So… there’s going to be a big dramatic reveal, I guess?
Well, I’ve only seen two movies before by Wong Kar-Wai, and I liked one (In the Mood for Love) and not the other (2046). Both were very stylish, but with shots that were cliched and overly mannered? And this looks like more of that.
On the other hand, it’s nice to see a movie like this these days — when virtually all movies are filmed without any specific lighting, and everything is colour graded into oblivion.
Wise words.
And then all of a sudden we’re in a different story? Is this an anthology movie?
This part is kinda boring. It’s just “oh she’s so kooky”.
I didn’t immediately clock it as a short wig. That’s on me.
So… er… I thought this movie looked pretty good, but was boring as fuck.
Yay! Edward Everett Horton! I should watch all movies he’s been in, really.
Oh it’s… it’s.. what’s his name? Yes, David Niven! I don’t really think of him as a 30s actor, but indeed:
He was 28 here, but basically looks the same as he looked when he was 60.
Wow, that’s odd looking. The four people in the foreground have been shot in front of a read projection of people cavorting at the beach. So that’s already weird, but also the depth of field is so strange. The projected people are slightly out of focus (which is natural), but everybody in front are abnormally super sharp even though there’s a couple meters between them — the guy behind Coop is 100% in focus, while the people “behind” him aren’t.
It’s just disturbing, and it’s not the first shot of the kind. Did they send a second crew to the Riviera to film stuff, and then shoot the rest in Hollywood on a sound stage? A very sandy sound stage?
Tu plaisantes !
Heh heh, that’s funny.
Oh, they didn’t name this movie randomly… but it’s so weird that they’d spoil the plot (sort of) by giving away the twist in the title? I guess?
This movie sort of goes off the rails after the first bit…
But it’s still very funny!
Yeah, Hazel Flagg’s right again. The good parts here really are perfect — Coop is doing an extremely good job here, and Claudette Colbert is so much fun, too. But the movie falls apart! The scene where he tries to get Colbert so drunk that he’ll get her to bed is super duper creepy, for instance. And the ending where Coop is in a straitjacket? It’s… I see what they were aiming for — screwball comedy — but it goes past that and into nightmare.
Wow, this is quite something else. It reminds me a bit of Hal Hartley movies made around the same time? Absurd but not quite.
OK, the plot here doesn’t make much sense. He apparently has $500K in art and stuff, but instead of selling some of that stuff off, he goes to his uncle and asks for a $50K loan… and if he doesn’t pay him back in six weeks, his uncle will take all those $500Ks worth of stuff.
That’s just… stupid. I mean, he’s supposed to be pretty dim, I guess, but even so.
But I mean it’s a good setup for a screwball comedy, I guess.
This is a very funny movie. It reminds me so much of the screwball comedies of the 30s, but updated. The twist is that the Mattheau character isn’t very sympathetic, but the audience is rooting for him to become one. Which is a pretty 30s plot, I guess?
Anyway, I loved this movie. It’s almost a ⚅, but not quite — the last half is perfect, but the first half is a bit clunky in setting everything up.
This DVD has the oddest aspect ratio problems I’ve ever encountered. It came up as something approaching 1.2:1, but it’s really a 1.37:1 film. (And it claimed that it was 1.5:1!) So to get it to stretch out to something that approaches normality, I had to tell mpv to play it as 16:9! It turns out that this DVD has been mastered with black borders at the sides! The borders are in the video file! I mean, I’ve seen that with black borders top/bottom (quite usual, “letterboxing”), but I’ve never seen a DVD with burned-in window boxing fit for a 16:9 TV. That’s just absurd. So they just waste a lot of horizontal data area for blackness.
Very strange — and it’s a brand new DVD, so perhaps they’ve fired everybody that knew how to master DVDs?
This is quite an intriguing movie. I really didn’t expect this to go where it did — and I guess a few years later, a movie like this would be pretty difficult to make?
That said, I wasn’t as gripped by this movie as it wanted me to be.
That’s an impressively high-ceilinged office, man.
It’s kinda odd — I mean, it’s basically a 40s music video, but there’s “drama” parts where the characters deliver their lines in a rhythmic speaking kind of voice. It’s a bit interesting.
I’ve been following this Twitter account over the past few months. She posts about movies all the time, and it’s mostly older movies, with an emphasis on deep cut screwball comedies and the like, so that’s like catnip to me.
So I’ve been buying movies, but haven’t watched any of them yet — this is the first, and it better be good!
I think he likes her!
This is indeed pretty amusing, and the plot is very original — James Cagney works for United Fruit and keeps the banana plantation running, being all hyper competent and everything. But on the other hand, it’s not totally unsympathetic towards the revolutionaries either? And the guy who runs United Fruit is a total asshole, so…
But it’s a pretty odd movie.
Ann Sheridan is fantastic as the hard nosed quick witted card shark.
I like the movie — it’s satisfyingly weird — and there’s some really good jokes in there. But there could have been more jokes? More hi-jinx?
This has gotten quite a lot of attention, but I just found it to be boring and annoying. Spoilers! Don’t read anything after this if you intend to watch this movie, because in the very next sentence I’m going to spoil the entire thing!
When Paul Mescal arrived I said “oh, right, Mescal is going to be the Magic Pixiel Dream Boy who’s going to die so that Andrew Scott is going to learn an important lesson. I’ve seen a movie before, you know.” (From memory, but I did say something like that.) I was just half joking, though, but it turned out that I was even more literally correct than I knew!
And yes, indeed, this movie is about a guy who writes movies. But he’s got a writer’s block. I.e., the entire thing is a Mary Sue, but with Mommy Issues. (Which makes a change from Daddy Issues.)
See, he’s learning a lesson about his life.
One thing I have to say, though, is that the movie is quite nice to look at. It’s shot well, and it has actual proper lighting instead of just fixing everything in post. Props to the cinematographer and the lighting people.
And all the actors do solid performances.
But it’s fucking tedious. I guess there’s supposed to be a Big Twist Reveal at the end, but it was signalled with Big Huge Whopping Neon Sign Sized Letters, so I was just impatient to get to the end.
I’ll give it a ⚁, because it looks good, but it’s really a ⚀. One of the most annoying movies I’ve watched in a while.
So of course it has a 96% tomatometer with reviews like:
I think I’ve probably seen this before? But there was a remake last year, and… I’m not sure I bought this bluray because I wanted to see that one or this one?
Anyway, I’m watching this again, and I’m kinda thinking that it’s not as good as I remember it being?
The soundtrack is insane. Missy Elliott, Peaches, Orbital…
There’s so many funny and memorable things here, but I wasn’t quite sure? Until the final bits and it totally stakes the landing. It’s cute.
This is a 4K version, and some of the bits are perhaps a bit too clear? Like some of the people wear this weird green-looking make-up (probably to make people less blushing), but it looks pretty disturbing in some scenes.
I haven’t seen a movie in yonks! I don’t know what happened. So I thought I’d re-start my movie watching by watching the creme de la creme.
KIDDING
Man, this just looks so bad… I mean, all TV looks like this these days: They put the actor up against greenscreen, and film them without barely any lights — just everything evenly shot, desaturated, so that they can CGI in the backgrounds without them seeming out of place.
It’s super duper crappy, and I don’t know why there aren’t riots in the streets protesting this slop.
The title sequence was “fun”, if by “fun” you mean “Deadpool killing lots of innocent people”, but it looked so bad, too! They had CGI blood splatter everywhere that would have made CGI people in the 90s being ashamed of themselves.
Oh fuuuck! It’s about the Time Variance Authority! The thing everybody hated in the Loki series! I think this movie was commercially successful, though?
Yes indeed — 1.3 billion dollars.
I just hope the movie is going to start soon, because the first uhm 20 minutes have been brutally tedious. (And looks like dogshit.)
This is amusing… I mean, it’s pretty funny. But it’s like the timing is off? This could almost be extremely funny with just some pacing fixes and slightly better repartee. It leans into kinda gross bodily damage humour instead… but you can’t argue with $1.3 billion dolares.
What I’m saying is that I’m amused but bored at the same time.
Eh. I kinda admired the gross jokes more than I enjoyed them, if that makes sense? I can totally see why people liked this movie, but I was just mildly bored most of the time.
It’s not awful! It’s almost good? Like all big budget movies the last few years, it looks like dogshit, and that really cuts down on the enjoyment. But it’s otherwise OK?
Well, that’s no way to govern an empire. They do Hunger Games to choose an emperor?
“You have 24 hours to complete the mission.” Common.
This looks so cheap. Everything is greenscreen, of course, but the CGId environments look like they’ve been outsourced to Fiverr. To their credit, they try to hide the decrepit environments by only showing them for half a second at a time, and zooming in on faces almost the entire time, but…
First of all, this is a lot of fun. Sorry, I’m lying: I’m flabbergasted at how tedious this is. My jaw is down to here. How is it possible to be this bad?
I totally see what they’re going for — a kind of zany Guardians of the Galaxy thing. But there’s zero chemistry, there’s zero charm, and there are zero gags that actually work.
I don’t think anybody’s given the inside story on this, but it was originally supposed to be a “dark, edgy” TV series, but then Michelle Yeoh got more famous and refused. So they retooled to do a single movie with her, and went “zany” instead… but the writers and producers involved (just go ahead and watch Star Trek: Discovery) have no sense of humour at all.
I had hoped that it was just the usual Nazi brigading:
But this is astonishingly bad. I mean, I’m not speechless, but it’s so bad that most people in my situation would lie and say “I’m speechless”.
OK, we’re 40 minutes into the movie — is it finally going to start?
x
It’s the God’s End!
“I am a science officer, and science is controlled chaos.”
There’s been a lot of really bad Star Trek stuff. Remember Picard s1? No? Well, good for you. But this is off the scale. It’s amazing that they had the chutzpah to 1) film this and then 2) show it to people. I feel bad for Michelle Yeoh that they made her do this, and I feel bad for myself that I watched this. But I didn’t have to!
I won’t say it’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen, because I’ve seen a lot of stuff, but it’s the worst movie I’ve seen in quite a while.
Anyway, I got this movie because I watched Harold & Maude the other month, and this is another movie by Hal Ashby. And I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen this before.
But! I read the Mad Magazine parody of this many times as a child. I don’t really remember the parody either at this point, though, so I basically know nothing.
Sure, phones have a light in the handset…
Goldie!
Is Beatty wearing a wig? That’s a lot of hair.
Is Christie wearing a wig, too? That’s a lot of hair!
This is extremely Robert Altmanesque. But I guess that entire thing was a more general 70s movie thing — lots of people talking across each other; people constantly being interrupted; people changing their minds…
Oh my god! Christie’s wig keeps on growing! Is this a comment on er something?
It’s very political.
Is Beatty’s character supposed to be like 25? His acting is all over the place… I don’t quite get what this movie is, like, about? I mean, I’m kinda enjoying it on a scene by scene basis, but it seems so unfocused. Perhaps that’s the point.
I guess the election in 1968 was when the US went off the rails.
Well, at least they didn’t spend half the budget on these wigs, because they look cheap.
This is a fun way to start a movie… but… is this referring to the previous Venom movie or the Spider-Man multiverse movie? I don’t know!
So here’s the problem — I like movies that doesn’t explain things at us. But I’m not at all sure whether I’m just supposed to get references to previous movies (that I don’t remember at all) or other movies (that I don’t remember, either), and that’s just frustrating. That is, I don’t know whether I’m supposed to be confused (complementary) or whether I’m just not getting some fan service (derogatory).
That’s a normal amount of mascara and eye shadow for a top scientist.
I love how they commit to the dirty t-shirt bit. Tom Hardy is a hero — most other leading actors would have insisted on cooler clothes.
This is like a perfect super-hero movie.
Oops! Just after I said that thing about the t-shirt he changes into a dinner jacket.
The first third of this is a lot of fun…
… and then the last two thirds are just a long fight scene, mostly CGI in the dark. These are choices.
So…
I understand both the tomatometer and the popcronmeter here: If you’re a professional reviewer having to review this thing, you’re not going to like it. It’s pretty oddly paced, and lacks all the things that make a “good movie”. On the other hand, if you’re an audience member who’ve watched two of these movie before, and you choose to watch this one — you’re not going to be disappointed, because it’s more of the thing you liked in the first two movies… only even more so.
Myself, I liked it. I think it’s better than the first two movies — it’s really focused. It’s mostly just one fight scene after we get past setting the scene? It feels like you’re watching a stupid super-hero comic book, for better or worse.
Expectations can be difficult. I mean, everybody knows that this is the worst movie ever made ever (to summarise the reviews and the general feeling on Twitter)… and should give me low expectations, right? Noooo! That means that I’m now betting on this being some kind of genius, future cult movie, because people are usually wrong.
So I’ve got unreasonably high expectations for this, which means that I’m going to be disappointed, and then hate the movie, and then agree with everybody else, which I don’t want, so I’m trying to lower my expectations.
Which I’ve failed at!
Let’s roll the movie and see what happens.
Oh man, these “zooms” done in post processing are brutal. And they do it all the time! To add some excitement, but it looks so bad…
I am actually enjoying this this far. It’s been pretty charming, and they’re good at establishing the characters. And look! It doesn’t look like total dog shit! It looks like they actually filmed this scene on location? Instead of greenscreening it like everybody else does?
Hey! It’s a real cat! OK, a location shoot and a real cat — this is already better than 95% of other super-hero movies.
OK, not all the shots look equally good.
Dakota Johnson is really good.
Such web symbolism.
That was probably half the budget.
This is funny!
(And pretty exciting.)
Why did they give the blond(e) one such an unsightly and huge wig? It’s really distracting… Wigs are a lost art form — back in the olden days, they knew how to make ones that looked good on people, but now they just order Maximum Hair Ever and drop it on some poor person’s head in a way that will cover most of the places the wig meets the skin.
Dakota Johnson’s also wearing a wig? If not, they’ve somehow perfected the art of making real hair look like a wig.
OK, I can see why people are saying that Johnson is sleepwalking through this — there’s certain scenes where she could have done a bit more than “I’m kinda bewildered, bemildred and bemused”?
OK, there’s a couple fight scenes that are pretty risible, but on the whole, this is fine. It’s neither a future cult classic, and it didn’t deserve all the ridicule it got. It’s entertaining! It’s a bit oddly paced? Somehow it feels both rushed and too slow? But it’s fine. I’ve seen heaps of super-hero movies that have been worse than this.
Anyway, I got the final two of Greenaway’s 80s movies in the mail the other week. This 2K version looks pretty good — not overly restored or tinkered with.
I’ve seen this before — probably on VHS in like 1991? I did not remember it being this… stylised? It’s Greenaway’s big breakthrough movie, commercially, and I remembered it being more conventional? But perhaps that was just in contrast to his earlier movies that I’d seen at the Cinematheque by this point.
Yes, yes, hipsters, yes…
OK, I take back the thing I said about the transfer — shots like this have a lot of details, but there’s digital artifacting going on? That is, there’s pixels that, like, “shimmer” in the way old-fashioned CGI used to — when there’s too much information and the algo can’t decide on what the colour value for the pixels should be. Very odd. Haven’t seen that in a while. Could this be a very old digitisation? Did they even do 2K back in the olden days?
I’m so cynical… OK, the thing here seems to be that Helen Mirren is married to the most vulgar, uncultured crime boss ever, so she looks across the restaurant and immediately falls in lust with this nerd (because he reads a book).
And that’s definitely a fantasy nerds have — that if they display their culturedness (that’s a word), then a gorgeous woman like Helen Mirren will immediately want to have sex with them. That’s fine! But the casting! To make this a bit more plausible, couldn’t they have cast somebody who was even slightly attractive here? I know, I know, this is the fantasy of an older (not very attractive) man (I’m presuming), so that wouldn’t be their first choice, but c’mon. Didn’t anybody around Greenaway say “actually, more attractive actors exist”?
There’s the unfortunate whiff of cringe about “the vulgars”… She just asked about a bottle of Chianti with the “wrapping” so that she can take it home and hang it on the wall, and that’s just hilarious! So funny! Ha ha!
I’m beginning to think that Greenaway is a bit of a dick.
Very Last Dinnerish.
That’s what I want my toilet to look like.
Is that Ian Dury?
I can understand why this movie mad such a splash, both culturally and commercially. Greenaway keeps showing us this awful guy doing awful things, pointing at him “isn’t he awful? huh? isn’t he? look! he’s awful? see? *hee hee*”, i.e., The Sopranos Approach, and people love that.
I just found that bit tedious as fuck, and it goes on and on and on. Not to speak of the ultraviolence. It’s not a movie to watch while you’re eating.
Now, there’s other things here that are enjoyable — the staging (especially the kitchen), the music, the rotting trucks and some of the cinematography. And the colours! You can only dream about colours like this with recent movies.
But this isn’t as good as Greenaway’s good movies.
Last year, I watched a couple of classic Howard Hawks movies, and I thought “well, I’ve gotta watch them all”. And… when it gets to the 60s, these are movies I’ve never heard of before:
So this is one of them. I was only able to find this bluray in a Spanish edition, but it’s got an English sound-track, too.
But… I’m guessing this isn’t one of them there Howard Hawks classics.
Ah, James Caan… he was one of the biggest stars for a while, but I think he’s basically been forgotten now?
Er… I’m not even sure that’s him…
Man! She went to bed without removing the makeup!?
What happened! This is really bad! It’s written and directed by Hawks, but it seems totally amateurish — the shots are incomprehensively awkward, and it’s been super duper boring so far.
“To be serious I think there were some pretty good things in it but as a piece of entertainment I don’t think I did a good job. I think there were some individual scenes that were pretty good and there were a lot of great race scenes. But I’m not proud of the picture as a whole.”
Caan later called the film “a joke”.
People like it less than the critics (but there’s only six reviews).
It’s Sulu!
Man, this is so weird. Not just the boring plot and stuff, but just on a scene to scene basis — they splice in still photos showing what they’re watching, for instance, so it looks like a parody of a movie. (They couldn’t afford shooting the reverse?)
Nobody likes this movie — I think that’s the lowest rating Hawks has on any movie?
OK, I’m bailing. It’s rare that I bail on movies, but this is just dire. It’s amazing that somebody who made Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday and The Big Sleep made something as awful as this.
For a Godzilla movie, this has a lot of drama about surviving in Japan after WWII…
I understand the enthusiasm this movie had, because it’s like… a real movie? It’s not like those annoying American Godzilla movies? But… it’s hampered by the a low budget, I think. I mean, this looks better than most $200M American super-hero/monster movies, but it still doesn’t look, like, actually good.
Overbite Godzilla.
It’s not the special effects that show the lack of money the most — it’s the action scenes, where there’s supposed to be hundreds of extras running around, getting chomped, but instead there’s like four.
It’s a 99%/98% tomatometer — is that unprecedented?
OK, I wasn’t expecting them to fridge the Manic Pixie Dream Girl to motivate The Failed Kamikaze Pilot to Actually Do Something, and that’s on me — it was pretty obvious that that’s where this was going from the start.
I understand the enthusiasm for this movie. It’s a scrappy little movie that hits all the right notes. It’s quite moving, and it feels like the stakes are on the right level, and the action scenes are really effective — and all those things are things that US action movies usually fail at.
But.
There’s like an hour in the middle there that’s really (content warning: hate speech) boring. Sorry! It’s boring!
The fun parts are really fun, through, and it tugs at all the heart strings in a very effective (i.e. manipulative) way. So… it’s the movie for 2023? But is anybody gonna watch this in the years to come? Dunno.
I’ve never seen this movie before, but I’ve seen the name mentioned en passant a gazillion names. Like an example of 70s filmmaking? I’m not sure. But it finally occurred to me to just buy the bluray, so now I’m watching it.
Wow, I don’t think I’ve seen any of Hal Ashby’s movies, but again, the name is so familiar.
That’s an odd-looking kid, so I wondered how whether he was supposed to be 12 or 22, but the actor turns out to be 23…
Ah ok, Maude is the Magic Pixie Dream Granny. I’m guessing she’s going to die, but the kid is going to experience Character Growth.
That’s Maude.
It’s radical to cast an older woman to play an older woman — that still doesn’t happen a lot.
Interesting wall treatment….
I like this. It’s very… 1971.
Very big.
Oops, I think we entered the third act.
I want a hallway with pictures like that!
I have never been so sad to see a plot development that I predicted at the start come to pass. Because I really, really enjoyed this movie, and I’m so disappointed that it had to end on such a cliché.
Anyway. Perhaps I should sample some of the other Hal Ashby movies anyway?
And I think the trope of the old, funny woman who represents anarchy and disregard for laws and propriety has largely disappeared? Growing up, it seemed like this — the cheeky grandmother — was a character that appeared all the time? But I can’t remember the last time I saw one of these characters…
The weird thing, when this movie was released, I was all “oh, I hated the first Dune movie, so I’m never gonna watch this one”, but then I checked my blog post about that movie — and I totally misremembered. I loved it! Why didn’t I remember that? So weird.
Anyway, that just goes to show: You should always blog what movies you’re watching. And now I’m watching Part Two.
Futura!
It’s Zimmerman!
I respect that there’s no recap — “as you know, Paul, you’re the son of a king who was killed by the eeevil Harkonnen in the previous movie” — but I have to admit I’m slightly confused. I don’t remember these people! But still, I’m enjoying this a lot! So far.
Hang on… that apostrophe isn’t a Futura apostrophe! What’s going on!
Somebody was tweeting comparisons between the bluray version and the Max version, and I thought it looked kinda fake, but indeed, the bluray version is very horizontal.
You gotta admit that it’s a bit confusing that they cast a woman 12 years older than Timothee to play Timothee’s mother.
That’s not Sting!
Are we black and white now!?
Wow, that’s a cosy hotel room. Kinda like the one I stayed at in London last week — it had black rubber floors.
OK, I’m a bit bored now. It’s, I guess, kinda brave to have a movie start with 90 minutes without much plot, and basically being a training sequence. And it’s been entertaining mostly, but now it’s kinda sagging.
Hopefully the movie is going to start now — there’s a bit more than an hour to go.
It’s a bit amusing that the Eeevil Sting Guy’s Evil Genius plan is just to actually bomb the Fremen instead of, like, running around and being shot at by them. That’s so… genius. And evil!
Man, these Arabs have excellent sound systems… Paul was ranting in the middle there, but all these hundreds of thousands of people could hear him.
Hey, it’s Post Atreides.
I think I have that headpiece.
These algorithmically generated crowds just look silly. And why didn’t the worms eat all the soldiers anyway?
I liked this… but I have to admit to being bored a bit, too. It’s not that the movie is overlong (at almost three hours) really — there’s nothing that feel superfluous, exactly. In many ways it feels like it’s recapping a story? I.e., perhaps it could have been longer?
I think the parts that were most boring were when we had to go through plot points. Like, when Paul drank the Secret Potion — that felt like we were going through the motions. While the more offhand, less plot-driven scenes were more entertaining?
But I did like it, anyway. And it was fun watching Stellan have so much fun playing the eeeevilest guy.
It also felt like the middle part of a trilogy, but I guess it’s unsure whether there’ll be any further Dune movies?
I’ve never seen this before. I was a huge Talking Heads fan up an until Remain In Light as a child (my elder sister had most of their albums; I was 12), but their first album I bought myself (Speaking In Tongues) I found kinda naff. So when this came out the year after, and all my friends finally got into them (and the live version of Psycho Killer was playing everywhere) I was doing the stupid teenage hipster thing and thinking I was all over it.
But man, this is awesome!
I would have loved this.
I admit it: I was wrong. Once! When I was er sixteen, I guess? 1984? Yeah, that tracks. But I was listening to The Smiths and Ministry by this time.
Oh, I didn’t know that Tina played the pick-ey guitar part on Home. Makes sense, though.
<menswear guy>That suit should be bigger.</menswear guy>
Wow, I still feel exactly the same as when I was twelve years old listening to Crosseyed and Painless: Why can’t that song just continue forever?
One thing I kinda regret is watching the half part of this with the subtitles on, because it corrected so many misunderstandings I had about the lyrics. I’ve always thought it was “TV’s in the bedroom, inventing situations” not “Judy’s in the bedroom” and so on, and I prefer the versions of the lyrics I made up back then.
Anyway, this is absolutely fantastic. (Even if some of the songs have a distinct lack of much needed Adrian Belewness.)
I got this DVD because I read Casanova Frankenstein’s fantastic autobio book (with Glenn Pearce). He described how seeing this movie randomly on TV in the early 80s was a real eye opener and kinda changed his life? So I had to see this.
Oh, I guess the Police were the biggest name here…
I don’t think that this was originally in 16:9? Oh, it was! I mean, 1.78:1. That’s unusual.
What I understood from the book was that this would be a compilation of concert footage bits? And it is! Did they have one big show where all these people played or is it cut together from many different dates?
Punk, New Wave, Reggae and Techno bands from Europe and the US recorded live in several locations in 1980.
Looks great, anyway.
What’s Jools doing here!?
I bought Klaus Nomi’s album just the other year… and while I admire his schtick, the music is kinda naff? “HUMOUR OUT OF MUSIC” is a slogan I could almost sign off on, but there’s plenty of bands that take funny concepts (like Matmos) and make something awesome out of it, and… other’s don’t.
This movie is 99% just shots of people playing on stage. One song per band. No talking heads. Nobody talking about how radical this music is or whatever. No explanations. No pauses between acts. I love it! But I also like these occasional shots of the audience.
Very realistic shot of what it’s like to be in the audience.
Rare non-stage shot…
… but it leads into these comedy punks so it makes sense.
I love The Au-Pairs. So many fantastic bands on this thing. Those Police guys have good taste!
All the acts are really sweaty, too, so these shows aren’t just the band doing one song each or something. Did they like put on a huge festival spanning weeks with a couple bands per day?
OK, not all these bands are as well-remembered these days.
Is that Pere Ubu? I just bought a complete box set of their stuff, but I’m not familiar with what they’re playing…
Man, that was awesome. I saw them live a couple years ago, but the performance here was so precise… just amazing.
Most of these are shot in pretty big venues, but here’s one from a small one.
Hey! The Police started the movie, and here’s another Police song? They’re the only band that gets more than one song? SUCH NEPOTISM¹.
Such edgy drum kit. Not a jazz at all.
What!? Another Police song? But with Jools!?
Oh, it’s while they run the end credits. Well, that’s OK then — the first one while the opening credits were running, so while they did three tracks, only one of them on their own, like.
Now there’s like two dozen people on stage, so I guess at least some of these bands played the same night to do this movie.
Well, that was kinda awesome? I don’t have any negative things to say about this. The sound is great, it’s filmed perfectly, the selection of bands is almost impeccable, and there’s nothing annoying at all. That doesn’t really happen. So it’s top grades from me.
I do wonder what the story behind this is, though. How did they get financing? 34 bands? So much film filmed? Who financed this? And did MTV help or hurt the movie?
At the start of this I was spending too much time to see whether they were really playing all the sounds we were hearing… but then I relaxed and was amazed.
It’s such a fun concert movie. And nostalgic now — he’s getting out the vote and everything. Awww. As if that mattered. It’s like a peek back to the idyllic time we had in … 2020.
I love it.
And since this is the third concert movie I’ve seen in a row that I’m giving ⚅, I guess I just love watching live shows.
I guess I didn’t see this tour, because I would have remembered that stylish hat.
This is such a bangin’ show, with lasers and everything.
Electric (their previous album) was amazing, and then Super was kinda not. But they’re really leaning into the Electric feel (if not all the tracks). This show almost makes me like the songs from Super! And even the gruesome Electric track, Love is a booshwah concept sounds good here.
And Neil Tennant has been using autotune so heavily the last decade that it’s a relief to be able to listen to his real voice again for an hour.
This is a 4K remaster, but er, I’m sorting comics while “watching this” so I’m really enjoying the K-ness.
Very rock n roll.
Neil!
This guy is a good singer, too.
Joni!
Somebody!
I liked it! Even if I didn’t really “watch it” watch it.
But I’ve seen this before — it was among one of the first handful of movies I saw in the movie theatre. I’d seen all the Beatles movies, so I guess this was the logical next thing for my elder siblings to take me out to. I was ten, I guess?
I don’t really remember much from watching that time around, other than that it was… kinda magical? And re-watching this now, I’m thinking perhaps this played a part in me becoming really into going to live shows? Because this is so romantic in its way, and there’s no talking heads interrupting the performances. We get songs in full, and then perhaps somebody talks for a couple minutes, max.
It’s 90% live performance, and I really like that.
So I’m rating this on both almost forgotten nostalgia and just how you should film live shows:
I’ve seen the remake of this — by my favourite director, Douglas Sirk. It’s good! And strangely enough, Sirk has also redone another movie by John M. Stahl — Magnificent Obsession. Sirk’s version was better than Stahl’s, I think, so I’m wondering about this one…
… and whether the reason that Criterion released these two particular Stahl movies was because people remember the Sirk versions.
Man, that’s some drawn-on eyebrows.
No collar gap.
This is quite good! Louise Beavers is great, and of course Claudette Colbert is, too. The first third of this movie is wonderful — it’s snappy, fun rags to riches story that you can’t help love.
Then there’s the rest, and it’s… fine? The last bits drag, though.
I was mostly surprised by how little the Sirk version of this has in common with this version. His version of Magnificent Obsession is almost a scene by scene copy, but this movie has very little in common with the Sirk version.
I mean, it’s got “the concept of ‘passing'” in common, but none of the plot (except perhaps a scene or two). I wonder what the reason was — I think this plot is more interesting, really? I mean, the rags to riches bit; not the love story between Colbert and whatsisface.
I’m guessing I have seen this before (I mean, it’s a classic), but I have no recollection of doing so. So it’s possible that it’s just passed me by?
This opening scene doesn’t ring any bells either.
Love that shot and that juxtaposition.
Oh, now it does seem familiar to me… I think I may have seen this when I was like… ten? Or something? I think it might have been shown on TV.
The only thing I remember is feeling so sorry for the Jon Voight character for being so painfully stupid, and … that it ends in tragedy. Or perhaps just for the Dustin Hoffman character? I can almost envisioning him freezing to death on the streets or something.
Why were everybody so sweaty back then!
See, he’s stupid? He reads comics!
Oh no! Now I remember the ending… on the bus to Florida?
I’m really enjoying this movie — I’m like going “they really knew how to make movies back then *grumble* *grumble* these days”. But I’m also thinking the same things from when I was 10 — 1) why doesn’t he, like, just get a job?, and 2) is it humanly possible to be as stupid as that guy?
Nooo the Mary Jane is hitting! Not the reefer madness!
This is the kind of movie where you’d go “we used to be a nation! we made proper movies!” Because this is indeed a proper movie.
I think it’s a bit flabby in the last third? But I mean, it’s great.
I’m watching this movie for no particular reason at all. What, did something happen?
I’ve rewatched all (or just about all) of Lynch’s movie over the past few years, but I skipped this one — and I think it’s because I was just confused? I thought that this was Mulholland Dr or something.
So I don’t think I’ve seen this since the 90s.
Ssh! Now we’re watching the movie.
After watching this now, I see why I’d forgotten about it… or at least gotten it mixed up with Mulholland Dr. It’s just this is a kind of run-through of many of the themes Lynch would explore in a better way there?
But it might also be that my problems with this movie is mostly due to the casting and the soundtrack. Bill Pullman tries to act like Kyle MacLachlan, but doesn’t succeed, and the guy playing the er “other” lead guy wasn’t much better.
Were there none of Lynch’s usual troupe except the tiny Jack Nance cameo?
The musical choices haven’t aged well (except for the Bowie track) — and what’s with the stunt casting of Henry Rollins? I wonder what the story behind all this was: Nobody wanted to finance the movie unless he made it… more… 90s? Hm, looks like it was financed by a French company, so perhaps not.
This wasn’t the final movie Lynch would get to make, but The Straight Story was, er, something quite different, and then Mulholland Drive was supposed to be a TV series, but wasn’t picked up, and then Inland Empire was done digitally on the cheap, and that was it for Lynch and movies.
It’s a tragedy that Lynch couldn’t get financing for the last couple decades.
Anyway, I’m just saying: This is probably Lynch’s least good movie. Except for The Elephant Man.
Heh, haven’t seen an “and introducing” thing in a movie in a minute.
So these are zany high school students! Dressed by Derek Guy!
These are the most Derek Guy looking high school students ever!
(Complimentary.)
This is very amiable. The performances are all over the place — some are playing it straight, and some are chewing anything even resembling scenery.
Oh, Cynthia Davis, who was introduced by this movie, didn’t do anything ever again.
It’s a charming movie, but it’s so episodic. And we’ve had at least two of the episodes ending with a riot and everybody fighting each other, which makes things a bit repetetive… and we’re barely half finished here.
That’s not a six-pence. That’s a three-shilling.
The fun parts are fun, but I got pretty bored with the drama in the last half. Lots of great tunes on the soundtrack, though.
Yes, this does indeed seem like a very Finnish movie already.
Very Finnish!
And animal friendly.
It’s a kinda digital looking movie? That is, they seem to be dropping in CGI and compositing here and there…
People are standing very close to each other in this movie.
Yeah, it’s worrying!
It’s like… I mean, I like this movie in general, but it’s like it’s referencing things that are better, and that backfires sometimes. Like the sound design sometimes reminds you of David Lynch, but not as good, and then you’re sitting here thinking “I should watch Lost Highway”. The family drama is kinda sorta Ibsenish? So you’re thinking “wow, it’s been a while since I watched The Master Builder”…
Weeeell… The cinematography is wonderful, even with the digital flourishes. And this is apparently director’s Pirjo Honkasalo final movie? I see that she had a long career before this:
The plot seems a bit unmotivated? Unless it’s all “well, that kid was skeebee deebee from the get go”, the tragedy doesn’t quite work? I mean, it almost does? But the pivotal scene where he beats the crap out of that creep… I was going YAY, but apparently that wasn’t what you were supposed to say?
And also, I’m a bit Judy-Garland-on-Mia-Zetterling’s-Night-Games here… was all that stuff at the start necessary?
OK, I’m trying to talk it down to a ⚃, but it looks great, and the performances are totally amazing, and even the soundtrack is really on point, so I’m going with:
OK, I’m starting watching the massive Alan Clarke box set again: Dissent & Disruption. These are all movies done for the BBC, and I quite like that genre. Sort of… earnest 70s things? But I’ve been a bit disappointed by these Clarke movies — some of them have been mortifying.
But now we’re in 1970, so perhaps things are going to pick up a bit.
I’m not quite sure what’s happening here… It seems like these people are joining the army? But they seem to be too old for that? So are these people who are already soldiers joining an elite company? The “Sovereign’s Company”?
No, now he’s teaching them to polish their boots, so I suppose these people are supposed to be 18?
He’s giving Rik Mayall in The Young Ones, I guess.
So they are supposed to be old soldiers!?
*gasp* Could he be… that way!?
These seem rather too dressed-up to be recruits, don’t they? But… one guy flew in from India to be in this squad, and another came up from London, so they weren’t already in the military?
This is extremely confusing.
I don’t think any of the black characters have any lines?
But again, they seem to have very formal uniforms for recruits, so er uhm. I’m guessing things weren’t as confusing for a typical British BBC viewer in 1970.
They sure have a lot of er uniforms.
Now that’s how professionals fight!
This is an odd movie.
I kinda like the general approach of this movie… we’re presented with a situation, and then we get a “shocking” ending that shows how corrupt The System is… But it’s not exactly firing on all cylinders, now is it?
Huh. The names attached to this movie… Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lorre, Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, Truman Capote… And I don’t remember hearing about this movie before? Is this one of those late-career white elephant kind of movies?
The cinematography is very post-Vittorio de Sica.
I’m not quite sure whether this is supposed to be a broad comedy or, like, a serious drama/heist movie?
I mean…
But I think perhaps Huston is going for a British comedy kind of thing? That is, “satire”, i.e., “not actually funny”?
I wonder what “colorist Sheri Eisenberg” did on this restoration, though.
John Huston has directed so many classics that it’s hard to grasp that the movie you’re watching might be a total dud.
I’m starting to think that this is.
Yeah, but that’s what a satire is… But it’s true — there’s no jokes here (that land).
“Beat the Devil” went straight from box office flop to cult classic and has been called the first camp movie, although Bogart, who sank his own money into it, said, “Only phonies like it.” It’s a movie that was made up on the spot; Huston tore up the original screenplay on the first day of filming, flew the young Truman Capote to Ravallo, Italy, to crank out new scenes against a daily deadline and allowed his supporting stars, especially Robert Morley and Peter Lorre, to create dialogue for their own characters.
But the cinematographer didn’t always choose the right lens for the scene.
At first, I thought this was a ⚂ movie… and then I was so bored that I was going to go with ⚁… but it’s bad. It’s really bad.
Anyway, I’m watching this because somebody said that it was unexpectedly hilarious… and it is indeed pretty funny. It’s quite old fashioned — you could almost see Schwarzenegger do this movie in 1992.
But it does constantly skirt eww territories which those movies steered clear of.
And now they’re doing a training montage. This is where you can go all overboard with funny stuff, but instead it’s like… amusing, but they could have turned it up a few notches?
Ah yeah, the director started off doing a Naked Gun sequel, and has continued doing silly movies. And this movie is exactly what you’d expect — but it’s good. I laughed out loud several times, especially during the last 20 minutes.
But this is not a future cult classic, I think. It’s kinda uneven tonally? And there’s so many scenes that could easily have been hilarious instead of just amusing. But still. It’s fun.
So it looks like this is going to be a bunch of short bits from movies and news reports with extremely high contrast and offbeat chroma?
Which I’m on board for.
Eh… the subtitles in this movie are kinda random.
Murder?!
There’s a sentence you don’t see every day.
The English subtitles on this one are weird. But I quite liked the movie? Especially towards the end? I kinda wanna go with a ⚄, but let’s be realistic.
Anyway, is this the movie that ends with the guy telling people to scream out the window? Or… is that something else?
It’s a satire? I.e., not actually funny?
Oh, I think I was thinking of Network (which was from the 70s). This is from 1987! I was thinking “wow, William Hurt looks old to be like 27”.
Oh, right.
Oh, that’s her!
I’m having some problems getting into this, and I’m not sure at all why. The base mood is basically… Hill Street Blues? But with a plot line that’s all satirical and critical of the news business and how fake (*gasp*) it is and stuff.
It’s refreshing to see actors without fillers and botox again. We used to think of the 80s as being so over-the-top glamorous, but then the trend just continued and now nobody protests at the otherworldly faces on the screens.
Button down shirts! I’ve been reading the menswear guy lately… I didn’t know what that expression referred to before.
I’m not sure whether we have those in Europe? A Brooks Brothers invention, I think he said.
See those buttons?
Oh oh I’ve seen this before! Probably at the time? I remember this sweaty scene!
Yes, it’s him.
I really liked the ending. (SPOILERS!) The movie kind of sets up Holly Hunter to choose between Hurt (who’s very nice, but fake) and Brooks (who’s a bit of a dick, but serious), and goes for the unusual solution of: How about none of them?
Which is the only right solution.
But it’s not that the movie aged badly, but more like it’s… I dunno. For large stretches of this movie, I just didn’t really connect. Is it just that it’s too long for the material? (It’s 2h10m.)
OK, not loving this so far… The colour grading isn’t overpowering, but they’ve grayified a lot (except certain colours), and there’s shakycam. Which I just loathe.
OK, we’ve got a sad kid who gets bullied… so is he gonna go all Harry Potter all of a sudden?
Oh, it’s Liam!
Oh yeah! That’s why I bought this bluray — it has Sigourney Weaver. I was starting to wonder how I ended up with this…
Nice decor. I mean, I mean it — if they hadn’t colour graded this into sadness, it would be a comfy kitchen.
They found the one child actor in the UK that looks like a jaundiced 40s child. Which is confusing, since it’s contemporary (I think). Nobody’s got a mobile phone… perhaps it’s meant to be set in the 90s? (They have a DVD player.)
Stern! Very stern!
So Liam Neeson plays an ent?
Oh, there’s animated bits, too.
I like the style. It’s very computerish, but somebody has apparently invented an algorithm to make everything seem all watercolourley. It’s pretty.
But it looks like we’re going to get Liam Treeson telling the poor kid three of these fairytales? And I hate fairytales sooo much.
Oh god
This is very confusing. She’s got thick, luscious hair, but cropped short. So her mother is trying to get her to wear wigs!? But why? This isn’t how cancer treatments work — chemo doesn’t result in having shorter, luscious hair!
Did she just refuse to shave her head for this role? Which I can totally understand, if so.
This movie didn’t bomb exactly, but didn’t do well either.
Still not shaved her head.
Bandana is growing bigger, though.
This movie is even worse than the Jurassic World thing Bayona did.
Well, OK, this movie is well made and I love the actors, but… It’s only been fifteen minutes, and we’ve already had so much misery heaped upon this poor woman that it’s… It’s not that I don’t believe that it’s possible, but it’s too much.
Yeah of course — in addition to everything else, she’s probably dying from some disease?
I’m sorry, this is veering close to kitch.
OK OK.
Yeah, a mattress without a sheet. Trés economique à long terme.
Lokita is such a gormless character — she deals drugs but apparently gets paid less than 1% of the take? And is also paying off the people who smuggled her in (in the most humiliating way — by carrying around absolutely all her money on her person), and etc etc. I thought it was a kinda racist movie, but then her kid brother is super duper competent and does almost super human feats, so I guess it’s just misogynist?
I just didn’t find the characters believable.
So instead of being heart-rending (which is what the directors where obviously going for), I was just rolling my eyes at each horrific thing.
Don’t listen to me:
It’s got an 87% tomatometer.
But I’m pissed off with this movie, because they really went all in on making a tear jerker about the horrible conditions immigrants face, and how terribly they’re exploited — and the filmmakers failed completely, in my opinion. I totally applaud what they apparently were trying to make, but instead they made this piece of kitch.
Still, I loved the performances (especially the kid (who they had say the most hair-raisingly incongruous things)) and it looks good, so let’s go with:
Tori and Lokita. Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne. 2022. ⚁
So this is the 2010 er reboot of the series? I watched all the previous movies last year, but didn’t do this one, because I didn’t know that it existed.
Since it didn’t lead to the franchise taking off again, I’m guessing it bombed? So my expectations are high!
Whoho!
This is gonna be awesome.
This guy has the same makeup artist at the president after the next one in the US.
Well, these digital effects just aren’t as scary are the original practical ones…
Hey! That’s not whatsisname Englund!
Instead of being scary it’s more like “oh this again? really?”
Oh, this is made by a production company specialising in doing uninspired remakes?
Oh, that’s grim. But then they got a hit with The Purge and then A Quiet Place.
OH NO
That’s a nice nightmare library. It’s a kind of confusing movie — it generally looks pretty good, but it seems like it doesn’t have any energy or enthusiasm?
Yeah, it had a pretty solid budget (and didn’t lose money!?).
Allegedly making this was such a miserable experience that Rooney Mara almost quit acting.
So in this version, the parents killed Freddie just on a vague suspicion? That sucks. I mean, Freddie being eeeevil is the whole fun of these movies.
Oh, now people can be having “micronaps” while being seemingly awake so that Freddie can appear at any moment, whether they’re awake or not? That kinda fucks up the logic even further. When it’s just randomness it’s just *rolls eyes*.
The guy playing Freddie is giving like zero percent. He’s barely delivering his lines (and those lines suck). It’s like he’s trying to make sure that he’s never going to have to get that makeup done ever again.
I was bored out of my skull watching this, so it’s really a ⚀ movie. But I did like the sets and the general look? So let’s go with:
OK, I had to stop this and download subtitles from the pirates (if pirates can create subtitles, why can’t DVDs carry subtitles? (because fans will do this sort of thing for free, but the people who make the DVDs can’t afford to anybody)), because the first few scenes were totally incomprehensible to me. Which is doubly weird because I think the audio has been done after it was filmed?
So this looks like it was filmed on one of those early digital cameras? So this looks pretty bad except in scenes like this.
I’m not sure whether the general aimlessness of the movie is because Hogg wanted to depict this kind of aimlessness or whether they basically just went to Italy and mostly improvised the movie?
There’s genuinely unnerving scenes, though.
And scenes like this just seem a bit too staged for the aesthetic?
Uhm uhm uhm I just couldn’t get into this movie. It seems like totally the thing I’d like, and the cinematography (modulo the horrible digital cameras) is good, and the performances are good, but I just didn’t connect.
It’s a cute opening to the movie, but… it felt like an exposition dump? While pretending to be witty repartee? It was just a bit odd.
That’s some awesome… wig work.
So is this all about Tom Cruise? But doesn’t he do a lot of his own stunts?
Eep!
If there’s one thing huge audiences love, it’s a movie about making movies. I can’t think of any movie like this that has bombed, except all of them.
Yeah, it lost a lot of money. But not historically.
It’s cute and it’s amusing, but it just moves so slowly. The movie is 2h25m long, and it feels like all these scenes could have been cut. Even though they’re cute.
… oh! I’m watching the extended cut? It’s 20m longer than the proper version. Oops.
It seems pretty obvious what scenes were cut… like this one? I mean, I’m just guessing, but…
Heh heh
Heh heh
Yeah, OK, I like all the stunts and stuff — and they’re supposed to be all? mostly? practical — but the way they’re filmed, they just don’t pop like they should. I mean, most everything has been desaturated in the way movies are to match up real footage with CGI, so it’s just hard to be as enthusiastic as you’re supposed to be.
