exit elena (2011) shockingly engrossing microbudget indie from Nathan Silver, whose work I haven't seen before. came across this trying to find mumblecore movies about precarity during the great recession. while I do think that's a relevant context (the narrative follows a young live-in nurse who moves in with a family that doesn't understand boundaries, which seems better than nothing), I probably won't include it in my series, but it's one of the better films I've watched in that idiom so far.
chad wrote:"How can I make this about me and also congratulate myself in some way" - basically every hipinion bro
The Only Son (1936)- Yasujiro Ozu Really liked this.
The Reckless Moment (1949)- Max Ophuls This was great, Bennett and Mason both gave great performances. Loved the camera movements in this.
They Drive By Night (1940)- Raoul Walsh Great stuff, solid performances by the main cast, the standout for me is Lupino who's intense performance elevates this film to a whole new level.
Three Outlaw Samurai (1964)- Hideo Gosha This ruled.
watched this again because of the numerous references/blatant steals in aronofsky's filmography. i had only seen it once in full before, at a pretty young age at that. i tried to rewatch it in late 2013 having realized i was trans earlier that year and was put off by how the movie they're filming seems to be about "a killer who wants to be a woman", was pretty put off by the potential for transmisogyny and promptly shut it off. luckily, i don't really feel like it dives into waters but i still feel like this films key flaw is making it's antagonists grotesquely ugly parodies. it softens the edge of the films critique of misogyny and the erosion of personal boundaries within the internet and the entertainment industry by making it feel like satoshi kon's self-serving screed against "otakus who need to get laid more". this is a flaw i also find in hideaki anno's treatment of misogyny despite having softened on it a fair deal and now finding ritual and end of evangelion to be two of my favorite films of all time.Toggle Spoiler
a lot is made of black swan's structural integrity and the bathtub scene from requiem being copied from this film 1:1 but i feel like the most illustrating, and underrecognized example of this plagiarism comes in the fictive rape scene. it seems clear to me that the much mocked "ass to ass" sequence from requiem's climax also took great influence from it. the scene in perfect blue is weighty enough to shape the direction of the entire rest of the film, and is treated no less seriously despite it being something that mima "consents" to. whereas when jennifer connelly was asked to enact an analogous scene of questionable consent it's just a meaningless degradation in a film that revels in them for it's entire runtime. speaking of which, the fact that this film manages to accomplish everything it needs to with a 78 minute runtime is pretty darn noble.Toggle Spoiler
it's weird that the internet has become a much more blatantly scary place in the last 22 years but i still find this film and some episodes of serial experiments lain to be the pieces of media that best explore those terrors.
it's great that this has a happy ending. "no, i'm real!" is up there with inland empire's "sweet!" as the most smile inducing ending lines to dense surreal hellrides i can think of.Toggle Spoiler
robocop 3 (1993)
taken in isolation this is a pretty bad but hilariously goofy last ditch at making a family friendly product outside of something that should have never been franchised in the first place. put into context, it becomes this weird surreal document of lost futures and possibilities. most of the film was filmed on a chunk of auburn avenue in atlanta that was to be bulldozed for the olympics within a few years giving this film the unintentional quality of depicting a hypothetical future atlanta that never hosted the olympics.
so many subplots in this were created from various versions of the script that apparently, some time, some one cared about. there's a random cyborg ninja character that shows up in non sequitur scenes once every twenty minutes or so to remind you that this was, at one point, supposed to be conceptually centered around recreating the hong kong action film for american audiences. a japanese mother has a caucasian child because they couldn't bother to find a female japanese child actor. there are humorless yet well-animated cartoon scenes that seem to suggest nothing about the universe as a whole. robocop is barely in the thing, making you wonder if this script even started out as a robocop property in the first place.
it was an absolute blast to watch in a group of friends and the more distance i get from it the more i feel legitimate sorrow and pity for it. this is going to be something i suggest to throw on in group settings many times in the future, i think.
I absolutely loved Perfect Blue when I watched it last fall, but those are some good criticisms.
Little Woods (Nia Dacosta, 2018) - I liked this. It's pretty interesting to make a thriller that largely centers on abortion accessToggle Spoiler as the source of its conflict. I wasn't wowed by it really, but it was definitely a solid film, imo.
Someone talk to me about the cinematography in Taipei Story, I want to make a thread of screen caps but it would simply be the whole movie frame by frame
"let's get psychic not blacked out. Let's get wild without getting sick. Let's get turnt while staying woke."
i liked this a lot. in the canon of drug/crime/cartel epics it's very distinctive because it's made by people who don't care about the trappings of that genre. imo there is a one-dimensional aspect to the antagonists, and they way they are used/deployed by the movie, which was uninspiring. some of that can be put down to the movie having a sort of fable/myth framework, i think. it's as good as, maybe even slightly more assured than, Embrace of the Serpent. catch on big screen if u can.
