last movie watched.

[ero guro vidal (aka todd)]

The line from these movies and, like, my burgeoning love of reactionary fasc masc movies is thick and connected somehow that I can't figure out or motivate into a coherent thought yet.

[GODDESS ktrska]

i think the best light i can read american pie in is that it seems like it's ultimate 'message' is that "focusing on 'getting laid' is silly, everything will 'work out in the end". like i think if you read it in a certain light it 'has it's heart in the right place'. like i think it's actually trying to be relatively wholesome... but i dislike that more than if it had just been a ribald sex comedy?

but like. the extended shannon elizabeth nude scene ... idk i think i would be more charitable to it/read it as more playful if i was watching this in theaters 20 years ago but honestly revenge porn has become so commonplace over the past several decades it really left a nasty taste in my mouth. and it's the centerpiece of the movie. like, i earnestly think my memories of that scene are a big part of what have ruined blink 182 for me during the periods of my life i haven't been able to listen to them lol. i also watched the adventures of ford fairlane, the andrew dice clay movie and honestly don't think anything in it felt as rotten to watch in modern day.

i think outside of josie and sugar and spice i feel like freddy got fingered really blasts all of these tropes into the stratosphere and turns it into a dada masterpiece. like it's literally a film built around incest jokes and nonstop grossout humor but i'd much rather watch it honestly. it's not trying to reallyt say anything about the human condition

otoh i also thought a lot about todd solondz' 'happiness' a lot while watching it. i earnestly could not believe that happiness predated it by a solid year. in terms of like, taking all of the gross things about these films, making them feel real and disgusting, and then *actually having something to say* about what it's depicting, i dunno. still find that film has a lot of utility.

i watched it primarily because of mena suvari and tara reid being in josie and the pussycats, i enjoyed that a lot more.

[GODDESS ktrska]

i forgot shannoin elizabeths fake czech accent sounds like what my partner sounds like when she's imitating her grandmother speaking in polish as a joke. that too. i don't even dislike most of those actors in isolation but in the film itself eugene levy is the only one that feels natural to me.

[nice pass]

the underneath - soderbergh

fuckin filthy

[Buzz Fledderjohn]

Another Round - really liked it.
Doing Hunter Hunter, The new Zappa Doc, Jimmy Carter Rock n Roll Pres, The Mortuary Collection, and Psycho Goreman all this week.

yes Another Round was really amazing! blown away by mads

[Buzz Fledderjohn]

the underneath - soderbergh

fuckin filthy

how did i never hear of this movie

and is it filthy good or filthy filthy

[GODDESS ktrska]

lilja 4-ever

ok im going to pay full attention to this film now cuz but i feel like remarking that this, possession, and albert pyun's "urban menace" all open in the exact same way (pumping electronic music over shots of drive-by squalid eastern european rowhouses). the shot of the convenience store at the very start of the movie even looks like the one that's featured in albert pyun's films starring snoop dogg that were filmed in estonia. wacky.

[shizaam]

watched hitchcock's foreign correspondent last night, plane crash + the windmill scene were just fantastic. all the anti-isolationist world war ii stuff, especially that ending that was tacked on, was pretty wild. would love to read more about the whole range of propaganda in hollywood films leading up to the war

[zajaxi dynamos]

the WWII era was really interesting for sure.

[Pris]

watched hitchcock's foreign correspondent last night, plane crash + the windmill scene were just fantastic. all the anti-isolationist world war ii stuff, especially that ending that was tacked on, was pretty wild. would love to read more about the whole range of propaganda in hollywood films leading up to the war

The language spoken by the Dutch people in that movie is phonetic gibberish. Cool movie though. Powell & Pressburger got the language right in One of our Aircraft is Missing.

[Pris]

the WWII era was really interesting for sure.

All Through the Night is a great one. Humphrey Bogart vs Conrad Veidt!

[nice pass]

the underneath - soderbergh

fuckin filthy

how did i never hear of this movie

and is it filthy good or filthy filthy

good filthy

[shizaam]

watched hitchcock's foreign correspondent last night, plane crash + the windmill scene were just fantastic. all the anti-isolationist world war ii stuff, especially that ending that was tacked on, was pretty wild. would love to read more about the whole range of propaganda in hollywood films leading up to the war

The language spoken by the Dutch people in that movie is phonetic gibberish. Cool movie though. Powell & Pressburger got the language right in One of our Aircraft is Missing.

oh yeah it’s so bizarre.

[GODDESS ktrska]

lilja 4-ever

ok im going to pay full attention to this film now cuz but i feel like remarking that this, possession, and albert pyun's "urban menace" all open in the exact same way (pumping electronic music over shots of drive-by squalid eastern european rowhouses). the shot of the convenience store at the very start of the movie even looks like the one that's featured in albert pyun's films starring snoop dogg that were filmed in estonia. wacky.