So, like, this looks 100% fake an embarrassing — but it might just be because of how it’s composited.
I dunno… The first half of this movie, I was on board, but then the last nine hours have kinda dragged? But then again, I’m watching the extended cut (which was a mistake).
Those are weird glasses. Did they CGI in the sky reflection in every shot?
These are the things you start wondering about when you’re not quite invested in the movie.
I’m totally willing to believe that the theatrical release of this was better, but I was just bored silly through large parts of this extended version.
But this movie just has a basic problem with the aesthetics. It’s supposedly a love letter to practical stunts — and there were a lot of them in this movie. But they all looked like shit! Because they were all colour graded into oblivion and composited, so even the realest stunt looked as bad as the cheapest CGI these days.
It’s like they had no confidence in the central concept of this thing but had to hedge.
Solondz is unable to get financing for his movies these days… but on the other hand, you have to ask yourself why we were subjecting ourselves to his movies in the first place. I need more pillows to hide behind while watching this.
Wow, weird desks. You can’t adjust the chairs?
DING DING BITING SATIRE WARNING DING DING
Well, I dunno. It’s such an aggressive movie — it’s designed to get a rise out of people. And the second part of it seems designed to be critic proof — Solondz has already made all the criticism you could make, so ha ha!
I think the only way the two parts work is that the second part tries to defuse any objections you had to the first part? And that’s just ass covering. So it’s no wonder that the featured review on imdb is:
Yeah yeah yeah right.
More confusing are the reviews by actual reviewers:
With things like:
So… that’s… bad?
That’s true.
But I dunno. I admire some of this movie, but it’s hard to make the case why anybody should subject themselves to watching this movie.
Anyway, after I watched the other Carax movies (one was good, one wasn’t), I watched a couple of the documentaries that were included on the discs, and… well, they made me less excited about watching more Carax movies?
Oh, this is the one where Levant plays that he’s portraying a Bulgarian beggar in Paris…
Or, er, non.
That’s a very pretty factory. The French even has pretty factories!
So this movie is gonna be a series of tableaux where Levant performs a role for a couple of minutes and then it’s on to the next thing? Is that like a comment on film-making?
There’s no doubt that Carax is able to get a lot of talented people on board to do this thing. Like this scene — it lasts for ten seconds, but must have been so much work to put together.
And is this biting satire? Or just kinda… eh?
BITING SATIRE
(As I’m fond of saying: “Satire” is another way of spelling “not actually funny”.)
This movie looks great, but it really feels like the impetus for making this is to see just how far he could push Denis Levant. In the previous scene, you had this gorgeous pietà scene, but with Levant in the Christ role sporting a very rigorous erection for quite a long time (I can’t show you a snap of that here, since this is a family oriented blog)… It really reads as if Carax just wants to fuck around with Levant, making him suffer?
That’s probably way off the mark, but that’s what this feels like.
It’s like the movie is saying something deep like “in life, we’re all playing roles”.
Carax was able to sway potential investors concerned with the film’s budget by switching to digital photography, a process of which he strongly disapproves.
Digital.
I kinda wish I liked this movie, because it’s… I wants to be fun? But instead it’s kinda cringe?
I know! I’m so insightful. But it’s like the concept could work, and many of the scenes are quite interesting, but it just doesn’t work.
Anyway, I’m done with my 80s arthouse movie binge, so I was wondering — what’s next? Well, after the 80s, there’s *shiver* the 90s, and the most 90s director there is is Todd Solondz, so I bought all his movies.
And I’ve seen them all before — back then. All I remember is like… they’re all Three Pillow Movies? That is, that’s how many pillows you have to hide behind to not just die from sheer cringe.
OK, I’ve got pillows here, so let’s go.
Hey, wasn’t Solondz’s last movie called Wiener-Dog?
Hey, it that that guy…?
It is!
Yeah, I needed those pillows — this is hard to watch.
But on the other hand, man: Those kids are amazing. I kinda feel like you couldn’t put child actors through something like this these days? And that’s probably good! But, wow, Heather Matarazzo is unbelievable, but it’s not just her — Solondz is just amazing at directing kids.
The movie is kinda genius? I remember it being good, but it’s fantastic.
This is sort of a coda to my 80s art house blog series — I sort of think of Atom Egoyan as belonging to that cohort, but he really had his breakthrough a bit later, in the 90s.
So he’s like a transitional figure, I guess? Because I’m gonna continue on with the very, very different 90s art house people next.
There was a thing in the 80s where you have to have a scene set at a strip show, because that er shower that er you weren’t uptight or something? But this movie seems to be set there? And is very sinister!
I don’t think I’ve seen this movie before?
When watching movies from before like 2005 I’m finding myself going “ooooh awesome” even at shots like this — because this just look casually great. As opposed to the beigeness of all movies after they started with digital cameras and colour grading everything to whatever colour they wanted in post.
But you don’t end up with results like this using that process.
Or this.
It’s just like movies were casually visually interesting in a way that post-grading films aren’t.
I mean, look at this! It’s awesome.
Hey, it’s that guy…
Man, this movie is kinda hypnotic. I have no idea where any of this is going.
OK, not all these lighting choices are totally successful.
Oh, I’ve been wondering where I recognise this guy from:
I think this is like their outback? Where their spirits are?
Wow. I wasn’t at all sure about how I felt about this movie until the last second, really. The strip joint setting seemed so… *rolls eyes* but turns out to be integral to what’s going on. And then the heart-wrenching final ten minutes…
It’s some kind of masterpiece, isn’t it? It’s a hard sell for sure, because it’s just so odd — it isn’t about anything you think it’s about, and then it snaps into focus and it’s devastating.
I started watching this movie thinking that it was a Stanley Donen movie or something…
… but it’s not — it’s Howard Hawks. And it’s an excruciating watch.
It’s basically Bringing Up Baby done for the 60s, with Rock Hudson as the Cary Grant part.
For the Katharine Hepburn part, we have not one, but two Magic Pixie Nightmare Girls (from Germany, for some reason? financing?).
There’s a lot of odd bits in here…
Hepburn and Grant had wonderful chemistry, so while Grant’s character sometimes wanted to strangle Hepburn’s character over her madcap behaviour, there’s absolutely zilch here. Instead the two women are just insanely (and I mean insanely) annoying, and I wanted to strangle them myself.
Oh, and this embarrassment… He’s Native American, see.
The movie has one thing going for it — Hudson’s not all bad with the physical humour. But even there, Grant did these things so much better.
Many older directors didn’t really do well in the 60s, or at least made a few clunkers. Michael Powell (of & Pressburger fame), for instance, made some real stinkers, and even Hitchcock couldn’t keep up. This movie feels like somebody old wants to make a new, modern comedy, but ends up halfway to a Carry On movie, only without the boobs.
It’s well shot, though.
Wet shirt time!
Yeah, OK, it’s more like two thirds to a Carry On movie.
The plot goes for zany but ends up dumb.
It’s well-liked by imdb.
Yeah.
I dunno; I really really disliked this movie — I was annoyed and I was bored — so I’m going to throw an unfair die. So there:
This is another one of those movies that’s mainly a way to string together a bunch of musical numbers and call it a film… and also featuring Mae West, but it’s not a typical West vehicle, because she isn’t in it all that much.
Despite all that, this is much better than it has any reason to be. I guess it’s a testament to how good the Hollywood professionals were back then: They could take a nothing-much concept like this and make it into a really amusing movie.
And Mae West has several dozen of funny one-liners to hand out at any given moment.
This is the performer that’s given the most screen time, I think? And looking it up, she has to be Hazel Scott…
Yes, it’s during WWII, so we get a couple of patriotic numbers, too.
And this thing — a Gardening for Victory skit that seems to come out of nowhere, but I assume was sponsored by the gummint.
Amazingly enough, this movie has good reviews — it has a 92% tomatometer.
The imdb rating is more realistic.
It’s a really, really bad movie — nothing makes much sense, and the characters’ motivations seem totally random. I was going “wha? wha?” throughout the entire thing.
The only thing here that worked was the ending, which I guess was trying to reference Beau Travail, perhaps?
Even as a cigarette girl Marlene has the best lighting.
Nice drapes.
While watching the movie, I kept wondering whether the governor was that funny guy from all the movies, and:
It is! I didn’t know that Edward Everett Horton had done even slightly straight roles like this. But he’s excellent here, too.
This really isn’t that much of a movie — it’s mainly a vehicle to watch Marlene Dietrich being pretty on the screen. But even so, von Sternberg makes the most of it, and we get a very amusing little movie where Dietrich is The Bad Girl; the Baddest Girl Ever In A Movie.
Is that John Lurie or that guy that looks like John Lurie? Hm… Ah, the latter.
This movie has a bunch of really accomplished actors. Harvey Keitel had even starred in a couple movies Auster had done with Wayne Wang, so you’d think this would be easy peasy — but the performances are really off. It’s weird that a bad/inexperienced directory like Auster could somehow make Keitel act amateurish, but there it is.
But it’s a pretty good movie overall, and it certainly has that Austerian mystery going on — you never know exactly happening, and it’s fascinating. And the ending could be seen as a groaner, I guess, but I really liked it.
I’ve seen the remake before — it has Rock Hudson instead of Robert Taylor as the slacker who turns into creepy stalker and then saviour. And I think I remember that version being more successful?
The movies are very, very similar, though, and have basically the same issues.
I’m not actually sure whether I’ve seen this one before, and it’s from the 90s, but I feel it was kinda vaguely part of what was being shown at the local cinematheque, so let’s watch this anyway, since I’m doing a blog series about that — it’s the final Branagh movie I remember anybody being enthusiastic about. His next movie had these actors:
And from there it was just downhill:
Nice-looking cat.
Emma Thompson is the best — another reason Branagh’s movies nosedived (they divorced).
Oh, I’m getting this movie confused with Four Weddings… makes sense; they’re from around the same time. I think I did see that one? I assumed that Stephen Fry was going to die in this one? But perhaps it’s that guy from Four Weddings…
The use of music in this movie is unreal… They seem to want to use all movies that were on Top Of The Pops in like 1984-85? We’ve had all the hits — Tears For Fears, Cindy Lauper, etc — and I don’t mind. But it’s odd!
Nice sweater.
By the way, I could only find this bluray in a Spanish edition (but it has an English language soundtrack, too). But it’s odd. Perhaps it’s a rights issue? Nobody in the UK or US has the rights for a physical release at the moment? It happens.
But it looks very nice. It’s a good 2K scan, and has been sensitively restored.
This is a lot of fun. I could totally see this being somebody’s favourite movie — it’s hard to stop smiling. But it’s a bit clumsy? Artless? Perhaps that’s a bit of the charm.
Like this shot, which is both a bit much and also not quite successful at the same time.
OK, the drama is a bit over the top… I think half of the cast has left the room to go off crying or something.
The funny bits feel genuine. But it’s like the drama parts are like… Ibsen via Bergman via Woody Allen?! OK, not accurate, but it’s like the drama parts feel second hand. Or third hand.
That’s a fun shot.
Such fake drama.
So, I’m guessing somebody has to die, so it’s probably Peter? He’s gay, and no gay characters got out of any movies alive during the 90s, so…
OK, this didn’t quite end like I expected. But… almost…?
I did quite enjoy watching this. But I understand totally people who’d think this kinda sucks, because it’s not quite successful.
I think that’s right. But I quite like bathos, anyway, so:
This is in 16:9, so I assumed that it had been cut down, but this was apparently filmed in this aspect ratio? Very unusual for its time, but Greenaway has always been in the avant garde…
Yes, I’m continuing my “80s Arthouse Movie” series, even thought this is from 1991. I think I’ve got like three movies to go, and then I’m done.
I didn’t see this at the Cinematheque at the time — and I didn’t think I’d seen it at all, but I have — it was shown on Swedish television a couple years later.
OK, I usually write these blogs while watching the movie (whenever I take a terlet break or get bored), but I was so fascinated by this one that I didn’t type a single word while it was running. So I’m writing this blog post afterwards, so perhaps I don’t remember what I was going to write…
First of all, I could only find this bluray in an edition from Spain, which I thought was really weird.
But… this isn’t really a restored edition like I was expecting: The previous Greenaway movies I’ve seen this year have been exquisitely restored by the BFI, and this has not. But there may be a reason for that:
Edited in Japan, it makes extensive use of digital image manipulation (using Hi-Vision video inserts and the Quantel Paintbox system), often overlaying multiple moving and still pictures with animations.
If I understand correctly (and I’m guessing at some bits here), this means that this movie was filmed on 35mm film, but then edited together on hi-def video using Quantel Paintbox for bits. And then transferred back to 35mm for showing in theatres. And that is probably what has been scanned here in 2K for this bluray?
So it looks like that: It looks like hi-def analogue video. Which isn’t a bad thing! But Greenaway’s sets are so baroque and detailed, and all that detail is lost.
Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire had a similar problem: He used so many dissolves and overlays that what was shown originally in theatres was a seventh generation copy (at best). So when they restored it a few years back, the went back to the original negatives, scanned them, and then painstakingly recreated every edit, overlay and dissolve to mimic the original. And it looks amazing, but was very expensive, of course.
And doing that to this movie would be even more work, because there’s so many edits, inlays and overlays all the fucking time. And this isn’t even a movie that people like! It got exactly zero (0) votes in the 2022 Sight & Sound poll.
(Of course, part of the reason for that might be that it’s not available to watch anywhere…)
Er, yes, did I mention there’s some nudity in this movie? There’s nudity in this movie — basically in every other scene. But there’s nothing sexual, really.
Heh, it needed a lot of financing…
WTF?!? It had a 1.5M pound budget!? That’s insane! There’s so many scenes, each with an elaborate, baroque setup, and each scene lasts like seven seconds, and then it’s on to the next one. How on Earth did Greenaway do that with that small a budget?
Gielgud is quoted as saying that a film of The Tempest (with him as Prospero) was his life’s ambition, as he had been in four stage productions in 1931, 1940, 1957, and 1974. He had approached Alain Resnais, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Orson Welles about directing him in it, with Benjamin Britten to compose its score, and Albert Finney as Caliban, before Greenaway agreed.
[…]
“I was glad I knew the part so well, because there was so much going on in the studio to distract me,” Sir John recalled, “I had to parade up and down wearing that cloak which needed four people to lift, and with papers flying in my face all the time. And it was terribly cold in the bath.” Sir John spent four frigid days during the winter naked in a swimming pool, to choreograph the shipwreck with which the film begins.
Heh heh.
Speaking of The Tempest, I re-watched the Derek Jarman version earlier this year, and… they’re very different movies. Jarman famously disliked Greenaway a lot, but I wonder whether he saw this before he died… It’s a lot closer to Jarman’s aesthetic than any of Greenaway’s previous movies.
These two shots are typical — there’s all these frames within frames, and images overlaying images, and it’s all sensory overload. And it looks great! Within the confines of hi-def analogue video.
Heh heh.
I’m guessing the titles are from Quantel Paintbox?
There’s also a lot of these shots — where we see previous scenes within these frames, viewed by other characters. It’s great!
It’s also quite violent.
Aww.
But, err… Another reason people might not be jumping at the opportunity to do a re-release of this is that there’s is (among all the other nudity) a significant amount of child nudity, and that can quickly go like EEEK. So I’m not including any shots of that here at all because I’ve noticed that whenever I include a shot that even vaguely points towards that, I get a gazillion hits from Russian search engines, for some reason.
And nobody wants that.
These shots are just so elaborate… just… how…
Nice hat.
The resolution varies quite a lot between shots, like the above…
… and this one, which looks pristine. (Nice collar.) I’m guessing some of the shots didn’t go through the Hi-Vision process..
Oh, I remember this scene from the Jarman movie.
Horsies!
Even bigger collar!
BIGGEST COLLARS
This was probably the longest scene? It’s the wedding scene (sort of) and they did an entire Michael Nyman lieder, and it was great. I’m not really a Nyman fan, but that was a really good one.
And this was the last time Greenaway and Nyman collaborated — and I wonder whether that was because Nyman saw the writing on the wall: That Greenaway was never actually going to er break through. Their previous movie was The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, which was Greenaway’s most commercially successful movie ever. And this movie is wilfully obscure; like Greenaway purposefully wants to piss off any fans he might have picked up with that movie.
Is that Erland Josephson? Yes! It is! (Nice collar.)
(Hopefully the Russians won’t find this screenshot…)
Nice shoes!
Yeah, OK, sometimes the effects show their age…
This movie has a 62% tomatometer, which I think is the perfect score. If at least not one third of people hate your movie, you’re doing something wrong.
I think it’s brilliant. It’s like a culmination of all the what Greenaway tried to do in the 80s, but wasn’t quite able to pull off before this.
Oh yeah. This eight (!) minute news item (!) confirms my guesses:
"Prospero's Books" Channel 4 News Item
But it also has more info. The budget for the movies was indeed 1.5M… but the Japanese were so excited about it that they donated 2M (!) worth of work to it. So a typical scene had 35mm (shot in Amsterdam), digital overlays (books, etc) from the Quantel Paintbox, and also footage shot with TV cameras, all edited together on Hi-Vision analogue tape.
So making a higher def version of this sounds impossible.
Unless you get an AI to guess what the missing pixels ought to be.
Ooh! New Line used their Freddie money to finance art movies? I think I’d almost forgotten that, but they were the ones who financed Hairspray, I think?
So I’m continuing watching 80s art house movies… but this is from 1991. It’s basically the 80s! And I think I watched this at the art house theatre at the time, but I’m not quite sure…
I mean, I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen this before, but it’s three decades ago. Perhaps it was on VHS?
Flea!
Oh, right… this one has a bunch of lines cribbed from Shakespeare…
loosely based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V.
But I saw Henry V just a week ago, and there were hardly any hustlers there! But a lot more war.
Oh, right, Udo Kier.
That’s so Italy.
I really enjoyed all the scenes here… but it feels a bit disjointed? Like some kind of Frankenmovie? I mean, I love it, but it could be… more… something.
Ooh. There’s a logo I haven’t seen in a minute. But it’s also rather surprising that a first-time director — doing a long version of Henry V — would get distribution on that level, isn’t it?
Yes, I’m continuing my Festival Of 80s Art House Movies.
So meta!
Such mascara.
Augustus!
This is good stuff! I remember the buzz about this movie was that somebody had dared make a … fundamentalist? … version of Shakespeare for the screen again. And indeed it makes it a thrilling thing to watch.
(I mean, it’s an edited text, but it’s not heavily modernised.)
THAT DARN CAT
It’s so tense!
And I love these bits, too.
WHERE”S OSHA THAT”S TOO CLOSE TO THE CLIFFS
The production is spiffy, but I don’t quite believe in Ken’s hairdo. That’s a very 1989 cut. I mean, I can see how they’ve tried to make it something else, but they’ve worked so hard at it that it’s gone full circle.
Henry V received widespread critical acclaim and is considered one of the best Shakespeare screen adaptations ever produced. Among its numerous accolades, the film received three nominations at the 62nd Academy Awards, two of which went to Branagh (Best Director and Best Actor). Henry V won with its other nomination, Best Costume Design for Phyllis Dalton.
Despite being nominated for the Oscars a lot, it’s a good movie. I think the scenes with Henry at night in the camp are magical. It sort of falls short of that in the final scenes. Which are cute! But they’re kinda like “er”.
So I wondered whether this movie got any votes in the Sight & Sound 2022 poll — and nope. Not a single one.
I’ve seen this movie many times before, of course… but now it’s in 2K!!!
But… WTF!? It’s in 16:9 now? But but but. THEY”VE CUT IT DOWN FROM 1.85:1 to 16:9!? WHILE MAKING IT 2K!?!
EWWW
This is such a brilliant movie. Not a moment wasted — it’s all full on fun. And all those novelty dance hits. It’s like perfect.
And after seeing it this time… I’m starting to wonder how the version with John Travolta in the Divine role is. It’s probably horrible? But I feel compelled to see it now.
So — continuing my Festival Of 80s Art House Movies.
I’m not sure whether I’ve seen this one before. If I did, it was probably on like a bootlegged VHS when I was 15?
All these hallways and doorways…
This is what I want my bedroom to look like!
This 4K bluray has been beautifully restored. This movie has probably never looked as good as this before. And soon, I’m guessing they’re going to stop restoring movies this painstaking way, and instead ask an LLM to do it: “Hallucinate this movie as if it were 4K” and then all movies will feature Nick Cage.
That’s the best-trained dog actor ever.
It’s so weird seeing Erland Josefsson in this — not because of the Italian that’s on the soundtrack, but because I’m constantly hearing his lines in his own voice instead of the one they’ve dubbed him into. I can tell by his mouth movements that he’s actually delivering the lines in Italian, but of course, at this time they didn’t actually record any sound on sets in Italy, so it’s all dubbed, but they’ve got a voice actor that sounds nothing like him.
It’s so weird — I’ve seen him in so many movies that his voice and very distinctive delivery is just a natural phenomenon to me, and it’s missing here.
Tarkovsky’s tableaux usually look so striking, so it’s jarring when you get something kike this, where it looks kinda like a parody of a Tarkovsky scene…
I wonder what the story behind this one is. There’s so many shots reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s previous movies — it’s like the producers told him “we really liked Stalker! Make a movie with all those scenes! But make a new story!” And so we ended up with a kind of … post-landing-on-Solaris thing, but very wet.
Ok ok, it’s probably not that at all — what with the main character being a Russian author called “Andrei”.
Almost every shot here is stunning… and the storyline kinda peters out. But it’s still a great movie.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times said that Tarkovsky “may well be a film poet but he’s a film poet with a tiny vocabulary. […] Nothing happens.” Dave Kehr was mildly positive, considering it to be “packed with imagery that seems at once hopelessly obscure and crushingly obvious” while also arguing that the work “does succeed in inducing some kind of trance.
OK, I’m continuing my Festival of 80s Cinematheque Favourites… but I’m not sure I ever saw this one at the time?
It’s very Greenaway… I guessing this is before The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Etc? That was his first … well, not exactly mainstream success, but that movie definitely made a splash, and I see people still referencing it on the Twitters.
And looking at his movies:
That movie also marked the end of his run of movies that were notable, really? I guess Prospero’s Books was also notable… Oh, and I’ve heard people mentioning The Pillow Book, too. So perhaps that’s just me. The Cook etc was the final movie of his I’ve seen. Perhaps I should fix that, even if I have been slightly disappointed wen rewatching his 80s movies.
I wonder what that German Twitter account (i.e., @dieworkwear) would say of this suit… I mean, both buttons are er buttoned.
*gasp* COLLAR GAP
I was going to do a joke about “you can clearly see this is science fiction, because he got the copier to do what he wanted immediately”, but then I noticed that the original image wasn’t even facing the scanner in the snap above the above one.
I”M SUBMITTING THIS TO THE IMDB “GOOFS” PAGE NOW
As you’d expect with a Greenaway movie, this looks really good. But there’s the extra distancing thing going on here with many scenes being filmed without sound and then the dialogue is flown in afterwards (presumably because they’re using an Italian film crew?)…
I guess Brian Dennehy isn’t bad, really? He’s much better than I’d expect an American character actor to be in an European art movie.
Greenaway has the best set designers.
This is what I want my living room to look like.
Ah, so that’s how all those statues lost their noses…
Eh… I’m not really feeling this movie. I keep getting distracted because I’m not really interested in what’s happening? And like I said, Dennehy isn’t bad, but he isn’t fascinating, either. And he had to carry a lot of this movie.
The movie feels a bit flabby, which I don’t think you could say about Greenaway’s previous movies, really.
OK, I’m not quite sure what’s happening now, because I zoned out.
Heh.
OK, nice roll to those lapels… and no collar gap OH NO @dieworkwear HAS RUINED ME
Anyway, I was rather shocked by the totally hackneyed birth/death scene at the end? C’mon, Greenaway. You could do better.
Well, that’s weird, but it’s not 16:9 in any case.
Boo!
Criterion! What the actual fuck!
Greatest actor ever.
Oh yeah… he wrote a number of things around this time that were all pretty spiffy, if I remember correctly? Or I might be.
I was pretty sure that I saw this at the time, but nothing here seems familiar… weird…
Heh heh. So meta.
Look at those colours. That lighting.
Just look at this.
This movie made a million European film nerds want to visit Texas.
Everything here looks just amazing — you can almost see the nine assistants standing just off camera with reflectors and stuff just to get this perfect light for this tiny shot. No modern movie looks like, what with the desaturation and digital cameras and GET OFF MY LAWN
Claire Denis worked on this, and I wonder how much input she had. Because some of these shots look quite Denis-ey.
I hope the Texas Tourist Board chipped in.
Bizarre.
Only Europeans make the US look this good.
That’s John Lurie!!!
That’s Nastassja Kinski!!!
Oh my god. Movies were so much prettier before digital colour grading.
This is such a gorgeous movie. And it’s kinda perfect until the final bits? But when we get to the monologue in the booth, it starts to feel as it’s flailing a bit?
Nooo! The bluray has been cut down to 16:9! (From 1.85:1.) Whyy!
*pout*
Anyway, I’m still sorta continuing my 80s arthouse movie blog series here, but skipping a bit ahead. In the early days, Branagh’s movies were shown in the Cinematheques — starting with his Henry V movie, he was sort of considered a serious director. I guess that lasted until 1994, when he did his Frankenstein?
But I’m skipping a bit ahead, just because I wanted to (re-)watch this movie now. I think I’ve seen it before, but I’m not quite sure.
The black and white is an arty choice.
Colour!!!
I love Emma Thompson. Did Branagh’s movies start sucking when they got divorced?
Yup; checks out.
Hey!
It took a while before I realised that Branagh is trying to do a US dialect.
This movie has all of the British actors!
But it’s just a bit… mawkish? I mean, it’s a goofy, amusing movie, but you feel Branagh’s ambitions — and it sorta falls short. Like in this shot, which looks great, but it’s so incongruous. It screams “look! somebody on the set can do lighting!” And it’s the same with the camera movements — they do all the possible camera movements — dollying around people, swivelling from one to the other and back again, etc etc. It’s like Branagh’s cinematographer is going through a list of fun things they could do.
But botching up quite a lot of them. Or rather — not getting them quite right.
And it’s not a tiny budget either — modest perhaps for all the stuff they want to do?
It’s a fun little movie — all noirish in parts, and properly Hitchcockian in parts. My main problem with this is really the performances — Branagh himself, of course, but many of the smaller parts just don’t quite work. Derek Jacobi is great; sure, and Mork is fine, but so many awkwardly directed parts.
It’s fine? I liked this movie at the time perhaps because it was an odd throwback movie, but watching it now, there’s no really no reason to watch it, really.
Ah, right, I forgot that I was doing an 80s Art House Festival, because I started watching the Alan Davis box set. But now we’re back on track with this movie I watched in like 87? at the local Cinematheque (they had a Fassbinder festival going on).
These stylised sets are something else.
Er… like I said.
Oh, Brest! I’ve never been there.
Wow, I really remember nothing from this movie except the colour scheme. I remembered that.
The action in this movie is so stylised… There’s like several layers of unreality — the staging, the way most of the actors are dubbed in, the strict blue/yellow lighting, the Pornotopia setting, the acting style…
This is a very horny movie, which I approve of. And it looks great and stuff. But I just kind of zoned out after about an hour — it might be me, or it might be the movie. I dunno!
These Alan Clarke movies have been hit and miss… more miss than hit? But I kinda enjoy them in an instinctual, nostalgic way, anyway — if it’s a BBC movie from 1970, it’s gonna be something, even if it’s gonna be awful.
Nice hairdo.
Oh, this is one of these movies where we’re listening in to everybody’s thoughts?
Another nice hairdo!
Not all these thoughts are…
Heh, OK, that one was a good one.
No, they ditched the internal monologue thing, and now it’s about a mysterious stranger who’s going to join the congregation.
So he’s Satan, I guess? Or possibly Jesus? I DON”T KNOW
THEY”RE SCEPTICAL!
I’m leaning towards Satan. But his constant refrain of wanting “to work with young people” perhaps means that he’s just a pedo?
Uh-oh.
Hang on… are these two characters played by the same actors, but in different wigs?
No, but casting agents in general should be fired. Cast more different-looking people!
OK, now I think he’s Jesus.
OK, now I changed my mind again.
OK, perhaps he’s Jesus?
OK, definitely Jesus.
Oh, now he joined a Catholic church? (They threw him out of the first church for being too creepy.) Or is it just a grand Church of England one? Definitely Satan, then.
Or is this just about how the Church of England accepts insane, icky people into its ranks?
Er… all my guesses were wrong? But too late to edit now!
I think this is sourced from video? (The over-sharpening “echoes” is a dead giveaway.) Perhaps it was even filmed on video? Ah, the booklet says that it was transferred from a digibeta (!) copy of the original 2″ PAL transmission tape. What on earth is digibeta?
Ah, it’s something that was invented in the 90s. I guess the BBC did the PAL tape -> digibeta transfer back then to preserve this? And then the BFI used that copy to make this bluray.
I mean, this doesn’t look bad, but it looks unusual.
This is mostly a courtroom drama? But not very dramatic?
This movie is kinda cheating — we first saw what “really happened”, and then we’re watching the trial, where the coppers are lying their heads off about what we’ve already seen. So there no doubt in the viewers’ minds about anything, so the movie is a bit pointless? I guess we can sit here stewing about coppers lying, and the horrible judge, but…
It’s not very efficient as propaganda either because we’re not given a reason to trust that the filmmakers knew what “really happened”.
Fuck this guy!
OK, the last hour is going to be a voiceover laying out all the reasons why Bentley is innocent? I’m convinced! But… OK, I guess it’s a good thing that the BBC showed a film like this that makes it so clear that cops lie?
But at this remove, at least, this is not thrilling to watch.
It’s confusing that they’re using aged-up pics of the actors as if they’re actual snaps of the people involved.
This movie could have been a book. And it was!
I don’t really know how to throw the die on this one. The final scenes are really powerful, and I guess this could be seen as an important movie in some ways. But… I didn’t really get much out of watching it. So:
The previous Half Hour Stories have been immaculate, picture and sound wise. This isn’t — it looks like it’s been sourced from a video tape? Which is a shame, because it looks like the most interesting one so far…
It’s a lot of fun watching Siân Phillips here, but the script is beyond risible.
There’s a common theme going through several of these shorts (but not the first two) — stunning women being involved with men that have no charms whatsoever. It’s awful casting. If the scripts were good, that’d help, but this is horrible. It’s so bad that I wonder whether I rated the previous shorts too highly. Perhaps they were all as bad as this really?
This short doesn’t really explain why a knock-out like Frances White would be so desperate to hang on to Ronald Fraser? He’s presented as having no redeeming qualities what so ever.
This is pretty weak. It’s basically a O. Henry story — but ambiguously! — so that it can be All Serious And Stuff.
It’s an elevator pitch padded out to 25 minutes.
Still, the performances are good. It’s better than the last one, but it’s still not actually worth watching.
Yes, I’ve finally starting the Alan Clarke box set: Dissent & Disruption. It’s, like, the biggest BFI box set ever or something.
Like most of the world, I’ve not seen many (or any) of Clarke’s pieces, because he almost only worked for the ITV and BBC (with one exception when they refused to show his work). So I’m totes excited.
This is way before its time — it’s from 1967 but looks like a 1977 TV thing.
Wow, this is some extreme TV. I can’t even imagine what the poor people in the UK were thinking when they were subjected to this.
This start straight off of the previous movie — and kinda undoes the climax from that movie. But I guessed they were gonna do that, so…
The first movie was all about getting the Scooby Gang together, so perhaps in this movie they’ll do some attacking.
The bokeh! I guess it’s CGI?
I’m over half an hour in, and basically nothing has happened yet? We got a flashback telling us what we already knew, but not even in a fun way…
And these people that are… er… supplying the empire with a huge amount of grain? Are using scythes. Sure, sure.
This thing has the same problem that many space operas have — it’s supposed to be all Huge and stuff, being an empire of innumerable worlds etc etc, but then all the writers can come up with is having a couple dozen people in a field cropping wheat as a pivotal action… It’s supposed to be Huge, but then it’s picayune.
Yes, they’re even threshing the wheat by hand. That’s just silly. They have space ships but not threshing machines (invented in the 16th century).
OK, up to one hour now, and we’ve gotten the backstories from all the Scooby Gang members. Which I appreciate, in a way, but it’s not exactly thrilling.
Man, they saved a lot of money on CGI when they realised that they could just pretend that it’s all out of focus. In the olden days they used to try to render it all…
Yes, the grain is so important… the grain that these dozen people… carry into the village… that the empire will… OK, I give up. This is just wilfully stupid. Perhaps it’s meant to make people surrender to the stupidity of it all and just let the movie wash over them?
Razor tech is trailing, too.
“Remember everybody… don’t shoot their dozens of sacks of grain, because we need porridge tomorrow.”
They forgot to install their catalytic converters for their coal-burning intergalactic space ships.
So much smoke.
Still so evil!
OK, is the movie finally starting now?
It’s nice that they have light sabers.
OK, is the battle on the Planet of the Village of Several Dozens of People of Wheat going to be the rest of the movie or is it going to move on at some point?
I mean, I liked the first movie. It was fun! It was all “establish eeevil person and then kill eeevil person”, and that’s entertaining. But this is just a slog.
It reminds me of that Avengers movie that ended with them all fighting an alien invasion on the roof a building, as if that would make any difference.
Oh yeah, I was making fun about these coal-power intergalactic space ships, but I forgot that that’s what they actually are… here’s people shovelling coal or something into the furnaces. Looks like these are max energy efficient.
OK, then. No porridge tomorrow.
I do really like these futuristic space army uniforms.
Such eeevil bangs!
No collar gap!
I don’t know what happened. The first movie was a classic Run Around The Universe To Collect A Scooby Gang. It was fun. Sure, it was kinda stupid, but not more so than these things usually are.
This, on the other hand, is just unbelievably moronic. I don’t mind stupid as long as it’s fun, but when every other scene is “er wha” it’s hard not to turn into that comics nerd guy from The Simpsons. And that’s not a fun place to be! I’d rather have fun with some entertaining sci fi thing! But I can’t! Because it’s just too stupid! It’s like the writers just gave up but they started filming anyway!
I think a slight reframing could have helped slightly? If they’d like done a “if you do this insurrection successfully then we’ll help you”, but instead the entire movie was about fighting in a sandy village of about 100 people, and then the people who could have decided the fight (the robot or the rebels) were swooping in after the action was kinda done.
This is a really good review, and it’s even more down on the movie than I am. I found the movie to be ugly, boring and stupid, but not really offensive. Despite everything, I’d be interested in watching Rebel Moon Part Three and Four.
I saw this movie back in the 80s, but… probably on VHS? I don’t recall seeing it in a movie theatre.
Columbo!
Heh, Tuxedomoon on the soundtrack. This really is the coolest movie of the 80s.
This 4K restoration really looks amazing — probably better than it looked in the theatres originally.
Commodore 64!
And now there’s Nick Cave.
I’m really enjoying (re-)watching this. It’s serious and portentous to the max, but really owning that; leaning into that.
There’s the “Oscar bait” term — movies that are designed to appeal to a typical Oscar voter (i.e., a famous actor playing a disabled person or something). This is kinda that, but for a different audience: It’s Cinematheque/film festival bait! It’s perfect: Mostly black and white, it’s all about life and death and all those serious subjects, it’s slow, it’s got Allan Falk, it’s about Germany and the war, and there’s even a film within the film! You couldn’t engineer a more perfect movie for that market if you try.
And I’m totally riveted.
Crime and the City Solution?
I love this movie — probably more now than I did back then. At the time, it seemed like just another European art movie, but now it seems like probably the last one of its kind: It’s a movie in the tradition of Bergman and De Sica — a serious movie done in a playful way. It’s an anachronism, really.
If there are no colours, it makes it easier to match up the real beige footage to the beige CGI backgrounds.
EVILEST PERSON EVER
That’s how you make a villain. I just hope he doesn’t get a tragic back story.
Urrr… Oh, this is chapter one of part one? Oh, he changed the name of Part One: A Child of Fire to Chapter One: Chalice of Blood. Sure, sure.
And, OK, the movie is three and a half hours long, so.
Rebel Moon: The Beigining.
This movie so relentlessly beige — Snyder’s taking things to extremes, as usual. And more lens flares than a JJ Abrams movie.
The beige… the beige…
Allegedly Snyder has said that he wants to create a whole new “franchise” or something with these movies. I.e., something like Star Wars? But Star Wars became A Thing by being a pretty fun adventure movie for children in 1977 — and then grown people obsessed about it way to much for decades and there we are.
It kinda seems like Snyder wants to jump straight to doing one of the boring back-story Star Wars TV series? Because I’m 40 minutes in, and nothing entertaining has happened yet, really.
And it looks like dog shit. (Did I mention that yet?)
I’m hoping Snyder is using this colour palette as a contrast to the real one he’s going to use once we leave er these planets.
(Not holding my breath, though.)
Such beige.
This is possibly the stupidest shit I’ve ever seen.
The robot is pretty spiffy.
Wow! Snyder’s got it! That was the most satisfying action scene ever! It’s like… an anti Vince Vaughn action scene.
But now we get a ton of backstory, and it’s the most boring thing ever. That Snyder drops into slo-mo seemingly at random really doesn’t help.
That’s another satisfying scene of ultra violence! Both scenes were set up very similarly, though: First establish that the bad people are really really bad (both involving sexual abuse), and then having all the bad guys killed while the audience can go WHOA YEAH!
I like it, but is the entire movie going to be just this scene repeated over and over? I’m just 90 minutes in, so the movie has barely started!
Harsh!
Actually, I’m not hating this movie? I don’t mind slow movies at all — I’ve got my “I Watched Out 1: Noli me tangere And I Survived” button, and this is just a … quarter? … of that running length. And that’s an absurd comparison, but still — they’re both slow movies with occasional high intensity interest? Yeah yeah OK.
There’s quite a lot of really silly stuff here, which I appreciate. And I now see what the structure of the movie is, which wasn’t obvious: It’s about that woman going around the galaxy gathering up a scrappy gang of rebels to help fight against the evil, evil empire, to save her adopted agrarian moon.
Heh heh. The totally evil general guy is also a total perv! Into tentacle sex! And drugs! But no rock’n’roll.
So this is fun, but Snyder is really gonna film this entire movie in beige-o-vision?
I was assuming they’d be having a preliminary showdown with the Forces Of Evil in this movie, but perhaps it’s just going to be three and a half hours of gathering the Scooby Gang?
I like the sheer humourlessness of the movie. It’s rare to see somebody dare to be this dour.
But the movie has a problem of scale: Is this insanely eeeevil general the only guy they have to kill, and then everything’s OK? That is, they seem to be fighting an evil galactic empire, but this guy is going around and personally killing nice people… which seems kinda inefficient, evilly speaking?
Yeah yeah, the raze the planets after he’s tired of killing people personally. But still!
Oh, perhaps this movie is gonna end with them killing The Eeevil Guy, and then the next movie is gonna be about conquering The Eeevil Empire? That’d make sense.
[even more time passes]
OK, then.
29% tomatometer? I understand that. But I think that if this had been a four episode TV series instead of a three and a half hour movie, the TV reviewers would have been creaming themselves.
I liked this movie! Yes! It’s fun. But it looks like dog shit, and there’s parts that are really boring. But still. I liked it. So let’s go with:
Yes, I’m continuing my 80s Arthouse Film Festival. It’s another Leos Carax movie, and I haven’t seen this before, either.
This is a lot more stylish than the first Carax movie.
Even on an 80s scale, this is pretty odd. It’s got a pretty high concept hook: It’s about a new mysterious retrovirus that infects everybody who has sex without loving each other. (Yes, I know.) But then it’s also about a heist? And then they’re in a plane? And why are all these guys topless all the time?
I’m just saying that it’s a lot.
Oh! This is the movie where Claire Denis got the idea for the astounding ending of Beau Travail!?
The scene is great here, too. But Denis improved on it.
Exactly.
When people are talking about French lingerie, I think this is what they’re talking about.
This is what I want my apartment to look like!
I really enjoyed this movie. It’s goofy and strange and funny. But I’m also not quite sure that it totally works? Perhaps it’s more of a ⚃ movie? But I’m going with:
OK, I’m doing an 80s Arthouse Film Festival thing here on this blog, and this movie is slightly off track. I mean, it was released in the 80s, but Tarkovsky was definitely huge at the Cinematheque at the time, so it’s technically part of that thing, but Tarkovsky is, of course, more of a 70s director.
But what the hey. I think I watched this on VHS at the time? I don’t remember anything about it except the final scene.
Ah, yeah, Tarkovsky basically used Ingmar Bergman’s team for this movie? At least that’s what I assumed when I saw it at the time…
Well, even though this has Bergman’s team, and they’re speaking English, it’s still very Tarkovsky. I’m riveted.
But this movie just reminds me of a rant I’m not sure I’ve typed before: Filming movies without sound and then adding the sound afterwards was OK in certain parts of Europe for a long time (*cough* Italy *cough*), but it makes audiences go WHAT!?!? When the lips don’t match the dialogue, it’s hard to get past that. And I know! There’s so many movies that was made that way, and it’s like dismissing all movies that are, what, black and white? But I think that’s a major reason why much of Italy’s cinematic history now isn’t part of what people are watching.
And in this movie — a Swedish movie from 1986 — it’s particularly disturbing. But many of the shots are done at a distance where you can’t even see their lips, so it’s less of an issue…
OK, *re-rolls*.
Allan Edwall is my favourite actor.
OK, I was totally riveted by this movie at the start, but now it’s all christianey and stuff? But there may be a twist.
If you want to be really really uncharitable about this movie — it’s about an old man who has to bang this young chick, and if he doesn’t, the world will end.
I know! Really uncharitable reading, but it’s such a cliche the entire thing. I mean, there’s certain (male) authors I’m following, and almost invariably when they reach their 60s, their books start being about older guys who bangs younger women. These younger women usually find these old guys mysteriously hot, but Tarkovsky takes the trope one step further: This time around, the young woman has to have sex with the old guy or (literally) the world will end.
It’s like… there’s not even a subtext? Oh sure, it’s all mystery and woo hoo and christianity and whatever, but the major part of this movie is about an old guy getting laid to save the world.
So the movie is basically bullshit, but I loved the start of this movie, and it has some really powerful scenes. And it has Allan Edwall! So:
Ah, yes, Michael Nyman… I wasn’t really a big fan of his.
These shots are really well staged, but…
… but it’s all a bit jejune, innit?
The impetus for (re)watching all of these 80s arthouse movies was because I wondered why almost all the 80s arthouse directors are excluded from lists like this. It’s like everybody’s decided that the 70s had great movies, and the 90s had, but prefer to skip over the 80s.
And… I’m starting to think that’s for a very good reason?
But perhaps I’m jumping to conclusions.
For the first two thirds of this movie, I was sitting here with crossed arms and thinking “this is such sophomoric bullshit”. But then I was totally gripped by the last third, despite myself. It’s really quite something…
I wondered whether this movie got any votes at all at the S&S poll, and nope. But Greenaway did — if I count correctly (not very likely) and Google shows all results (not very likely), The Cook, The Thief, The Etc and the Etc got four votes, and The Pillow Book got two votes. So it’s not that the votes were split over a large number of Greenaway movies, either…
Anyway, I ended up respecting this movie, albeit grudgingly.
I’ve heard the name of this movie like forever, so I think it made a splash on the scene back then? But I’ve never seen it.
It’s like a hyper-active version of Jim Jarmusch? Or perhaps… a hand-held Robert Altman? It’s very appealing, in any case.
I’m guessing the dialogue is partially improvised? And none of these are professional actors…
It’s a kind of mystery movie — they’re trying to find out what happened to Chan.
I think this is what they’d call “promising”? That is, I think the premise is really interesting, and the approach is fun, but then it sort of peters out and loses interest as it goes along.
I’m continuing my 80s Arthouse Film Festival with this movie — which I haven’t seen before (or indeed any Leos Carax movies, I think). But I got a Carax box set because Denis Lavant is in this, and Claire Denis cast him in Beau Travail because of these movies, so I wanted to have a look.
Hey! That’s very solution orientated.
She’s a woman of culture.
Um… I dunno. This is the sort of film that seems like something I’d really like, but I’m not really feeling it. The performances are super stilted and stylised — but not in a Robert Bresson way, but more like in a fumbley way?
And the plot (FSVO plot) isn’t exactly gripping either.
The film wants to say something about movie history and reality, I think? There’s a lot of people observing other people and stuff. But it seems kinda half baked to me.
It is the debut feature by Leos Carax, a film he directed when he was only 24 years old. Like most of the other films in the cinéma du look movement, in which Carax was a key member, it’s not very story-driven and instead favours strange plot tangents and a cool distance from its characters.
Cinéma du look? Nice.
But I mean… look at these shots. They look amazing. So it’s impossible to just dismiss this movie, even if it’s perhaps mostly just a goofy comedy.
By the end here, I was super impatient with the movie. So:
I’m continuing my 80s arthouse cinema festival with this movie, which I saw at the Cinematheque back in the 80s, but remember exactly nothing about.