Communion (1989) - aka Christopher Walken gets an anal probe. Favorite thing I've watched recently. It's the filming of an alien(?) abduction book that the author still claims is real. He went on to write five or six more! Only thing is that the director certainly doesn't treat it like fact. All through the movie there's all these crazy paintings and statues that seem to suggest your enviroment informs your dreams or hallucinations. It would also explain why the alien effects totally suck. At some point Walken is sat next to some props! Really good mood movie with shots of nighttime New York and a sick soundtrack featuring Eric Clapton.
Capricorn One (1977) - I can watch Elliott Gould for hours, but I didn't really give a shit about the plight of the would-be astronauts. Thirsty OJ Simpson with all this shit caked to his face was pretty funny though. Telly Savalas has a strange role late in the movie and almost steals the show. Something about these 70's thrillers that just leaves me cold.
The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) - Great documentary. A real gut punch though.
The Blackbird (1926) - Lon Chaney's always watchable and there's some good sequences, but this didn't do that much for me. Chaney's a villain who pretends to be his own crippled brother when it suits him. So spoilers! -- At some point the police are knocking down the door and he's changing into his alter-ego. Only the door hits him and he falls and now the affliction he faked is somehow real.Toggle Spoiler. And this is somehow the least convoluted Tod Browning / Lon Chaney movie! Big reccomendation to check out THE UNKNOWN or West of Zanzibar instead.
The Outlaw and his Wife (1918) - Good early Sjöström movie about lovers living outside of law & society. Since it's 1918, a lot of the movie is happening in the shot of an unmoving camera, but there's some great outdoor scenery. Gets pretty dramatic near the end, but avoids melodramatic cliches. At some point the villagers are coming to arrest the lovers. So the woman is like "You'll never get my child!" and throws the fucking kid off the side of a mountain! After which both escape anyway!Toggle Spoiler
Mildred Pierce (1945) - Good noir mystery. You'll figure it out before the movie does, but it's a very entertaining watch. Can't see Joan Crawford as anything other than Joan Crawford though. She's more alien than the strange hobgoblin that gave Christopher Walken an alien probe. Anyway, be sure to check out Mommy Dearest before anything else Joan-related.
Utamaro And His Five Women (1946)- Kenji Mizoguchi Loved this, Mizoguchi is definitely one of my fav filmakers.
10 Rillington Place (1971)- Richard Fleischer Disturbing as fuck. Hurt was pretty good, but Attenborough was incredibly chilling.
The Far Country (1954)- Anthony Mann Finally finished up the Mann/Stewart Westerns with this and found it to be a pretty solid western with really stunning cinematography. Brennan was enjoyable as always, but Ruth Roman gave a pretty stand out performance.
this is an hour long plotless cartoon about anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables made by/for the msx console. it does a lot of cool things with animation with a nonexistent budget. i recommend it tto anyone with an interest in experimental animation/video art with vaporwave leanings. you can watch the whole thing on youtube . . . i give it TWO thumbs up ! ! !
Cool As Ice rules. feel like this is what Twin Peaks was like once 90s hip hop & streetwear fads took over the town. can't recommend it for it's soundtrack and cinematography enough.
I watched some Australian film from 1982 called Starstruck which was almost fun but ran out of spunk a bit halfway through. It gave you the impression it was gonna be a tad better than it was but it's certainly so visually 80's that i didn't feel i wasted my time because i have a pathological obsession with early to mid 80's films and i'll essentially watch anything at all made in that era. And it being Australian is a nice change. The lead, one Jo Kennedy, has a nice energy about her. It's just a basic story about some young girl who wants to be a pop star. It's a bit of a musical comedy, there's some choreogaphies (one in water!) and nobody ever uses a mic to sing.
Here's a trailer
This is basically just pre-Cyndi Lauper and Madonna but her look would make you think it isn't. Even if i'm aware these two didn't really invent anything. the director ended up making the Little Women with Wynona Ryder 12 years later. Bit disappointing trajectory, but she's mostly made movies about women at least.
I must insist on being a pessimist, I'm a loner in a catastrophic mind
I never really watched the Disney movies that came out after like... idk... Aladdin ? and I've been watching some of them with my kid
The Emperor's New Groove is a really confounding relic of... the year 2000??? with david spade voicing South American emperor. it's a really weird one to me, most of the times closer to being a full length Looney Tunes than that era of Disney.... and the number of gags that involve characters falling is really a lot. falling down hills, into MULTIPLE ravines, out of towers, just falling down all the fucking time.
and ANGEL/DEVIL shoulder bits!
actually warburton is definitely the best thing here.
and this movie's title doesn't make any fucking sense.