This film is really good. I kindof hate myself for thinking it didn't/wouldn't hold up in my memory. Also weird to realize I watched this for the first time literally half a lifetime ago (I rented it from Netflix in January 2006). Down to the month even.

I think my statement about getting this more because I understand catholicism more was kindof half joking but no it makes complete sense to me now / I don't really find the back half of the film where it goes farther into angelic death fantasy as cloying anymore. I always thought the first half that focused on lilya/volodya's friendship was really sweet / reminiscent of the solomon/tummler parts of Gummo. i don't know. it was really easy to project that onto how i viewed my friendship with my cousin at the time when i first watched this, minus the sexual aspects of it. and idk i can see tons of parallels between the main character and my partners life at this point... The scene with her absentee aunt where she tells her to go sell her body reminds me of the one (and probably only) time I've ever directly interacted with my partner's mother lol. i think that's a long way of getting around to the ultimate point i'm trying to make that despite the lurid subject matter this film feels remarkably down to earth and relatable ig which this time around made the descent into the horrors of sex trafficking/fantasies of death hit a olot harder.

for whatever reason, i don't think i caught onto the fact that lilya's mother was almost certainly trafficked too. idk added a lot of thematic depth for me. there are so many little threads there that i think work to add up to something more than "a parade of endless suffering" as i once thought. i made this observation when i revisited the adaptation of suehiro maruo's midori which follows a relatively similar trajectory last year but like these types of movies that are just nonstop bad things happening resonate with me a lot more now as an adult when i realize that for a lot of people life is literally just nonstop bad things. i think i remember the sarkeesian effect the davis aurini film spends an extended period of time going on about how zoe quinn's life couldn't possibly be real because she says too many bad things happen in it and ultimately those criticisms of a good chunk of art like this rings along similar lines to me now.

I wish I had watched this with my partner because I'm sure she would have had a lot more insightful things to say about it's relationship to religious imagery. Like 90% of the films I watch by myself at some point are films with horrific sexual violence I'm not sure would go over well in group setting but I think the way it's shot here would ultimately not be terrible. I will probably rewatch this film sometime in the next week lol. Anyway a bish has some Doom II (1994) to play and I don't know what's in store for me on the next couple of maps but I'm su re it'll be poggers.

[BlackSugar]

Some Kind of Heaven - really good!!! will expand later maybe!!!

just watched this and was really moved by it once I accepted that this was highly staged and narrated and choreographed, but that it represented real people that were living that life, even if it wasn't that particular person on screen. half-assedly clicked on this and then was immediately locked in

[tgk]

Hunt for the wilderpeople- taika waititi



Loved this, thought it was absolutely hysterical, sam neill was great

[sleigh]

On the Count of Three -- really fucking good
Son of Monarchs -- woof
In the Same Breath -- the footage from wuhan was unbelievable. wasn't looking forward to spending 2 hours thinking about covid but this was worth it.

[brent]

Some Kind of Heaven - really good!!! will expand later maybe!!!

just watched this and was really moved by it once I accepted that this was highly staged and narrated and choreographed, but that it represented real people that were living that life, even if it wasn't that particular person on screen. half-assedly clicked on this and then was immediately locked in

i loved it. extremely beautiful to look at too.

[Repo]

echoing the praise for some kind of heaven

[aububs]

this movie has an unexpectedly amoral core and the lead actress is waaaay better than i expected. liked this


this was funny


didn't really like this. it was ok i guess if you like that sort of thing

[aububs]

oh, this one was incredible

[landspeedrecord]

looks great. the only luna I’ve seen is caniche, which I enjoyed

anyone doing Sundance 2021 online this year? tix just went on sale.

here's the program/schedule -> https://fpg.festival.sundance.org/film/films/schedule

I'm gonna catch the new ben wheatley film (in the earth)

might check out a doc as well (thinking either philly d.a. or all light, everywhere)... am open to suggestions

update

in the earth (new ben wheatley!), a horror film about 2 scientists who enter a haunted forest where the indigenous people believe in fairies who rule the trees. great concept, promising first act, but it quickly becomes a hodgepodge of familiar reference points and overly expository dialogue. all in all, pretty wack, sadly. it was the first film made in the uk during lockdown, and you can tell... the script rly could have used a rewrite. there's a good film in there if they had spent more time on it // there had been reshoots or had cut 20 min. alas...

a glitch in the matrix (by rodney ascher, who made room 237) a documentary about simulation theory. it's not going to teach you many new things if yr curious or terminally online, but that's sort of beside the point. a great look at how we create worlds for ourselves via the internet without rly ever bringing up politics(!!!). I thought its integration of different media (film, tv, video games, commercials) + formats (from VHS/DVD to HD--sometimes alternating btw both for the same source), the clearance of footage via Fair Use laws, editing, and sound design were all quite something... one of the few contemporary docs/films that genuinely conveys how strange it feels to be alive in the now times. can't recommend it highly enough--it screens again tomorrow (Monday Feb 1st at 10am EST)

[Melville]

My only January viewings:

Shirley - I liked this one a lot. Moss and Stuhlbarg create two indelible characters, and there's a palpable Southern Gothic atmosphere of haze and derangement. It somehow felt like less than the sum of its parts to me though, like it needed a stronger thematic punch or dramatic climax.