Is this the basis of a meme?
Ah, yes, twelve drawings… Which reminds me of The Falls, which I also saw at the Cinematheque. Which is a 92-part series of interviews with people who experienced the Violent Unexplained Event. It was really cool — more than half of the already thin audience disappeared during the viewing.
I mean, it’s more than three hours long, and while it does have a kind of cumulative effect, it’s a lot.
So this is scaling it down a bit.
This is a fascinating movie, but I’m not sure whether the fascination comes from what’s actually happening or because of the cod-Shakespearean dialogue which makes things hover on the edges of comprehensibility.
And, of course, Michael Nyman’s cod-Philip Glass soundtrack doesn’t hurt.
This restored blu ray edition is a bit weird? The white bits are really #fff — they seem digital and blown out. It might have been that way on the original film, but that would have been pretty odd.
And see? There’s like VHS-like artefacts on this, and of course this hasn’t been near a video, so that’s just weird.
It’s like they’ve over-sharpened the film when transferring to digital?
In 2003 the BFI restored the film digitally and this restoration was released on DVD.
It was digitised in 2003? That was the worst possible time, because the tech around that time was just horrible.
Ah yeah. It’s extremely 80s, what with the sort of meta mystery embedded in the movie — and it’s also very unpleasant, what with all the sexual abuse the protagonist (well, perhaps not protagonist, but the main character) perpetrates with a presumed snicker from the audience.
So the Shocking Upper Class Ending falls flat, because I really wanted that guy to die, anyway. And their burning the artwork was supposed to be extra super shocking, but the artwork isn’t very good, so…
I’ve been wondering why there’s no Greenaway movies on the Best Of List, and now I kinda understand: This movie is brilliantly made, but it’s bullshit.
Oooh. It’s been a minute since I’ve seen that logo…
I got this bluray because I rewatched Smoke/Blue In The Face recently, and that reminded me that I’ve never really gotten into Wayne Wang’s movies — he was another one of those 80s hot shit indie directors that’s basically been forgotten now.
Weird. I mean, the aspect ratio. It’s aaaalmost 16:9, but no movies are shot in 16:9. And indeed imdb says 1.85:1, but it’s been cut down slightly for this bluray.
And the subtitles are weird! There are three of them! One translates from Cantonese to English, but whenever they’re talking in English, there’s nothing. The third subtitles the English, but when there’s Cantonese, it just says [speaking in Cantonese]. And I have no idea what the second does, but it’s not useful, either.
Because when they’re speaking in English, it needs subtitles, and when they’re speaking in Cantonese, it really needs subtitles.
Why do everybody in this movie have a perm?
I’ve never been upstairs in an airplane… do those even exist anymore? They do! Hm, I wanna do that once in my life… The -8 is allegedly the newest iteration (but it’s more than a decade old).
Yeah… Arthouse. There really was a separate genre of films in the 80s, wasn’t there? Movies that were shown in the local cinematheques all over the world: Think Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, Peter Greenaway… Which was a separate “market” from the experimental movie market: Indie movies that are pretty conventional, really, but appeal to a slightly different market than the mainstream one.
I used to go to the cinematheque here all the time in the late 80s/early 90s, but I haven’t been in decades. I wonder what they’re showing now?
Oh! Lots of movies for children… and Goodfellas? OK. Cube!? That’s a horror movie… There’s a Woody Allen movie, which I’d guess would be there. And Cleo from 5 to 7, which is a stone cold classic. Heh, Ghost Dog — Jim Jarmusch, and Do The Right Thing — the Spike Lee movie people like.
Yeah, no. It’s old movies — 40 years older or more — and commercial movies. Doesn’t seem like they are showing new, interesting movies at all, which is a huge change from what it was like in the 80s. I guess those movies go on the festival circuit now, before being bought by Criterion for streaming?
Aaanyway. I really enjoyed this movie. I kept smiling the entire time. But it’s really… I’m not really gripped? So it’s really a kinda ⚃ movie? But I just really enjoyed letting it wash over me, so let’s go with:
I got this bluray because I read a joint interview between Alice Diop and Claire Denis in Sight & Sound, and Denis had many nice things to say about this movie.
And I understand why immediately — from the very first scene, it’s kinda gripping, and not completely unlike Denis’ films.
*gasp*
Wow. This movie is fantastic. It’s so … It’s not that it’s a subtle movie, because it tells you exactly what’s going on all the time — but not by having characters explain it at you, as most movies do. There’s these incredible shifts in where we suddenly realise something (like in the scene where Medea is mentioned) and everything shifts and you feel like shouting “DID YOU SEE THAT!” because if you’re looking at your phone while watching this, you’ll feel like nothing actually happened.
It feels like a movie in conversation not only with Claire Denis but Jeanne Dielman: It’s low key, but gripping and exciting.
And the actors in this are amazing. So many wonderful performances. Except, weirdly enough, the central character (but not the protagonist) — the woman accused of killing her child? I just didn’t buy her as the character she was portraying.
But on the other hand… perhaps that’s a very calculated move? Because that’s one of the mysteries of the movie.
The name of this movie is really familiar — it has to be a major classic or something? But I bought this bluray pretty much at random, and I have no idea what this movie even is.
I assumed that the uniforms in question were military uniforms, but they’re school uniforms instead?
This has to be one of the earliest German talkies, I guess? 1931?
Oooh.
The cinematography is somewhat inconsistent? Some scenes have shots that are totally blown out, and other scenes look meticulous.
That’s my nightmare! Tender scalp.
It’s a fun movie in many ways — it seems to unsentimental and … abrupt? … which seems so unusual for its time. And, of course, everybody on screen being women (and kinda lesbian).
I think my problem with the movie is in how little character the characters have. Well, most of them — Ilse has lots of character, but the rest of them are sort of a melange.
Not even the play within the play really gets things going. There really isn’t much of a plot here, is there? (Not that there’s anything wrong with not having a plot.)
The film was almost banned in the U.S., but Eleanor Roosevelt spoke highly of the film, resulting in the film getting a limited release in the US in 1932–33.
The last fifteen minutes of this is amazing — it’s unexpected, and really emotionally affecting. The rest of the movie is… It’s OK? It’s interesting and everything, but doesn’t quite fire on all cylinders.
Well, the first movie was mid, but sequels are always better, eh? Eh? EH?
Trixie’s Motel?
Very subtle logo.
This looks incredibly early-digital — blown out highlights and bad white balance. I had to check the date, but it’s really 2016 and not 2001. Did they film this with a vintage 2001 Canon?
Perhaps the director just hates Tom Cruise and wants him to look as awful as possible — but without making it obvious that that’s what he’s doing?
This movie looks so ugly — it’s just hard to get past that. But it’s not that bad otherwise? The plot makes more sense than in the first movie, and there’s fewer long stretches of unnecessary exposition.
I’m kinda enjoying this on an 80s cheapish action movie basis — it could, like, have been a Golan-Globus production.
OK, I take that back. It’s been really boring for the last half hour.
Man, that last hour was just … without interest? The first movie had a lot of fun action pieces, and this totally didn’t. And I understand why Cruise wanted to do the first one — it’s a fun character to do, and he really leaned into it. And in this movie, he was sleepwalking through the movie. Perhaps he just had a multi movie contract that he couldn’t get out of?
While Jack Reacher was intended to be a tent-pole for a film series, a sequel was initially reported to be unlikely due to its lackluster run at the North American box office.[6] In February 2013, a sequel became more likely after the film surpassed a gross of $200 million worldwide.
It took them years to decide to do another movie, and only after it grossed a lot abroad.
I haven’t seen this (and just one of the Mission Impossible movies), because eh whatevs. But I thought the first season of the Reacher TV series was a lot of fun (and the second was awful), so what the hey.
Yeah, that’s a bad guy, alright.
This starts in a pretty intriguing way?
But then grinds to a complete halt.
Hey! That’s not Thad! We want Thad!
Hey! Did they hire only puny actors, or is Cruise standing on a milk crate this entire movie?
Hey! Cruise is pretty good at doing this guy… He’s got the Thadness.
Man, this is boring. The first five minutes were interesting, and now there’s been over 20 minutes of really dull infodumping.
Fight! Fight!
This is almost like an episode or two of a New Era Of Quality TV series — it feels strangely padded.
Werner!
Well, OK, this has some really inventive action scenes.
Hey, it’s that guy.
I enjoy hypercompetence porn as much as the next person, and those scenes were fun. But oh so many dull moments in between. It could easily have been 30 minutes shorter without dropping any plot elements, really.
I bought a bunch of movies from Criterion (kinda at random), so I thought it was time I started watching some of them.
Very mysterious!
I’m not sure whether this is a horror movie? Or more of a psycho thriller kind of thing?
Terrific performances all around, and it looks great. It’s just that I’m not really that fond of those “is she insane, or are somebody trying to drive her insane, or ARE THERE GHOSTS!!!!” stories? I’m sitting here and going GET ON WITH IT which is totally the wrong approach and not the movie’s fault at all.
See? Looks awesome.
This movie makes a lot of interesting choices, like making the Kidman character (who is the protagonist) absolutely insufferable — a religious fanatic, somewhat sadistic, stupid almost beyond belief…
But everybody else (including half the children) are evil or ineffective, so it evens out?
OK, if you haven’t seen this movie before, and there’s a chance you will, stop reading now.
I’ll leave you with this gif, but close this tab now!
Are they gone?
Wow, I didn’t see that coming at all! He out-Shyamalaned Shyamalan!
I’m in total awe of that ending, really.
But even so, the first 90 minutes were not fun? But like I said, that might just be me, because I don’t really enjoy the sort of movie er I thought this was, and just because it turned out to be something else, that doesn’t make it more enjoyable. For me.
This has like 20 producers… I kinda thought those days were over, and that Netflix or Amazon would just hand out silly amounts of money to everybody, but not to Cronenberg, I guess?
And this is the second movie of that name Cronenberg has made! The first one was er “eek” I think I would summarise it. And I haven’t really been looking forward to watching this movie, but it Cronenberg, so I have to.
Oops.
Hm, these mechanical-organic things certainly remind you of similar things in eXistenZ — but they looked so much better in that movie. Even slithery things in, say, Videodrome looked 100x better than this plastic thing that can barely move…
OK, I was worried that this was going to be totally gross since I’ve actually read reviews of this movie. But it’s not! Instead it’s totally CGI? I mean, they’ve got all these kinda neat sets, but then they cut to 1995 level CGI for all the surgery shots? And possibly some muppet show stuff.
It’s disturbing, but not because it’s gross. More because even with 20 producers, Cronenberg didn’t have the budget to do effects that look OK.
I’m finding it very hard to keep paying attention to this movie. It’s just… dare I say it… kinda boring? Perhaps viewers who have a surgery fetish would find this thrilling? It’s got all these weird elements that should make this an interesting movie, but instead every thread seem to disintegrate. It’s without focus?
Two repair people are better than no repair people.
Anyway, I’ve seen all of Cronenberg’s movies — some several times. And his movies are by no means all wonderful or anything. But… I didn’t really enjoy this much. And it even ended exactly like I guessed it would.
Oh, right, this is by Ethan Coen without his brother. I was just going to write “this doesn’t really seem like a Coen brothers movie” and I was right?
Anyway, I’m probably the only person in the world who think they’re overrated? I like most of their movies fine, but I don’t quite understand the adulation. But I guess they’ve got a kinda oldee tymey auteur thing going that’s attractive.
It’s a confusing movie so far? They’ve got the repartee going on like it’s a 30s screwball comedy, which I love, but then they have these scenes of intense violence that’s just a total turn-off. It’s giving me whiplash.
And also the wonderful wonderful sets… but with these CGI things imposed here and there? It’s visually distressing.
Hey, this reminds me of what I was reading earlier today…
Paris Review.
>
This movie looks good, and it’s got some great performances. And it has a fun fluffy comedy plot like they used to do back in the 90s. And this was apparently written a quarter century ago? But it’s just tonally veering from So Much Fun to Eep all the time…
So this is partly a jokey documentary about Tuxedomoon and party footage from them going around Europe in the 80s…
Here they’re doing Holy Wars.
See?
Winston!
I like it, but I think it could have been edited together more er aggressively. Or perhaps I’m just saying that because I’ve seen a lot of Derek Jarman movies lately.
It’s a nice little move for Tuxedomoon fans. If you’re not a fan, though, it’s not going to be very interesting. Still, I’m a fan, so:
Anyway, this movie has been released in several versions, and I’m watching the three hour DVD version:
While the studio insisted the film’s running time could not exceed 150 minutes, Lonergan’s preferred version was closer to three hours. Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker contributed to editing a 165-minute version that Lonergan approved; the cut was never released because producer Gary Gilbert refused to approve it. Eventually, Fox Searchlight Pictures released the 150-minute film in a limited release in the United States on September 30, 2011, to moderately positive reviews from critics.
Hey! Anna Paquin! I like her…
Oops. This guy… not a fan. Whatsisname… er… Batfleck? No… Matt Damon!
Basic instinct.
This starts very strong, and not how you’d expect at all.
And I have no idea why I bought this movie — somebody must have recommended it, or something? But as usual, I have no recollection of why I bought it.
You know, I’m not sure about this movie. On the one hand, there’s interesting stuff going on — and on the other hand, there’s scenes like this that are supposed to be … knowing? in a way? and instead it comes off as clichéd.
I mean, clichéd in that it’s a middle-aged director doing a movie about teenagers getting laid.
And I’m guessing Lonergan was a huge nerd, so it’s like a Mary Sue on his part.
Checks out.
Hey, it’s that guy…
Er…
Yeah. that guy.
I’m enjoying this movie, but I can understand why the producers wanted to edit it down… All the scenes are interesting and stuff, but some scenes, like discussing Shakespeare, might not be … vital? But I like it — it’s a very unusual movie for a 2011 movie: It’s more like a 70s movie, but with better hair and less sweat.
Oh my god, I want to live there.
OK, into Mary Sue territory again — Mary Paquin’s character (who’s like 18?) is totally hot for her middle-aged teacher.
Checks out.
OK, there’s wobbly parts in this, but it’s a really original, interesting and affecting movie.
So, this is the companion movie to Smoke — I saw both of these when they were released, but I don’t remember at all what this is all about.
This little box set was released by Arthaus — a German distributor. (But the soundtrack and stuff is in the original English.) When I was looking for these movies, this seemed to be the only bluray option — which makes me wonder: Are Miramax movies just verboten in the US these days? Because of the Weinstein thing? But Miramax was perhaps the most important US indie thing back in the 90s, so it’s a shame that their catalogue is … er… mostly forgotten now? Perhaps it’s because Disney bought them, though?
Anyway!
Roseanne! Is this just a bunch of adlibs done on the sets of Smoke? With famous people doing cameos?
John Lurie!
Jim Jarmusch!
Is that… Lily Tomlin!?
This movie is just so random… but so amiable.
Oh, I had forgotten that Lou Reed is in this.
That’s whatsisface? Er… uhm… Oh, Michael J Fox.
This movie is amusing throughout — I smiled the entire time — but it does dip in interest depending on who’s doing a little story. Like, Jim Jarmusch was great — they could have done an hour of him just talking — but some of the other people sounded a bit, er, like they’d rehearsed an anecdote for a talk show? I mean, not a lot of those, but a couple.
Yes, it’s Madonna!
Yes, it’s RuPaul!
Half a meter taller than all the other actors!
They’re short in Brooklyn, I guess.
Anyway, this is a really enjoyable lark of a movie — it’s really charming. I can totally see how people would get a bit impatient with it, but I loved it.
People keep dying! I bought a shirt with fabric designed by Trina, and later that day it was announced that she died. And I bought this small box set (Smoke and Blue in the Face) in May 2023, and whattayouknow, May 2024 Paul Auster ups and dies.
I HAVE TO STOP SHOPPING
That skyline…
Anyway, I was a huge fan of Auster’s — I’ve read all of his books up until, like, 2005-ish? Even the essay collections and stuff. (Unfortunately, his later books weren’t as compelling as his 80s/early 90s stuff, and I lost track of him…) But I did indeed see this movie when it was released, and I remember that I really liked it? But I can’t recall anything about it beyond that.
Hey! William Hurt! For most of the 80s, I’d see a VHS his name on it, and I’d rent it, and then be disappointed that John Hurt wasn’t in the film.
But I’ve finally managed to remember that those are different names.
Harvey Keitel, too…
Oooh. Hurt plays an author named Paul Benjamin. Getting meta already! (Benjamin is Auster’s middle name, dontcha know.)
I cannot overstate how much I enjoy watching these scenes — just wandering around New York, not a greenscreen in sight, without digital colour grading. It’s such a relief — these scenes bring me joy.
Man, Auster is so good at this stuff — random events that tie into something significant.
I wanna live in one of these apts.
Perhaps with less smoke, though.
Nice home decor!
This is such a great movie. It’s just kinda perfect. And I think it’s basically been forgotten now?
And it makes me wonder about Wayne Wang’s other movies… I should look them up.
This seems like another kinda… low effort thing? Jarman does his trademark slow-and-low-frame-rate-with-super-8 thing… which can be very effective! If he’s filming something interesting.
But here he just seems to be filming Burroughs visiting or something?
Is that Sleazy?
Using his normal technique, everything seems kinda interesting by default? But this is just a waste of time. The soundtrack is snoresville, too.
I’ve seen this before — but now it’s in 2K. I remember I bought that first copy of Jubilee as part of a DVD box set in London when I was visiting in, like, 1998, but it took me more than a decade to actually watch it (because I had basically stopped watching movies). I wanted to get back into watching movies again, and that coincided with my starting to blog, and Jubilee was the first movie I watched as part of that…
It’s the Eurovision, see?
This guy is the greatest actor ever. Ever!
Adam and the Ants.
See?
It’s a frustrating movie. There’s bits in here like a more deranged (but realistic) A Clockwork Orange — it’s wild and totally unhinged. But then there’s scenes like this where they drop in a lot of commentary about The State Of Britain Today that are so badly done…
I mean, it helps that Adam Ant is rolling his eyes to this monologue — is Jarman making fun of New York punks? That’s a Richard Hell quote…
Is that Jarman himself?
I love their uniforms with the pink rubber gloves stuck on the shoulders.
It’s kinda brilliant? But it also doesn’t quite work. But it’s mostly brilliant.
The film had many critics in British punk circles. Fashion designer Vivienne Westwood manufactured a T-shirt on which was printed an “open letter” to Jarman denouncing the film and his misrepresentations of punk. Jarman, according to biographer Tony Peake, was critical of punk’s fascination with fascism, while mocking its stupidity and petty violence.
This is the final movie on the Columbia Noir #1 box set, and if the movies have anything in common, it’s that 1) they’re cheap, and 2) they’re not really noir movies.
This starts off really intriguing — lots of action, and a big mystery.
OK, the mystery is totally gone now, and it’s just a standard procedural. This feels more like a TV episode than a movie at this point.
The Lineup is a 1958 American film noir version of the police procedural television series of the same title that ran on CBS radio from 1950 until 1953, and on CBS television from 1954 until 1960.
So there’s a good reason for that…
This is so weird. I mean, they’re going for an in depth view into the minds of sociopath killers, so they have them standing around glowering at each other, being all tough… And then they have them going “so how did you end up being like this?” which is totally a thing a mobster would say to a hired killer, right? And the killer says “I had a father. I never knew him.”
That must have taken the writers several weeks to come up with.
They’ve working really hard at making these guys interesting — the older guy is teaching the younger guy all about grammer and stuff, and the younger guy (who’s the killer) tells the older guy the last words of everybody he’s killing, and the older guy writes them down enthusiastically. He’s writing a philosophical treatise about last words or something?
So both stone cold sociopaths, but originals.
And it’s all so “wha”. What the fuck were the writers thinking?
But people like this?
So do the critics (except for Internet Reviews, who’s correct).
I guess an attraction here is that we’re getting all these really nice views of oldee tymey San Francisco.
I may have seen this before at the local cinematheque back in the 80s — but I’m not sure. Jarman did more than a couple of movies based on speeding up/slowing down old Super 8 films and editing them together with an interesting soundtrack… so this seems familiar, but not hugely so.
I wonder how they approached restoring this for the bluray… The movie (which is 35mm, I’m guessing) was composed from 8mm originals, I think? Which is super grainy, and there’s a lot of dust and stuff… but that was reproduced by Jarman deliberately, so you don’t want to edit that out. But you do want to get rid of the artefacts from the degraded 35mm print.
I guess you just er wing it?
This looks really good, though.
And it’s rather fascinating. Without the soundtrack by Throbbing Gristle, though, it would have been a very different film.
It’s… contemplative.
If I really did see this back when I was a student, I would have felt very cultured indeed — I mean, watching an abstract movie like this surely deserves a lot of cultural brownie points!
And I guess I still feel like that? But I do like this one anyway. Even if there are no bragging rights attached these days.
Box sets from the BFI (the British Film Institute) are pretty interesting — that is, they have access to a lot of odds and ends that even outfits like Criterion don’t. For one, they have their own archives, where a lot of British film stuff has been deposited. And they also have access to the BBC archives, where there’s a lot of stuff, too.
So you get stuff like this: It’s an incomplete alternate edit of the Sebastiane film — in black and white and 16mm.
They’re releasing bluray box sets — so why not include stuff like this? There’s more than enough space on the discs, I’m guessing they’re thinking.
But… it’s not really that interesting, is it? The differences between this cut and the released cut isn’t … huge. The scenes are in a different order, but they aren’t really more compelling in this version than they are in the other version.
So I didn’t really watch this all the way through.
Ah, so that’s why this is included in the Jarman box set. (It’s not directed by Jarman.)
Well, that is very scenery.
The newly-compiled jazz soundtrack is pretty odd.
Even for a single camera/no edits shooting of a ballet, it’s not done very well. I mean, the third bottom half here, for instance, is below the stage… and while they move the camera slightly, it seems pretty random. This seems to be Edmee Wood’s only credit on imdb.
So I guess this is more of a documentation of a ballet than a short film?
OK, now the soundtrack is more straightforward.
I’m not really into ballet — I mean, I don’t dislike it or anything, I’ve just not seen much ballet.
But I’m not sure whether these people are really that good dancers? Their movements seem kinda tentative and sometimes awkward?
Jazz Calendar is a ballet created in 1968 by Frederick Ashton to the music of Richard Rodney Bennett. The ballet was first performed on 9 January 1968 by The Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with designs by Derek Jarman. The work was performed over 50 times up to 1979 by the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden but is not part of the current repertoire.
See? It’s just kinda not very … physical. But perhaps it’s meant to look tentative and awkward? You never know with these arteestes.
It does seem in-credible that the London Opera House would have downright bad dancers in their ballet, but…
And perhaps it would have been better with the original music?
OK, Wikipedia said that this section is supposed to be a parody of a men’s dancing class… but they aren’t dancing any worse here than in the previous sections.
So how to throw the die on this one? It’s not meant to be a “real movie” or anything, so I’m gonna score it on the ballet itself (with the music on this bluray):
The films on this Columbia Noir bluray box set have been mostly… not that good? But nicely restored, at least. And this looks, I guess, like another one of those.
Eating angrily!
Oh, they’re ribbing Rooney for being a natural blond(e)!
It’s lust at first sight!
I haven’t seen many movies by the director, Richard Quine, I think, but the one I have seen — Paris When It Sizzles — was a hoot. And… this seems pretty cool so far. It’s an original way to set up a movie, and I’m not quite sure where it’s going? But I guess Rooney and that dame (Dianne Foster) are gonna hook up somehow.
Hey! I had some car problems the other day, but no mechanic made house calls for me! That’s so sexist!
I’m really enjoying this! It’s weird! She has some nefarious plan, but what! I mean beyond getting into Rooney’s pants, but that’s normal!
I guess the most likely plot is that she needs a fall guy of some kind… or a driver for doing a heist? Both?
Now that’s a horny car mechanic!
I think the moral here is… never trust a man that can cook!
This movie has so many little great touches — like that awfully drunk woman butting into The Scheme.
Kevin McCarthy is so evil!
OK, this scene could have been really exciting if they’d had a bigger budget… I mean, it’s a B movie, and they’ve kept to a couple of smaller locations, but the movie looks great — it hasn’t been really obvious how small the budget must have been until we get to scenes like this.
It’s a simple, small movie — but it’s done so well. I totally enjoyed this, and I had no idea that Rooney could act this well.
This ten minute short starts off as just being a very quick time-lapse movie kind of thing, but then it diverges and starts getting all kinds of interesting. I wonder how this was made — did Jarman have a camera set up that allowed him to just shoot one frame of a film roll at a time?
I’ve never seen this movie before — I’ve seen most of Jarman’s movies, but not this one (his first full movie, but co-directed by Paul Humfress). It’s on a BFI box blu ray bux set, and seems nicely restored…
Hey, she’s in Jubilee, isn’t she?
The dialogue is in Latin, I think? Hm… or Italian? It doesn’t sound very fluid, whatever it is.
I wouldn’t really have guessed that this is a Jarman movie — it seems like a much more conventional film than his later movies, but then again, he didn’t direct it alone. I guess that most jarmanesque thing is that they’re not speaking English (which seems like something he’d do).
OK, that’s a Jarman shot, I guess.
Is he reading comics?
No, porn!
I’m guessing some of the guys who play these soldiers are ballet dancers?
This is like a Beau Travail of the 70s!
Or perhaps not! I’m wondering where they got the financing for this movie — it’s shot really fancily, but I’m not sure it could actually have been shown anywhere outside of porn theatres at the time? (There’s erect penises and everything.)
Did they really have plastic Frisbees back in Roman days? Hah! I got them!
The actors are mostly non-professinal (I’m guessing), but they all did a really good job. Except the guy who did Sebastian — he was pretty bad.
Ah.
This is from a handsome box set from the BFI which says “volume one”, but I’m not sure another was released? *googles* Oh, it was! And I missed it and it’s sold out now…
But since Wikipedia didn’t explain how this came into being, I thought that perhaps the booklet in the box set would explain. And indeed it says that it’s got professional filmmakers and non-professional actors — which I kinda already guessed. But who paid for those professionals!?
“Funded through private investment from wealthy, older gay men.” OK, I guess, but it’s still pretty… vague? It seems like a really expensive production (the images and the audio are fantastic), and could it ever hope to make back the investment through screening at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill? It seems rather unlikely, doesn’t it?
Anyway, I was pretty sceptical towards this movie at the start, because it didn’t really look much like a Jarman movie? But after about half an hour, I was all in — the photography, the horniness, the sheer fuck-it-all-ness about it all means that I have to give it a ⚅. But I can understand if this isn’t a movie included in Jarman retrospectives (it wasn’t in the one I saw in the early 90s) — because it’s not The Last of England or Jubilee, like — it’s not obviously worth watching.
This starts with a three minute exposition — we get Freddy’s backstory, and a kinda-sorta wink wink rationale for the movie: People have forgotten Freddy, so we need more?
Wow, they really want you to root for whomever gets to kill these guys, don’t they? It’s a Pro Freddy’n’Jason movie?
Hey, is that whatsisface? Nah, can’t be. Hm… oh yeah, he was in Scary Movie.
Lots of jump scares. People are hating on jump scares now, but I’ve never understood why. Jump scares are what horror movies were made for!
Noo! Not the generic!
OK, now it’s finally Freddy Vs. Jason!
Hey, the concept of this movie isn’t that bad — the kids really want to kill Freddy, so they’re using Jason to try to do that. While trying not to get killed by Jason at the same time. It took a while getting to that point, though…
It made money, but I guess not enough? People wondered why there wasn’t a sequel. Hm… oh, they’re saying there’s problems with the rights?
Anyway, once this finally gets going, it’s surprisingly entertaining. I guess it’s mostly due to the satisfaction of seeing these two loathed evil guys getting really trashed?
The four would-be robbers are clearly all in their 30s yet are in college. This is NOT a case of miscasting but the men are supposed to be veterans going to school on the GI Bill…and during the 1940s and 50s, many older and non-traditional students existed.
I’ll say!
I’m not quite sure what this movie is doing on a Film Noir box set — it’s a comedy that I assume is going to turn into a heist movie at some point?
And now Kim Novak sings a little song.
This movie is all over the place.
OK, now the movie took a sudden turn into noirish territory, and it’s actually starting to get kinda exciting. And we’re only 62 minutes in! So… er… 22 minutes to go.
Man, the first hour of this movie was Snoozeville, Population Me.
Nice beard.
OK, the actual heist plot is so stupid that it’s hard to keep paying attention.
OK, this bit in the automated garage is cool.
Wow, that was really stupid.
For a few minutes I thought this was at least a ⚁ movie, but nope.
This is a pretty interesting movie — as it says in the opening titles, this movie isn’t about spectacular action, but about the quotidian work done by IRS-ish agents trying to track down a criminal.
I mean, there’s a murder and stuff, but so far (at least) it’s mostly been the agents doing their low key work, sort of.
OK, there are some bits where interest lags… but then they do great scenes like this! Masterful.
Nevertheless, the film authentically portrayed the efforts of Wilson’s team to put together a tax evasion case against Capone, and in many respects, despite the name changes and nondescript settings, the film is a far more accurate depiction of the investigation than later films on the same subject like The Untouchables.
There’s a reason this isn’t a Film Noir classic — it’s a bit on the boring side at times. But! It’s a really original movie, not only for the sorta realistic portrayal of an investigation, but for things like the very moving scene with the Italian grandmother that would have been cut from any reasonable studio movie.
So I’m glad I watched it, even if it isn’t, you know, perfect.
Oh, I haven’t really seen any Three Stooges movies. Well, OK, this is a short — 18 minutes. But still!
This is trenchant social commentary! But it’s from 1940, so I’m not quite sure which side this is on — these warmongering dudes are from the kingdom of Moronika, which I guess could be a substitute for Germany…
Oh, they’re short!
OK, perhaps this is really anti Nazi.
DING DING DING! Making anti Nazi movies in 1940 was problematic, because the US was officially neutral, and you could be pulled before a pro British tribunal at the Senate if you weren’t careful. But I guess Columbia didn’t care.
Hey, the bald guy is Mussolini.
Heh heh. This is very subtle.
Mattie Herring.
You can never have too many medals.
I’ve never seen one of these before, but was it customary for the bald guy (I googled him — he’s Curly?) to mouth the other guys’ lines? You can see his lips move here in this clip along with their lines before he has to deliver his own line. It’s kinda amazing.
Wow, this is exquisitely silly and random.
Wow, this is amazing. It’s a pure FUCK YOU to Hitler — it ends with Hitler and Mussolini being eaten by lions, and the final shot is this lion belching. It’s the best short movie ever!
The film is often recognized as Hollywood’s inaugural anti-Nazi comedy, predating Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator by several months
[…]
You Nazty Spy! satirized the Nazis and the Third Reich and helped publicize the Nazi threat in a period when the United States was still neutral about World War II and isolationist sentiment was prevalent among the public. During this period, isolationist senators such as Burton Wheeler and Gerald Nye objected to Hollywood films on grounds that they were anti-Nazi propaganda vehicles designed to mobilize the American public for war.
[…]
The Hays code discouraged or prohibited many types of political and satirical messages in feature films, requiring that the history and prominent people of other countries must be portrayed “fairly”. Short films such as those released by the Stooges were subject to less attention than feature films.
Ah; that explains how they got away with doing something like this in 1940.
Anyway, I’m mostly being dazzled by the historical significance of this — are the gags funny? Yeah, pretty funny. The routines aren’t tight, but that lends a certain charm to the proceedings. It’s not a perfect short, but it’s fantastic, so:
Anyway, I bought a Boetticher bluray box set a few months back, so I thought it might be time I started watching it. I know absolutely nothing about Boetticher (can’t recall seeing his name before), and most of the movies in the box seems to be westerns, but this is a noirish thing from 1945.
Err… This box really is all westerns? So where is this movie from, then?
Aha! It’s from a Noir box set! I guess I’m watching that box set instead, then.
I dunno… I’m not feeling this movie. The plot is convoluted and simpleminded at the same time, and the performances are mostly undistinguished. Except for these foggy scenes, everything looks pretty professional? If somewhat low budgeted.
This guy (the villain) hams it up, but the rest are playing it straight.
For once, I agree with imdb.
Heh, that’s the way they used to tie up people in old comics — a mess of ropes that don’t really serve much purpose.
Hey, they’re saved by passing Chinese people!
This looks nice, and the restoration work on this is excellent, but it’s just a pretty bad movie.
This is very amiable. I haven’t seen it before, and I thought I’d seen all Astaire/Rogers movies…
What’s fun in this movie is that Ginger Rogers gets to be a total goofball — this is really her movie. She does the funny bits and Astaire has to be the straight man.
Hattie McDaniel!
Oops spoilers.
It’s fun! It’s not the best Astaire/Rogers movie, but…
I’ve never heard of this movie, but it was apparently a box office success and everything. It’s from 1965, but it’s very much a 50s Film Noir movie, so it’s all kinds of weird.
It’s one of those paranoid movies where you don’t quite know whether he’s lost his memory or something else screwy is going on. It’s nice and tense.
Walter!
Triple A.
It’s pretty good! I’m not sure the plot actually makes sense — there’s a conspiracy going on, but it seems to rely on things the people involved couldn’t possibly know. But it’s really tightly plotted — it’s like a clockwork thing.
It’s hard to really get into, though, because it’s just so weird.
I was watching a couple famous Howard Hawks movies and I thought “well, I should watch them all, eh?” But many of them are pretty hard to find — this bluray was released in Italy, but fortunately the original soundtrack is on an alternate track.
The footage of the timber rafting is fascinating. I mean, it’s so unromantic — we don’t get pics of men heroically wrestling with the timber, but instead we get them dynamiting the timber whenever there’s a snag somewhere. So much dynamite.
Upon returning to the studio, Goldwyn viewed a rough cut of the film and was shocked to discover Hawks had shifted the focus from the unbridled destruction of the land to a love triangle in which brawling Barney Glasgow and Swan Bostrom vied for the affections of lusty Lotta Morgan. The character of Richard Glasgow, intended to be the second lead, barely was in the film, which was cluttered with Hawks-like improvised bits of business. When the director refused to comply with Goldwyn’s demands for major changes, the producer fired Hawks from the project.
[…]
Wyler never considered Come and Get It a part of his filmography and disowned it whenever he could, although it greatly pleased Ferber, who praised Goldwyn “for the courage, sagacity, and power of decision” he demonstrated by “throwing out the finished Hawks picture and undertaking the gigantic task of making what amounted to a new picture.
Wow, the history of the production of this movie is more interesting than the movie is…
Frances Farmer is fun, though.
Heh heh. That’s a shot all right.
Personal saunas.
Spencer Tracy was originally intended to play this guy, and I can totally see that. It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with Edward Arnold, but he’s, er, a bit lacking in the Leading Man dept.
Well, the wife looks nice!
Well, this is creepy! So he didn’t marry the first Frances Farmer character (because he married his boss’ daughter instead) but now (25 years later?) he has the hots for the daughter of his best friend and the first Farmer character (who’s also played by Frances Farmer).
It’s weird! It’s creepy! It’s weird!
He’s so horny.
But now the Farmer daughter has the hots for the Tracy son! Complications!
It’s not a very… compelling movie? Perhaps it’s the weird production history, but…
Such love triangle!
It’s just not very good, innit?
Come and Get It. Howard Hawks, William Wyler. 1936. ⚁
This movie is so close to being really enjoyable — it’s a zany thing about a woman running a sort of scam on everybody, but then doesn’t feel very good about it all. You know, the usual thing. And they try so hard! Especially Carole Lombard. But it never actually takes off? It remains a series of somewhat escalating but not compelling scenes?
It may just be me, though.
The director, William A. Wellman isn’t somebody I remember, but he seems to be a proper jobbie kind of director:
Etc etc. Starting in the 20s, he does like seven movies a year. And looking at this list, I have seen a few of his movies (The Ox-Box Incident, Beau Geste), and they’re pretty good?
Indeed.
Tough guy, see?
It’s fun, but it’s really odd. I wonder whether they didn’t quite know what to do about it all — it’s 1h13m long, which takes it into B movie territory — which is pretty unusual for such a big star as Lombard, I think? Or is it? Hm.
Anyway, it’s one of those “there’s some fun scenes” bits, so let’s go with:
The titles to this were so colourful that I thought “*phew* dodged the desaturated colour grading on this one”, but nope.
Paul Schrader… that name seems really, really familiar, but I can’t quite place it.
Oh, right, he directed (and/or wrote) a whole bunch of movies back in the late 70s/early 80s that seemed to be very much part of the zeitgeist back then: He wrote Taxi Driver and directed Hardcore (with George C Scott), and American Gigolo (which I guess made Richard Gere a thing), and er Cat People and Mishima…
So I think I’ve seen all his movies until the mid 80s, and after that, I’ve seen zilch. Eyeballing them, it seems like most of them weren’t well received. Like:
And:
This first five minutes of this movie are risible — Joel Edgerton (a very philosophical gardener) spouts deep-sounding but deeply moronic lines while the camera portentously follows him.
In 2022, Schrader criticized that year’s Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll, describing it as a “politically correct rejiggering”, with its selection of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as the greatest film of all time being the product of “distorted woke reappraisal”.
It seems really weird to go this grey in a film about plants and stuff. Perhaps they’re gonna go all Wizard of Oz when summer comes? I doubt it, though — this is just what all movies look like now.
Very ambiguous tattoos, Travis.
That’s some wallpaper.
Very cosy dinner party.
Oh, the gardener is boinking both his boss and her grand niece? Very Schrader I’m sure.
OK, so he takes off his shirt, revealing the tats, because he’s… writing… Writing is sweaty work.
See, by having sex with a Black woman, he’s absolved from his Nazi tattoos (and she’s making him remove them). He’s a fixer upper.
After having sex with the grand niece, the road somehow becomes CGI.
Nooo! They hurt the annuals! Vandals! *shakes fist*
This is barely a movie at all. Everything about it is risible. Well, except Sigourney Weaver’s brief performance (I’m guessing she was on set one single day).
It’s a super-hero movie that’s just 1h44m! I didn’t know that was allowed! I thought they had to be at least two and a half hours!
I didn’t watch the Ms. Marvel tv series (after the first ep), but it seemed like an OK series. But I was disappointed that she didn’t have her embiggening powers and instead seemed to shoot some kind of energy bolt out of her hands? It seems like she’s still doing that here.
And now we’re getting a recap of Capt. Marvel’s origins…? I think I’ve seen that movie, but I remember nothing of it. Still, I don’t really feel I need a recap — she’s a super-hero; they all have an origin and they’re never interesting.
But OK, that only lasted for a couple of minutes and now there’s stuff happening! And Captain Marvel has a cat on her shoulder!!!
And and…
Wow, this really moves fast. I like it.
And it looks kinda good? Much better than most Marvel movies, at least. I mean, it’s all CGI and greenscreen, but they haven’t colour graded everything into oblivion…
Oh, this is a Palestine/Israel metaphor…
This is so entertaining! I thought super-hero movies were over? But so far, this is one of the best ones I’ve watched.
Well, I’m still not sure why this wasn’t a box office smash. But it does tease you with all these continuity things that you may or may not know. I mean, I got about half of them, but I didn’t mind the half I didn’t get? It’s like “oh yeah, there’s a history here; sounds interesting” but that didn’t detract from enjoying this very enjoyable movie?
EEk!
And this movie really leans into the silliness of classic super-hero comics. It really captures the feeling of reading those comics.
Such Fury.
Oh, and they’re tying this into the Hawkeye series — the best Marvel TV series? Man. But I guess that’s never going to happen since this movie bombed:
I guess it’d have to gross around $400M to make a profit, and it didn’t do that.
Which is a shame. This movie really nails what a super-hero movie should be: Fun, action filled and inventive.
And… it looks great! So much better than most Marvel movies — it’s like if they don’t have to do 150 minutes, they can do proper CGI? And not colour grade everything into greyness?
So, this is basically just a guy doing the way of the wu tang shaolin clan thing for 15 minutes — and it’s just not that fascinating? My mind started wandering and before you know it I had gotten a cheese board out, and that’s not a good sign.
Huh! I wonder how Deren did this. Is it just inverted film stock?
But if so, why are so many of their faces so dark while their bodies are almost totally white? So it can’t be that… is it infrared or something? And they all have a pound of makeup on their faces so their faces become kinda blackface?
Made in collaboration with Metropolitan Opera Ballet School,[5] the film was shot in black-and-white in the 16 mm format, and is projected as photographed in the negative.
So… were their bodies painted black, but their faces weren’t?
The images in this short seem so fresh — it’s hard to believe that it’s from 1944. If I were presented this movie without any context, I would have guessed that it’s a modern movie made to look old, you know?
Is that an open-faced salt mine? No! It’s a glacier.
So evil!
This is apparently about the Armenian genocide (when the Turks were killing everybody in occupied territories). But more importantly, it’s the final movie in the Elia Kazan box set! After watching this, I’m free! Free, I tells you! I’ve now completed all the box sets I was watching! Except the Maya Deren one! Oops! Never mind!
(But that is a very small box.)
The Turks are so evil! You can tell by their glued-on moustaches.
(And by them killing old, nice Armenian uncles.)
I love me a good melodrama, but this guy… I dunno. I don’t mind that he’s a bad actor (that sometimes works very well in melodramas), but he’s just not that interesting? Whenever he’s on the screen, it’s like *sigh*.
He did do a handful of other things after this, though.
This was shot in 1.85:1, but cut down to 16:9 for this DVD. Or… wikipedia claims that it was 1.66:1? imdb and wikipedia are fighting! Bits of the movie are missing in any case in this version!
The faults are mostly at the beginning, (it’s worth sticking with it), and the scenes of peasant oppression and revolt don’t ring true. The casting of American players doesn’t help or maybe Kanzan was just too close to his material.
I was totally ready to ditch this movie, because it’s, well, awful, but this guy says that it’s going to pick up, so I’m giving it a go.
The rest of the acting is very uneven and Giallelis is certainly no James Dean, (his career was short-lived).
OK, this is brutal. Brutally awful. I may not last until Constantinople (not Istanbul).
With a more compelling lead, this might have been OK, I guess? But it’s not.
You see, he wants to go to America America, so he ogles models a lot. I’m not sure whether he’s supposed to be developmentally challenged… I guess not, since it’s modelled after Kazan’s uncle or something?
No, I can’t take it any more. I’m ditching this movie before the halfway point. Perhaps the last half is the best movie ever, but I’ll never know.
I really like that Morgen didn’t interview anybody — it’s all snippets of Bowie talking, and footage of Bowie.
The first (I’d say) two thirds of this movie really work: It’s interesting footage, and Morgen lets the songs play to completion, etc etc. It’s all good stuff. But then when we get to the mid 80s, the film starts sagging, and Morgen’s lack of enthusiasm for Bowie’s 90s (and beyond) years make the last third a slog to watch.
The reason I bought this bluray is because the cover looks like this:
How could I not buy it!!! But I assume that it’s probably the worst film in the universe, although… it’s got Cyndi Lauper, Jeff Goldblum, Julian Sands, Steve Buscemi, Park Overall and Peter Falk. How bad can it be!
Max 80s.
Why didn’t Lauper get the Oscars for this? She was robbed!
Hey! Isn’t that… er… that guy!? I think it is! From Buffy! This movie has all the people!
And there’s that guy!
I love these NY-ey shots.
Columbo!
This is such an odd movie. (But aren’t all movies odd?) But I mean, it feels (in some ways) like a straight to VHS release — it’s silly, it’s leisurely paced — but they really went to South America to film? And it just looks really good.
Oh, it wasn’t a straight to VHS movie! $18M was a pretty solid budget back then. But it seriously bombed.
(The gag is that he’s afraid of germs so he brought water from the US. Love the umbrellas on the water tank.)
He’s the bad guy.
Heh heh.
SPECIAL EFFECT IS OUR PASSION
Yeah, OK — the first two thirds of this movie was just really, you know, amiable? There were lots of jokes, and most of them missed, but then you’d get some more… and Lauper is fun to watch, and Peter Falk hammed it up to match, and Goldblum was Goldbluming away, as he does. It almost felt like some kind of lost treasure? In just how likeable, silly and easygoing it was?
But then we got to the dreaded third act, and Julian Sands shows up, and is, like, all Serious Actor, and it all goes down like a lead balloon.
I mean, it’s probably not Sands’ fault, precisely — presumably the script was bad — but…
It’s like Peter Falk was holding it all together, and then when they killed his character off, it’s *thud*.
Roger Ebert gave the film 1 out of 4 stars and wrote: “Movies like Vibes appear and disappear like fireflies in the dog days of summer. Nobody seems to have made them, nobody sees them, nobody remembers them.
Wow, that’s quite a critic/audience spread.
Anyway, I did like this movie. The last third was a total drag, though.
Oh! Lee Remick! There’s a name I haven’t seen in a minute…
This starts with a voice-over infodump about floods along the Tennessee river, and we’re apparently going to follow people working for the TVA who are buying land from recalcitrant people along the river? Or something? It doesn’t quite make the “elevator pitch” criteria (unless it’s a long and boring elevator ride), but it seems … er … It seems like a weird way to start the movie, laying out the concept like that.
Is there gonna be romance?
