. The tone was interesting for a Fincher movie, because it didn’t really have any melodramatic stretches with embittered people or shocking twists. Well, I think technically there was some of that, but Gary Oldman seems like an clown unphased by any of it.

I thought it looked kind of ugly though. There were only a few scene that the lighting seemed right enough to pull of the black and white look without too many hues of shadow obscuring details. The movie also had fake burns in the film which made me lol

[villain]

[isfet]

the erotic dance scene is one of my favorite things captured on film

[Tulpa]

@villain

Fun fact: this was the most expensive and cgi intensive shot in the entire movie. Can you guess why?

they had to digitally erase all of the characters’ reflections from the surface of the table because vampires don’t have reflections

[villain]

A tablecloth would’ve been cheaper!

[Tulpa]

It would’ve been! They shot the scene without thinking about it and had to fix it in post when they noticed how reflective the table was

[villain]

John Young’s statement was so true it had to be printed twice.

how the hell did jim norton manage his way into spider-man?

[villain]

[Rudie]

It’s a nicely lit film.

Back to war movies I saw Da 5 Bloods. It was good! someone needed to tell spike to cut it from 2.5 to 2. That said when it got intense I had to take off the headphones and pace around the room and just watch the subs. It felt very plane movie at that moment. I did that for plane movies a lot.

Isfet and uvnvnv talked about it way back when but as someone that has seen a LOT of war movies recently and enjoys a heist film (which this is equally both) (and a ptsd vibe film). It handles the war movie thing well. It presents a hyper reality to the past stuff that well…hmm. I was emotionally invested by that point so I kept thinking at the end of the film is the bombastic appropriate or is it being carried by my investment. Which is a successful movie so shut up and stop thinking.

I did also think wow someone needed to tell Spike Lee no a few more times. But I can’t believe Spike didn’t get everything he wanted.

A slow train ride of plot devices.

[Rudie]

God dang there are so many movies inside this movie that I got side tracked and meant to write about how thoughtful and complicated it treated Black American Masculinity.

Obviously none of the film would work with a white cast but I kept thinking about the vunerablity would have been impossible with aging white men.

[lasa]

she shoots straight another absolute corey yuen banger. joyce godenzai was such a missed opportunity.

[ellaguro]

movies i watched recently:

Mandy (2018): cool visuals and soundtrack. plot is a very one-dimensional revenge fantasy. kind of a skin-deep exploitation movie with the somewhat self-important slow pace of like a Tarkovsky movie, which is kind of frustrating. but still… cool visuals. lol

Don’t Let The Riverbeast Get You (2012) and Local Legends (2013): Matt Farley is a guy who lives in Manchester New Hampshire and is famous for releasing like 40,000 songs on Spotify, but he also makes movies with his friends. most of them are like intentionally awful Tim and Eric-esque “horror” movies that are intended to be kind of funny and i thought it was kind of interesting though i wasn’t fully convinced about its merits, though Local Legends is sort of a Woody Allen-esque faux-documentary about his life that i enjoyed a lot. i was recommended both by a cinema podcast i listen to called The Important Cinema Club and i feel like it was worthwhile. you can rent a lot of his films for cheap off Amazon also.

i’m thinking of ending things (2020): there was a snowstorm here in NYC on Wednesday night so i thought it was an appropriate time to dive into the latest, very snowy, Netflix film by Charlie Kaufman. my verdict: it’s a Charlie Kaufman movie! lots of depressing themes about aging and bodies decaying, the usual psychological mindfuck stuff, etc. it’s a bit lower budget than his usual stuff but i didn’t really find it to detract from the movie. still not something i want to rewatch any time soon though because… it’s fucking depressing, as you might expect. but i do think it was worth my time to watch.

[Felix]

@ellaguro

The Important Cinema Club

I am very fascinated by will sloan as a media figure because he seems exactly like an alternate universe version of the kind of person I thought I was developing into at 17 before I lost confidence in both a) the worth of my aesthetic judgment and b) my financial stability (and my ability to tolerate said lack of stability)

I like him in general but I find him both excessively torontonian in tone and also just kind of eerie

[ellaguro]

@Felix

I like him in general but I find him both excessively torontonian in tone and also just kind of eerie

are you from Toronto? as an American (with some Canadian extended family) i have no idea what Torontonian means.

[lasa]

don’t let the riverbeast get you really grew in my estimation on a second watch and i think that will likely hold true for all the motern films, but yes, local legends was the most outwardly “good” movie on a first time viewing. i don’t even know if calling them intentionally awful is accurate though. the films all have this very specific cadence that is somewhere between detached irony and insufferable earnestness.

[Felix]

it’s a sort of conspicuous anti-tweeness that presumes the existence of a twee baseline to reject at any given moment

(I’m a dual citizen, grew up on the east coast in the US, lived mostly in Vancouver since 2009)

[ellaguro]

that sounds like several parts of the Midwest to me tbh. maybe the variety of baseline twee is different.

[vodselbt]

I watched a Finnish film about a budding relationship between a dom and an emotionally traumatized sub called Dogs Don’t Wear Pants. The poster brought me to it, it’s very pretty.

For some reason I can’t understand about myself I am very interested in books and film adjacent or directly about BDSM or power play, like Venus in Furs or The Piano Teacher or Gravity’s Rainbow. This was the first movie I’ve watched that is explicitly about BDSM and going into I actually felt really weird because I was like what do I expect to find in a film about this sort of thing that doesn’t treat it as just a metaphor for something else? I don’t know was kind of weirdly existential for a second there, out of sorts lol. Obviously the subject is rich with the potential for human drama, and Dogs Don’t Wear Pants was full of that but also a lot of humor as well. Like those other works I already mentioned, it would make for a good foundation for some conversation if you can get others to watch it with you. Oh, and it’s very beautiful looking too? Excellent color and composition. Highly recommend!!

[jellicle]

watched jackie chan dragons forever and this is just an incredibly light comedic movie with sunny vibes and some incredible soundtrack work that sounds like an obscure ps1 golfing game. jackie plays the most lecherous scum character i’ve ever seen him play. biao yuen wears the coolest sweater i’ve ever seen him wear.

Dragons Forever OST 2

Dragons Forever OST 9

[isfet]

watched the UFO documentary “The Phenomenon” tonight. regardless of your feelings on UFOs, the segment at the end with the children in Zimbabwe who claim to have seen one land at their school is…really compelling.