Booksmart - I liked this one even more. I'm predisposed against teen movies that tell us young people need to loosen up and learn to party, but this was full of verve and charm and funny as hell.

[Ersaph]

Promising Young Woman is one of the most insipid movies I’ve seen in awhile. Who is this movie for?

[GODDESS ktrska]

god i truly hated promising young woman

there's also this

a film made entirely to be played in freshman level sociology courses

i really do not care at all about disney/mcu one way or the other and find "film twitter" whining about it tiresome but a major thought i had watching this film was that it basically tackled the rape/revenge genre in the same way superhero movies are written. like, the weird scenes where she cuts down would be rapists using like, twitter burns about Having a Bad Screenplay or Wearing a Fedora are so absurdly childish. like, she literally never kills or enacts violence on a single perpetrator of sexual assault while she does take glee in making a woman think she's been raped etc... so fucking anesthetized it becomes infinitely more offensive than the 'worst' 70s rape/revenge films... i would be more charitable to if it actually leaned into the idea that the main character is not a good person (this is something, in recent memory, that Paul Verhoeven's Elle or Rob Zombie's Halloween II actually do wonderfully! a film I actually thought about a lot watching this lol.) but it never commits to that either.

it's a case study in how the kid logic of those films fails to address anything requiring a more nuanced view than itself as it collapses in on itself, ending at a point where it takes the police as a Necessary Force To Solve Sexual Assault.

earnestly one of the worst films i've ever seen idk if i can say that enough.

it's also the same school of writing as shit like this. anyway a bish has her minecraft discord server to et back to.

[GODDESS ktrska]

the bo burnham subplot is basically a 30 minute #YesAllMen hashtag then walks even that back with "serving justice" when alfred molina's character decides to call the cops. it's so incoherent it seems like it hates literally every aspect of humanity.

[GODDESS ktrska]

it even fails on the terms of "representation" it sets out to achieve. literally, there are two black characters in the film. one, played by laverne cox, who exists in the film exclusively to tell her to find a Good Man and Settle Down and a bouncer that's framed as a would-be rapist and definite sexual harasser.

i mentioned this in my writeup of the post but all the "angel of the morning" song choice does is literally make you realize you would rather be watching Deadpool instead. anyway that's my third post in ar ow that's a wrap. bad movie.

[Ersaph]

I really don’t get her initial gambit of pretending to be drunk in bars and how that ties in in anyway to avenging her friend, specifically. There were so many of those scenes and every one of them felt pointless and illogical within the context of the plot

[tgk]

It was trying to be too many things at once and couldn't settle on a tone, it's high moments were ironically when she was exacting revenge on women, allison brie and connie britton, which were elaborate traps but with the men it wasn't any more complex than just "ha ha! You thought i was drunk!"

[zajaxi dynamos]

some things I watched last month

My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days (Zulawski, 1989)

didn't love it like I hoped to, it has some nice things about it. despite the subject matter of like, a guy dying of terminal brain disease meeting a woman who is unable to move on from childhood trauma, it's kind of the most chill Zulawski movie I've seen. but a lot of it is just the dude muttering french puns and wordplay I think that don't really work if you aren't fluent.

The Ninth Configuration (Blatty, 1980)

another one I had high hopes for but just found kind of okay, no fault really of the movie, it is weird and atypical independent project (did he really get pepsico to give him a couple million bucks? lol) but not my favorite genre tropes here, an insane asylum story, the echoes of vietnam story, the catholic is-god-real-or-not angst story.

Risky Business (Brickman, 1983)

I feel like I see Risky Business recommended around here and adjacently a lot so I did check it out since I've never seen it and you know what it's a pretty damn good movie go figure. tangerine dream and trains and joey pants.

Housekeeping (Forsyth, 1987)

don't have much comment on it but it was good.

The Sound of Music (Wise, 1965)

honestly I was certain that I had never seen this before and I think I'm still right that I had not because none of it seemed familiar at all. it was great just wall to wall bangers

The Deserted City (Obayashi, 1984)

finally saw an Obayashi movie I wouldn't praise to the gills. it is still quite good, actually, just a bit more plain than I expected and the central drama is a bit dull, lots of nice photography and scenes apart from that central conflict though.

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (Dante, 2003)

this kicked ass

Chimes at Midnight (Welles, 1965)

definitely the best new to me thing I watched this month, I've been wanting to watch it for years. honestly a lot of it surprised me as it seemed in the vein of like, Pasolini and eastern european middle ages flicks from the 60's but I think they mostly post-date this so the influence if there was any went the other direction. but also often he's drawing a lot from like, Dreyer's Joan of Arc and from Alexander Nevsky but Welles' battle scene is much much better.