Hm… is the aspect ratio correct here? People seem a bit squashed? Vertically?
And that image up there is 853×364… (/ 853.0 364) => 2.34! I guess they just have some kind of squashed-looking faces?
Oh, that sounds wonderful!
Oh, Lee Remick… I was thinking of Lee Van Cleef!
Not the same kind of thing at all! But most amazing of all:
There’s somebody else in this movie with exactly the same name! Doooing!
Yeah! Take that, city slicker!
This is really entertaining. And quite unlike any of Kazan’s preceding movies. I think he’s hitting the beats he didn’t quite hit with Baby Doll? That was supposed to be funny, but instead was… confusing.
This movie has so many good lines.
*insert Beavis sounds here*
Subtle framing.
Clift’s performance is a bit confusing — he often seems diffident, but at the same time he’s being kinda heroic (here he’s talking to the local KKK boys (I think) who don’t want equal pay for the Black people)… It’s… it’s… almost like he’s trying to do a more serious version of Cary Grant? But not quite getting all the way there?
This woman does the best side eye ever, though.
Wow, this is a masterful performance. He’s managed to portray the most repugnant character in movie history.
This movie was unexpectedly really good. I guess perhaps Kazan wanted to go total melodrama, but he’s good at this.
But then I forgot to watch the other movie! Which I’m doing now.
Man, I’d forgotten how weird Greenlandish sounds… it’s like nothing else phonetically. Phonemically? It’s fascinating. Especially with the occasional Danish words inserted at random.
But… hm… Qaqqat alanngui had nerve from the start, and entertaining performances. This one starts off more ambiguously — it is a comedy? Is it a drama? Or are we gonna get some horror already?
(But kudos for the subtle camouflage shirt.)
It’s horror!
That’s the scary horror house!
Gotta have them shovels.
Having somebody yawn this much in a movie isn’t a good idea. That stuff is contagious!
Well, that’s scary.
But, nope, this movie just isn’t as compelling as the previous one. I mean, they’re both no budget tiny horror movies, but this one is mostly the two guys sitting around and then something mysterious happens once in a while. It’s just not that entertaining.
There’s original bits in here — like the thing with the rope? That pulled the guy into the Scary Basement? That was pretty cool (and properly nightmarish). But… on the whole, it’s not as much fun as the previous movie.
And I know, this is a no budget movie, made for fun, presumably, so it doesn’t feel fair to throw a die on this thing. But I’m going to, anyway, because I’m not fair.
There were several scenes I think worked well (by that I mean, they were scary), but overall:
Wut. This DVD is in 16:9? But nobody shot in 16:9 back then (and hardly any movies are shot in that aspect ratio today), so it’s been cut down, one way or another. I’m guessing they cut the top and bottom? TSK TSK this Kazan box set, dude…
Nope! They cut the left/right edges. Wrong again!
I hate 16:9 soo muuuuuch…
Hey, is that Mercator? Hm… it’s odd, whatever the projection is. And with Australia all the way up there in Asia? And all the islands in between all smushed into one land mass? Oh yeah! I didn’t notice that the Mediterranean was smushed, too! It’s a very land-centric projection.
Hey, it’s what’s-his-name!
This is very amusing. It’s old-fashioned (duh, from 1957) media criticism… but, man, it’s early for this kind of thing. The movie makes fun of the media in a way that feels staid now, but it must have been pretty radical back then.
I think! (And perhaps why it feels staid is because it’s been copied a lot?)
I mean, it’s meant to be over the top, but the problem is — why is this guy suddenly so popular? They try to establish him as popular by making him 1) not a racist, and 2) somebody who makes fun of (some) ads, but is that enough? On the other hand, people get famous on less than that, I guess… I think it would have helped if the songs he wrote were better?
And we’ve got more than half the movie to go — it the last half going to be about how the guy is discarded by the public? That’d be typical…
The power of aerials.
so critique
He’s so horny!!!
Yeah, as I expected — the last half isn’t as much fun as the first half.
I mean, the movie is, like, correct? Everything it says about TV and politics and everything? But… is it funny? No, it’s not. “It’s funny because it’s true” is the most incorrect thing ever.
He’s an influencer.
Heh heh.
My spellchecker doesn’t recognise “influencer” as a word! I’m proud of my spellchecker!
Yeah, that’s the correct reaction to the revoltin’ plot developmints.
Fighters For Fuller… Oh! KKK. Very subtle.
It ends with what has to be a reference to A Streetcar Named Desise (but “Marcia” instead of “Stella”), which is cool.
I dunno. I really liked like about half this movie? Then the rest not so much.
Should they keep shoving his face this far up into the camera? I mean, they want to make him look like a dork, but…
Anyway, I’m watching this movie (even if I’ve kinda stopped watching super-hero movies) because it got so conflicting reviews that I kinda thought that it might be interesting? It flopped majorly at the box office, presumably both from super-hero fatigue and because the DC people said “we’re rebooting the DC universe, so whatever happens in The Flash ‘doesn’t count’. I MEAN IT”S THE MOST IMPORTANT MOVIE EVER!”. Which is confusing messaging.
Oh god. This movie started off pretty amusingly, but now we’re in bad, bad CGI land. It’s supposed to look awesome, but it just looks shoddy. Especially with the awful orange palette they’ve gone with.
I guess there’s gonna be a lot of this…
… and a lot of this.
I guess I see where they were going with this — it’s a fun madcap scene, but when you’re throwing ten babies out of the window, it’s a bit eh? Eh? Do we really need to have ten babies plummeting to their deaths (to be saved by The Flash in amusing ways)?
I dunno.
Heh, well that’s a nice touch.
Tada!
I think that was a lot funnier in the script than it turned out to be on the screen.
Nooo! Now we’re getting The Flash’s origin! And his childhood! Nooooo! Why can’t they just do the fun parts of super-heroing? When they have their powers and stuff? Instead we always get their traumatic, boring origins.
Oh, he was so sad that he broke into the multiverse! I hate multiverse stuff!
Well, it’s inventive…
*rolls eyes*
It’s classic multiversey stuff, and it’s kinda amusing.
That’s the problem with multiverses…
OK, now we get to the infamous final boss fight, rendered in a desert. But… it didn’t really look as bad as I expected.
And the CGI Nick Cage instead of the scenes he did for this movie.
Yes, exactly.
But… it’s not as bad as everybody says it is. It’s written mostly as a comedy, but that doesn’t really make it all of the way to the screen, I think. The goofy bits (and half of the film is goofy bits) are successful, but then you shift to these standard super-hero serious bits, and that doesn’t quite work.
Ezra Miller is really good in this; he can turn the goofy and silly up to ten at the drop of a hat. The movie is perhaps too long, but I wasn’t really bored at any point of the movie. It feels like it almost should have worked?
Another Tennessee Williams play… Kazan kinda had a Tennessee factory going on there for a while?
But this is a movie I haven’t seen before! I think! So I’m excited.
Hey, Karl Malden…
I bought a Kazan box set some years back, and I’m finally watching the last handful of movies from the set. It’s a bit odd, because while the set is very handsome — there’s a huge book and stuff — the movies themselves look very unrestored. Lots of juddering and lots of dust on the film.
Oh, Tennessee.
Hey, she’s great. Carroll Baker? The name’s not familar…
Wow! I’ve seen Giant, but absolutely none of the other movies have names that ring a bell. There’s some bigger names among the directors… oh, and then she goes off to Italy? Based on the directors’ names. I guess her career didn’t really take off? (But she was Oscar nominated for the role in this movie.)
They were eating pizza down thar in the 50s?
This started off like distilled Tennessee Williams, but now it’s really not — it casts a wider net and is much weirder. So I had to pause and goole:
Although the film’s title card reads “Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll” and the film is based on Williams’ one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Elia Kazan claimed in his autobiography that Williams was only “half-heartedly” involved in the screenplay and that Kazan actually wrote most of it.
Yeah, that makes more sense.
Really!? Well, the characters are caricatured, but pure comedy? It doesn’t really seem to me like this is intended as a parody of these kinds of movies. It’s just really over the top, I think? Full on.
But I guess, if you take this as a serious movie, it’s incomprehensible why Baby Doll continues to confide in this sleaze ball after he’s made it pretty clear that he’s a sleaze ball.
Yeah, OK, it’s a comedy, I guess… But it’s less funny than horrifying.
Yeah, OK, this had to be meant to be parody, I guess, but it’s not funny.
Yeah, OK, it’s a harsh take-down of Tennessee Williams type movies? All southern angst and stuff? So Jonathan Rosenbaum was right after all.
Still, it’s not actually that funny. The last half hour was excruciating.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this before. But… not quite sure?
Heh heh. This is most amusing.
Now that’s some hat.
Heh heh heh.
Yeah, that’s right!
Oh oh oh. I remember this thing. Did I watch this movie in my childhood or something?
Horrifying!
The basic plot of this movie is, of course, something that’s been done a lot around this time, and several times by Cary Grant himself. (I.e., they’re divorcing, but… perhaps not!??!!) But it doesn’t follow the expected beats, and it ends with the Dunne character plotting to get them together in the most absurd way. It’s a very funny screwball comedy, and it’s so charming and odd.
McCarey’s improvisational style was deeply unsettling to Grant, and at the end of the first week Grant sent Cohn an eight-page memorandum titled “What’s Wrong With This Picture”. Grant asked Cohn to let him out of the film, offering to do one or more pictures for free and even saying he’d reimburse Cohn $5,000 if he were released. McCarey was so angry at Grant that he stopped speaking to him and told Cohn he’d kick in another $5,000 to get Grant off the film.
The movie didn’t really have a script!
His working method was to ask his cast to improvise the scene, creating their own dialogue and blocking their own action before allowing cameras to roll. If a problem arose with a scene, McCarey would sit at a piano on the set and pick out tunes and sing until a solution came to him.
Sounds like quite a character, and that explains the lack of… well… plot. I mean, there’s a plot, but these things usually have a clockwork plot of fun things, while this movie is basically just a handful of funny scenes.
I have an Elia Kazan dvd box set, but I started watching this movie, and I though “well, this looks so bad” so I aborted and bought a bluray version instead. Which I’m watching now. And… it looks better? But it still looks pretty odd, so I guess Kazan was going for that “everything looks kinda occluded” look? I mean “only use natural lighting”. (Well, I guess there’s nothing actually “natural” about his lighting, but there isn’t a lot of it.)
I’ve seen this movie at least a couple times before, probably on TV in the 80s, and I remember really liking it as a teenager, so I was exited to watch it now with better visuals, but I guess not. But I’m still exited!
UH-OH!
I’d totally forgotten the plot of this movie…
Wow. There are black people in New Orleans.
Whodathunk.
What a goof. Is he supposed to be developmentally challenged? I think I missed that when I saw this movie last time.
Couldn’t they have gotten a prettier baby!?
This movie is as terrific as I remembered. Is Stanley Kowalsky the most evil character in the history of movies? Has the Anti Polish Defamation League protested this movie? Or what?
It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it’s pretty amazing.
This is a documentary made for TV, and it’s got a simple concept (as is often the case with Varda’s movies) — she interviews a bunch of widows who all live on the same little island.
They talk about their (dead) husbands and their lives and stuff. It’s pretty interesting.
And as usual with Varda, she doesn’t do “verité” but lets people present themselves as they prefer.
This is a really strong documentary — and it’s really touching. (Have plenty of mouchoirs ready.) But it’s also funny and endearing.
And… I think this might be the last Varda movie in this box set? (I may be wrong and there might be a couple more shorts after this…) But in an case, let’s have a look at the box.
It’s got two covers, one with young Varda and one with old Varda.
The format is unusual as DVD box sets go — it’s an awkward size: Not so large that it becomes A Thing, but large enough that it’s not a cute little thing, either. If that makes any kind of sense.
The blu rays are housed in a cardboard book, and lists the major movies on each disc.
And there’s an accompanying book with essays and stuff.
There’s even stuff on the inside of the box!
So — it’s a kind of neat box, and… it’s exhausting! I mean… I love Varda’s movies, so I’m the kind of person that has to, by gum, watch everything on every disc. And there’s so much stuff! It’s wonderful!
What I’m saying is: I wish every director could have as fabulous box as this, but I probably didn’t watch it in the optimal way: When I start watching something like this, I feel a compulsion to be done with it before I start on the next thing? It makes no sense: I could sensibly watch one of these discs per year or whatever, but instead I ploughed through and watched it all, and for each hour of her “main movies”, there were (at least) two hours of shorts, documentaries and commentaries.
And I guess the reason that it’s possible to make a box set like this is because Varda had her own production company for most of her life (Ciné Tamaris), so she owned the rights to her own movies. And she was also interested in revisiting her movies, so when a new DVD edition was released, she sometimes made a documentary about that movie; seeing what had happened in the intervening years. And it’s fascinating stuff, much of it.
Compare with Criterion’s Bergman box — which is (physically) twice the size, but is not complete, and does not exhaustively include every TV appearance and discussion etc…
Er… did I have a point here? Uhm. Probably not. I have to make dinner now.
This is a series of very short films (I think they’re a bit longer than the announced “one minute”, though), each one about one photograph.
Varda does the “this makes me think of” school of commentary — we don’t learn a lot about how each photo was done (or about who did them)…
Some of these are more interesting than others, and I guess seen separately (shown randomly on TV, perhaps?) would be fun. But seen as a single 26 minute short, it’s hard to keep paying attention.
As documentaries go, this is pretty odd. But then again, it’s Varda, right? Anyway, an exhibition featuring hundreds of pre-WWII pictures with teddy bears piqued her interest and she made this documentary about the person who mounted the show, and the show itself.
It’s pretty interesting, and there are, of course, twists. (Sort of.)
This is one of those still photo shorts — but it’s pretty long as these things go. The voiceover (both Varda and at least a couple of male voices) says that Varda went to Cuba and took pictures, so we’re presumably watching these pictures here?
So we’re getting all the usual tricks — zooming on the photos, rapid edits, lots of music, and narration that just doesn’t let up.
It’s not my favourite genre. I mean, the still-into-movie thing has been done brilliantly, like with La Jetée, but this isn’t that.
That’s what I always say.
I didn’t think this worked well as a film, but it’s kinda interesting.
So — this is a movie jointly directed by Varda and an artist called JR. Is this the only co-director credit in her career?
It’s a lot less exacting than Varda’s earlier movies — things go in and out of focus, and the blocking is pretty random (instead of meticulous).
Heh — the concept is that they drive around in this photo booth car (that has a huge printer built in, apparently)…
… and they take pics of people like this? Well, that’s fun.
Yes, that’s Varda’s toes.
This movie is très aimable, as the say. I mean, it’s less digressive than Varda’s movies usually are — there are fewer locations, people and encounters than you’d expect from something that’s structured kind of like a road movie. It’s more… efficient? So it’s not a masterpiece or anything, but there are glimpses of brilliance, and then the rest is very amiable.
Oh, right! There was a section in the documentary Varda made about herself (I think) about his — Varda got a whole lot of money to do this movie (after the success of Jaquot de Nantes), and it features Marcello Mastroianni, Alain Delon, Anouk Aimée, Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu… and everybody else. And if I remember correctly, it absolutely bombed at the box office, and Varda never got financing to do a “real” movie ever again. I guess The Gleaners and I is the closest, and that’s a documentary of sorts…
I may be confabulating, though; my intelligence is very artificial. Let’s see…
Wow. Just a single review? And what did it say?
And it’s from a blog! How useless! Nobody reads blogs!
Variety’s Lisa Nesselson gave a mixed review: “Agnes Varda, who has been making movies for 40 of the 100 years that motion pictures have existed, has put everything she knows about filmmaking and much of what she loves about the cinema into A Hundred and One Nights [sic]. But despite a star-decked cast and manifest good intentions, Varda’s self-described ‘divertimento’ soars in only a few spots.”
OK, let’s watch this thing…
That’s Mastroianni…
I’m quite enjoying this so far — it’s very whimsical, but it’s centred: It’s all about movies.
So I’m wondering whether that’s how it was sold to the investors — as a cross between 8½ and Cinema Paradiso: Broadly sentimental and amusing about being really into movies.
All of a sudden everything turned really boring… Dunno why.
Oh my god! Varda brought Sandrine Bonnaire’s character from Sans toit ni loi back from the dead! *sniff* I’m kinda tearing up…
Le bonheur…
Heh. She’s doing a nuit americaine with an American actor… how appropriate…
It’s brimming with Easter eggs — tiny references to other movies. But sometimes it seems like Varda doesn’t trust the nerdy audience to get the references. Like, in one ten second scene, a guy in 50s clothes and his boy shows up and steals a bike. That’s a fun reference to the de Sica movie, right? But then it’s spoilt a few scenes later when the guy goes “Italian neorealism strikes again”.
And, yes, it bombed.
I really enjoyed this movie. It’s so playful and amusing, but is also affecting. It’s almost, almost a masterpiece — but some of the scenes (especially some of the scenes with the most famous people (de Niro, Delon, Depardieu)) fell flat. (OK, the Delon scene was amusing.)
I’ve never seen a movie by Winding Refn before (but I’ve seen his Mysterious Five adaptation now). I’m not at all sure why I bought this bluray — while his movies seem to look quite stylish and all, the hyperviolence of it all didn’t really seem my like cup of chamomile tea.
And, yes, this looks really stylish.
“It’s a sin”. The soundtrack is fun. And I’m enjoying this movie, but it’s like… it’s not as good as it thinks that it is? I may be totally misinterpreting it, and it’s all just a goofy goof, in which case: Mission accomplished. (But with extra violence.)
I suspect that Winding Refn didn’t quite have the budget to achieve the film he wanted, though. Let’s see…
Ouch. That’s a smaller budget than I guessed — I was thinking like $1M. In which case: Kudos; it looks more expensive than it is. And it raked in 10x the budget!
This guy is amazing.
It’s a compelling movie, but it does get bogged down in parts. It’s also kinda like somebody who only knows exploitation movies had seen one Godard movie and decided to make an art film? I wonder what the critics thought…
OK, pretty well-liked, but not universally so — I guess that’s what I expected.
I think… without an actor as committed as Tom Hardy was, there isn’t much of a movie here. I mean, I could see other actors in that part, but Hardy goes well beyond — and he manages to make this guy interesting without suggesting that he has any hidden depths? It’s an interesting performance.
But, like… I didn’t think it was totally successful, either.
It seems like the sun is directly outside these windows, no matter what angle the camera is shooting at? And it kinda looks fake, but then most films do these days, due to excessive colour grading…
Anyway, this is a Walter Hill movie? I guess I bought it because it features Sigourney Weaver, because she often picks fun movies to be in.
Hm. I thought this was somebody else? But who am I thinking of? Oh!
Walter Hill, Michael Mann… same same…
Walter Hill produced Alien and stuff. Hm…
Oh!
OK, then I guess I do remember who Walter Hill is.
Was this a really low budget movie?
Yeah, I guess. I mean, not super duper low, but…
Is that Sigourney with a beard? Everything here looks so fake…
Perhaps we’re supposed to notice the fake beard and it’s a plot thing?
I guess it isn’t Sigourney after all? But she’s accused of heinous human experiments, so perhaps this guy is an experiment? So far I’m liking this movie, even if everything looks so odd.
The oddest thing about this doctor is that she applies mascara to her patients.
Housekeeping!
Oh, it wasn’t Sigourney, it was Michelle Rodriguez! Plot twist!
Oops, spoilers.
As revenges go, it seems pretty elaborate — Sigourney (mad doctor) made a hitman into Michelle Rodriguez as revenge for killing her brother or something. It seems like a pretty large expenditure… and is that really an effective revenge, anyway?
Hey! Is this like a send-up of a thriller? That makes more sense…
Yeah… they’re just having fun with clichés and an absurd plot? And it is indeed pretty entertaining.
It’s an odd movie. Sigourney Weaver has a tendency to pop up in these movies, but I wonder how this movie came to be. It’s a low budget oddball movie, and even from the script it must be obvious that it wouldn’t have much of a general appeal.
“The Assignment” is an embarrassment all around, a murky, regrettable piece of gutter cinema. Next year’s Razzie Awards race starts here.
But no — it’s to odd to land on the Razzie Awards, too.
I liked it! I thought it was interesting, and both Rodriguez and Weaver are great here. It needed a higher budget, because that awful fake beard (and other er fake bits) gave away the gag straight away. But I like that somebody would put in this much work on a doomed film.
This movie is a companion piece to Jane B. par Agnès V — Birkin talks about a script she’s for a short film she’s written, and Varda says that they should expand it into a full film. Et voila. But the kids in this movie are played by Birkin’s and Varda’s real children, and it’s filmed in Birkin’s house, so while this is a fictional narrative, it a bit blurry at the edges…
Birkin explained in the previous movie what this is about — Birkin’s character gets the hots for a 14 year old boy, and tragedy ensues. So it’s kinda creepy, but… having Varda’s child play the boy makes it even more creepy? I think?
I think that’s Birkin’s real parents?
And then the movie takes a really bizarre turn — Birkin’s character’s mother tells her to take the boy to a remote island!?
OK, perhaps this is supposed to be a fantasy sequence…
It’s a good movie… and Varda foregrounds all the problematic things about a story like this — she doesn’t try to make it reasonable. The performances are good, it looks great, but there’s still something not quite gripping about it all.
It’s a kind of documentary movie — it’s a portrait of Jane Birkin, but we get fictional interludes and stuff. It’s got a nice flow.
That’s a nice kitchen.
The movie is kinda entrancing, but some of the tableaux are pretty… lame. I mean, everything looks so great, but we get a lot of these mini-dramas that aren’t that interesting. Semi-improvised, perhaps?
It’s really good. It’s got a kind of stream of consciousness flow, and is edited together incredibly well.
I guess this is a pre-code movie? It seems uncensored.
But this is fantastic. It’s really melancholic. And no swelling orchestration, which is unusual for 1932.
That’s a nice set.
Is that a real dog?
Very Lynch.
It’s quite a strange movie.
The first fifteen minutes were ingenious, but now the tensions has kinda dissipated — it’s basically just going to be about this drunk who’s marrying this woman? And it’s about him being a drunk?
That’s no fun.
No! Now she’s starting to drink, too! They’re both going merrily to hell! Except for them both being depressed and not merry!
He said the line.
Hey! It’s Cary Grant! In a very small role.
Wise words.
Well… this started so well, and then it’s just kinda boring.
Let’s see… I’m guessing… 7 pieces (rooms), cuisine (kitchen)… er… s deb? Dunno. To let?
So — we’re shown a lot of empty rooms… and then an imaginary version of how they might look when they’re furnished?
But there’s also a narrative here…
Yum yum!
Heh heh.
Well, that is memorable.
Yum yum.
I think this might be a dream sequence.
It’s a pretty intriguing short (well, it’s a long short), but it feels a bit unresolved? There’s a number of striking images, but also some that don’t feel that successful. And the storyline is pretty vague…
This is included as an extra on the One Sings, The Other Doesn’t bluray — but it’s not listed in the table of contents. I guess perhaps because it’s not been restored or something? It’s a movie made for TV in 1971, and it seems to be about the Fascist coup in Greece and refugees from Greece?
It’s an odd movie — large portions are straight-up interviews with Greek refugees, but then there’s a fictional narrative in between those bits (that’s also about Greek refugees, but also about this woman).
It’s good! It’s interesting stuff, so I wonder why it hasn’t been restored? Perhaps the extras on the disk will explain… (There’s no Wikipedia entry for the film.)
But it’s really unrestored — not just all the dust and stuff, but the film skips and jumps and it’s pretty annoying to watch in parts… Surely there’s a low cost option to at least stabilise a movie?
Oh, this was never shown — and it wasn’t completed, either. So this is a work print of the incomplete film? The liner notes in the booklet that accompanies the discs says it was “suppressed”, but it doesn’t say much more.
So it sounds like Varda was on the outs with the TV station?
But what happened with the fictional narrative? We haven’t seen anything from that bit for quite a while…
OK, now we’re back with actors, but … different ones?
Perhaps this was supposed to be edited differently.
Er… I think I missed who these people are…
And now… Hm. Well, OK.
Well, OK, it’s a work print. It looks like it may have become a compelling movie, but as it stands, it’s a sketch towards a movie, I guess?
So how do you throw the die on something like this… I mean, it’s unfinished. But it’s kinda interesting? Perhaps the end result could have been great? I’ll just go with what it was like to watch it now, which was both frustrating and occasionally riveting:
I have no idea why I have this blu ray, but I do, so something must have made me buy it. It’s made by the distinguished director of Demolition Man (and who has apparently never done a feature film after this).
It’s a comedy? But it’s really unfunny?
Oh, there’s that guy… er… was he in Buffy? Oh, er, Will & Grace?
This was the first film produced by Alicia Silverstone under her production company First Kiss. Benicio del Toro was handpicked for his role by Silverstone after she had seen his 1995 film The Usual Suspects.
This short is very nouvelle vague, but like the previous movie, it doesn’t really seem to be Varda’s aesthetics — it’s kinda gimmicky? But it seems more heartfelt, which is rather Varda.
Hey, it’s Maria Falconetti!
Well, I dunno. It seems like the movie’s heart is in the right place, but it doesn’t tell us why we should care about these people, and the artifice of it all just makes it rather annoying?
Well, I dunno. I mean, I’m a huge Varda fan, but this seems like such a mish-mash… It’s less like a Varda movie than a Godard pastiche?
Lots of crabs. Must be symbolic.
And then all of a sudden that guy’s playing chess with er satan or somebody. But a very high tech satan — he’s got a 3D chessboard and surveillance cameras!
Which makes sense.
The other guy is on the side of lurve.
It’s a pretty good idea, I guess, but the resulting movie isn’t really that gripping.
Les Créatures was an official selection of the 27th Venice International Film Festival, though it received mixed reviews. The film failed commercially.
Well, I can see that. I don’t think it’s a successful movie, but it’s kinda interesting? But…
After watching perhaps the worst movie I’ve ever seen (see “previous” in this post), I had to watch something guaranteed to be good. And I’ve seen this a couple of times before, but it’s been a long time — and this is a new 2K restoration from Criterion. So it’s gonna be even better!
The only thing I remember from the plot is that these murderous sweet old ladies kill off a lot of people…
… so I’ve forgotten completely the Frankenstein guy and the Peter Lorre guy.
So it’s not all about those sweet old murderers!
Because these two are murderers, too, but of the bad kind!
This movie is so funny, and so over the top. And Grant is magnificent.
OK, I have absolutely no idea why I bought this bluray… I haven’t seen any other movie by the director or anything. But I see that I ripped this disk the same day I ripped movies by Jeff Baena, so perhaps he said that this was an amazing movie or something? (Those movies were disappointing, too.)
This is really, really bad. It’s like a metaphorical movie where they state all the metaphorical implications up front. But while high.
I’m so bored by this movie, and I’m only ten minutes in — I didn’t know that it was possible to be this bored.
I’m this bored.
Isn’t that that guy?
After a seemingly interminable 15 minutes which was Dave shouting at them not to enter the cardboard maze, they’ve finally entered the maze — this is where the movie should have started.
Spoilers: It’s bigger on the inside.
It’s still in-credibly tedious.
Actually, I’m not sure why I hate this so much. It’s an inoffensive little small budget whimsical horror/comedy movie… that I hate so much. Sooo much.
I don’t know if the same person conceived the visuals and wrote the text, but the former are wonderful while the latter is unbearable.
I really, really disliked this movie, and the dislike was immediate — I loathed this movie from the first scene on. That sounds totally irrational, right? And I can’t explain why I hate this so much. I mean, the performances were bad, and the dialogue was horrible, but it looked pretty OK, and that usually counts for something, right? But nope.
Perhaps it’s the forced whimsy of it all — it’s fake whimsy.
Gates of hell!? (I’m learning French, but I think that’s what it says…)
This Criterion box set feels like a cornucopia, and I’m sitting here wishing they’d give this treatment to other directors (I’m thinking Chantal Akerman, David Lynch or Peter Greenaway, say), but on the other hand, perhaps Varda is ideally positioned to have a box like this made. For one, she had her own production company, so there’s no problems with getting the rights to it all. But beyond that practical issue, her filmmaking also makes for a compelling box set: She didn’t do that many full feature-length movies, but when she did, she revisited them later and made documentaries about making them. So instead of having to sprinkle these disks with people-discussing-her-films, we get her discussing the films herself, which is more fun.
And she also did quite a number of short movies that revolve around the same issues as her main movies, so it all… fits. I’m not sure that there are that many other directors that had the same sort of output.
This is a documentary about the shops on the street Varda lived in — and as usual with Varda, it’s very wistful and emotional. These hand-written signs… these are shops you know won’t last much longer — they’re remnants of an earlier time that would soon disappear. So it’s a movie full of nostalgia for something that hasn’t disappeared yet.
This is not one of those documentaries where you drop by with a camera un-announced. Everybody’s been warned, and are putting their best foot forward — everybody’s got their hair done up nicely, and are presenting their wares, so you get tableaux like this…
(But I’m guessing Varda herself arranged some of this scenery, which makes it even more artificial.)
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry for this scene. And I have to ask myself if my life is somehow similar to her.
It’s a moving documentary — the couple in the parfumerie is just heartreaking… but some of the things Varda does here doesn’t quite work. They’re too artificial — like the scene with the magician? I just found that really boring, but that may be just me — I’ve got an antipathy towards magic… But moreover, the forced parallels between the stage magic and the “real” stuff was groan-worthy.
She already had gold with the less staged sequences! They’re ⚅ sequences, but I’m going with:
This is pretty amusing. I’m not really digging the colour grading on this (everything except the reds is given a greyish desaturated treatment), but it’s engaging.
So this is a comedy about a young criminal in Germany trying to avoid getting sent to Senegal by marrying some German… I guess it’s a screwball comedy?
Heh heh heh classic. It’s basically the same plot as the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Proposal, if I remember correctly… Or the Andie MacDowell movie Green Card? But with the twist that he marries a guy (and neither are gay).
Gotta adjust the decor.
This is not gonna end well! I think there’s gonna be a really depressing third act…
I think I kinda guessed right — it’s not as depressing as it could have been, but it’s pretty depressing. Gotta have that third act that All Serious or it’s not a Proper Movie.
In a way, it’s a surprisingly traditional movie — it reiterates the plot from the previous movie in that you absolutely can’t cheat the system (if I remember those previous movies correctly). And it also does some odd choices — like not having the guy try to get a job or something (no matter where he is).
The first two thirds of this movie are a lot of fun, but the third act, man…
I’m guessing this is a Hong Kong movie? I really haven’t seen that many films from Hong Kong, for some reason or other…
Wow, this is so goofy… I immediately thought that this looked very 80s, but it can’t be. But it’s got that indie 80s fuck off attitude, that audacity — it’s very Aki Kaurismäki, in other words. But with judo and stuff.
So much product placement.
I laughed, I cried, and I was fascinated. It’s just so full on — it commits completely to its concept, and you get pure cinema. It’s all emotion.
I mean, I’ve seen more than a couple of movies in my life, but this seems totally original. But then again, I’ve not seen that many movies from Hong Kong, and perhaps this is just what movies are there?
It’s a masterpiece, anyway. And very silly. I was totally riveted. It looks gorgeous, the performances were so much fun, and it’s just totally original. And now I want to watch all of Johnnie To’s movies.
This is a very shocking movie! I mean, such manhandling of the cat…
Well, it’s a movie with a series of striking images… but it feels pretty disjointed. I mean, it really feels like watching moving versions of still shots, sort of.
And Varda’s not being very generous with her subjects.
It’s a series of striking tableaux, but it feels pretty under cooked.
Oh, I thought this was gonna be a western… I’ve bought a bunch of Howard Hawks movies lately, but this isn’t that.
Instead it’s the only guy who looks like a director ought to look.
*gasp*
Noo! Jump the other way!
This is very noir (an early one; this is from 1941), so you gotta have Humphrey Bogart.
This is very early Bogart, isn’t it? I mean, he’d been hanging around for a decade, but he wasn’t really a star? But then:
This, Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca all in a row.
And that’s Ida Lupino, I guess? Who gets billing above Bogart here.
It’s a horribly racist caricature, but on the other hand, it’s an ingenious way to be lazy… But I guess that’s the joke.
I mean…
But that’s Willie Best, isn’t it? It is! I’ve seen him in oodles of movies, like The Ghost Breakers…
Now that’s scary! Bogey smiling!
That’s more like it.
YEAH! Over!
I dunno… It might just be me, because I sorta got distracted and started doing laundry in the middle of this, but I don’t think this is a very compelling movie. Lupino is just kinda… there… and Bogart is trying his best to make this movie happen, but it’s just a very, very silly plot, and nothing interesting happens, really. This movie is like they made a movie from the discards of a heist movie; collecting all the scenes that were cut from an exciting movie.
Actually, that sounds kinda interesting, but this isn’t that interesting.
This movie has it all — club-footed girls, annoying dogs, cross-eyed handymen… It’s so corny it could be Iowa.
But it also wants to be this super-dramatic movie, and it just doesn’t make sense.
I love the way she has two voiceovers — there’s the main one, who waxes lyrical about all these things at the Côte d’azur, and then there’s another voice that softly tells you where each shot is from… it’s kinda hypnotic.
Woolen bathing trunks!? Itchy!
Er… Dream… Hill?! That’s can’t be right.
Anyway, this is a lovely short. Beautiful shots and amusing, whimsical takes on being at the French riviera.
Heh, I’m now watching the DVD extras — both this one and the previous short were financed by the Tourist Office. And they’re effective ads! I want to go all these places she’s been! Money well spent, Tourist Office!
Restored… and digitised! My French is getting so french.
Is that the most French tableau ever?
Untrue!
This is a wonderful short — they’re basically showing us all these fabulous French castles, and the voiceover talks about how they were created and what their significance are — but the movie doesn’t really explain why it exists. It just seems so random and whimsical: It’s a series of gorgeous shots of gorgeous castles with gorgeous models modelling in front of them — but why?
It’s mysterious. And great. I want visit all these castles.
This is a short included on the first disc in the Criterion Varda box set… and it’s the only thing listed (except the main feature), but there’s a whole bunch of documentaries included, too. It’s like a cornucopia, but it’s gonna take months to watch the box if all disks are like this.
Varda uses CGI extensively here…
The performances are fine, but the whimsy seems forced, and it seems more like a way to play with CGI elements than anything else.
OK, I’ve completed all the box sets I had going… so I can start a new one!
And I had to choose the Agnès Varda box set from Criterion simply because it has an oddball format and pokes out of the shelf I have the unseen movies on.
Makes sense to me!
Oddly enough (or perhaps not) the box sets starts with a film from 2019 — which is basically a talk Varda gave to present her movies. So we start the box set with an introduction… I wonder whether she made this with the box set in mind?
This isn’t just Varda talking with clips from movies — we get extensive bits from other “behind the scenes” movies Varda has done before, but it’s presented as if it’s part of the talk.
So it’s a kind of fictionalised presentation? Very strange genre.
Hey… that’s a different venue…
Oh, there’s a lot of different venues — she did a tour?
I dunno… I don’t think this movie quite works? Varda had a really interesting career, but this manages to make it seem kinda boring: It’s just one thing after another — first I did this, then I did this — without really telling us why we should be interested.
Yeah, that tracks: It’s just kinda boring. Which is something that Varda’s movies never are, usually.
(Well, she died a couple of weeks after the premiere, so perhaps that influenced the scores…)
Heh heh.
The final 20 minutes are really good, though, so let’s go with:
Well, I dunno… I mean, I haven’t seen that many movies with Clara Bow (the ‘it’ girl of the silents), and I guess that’s she’s fine here, but the movie kinda meanders weirdly — it seems so formless. We were presented first with one situation (which turned out to be her childhood, being attacked by Savages (I mean Native Americans)), and then another situation 18 years later (which I thought would be the movie), but then we move even later and that seems to be what the movie is really about?
That is, it took a long time to get to the actual plot, and by the time that happened, I’d rather lost interest…
It feels kinda clumsy.
The directory is John Francis Dillon who’s made dozens and dozens of movies — but this is one of his last movies (he died two years later).
Haven’t heard of any of those.
Oh, and Clara Bow only did one movie after this one.
Not only is it a gay bar (the first in a film, according to wikipedia)…
… but it’s a communist gay bar! Wonderful!
Well, I dunno. I don’t think it works? It’s kinda “eeeh” on so many planes at the same time.
I dunno… is that really the optimal posture for using a toilet brush in a toilet?
Anyway, I think I’ve seen all the other movies by the Wachowskis, but not this one. It’s starting off pretty well (except for the unrealistic toilet cleaning posture).
Hey, this is really good! It’s interesting and really tense and I think I know where this is going, but it’s very entertaining…
This movie looks great — that fight sequence was awesome.
Some home decor…
Those candles must have taken half the budget.
ANyway… I think this was a box office bomb? (I haven’t looked it up now.) I couldn’t understand why, because this movie kicks ass. But now I’m kinda getting… like… “uhm?” I mean, there’s several twists and several infodumps, but the main character here is just going “well, do you have some less dressy clothes I could wear?” instead of the gazillion questions you’d have… I think perhaps they were going against the “OH MY GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING” cliché you have to suffer through in most of these films (as it’s revealed that nothing is what you thought it was), but they kinda went overboard into catatonic instead.
That is, I think we’ve been through like nine doublecrosses and reveals and it’s not confusing or anything, but if I was that woman, I’d sit down with that guy for half an hour and just have him explain everything.
That might not make for a thrilling movie, though.
Instead this is what she chooses to say:
Which is so over the top not what nerdly expectations clamour for that I’m picturing the Wachowskis going HA HA HA THAT”LL LEARN EM
And suddenly we’re into a Brazilesque parody of bureaucracy. Has this movie been a comedy all along and I just didn’t realise it?
… wat
I think I speak for everybody when I say:
wat
And… it’s just… frustrating how the Mila Kunis character does one stupid thing after another, and this guy with the ears has to swoop in, time and time again, to save her. The repetition is annoying.
At some point it gets more “OK, if she’s that stupid and gormless, perhaps she shouldn’t be the Princess and Owner of Earth”.
I loved the first hour of this movie. Then it got progressively more “wat” with every scene, and… I dunno. It feels like the screenwriters just gave up at some point, which is frustrating, because it’s such a great concept and world to set a film in. And it looks great, and has fun performances, and…
So people hated this movie, and I wonder whether that was a brigading effect — I can totally see why Nazis would hate this movie. But no:
If it was brigaded, you’d have a huge number of people at 1, but since most people gave it 5/6, this means that people actually disliked it. And the critics hated it even more:
And it lost a lot of money.
I understand all that, because it’s a lot, and it’s a lot of “wat”. But I liked it anyway. I can totally see this being a cult favourite in 20 years time, because it’s so over the top.
Wow. Nick Cage is the only person I’ve seen who has total Botox Forehead and wrinkles on his forehead at the same time. That’s talent!
OK, now his forehead is moving, so perhaps it’s not botox? They just CGId his forehead in that scene? Or… HE”S SUCH A BRILLIANT ACTOR HE CAN ACT FOREHEAD BOTOXED
OK, this movie was perfect, true ⚅, until this moment, and now it’s cringe.
I don’t know… Well, I had to take a short break to make some leftovers into dinner, and when I came back, I found myself rather unenthused by the proceedings. I mean, it’s properly silly and stupid, which I like, but it felt like it was more random instead of being inspired?
Might just be me.
Well, OK, then the last third was insane again.
But does it, though, A. A. Dowd from Digital Trends? Does it?
Anyway, Cage had such a weird career: He started off doing the coolest movies imaginable, and then went on to do decades of the … worst movies possible. Watching the “making of” bits on this disk, I don’t think this is going to lead to a change in his career (as in — starting to do good movies again), because he sounds absolutely dissociated from reality in the interview snippets.
But then again, perhaps that an act, too?
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Tom Gormican. 2022. ⚄
Oh, I thought this was just going to be footage from the performance. But instead it’s more of a normal documentary, where they talk about how much of a disaster the festival was, and stuff like that.
Well that’s disappointing.
Actually… this is really good. It was a strange and hostile festival, and this really captures that.
Did anybody hear the music? The field is enormous.
Such a consummately professional microphone setup.
And… I think I was wrong? We got an introduction, but now we’ve been shown two songs in full without any interruption? I love it!
This is the tensest concert movie I’ve ever seen. What a fucking nightmare.
I’m not surprised that it took almost half a century to release this, because it’s *gngnngg*
This is seriously one of the best concerts movies ever. It’s so un-annoying — it doesn’t have three hundred people giving one line about how amazing Joni is. Instead it’s 90% straight up concert footage, 5% Joni giving some context to what we’re seeing, and 5% footage from around the festival.
It’s kinda perfect.
I mean, your mileage will vary — if you don’t like Joni Mitchell’s music, you won’t like this movie.
(My only nitpick: The original footage was presumably not in 16:9, so it would have been nice if this movie wasn’t either, but whatevs.)
Joni Mitchell: Both Sides Now. Murray Lerner. 2018. ⚅
Oh, it’s the Xmas story, but with three cowboys as the kings?
OK, this is pretty lame. It’s slathered in sentimental music, and the performances are thirsty for scenery. I mean, it’s an Xmas short, so both of those things might be perfectly fine, but somehow here it’s just annoying.
Finally we have Jesus’ parents. (They’re Mexican, as you can see.)
So this guy is an angel, huh?
It’s pretty absurd — they’re apparently not allowed to say that Mary I mean Maria is giving birth, so whenever this woman tells people that, she whispers into their ears so the audience can’t hear something as offensive as “she’s giving birth”.
It’s also a kind of … reversal of the Xmas story? Everybody that hears that Mary I mean Maria is giving birth, they do their utmost to help, which is kinda the opposite of the original story, isn’t it? So I guess this is just a kinda anti-Semitic movie, right?
I mean, it’s pretty affecting… But is it good? Eh.
I guess this is a kind of coda to the original Nightmare on Elm Street series — they’d killed off Freddy several times, but in the 6th movie (named “Freddy’s Dead”) they were kinda more serious about it.
So if I remember correctly, this is a very meta movie, kinda about the Elm Street movie phenomenon, and done by Wes Craven himself, of course. There was a postmodern meta thing going on in the early 90s, right? Like with Last Action Hero… and like all these movies, it bombed at the box office. I think this one grossed the least?
Yeah. It probably didn’t make back what it cost? So after this one, it was over — not because they killed Freddy, but because Wes Craven killed the series.
(But of course, he tweaked things a bit, and made a slightly less meta Scream movie, and he was a star again.)
Very meta!
But it’s scary! It’s the scariest one since the first one!
That’s a very scary kid. And a very scary broom!
What makes this scarier than you’d expect is that you have no idea what the genre of this even is! Is this an Elm Street movie? Is she just imagining things? What’s going on!!!
So meta. And: Love that mobile phone.
Hey! It’s the actual producer! Bob whatsisname! Playing himself. This is so meta.
But what I wanted to say is: Those aren’t real Le Corbusier chairs — they look like knock-offs that done at 1.3x scale. Which I love! I want those! The real Le Corbusier chairs are way too small! People back then were tiny! Especially French ones!
Uh-oh!
As someone who has trouble falling asleep — I’ve never (well, after being 6 years old) dozed off on the couch, or while driving, or while watching an opera — these people just dozing off at the drop at the hat seem like science fiction to me. But I do know that they exist.
For me, falling asleep is, like, a lot of work.
It’s Wes!
OK, it’s less scary now — I’m not sure how, but somehow the tension dissipated all of a sudden…
It’s the longest of the Elm Street movies, and … it feels like it should be over by now, but there still 40 minutes to go.
Well, it’s the best Elm Street movie since the first one, but is it good? It starts off really swell, but then just wastes the fantastic tension that’s been built up. It’s not that there’s egregiously superfluous scenes here, but it just feels like it should have been a lot tighter.
And… this is the final movie in this box set. And this is the final box set! I mean, that I’m watching! I know it’s absurd, but once I’ve started a box set, I feel sort of… an obligation to finish the box set? I mean, it’s not giving me nightmares or something, but I had five different box sets going at the same time, and it feels good to have a clean slate.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 7: Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Wes Craven. 1994. ⚃
Hey, this starts off pretty cool… like something resembling a real nightmare.
Heh heh.
Anyway, this is directed by Rachel Talalay, who’d produced two of the previous movies, and been involved with the production from the start. I’m assuming that after the fifth (disastrous) movie, she went “fuck it I’ll direct it myself”?
The previous movie had a budget of $6M and made $22M, and this has a budget of $11M (and you can immediately tell) and made $34M. But oddly enough, it’s the final “real” Nightmare on Elm Street movie (although there’s one more movie in this box set).
Well, this movie started off very well, but the tension has kinda dissipated. I can see what they’re going for: More humour (and not just Freddy doing quips), and also a more dream-like atmosphere throughout. Which is a good idea. And this is definitely better than the previous movie, but…
I think we’ve all had that experience when using maps.
OK, that was the most original kill in the series.
Oh right, the last part of this movie is supposed to be in 3D… which this isn’t.
So they’re showing us these things that are supposed to be all 3D-ey, and it’s not as exciting in 2D, I guess.
Heh heh. (Uncredited.)
It’s one of the better movies in the series, I think? Or… I mean, it’s mostly kinda boring, but it really tries to make the whole “mythology” make sense, and to be original, and it kinda succeeds. It’s pretty entertaining. And also kinda boring.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: Freddy’s Dead. Rachel Talalay. 1991. ⚃
The director is saying that since they had to shoot the end in 3D, they were severely limited in what kind of effects they could do… which explains why the end is kinda lame (while the first two thirds are kinda cool).
And it’s in Portuguese (I think? no some other language?), but it’s subtitled in French, and apparently I know enough French now (after Duolinguing for three months) that I understand the subtitles!!!
OK, I had to use Google translate for “ailleurs”.
Gotta agree with the sentiment.
Anyway, this is really good — fascinating imagery. And I can see why they wanted to expand this into a full movie.
Or is this a short version of the movie? It’s been a while since I saw it…
This is a really, really stylish short with a not totally clear plot. It’s fun.
To digress for a moment — I’m watching these shorts because they’re included as extras on DVDs and blurays I’ve seen, but is there a “real” distribution channel for shorts these days? I know that Wes Anderson released a batch of shorts on Netflix recently, but those were pretty long shorts, and it was “a thing”: They’re being pushed as if they’re a TV series, almost. I’m not very familiar with streaming services anyway, but I don’t think they usually carry shorts (and especially not experimental shorts)? That’s more of a … Vimeo thing, so unmonetised. I guess a wider distribution for shorts was one of the things people talked about when streaming was new, but I don’t think that’s happened, and it’s not difficult to see why: People either want A Big Chunk (i.e., a movie) that they can commit to for a couple of hours, or Something On The TV (i.e., a tv series episode) that they don’t have to pay that much attention to. And a short is a short thing you have to pay attention to, so it’s not… part of what people are interested in?
Anyway.
DVD extras. Might still be the place where people are actually watching shorts.
(Well, and film festivals.)
I like how everything grows more and more out of control — even the light levels.
I’ve seen some of the Little Rascals/Our Gang shorts before, but much, much earlier than this. Like late 20s/early 30s. This is from 1939, and it seems more… professional? And less funny. It’s basically just two gags, and that’s not enough for ten minutes.
There’s frequently shorts included on the disks I buy, but I usually don’t watch them while watching the main feature. Not quite sure why… it’s like “oh, I’m done with that! next!” when I’m watching a movie.
But I’ve marked all these films as “mostly-seen” instead of “seen”, meaning that there’s stuff I might want to watch later. So… why not start watching these things now? Right? Perhaps a couple of days of shorts. Or not, depending on whether I get bored or have other things to do.
So here’s the first one: A short included on the Alcohol Years DVD.
This movie is a bunch of short vignettes illustrating headlines from British tabloids? I guess that’s a concept.
Like this one is based on “Her husband was granted divorce yesterday after complaining that his wife was moving furniture around in their house for 30 years.” So it’s these slightly absurd things, many of which live on in memes.
And many of them seem like urban legends.
But it’s amusing, I guess… And it tries to add some gravitas.
Uh-oh! Somebody’s in a shower! Somebody’s gonna get killed!
Ooops, nope.
Oh, they’re “expanding the lore”… this is about Freddie’s origin?
He’s apparently the child of a hundred insane guys and one nun. Well, that’s appropriate.
This movie looks pretty good?
I’m kinda bored already, and the Nightmare movies aren’t usually this boring. I wonder what happened here… Oh:
Director Stephen Hopkins has expressed disappointment with the final product, stating that “It was a rushed schedule without a reasonable budget and after I finished it, New Line and the MPAA came in and cut the guts out of it completely. What started out as an OK film with a few good bits turned into a total embarrassment. I can’t even watch it anymore.”
And it’s the second-lowest grossing movie in the series, so people didn’t really like it either.
The movie looks pretty good for a movie with this kind of budget, but it’s just really boring, and doesn’t seem to make much sense. Even for an Elm Street movie.
ABORT ABORT
(See, she’s pregnant.)
Seems accurate.
I mean, making a movie is difficult and stuff. The first movies worked because they were indeed nightmarish. But this movie seems like it’s made by somebody who’s never even had a nightmare. Instead it just a bunch of… random tableaux that just feel silly.
He’s being sucked into a comic book, see? A common nightmare.
Nice matte painting.
Such Escher.
This movie is in-credibly boring. And it so weird, because it has a lot of fun horror concepts going, but it’s still just really tedious.
So I was going to give this ⚀, but I guess some of the special effects are kinda amusing, so:
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. Stephen Hopkins. 1989. ⚁
As has been happening with this Elm Street box set, the documentaries are more entertaining than the movies themselves. They’re so… so… OK, the producer says she was burned out after doing a lot of Freddie movies, so she skipped doing this movie (and she also had to do Cry-Baby), and also because, as she said, this movie had the worst concept in the series.
You usually don’t get that level of honesty in these documentaries!
And then you get interviews with the writers and you realise why this movie is as bad as it is, and it’s because they’re totally moronic. Talking about “the collective unconsciousness” and “the imagination of God” as explanations for nightmares, and… they just let them spout this idiocy. It’s very entertaining, especially when intercut with the producer who explains how none of this works and nobody wants to see this (and that’s why the movie bombed).
(Well. It made money, but not as much as the others.)
This looks uncannily like a late 70s British movie… but it’s from 1999?
Wow, that’s some way to start a movie…
Well, I guess it’s set in the 70s, so there’s a reason it looks like a late 70s movie.
It’s grim up north.
The actors are absolutely amazing — even the actors manage to be period perfect — but this is a harrowing film to watch. Something horrible is gonna happen in every scene, it seems like.
I think the moral of this movie might be that kids should never be unsupervised, and that it’s probably better if they just stay in and play video games instead of mingling with each other.
Oh god, something even more horrible is going to happen!
I had to take a short break here to get dinner started, but mostly because I really don’t wanna see what happens next…
Yeah.
Well that was unexpected.
Look, this is obvious a great movie, but watching this is worse than watching Saw IV: It’s just painful. It’s brutal.
But great!
Which is almost the same reaction I had to We Need to Talk About Kevin (also by Ramsay). This is a better movie, and even more heartbreaking.
So the story here seems to be quite simple (and presented by having people chatting at each other endlessly (which I like)): There’s a very “modern” mayor in this small village, and he wants to build a huge library in the village (because he’s got a vision of people leaving cities and working in the countryside when that becomes practical). But there’s a tree they may have to cut down…
That’s the tree.
Is that the same guy as in the previous movie?
I was fascinated by this movie at the start — but I’m getting pretty annoyed by all these scenes of people sitting like this and discussing er philosophy and stuff. It worked better when they were walking around outside in the pretty countryside.
And now we’re going even further into faux reportage land — we’re following this journalist who talks to the villagers about the proposed library and life in the countryside in general… It’s… just not that interesting?
OK, this guy was interesting — talking about how farming had changed and how cows that are allowed to run free in the fields are more healthy.
I’m guessing these are real interviews, sort of? I mean, she’s an actor playing a journalist, but I’m guessing that the people she’s interviewing are real people talking unscripted. (Well, most of them.)
OK, this guy is definitely an actor.
Her balloon!? I mean, I don’t know French, but ballon means ball, doesn’t it?
Yes, indeed! Man, I’ve been doing Duolingo for three months and I’m already more fluent than whoever did this translation! *gasp*
This scene is pure genius. And so funny.
I use similar glasses for drinking wine — those are Duralex Picardie, but I use the Duralex Provence ones.
This is the final movie in the Rohmer box set (which was sponsored by Agnès B).
It’s a very pretty box set, and the transfers of the movies are very well done. Or perhaps I should say “main features” — there’s so many extras on each disk — several hours of shorts, documentaries and things Rohmer did for TV, I think.
I say “I think” because I haven’t seen any of it, because… THEY ONLY PUT ENGLISH SUBTITLES ON THE MAIN oops caps lock features. Which just seems kinda perverse. I mean, it’s nice that they did do that, but it means that there’s a lot of stuff here that won’t be accessible to non-French speakers.
But! Like I said, I’m apprendring French, so perhaps I can revisit the box set in a couple of years and watch the extras…
Anyway! This movie… it’s a bit frustrating? There are scenes here that I think are absolutely wonderful, funny and amazing, and there were parts of this movie I almost gnawed my foot off out of sheer boredom. So:
L’arbre, le maire et la médiathèque. Éric Rohmer. 1993. ⚃
Anyway, this is my next-to-last Rohmer movie, and it’s an unusually high concept movie for Rohmer — I mean, it’s pretty explicit in the (moral) dilemma it presents, instead of having it be slowly revealed over the course of the movie.
Finally, some real literature!
That’s a very hairy coat… very nice.
Finally, some real literature.
She’s got the best taste — Moebius and Herriman.
It’s a gripping movie in many ways, but it seems so… didactic? Rohmer’s movies are usually more surprising than this: Here he sets up a situation where everybody goes “well, that’s not gonna work”, and then at the end we see that, indeed, it doesn’t work.
Oh, this is one of those Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello movies — they’re allegedly what led to the downfall of Western Civilisation — because kids in the 60s watched these movies and went “fuck this shit!”
If I understand things correctly. I’ve never seen one of these movies myself.
*gasp*
That must be Frankie and Annette… the opening titles for this are kinda like a TV series, so I’m going to go ahead and guess that this is part of a series of films with the same characters?
That’s a nice radio.
Such jinx.
I watched a couple of Carry On films a few years back — they’re sex farces from the UK from the 70s — and I had no idea that these beachy movies were going to have basically the same vibe.
Bad boys!
I’m guessing this is a recurring joke? He shifted over from the sidecar to the bike to not be left behind, but HA HA
So this must be even more of a movie series than I had assumed — recurring characters and jokes, I guess?
This is very, very silly.
Wow, it’s really… er… involved? That is, some of these gags are totally incomprehensible — the movie really assumes that you’ve seem the previous movies, I think. It doesn’t explain or recap anything about anything.
I kinda like that.
Frankie Avalon seems like a total dork, but Annette Funicello kinda seems too cool to be in this kind of movie?
I quite enjoyed the first two thirds of this — it’s relentless, and the stupid gags just keep on coming. It’s not until they try to add more drama and plot that you get bored enough to start thinking about what you’re watching: This is a music movie about pretty young people on the beach — and absolutely all the actors are white. I think. At least I can’t remember even somebody in the background not being white, and that’s just a kinds disgusting statement to be making in 1965.
But the main problem is that the third act is painfully boring, of course.
Should you put your towel on your head while showering?
Anyway, this looks great! I really haven’t seen that many movies by Vincente Minnelli — that I can remember. I mean, I probably saw a bunch as a child, but I haven’t seen more than a couple since starting to get back into watching movies about a decade ago…
So I’m hoping this movie’s gonna be awesome so that I can start watching all of his films. Or something.
It’s a fun concept — it’s about a woman running an answering service?
You can tell that Minnelli isn’t American by the way he has women… *gasp*… talking… TO EACH OTHER!!!
Heh heh.
Oh, Dean Martin’s in this? I haven’t really seen many movies with him either…
It’s the cops!
It’s the crooks!
It’s the gay neighbour!
Anyway, I love Judy Holliday here — I’m not familiar with her much, but she plays this slightly over the top, somewhat out of control character with such aplomb — it’s breathtaking. And very funny.
This was apparently her last movie — she died just a few years later.
Where 7th Ave meets Broadway.
The lighting in this movie is so… I mean, it’s extremely artificial, but in a wonderful way. Look at the shadow in the middle of that guy’s face…
Oh, Method actors…
Those cops!
I feel like Minnelli might be making fun of musicals…
It’s a pretty odd movie — it’s so unfocused. I mean, the point of the movie is the romance between Holliday and Dean, but it’s not really focused on that and doesn’t really adhere to the story beats you’re expecting. It’s so… knowing… and seems to delight more in just watching Holliday being silly on the screen instead of moving the plot forward. Which explains the 125 minute running time.
I don’t know quite what made me buy this bluray, but that’s not unusual. It’s on Criterion, so perhaps I just clicked “buy” at random…
Anyway, this is a very 70s American indyish movie (but apparently released by Warner Brothers)? I think I can see some Chantal Akerman influences here, but it really seems very American so far…
I mean, all these dramatic camera angles? (That I’m not sure works.)
And the over-the-top drama… So perhaps there’s no Akerman influence at all, really.
But I’m enjoying the movie so far.
Nice colour.
The cabbie tells it like it is.
The focus on this movie is just odd — the protagonist is usually slightly blurry… is that supposed to be symbolic?
Hey! She’s suddenly in focus! After she got a new hairdo.
Now it’s soft again, so perhaps it wasn’t symbolic.
You tell ’em!
Well, she looks very familiar.
Yum!
Yup, still random shots out of focus…
The story here is pretty normal — young, struggling artist in New York bla bla — but it’s really done in a convincing way. It feels very young and vibrant? I really liked it.
Noo! I hate the Decameron! But perhaps this’ll be a savage takedown!
Hm… still not sure…
Hey, it’s her!
I think it’s most of Baena’s troupe — so I guess he just got all his friends together and they went to Italy and made a little movie?
It’s pretty funny, and I have no idea where any of this is going. Which I like.
So… was this made by riffing on a few of the stories from the Decameron? It seems pretty improvised — that is, it has jokes, and they’re amusing, but they’re the kind any reasonably amusing group of people could come up with on the spot.
The screenplay is based on the first and second tales of the third day in The Decameron, a collection of novellas by Giovanni Boccaccio; however, the dialogue was improvised.
And it’s one of those films that the critics liked, but audiences loathed, I guess.
Yeah, I dunno. Perhaps you have to be Catholic to feel the sacrilisciousness of it all? It’s not that there aren’t fun bits, but… I’m also just kinda bored? I mean, it’s a goofy unpretentious little movie, but it could have had more zip. More and better jokes.
I almost feel guilty that I didn’t like this movie more, because it seems like everybody had a good time, and it’s got a lot of cute ideas. But nope — I was mostly bored. Sorry! I think it’d totally be a better movie if you were stoned.
The visuals are original and interesting, but this is basically one of those “two lines from that guy and then one guy from this guy” type of documentary (which I loathe). But Haynes manages to make it work — it’s pretty interesting without being fawning.
The reason I got this movie is that I read an interview with the Pet Shop Boys, and they were so fascinated by this movie that they watched it multiple times. But they didn’t really say whether it was… good, I guess?
It’s not, really. I mean, it’s kinda interesting in that they allow themselves to come off as blithering morons, spouting stuff about “two rectangles coming together and forming a square” (right), but as someone who didn’t like Bros back then, this didn’t make me like them now.
As always with Mae West movies, when Mae West is on the screen, the movie is really enjoyable. When she’s not, it mostly languishes, because it seems that nobody else are given any good lines?
I totally understand why Mae West’s movies did gangbusters back then, and I also understand why none of these show up on the “best movies EVER” lists — they’re enjoyable, but lack that little spark that makes them something you’d obsess about?
This movie gave me whiplash. It starts off as a very fast-paced zany comedy with nine swivel cuts per second — and then all of a sudden, we’re in a totally different movie, which is all about suicide and stuff.
I wonder whether covid happened in the middle of making this movie? The first half is shot on many different locations and outdoors and stuff, and the last half is basically in a couple of rooms.
This is a pretty charming movie overall, with some strong performances and cinematography. But it also seems oddly edited at times — as if the director wants us to see something that’s not quite on the screen?
This is an odd one. Grant plays a kind of mobster light — he only does gambling and doesn’t kill people, but he talks like he’s James Cagney, see, and it’s all very weird.
But the main point of this movie is that the US should support Europe against the Nazis. Which is a good point to make.
I’m not sure I knew who Laraine Day was, but she’s really good in this movie.
“Who me?!”
WHO ME!?
Yes, the most fun gag in this movie is Cary Grant learning how to knit.
But then his henchman picks it up, too, and he’s much better at it.
Yeah, I’m not sure about that hat, either.
There’s also this entire thing about him not tying his tie properly… that’s not a Windsor, see?
*gasp*
It’s just a very odd movie. I’m not sure it really works? It’s not screwy enough to be a screwball comedy, and it’s not touching enough to be a weepie… But still, it’s pretty entertaining.
So this is another Elia Kazan movie where he’s trying desperately convince the FBI that he’s not a commie? It wasn’t enough to snitch on all his friends to the HUAC, or the previous movie which was all about how eeeevil communism is — now he’s doing a movie about how evil unions are?
(But it’s just one specific union, of course, which is all controlled by the mob; not that Kazan is making a more general point. He’s such a weasel.)
It received twelve Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Brando, Best Supporting Actress for Saint, and Best Director for Kazan.
The film is widely considered to be Elia Kazan’s answer to those who criticized him for identifying eight Communists in the film industry before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1952.
And the answer was… “Fuck yeah! I’ll snitch on all of youse!”?
But as usual with Kazan’s movies, it really works. It’s totes gripping. I would have give it a ⚄, but the ending is so silly that I can’t.
This is a movie about a Czech circus, and it kinda feels like it’s been financed by the CIA? Was it?
It also feels like Kazan was thinking “now I’m finally gonna make one of those European masterworks” — some scenes are like Herzog 20 years later, or Lang 20 years earlier.
But it’s let down by some really bad performances.
I mean really bad.
Interrogation…
TO THE MAX!!!
A knife thrower practising with his wife, of coures.
Such expressionism.
But then there’s the less fun parts, like this scene, where his bitchy wife is being bitchy, as usual, and he slaps her around, and she goes, Ooooh, you should have done that a long time ago, and then they fuck and live happily ever after.
(Well. SORT OF.)
Somebody’s getting suspicious!
It’s a super duper mega pandering propaganda movie — it was made after he snitched on all his friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and I’m guessing this was made to show them he’s really really really Un-Un-American — but the thing is, it works. It’s gross and manipulative, but that final scene is 100% gripping and moving. And the rest is pretty entertaining, too.
Oh! Renny Harlin! He’s a Finnish director who made a surprising career in Hollywood (FSVO), and I found him interesting at the time. He married Geena Davis (who’s great) and made a number of slightly off-kilter action movies before disappearing… Well, I don’t know that he disappeared, but I haven’t seen that name in decades.
I guess he never did disappear. I think the last movie of his I’ve seen is the 1996 Long Kiss Goodnight, which I think famously bombed…
I like Harlin. He did these oddball shots that nobody else would do, because they’re too artificial.
Best. Hairdo. Ever.
Is Harlin expressing all their personalities solely through their hairdos? I think he is!
What a kind-looking nurse.
Anyway, this isn’t as good as I’d hoped. The “Scare Scenes” are really inventive and fun, but then when they have to do the connecting scenes (to get irrelevancies like plot and stuff out of the way), tension just dissipates.
Yeah!
It’s a pretty fun horror movie — but it’s not actually scary at all. It’s also uneven in tone… so what’s the story behind this movie?
In an interview with Midnight’s Edge, director Tom McLoughlin said that after completing Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, New Line offered him the job on The Dream Master. His one caveat was that he wanted creative control. The studio could not adhere to the demand, specifically because they had already begun filming without any director. McLoughlin said,
“When I finished Friday, I was offered Nightmare 4 and went to New Line, met with them, and I said, ‘I love Freddy, I would love to do one of these, but I really want to do what I just did, where I had creative control’,” he explained. “And they go, ‘Well, we’re already shooting.’ ‘What?’ ‘Yeah, we’re already shooting, we’re shooting like two different units for the visual effects’ and something else, puppets or something. And I said, ‘Without a director?’ ‘Yeah, we kind of know how we’re going to make these things.’ And I went, ‘That’s not the way I work.’ So I turned it down, which of course made (Nightmare 4 director) Renny Harlin’s career.”
Heh heh.
I’m now watching these excellent extras on this box set — they’re not the typical “one sentence from one guy and one sentence from another guy about how wonderful everything was” puff pieces. They’re very forthright and talking about how much they hated the other guy’s ideas, and so on. Like:
High praise indeed!
But is this a good movie? Nah.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. Renny Harlin. 1988. ⚂
This started off with a voiceover over a bunch of paintings…
… but then the people in the foreground started moving! That’s a lot of greenscreen.
This is from 2001 — I didn’t really know that Rohmer was still directing then, but looking at his imdb, I’ve seen one later movie: Triple Agent.
This is so weird — a horse and carriage on greenscreen over a painting. Was this done for TV?
It’s la revolution.
This is pretty confusing — for me, because I’m an uncultured cochon. So this is like happening at the start of the French revolution, but they’re dropping all these references that I don’t quite get. But that (I’m guessing) any French three year old would understand.
Still, it’s pretty interesting… Not quite gripping, but plenty interesting.
I almost understand that… two months of Duolingo works!
Perhaps not all revolutionaries are as honourable!
I like this movie — but I’m not sure it needed to be this long? That is, there’s really not any scenes that are superfluous or seem gratuitous, but I found my interest flagging a bit… Like, is there sufficient interest in this story for a movie of more than two hours?
OK, so this movie (the sixth) is finally going to do what I assumed the second one would do to escalate things: Have the dinosaurs be in the Real World instead of on some remote island. Perhaps they resisted the idea because it would be a too large a perturbation of what’s known to be the “real world” — if you change the scenery too much from what’s outside the window, it gets harder to care, too.
So now you have dino rustlers. Yee haw.
Anyway, the reasons I started watching these Jurassic movies is because I have a tendency to just buy random 4K blu ray movies — while the novelty has worn off, some of them still look pretty great. And then I thought — “hey, I haven’t watched the first five movies”, and I got those, too… but after starting watching them, I quickly regretted the entire thing. But if I’ve bought them, I’ve got to watch them, right? That’s the disadvantage to buying physical media… there’s more of a… pressure to actually watch them.
But that’s also a good thing, often.
I’m just saying I’m really really fed up with this series at this point, and I’m like grudge watching this one to get it over with.
Oh, and there were two versions of the movie on the disc, apparently — one that’s 2h40m long and one that’s 2h29m long. I’m watching the shorter one, obviously.
SO SHORT
What’s the budget on this one?
It looks … cheaper? They’ve even skimped on hairdressers.
Well, it’s $5M cheaper than the previous movie:
And made $300M less. Still, it made beaucoup d’argent, so I guess it won’t be the last one.
So this movie is less about dinosaurs ravaging New York than about peacefully living with them? Huh… that’s a choice…
Aww.
Mother and child. How cute.
I SAID HOW CUTE
It’s her! I love Laura Dern.
I’m actually kinda enjoying this movie… perhaps it’s my lowered expectations?
There’s something old-fashioned about this movie… it’s a bit 80s in the way it builds slowly. There’s also something really 2012 about the colour grading — everything tends towards cold greys.
But then… they go to another island! I mean not really — but it’s a cut-off remote area, so it’s basically the same.
The entire crew is back!
Is that Steve Jobs?
What’s with the hairdresser on this movie?
I haven’t looked at reviews, but I understand that it’s a movie that’s not well-liked. And I can understand why — it doesn’t feel like a Jurassic movie at all. Instead it’s more like a heist/secret agent kind of movie? At least so far. And… I like that better? Because the Jurassic template was boring as fuck.
(I mean, it worked in the first movie, but that’s it.)
OK, this is pretty stupid.
Whoa
I take back what I said at the beginning — about this movie looking cheap. I think the problem is the excessive colour grading that makes everything look slightly unreal, even the scenes that are totally on location.
But that was a totes fun action scene.
This movie is aggressively and unapologetically stupid, which I like.
Heh heh. Does Laura Dern have a contract that stipulates that her forehead never be shown?
This is really entertaining. Now I regret that I didn’t watch the longer version instead — I bet it has even more nonsense.
Oh, they’ve finally started to incorporate some new research — this one is slightly feathery, and moves more like a big chicken than an alligator that stands on two feet.
Oooh! This one has big feathers!
FAMBLY
Nice.
Perfect little gag.
Is this the end of the road for Steve Jobs!?
It’s like they had a speech before each scene that went “Remember, this is a dinosaur horror movie for children… with that in mind, how can we make take this scene… TO THE MAX”. And they just deliver, scene after scene: It’s funny/scary in a way that’s totally exciting.
So I’m wondering why this movie got such harsh reviews. I mean, I get it — it’s more like a Fast & Furious movie than it’s like a Jurassic movie. But what?
Oh, that’s harsh. People on imdb really didn’t like it.
And not because if brigading — that’s a normal distribution when people don’t really like a movie.
Critics really loathed it, but the rottentomatoes audience kinda liked it?
Well, I guess — this movie almost takes the dinos for granted, while in the first five movies, they were played for “gooosh! dinos!” But for how many movies can you do that?
What!? Urgency? In Jurassic World?!
So weird. Critics are weird.
Anyway, this is the best Jurassic movie since the first movie. I’m almost tempted to try to watch the long version. But not now.
Jurassic World: Dominion. Colin Trevorrow. 2022. ⚄
OK, finally we’re off the island(s) — it only took them four movies. Going-to-an-island-with-dinosaurs-and-then-things-happen isn’t an intrinsically exciting plot.
So I’m guessing this time they’re gonna go on rampage in Manhattan or something?
And… perhaps it’s going to be because a group of environmentalists wants to rescue the dinos? Or possibly the evil capitalists. Or both?
Aww!
Noo! They’re back on the island!
This movie does look pretty good, though. Puts Marvel CGI to shame.
OK, now I changed my mind — the CGI isn’t all that convincing. The dinos seem too stiff, but when they fight each other, it’s light they’re made of lightweight rubber — they bounce around in a not very thrilling way.
And why do they go for this pose All The Time?
Nice. Especially since he was trying to reboot the system.
THIS MOVIE IS SO UNREALISTIC yeah yeah
I guess this movie is better than the fourth film. But it’s still not very exciting.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. J.A. Bayona. 2018. ⚂
I’m wondering how they’re gonna depict the dinosaurs now that we know that they’re overgrown chickens: Are they still gonna go with the reptile look, or update it to a more feathery look?
I’m kinda surprised that they continue with the “people go to an island with dinosaurs” plot yet another time: I had kinda expected that they were going to go with a “the dinosaurs escaped and they’re now living in the sewers in New York” or somthing.
I mean — Dinosaur Island for the fourth time?
OK, but this time around they’re more professional, and have a real functioning dinosaur theme park.
This movie looks a bit odd. I mean, it looks like an early digital movie — everything is overly sharp and contrastey — but this is from 2015, so movies looked smother by then… perhaps it’s the 4K transfer that’s been overly sharpened?
Heh heh, this guy wants to use the dinosaurs for the military. Yeah, that’s… er… genius! We should be using lions and tigers now!
Hey! I’ve seen a meme of this!
Grr
Aww.
Some of the performances are just downright weird. I was waiting for this character to be revealed as a genetically modified android or something, but I guess not? She just plays the character this way?
I know, I know — it’s a Jurassic movie; it’s not supposed to make sense. But like — why did they breed like 200 pteranosauruses and keep them all in a glass bowl? That seems really expensive (they must eat a lot of meat), doesn’t add a lot of spectacle to the theme park (you can’t pet them), and it catastrophic when the glass bowl fails?
I KNOW I KNOW
What I’m trying to say that I’m pretty bored.
What is that thing anyway?
Plot twist!
And I love how when they finally decide to start shooting, they start off with some put-puts that doesn’t hurt the dinosaur at all, but makes it run away into the forest. Only after doing that, you shoot off the grenade launcher that can actually do some damage. (But you’ll miss because it’s run off already.)
Oh, I thought there was going to be a twist in the Big Dino Fight — that they’d mate or something instead.
OK, I don’t know why I just couldn’t get into this at all. I mean, it looks pretty good? And it’s got some nice dinosaurs. And Chris Whatsisname does a pretty good job. And I guess it’s not any more stupid than the previous outings.
But I just found the entire thing pretty boring? It may just be me, though.
Oh yeah, this is the Elm Street movie that really establishes the “mythos” — the first movie was just a smart movie about nightmares and stuff, and the second movie was… nothing… but then this movie takes a hard look at the first movie and creates this whole… thing… using that as a basis.
If I remember correctly.
Hey! She’s back!
It’s Cowboy Curtis!
It’s really 80s — I like that.
IT”S GOOGEL
This movie, like, distills what made the first movie work: If you fall asleep, you’re in a really scary world where you’re powerless, and that really resonates.
But then this movie is about banding together and vanquishing the evil, which is a really smart move, too — for a final movie in a series, but then again, this isn’t.
Is that the talk show guy…? I guess not.
The scares are pretty inventive. They don’t really seem like actual nightmares, though.
Oh yeah, in this movie Krueger is the result of a gruesome rape. I think they backed off from that in later movies? It’s perhaps not the best origin story for a gruesome villain?
It’s not very scary, but it’s kinda inventive? And while there are large portions of this movie that drag, there’s some parts that are pretty entertaining.
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Chuck Russell. 1987. ⚃
But what are they gonna do in this movie? Send some people to an island with dinosaurs, and then they’re gonna run around a lot until they get off the island again?
Even in the second movie, the premise seemed really… tenuous.
They’ve invented the 3D printer!
This is directed by a Spielberg-adjacent director (I think?). He’d done Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Jumanji, so this seems like a natural movie for him to do — it’s very 80s.
It’s just hard to get excited about this, and you feel like the people involved think the same thing.
This looks kinda cheap… what was the budget on this thing?
Oh, OK, it was a pretty expensive movie — this scene just looks oddly cheap:
They shake the cam around a lot to avoid showing the dinosaur in focus.
It made money, but less than the previous films. So I guess they decided to pause the franchise for a while after this: The next movie didn’t appear until 14 years later.
OK, we get to see the dinosaurs a lot more as the movie goes along. And they look pretty good, although a bit stiff.
OK, that’s a reasonable plot — these rich people brought the rest of the people to the island because they wanted to find their son.
But… it’s also not a very interesting plot? That is, why should we care?
Johnston thought about quitting the project on a few occasions because of uncertainty about how the film would turn out, considering that it did not have a finished script.
It does feel like a sketch towards a movie in many ways… it’s got a lot of elements, but it doesn’t really cohere?
The dinosaurs look pretty good? I guess it’s a mix of CGI and rubber? They look pretty stiff, but pretty good…
This is the nerdiest quibble ever — but I’ve always felt that these scenes are just kinda stupid, even if they look great? I mean, all these animals are plant eaters — but there’s basically nothing on these fields to eat? The grass looks like a lawn, and there are no juicy trees or bushes to nibble — so why are they all standing around here anyway? These animals need to eat! A lot! Get noshin’!
Now this is just stupid.
It’s a pretty bad movie. I mean, there’s some fun scenes, but it’s incredibly hard to care about what happens — there are no stakes beyond “oh no, they’re trapped (?) on an island with some dinosaurs” yet again.
based on the 12th-century Arthurian romance Perceval, the Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes
It’s based on the real thing. I mean, as these things go…
This is so weird — the Perceval character is a total moron, and apparently a total psycho, too?
It’s so close to being, well, Pythonesque… but instead it’s serious? Or is it? I’m not quite sure whether Rohmer is poking fun at the Arthur thing or taking it super-hyper seriously?
OK, he’s making fun of it.
Having a Greek chorus is very handy when doing plot recaps.
I like they way the switch between delivering their lines and reciting stage instructions.
This movie is something else, even on an Oddball Movie scale. But is it good? I’m not fascinated exactly, and I’m not laughing either… but I’m not bored. It’s très amusant, as kids say these day.
Rohmer asks the same question.
Wow, that’s cool…
Uhm uhm I zoned out there for a minute, and now we’re somehow doing the crucifixion of the Christ? How did that happen?!
Rohmer was famously very Catholic, but again — this seems to be making more fun of the proceedings than anything else…
What with the choir in a corner singing along to the nails being pounded in.
It’s just such an odd movie.
I did enjoy this puzzling movie, but I’m not sure it was worth spending this much time on it. It’s almost two and a half hours, and while the final half hour did eventually make sense in context (plot threads were tied), it’s… just a lot?
So while there were parts I loved, I’m gonna lowball it:
Oh yeah — I watched a documentary about the Elm Street series: The producers (New Line Cinema) had an unexpected runaway success on their hands after the first movie, and had no idea what to do next. So they thought: Well, Twilight Zone was successful, so we could do that as a series of movies? Like, if you make a movie that has almost nothing to do with the previous movie, that’ll make a ton of money? Wont it? WONT”T IT!?!
And it did.
But they realised that making movies like this didn’t make much sense long term, so the first real sequel is the next movie.
Oh, this is the gay Elm Street movie…
Nooo don’t sleep in class
I just remembered why I lost my enthusiasm for watching this Elm Street bluray box set: It’s been cut down from 1.85:1 to 16:9.
THAT”S SEVERAL PIXELS
Nice digs.
Nice shades.
Nice can.
*gasp*
It’s hawt.
Nooes it’s his gym teacher!!
It’s amazing that this movie didn’t tank the enterprise. I mean, it’s not that it’s horrible… but it has so little of what made the first movie a classic. It’s got a few jump scares, and it’s got the general dream/horror thing going, which is the selling point, but…
That’s a sick jam.
Rude!
Limahl!
Hey, they filmed this in an actual abandoned steelworks?
Mm-hm.
I’m watching the extras here, and this is the director explaining why the movie doesn’t make that much sense, and that’s kind of amusing.
…
Wow, the extras here are really interesting. It’s not the usual puff pieces, edited together annoyingly — they’re giving pretty harsh critiques of the movies, and are allowed to do so at length.
I give the extras a ⚄, but:
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Jack Sholder. 1985. ⚁
Huh… this is an odd 2K transfer… it’s very grainy.
Huh. This doesn’t looks as good as the first movie…
Heh heh.
Well, that’s very New York.
This looks like it’s been upscaled from a VHS or something.
Well, it’s nice of Jeff Goldblum to summarise the movie.
Man, this movie just sucks. I guess Spielberg didn’t want to make another Jurassic Park movie, so instead he made a movie about how capitalism sucks (true!) and t. rexes being all maternal (doubtful!) and stuff.
I’m one hour in… and finally something is happening?! Can it be? Spielberg found his schlock gene!?
Nope. I mean, he tries, but it’s just hard to care at this point.
C’est vraiment mauvais. (Yes, I’m duolinguing.) Spielberg tries so hard to make you care for some of these characters, but it doesn’t work. He wants you to rejoice at some of the other characters’ deaths, and that works better, but it’s still not … actually worth seeing?
I’ve got a Rohmer thing going on after I bought the Rohmer box set in 2018 — I’ve been watching the movies mostly while on my laptop while on planes to different parts of the world. But I’ve skipped all his costume dramas, because they don’t seem to be quite as well suited for watching while eating overcooked carrots.
So I’ve now got a handful movies left from this huge box set, so I thought I should get around to watching them so that I can move the box set (financed by Agnes B) from the To Be Watched to the Have Watched bookshelf.
Makes sense? Right?
This film is in German! Boo! I wanted to practice kinda-sorta understanding French…
I’m not sure Rohmer’s general aesthetic lends itself to these costume dramas — his thing is filming people chatting with each other about nothing much, so when you have to do actual staging, you end up with a lot of scenes looking like this: I.e., a mess.
Well that aged well.
OK, these shots are lovely…
And after eating dinner (a truly indifferent lasagne and a somewhat decent red wine), I’m totally into it! I’m being lulled into an airplane cocoon feeling! Slightly tipsy, slightly distracted, mostly watching a Rohmer movie!
It’s such a weird movie. I’m totally into it.
Oh my ghod! This is fantastic!
Nice hat!
This is like finding a lost Bergman movie of a lost Shakespeare play — I mean, it’s a somewhat weird plot, but played with such conviction that it works. It’s totally gripping, and you feel like you’re watching something from a strange dimension.
Hey — it’s that guy from that TV series… er… Firefly?
This is a very… “Hey look at them Southern yokels” movie.
Which is always nice.
As comedy horror movies go, this is on the grisly side? I mean, many comedy horror movies go for gore, but some of the stuff here is just yuck.
Oh, this kinda bombed… Gunn did a bunch of TV stuff after this, and then made Super four years later. (Before going on to do Guardians of the Galaxy and taking over the world.)
I guess I’m surprised that this had such a big budget? It’s not that this looks bad, but it looks… small.
Indeed!
Any similarity to sperm is purely coincidental.
OK, this basically devolves into a zombie movie? (With a group consciousness thing, which is a twist, I guess.)
It’s a pretty good horror movie, but I grew a bit impatient during the middle parts. It needed more of something? Perhaps good jokes?
I bought this DVD kinda at random — I was looking for the 2006 film with the same name, and this one came up, too. And I thought “what the hey”. So now I’m watching this movie — which I assumed was going to be a horror movie based on the name, but I guess it’s some kind of … thriller/crime/comedy thing?
This is very much of its age — it’s a very 1973 movie, looking all indie (but isn’t actually, I think?), and is all outlaw chic and stuff.
But it’s also a quite odd movie — the storytelling beats are totally unpredictable. People die or start robbing diners at random — but this isn’t one of those zany “satires”, either. It’s kinda… slinky and knowing?
A subtle dislocation of the norm.
And what’s up with that van!
I’m still not sure why this movie is called “Slither”.
I had no idea that Caan was this good at playing slightly goofy guys.
It’s an amiable, original, amusing movie. But the pacing in the middle part is a bit off.
What’s striking about this movie is how much it looks like an 80s movie.
Oh, hi — I bought a Jurassic Park 4K box set, because I think I’ve only seen the first one (or possibly two of them). I don’t really want to re-watch this movie, but I thought I should if I’m gonna watch the rest of them…
I guess this is the final… “Spielberg movie” Spielberg initiated. I mean, he did the second movie, too, but…
I mean, Jaws, Close Encounters, Indiana Jones, ET… and now Jurassic Park. But he was transitioning to a “serious director” (the awful Schindler’s List was released the same year), and I think this is like his final 80s movie? Just a bit late.
That is, I think there was a very distinct 80s sci-fi/action movie thing (Gremlins, etc) going on with Spielberg and his compatriots — it’s what we think of when we think of “80s movies” (except for the John Hughes stuff, of course). And this is where it ended. Sassy kids and all.
I just love that somebody in the props dept spent so much time paper towels around this set.
Finally.
Wow. When they switch to the CGI shots in this 4K version, it’s a bit fuzzy, but it holds up. This 30 year old CGI is better than most of what they do today.
(Or is it all practical? I guess it could be practical? A lot of rubber.)
Ah, this is where all the memes come from.
Whee!
Sassy.
What’s fascinating about this movie is that it’s barely a movie at all: We get the premise presented in the first half hour, and then we get 90 minutes of people being being terrorised by dinosaurs. In one extended scene after another.
And the weird thing is that is works. We’ve barely been introduced to the characters, which is something you’d think matters if we’re gonna be invested in them being terrorised, but nope.
Aww.
But then when I thought this was some kind of masterpiece, the tension drops…
Yes!
This really is one of Spielberg’s better movies, isn’t it? No nonsense; just action.
Anyway, I’ve seen several (two? three?) of Yang’s movies the last year, and I’m rather unimpressed. But this one seems less bad. So far.
I don’t really know what this movie is going to be about yet, and I like that. It’s got a somewhat Rohmeresque thing going on…
It’s the album all the DJs are playing — the D. J. Dance Music album.
Anyway, Yang is a respected director (or rather, he was), but I just don’t quite get it. He was extremely influenced by various European arthouse directors, but to my eye, his movies seem like failed pastiches, really. They’re more about making a movie than having something to make a movie about.
I.e., the opposite of, say, Bergman.
So I wonder where the Yang cult is coming from — there’s so many interesting directors, and Yang’s movies are just so… just… there.
That’s the harshest review of this movie on Rotten Tomatoes.
Not Duran Duran Duran?
Dance party!
This is definitely the best of the Yang movies I’ve seen. It’s still not… all that great.
This is a Criterion 4K release — and I didn’t quite expect that to happen. I mean, I saw this movie on VHS back in the 80s, and I remember thinking it was kinda lame? But I remember no details beyond that.
Heh heh, such social satire.
Oh yeah, parody game shows were big back then… before all those parodies became actual game shows.
Whoa. Or rather, I can see how they wanted that to be a “whoa” scene, but it wasn’t quite…
Into the custard!
Whoa.
It’s Napoleon, see?
Gilliam goes for “zany” mixed with “satire” a lot, and neither actually translate to “funny”… But it’s amusing for sure.
Oh, I thought this was a flop? But nope — it was a box office success. I’m probably getting it mixed up with the Munchhausen thing…
See? Zany. But pretty amusing.
Are all the Monty Pythonses gonna make cameos in this?
There’s so many shots like this — where the framing is really uncomfortable, as if the cinematographer has been given no choice but to film like this, possibly because of issues with constructing the sets? So many shots have this cramped, amateurish quality about them — you could just sort of imagine one of the American post-Spielberg directors doing this movie? Like Joe Dante. And it’d be one of “those 80s movies” instead of being this odd thing…
Yes, it’s Sean Connery for a couple of scenes.
These two are the best characters in the movie.
I can totally see somebody having this as their favourite movie ever. It’s just overflowing with oddball ideas and weird settings. And there are some pretty good jokes in here, too. But to me it didn’t quite work? All the famous people cameos, the squishy sets, the off-kilter cinematography… It just left me being bored a lot.
Yeah, I can see what they mean… difficult restoration. But you’d think they could do something better with AI restoration now (although with an increased likelihood that random faces are replaced with Nick Cage).
Aaah! Now those pants make sense.
Odd hairdo… is that a little wig on the back of her head there?
I have to admit that I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. There’s possibly a dozen different characters, but I’m not quite sure? And there’s a lot of shouting and drama, but I have no idea what it’s all about…?
It’s something to do with herding some sheep across a mountain…?
Very small tables?
I HAVE NO IDEA
The casting director goes for a certain type, I guess.
But I think I’m starting to understand what it’s all about… Smugglers who are being encouraged to take up farming and stuff.
This movie is well-made on a shot to shot basis — we get one striking shot after another. It’s just hard to try to keep paying attention — the characters are so under developed, and things seem to happen with little motivation.
So we get occasional speeches that attempt to drive the plot home, but that doesn’t really work, does it?
OK, that’s a solid joke.
A lotta smokin’ going on.
Yes, that is almost the perfect posture for cutting barbed wire. Get in closer! Closer!
The final scene is amazing. And it’s kind of impressive? But it’s not actually a good movie, so:
I dunno… for a movie from 1931, it seems quite ahead of its time. It’s like some guy with a movie camera trying out a lot of interesting things? And he’s got an eye, so everything looks cool.
But I’m not actually riveted by this.
Now things are getting meta — we’re watching a Chaplin film within this film.
I have to admit I zoned out there for a while, so I don’t actually know what’s going on now…
Why are there three people in the boat? Weren’t there just two people escaping from the jail?
Yes… waxy…
Oh, perhaps there were three people in the boat all along…
CRIME DOES NOT PAY
This movie is definitely an interesting historical artefact. The imagery is so striking, and it’s a technical achievement for sure. Peixoto must have been super talented to be able to make something like this.
But I’m just gonna throw the die based on how much I enjoyed watching it now, so:
I’m pretty sure I saw this movie on VHS back in the 80s, but I remember nothing about it, except it being about roller skating? And… OK, that’s it?
The opening here is really, really Kubrick-ey — I’m thinking Jewison was trying to make his A Clockwork Orange here, but with roller skates and James Caan.
Huh — this movie was filmed in 1.75:1, and they haven’t cut down the 4K blu ray to 16:9! Nice! It’s so close (to 1.77:1) that most packagers would just have lopped off a smidgen of the bottom to get it to 16:9, but nope. Nice.
1.75:1 is a pretty unusual aspect ratio, isn’t it?
Roll, James! Roll!
Oh, it’s not just roller skating — it’s also motor bikes. Well, that’s a sport.
But even on a sports scale, this seems like a pretty dull sport. I mean, I guess it’s supposed to be a satire on American football or something? OK, it’s not quite as boring as that, but then again — is anything?
Such evil!
Such naive!
Impressive socks.
Such evil!
Eeevil!
I do like the colours here.
It’s a very, very 70s movie, and I kinda like that?
Such a futuristic fireplace!
You just take a 70s interior and add some stainless steel and you’re done.
It’s an intriguing movie in many ways — it’s not clear at all what it’s really about. They keep dripping information on the viewer in a very thoughtful way, letting us learn one horrific and or interesting thing about this society after another.
What makes it so odd are the performances, which are hammed up to the max. It’s like Jewison really wanted to one up Kubrick, but then all he has to work with are actors who’ve been told that they’re on a made-for-TV sports movie or something?
Welcome to my lair, Mr. Caan.
The Japanese! So eveil!
The Japanese are so evil!!!
Now things are gonna get personal!
Good game, good game… I guess Caan is finally gonna realise that contact sports are bad!
*gasp*
OK, this is just getting silly.
See, they’ve put all the books in the world into a single fluid computer (and then thrown all the books away), because you know, people totally trust computers to not ever break or anything.
*cough* *cough*
Indeed!
“Satire” is code word for “not actually funny”.
So it’s like Big Brother?
It also makes no sense as a game, because it just means that the team that (literally) kills the other team first wins. So why play the game at all.
So satire! Much commentary!
That’s what I want my kitchen to look like!
The entire world is watching…
I dunno about this movie… Jewison tries so hard to make a classic sci-fi movie that reflects on current society — he wants so hard to be Kubrick — and he gets halfway there. Some of the sets are amazing, and the cinematography is pretty good. And that it’s all very silly doesn’t really hurt. But the performances are so bad.
By getting half way there, it makes it all rather risible and boring.
Basically this is a commercial for Hollywood’s Lido Lounge and for MGM contract players. The Lido is a large watering hole; we visit one afternoon with an orchestra playing, all sorts of stars and would-be stars sitting at tables near the pool alongside paying customers, and bathing beauties parading and diving.
It’s weird that they’d spend Technicolor on something like this — in 1935. But perhaps it’s as much an ad for Technicolor as it for the Lido.
So we get brief clips of famous people sitting around… like Clark Gable (and that’s his wife).
There’s also musical/comedy bits, of course.
So how do you rate something like this? I mean, it a 20 minute ad. But it’s pleasant to watch, and there are some amusing bits? So… er…
Hey! I was there this week! Coney Island! What a coinkidink.
Such 90s sex thriller.
See?
Sure, sure.
Well… I’m of two minds about this one. There’s a lot of actors that I like in this movie, and it looks pretty good, but for me it just didn’t work. It’s like it’s trying too hard at being This Kind Of Movie, and it feels like a pastiche that doesn’t quite work, which makes it hard to care about anything that happens.
So I was pretty bored throughout this movie. But I’m sure mileage will vary, and I can totally see people having this as their Favourite Movie Ever.
Mwah… this burg ain’t big enough for the both of us.
Mae West is so fun to watch. She co-wrote this movie with W. C. Fields, apparently, and the first half is a pure delight, and is LOL-out-loud funny.
Sure!
Heh heh.
Mwah!
Heh heh.
But… while the main plot is very funny, and the performances are hilarious, there’s just something about this movie that’s not firing on all cylinders. Especially the Fields scenes seem to drag on without much purpose, and the excessive nastiness towards his manservant is just offputting (and I think it’s meant to be funny).
Still, the scenes that work are hilarious, so I think I’m gonna go with:
Oh! Bruce Willis! Is this one of those fake movies that are being churned out by the dozens?
No, it’s too old for that, and it’s got a $20M budget. I’m guessing most of that went to Willis (who is killed off after 15 minutes OOPS SPOILERS).
It’s one of those weird movies: It feels totally predictable, and still totally chaotic.
Oh, Superman.
OK, this is where the money went: It’s a pretty good car chase scene at the end of the movie there. It’s both goofy and familiar: They do the driving-down-stairs scene, but the cars bounce around in an amusing way instead of being all manly and stuff.
This is a really, really bad movie, but it looks pretty good, and Sigourney Weaver looks like she had a good time playing a kick-ass evil CIA agent.
Hey! It’s Sigourney Weaver! That’s probably the reason I got this movie in the first place, but I’d forgotten…
I know this is supposed to take place in 1995, but couldn’t they get a hairdresser that had actually experienced 1995?
I like the whimsical bits in this movie… It’s a very likeable, old-fashioned kind of drama: Young woman goes to work for a literary agency, and whimsicality ensues.
While it’s very likeable and very watchable, it doesn’t really feel… vital? But I like it.
This is a very fun, twisty movie, and designed to shock — the protagonist is a total psychopath, and everything is totally immoral — but it’s so much fun (and is really well made).
I saw this movie on a Worst Films Of All Time list, so I naturally had to see it.
And it is indeed quite a lot, but it’s pretty fun (when you’re able to actually understand what they’re saying, which isn’t always).
It’s a really strange movie. For instance, having the mother being so decrepit and helpless is an odd choice for a movie that mostly tries to be funny. It goes into abuse territory…
I still think this is a very interesting movie, though.
(I watched this on the plane and is typing this later.)
Heh heh.
This is very very funny.
Scott does a perfect charming country bumpkin thing here.
Irene Dunn!
The plot is the silliest thing ever — it’s perfect!
The first half of this movie is perfect. Then it sours seriously — the Scott character gets all huffy about women’s revealing clothing, and it makes no sense other than to give him a chance to “man up” against all these strong women. It’s just no fun.
But like I said, the first half of the movie is so silly and wonderful that it’s like watching one of the screwball classics. So I choose to repress the memory of the Scott Mannification and give it:
I watched this on the plane to New York, and I’m kinda just testing whether the screenshotting thing works on this laptop with this post. (I’m typing this later, though.)
I’ve sort of made it a ritual to watch a Rohmer film when on long flights. They seem so well-suited for slightly distracted watching (with the flight stewards interrupting every three minutes).
As usual with Rohmer, it’s a very pretty film, but unusually, it has a kind of “high concept” kind of plot — a woman meets the love of her life while on holiday, but then gives him the wrong address by mistake, so they can’t find each other afterwards. So the question is: Should she settle for other lovers, or hold out for that guy?
This is more like a TV series than a movie, but it’s not annoying.
This is a very confusing movie. I don’t even understand what this is supposed to be about… It’s about… a gay rugby league, and things are… dramatic… because…
Every scene has been played as if something really dramatic is going on, and then there’s nothing. It’s like they’ve read that book How To Write A Damn Good Novel, where the central tenet is that there should always be a primary and a secondary conflict in any (ANY) scene. This usually translates to people shouting at each other for no reason when the writer can’t come up with a secondary conflict for that scene.
…
OH MY RU! This is 135 mins long?! So was this a TV series originally?
OK, this is just a love story kinda (with lots of cheating)? There’s like very little plot here.
Just sneaking around, some rugby, and a lot of drinking in bars. So my puzzlement have changed from “what’s this then?” to “why should anybody care?”
I’m hoping there’ll be a twist, but I’m not counting on it.
You can tell that it’s cold by them colour-grading everything blue.
There’s like no stakes? I’m beginning to believe that they haven’t read that book anyway. I mean, the outcome of this match should determine his grandmother’s birthday or something, but instead it’s just this random match that means nothing (except them getting cold and wet).
Eep! I’m just an hour in… more than half to go, and there’s basically nothing really is happening. I mean, there’s a handful of plot strands, but none of them seem really vital. I guess that’s what makes it seem like a TV series…
It’s an intriguing backdrop to a tale of infidelity, but it would be better suited to a four-parter on TV.
OK, this bit where he takes his super-secret lover to meet his parents (as one does) is tedious beyond belief.
UNCOMFORTABLE
But now he remembers what’s important in life: Rugby.
I wasn’t annoyed by this movie. It’s like… there’s so little going on here that it’s almost impossible to be annoyed? But that’s perhaps a bit too flippant. But it’s really quite unusual how un-annoying it is: There’s nothing weird going on with the cinematography (shakycam or over-colour correcting), or the audio (no insistent soundtrack or over-foleying), or the acting (perfectly pleasant and professional).
There’s a certain amateurishness to everything here… as if this was made by kids who were telling TV camera people what to do? I.e., lots of zooming, and odd framing, and overly theatrical performances…
Ah, it’s a pro-Korea propaganda movie? I’m guessing ex-Korean people weren’t treated well in Russia… (I mean, Soviet Union.)
Oh, it’s a series of (quite short) … stories? The first one was barely a scene.
Oh, these aren’t stories at all… It’s just one story that’s broken into chapters.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty dull stuff. I mean, the concept doesn’t sound that bad: A teacher kills a girl, and their parent vow revenge. But the parents are old, so the father has to take a new concubine to get a son who can carry out the revenge.
I mean, that’s practically John Wick, isn’t it?
It’s just not done very well. I think I see what the director is going for, but it turns into a kind of … parody of art movies instead.
It’s not impossible that I would have enjoyed this more if I paid more attention, but I sorta lost interest pretty quickly and my mind stated wandering.
So now I’m not quite sure what’s happening.
I’m totally open to the possibility that this is a masterpiece, but I just found it pretty dull.
I know that there are people who are fans of the A24 production company — it’s a whole thing — and I can respect that. I’m a fan of certain record companies, and that’s fine.
But I’ve seen like a handful of A24 movies, and I’m not impressed. They’re generally technically pretty slick (for the budget they have), but they’ve all been pretty… annoying? Like they’re chasing some social media conversation or other.
But perhaps this’ll be awesome.
Uh-oh.
Hey! I’ve been there.
Yeah, this is already pretty annoying. The “hand-held” camera (either simulated in post or done on a tripod but with a lot of operator movement) is so eurgh.
Such symbolic.
SUCH SYMBOLIC!!!
Man, OK, I’m not sure I can do this…. It’s not just All The Clichés, but it’s also All The Boredom.
Although it’s frustratingly clumsy in certain respects, The Inspection is an affecting actors’ showcase in service of some truly worthy themes.
“Worthy”.
It turns out that living rough (and possibly being on drugs?) makes you really fit! Whodathunk! The other soldiers are jelly at the hero because he’s so good at the push ups and stuff.
It’s like a Mary Sue kind of movie… the protagonist (based on the writer, apparently) constantly has people telling him he’s hot and smart and then he’s the best at the sports, too.
And then the movie gets even worse! At this point I’m kinda getting interested in this as a pure train wreck. It’s just ridiculously silly.
It’s… It’s…
And this doesn’t break with tradition.
Meme potential?
Perhaps it’s a recreation.
Oops! What a nerd.
It’s boring. It’s almost enjoyable just for the sheer stupidity of it all, but just almost.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul is famous and stuff now, so I’m guessing this is one of his first movies? And… it’s a documentary?
Whoa.
This is wild… I assume we’re inside the (fictional?) story the first woman up there is telling, but I’m not totally sure. In any case, every scene is just riveting — everything is so tense, even if what they’re actually doing is mostly rather trivial? I’m totally into it.
The film is absolutely riveting for the first two thirds — I mean, it’s a meandering mess, really, but it feels like they’re going to tie things up somehow. It feels really vital. But then we start going into a territory that’s so meta that it wraps back again, and we’re watching “making of” documentary, and that’s not as interesting.
OK, we’re back on track.
For the first two thirds, this movie is a solid ⚅. Then interest dissipates somewhat when it becomes clearer that this really isn’t going anywhere, but is really an improvised movie.
But it’s still pretty fascinating. (And very entertaining.)
I’ve gotten a lot more respect for Scorsese lately. I used to think of him as a guy that did a couple of good movies in the 70s, and then devolved into somebody who generated tedious mobster (OK, that’s a pleonasm) flicks. But I watched After Hours recently, and it’s really great, and you gotta respect somebody who gets financing to restore and distribute a movie like this.
Mysterious Object At Noon. Apichatpong Weerasethakul. 2000. ⚄
I have a tendency to buy box sets of movies and then never watch them. Because if I start watching one, I’m like obligated to watch the entire box set? It’s like to much commitment? I know it makes no sense but there you are.
So this is a Philippine film from the 70s. I admire Scorsese’s project — restoring films from around the world to make them available to a wider audience now — but I’m not quite sure what makes this movie in particular er interesting.
It’s very noisy. That is, people are shouting at each other all the time, and whenever that dies down, you get a soundtrack filling up the space.
True! But they’re all like that…
I think the moral of this movie is: Men suck.
That would be my expression too!
There’s good points… The cinematography is very attractive, and the performances are pretty good… And it’s not that the story is uninteresting, exactly? But it does feel like I’ve seen this movie many times before. Not in the particulars, but the general… gist of it all.
Is that a Rembrandt!?
OK, that was original.
OK, I didn’t really enjoy this much, but the ending is kinda great. So:
Well, this is very modern… by that I mean that everything’s colour-graded to match all the greenscreen they’re flying in, and that also means that most of the scenes are pretty dark, since that makes matching elements up easier.
I.e., make even the real sets and costumes look bad enough that they don’t look out of place with the bad CGI.
This seems to make references to stuff I don’t really know? I mean, it might all be in-film fiction, but Gawain sounds familiar… Er… I mean, I’ve read Prince Valiant. Knights of the Round Table and stuff? I dunno. Is it something they make poor American children learn in school?
The Green Knight honors and deconstructs its source material in equal measure, producing an absorbing adventure that casts a fantastical spell.
That sounds awful! Why did I buy this?
These fifteen minutes have probably been the most boring I’ve ever endured watching a movie ever. I’ve literally died of boredom. It’s like somebody has taken Game of Thrones and boridified it.
Even more!
OK, so Gawain is a dick, and also a total moron? I guess that’s something.
No! It took forever!
Nice CGI.
Nice colour grading.
Everything seems to take forever.
Oh god. It’s 129 minutes long. I’m not sure I can take being this bored that long.
Oh yeah, the doofus needs a CGI animal companion.
They haven’t quite figured out whether to model its movements on a dog or a ferret?
O my ghod. There’s still 45 minutes left!?
Man, that’s a bad CGI fox.
It’s even worse when it talks!
SUCH IRONIC
I’m guessing that the director wants to make fun of the entire idea of “heroic quests”, or perhaps express “I hate doing homework” or something. But surely you can do that and still make something less tedious than this.
The very end was kinda clever, but that doesn’t excuse the previous 126 minutes, so:
This rom-com has gotten quite a bit of attention the last few days… and I can totally see why. It’s a snappy, well-written rom-com, and that’s so rare these days.
No lines (so far) that are actually hilarious so far, but they keep coming so fast that that’s OK.
OK, now it’s even funnier.
It’s so… breezy and well made.
Boo hiss!!!
Things get a bit more serious, and I’m not sure that works as well as the zippy frothy scenes at the start?
I mean, it’s not bad, but…
The performances are so much fun.
Oh, I didn’t think about this before this scene — is Uma Thurman old enough to be his mother? *pauses movie* OK, he’s born in 1991 (but is playing a 23-year-old, I guess?), and Thurman is born in 1970… Yeah, I guess it’s possible. She’s really young to be a president, though, but I guess she’s playing somebody older…
It’s a bit of Fry!
Anyway, the film is a bit uneven? The start is fantastic, and then it’s a bit bumpy, and then the ending is amazing! I laughed, I cried, etc etc.
Nice fridging! I bet that’s gonna make Lovejoy all vengeful and stuff.
Reviewers are always saying how realistic the fight scenes are, and they totally aren’t. But they’re fun to watch — a lot more fun than, say, Marvel fight scenes are. They’re very theatrical and dance like.
And extremely silly. Did I mention silly?
But then again, the entire premise is too, so it all adds up.
As with the previous movies, this looks really good. Nice saturated colours and dramatic scenery.
They ramp up the stupid even more in this movie — which I don’t mind. I do mind that they take a half hour time out to do some character building (i.e., talk about fambly (it’s all about fambly, after all)). It’s really tedious.
But even that looks good.
Have they used more CGI in this than in previous movies? Some things, like the Arc de triomphe looks really… fake. The cars don’t really move like cars do.
In general, it looks more like a traditional action movie (and by traditional, I mean “from 2015”), where they don’t bother to go on sets but just greenscreens everything, even stuff that would be easier to just shoot on location. To take a shot at random, the above one — it looks a bit unreal. And there’s been way more of those “uhm…?” sets in this one than the earlier movies.
Well, it’s better than the third movie, but there’s a lot of dead air in the middle of this one. The plot is the silliest of all the John Wick movies, and that says a lot, but that’s fine.
Yes, that is totally how a spice rack is mounted in an actual, real house.
OK, so this is a no-budget kind of movie, I guess? But it’s pretty odd even for one of those — the video is kinda choppy… is there an FPS mixup somewhere? It feels like it’s a 12 FPS film.
Yes, that is exactly how you paint.
So… this is set in like 2001, but there’s flashbacks to… the 70s?
I really started wondering whether this was an older movie (i.e., more than a decade old) because it looks rather like early digital — kinda crappy.
Some of the actors here aren’t that bad, but… it’s a pretty bad movie.
Perhaps the worst thing about this film is the über-schmaltzy music running in basically every scene. It’s pretty hard to take.
Such shock.
Oh my god. I’m only halfway through?
That’s such a real 70s living room. The whole family just relaxing.
It’s debatin’ time!
There’s barely a movie here at all, and they spend two hours getting there. I mean, the people making this probably had fun? But…
This isn’t day for night — it’s colour grading for day?
Is that CGI?
Heh heh. OK, this is a comedy? I have no idea what led me to buying this movie, but I did? Apparently? Did somebody recommend it?
It’s quite amusing so far.
I really should note why I’m buying stuff, because this seems pretty random.
This is obvs a low budget movie, but it looks really good.
Except for the CGI snow which they overdo in some of the scenes.
I’m really enjoying this — they’ve got great repartee going, likeable characters and entertaining actors.
Hey! That’s Cheyenne Jackson, isn’t it?
It’s a kind of chamber piece — there’s less than a dozen actors in total, I think, and they’re trapped in a tiny village. And all the characters are real characters.
Well… it’s really slowing down now. Did they run out of money to do outdoors shots and just had to plough through 30 script pages with these people sitting in one room?
OK, that was just some down time — the movie picks up again.
This is one of the best low budget comedy/horror movies I’ve seen in years. It’s really charming — the funny bits are really funny, and there’s some scary bits that are scary. It’s just really well made. *slow clap*
However, it was just a bit flabby in the middle there. Perhaps because they didn’t even have enough money to shoot something fun? So instead we got a section in the hotel there that didn’t seem to go anywhere interesting — and a lot of “eh?”, like the fate of that science woman (who had some of the funniest scenes before that).
Perhaps it’s a ⚃ movie really, but I’m rating on a low budget scale, so:
I’ve seen this before, and I didn’t like it much then. But that was a crappy pirated copy, so when I happened upon this blu ray release from the BFI, I bought it anyway.
And now I’m watching it. Perhaps it’s better this time.
Indeed.
So basically, the entire film happens in this hotel room? And it’s all philosophical discussions between a British journalist and an alien robot — about the Middle East conflict(s).
It sounds like it should be brilliant, right? But it’s not.
Very Vermeerish.
Peter Wollen was a film professor at UCLA, and had done a number of shorts before this movie — which is his final credit as director.
Perhaps he was a good teacher — but… er…
This movie has a lot of problems, but perhaps one of them is the stereotypical casting? In this movie, by an older male professor, the protagonist is an older male journalist, who is lecturing a young woman (OK, robot) about all kinds of things. It’s a kind of Mary Sue movie, really. Mary Wollen.
Perhaps it could have worked with different casting for the guy.
I wonder whether Wollen was thinking he was making something like Liquid Sky — that’s got an alien and strange things, too, but…
Man, this is even worse than last time I saw it. It’s just bone-crushingly uninteresting.
Oh, this is a cute little comedy about a high school reunion or something?
So it’s about a prissy gay dude and his old bully stuck in a car for nine hours? I guess hilarity will ensue.
It turns out that the high school bully was secretly bi?
It’s fun. It’s a very low budget movie, and it doesn’t have much of a plot, but it’s cute.
OK, now it’s just a bit boring. They totally forgot to write the movie — instead it’s just a series of random meetings that’s getting progressively more annoying.
Nice art.
This starts off as a pretty charming movie, but then it gets brutally — brutally — tedious.
Oh, that’s why it’s called “the good house”… I’m so smart S M R T.
I’m not quite sure how I ended up with this movie — it’s probably just because it’s got Sigourney Weaver? It seems like a very undramatic drama — the kind of movie you don’t see much these days (except from streaming services). But this is apparently a real made-for-cinema movies, in 1.85:1 and all.
Oh, this is one of those movies where a character looks at the camera and talks to the audience… but it’s not a comedy! I think! Weaver is playing an alcoholic real estate agent?
Yes, lots of these shots.
What’s with the colour grading? Everything is really desaturated and dull… perhaps things are gonna pop once she gets all non-drinkey and stuff.
It looks so nice and warm on that beach…
Aww.
I’m quite enjoying this movie — it’s so down to earth… and I’m not able at all to guess the critical reception. I could see this both being totally panned (because it’s so old fashioned and sincere), and also being praised (because it’s Sigourney Weaver like duh).
Oh, people like it.
I mean, I know that this isn’t Mexico, but c’mon.
That’s more like it.
This isn’t my kind of movie at all, really, but it’s a very enjoyable movie to watch. It shouldn’t work, but it’s sensitively directed and has amazing actors. And there’s nothing annoying — no overbearing soundtrack or nothing.
I’m adding one ⚀ to what I was originally going to give this because it plays Down to Zero by Joan Armatrading over the end titles.
I’ve basically watched all the super-hero movies, but the last few have been so boring that I’m going to stop, I think. I’m giving this a chance, because I… forgot that the the first one was tedious.
(I should look up my blog before buying blu rays.)
You’d think that CGI smoke was a solved problem, but that’s what’s looking fakest in this sequence…
It’s pretty amusing, but… it looks like they’ve told the CGI people “make it look really big, but generic”. It’s all just a bit dull graphically.
It doesn’t exactly move too slowly on a scene by scene basis, either — most of the scenes are just fine. But we’re one hour in, and it feels like we should be further ahead in the storyline by now.
I was thinking — no movie should be longer than 90 minutes? Unless that movie is Noli me tangere or Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Most movies aren’t. I mean, the vast majority. This is 130 minutes, and there really isn’t any good reason for being that long, even if each scene is perfectly unannoying.
The first Shazam movie was well-received, and this one was panned:
So, of course, I think that this movie is better than the first one. The first one bored me silly, while this is more entertaining — probably mostly due to the presence of Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu.
I find the audience score amusing — better on the second than the first, while the first movie did 3x bigger box office, and the second movie didn’t earn back the budget. People voting on rottentomatoes are mostly brigaders and trolls, I guess?
The professional reviewers are more in tune with the audience than these trolls.
Nice dragon!
Heh heh.
We’re now at 95 minutes, and it really, really feels like this movie should be over already. We’ve had some nice fights and all… but there’s still half an hour to go?
[time passes]
Well, that was another big huge fight, and it was OK. But the entire movie just feels… not that necessary, perhaps? Perhaps audiences went “another one? do we need this?” and they answered “no”. Which is the correct answer.
But it’s really not that bad a movie. It’s way too long, but it’s amiable.
Shazam: Fury of the Gods. David F. Sandberg. 2023. ⚂
I think this may be the last Rock Hudson/Jane Wyman Douglas Sirk movie I haven’t seen before? (This is a Criterion blu ray.)
But there’s a whole bunch of Sirk movies I haven’t seen yet. I’ve only seen, like, one third of those? Why doesn’t somebody release a Sirk box set? Hop to it!
Movies like this raise unrealistic expectations for hairdo preservation while driving convertibles!
Hospitals were nice in those days…
But this restoration is rather odd. Were there problems with the source material? The graininess isn’t unusual, but there’s er chromatic aberrations in a lot of the scenes. That is, sometimes there’s a shimmery orange outline that’s floating around…
Hm, it says here in the liner notes that it was created from an interpositive, so I guess the negatives were lost? (Or in bad shape.) An interpositive is copied from a negative to create new negatives, so it could theoretically be second generation.
So the plot is that Wyman’s husband (who was a total saint) died because Hudson (who was a total asshole) bogarted the life-saving equipment. So I’m guessing Wyman is going to end up marrying Hudson? That’ll be a properly melodramatic melodrama.
Hah! I knewed it!
Is that Agnes Moorehead? She’s wonderful, anyway.
Symbolism!
Oh, is this some cult movie? Seems like the good doctor was the leader of a do-gooder cult of some kind…
Wow, this isn’t going where I thought at all. I mean, it is, but not in the particulars.
This is the creepiest movie I’ve ever seen! I mean, the plot is satisfyingly preposterous, but like wow. It’s all gaslighting, but the guy doing the gaslighting is… the hero?
I guess it’s a bit ambiguous whether we’re supposed to go “aww” or “what’s the number for 911!”, but it’s… it’s creepy. I suspect Sirk is aiming for the latter?
Suddenly a scene that’s all fuzzy… I mean, image quality wise.
I’d never have guessed that a Sirk movie could be too over-the-top, but this is?
I’m not sure. It’s beautifully shot, and with very enjoyable performances from everybody involved, especially Hudson and Wyman, of course. It’s enjoyable to watch. But it’s not one of Sirk’s better movies, in my opinion. It’s just a bit to leaden, and the payoff isn’t as magnificent as this obsession seems to warrant.
This is the second film in the “Koker trilogy” (which is what the name of the Criterion box set is, even if Kiarostami was (apparently) luke-warm to grouping these films that way). And I watched the third film a couple months ago, because, er, I was befuddled.
This is like Kiarostami’s favourite shot — a man in a car, driving along some road in Iran. I guess there’s logistical reasons for that, too… I mean, the authorities in Iran are kinda “eehhh?” on Kiarostami’s films, so a car is a nice self-contained unit.
Gary Numan - Cars HD
The story behind this is apparently that Kiarostami was worried about what happened to the two boys who starred in Where Is the Friend’s House? after a huge earthquake in the area. So he went looking for them. And this is a fictional account of that?
It’s kinda fantastic so far — so focused.
Whoa.
This is so meta. These three films are the kinds of films that’ll keep film clubs atwittering for centuries!
Yes, that’s the scene from the third movie — they keep rehearsing and rehearsing the scene in that movie, but this is the “original”?
WHERE”S OSHA
I think this is the best movie of the trilogy? But if you haven’t seen the other two movies, then there’s a lot of stuff that wouldn’t… quite have the resonance it has here. So I wonder how seeing the third film after seeing this one would have been? Perhaps it would have been awesome?
Instead this is the awesome movie, because I watched it last.
And the box set is rather clever.
The cover has these die cuts…
And the die cuts continue inside.
So it’s like everything is nested inside.
Trés clevaire.
I’m watching the documentary now… and it explains a lot about how his non-professional actors aren’t… very natural. I mean, I watch a lot of stuff with non-professional actors (Varda, Bresson, etc) and they get amazing performances out of them. With Kiarostami, they’re totally unnatural and kinda smirking at the camera, and he’s saying that when he wants a sad scene out of somebody, he makes them sad the night before. To get the boy crying in Where Is the Friend’s House?, he tore up a polaroid he was fond of in front of his eyes. Etc. He’s… he was kind of a monster? And the result was totally unconvincing performances.
Nooo! This blu ray has been cut down to 16:9! How evil! Boo! Hiss!
What. Ever.
It’s the 90s!
I saw this movie back then, but I haven’t seen it since. I remembered it being pretty good, but it’s been brilliant so far. So snappy, so breezy. The jokes keep on coming at a dizzying pace.
Such a poseur.
Fashion!
Now here’s real literature.
This movie is pitch perfect… for the first two thirds. Then the Dreaded Third Act Syndrome happens, where Drama happens, and people Experience Character Growth, and that’s just kinda boring.
Now, how did I come to get this movie? Hm… Oh, right, I watched The Beaver Trilogy Part IV, and Crispin Glover was in that movie. And the director of this movie directed The Beaver Trilogy. (Not Part IV.) And I think this film was mentioned? So I had to see it, and now I am!
Mystery solved.
This is where Wes Anderson got his entire style from. This one scene.
Anyway, this is a low budget indie movie, I guess? But it’s really stylish, and it’s not as odd as you might think looking at these pictures. It’s about a strange boy (played by Glover) and a multi level salesman in training meeting up by accident, and I’m guessing hilarity will ensue.
It’s really charming so far, but not actually… “ha ha” funny.
See? Wes Anderson.
It’s really well filmed. The shots feel very thoughtful.
Yowza.
This is just a really enjoyable movie. Films like this have a tendency to start out strong, establishing the milieu of the movie, and then often start flailing around. This one doesn’t put a foot wrong at any point — it’s consistently amusing, and doesn’t overstay its welcome.
And the cinematography is fantastic.
It’s the only movie I’ve seen on Rottentomatoes that just has a single review.
Oh, I’ve gotta see that.
Yeah, he’s totally appearing in the costume for Rubin & Ed — and this is in 1987, doing publicity for River’s Edge. It took four years to get financing?
Well, this is quite meta. Astaire is playing a washed-up musical star, but Ava Gardner is playing herself… And I guess Astaire was past his prime (commercially, at least).
It’s most amusing.
This is quite the old-fashioned musical, but it’s about putting on a Broadway show, so some of the dance routines are in-show, and some are “fantasy”.
According to MGM records, the film earned them distributor rentals of $2.3 million in the U.S. and Canada and $1,202,000 in other countries, resulting in a loss of $1,185,000.
I’m both surprised and not — this is an amusing movie, but it’s also a bit out of step with the times? It’s manic and frothy, like a late 30s musical. And doesn’t really have a hook like Singin’ in the Rain (which was released the previous year).
Harsh!
Well, OK, now it’s dragging a bit. Too Much Drama.
Heh, nice set.
Such serious.
Shell shocked!
Perhaps it’s not the frothiness that’s the problem, but rather the opposite — the movie takes a long time to get to the inflection point… The plot is that they’re putting on a show, and the director wants to make it Faust, and that takes up 80 minutes. Then they start fixing the show (and make it a success), and that’s the rest of the movie. By the time we get to the success part, it feels like we’ve ready for the movie to end (while there’s half an hour to go), which is the wrong vibe altogether.
Creepy!
Are there any real hits here? I guess there’s That’s Entertainment, but…
The “successful” version of the show they ended up with seems totally nonsensical and disjointed — basically a vaudeville skit show. Which is hard to get enthusiastic about.
It’s OK? I mean, it’s fine, but it’s also disappointing, because it started off like gangbusters. And then it … got to bogged down? But it’s pretty good. Astaire and Charisse both shine, and Nanette Fabray steals any scenes she’s in. The music is meh, and the dance routines are nothing special.
So that’s Miriam Hopkins… I must have seen her in stuff, but I don’t remember anything in particular.
Perhaps Jekyll and Hyde? Her performance here seems very… er… stately.
Bette Davis is doing her Yes I’m Indeed A Teenage Girl For Sure thing.
Those skirts seem very practical. Gives you more lap to put your laptop on.
This is extremely melodramatic, which I quite like. The performances are entertaining, and the costumes are fun. But it’s a bit hard to get into — it’s just not all that gripping.
The story is adult, insofar as it is concerned with something beyond getting a certain girl into the arms of a certain man. But how dull it is! Written and directed with no variety or change of pace, “The Old Maid” just trudges sensibly along to its inevitable conclusion, and then stops.
Yeah, that’s basically the problem.
So I guess her character is supposed to be… 40 now? So no wonder she’s gone grey.
This old film does have good points, but at the end of the day, I just have to agree with the New Yorker review: It’s just a bit on the dull side.
I really haven’t watched many of Mike Leigh’s films… I always get them confused with whatsisname… Ken Loach? Hm.
Anyway, Leigh is the kind of director I’m always thinking I should watch more of (because I quite like British “Channel Four realism”). But the one film by Leigh I can remember watching (Naked) really rubbed me the wrong way.
So here we go again.
One of the main characters is a photographer, so lots of opportunity for these montages.
There’s like… a lot of people with this expression.
I don’t think the use of music is ideal. Some of it works well, but Leigh errs on the side of slathering music to underscore feelings, and it sometimes feels very pat indeed. Like this guy getting a “funny trombone” ditty.
Well, it might have been French horn.
But I guess the music is appropriate for a melodrama like this.
Everything is melodramatic to the max! Every conversation is life or death.
But it’s pretty amusing, and Brenda Blethyn is devastating.
I like some of these odd choices — like doing this shot for several minutes.
It’s an enjoyable movie. It’s by no means a naturalistic movie — it’s more of a well-oiled machinery than even a Douglas Sirk movie. But even so, there’s some interactions that don’t really work for me; where it’s a bit “c’mon. dude. c’mon”. It might even be the editing that’s sometimes a bit stilted?
I ain’t harf running out to buy his other movies, I don’t think.
Wow, this movie has been pretty annoying in the first few minutes — the use of music indiscriminately as a “bed”, and how Now That’s What I Call Stock Nature Sounds Vol XIV is used constantly… It’s ridiculous.
Everything here is a cliché.
Well, OK, I’m only ten minutes in. Perhaps it’ll turn out to be awesome, despite the indifferent (if pretty) cinematography, annoying soundtrack and atrocious foley work.
So bokeh.
Very drama.
If it hadn’t been for the music telling us how to feel (every damn second of this movie) I wouldn’t have been as annoyed, I think. But the sound bed is insufferable. So I turned it down now.
The incessant music er cessed! Ceased! Stopped! *phew* The movie is much more enjoyable now. (The hyper-active foley guy hasn’t given up yet, though — every time somebody picks up a piece of paper you get at SCRUNCH sound, and if somebody touches their hair you get a SCRIIIITCH sound.)
I think this is all supposed to happen on one day? In the previous scene, the sun was setting, and in this, it’s… not? So I guess they just filmed for a couple weeks without thought for where the sun was? It’s all filmed outside, si it’s a logistical nightmare if you want to have consistent light, and I think they just decided “eh whatevs”. Or perhaps “it’ll look more magical if every scene has the sun coming from a random direction”.
In 2022, Daughters of the Dust was named at number 60 in the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time list selected by critics and published every 10 years since 1952.
I’ll start by saying that I usually like non-linear movies
But… is it? Are people interpreting the shifting lights as meaning that things happen over a long time or something? It’s basically just a (big) family having a dinner party one day and talking about stuff (like whether to go north). (And then we get some flashbacks to Olden Times now and then.) It’s really straightforward — it’s a Robert Altman kind of thing?
(Well, OK, there’s also an unborn child doing a voice-over.)
It might also be the painfully uneven acting that’s leading people to think that there’s more er complexity? Some of the performances are really good, but two of the most central characters sound like they’re putting on a student performance of Shakespeare — “poetic” voices, don’t you know.
It seems to have several dialects that would be impossible to close caption and completely unintelligible as it is. Only a rare person would get anything from it.
Perhaps all the mystery surrounding this film comes from people not being able to understand what they’re saying? I’m watching it with subtitles, of course, and they are in standard English, not in the dialect they’re talking.
I’m actually kinda enjoying this movie now. If they’d removed the horrible soundtrack, it would have been a pretty watchable movie.
By turning down the volume so I almost couldn’t hear it, I found that I quite liked the movie. It’s nice — it’s a movie type that I’ve mostly encountered in Swedish cinema? That is, we’re introduced to a large group of people (for instance a family) who are getting together for an event, and we listen to all these people bicker and talk and slowly get to know how the family dynamics work. And then in the third act, there’s always some dramatic thing (somebody has to make a decision or whatever), and then everybody goes home.
I’ve had a look at rottentomatoes, and most of the reviews are incomprehensible to me, because they talk about “non linear” and “complex” and “timelines”, and… there’s less than a handful of flashbacks, and otherwise it’s totally, utterly linear, as far as I can tell. (Well, OK, there’s the unborn girl we see in the past, too, but she’s doing the voiceover, so…)
So it seems to be a well-liked movie, but because people didn’t understand what anybody was saying?
Anyway, the sountrack is so painful that I have to go with this die:
I was watching Polyester last month, and on one of the extras, Tab Hunter said (or somebody said that he said) that he was so impressed with Divine’s performance that he invited him to play in his next movie (which is this one). So I bought the bluray. By amazing koinkidink, I’d also gotten Eating Raoul, so I’m having a mini-Bartel festival here.
It’s Divine!
This is most amiable. It’s a straight-up old-fashioned parody of a western movie — I guess it references both classic westerns and spaghetti westerns. It feels a bit out of time — it’s from 1984, but it has a 70s vibe going on?
It’s funny, but it’s not hilarious.
And it’s a musical?
Edith Massey was apparently supposed to play this part… and they’ve kept the lines. You can just picture her saying all this stuff.
But I dunno. The movie was going quite well for about 45 minutes, and then it turns… more serious? Nastier? I mean, the *crack* gag is fine, but then to kill off the pianist? (Oops spoilers.) It just seems… mean, and isn’t that funny.
Apparently the movie bombed, and I can totally see why. It’s a hard movie to peg down. It’s not a Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker thing, and it’s not a John Waters thing, it’s not a Mel Brooks thing, and it’s not a straightforward parody, and it’s not an exploitation movie… instead it lives in a kind of uncertain state of uncertainness. As they say.
They do to!
The performances are wonderful, though, and without the scenery chewing from, well, everybody, there wouldn’t have been anything at all. It’s probably Divine’s greatest performance, really?
There’s also a lot of plot happening in the last half, and… it’s not that interesting? There’s still some good gags, but they mostly fall flat betwixt the plot machinations.
The first half of the movie is great, and the final scene is wonderful.
I’ve been hearing about this movie seemingly my entire life, but I’ve never gotten a handle on what this is supposed to be. That is, I’ll be reading an interview with somebody, and they’ll be mentioning this movie, and everybody agrees that it’s genius. But I’ve never seen it, and I’ve never looked the film up on the interwebs.
But while doing some shopping on the Criterion web shop I saw this and bought it, and now I’m watching it.
And…
… I realise that I thought that this movie was directed by the guy in Cold Souls:
I.e., Paul Giamatti, but that’s because if the beard and because the director was called Barthes. Not Bartel.
Is everybody as confused about everything, or is it just me?
Anyway, roll film.
Heh heh — this is some John Waters-like kinda thing?
And… this blu ray is in 16:9, but nothing was shot in 16:9, so Criterion has mangled the film!?
Yeah, it was 1.85:1 originally… they’ve cut the edges! Shame! Shame!
Huh, I just checked the liner notes — they claim that the original aspect ratio was 1.78:1 (i.e., 16:9)? I’d like to believe them, but… it would be a really unusual aspect ratio for 1982. Like really.
ANYWAY! ROLL MOVIE I SAID!
OK, this is more broad comedy than John Waters — it’s not unlike, say, Airplane? But a bit more… more.
It’s funny. But it’s… it’s kinda choppy? The jokes come at you fast, but then there are pauses where you’re just going “hm” while enjoying the, er, acting… It’s like… a bigger budget, straight, studio version of John Waters. I.e., a lot slower and less insane.
Hey! That’s the guy from Star Trek!
It really is the Star Trek guy.
I guess this is the type of film you should be really stoned to watch? And then everything would just be getting funnier and funnier… But unfortunately, I’m not, and I’m just getting bored with this. I mean, the funny bits are genius, but the movie lacks zip.
I kinda want to give this a ⚅ because of the concept, but the movie really, really drags, so it’s really more of a ⚁ film. So I’m going with:
Hm… are they using CGI in this chapter? They’ve doubled the budget again, so perhaps sending a helicopter up to shoot some footage was just too cheap now…
And the cinematography has changed quite a bit again.
Hey! How come he has a new shirt since the previous movie!? No blood stains on the collar!
This movie does not look as good as the second movie. Everything is just kinda washed out? It’s the same cinematographer, though.
The first movie had quite a bit of plot, and the second had, too — but this one is just, like, an extended action sequence? They could have added two hours to the second movie and that would have been these scenes.
But they’re good action scenes and all, so I’m not complaining. It’s just kinda odd is all.
OK, now we’re getting plot.
The more they develop the crime syndicate thing (modelled after the Vatican?) the sillier it gets.
All these movies have cute puppies.
Kitten!
This movie ups the humour in the action scenes, which is nice. But the scenes in between the action scenes just isn’t that compelling — several of them just kinda drag, and that hasn’t been the case in the first two films, really.
And things just don’t look as real as in the second film. I mean — this probably is a real shot? But it doesn’t look like it is, and it’s the same with a lot of the shots…
So from now on every shot of Keanu’s hand is going to be a special effects shot?
It’s weird that a huge increase in budget would lead to them using more CGI… I mean, it looks good, but…
It’s getting really video gamey now — the bad guys have levelled up and have magic armour that means that you have to shoot everybody a lot to make a difference.
OK, now they’re getting more effective guns, too.
And then we end with a … knife fight? That seems to go on forever? That’s anticlimactic.
Oh, OK, it’s not the end yet. Still 20 minutes to go?
*sigh*
This isn’t as good as the second movie. The second movie just looked really good, and didn’t have any boring bits. This feels like it’s treading water at times — it’s bit flabby. Not hugely, though. If they’d dropped, like, 15 minutes of the scenes where people are standing around talking about Rules and The Table, then it would have been a whole lot less boring.
John Wick 3: This Time It’s Personal. Chad Stahelski. 2019. ⚂
It’s a new Russian villain! The brother of the previous one.
This movie admirably dispenses with exposition in a couple of minutes, and then we’re in a car chase.
The cinematography on this one seems a lot better than the first one. The first one was relentlessly colour graded, making everything look rather blah, but here we seem to have actual colours. And while the action is still happening in dark environments, you can see what’s happening (instead of guessing, like in the first movie). Did this have a way higher budget than the first movie?
Yup — according to imdb, this was $40M, while the first was $20M. So they had more money for lighting.
Oh, OK. In this one we get the touchy feely stuff after a bit of action…
So who’s gonna kill the dog this time?
Oh, the villain this time isn’t Russian, but Italian? Or something?
Cool.
I assume this is a composite shot (because the elements just seem to fantastic), but it looks really good.
Heh heh. They’re going full Bond nonsense in this one?
It’s kinda shamelessly stupid, and I like that.
Rawk!
OK, this bit is like watching somebody play a video game, which isn’t great.
This really has spectacular use of location. It feels extremely… there… and it’s very pretty.
The first movie had some pretensions towards realism (however slight), but this is pure fantasy land, which is a lot more fun.
Brian Blessed!
But now it went from pleasantly absurd to silly. One gun? With seven bullets? But why?
This movie looks better than movies that cost five times as much. I guess it’s because they actually built these fun sets instead of just CGI-ing it in?
It’s really an enjoyable if nonsensical movie, but it’s too bad they couldn’t come up with an ending, and instead it just say that it’s going to continue in the next film. Isn’t he even going to be able to change his shirt before the next film?
Anyway, it’s one of those extremely rare sequels that are better than the original.
John Wick 2: The Wickening. Chad Stahelski. 2017. ⚄
I haven’t seen these John Wick movies, because I assumed that they were, well, pretty tedious, but I’ve recently seen several people with good taste state that they rather like these films, so I went ahead and bought the box set.
This better be good!
This is from 2014 — the apex (or possibly the zenith) of the Colour Grading Wars. Not a single pixel will make it to the screen with the actual colour it had when filming!
Aww.
OK, now the revenge is gonna start?
This is actually pretty well made. I mean, they are fridging the dog to give him a reason to start killing people (which is a better twist on this than usual — fridging a daughter or wife would be more traditional), but they’re also giving us a reason to care first. Which is unusual. That is, they managed to make the Keanu character both sympathetic and interesting in a very efficient (and non-clichéd) way.
But now I’m wondering whether he’s gonna get a new dog for each movie?
It’s too bad the fighting is happening in darkness, really… Not a very confident approach.
It’s Bergerac!
Finally! Ultraviolence!
The whole point of this movie is presumably to allow people to enjoy watching Keanu kill a whole bunch of Russians, so it’s a bit odd that it’s taken this long… but on the other hand, there’s 50 minutes to go, so perhaps the rest of the movie is just going to be Russapocalypse?
Very practical to have the sight light up your face.
I guess this is more of a fantasy movie than an action movie… The fantasy being that there’s a whole underworld of elegant hotels and clubs for elegant assassins etc.
I’m not quite sure how to throw the die on this one. Were the action sequences good? Yes. Was I bored? Yes. Was it interesting? Kinda.
So, this is about making a movie (perhaps related to the previous Kiarostami films like Where Is The Friend’s House).
Hm… Oh, I see that I’m watching these films out of order — this is the third film in the trilogy — I haven’t seen And Life Goes On yet. Oops.
Hey! That’s the guy who played the protagonist in Where Is etc!
Hit that mark!
But in this film it’s hard to say whether it’s obvious the actor is hitting a mark because they’re supposed to, or whether they’re not supposed to. It’s fun!
I’m enjoying this movie, but I’m having some problems actually following the plot here. It seemed that we were going all in on a kinda meta thing, and then we’re apparently following that actor (who’s really a mason) instead on his quest to marry a neighbourhood girl? So then we get scenes like:
Which are indeed two good reasons.
Heh heh, this granny doesn’t take any prisoners.
I’m not sure where Kiarostami is going with the movie-in-the-movie scenes — we’re getting to see the same scene over and over and over again, with small variation — somebody’s always flubbing their lines. The rest of the movie seems fairly straightforward, but these scenes seem like… uhm… Kiarostami’s making fun of himself, in a way? That he’s spending his days like this?
Extreme long shots.
I’m not even sure whether I like this movie, in a way? That is, I was pretty annoyed in parts — the repetetive takes are almost kinda magical, but not, and the cute romantic plot is so close to being really creepy and stalkerish.
And listening to the commentaries makes things even worse — Kiarostami’s son is extolling his father’s genius, but makes him sound like a really manipulative weirdo. Sorry!
The film was selected as the Iranian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 67th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. Many have since declared the film a masterpiece.[according to whom?]
Yes, I can see that it might be a masterpiece. But I’m going with:
Anyway, this movie is famous for, like, kinda killing off the “Marvel Cinematic Universe”? That is, the reactions to this were so adverse that Disney decided to scale back the Marvel movie stuff significantly, and sent all the producers to their corners to think about what they’ve done.
I just find that rather hard to grok, because the previous two Ant-Man films (by the same people) were among the better Marvel super-hero films, really — quippy, lighthearted and entertaining.
But we’ll see.
Well, this starts off well, if a bit leaden — it doesn’t have much zip.
Oh, OK, perhaps the problem is this stuff — I almost groaned out loud when I realised that this movie was a Snappening movie. It feels like that happened decades ago, and we still have to watch movies about it?
I’m not even sure I remember what that was about… except for snapping.
Wow, that’s a lot of CGI… I guess the rest of the movie is gonna be CGI with some humans composited over it once in a while?
Looks like it.
Man, this really boring. We’re getting a lot of exposition very slowly, and the main driver of the plot seems to be withholding information (which is the most tedious way to make things happen).
Oh, OK, perhaps this is part of why people didn’t like this movie. I mean, that’s an on-spec MODOK, I guess, but it just looks so stupid. Which is also on-spec — MODOK’s a character that’s been played for laughs a lot…
It’s like this movie just can’t get started. Whenever something starts to happen, we get fifteen minutes more of backstory, flashbacks and explanations.
We’re now one hour in, and they’re still introducing characters.
I guess we know that that’s gonna fail? Because Kang was supposed to be the villain in a bunch of new Marvel movies. But perhaps that’s changed, too, with the performance of this movie, and er the Kang actor’s performance. I mean behaviour.
I don’t know… I think a lot of this movie could have worked if they’d just dropped all the exposition and stuff. Then they’d have a movie that was about an hour long, and then they could have added 15 minutes worth of jokes, and then it would have been pretty OK.
Certainly feels like it.
And the Kang actor never stops giving Blue Steel.
I had a peek at Rottentomatoes, and many of the reviews said that the plot was convoluted or something. But it’s not — it’s more like the plot is barely there. What with all the infodumps, the plot is: Kang wants the macguffin, and the others want to stop him (because that would mean the end of the Multiverse, probably). But that all they had time for. Perhaps the lack of plot makes people feel that it’s convoluted?
(Or perhaps it was that bit where Kang explained that he’s fighting a war against other Kangs?)
But man, that was a bad movie. The CGI was surprisingly good, though — lots of goofy bits. And… that’s it.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Peyton Reed. 2023. ⚁
Oh yeah — I bought all of Preston Sturges’ movies (that are available), and this is apparently the last of them I haven’t seen.
Heh heh. It’s the shootingest kid.
Good form.
Oh, it’s a musical?
You know, Betty Grable is one of those actors I never can quite place. I bet I’ve seen dozens of movies with her, but I don’t think I would actually recognise her.
I know! Shocking!
Or … perhaps I’ve just seen a handful of films with her, but just remember the name because it’s er memorable — it’s such an anti-Hollywood-made-up-name: Grable.
Hm… this bluray is pretty odd — the black levels are like #333 instead of #000. Hm. Perhaps I can just lower the brightness?
Well, that looks better.
But… this movie is just kinda odd all over. I mean, I think if I were to read a recap of what I’ve seen so far, I would have assumed that it was a hilarious, madcap movie. But instead it’s just… lethargic. There are gags, but you have to tell yourself that: “Yes, I can see that this is a gag. It is even funny. I should probably laugh?”
That is, the pacing is just way off. Grable is doing her best to get things poppin’, but the rest just seem to be mouthing off lines while looking at the director for direction.
I’m normally all for a good yokel bit, but even that fails here.
Sturges’ good movies are wonderful. This just doesn’t work, despite a pretty good script and some scenes that are really funny. It’s like… imagine this movie directed by one of the old studio system workhorses like Sidney Lanfield or George Marshall, who pumped out several films each yea? Craftsmen who really knew what they were doing and did it in a reliably zippy way? It could have been hilarious.
It does have the silliest shootout ever, though — it’s a great spoof of Westerns.
The film, Sturges’ first Technicolor production, was not well received at the time it was released, and was generally conceded to be a disaster – even Betty Grable bad-mouthed it
Oh, and this was Sturges’ final movie in the US (but he did do one movie more, six years later, in France).
This is a hard one to throw the die on… it’s really not a good movie, but there’s bits that are really enjoyable. So ⚃? Uhm. No, let’s go with:
The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend. Preston Sturges. 1949. ⚂
I think this is basically a bunch of music videos strung together, but I’m guessing none of these videos were shown separately?
I was supposed to be washing my balcony furniture down, but instead I’m sitting here watching these videos… they’re really rather well made. Filmed on video? Hi-def video? They’re well edited and interesting.
I guess the songs here are basically most of the stuff from the Holy Wars album, but with a couple earlier tracks?
I mean, this is a collection of music videos, but I love Tuxedomoon and I quite like these videos — they’re original and interesting. So:
Yes, indeed — this is a live King Crimson thing from 1982. And I feel like I may have seen it before? The eight minute long version of Waiting Man seems familiar.
But what the hey — I can watch it again while cleaning the balcony.
Bill Bruford really wants to be at the front of the stage for this movie. But that’s a nice instrument.
And then we get a fifteen minute version of Sheltering Sky? Man, the people in Frejus are patient.
Yes! This is exactly what the people in Frejus needed right now! A five minute drum solo!
Obvs, if you’re not a fan of King Crimson (or King Crimson from this area; most people aren’t), this is gonna be the most boring thing ever. But for me, this is almost an ideal concert movie: No chatter, no audience shots, no interviews with people saying how great King Crimson is.
It’s just fantastic music filmed sympathetically.
But I’m deducting ⚀ because of the rather crappy VHS-like video quality. (The audio quality is great.)
John Carr is the editor, and no director is listed in the credits, so I’m crediting this to him. Hah!
I’ve been watching a whole bunch of concert DVDs, and DVDs included in CD box sets with music videos and stuff lately… (And mostly because I started, and once I start doing something, I just continue.)
This isn’t that, really, but a documentary film about Joëlle Léandre.
So far, it’s my Platonic ideal of a music documentary — we get quite substantial takes from a variety of concerts, and then inbetween we get Léandre talking to the camera about music. And that’s it. No talking heads dropping in with a sentence, no zooming on still photos, no voice overs. I.e., nothing annoying.
OK, we also get shots of Léandre shopping and talking to fans and stuff, but that’s not annoying.
I like the er cinematography here, too — I think it’s just a single camera in every shot? Which makes things quite like being present at a concert, because you can only watch one thing at at time — you can turn your head, just like the camera can pivot, but there’s no… editing.
I would have appreciated if they could, like, pop up some text to say who Léandre is playing with…
The performances are lovely.
As the movie progresses, there’s less talking and more music… which is nice (because the music is enjoyable), but it also feels a bit lopsided?
Léandre was talking about not playing a lot with French musicians… and then this guy was talking about how he had very few gigs in the US (where he’s from)… so is everybody playing in, like, The Netherlands?
It’s a documentary that’s very vague on locations and names.
This comes in a nice cardboard cover…
… and a substantial booklet of paintings by Léandre.
I liked this a lot. If you’re not a fan of Léandre’s music, I suspect it’ll be somewhat of a slog to get through — it’s almost two and a half hours long, and I guess about four fifths of the movie is live (improvised) performances.
This is a movie so obscure that nobody’s even bothered to make an IMDB entry for it? It looks pretty elaborate, and discogs has the data. So it was released on a VHS? And it’s the music of Tuxedomoon, of course.
I got this from a Tuxedomoon extras DVD.
I’ve got a gazillion Tuxedomoon albums (I’ve got 43 of the 9 albums they released), but I don’t think the soundtrack to this movie has ever been released in this form? Most of the songs have, but there’s different mixes/versions and atmospherics…
I guess it’s kinda like a long-form music video — it doesn’t seem to be narrative, and it seems tied to each song.
How much you’re going to enjoy this movie depends on how much you like Tuxedomoon’s music and how drunk you are. I’m scoring 11 on both, so I’m giving this:
The Ghost Sonata. Bruce Geduldig / Winston Tong. 1982. ⚄
OK, it’s got 105 seconds of co-producers at the start, so perhaps it being Netflixey isn’t going to ruin it totally…
Man, that’s a bad shot. It’s like somebody phoning into the Netflix Movie-Like Creation Department and requesting a Cowboy Walking In A Hallway scene.
Cumberband Whatsisname is really bad at being a cowboy.
I have no idea whether anything here is real — this scene looks like it’s 100% CGI, but why would anybody CGI a scene like this? So I guess it’s probably real, but they’ve just fucked things up so badly that you can’t tell. Filmed in summer in New Zealand when everything is green, but then colour graded to a brown desert? I don’t know, but it looks horrible.
Everything here looks so unreal… is that like a commentary on something?
This is really bad. Really bad! Even for a Netflix movie!
I was a Campion fan back in the Sweetie days, but then she got all Oscar Bait, and I guess this is the baitiest ever:
It was nominated for twelve (!) Oscars… and then won only one. Yoinks! Is that a way for the Oscars people to say “fuck you” to Netflix or something?
Such Montana.
It’s so… it’s so… crass? Is that the word I’m looking for? It’s a movie that wants to hang everything on Benderbatch’s scenery chewing performance, and that just kinda fails.
Such a strange doctor.
This is like a New Era of Quality TV thing, but in movie form. Which makes sense! It’s Netflix.
It doesn’t even make much sense. That… thing… that Cumulusband used to… gain entry… to a whole lake in the middle of the woods? Like… what? A secret huge lake you can only reach via a hutch? What?
Is this pounding symbolic of something!? Are they finally going to have sex!?
But the movie’s gotten a lot more watchable after the first hour, which was pure distilled tedium.
And then it gets both tedious and offensive — of course the gay brother has to die, because this movie was apparently filmed back in the 80s. The nineteen eighties.
Man, this film is such a turd. And it doesn’t even look good.
This is from a DVD box set of public domain B movies. Apparently nobody knows who made this — there’s no entry on imdb and the movie itself doesn’t say who the director is.
But I’m guessing this had to be from the early 30s? But not too early — the audio is scratchy, but actually sounds pretty nice.
Hm… or perhaps it’s way later? The songs could be 40s songs… It’s just weird they’d use the name “soundies” if it’s not early 30s.
It’s a kind of vaudeville thing, but in this movie it’s being presented as happening at a party in a house.
There’s comedy bits, and there’s musical bits.
Wow, this routine is so boring I literally died.
Oh!! This isn’t actually a movie, but just a compilation of shorts!
The first one was kinda bad, but let’s hope this one is better.
This one has more pizzazz.
And is from 1934.
This tune is very good.
That’s an unusual pan.
Man, Ethel Water’s got a beautiful voice. And another pretty good tune.
But so short! That song should have been three times as long.
“Soundies” were American films based around a song, dance, or orchestral number. They were at their peak between 1941 and 1947 and presented as 16mm “jukebox” films in nightclubs, taverns and amusement centres.
So the Ethel Waters thing is from 34, but the other two are from 49 and 47.
Very confusing.
I should buy more chicken.
Man, this routine is … well, actually, I’m not sure what it is. The sound is kinda bad on this so I’m only picking out one word in three. It might be hilarious for all I know, but I don’t think so.
The Ethel Waters thing was pretty good, but the other two bits weren’t.
I’ve never seen this movie with the Odorama cards… But I wonder whether this 2K Criterion release has the cards?
OH MY GOD! IT DOES!
Yes! It smells like rose! I’m guessing all the other smells are going to be just as pleasant!
(No spoilers, please.)
Hey! We went to 1.85:1 all of a sudden!
All the stars.
My god, this movie is brilliant.
I guess it’s Waters’ last “classic” movie? With all his crew?
After doing movies in a pretty steady clip, there’s a seven year pause before his next movie — Hairspray, which was a major studio film, I think.
That is the only way I’m moving around from now on! Disco dancing all the time!
Nice!
I’m shocked, but the Odorama cards really add a certain jennesequa to this movie. I’ve seen it several times before, but without the cards.
So the “3” is flashing, and I grab the card and sniff and I’m not quite sure what I’m sniffing…
Yes! It’s glue! I’m sniffing glue!
Fantastic.
But whatever you do, don’t use your nails for scratching! You’ll never get the odours off your fingers.
Hey! I love India Song… I’ve watched it a bunch of times. And now I’ve got a new 2K restoration, so I’m gonna watch it again one of these days.
Hopefully somebody’ll do a Duras box set one of these days.
Nice!
Heh heh.
Well, OK, now the movie is over, and I’ve washed my hands nine times, and I’m airing out the apartment, because the smells were all kinda vile. Even the good smells! They all had a kinda solventey unpleasant smell going on, probably composed of chemicals illegal in the EU. And several of the smells were just impossible to tell what they were supposed to smell… but they had to source a new supplier for this edition, since the old supplier had gone out of business.
Well, it’s strange watching a Bond movie that looks this CGI-ey and greenscreeney. But for all I know, some of these shots are on actual location, but just colour corrected into looking really fake?
Rant time! I wrote this earlier but didn’t have any place to put it, so what about here?
An amusing thing that’s happening these days is that people complain about how CGI everything is, and then the makers behind that clap back with a “LOL THAT WAS REAL”.
Like the giraffes on One of Us.
Or the park scene in The Sandman.
And yes, that’s “LOL” all right, but not for the reasons the filmmakers a apparently laughing, but because these scenes, filmed for real, in camera, look so awful that they are indistinguishable from CGI scenes.
And that’s because these aren’t “real” even though they’ve been shot kinda on locations. (Ish.) The giraffes were against bluescreen backgrounds and had to be “colour graded” back to something that actually looked like a giraffe, and the Sandmand scene has had its colours and white balance tweaked beyond believability to match the rest of the awful CGI extravaganza.
That is, to avoid the occasional “real scene” to stick out like a sore thumb between all the green screen, filmmakers are making them look as bad as the rest.
And then they go “LOL” when viewers can’t pick them out, like that’s a gotcha. It’s not. It just means that it all looks horrible.
Because that’s the truth. Just about every TV series looks horrible these days: It all looks vaguely unreal, but it’s often difficult to point out just which elements have been generated, because it all looks bad.
I started rewatching Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV series a few weeks back, and my immediate reaction was just a feeling of relief: Everything looked real. The sets looks like if they had carpenters in to hammer some plywood into place, but there’s never that slightly nauseating feeling of unrealness where you’re pretty certain that the actor isn’t actually leaning against the wall they almost seem to be leaning against.
We’re back!
My god, this looks bad.
Even this looks kinda bad.
The director was particularly proud of this shot? We got this for like ten seconds. Is the director like 18 years old?
Well, finally something kewl.
So this is from 2021? I’m assuming this is all a COVID reference?
That’s some weird colour grading.
I thought the mania for teal/orange had dissipated a decade ago, but it’s back now…
OK, I’m griping a lot about the colour grading, but I’m enjoying this movie. It’s got a certain Bondness going — it’s moving slowly, but in a way that seems to be building up to some spectacle or other, which is what we want from a Bond movie, right?
This is classic Bond — it’s fun, and nothing makes much sense, and that makes it even more fun.
I mean… Spectre’s entire idea for that scene was apparently to kill Bond by stealing some kind of virus, and then exposing Bond with that virus in a very complicatedly staged setup… instead of just shooting him… which is very on brand for Bond movies.
I Approve Of These Spectre Logistics.
Ooh such orange.
Teal and orange.
Such real ship.
Nerd alert!
Man, this colour grading is brutal — it’s really like being back in 2013. I don’t think a single pixel escaped unscathed from the original SSD.
It’s Norway!
This could have done with more humour. There’s just long sequences that are kinda … not very interesting.
This film got millions in Norwegian subsidies to shoot these scenes. Probably well spent?
Ah yes, the Norwegian fern woods.
I make fun, but this bit is quite entertaining — lots of practical stunts (that look kinda good) and some CGI (I’m assuming).
Well, I have to give them props for this CGI set — it looks like a really good mad scientist hide out. And the composition is flawless: I was wondering whether they’d actually built this set physically.
So now I’m reevaluating whether any of the scenes were real — are those backgrounds CGI?
I quite liked most of this movie. That is, I wanted to watch a Bond movie, and this was a Bond movie. But is it a good Bond movie? Well… it did have the required elements, but it seemed to waste a lot of the set pieces that were presumably meant to be exciting. For instance, that plane drop? It should have been exciting and stuff, but instead it was like watching somebody play a video game on Youtube.
And some of the casting choices are just weird. Like… that Q? They went with The Full Nerd, which could work, but it just wasn’t funny enough.
So the director was flubbing some important elements, but it was still… fine. It’s OK. Nothing you’ll remember in a few years. Like most Bond movies.
This is a very traditional documentary — talking heads that deliver one line and then there’s a cut to a different person, then a cut to an old still photo with a zoom-in, and then three seconds of old footage, and then back to another line from a different talking head.
I hate this genre so much.
But it’s something I’m kinda interested in — it’s about Max’s Kansas City, and it’s kinda interesting even if the form is really, really, really trite.
At least they’re showing the old footage without cropping to 16:9.
One weird thing about this docu is how little actual music they’re playing. I think the above is the first actual live performance (with sound) we’ve seen? That may be due to little being filmed, but when there’s talking heads, we’re getting a bed of tracks from Now That’s Vaguely Like A Rock Song… so perhaps they just couldn’t cough up money to license actual music?
CBGB’s looks a lot cooler than Max’s, but I guess there’s been a hundred docus about CBGB’s already.
Jayne County has the best anecdotes! The one about Dee Dee Ramone turning tricks and getting his dick stabbed…
That’s the cleanest cat ever. It’s been washing itself this entire movie.
Makes sense!
I was wondering whether they had a composer for the music-like stuff they used as a bed, but nope. So that stuff was from one or more of these bands?
Well, this isn’t a very good movie, but I hate all these documentaries. But there’s some really interesting stuff here… So… I’m going with:
What the fuck? Surely this wasn’t originally in 16:9?
Gah! They’ve cut this down from 1.85:1 to 1.77:1! The edges are gone!
Now I don’t know whether I want to watch this… I was pretty suspicious of this box set — it’s got all the Freddy movies — on four bluray discs.
Except for the mutilation, the restoration looks pretty OK, though.
I was gonna relax with some trash after having watched over thirty quality films, and now it’s ruined. RUINED I TELLS YA
This movie is still kinda scary, though. I haven’t seen it since I was a teenager, and I remember being scared shitless.
Such teenagers they have in high schools!
It’s just such a good idea. I mean, Nightmare on Elm Street — nightmares are the scariest things most people experience (hopefully), and this film harnesses that expertly. And Wes Craves can play around endlessly with the viewer’s expectations — “did she nod off? is this real and we can relax? or is she asleep and we have to be prepared for Freddy to jump out of the mirror?”
The concept is just so much more exciting than the other major horror franchises like Halloween or (*zzz*, ironically) Friday the 13th. There’s just so much more scope for a writer to play around with.
Allegedly this series was the main thing that kept New Line Cinema afloat for a decade.
I’ve seen some of the subsequent films before, but not all of them, I think.
Not just a TV in bed — but shoes!?!
Oh, I didn’t realise until just now that it’s Johnny Depp. His first role?
Very ergonomic.
The 80s was a more … hopeful time, I guess? People in horror movies at the time often take a totally rational approach to what’s happening, try to work out the rules and vanquish the evil. (See Poltergeist, for instance.) I think that in most recent films of this ilk, we just see people crying, running around, and then crying some more until the film is over?
It’s a pretty good movie. I’m never sure how to throw the die on horror films like this — I mean, it’s not a “good movie”, but it’s a good horror movie. Let’s go with:
Geez. There’s a lot of big names here (and names that are gonna be big later)…
I saw this movie back in the 90s, but I remember absolutely nothing about it.
This is a really callous movie. If it had a few more jokes, it’d almost be a John Waters movie. (Or perhaps that’s just the Kathleen Turner presence speaking.) It’s very stylish, and very cynical.
Aaah! Kirsten Dunst isn’t Kristen Bell! This explains so much!
There’s something really odd going on with the white balance in some of the shots. I guess these days it would all be colour graded into something less odd-looking.
Like what I said about the white balance…
Anyway, I didn’t dislike the start of this movie — it was kinda mysterious, even if a bit icky. But now it’s just “oh, abusive parents gonna abuse”, which isn’t that interesting.
This is the kind of movie I want to love? But I don’t? It’s probably just me, and the movie is a masterpiece. But I’m going with:
This is from a box set of Columbia noir movies — the picture looks nicely restored, but there are some audio/video sync issues?
Hm… but only when some people are speaking? Perhaps some people were dubbed and the problem was always there?
This is an odd movie. I mean, I don’t know where it’s going at all, and that’s unusual. And I like it.
The performances are rather stiff, though, as if the director didn’t know quite how to direct people… but the (credited) director, Vincent Sherman, is an old veteran of the business, so that’s not it at all.
Aldrich called the movie “the first pro-labor picture; in it I am trying to emphasize another particular aspect of our times – the tragedy of the small businessman, caught between the ever expanding large corporations and the pressures of organized labor. The small businessman has often, in order to stay alive, compromise with graft and blackmail….[the film] should be an unusually frank film.”
[…]
Sherman says Cohn then asked him to finish the picture. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” said Sherman. “I re-shot, I would say, about seventy percent of the picture in about ten days time.”
So Aldrich was fired, and Sherman re-shot most of the film in a very short amount of time. I guess that explains the general weirdness of the film.
Nice hat!
The cinematography on this is really on point. Lots of striking shots…
The tough-guy union man is also adept at changing nappies. That’s an unusual detail to put in…
There’s just a lot of stuff going on here — as if this movie was designed to appeal to students writing term papers on it thirty years later. There’s the union thing, of course, but also the Italian mobsters vs Italian organisers, and Jewish manufacturers, and the apparent love interest being the (obviously) soon-to-be-widowed wife of the organiser (with the nine month old baby), and…
Was all that in the original script, or is it this messy because of the change in directors?
(She’s breastfeeding the baby.)
About the half-way point, the movie just seems to get a whole let interesting. I mean, on a scene-to-scene basis. It’s more pure melodrama instead of being a kinda odd thing? Perhaps the remaining Aldrich scenes are towards the beginning (if they filmed it chronologically)?
Yeah, the first half was weird and great, and the last half is just snooze-ville: No nerve, no interest, no fun.
So… this is one of those things where your mileage will vary a lot. Some of the early scenes are so great you might want to ⚄ this, and the last half is so boring that ⚀ seems too good. So I’m going with:
The Garment Jungle. Robert Aldrich & Vincent Sherman. 1957. ⚂
Ah, right — I’ve seen this movie before a few years back. But that was a lousy DVD copy, and this is from that new Mae West blu ray box set from Indicator.
Mmm… beer…
Oooh, I love this movie. It’s all repartee.
Mae West is so much fun to watch. She absolutely hams every line up to the max; very knowingly makes everything into a triple entendre. It’s just delightful.
West controlled casting (and pretty much everything; she wrote the movie, too), so she cast Cary Grant in his (I guess?) first major part. She allegedly didn’t want anybody to outshine her on the screen, so she didn’t want a well-known actor… and boy is Grant awkward in some of these scenes. But he’s still the same charming Cary Grant everybody came to love…
Eek! That’s a really unfortunate anti-Semitic caricature…
That hair must have taken hours to get just right… it’s like a helmet of blondeness.
I guess this is, really, more of a ⚃ movie — it’s got some pacing problems, and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but… I just find it delightful. It’s so cute! So I’m going with:
It looks like only Carol Anne is returning from the previous movies?
It had half the budget of the previous movie, and it looks like it didn’t make the budget back (which explains why this is the last Poltergeist movie).
II was more wide-screen — this is in 1.85:1. And I appreciate that the people who made the blu-ray didn’t chop it down to 16:9 — so many films that are close to that aspect ratio are mutilated these days.
In some ways, this is a bit more scary than Poltergeist II — it’s got a kinda creepy atmosphere that works, while II pretty much failed at that. This is obviously a final desperate cash grab at a disintegrating franchise, retaining very little of the “mythology” of the first two movies, which in some ways is liberating?
Huh… Carol Anne has changed a lot in the two years since the previous movie… Oh!
She was prescribed cortisone injections to treat the disease during the time she was filming Poltergeist III. The steroidal injections resulted in facial swelling of the cheeks, which O’Rourke’s mother said she was very self-conscious about.
And then she died just after finishing this movie, so it was released after her death.
*gulp*
Well, that’s another reason to end a movie franchise… when two of the original starring actors are dead over a short period of time, perhaps it’s time to give up.
Looks like a reliable group of people.
Oh, Tangina’s back, too, so it’s not just Carol Anne.
The cinematography in this movie is kinda interesting. It’s… kinda cold and distant? Lots of far-away shots through windows and mirrors.
So many mirrors — walls and walls of mirrors.
I like this one! It’s kinda scary without having a lot of jump scares. The horrors are kinda original without being gross. OK, it’s a dopey 80s horror sequel, but it’s way better than it has any reason to be.
I watched the first Poltergeist movie again a few months ago, and I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was. So, of course, I got all the sequels on blu ray… and I’m assuming they’re all gonna suck, but let’s see.
I don’t recall whether I saw the sequels back in the 80s or not, but… probably?
Such matte painting!
Oh, I assumed that this was a direct-to-video kind of thing, but it had a sorta big budget.
Hey! Did the entire cast return for this movie? I didn’t expect that… Hm… Oh, the older sister is gone, and for the normal reason:
The only family member absent from the film is Dana, who according to the script is off at university, but a scene explaining away her absence was never filmed. Dominique Dunne was murdered by her boyfriend John Thomas Sweeney (who later changed his name to John Maura and disappeared) shortly after “Poltergeist (1982)” premiered.
On October 30, 1982, Dunne was strangled by her ex-boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, during an argument on the driveway of her West Hollywood home. She fell into a coma and died five days later on November 4, 1982. In a court case which gained significant media coverage, Sweeney was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in Dunne’s death, and served three and a half years in prison.
Three and a half years in prison for strangling her? *double sigh*
This movie isn’t, you know, awful or anything, but it’s not scary… and the first movie was kinda interesting? The characters took a logical approach to exploring the various phenomena, but now we know what’s going on, sort of, so it doesn’t have that, either.
The director here is mostly known for doing music videos, apparently — his movie career isn’t exactly extensive. But I do feel like I’ve seen Breaking Glass? Hm…
Heh; I remember we used to shout at each other “MIRROR ALERT” when watching horror movies back then… because if you have a mirror — especially one on a door or something — there’ll invariably be a jump scare coming up.
Yup!
This isn’t a good movie, but it’s not annoying, either. It sort of trundles along, making very little sense; mostly it’s just… there. It looks good, so I’m gonna up my dice here:
Poltergeist II: The Other Side. Brian Gibson. 1986. ⚂
Heh. This is a century old… but that’s some good CGI. I mean stop motion animation.
These are good sets.
Oh, they’re doing the three stories in parallel instead of sequentially?
Heh heh.
Nice!
This must have been a really expensive movie to make. Huge sets and the gags keep on coming.
She’s applying makeup at the table, so why shouldn’t he be shaving?
This is very amusing. If it had bombed at the box office, the plan was to cut it into three separate shorts, but it didn’t, so they didn’t. There’s a few laugh out loud moments, but it’s mostly just very… droll.
Like jokes about weather forecasting. Same a hundred years ago as today.
There’s not that many gags here that couldn’t work in a modern comedy, really.
Kitten!
OK, perhaps that gag wouldn’t have been done in a modern movie.
Nice mammoth.
Kitten!
And that gag would have taken five minutes, not ten seconds, in a modern movie. This is really good stuff, not just thoroughly amusing, but also pretty smart.
Three Ages. Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline. 1923. ⚄
Well, since I’ve watched One From The Heart and Hammett, I might as well watch this now — another nail in Coppola’s box office coffin:
Hey! Tom Waits!
Oh yeah, I remember this bit… the only things that have colour here are the fishies. I remember renting this on VHS back when the movie was new, so probably 83-84-ish?
Stayin aliiiive
The casting on this is insane. Dennis Hopper as Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke’s father? Brilliant.
Hm… come to think of it, a whole lot of the actors in this movie have had pretty strange movie careers. Nicholas Cage did a bunch of good movies in the 80s, and then nothing but crap. Mickey Rourke was tipped for greatness, but then kinda dropped out. Matt Dillon did some interesting movies, and then… not.
I’m not sure it’s a totally successful movie, but it’s kinda mesmerising.
Hey… that’s the wrong aspect ratio. *hits aspect change button*
That’s better.
I think this is the only blu ray I’ve seen that comes up in the wrong ratio here? Weird. But it is a Spanish blu ray (from StudioCanal!), so er uhm.
But! This is a Zoetrope Studio movie!? I thought they went bankrupt toot suite after One From The Heart totally bombed, but they got this Wim Wenders movie out, too? Hm… no, they didn’t actually go bankrupt, apparently, but the studio lot shut down, I think.
Oo, this totally looks like it was shot on that lot. It looks a lot like One From The Heart. I.e., great.
Wim Wenders, man… I’m just suddenly starting to wonder why all the Cinematheque darlings of the 80s have disappeared from history. You see 60s and 70s indie directors popping up on all sorts of lists (like the Sight & Sound 100), but none of the 80s ones. Perhaps it’s just an age factor? But you’d think that people that grew up on this stuff would be plenty old enough — I mean, they’d be in their 50s, so they should be manning all these lists.
Let’s see… the hottest directors back then were… Peter Greenaway, Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, Atom Egoyan, Aki and Mika Kaurismäki, Derek Jarman, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Hal Hartley… David Lynch, of course. Susan Seidelman? Andrei Tarkovsky did movies in the 80s, but is perhaps of an earlier age.
I feel like I’ve tried coming up with this list before, and it’s going to bug me all night. I feel like I’m forgetting a lot of directors.
Frederic Forrest isn’t quite the right actor for this sort of thing. He’s not exactly Brando.
Critically acclaimed German director Wim Wenders was hired by Francis Ford Coppola to direct Hammett as his American debut feature. Coppola and the film’s financing studio, Orion, were dissatisfied with the original version and nearly the entire film was reshot.
[…]
The reshoot was “entirely in one sound stage”, which Wenders avoids: “The first film was shot entirely on location […] in real places in San Francisco.” Of that, “In the final product ten shots survived from my original shoot: only exteriors […] a couple of shots from the first, maybe 5% of the film from the first version.” When Wenders later wanted to finish and release his director’s cut as “an interesting case study”, he found the material was destroyed: “They only kept a cut negative, everything else is junked.”
Wow. Wenders first shot a film on location, and then Coppola (and Orion) made him re-shoot it all on the Zoetrope studio lot. That’s… insane.
If imdb is to be believed, nobody at all saw the finished film.
That number just looks literally in-credible, though. I mean, I watched it at the time, so it had to have had some distribution.
Forrest is just totally uninspiring here. He’s half-smiling in an unconvincing way all the way through, and it really seems like he’s stoned most of the time. And not in an amusing way, but just being vague and tiresome.
I think Francis was too much of a director himself so he didn’t really delegate enough. He wanted to have a hand in all the projects and there were lots of projects. I had my studio next door to David Lynch; his movie never got made…there were a lot of great people on the lot, but Francis…he really wanted to be able to discuss every detail with everybody. As a studio boss you have to delegate. They didn’t produce even half of the films they wanted to produce.
Oh my god! It’s a shot from the original movie that’s survived!
After the one-two punch of One From The Heart and this movie, Forrest didn’t do any leads for a while, and moved more into TV. Coppola thought Forrest had star power, but…
I have to admit that my attention started to wander almost immediately, so I may well have missed bits that make this a better movie. But I found this to be pretty dull and uninspiring — there’s very little here of Wenders’ usual charms (and he can be very charming).
I’m celebrating buying a new, bigger 4K TV by watching this 0.7K DVD. Everybody’s so big!
I bought a new TV because I destroyed my old one by not paying attention to its OLED-ness. My fault. That is, as a screensaver I displayed the currently playing album, so that takes up an approximate square in the middle of the TV. And that started showing — a yellowing, ugly square in the middle.
So if I had to buy a new TV, I might as well go bigger, so I’m now at 77″. (Sony.)
But it looks quite nice now that I’ve switched off all of the upsampling and motion “improvements” and stuff.
This movie is pretty original — it’s about a guy that has a father that goes to jail, and the son get involved with the mobsters to get him a parole. (Somehow! The scheme seemed kinda odd.) But beyond the plot, it’s got an unusual wistful tone.
Dorothy!
It’s an odd pairing, too. Tyrone Power is slightly reticent and diffident, while Dorothy Lamour is a total predator on the hunt.
Indeed.
Unfortunately, as it winds its way to its conclusion, it loses a lot of tension. It’s not that it’s too long or anything, but it’s just hard to remain interested.
Oh my god. That was the funnest start to an action movie evar.
Noooe! Now there’s a sensitive flash-back! Whyyy
It’s Marky Mark!
How come they never get him a better hair stylist? Or is it a wig? No, a wig would look better.
I’m not bored, but I think a lot of that has to do with Holland’s charm — he’s just fun to watch on the screen.
Aww.
Hey, it’s that guy from all the Almodóvar movies!
I think the Barcelona tourist dept. got their money’s worth.
I’m guessing the logic of this is really eh uhm simplistic (I’m trying to avoid saying “bleedin’ stupid”) because it’s based on a video game?
But I appreciate stupid in action movies.
The action stuff here is a lot of fun — the extreme silliness of some of the bits is hard to not be charmed by — and there’s a whole bunch of likeable actors here. So it’s really watchable… but then there’s these bits where they try to cram “character development” in, and the movie sags.
(The “mystery” itself is almost unbelievably stupid, but that’s fine.)
This more of a ⚃ movie, but the final action sequence had me laughing out loud several times, so:
After watching a bunch of older movies, it’s always an adjustment going back to modern ones — everything seems unreal. That looks extremely like a CGI exterior, right? But is it? Is it just filmed in a way that’ll make it blend into the CGI-ness that’s going to happen later?
It looks like shit anyway.
And this is a 4K disc with the highest bitrate I’ve seen — it’s going past 100Mbps here and there.
Even just simple scenes like this — this totally looks like greenscreen, and somebody has rendered that wall instead of spending a few bucks on bringing a carpenter in.
It might just be the colour grading that makes everything look shitty, though.
Such real.
Did they CGI the rolls of cloth!? I think they did.
But it’s not just that it’s ugly — this is tedious as hell.
The aesthetics of the film are also bland: the visuals are shockingly unappealing: brown, spare, with a digital sheen that makes the well-appointed period costuming and production look modern and artificial.
OK, this is beyond tedious, so I ditched it after 33 minutes.
This film is part of a two-pack DVD, and I got the set for the other movie in the set: The Devil’s Daughter.
This looks even rougher than that movie. It looks like it’s been transferred to video (for TV broadcast?) and then to DVD?
This isn’t bad — it’s got nerve and fun performances. I’m not familiar with the director, Marshall Neilen, but he did 63 movies between 1916 and 1937 — with a sharp drop-off once talkies started. So I’m guessing he wasn’t well-funded, and this does look pretty cheap in parts.
It’s too bad this er “transfer” is so awful — it looks like they’re using the scenery in interesting ways. This looks like it’s been filmed in the middle of a jungle type of swamp or something. But it’s just hard to tell here.
Wow, that looked like he was actually fighting a live crocodile. (Or is it alligator? I forget.)
I guess this is in the public domain, so I guess there’s little chance of anybody doing a proper restoration of this (because where would the money be in that?), but this deserves better treatment than this. It’s kinda actually kinda good.
And interesting. It’s got voodoo stuff, and there’s also stuff about “passing”, and racism and stuff.
OK, it’s losing tension now, but it’s still… like nothing I’ve seen before. That guy to the left (who’s in love with Chloe (Olive Borden) who’s passing), has just told the other guy who’s in love with Chloe that she’s *gasp* got a Black mother!!!
And that her mother is a voodoo priestess!
I have absolutely no idea where this is going.
What!?! She’s the long-lost daughter of this white guy! She’s not Black at all! And this is the guy why lynched her Black (now apparently her adopted) father! Oh the tangled web!
These women doubt that she’s really the long-lost daughter, because “she’s so dark”.
And whenever she steps out, Chloe suffers attempted rape by these two guys.
It’s a very strange film.
I’m not at all sure how to parse this movie. I mean, what they were trying to do. Were they pointing out the absurdities of the concept of “race”? Or was this a movie where the audience was supposed to be horrified that a nice white girl had been mistaken for not being white?
Anyway, it’s entertaining, so:
Chloe, Love Is Calling You. Marshall Neilan. 1934. ⚃
Oh! I was thinking this was Dumbo, so I’ve been avoiding watching it. (The spine of the blu ray just says “Jumbo” without the “Billy Rose” bit.)
This starts off with an overture, then a long title sequence, and then a sort of introduction by this guy (sung, of course) — he’s singing that the premise of the movie is to bring the circus to you. So we’re like nine minutes in when the movie starts.
It’s like they’re really trying to class this movie up like it’s a blockbuster like… er… Gone With The Wind or something.
Doris Day!
I was starting to wonder whether this was going to be all sing-songey, but there’s talking, too.
MGM bought the rights to the musical soon after it reached the stage.
[…]
According to MGM accounts, the film earned $2.5 million in the US and Canada and $1.5 million overseas, but because of its high cost recorded a loss of $3,956,000. It was the last film producer Joe Pasternak made at MGM.
The director Charles Walters only made two movies after this one.
So I guess Doris Day has to carry this movie. I mean, we’ve also got Jimmy Durante and Martha Raye, but for such a big budget movie, all of these starts are a bit (or a lot) past their peaks in popularity.
Let’s see… it’s Durante’s final movie. Martha Raye did one movie (eight years later) after this. Day did a bunch of movies until 1968.
Oh, the original stage musical was from 1935, but it didn’t get a movie adaptation until 1962. I guess that explains why it seems like such an anachronism.
Original producer Billy Rose stipulated that if a film version was ever made, he must be credited in the title, even if he were not personally involved.
Both play and film feature Durante leading a live elephant and being stopped by a police officer, who asks him, “What are you doing with that elephant?” Durante’s reply, “What elephant?”, was a show-stopper in 1935. This comedy bit was reprised in his role in Billy Rose’s Jumbo and is likely to have contributed to the popularity of the idiom, the “elephant in the room”.
But man, this is not a good movie. What were they thinking! Doing an overly long vaudeville/circus musical, with virtually no star drawing power, in 1962? Without a director like Stanley Donen, who could possibly have made this work? Instead it’s just flabby and tedious.
I mean, it holds true to the premise of bringing the circus to you, but I think the reason people like going to circuses is to look at all this stuff in person — to be in the presence of an elephant — and a filmed circus isn’t the same at all.
There’s also a plot involving the circus going insolvent, and they weave the scenes from this plot into the circus scenes. Which is a classic structure and can work perfectly. But these scenes are filmed so indifferently. Have they heard of the term “blocking”? These scenes are just amazingly amateurishly filmed, as if they used a newbie second unit director for these parts.
The elephant is really talented, though.
And Stephen Boyd as the beefcake, I mean romantic lead… His only talent seems to be standing around with that expression on his face.
I usually ditch movies that are this tedious, but I watched this to the bitter end. OK, while doing some programming in the middle. Because it looks quite good? I think that’s the reason I didn’t bail.
But there’s really no reason for anybody to watch this — it’s horrible. Martha Raye gets some good schtick in, but it’s otherwise… just…
I saw this in a cinema during its original run. I remember my reaction to it (as we were walking out of the place) as being “batteries? batteries!?!”
I.e., the reaction any nerd should have.
But watching it now, it looks cooler than I remember it. I mean… opening with that scene with Trinity… it’s fab. And… it’s greener? (This is the latest 4K restoration.)
Keanu does that face very well. Almost as if it’s natural.
Nice jewellery.
It’s Cowboy Curtis!
They’re really into acupuncture.
I guess there’s a lot of info to dump on the viewer, and that’s absolutely what it feels like. Except that they preface it with “what’s going on?” “I have to show you” *infodump while on greenscreen*
So I’m getting a bit bored now.
Finally! Something’s gonna happen again? We’ve spent about fifty minutes on infodumping and setting up the concept?
Nope, still more infodumping.
FINALLY!
So an hour of setting up the concept, and I guess an hour for the plot itself now.
Heh. The agent just explained that the simulation is set in 1999 because that was peak human civilisation. I guess it’s hard to disagree with him now…
The cool bits in this movie are so cool that when those things happen, they kinda blot out how boring the preceding scenes have been. It’s a neat trick.
I mean, obviously the Wachowskis are massively talented, and have thought up a universe here that’s really compelling and interesting. It’s just that they’ve felt the need to explain everything? That is, the world-building is just what we see on the screen, there’s nothing left for the viewer to piece together on their own.
The cool bits here are so cool that it’s totally reasonable to say that this is, like, THE BEST MOVIE EVAR!1! I wouldn’t really argue against that — it’s a unique movie, and it’s got something special going on. For me, though, I was thoroughly bored by at least half the movie, so I’m going with:
In 1978, the relatively obscure Italian football team, Bastia, made it to a first-time finals of the Champion’s League, against PSV Eindhoven. Tati was asked by fellow friend, and club Mediterrané founder, Gilberto Trigano, to document the final match in Italy.
It’s quite Tati in that it foregrounds everything but the actual match itself.
Heh. Kinda moist, eh?
It has an unrealness going on: Many of the sounds are obviously not real, but added later. Sometimes the sounds are realistic (“squish squish”) and sometimes they’re more for comedic effect.
It’s a pretty odd documentary, but it has charm.
And I’m not quite sure whether it’s really a documentary or a mockumentary. Trying to dry up a pitch with a bucket and a broom… I mean, it could be real?
And if it’s not real, Tati hired a lot of extras.
What!??! Some actual footballering!?
It’s pretty good.
Forza Bastia. Jacques Tati, Sophie Tatischeff. 1978. ⚃
At first I didn’t quite understand whether this movie was showing a genuine thing from France — men standing around, buying each others rounds of patisserie. But that’s the gag: These are alcohol-drenched baked goods, so they’re getting sloshed.
So that’s the joke. But… uhm… OK, it’s a thirteen minute short, but…
So… this is a bunch of skits collected as being an evening class — Tati is the teacher, of course, and shows off his skills at enacting various stuff, like “first time smoker” and stuff.
It rapidly becomes a rather flimsy conceit, as we’re taken to a tennis court (while the students are allegedly looking down from the building above).
So it’s just a series of scenes where Tati is being his goofy self, which is funny enough, I guess.
Here he’s demonstrating fishing.
He’d done some of these gags already in the short of the same name, and the following movie, but the facteurs gags are still hilarious.
But the rest is like… “Hey, Jacques! You’re a funny guy. You used to do vaudeville, right? Can you do 30 minutes of sight gags?” And then he did.
But we’re not talking roll-on-the-floor funny. More like amusing, and not always even that.
Anyway, this is the final movie on this Rivette box set — some years after the previous movies.
This is very Rivette — these two people are on the heels of a mysterious mystery, running around gathering clues. And while the previous movies were more obviously scripted (at least in part), but I’m guessing they made things up here as they went along?
Unfortunately, neither Schneider nor Dallesandro are all that good at coming up with mysterious lines… they’re mostly talking English, and seemingly meaningful, random things sound better in French, right?
But it’s pretty riveting nonetheless.
:
We started work with the two actors, and after 8 days, things were going very badly.
[…]
We had a starting point of course, and then we made up the beginning of a story, with a father who had disappeared, but all along we told ourselves, this is just a pretext for Maria and Joe to get to know each other.
[…]
But since the relationship between Maria and Joe rapidly became hostile, we were forced to develop the story-line; from a mere pretext it took on a disproportionate importance. Maybe that gives the film a certain vagabond charm, I don’t know, but it really is a film with a first half-hour that’s quite coherent, and then it searches for itself three times.
Right, right.
I’m guessing the film was done in sequence, and you can see Schneider slowly checking out, doing less and less, while Dallesandro seems committed.
But… not actually that interesting?
OK, I’ve lost all interest in this. It’s just a random collection of scenes now, and there’s no mystery.
OK, now they’re just fucking with us.
The free jazz bits here are really quite good… and are the most interesting parts of the movie.
Well, OK, the first half hour of the movie is really good, but then it’s just… nonsense. I mean, I’ve watched Out 1 and I enjoyed it, but that had nerve and was interesting. This just seems like a random collection of scenes that nobody were committing to.
OH MY GOD! This is pure genius! After three “well I can see how that might be interesting” shorts, we’ve finally got one directed by Tati himself, and it’s brilliant.
But… he repeated some of these gags for Jour de fête, which was released just a couple of years later. So this is like a … trailer.
Wow, that was brilliant. OK, it might just be a run-through (or proof of concept) for Jour de fête, but it’s hilarious. There’s a couple of gags that don’t quite land, but I laughed a lot.
I’m guessing this had its origins in a vaudeville show or something? The skits seem really well-rehearsed — and they’re solid skits. But does that make this a good short? Hm…
This is better than the previous short, and again, it’s fun to watch Tati doing his stuff. But is this good?
I’d totally forgotten that the Jacques Tati box set had a disc of shorts. But these shorts are pretty long — 20 to 30 mins.
This first one seems very lightly restored: It’s been stabilised (there’s no judder or shifts), but there’s plenty of scratches, dirt and stuff.
Well, OK. This is an early Tati short, and not directed by him. So I’m not expecting a lot. But this is really clunky.
Not to mention a bit cruel. But, I mean… I do think you can see the glimmer of his later films here. He insists on this gold fish gag way longer than you’d expect — and it’s not a good gag, but the sheer insistence on it does say something.
That is, right from the start, he’s not doing naturalistic stuff — it’s all very mannered and slightly surreal.
Nice statue.
It’s always hard to throw the die on these types of films. Is this an interesting thing to watch if you’re a Tati fan? Sure! If, not, is this actually a, like, good movie? No. There’s like a handful of gags in here, and a couple of them are good.
I don’t really enjoy documentaries that are like one line from one guy, and then half a line from another guy, and then some zoomed-in stills… but this looks like it’s that kind of docu. And I’m not a Stooges fan — I like them fine, but it’s not my thing.
But I do like Jim Jarmusch, so I got this movie, and it looks like it’s Jarmusch’ first (and only) bad movie.
Oh, Amazon.
This isn’t just bad — it’s embarrassing. So of course:
It’s a letdown that a singular director like Jarmusch has produced such a conventional film. In its totality, though, it’s still better than most movies of its kind because he never forgets to foreground the unique individuality of his subjects…
Anyone expecting anything formally inventive from this usually boldly iconoclastic filmmaker will be disappointed
OK, I’m getting less annoyed with this now. I mean, I still annoyed, but with no expectations that it’s going to be, you know, “good”, there’s some anecdotes they’re telling that are pretty amusing.
Huh! Well I never!
OK, it’s a traditional talking head music documentary. But even as tiresome as that is, it didn’t really work well on that level, either — I still don’t quite know how many guitarists (or bassists) they had. And the old concert footage looked really badly upscaled; as if Jarmusch had just punched “4x” on the player and filmed the screen. And it feels really dishonest — I mean, I don’t know much about the Stooges, but even I know that there’s stuff of drama and interest that was left out.
So it’s disappointing on any scale. But there’s some OK anecdotes, so:
This is the final movie on this Bob Hope box set, which covers about the first decade of his career.
And it’s been really fun — from this time period, I’ve mostly watched “classics” (i.e., big name actor/director movies) or B movies from studios that have gone out of business (and are therefore in the public domain). You know — “50 Screwball Comedies for $11” box sets.
But it’s been an eye opener watching so many “jobber” films from a major studio (Paramount, in this case). All these films feature veteran directors who’ve worked in Hollywood since the 20s, and most of them have careers that look like this:
I.e., churning out a handful of movies per year. We’re not talking precious auteurs, but people working for the studios on the films they’re assigned — given reasonable budgets and a really, really professional crew from the cinematographers on down.
So we’re talking, er, like, “standard Hollywood fare”… and these films don’t show up on anybody’s radar (unless they happen to feature an actor that would later become a star).
And… I’m just surprised at how good these Studio movies are. Well made and professional, but also (mostly) done with intelligence, zip and vigour (which is quite different from today’s churned-out popular movies). And probably done with a lot of coke (some things don’t change).
What I’m saying is that the Hollywood Machinery is something to behold, and I want to watch more of these films.
Anyway, back to this movie…
That’s Calamity Jane, see?
EEEEEK!!!
That was the most brutal dentistry scene ever film. Makes the Marathon Man scene look like Teletubbies, so no screenshots!
This movie really leans into the silly, and I love that. (I mean, the mass slaughter of Native Americans for yucks is… a thing, but still.)
Lots and lots of good gags in here, even if most of them seem really obvious, like? I would have absolutely loved these bits when I was like 11, and I still quite like them.
But the movie does seem to drag slightly in the last third.
Jane Russell is amazing in this, and I laughed out loud several times while watching this, so I guess I have to go with:
Well, this is very different from all other Rivette movies I’ve seen. It’s a costume drama? And the dialogue seems very un-improvised.
OK, I take back what I said about this seeming non-improvised.
Oh, that’s where the scary music was coming from!
The choice to have a band apparently improvising music while the shoot is going on is a bold one. Must make editing scenes after the fact virtually impossible.
It’s nice music, though. Very AMM.
The Pirates of Brittany.
This is good, but… there’s so many characters (and many of them look quite similar) that I’m having some problems understanding quite what’s going on. I mean, the plot probably isn’t the point of the movie anyway, but it’s still slightly frustrating.
That is, it’s partially riveting and partially frustrating.
The audio on this movie is really important — the use of music and natural sounds is so interesting. It’s a rather hypnotic movie… but only in the second half. The first half is rather a jumble of stuff and is hard to get into. But the last half! Geez. Fantastic.
I guess a reasonable rating would be ⚃, but I’ll go with:
Hey, that’s… that’s… William Demarest! I love him.
And there’s Lucille.
Ooh
I’ve been really impressed by these early Bob Hope movies, and this one has a lot of good gags, too. However, it’s feeling a bit staid? If this had been ten years earlier, there would have been twice the number of jokes and four times the number of lines.
Director Sidney Lanfield didn’t do many movies after this, but moved onto TV.
The concept of the movie isn’t quite clear, either — at first it seemed like the Bob Hope character was a destitute bookie, but then it turns out that he’s just a very… frugal… bookie. (Possibly.) And then it pivots from being a movie about racketeering into being a very uncomfortable Kid-N-Hope kind of thing?
Yeah, exactly — that’s what this movie feels like: A short story that has been through the wringer. So many writers involved.
Sorrowful Jones was a remake of a 1934 Shirley Temple film, Little Miss Marker.
I thought this seemed familiar! I’ve seen that one! The new kid is plenty cute, but she’s no Shirley Temple.
This movie, unfortunately, just goes Full Schmaltz for the second half of the movie, and it’s really tedious. So while it looks good and stuff, it’s not worth watching, really.
Oh, this is a romcom! I wondered why I had this, but I read an article or something about romcoms and why the genre had gone out of fashion, but that this was supposed to be a good new one. I mean, they still make them, but they used to be some of the biggest box office draws since basically the beginning of movies, but that’s not really the case now.
Unfortunately, while this movie is cute and stuff, and has some good running gags, it could have been funnier, and the rom bit of the romcom could have been rommier.
It’s fine! There’s a lot here to like! It’s very likeable. And I can’t really claim that it should have been cut down significantly — all the scenes were fine. But…
Huh — I’m not sure I’ve seen that logo this early before? I mean, 1927…
Nice! Sounds very convenient.
Oh!!! It’s Gary Cooper! Very young and looking totally deranged.
He’d been doing stuff (uncredited) for a couple of years before this, but it looks like this was one of his first real jobs. And he’s really going for it here — he’s totally acting for the cheap seats.
But she’s the reason I got this bluray — I’ve seen virtually no Clara Bow films, and I thought it was time I fixed that.
I should have a mirror like that! Looks very practical.
I know it was just how they did things back then to make everybody pop more on screen, but the heavy lipstick and mascara on Cooper makes him look insane.
I’ve gotta get one of those armpit showers!
Yay work!
I quite like the restoration on this. It’s from Flicker Alley, a company I can’t remember buying anything from before. It’s not over restored — it’s got some scratches and retains quite a lot of grain, but the contrast looks natural instead of being too stark or too bland, which sometimes happens. But it’s been stabilised so that it doesn’t jump around, and just generally looks good. The only thing that’s slightly disturbing is that sometimes when they show a title, they show a still of the title instead of the footage, so everything grows STILL. But that’s nit-picking — it looks as good as a movie from 1927 can look.
Unfortunately, Clara Bow isn’t really in this movie a lot. She’s the villain, sort of, getting in the way of Gary Cooper’s and Esther Ralston’s happiness.
Bah humbug!
This movie is fine. It’s well made and has plot that isn’t bad — the text is very explicit about Divorce Being Bad, but the plot seems to say the opposite — but it’s not more than that. The best things about the movie are really the incredible 20s fashions and the set designs.
Children of Divorce. Frank Lloyd, Josef von Sternberg. 1927. ⚃
I don’t know why, but while I was watching the end of the previous movie, I was thinking I HAVE TO WATCH LIQUID SKY RIGHT NOW.
I’ve seen it a couple times before, but never in 2K.
Oh my god. Every single shot is so iconic.
This 2K restoration is amazeballs. I always thought this movie looked good, but I had no idea it looked this good!
And the music and the editing… it’s… it’s… I’m already flabbergasted!
That’s me! With the monocle!
She shots of Manhattan at night are so romantic.
I didn’t type anything up there because I was just riveted by this movie. The visuals are stunning, and the soundtrack is propulsive. It’s a movie like nothing else — absolutely brilliant. The costumes, the looks, the performances…
Now, I can totally understand if somebody were to ⚀ this movie, because it’s a lot. And so many rapes.
This seems like a much more serious movie than all the other films in this Bob Hope box set. But perhaps it’ll turn all funny when the Hope character is introduced?
Oh, there he is. See?
Aww.
They had nice trains back then. At least in movies.
I can’t believe I’m not enjoying this movie more than I am. The plot’s quite nice and screwy and Hope is nattering away most pleasantly, but I’m just not feeling it.
Perhaps it’s just that I’m in a really bad mood after the previous movie.
I should just pause this movie and continue watching some other day.
Yeah.
[a couple days pass]
I just watched Star Trek: Picard s3e1. It wasn’t good… but it was definitely the best Picard episode ever. Perhaps this season isn’t going to suck?
Not holding my breath, though.
I was right! I was just in a bad mode! Not mood, mode. I’m a modey kind of guy. It’s the language of the future; the language of the past.
Oops, I went on a Laurie Anderson tip there…
Anyway, this is hilarious. It’s the screwiest of screwball comedies.
Hey! That’s Bing Crosby! Showing up for one five second scene!
High speed bus chase!
This is really quite ingenious. It’s super duper silly, and the plot doesn’t make much sense, but it’s so well paced — the jokes just keeps coming, and a large number of them are keepers.
This is very very silly and very funny, but you totally have to be in the right mode to watch it.
*phew* Shakycam gone — I guess they were using it to be all dramatic and stuff.
It’s not that I have something in principle against using shakycam — I just get physically nauseated and have to stop watching if it’s too excessive.
Oh, yeah, I got this movie because I rather liked Cold Souls (by the same director). This looks extremely different, though.
Hm… she didn’t get to direct a movie for a decade after this one, so I’m guessing it didn’t set the box office on fire?
Indeed.
And… I kinda see now why. The protagonist is bored, so it’s necessary to show her being bored, and that’s er you’re not going to believe this quite boring.
Her husband is a doctor, and he has patients with disgusting conditions, and we get to see them, too.
I.e., the ultimate date movie.
Finally! The love interest!
Oh! It is The Flash! They’re very young here.
Oh deer. This feels so… I bet when she starts to have affairs she finally gets a new frock, because that frock symbolises being all staid and corseted up and stuff. That is, this movie feels like if the director has mapped out a couple of symbols (corsets and cobwebs) and is existing on them to a degree that feels frankly risible.
It’s just tedious.
Oh, The Flash wasn’t the love interest — this guy is.
Scarlet woman!
Well, more orange, I guess.
Brutal.
It’s been years since I’ve seen a Madame Bovary adaptation — there’s like a dozen of them? — but I seem to remember the character having more… vigour? She’s so passive here that whenever she actually does something (like buying new curtains), it’s almost shocking.
I haven’t read the novel, though.
Hey! It’s Paul Giamatti!
*gasp*
This is like… first she’s dull, and then she grows more and more unpleasant, seemingly at random. It’s an extraordinarily unsympathetic figure to carry a movie. It seems like the director is saying “that Bovary bird? she’s well ‘orrible”. (I’m not sure why the director turned cockney in this scenario, but she somehow did.)
Flash! Ah-aaaah! Saviour of the universe!
Man, this is bad.
But the cinematography’s quite nice, so let’s go with:
This scroll continues for 90 seconds while a guy reads it out loud (presumably for people who can’t read).
Oooh, production value!
I’m not sure how I came to buy this bluray — perhaps it just popped up on a list of “New Sci-Fi In 2K” or something? It’s from the mid-90s, and I’ve never heard of it before.
Hey… this doesn’t look bad. It’s not upscaled VHS or anything…
But that makeup job was not done with high resolution in mind, so was this straight to video thing?
It premiered at the 1995 Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 1995. It was released in the United States on January 26, 1996, by Columbia Pictures.
[…]
The film earned about $5.7 million in the United States and Canada, on a $20 million budget. It was moderately popular in France, Japan, and the Netherlands. Worldwide box office was approximately $7 million.
OK, so that’s why I haven’t heard of it — it was a massive flop (but on a decent budget).
This looks pretty good, actually.
OK, that’s bad green-screen.
Gnarly!
Subtle!
Hey! It’s Robocop!
That guy looks familiar!
Must have seen him in Caroline in the City, I guess?
That’s some nice source code.
This is a very odd movie. They’ve basically got all the plot for a standard corporate-soldiers-on-an-alien-planet-that-the-company-might-be-trying-to-kill-off movie — and that’s a good plot, which is why it’s used so much — but it’s got no rhythm. The patter between the action stuff just sounds off? It’s like they haven’t actually heard any Humans talk before when they wrote the lines?
Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?
It’s a relief to know that they still have plenty of hair gel in the future.
Nice tats.
It’s a Buenos Aires standoff!
OK, this movie is kinda boring, even if it has a 29% tomatometer.
Sponge bath time!
This film was originally in 1.85:1, but for this bluray transfer they cut it down to 1.77:1, so we’re missing bits to the left and right. Whenever I put on a bluray and it’s 16:9 I immediately go NOOO HOW DID THEY CUT THIS TIME, because no real movies are 16:9. (Well, some Netflix movies are, but even there it’s not the norm.)
I’m still kinda sure that the twist I was expecting ever since they started talking about various types of robots is still going to happen, but I guess they’re saving it for the very last scene?
Nice.
(And the twist I was expecting didn’t happen. Kudos.)
But it’s still a really boring movie, and it really seems like a movie where they didn’t really have a real script, so it’s kinda choppy.
Watching the documentary now… Robocop wanted to get involved with doing rewrites, and the director is saying that Weller is so smart etc, but you can see his frustrations.
Hey! Isn’t that the guy who played Bob Hope’s man in Nothing But the Truth? Hm… Yes it is! It’s Willie Best! Well, that movie was from 1941, and this is from 1940, and both are from Paramount, so perhaps he wasn’t so much specialising in playing Bob Hope manservants as being on a contract.
Mitchell Leisen, who directed Willie Best in Suddenly It’s Spring, described him as “the most natural actor I’ve ever seen.” Comedian Bob Hope similarly acclaimed him as “the best actor I know”, while the two were working together in 1940 on The Ghost Breakers.
Oh, that Bob Hope. He’s so punny.
State of the art special effects.
Hope and Best make a good comedy pairing. The get the repartee going — they’re playing very similar characters.
Heh. Just like in Nothing But the Truth, the Willie Best character saves the day.
OOPS SPOILERS
This is so likeable — it’s such an enjoyable film. It zips along, never letting the fun stuff grow stale, with good performances and very Studio cinematography etc. However, there could have been more jokes? And better jokes? I smiled the entire time I watched this, but I didn’t laugh out loud once. So I guess I should go with ⚃, but let’s do this instead:
Wow. They start this off with six minutes of leaden exposition, all of which seems totally superfluous: They’re saying there’s a McGuffin and a hero waiting.
Yee-haw
Man, that was a bad CGI fight scene. It was like nothing had any mass. Even if they used the old “have no lighting” trick to have less visible things to animate, it still looked bad.
They’re the Justice Society? Is this Earth-2, then? Perhaps that was just in the olden dayes…
I’m not hating this. I mean, as super-hero movies go, I’ve seen a lot worse.
Sad Rock.
It’s very on the nose.
But I guess Black Adam is gonna fight Justice Society for a bit and then become buddies? What does that do to global stability?
This is pretty entertaining. It’s a kinda confused movie — it doesn’t seem to have much rhythm or throughline, but it’s occasionally charming. And there was one scene that had me laughing out loud, which is more than most super-hero movies.
And the CGI really isn’t that bad. The fight scenes are 97% CGI, which makes them boring to look at (who wants to watch a video game run through?), but they look better than Marvel CGI, for instance.
This was like a ⚂ until the last third, and then things become crushingly boring. There were kinda sorta slightly interesting bits — nothing big or clevery but at least something — and then the last third is just one big, mostly humourless fight scene.
I’m really sceptical towards all Norwegian movies that are supposed to be comedies. The last few decades, the absolutely only form of humour that’s acceptable in Norway seems to be cringe humour, and that’s just not my thing.
So I’ve avoided this movie, because I thought it was supposed to be funny.
Neeerds!
I dunno. This is well-made, and it’s fun to see all these places in Oslo and go “oh, there!”, but… it could be snappier? It feels like about a third of the running time could easily have been cut. So far.
But I was wrong! There’s not that much cringe humour. Fortunately. It’s more… satirical. Brutal take-downs and absurdities.
It’s constantly low level witty.
It’s a somewhat frustrating movie. There are scenes where I go “this is totally magical” and I’m thinking Trier is the new Bergman or something, but then the next scene is like… nothing.
Great performances, very pretty cinematography, boring music. So:
The Worst Person in the World. Joachim Trier. 2021. ⚃
This is very high concept — the Bob Hope character has bet 10K that he won’t tell a lie for 24 hours (because he wants to help the Paulette Goddard character double her money), and hi-jinx ensue.
And they’re very high jinx! It’s a good silly premise, and they really lean into it.
I’m really impressed by the level on these Bob Hope movies — it’s all veteran Hollywood directors, and they really know what makes a comedy movie tick.
Heh, it’s the perfect ending — this guy saves everything.
It’s a really fun movie. It’s not quite perfect? There could be more gags beyond Bob Hope doing his thing, but it’s really good. Perhaps it’s really more of a ⚃ movie, but I’m going with:
I jest, but the Criterion 4K restoration job here is a bit weird. I mean, they’ve removed all the scratches and stuff, but it seems like they’ve also lowered the contrast? Which is pretty unusual — you usually have them erring on the other side, making things too contrastey. I mean, I’ve seen this before, and I remember it looking cooler than this…
Can’t have Noir without blinds. Blinds are 90% of Noir.
Edward G. Robinson is the other 90%, of course.
What!
So here’s a screenshot from the 4K disc.
And here’s a screenshot from the 2K disc.
The 2K looks a lot punchier. But the 4K is in HDR, so, er, mpv does something to mix it down to SDR, and that’s not working optimally? Or… er… something?
Anyway, I’m switching to the 2K.
One moment…
There.
That looks noirer.
OK, it might just be my tribulations with the contrast here, but… I’m not totally into this film. It just seems a bit stodgy?
We skip back to his confession all the time, and that just makes the film drag a bit.
Praised by many critics when first released, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, but did not win any.
OK, I changed my mind — this is really exciting. We’re really rooting for these murderers! I mean, for their plan, and we haven’t really been given much reason to do so. Sure, the guy they’re planning to kill is a tool, but Barbara Stanwyck could, like, leave him. Instead they’re gonna kill him and claim the insurance and I’m all YES! DO IT! and then I’m worried that their plan is gonna be foiled.
And it’s all down to them being the protagonists — Wilder doesn’t try to make them sympathetic, really.
OK, now it’s not as exciting any more, and parts are starting to seem ridiculous. Like meeting in grocery stores — sure, that’s not suspicious at all.
This is a good movie, of course, but I was disappointed. So:
Bob Hope is really leaning into his “jumpy wimp” persona…
Before starting this Bob Hope box set (from the late 30s/early 40s), I wasn’t really much aware of him as an actor. I mean, I must have seen him a bunch of times, but somehow I think of him as a TV guy or something? And I’ve seen none of the almost dozen movies in this box set before, so I guess that means that his movies aren’t exactly critics favourites.
Look at that start of his film career — pumping out multiple films each year from the get go. But these aren’t exactly high-falutin’ auteur movies — they’re made by sturdy studio hands like George Archainbaud and Elliott Nugent.
Oof
So this film is about an actor who tries to get out of the draft (because he’s afraid of loud noises and stuff). This is from 1941, which makes it really, really topical, so I guess it was made very quickly?
This is by another veteran director I’m not familiar with. He directed his first movie in 1913 and did more than a hundred movies. And it’s well-made — but it doesn’t quite have the manic zip of some of the other movies on this box set.
The film was a big hit and became Paramount’s second most successful release of 1941 after Louisiana Purchase.
And I can see why — it’s so topical (with a premiere just a few months before the US entered WWII) and is properly patriotic, taking the Bob Hope character from abject cowardice to (I’m presuming) a heroic ending.
But it does look like it was made in a hurry. I mean, it mostly looks great, but there’s scenes where you feel they’d have moved the camera a bit to get a better angle if they’d had more time — like this little bit, where their faces are covered for most of the scene.
This bit was really impressive (and funny).
Not all the gags are as snappy, though. This was a good idea, but it just lacked some timing.
The name of the director, George Archainbaud, doesn’t really ring a bell, but:
He’s done about 110 films! Yowza. He started in 1917, and kept on working at a frenetic pace until his final year, 1953, when he directed six movies! OK, they were Gene Autry films, so they weren’t hard on the brain or anything, but still!
So I guess he was a reliable studio director, and this movie has that studio professional sheen. The same year he did this, he also did a Betty Grable film and a Ray Milland/Dorothy Lamour film.
This is really charming. It’s not really a screwball comedy like I first assumed, but it’s got a whole bunch of gags and zips along nicely. It’s also got these moody, romantic scenes… it’s a lot of fun.
Hm… are all cats in old films black cats? In comedies, there’s usually a scene or two with a cat (I know The Internet’s For Cats, but so were movies), and a surprising number of them are totally black. Or do they just film like it? I mean, I love all cats equally, but people seem to go for colours that are easier to Instagram these days which means fewer Voids.
Li’l Void.
*gasp* Shoes on the couch!
It’s a pretty small budget movie, I guess? It’s all set in one flat — perhaps based on a play? It really zips along, and has enough twists and amusing characters to carry the day. I really love the deadbeat friends that pop in all of the time.
Thanks for the Memory. George Archainbaud. 1938. ⚄
Is there a law against doing deinterlacing on old VHS stuff when doing bluray releases? Or is the point here to use the wrong interlacing as a video effect?
Oh my god. Not only is this almost three hours long, but it’s apparently the sort of documentary I hate the most: One person pops up saying one sentence, then there’s another person that pops up saying another sentence, and I HATE IT SO MUCH.
And they’re just playing tiny bits of songs, and then using them for backgrounds for when people are sound-byting.
They’re really consistent about having wrong/missing deinterlace on all the old footage.
I guess that’s trey artistique.
Or just stupid.
OK, it’s better now… it’s more of a narrative…
I started listening to Swans a year or so before Children of God… and I quite liked that album (and the World of Skin thing).
Hah! OK, I didn’t get this album. The snippets they’re playing sound totally awful.
Heh heh.
I got that album, though. It’s good.
Oh my god. We’re only 70 minutes in. Not even halfway through.
I think I may be ditching this soon…
OK, I think I’m gonna ditch this here.
It’s not a horrible documentary. They front-loaded it with a bunch of really boring talking heads stuff which made me almost ditch it within the first five minutes. But then it became pretty interesting after a while.
It’s not awful now either, but I’m just not that interested…
I’m subtracting at least one ⚀ for the interlacing.
Oh! Katharine Hepburn! I mean, I must have seen her in a colour movie before, but it’s… shocking… for her to not be in black and white.
So, this is a David Lean movie? I’m not really a fan of his. I mean, I like his movies, but I don’t really make an effort to watch them, either. So I’m not sure why I got this bluray — it might just be the Hepburn connection.
Is this one of those movies that were financed by the Tourist Board of ? I’ve seen more than a handful of those movies from around this time: Like the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce trying to encourage people to fly down there, so they sent some money to a slightly out-of-work director and/or actor, and then you hope for a huge box office success. (All the movies I’ve seen in that class of films, like the Powell/Pressburger one, have sunk without much of a trace.)
Nice…
*gasp* LOOK AT THIS:
I WANT TO STAY IN THAT HOTEL WHERE DO I BOOK
Hepburn is amazing here. But I can’t imagine that this was a box office smash? It’s too real.
:
In one scene, the character of Jane Hudson falls into a canal as she steps backwards while photographing Di Rossi’s shop in Campo San Barnaba. Leading lady Katharine Hepburn, concerned about her health, was disinclined to do the stunt herself, but Lean felt it would be obvious if he replaced her with a stunt double. He filled the water with a disinfectant that caused it to foam, which added to Hepburn’s reluctance, then required her to film the scene approximately four times until he was satisfied with the results. To protect her skin, Hepburn was covered with Vaseline. Later that night, Hepburn’s eyes began to itch and water. She was eventually diagnosed with a rare form of conjunctivitis that plagued her for the remainder of her life.
Directors! They’re the worst!
This is a beautiful movie, and Hepburn is fantastic in this. The first half, which is basically just Hepburn, is totally perfect. When we eventually get to the romantic interest, it’s still fine… but not as fascinating.
I’ve seen this before, but it’s been like a decade. And this time it’s on 2K! More pixels!
I remember it being awesome.
So where’s Isaach De Bankolé, then? … Oh! I was thinking of Chocolat, the 1988 Denis movie. Which I saw around the same time as I watched this one.
But this is like the opposite of that one…
Oh, yeah — this is a reference to the genocide in Uganda? Where radio shows would stir the pot…
Man, Isabelle Huppert is tiny…
Oh durr! Herp derp I eat paste. That’s Isaach De Bankolé…
This movie is a lot more frustrating than I remembered. It’s like a slow-moving horror movie where the protagonists refuse to realise that they’re in a horror movie. You feel like sitting there then entire time shouting GET OUT at the screen for like an hour.
It’s so tense I had to take a couple of breaks to just cool down a bit.
So I guess that’s brilliant film-making? To make the viewer care that much?
I watched an Elliott Nugent film yesterday — and it was a really screwy screwball comedy. And I see I have two more films by Nugent here, so here goes.
This seems like it’s more of a… comedy horror film? It starts off like a kinda-sorta serious thriller, I guess…
Well, there’s Bob Hope, so the jokes should commence soon…
Nice.
Leading lady arrived, too.
Well, this doesn’t seem to be a screwball comedy. Instead it’s, well, one of them there slightly meta comedy horror films? It’s amusing, but I haven’t laughed yet…
See? Slightly meta.
Indeed.
This is very amiable indeed, but it feels oddly padded. I mean, it’s a 75 minute long movie, so you’d expect it to zip along. And the script has good bones — everything you need for something like this, and the actors are great. But it’s like they had a finished script with lots of asterisks for “perhaps Bob can improv a gag here?” and then Bob didn’t. So you get scenes that seem to lack zip.
This has always been one of my top10 favourite films, since I first saw it in 1972, at least 14 times since. Bob Hope was still a little green at this stage, but you can almost see (and hear) him coming of age in CATC, his comic delivery technique and timing noticeably improved by the end.
And I do see how this could be somebody’s favourite movie… it’s got something going on. So perhaps it’s just me…
Yes, that’s how you should look going to bed.
*gasp*
But… no. I mean, I like this movie. It’s fine. But it’s not all there. So:
So this is the second film in a series or something? It’s the first one in this box set. I should probably read these liner notes, but I never do that before watching a movie.
I’ve bought more than a few box sets over the past couple of years, but I haven’t watched any of them, because it… like… never seems to be… urgent? But I thought I should start, so here I’m attacking the 70s Rivette box set. It’s just three films, though.
That veil fashion should return, I think.
I wonder whether this is an improvised movie, like some of Rivette’s previous movies. The dialogue seems too comprehensive, but on the other hand, these are French actors.
But that’s… one of the women from Celine and Julie Go Boating, isn’t it?
Yeah, this has to be improvised… so like with Out 1, it’s probably not going anywhere, but it’s intriguing.
This is a thriller/spy story kind of thing — also like Out 1 — which lends itself naturally to people saying mysterious things to one another.
See?
That’s just how I sit! I feel seen!
It’s a hotel room with a wash basin and a bidet? Nice.
I don’t know… this one isn’t as riveting as the boat one. I mean, the goddess thing is fun and all, and the mysteries are quite mysterious… but that film was compelling in part because of the characters. And that seems a bit lacking here.
Huh, unusual way to arrange to have a light on the stairs… a kinda bulgy outgrowth of the landing into the stairwell.
The last half of this movie is fabulous. The first half is meandering in a way that’s pleasing, but not totally riveting. So:
Oh yeah, I bought a Bob Hope box set, so I thought I should start watching it finally…
This is the screwiest of screwball comedies. Martha Raye is some kind of genius.
I need some of that clay pack — it’s the way to beauty.
Tee hee.
I don’t know whether this is a “good movie”, but it’s brilliant.
And there’s dancing.
I’ve seen one movie by Elliott Nugent before, and it was also great.
I think this movie is adorable. It’s just so weird, but it zips along in the most delightful way — and it accurately predicts OnlyFans. So this is probably overstating how good it is a bit, but whatevs:
SPOILER WARNINGS: If you’re going to watch this movie, don’t read this blog article, because I’m nattering on about stuff you don’t want to know before watching it.
OK?
You’ve been warned.
Here goes:
It feels like it’s been a while since I’ve seen that logo? And… never in faux metal, fortunately?
Is that Harry Styles? I thought this was with Alec Baldwin, but I was probably thinking of that other movie…
I guess it’s back in the 60s, because they didn’t have light or saturation back then.
50s?
Yum
So this is some kind of sci-fi movie?
Anyway, I’m watching this because it seemed to be universally critically panned for being to weird, and I’m all for that. I mean, I never read reviews before watching a movie, but that was my impression from various headlines that’s flashed before mine eyes…
So we’re talking some kind of virtual world?
Now there’s a song where the lyrics are going “Life would be dream” or something, so I guess.
I hope there’s a twist here beyond the non-reality of the movie. Perhaps the twist is gonna be that it’s real?
Foreshadowing! Subtle!
The lighting here is just odd. Even outside, in bright sunshine, it just seems like everything is too dark.
That’s a Chris, right? I can never remember what their names are… the Chris that’s in Star Trek?
The performances are swell.
Oh! Is this just a straight-ahead horror sci-fi movie, a la The Prisoner? Horror movies should have more obvious titles.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles tribute scene. Isn’t that the same colour bathtub?
Gotta have some eyeballs.
I really wanted to like this, but it just drags on and on. It’s been almost an hour now, and I feel there’s been material for, like, half as much screen time as that.
But I still have vague hopes that there’s be more than just the obvious Stepford Wives/Westworld/Prisoner rehash this seems like it is.
I’m just profoundly bored.
Oh oh oh, now I’m back to my second theory — the twist isn’t that there isn’t a twist. This is really the 60s and the protagonist is insane.
No! Now I get it. This is a post-apocalyptic thing — they’re all decanted embryos living in a gated city, and outside it’s all gnarly.
I’m sorry, I’m making this sound more interesting than it is… It just has no urgency. I think there might be a fun movie in here somewhere, but it just drags and drags. Even in the major dramatic showdowns, there’s like no stakes, and there’s nothing urgent, and it’s just hard to care.
And now it’s even darker!!!
Well… that plot twist was not what I expected. I mean, it was generally what I thought at the very start, but not that this was all about manosphere internet assholes and stuff. But that’s a somewhat better twist than I expected, really.
But it’s still not actually that … terrifying? And it fucking should be.
Shouldn’t that Porsche be going faster than those other cars?
I know, I have the most insightful, deep criticisms.
I think he’s exaggerating. There’s an 80 minute fun movie in here somewhere, but you’d have to work really hard to get at it.
But the movie is only tangentially interested in its clichéd narrative. The breakthrough to reality and self-actualization are perfunctory and stuffed into the last half-hour of the movie more as obligation than consummation. This is a Hollywood film with big-name actors; it’s got to have a plot and a resolution. It can’t be “Eraserhead.”
I’m not convinced. I think it’s just a very clichéd movie that doesn’t work even at the obvious level.
It feels like it’s been weeks since I watched a movie, but it’s… only been four days? Huh. OK, last week was a busy week…
I like the colours here. They’re very un-2014 — not desaturated with touches of colour-graded hues poking through.
Oh! It’s an anthology film? But one director? Well, that’s fun, too.
The first bit was the most Spanish thing ever. But very short and efficient.
Yeah!
These are excellent questions.
The second bit was totally shocking because… there was no twist! I didn’t even know that was legal!
Oh my god. The third thing is the most excruciating thing ever.
But funny.
It’s a nightmare scenario, but both people involved are assholes, so…
So are all these stories about the same? About revenge? The airplane one was definitely about that… oh, and the restaurant one was about revenge. And I guess the car one, too? And this is about some asshole not wanting to pay a parking ticket (because it unfair)… are all the people here assholes? Hm… 1, yes. 2, no. 3 and 4: Yes. So I guess it’s not about toxic masculinity, but just revenge?
Well, if this one is going to be about revenge.
Yup.
Well, anger…
I’m not sure this movie quite works. I think we’re supposed to identify more with these characters, and it’s hard, because they’re all assholes. Even that woman in the second bit could have removed the rat poison food from that asshole eating it… I mean, just pretend stumble?
Is this just a didactic morality play film? “Never get angry?”
Man, I don’t want to do spoilers or anything, but the parking ticket guy turning into a folk hero (after getting his revenge) is possibly the lamest thing ever in the history of movies.
And are the tales getting longer and longer?
The fifth bit seems oddly complicated. There’s a bunch of asshole characters, and a fall guy… so is this bit going to be about somebody committing revenge on the fall guy? That’s not even ironic.
But worse, this bit is positively tedious — it’s taking so long to set up whatever’s gonna happen. The first four bits were efficient, at least.
Perhaps it’s the guy paying off all these people who’s going to get the revenge…
But it’s so boring that it’s hard to care.
Nice!
… oh! I guessed the revenge ending. SORRY Well, it was obvious, so.
That was absolutely dreadful. Well, not… totally. The scene the older guy discovered he was being scammed was great. But otherwise…
OK, the final bit is gonna be half an hour… I hope it’s better.
Yeah. It’s very much like reading a Spanish comics anthology from the 70s (after everybody had fled Argentine for Spain and worked there). The stories are bitter, sad, “ironic” one-liners. Which was understandable then, totally. This feels like a mostly annoying retread.
But it’s well shot, and the performances are really good. I mean, astoundingly so. So the director is obviously talented… and hasn’t done a single movie after this one. (But there’s a couple in production now, almost a decade later, according to imdb.)
Now that’s revenge!
This just isn’t that funny. It’s even more boring than the fifth bit.
It’s annoying that rottentomatoes doesn’t have a way to sort by rating, because this is 94% fresh and you have to wade through so many positive reviews to get to the good ones. I mean negative ones.
Man, that was a bad segment.
This movie started off strong, but every segment wasn’t quite as good as the preceding one, and we ended with segments that were (respectively) tedious and beyond tedious. So:
I’ve seen all of Andersson’s movies over the past few years — but in approximately reverse order. So I’m now back to 1975!
He didn’t direct a movie after this for 25 years, so I’m guessing this is gonna be the best movie ever.
OK, I’m pretty proficient in Swedish, but some slang is beyond me. And I’m not sure whether some of the utterances are supposed to be absurd, or whether they make sense. Like, these guys just mest and that guy sitting there said “jämna plågor” which (non-idiomatically means) “even pains”, which… er… doesn’t mean much…
And unfortunately there’s not Swedish 1975 Slang Search Engine!!! Who knew!
This is a fascinating film. I would never have guessed that it’s from the 70s — it has a sort of eternal/modern quality thing going on. So perhaps it seemed very old-fashioned in 1975?
The reviews were very negative with almost no exception, calling it pretentious, old fashioned and reactionary on the level of a high school student caught up in French films from the 30s.
So I guessed right about people at the time finding it old-fashioned. But I don’t get a 30s vibe, either.
This is a very strange film, and I have no idea where Andersson is going with this. I mean, much much weirder than his 2000s films — they’re more stylised and clearly arteesteeque. This is like a normal film, only that none of the scenes make any sense.
“These people are evasively walking around each other, saying curious things of the type ‘we are destruction people’ and ‘we live like migratory birds’ and in the end I get the impression that Roy Andersson has got his whole philosophy of life from some film club that has gone through the dark French pre-war cinema with him, you know the one in which Jean Gabin always got shot right on the final step towards liberation.”
Well… it’s a Swedish movie from the 70s… I think there was a law about boobs.
Yes, I feel like that guy.
“wat”
This movie is, like, about that guy there, who seemingly has no personality to speak of, who meets these other absurd people, and then nothing happens.
It’s the sort of thing where you’re (I mean I’m) thinking “perhaps this is brilliant and I just don’t get it?” But I suspect that this is just shite. But it’s shite in a way that’s really original.
Andersson admitted that the film contains flaws, and he said that the main reason for them was that he was not completely in control of the production, and therefore he had to compromise in several scenes.
I’m totally open to the idea that this is a work of genius, but I kinda don’t think so? So:
Filmed on digital? It looks like digital from like 2002, but it’s 2011? Or was it filmed over a decade? It’s got that high-ISO blown out look that plagued movies for a few years until they figured out the sensors and were able to make better cameras, but I thought happened before 2011.
But the heavy-handed colour grading is totally typical for 2011 — desaturated with lots of greens. Perhaps it was shot on film and then just… digitised a bit too much?
I remember during the run-up to the Sight & Sound 2022 poll, people were talking about how this should be a shoe-in for at least the bottom half of the list. Instead Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles became number one and everybody started talking about that instead, so I wonder whether the Malick fans are doing well.
(It’s been fun reading Twitter reactions to Dielman, by the way — at first there was a bunch of “think pieces” from er assholes that said that it winning made a mockery of Cinema and that people were gonna be put off from Film totally for ever, and then reading people going to theatres showing it now and being totally being blown away. It’s like… people will actually enjoy great stuff if they just get an opportunity and an impetus to experience it.)
Oh, I was watching a movie, not kvetching about Twitter…
Oh, this was shot in 1.85:1 but this bluray is 1.77:1. Fuckers! Why does everything have to suck? *inchoate fury at people that don’t like “black borders” on their tvs*
He really likes shoving the cameras into people’s noses, right?
Oooh the grandeur!
Somehow, everything about this movie is rubbing me the wrong way. It feels like undiluted kitch. Perhaps I should try to reset expectations, stop writing snarky comments and try to get actually pay attention..
OK! RESET! NOW!
Nice CGI.
But I’m not sure using CGI this aggressively is a smart choice, because it just leaves the viewer going “is this animation or real? now then? now?” I guess the tell-tale sign here is that when the image sucks, it’s real, because the digital camera he’s using isn’t all there, but then it’s animation, it looks better?
Why so much rubber on Brad Pitt’s poor face? And insets to make his chin and cheeks bigger… is he gonna be younger later in the movie?
Oops, I forgot I was resetting. RESET!
Kitteh!
DADDY ISSUES
Oops reset.
The kid actors are great, though. And somehow seem to be right for the time period in both look and how they act; it’s very impressive.
Hm… perhaps Pitt doesn’t have any rubber prosthetics on his face? It’s just the cheek inserts and an jaw brace to make his jaw jut out like that? It looks kinda eeh.
Oh god, it just goes on and on with this picayune daddy issue stuff… Yes, we know that men suck. We know! This isn’t saying anything interesting about that, but is instead presenting this trite material as if it’s the most groundbreaking thing ever.
Is nominating a movie for a bunch of rewards and then giving it none a bigger insult than not nominating it at all? I hope so.
And for the record, a boy’s inner monologue (circa 1960) would in no way sound like Yoda (“Wrestle inside me mother and father does! Always you will!”)
That’s brilliant, but:
Incredible cinematography? Check. Beautiful soundtrack? Check. Narrative? You won’t find any such thing ’round these parts.
My problems with this movie seem to be perpendicular to this guy’s problems. I think this movie has too much narrative, really — it the movie was nothing but CGI dinosaurs, I’d be fine. (I’m exaggerating slightly.) The problem is that there’s a lot of narrative, and it’s all trite.
Ooh! A door in the desert! How deep!
OK, I guess we’re in the allegorical end section now.
Hm… hey, this is kinda good! The ending works — it’s the best part of the movie, really.
Oh, that’s snarky even beyond me…
I think there’s several scenes here that connect emotionally, and it’s mostly down to the performances of the kids. They’re really great.
But this movie mostly sucks. There’s no two ways about it. It’s like listening to the innermost, deepest thoughts of somebody that’s totally uninteresting.
*gasp* I wasn’t sure until this very scene, when they’re using screens and lighting to shift between that guy in the sofa and a different scene behind the screen.
I remember seeing this movie when I was thirteen (with one of my older sisters). I have no idea what made us (or probably me) choose this movie — I remember knowing that it was a film people hated (or at least “critically slated”), but I don’t remember why I dragged us to watch this film. On the other hand, when I was visiting Oslo when I was twelve, I remember just going to a multiplex and staying there all day, watching like five movies in a day. I was starved for cinema — in my home town, the cinema had just like the biggest movies (and only a couple per week), which I wasn’t that interested in anyway.
So I (presumably) dragged my sister to watch this movie (did it have a higher-than-thirteen age limit?) and I remember just being riveted by the colours and these flourishes of artificiality…
But I forgot what actual movie it was we were watching, and I’ve been trying to triangulate, and finally I found it.
Ooh! I thought this was in real Las Vegas for a while, but it obviously can’t be. So Coppola built all this in his studio?
The neon cost alone must be more than the budged of most movies!
And all these people on the lot!!!
It’s sometimes not clear whether they’re supposed to be in a dreamscape or actually outdoors… It looks amazing anyway.
Most of the actors here are perfect, but I think this guy (Frederic Forrest?) isn’t quite right for the role. I know he’s supposed to be an average Joe, but he’s er lacking in charm, and he’s a hammy actor.
The mattes!
I remember from when I was thirteen that I walked out of the cinema, discussing this with my sister, and I thought that it was a really cool movie. I loved the artifice of it all (although I phrased that as “those screens were near”), but I wasn’t totally enthused about it. I thought… that it wasn’t the disaster the critics made it out to be? But that the storyline left something to be desired.
But now, 42 years later, my brain has obviously atrophied, and I like this movie even more. I’m flabbergasted at how great and how artificial it is, and I’m just wondering how it was made. And… like… did Coppola spend absolutely all his Godfather money on making this fever dream a reality?
Ah, right.
Well, I made my sister contribute at least $10 of that worldwide gross. (I forget how much cinema tickets were at the time.)
So it was a total, absolute box office bomb with a pretty big budget.
Oh, the music really is by Tom Waits? I thought it sounded like… somebody trying to do Tom Waits, but softer…
The film’s cinematography has come to be lauded in recent years. In the Los Angeles Times, Susan King praised One from the Heart as “so visually arresting, it’s shocking that it wasn’t well received back in 1982.”
[time passes]
This DVD has a bunch of extras and documentaries, and they’re interesting. Coppola really bet everything on this movie, and it was really panned by the critics. And his Zoetrope Studios went up for sale after the premiere, because he was out of money, and he spent the next decade paying off his debt from this film.
There’s an entire DVD of extras, and they’re longer than the actual movie. Coppola is amazingly forthright about what he was trying to do… it’s interesting stuff.
This has never been released on blu-ray. The DVD I have is in 1.33:1, which it was filmed in 1.37:1. So I guess they cut off the edges? But it’s not a lot of edge.
I think when I was thirteen, I would have given this… ⚃. I was riveted while watching it, but not entirely convinced by the hokey ending. I’m more sentimental now, so:
It’s so odd watching movies from the mid 80s… there’s all these faces that seem immediately familiar, but I can’t place them at all? Looking at the imdb, that must be… Verna Bloom? There was no imdb in those days, so we never knew who anybody was…
This is so… is this really a Scorsese movie!? It’s really not something I’d guess was Scorsese. I’d guess… uhm… Coppola. Yeah. 80s Coppola.
So it’s good instead of sucking, is what I’m saying.
This is a really odd movie. The actors are playing this as if they’re in 1976, while the set decorator and hairdresser are going “YES BITCH THIS IS 1986!!!”. So it seems out of time…
This is a very charming movie. It’s all lower Manhattan at 3AM and not having enough money to go back home. (Because they increased the fare to $1.50.)
(Confusingly enough, home is East 91st Street, which is… walk able. I mean, just an hour and a half. I’ve walked longer. Hm… OK, it might be two hours. That’s a schlep. But it’s flat! Hm… I wanna walk that stretch sometime…)
It get more… allegorical towards the end, I guess? And that’s not as funny. But this is a solid movie. It riveting for the first half, and then it dips, but it’s still charming.
Scorsese’s best movie ever? Probably?
[time passes]
I’m listening to the commentary track now, and Scorsese says the he realised that an era was over and wondered whether his career was over (after The King of Comedy had bombed and his subsequent movie was cancelled). And this movie was made under that cloud: A smaller, simpler, cheaper movie to prove a point.
It’s not really a normal commentary track — they’ve interviewed apparently everybody involved, and drop in their voices at various points. It’s interesting — the cinematographer explains how much of the film was filmed in f2.4 etc just because he didn’t have the time or the budget to light it properly.
The commentary from Michael Ballhaus is especially poignant — he’s talking about doing Gangs of New York with a crew 10x the size, and being nostalgic for the days of Fassbinder and this film…
New editions of old movies is a good excuse to rewatch movies, right? So this isn’t something I’ve thought about watching, but it popped up on one of those “new in 4K” lists, and my brain went “I wanna watch that!”
I remember being scared shitless by this back in the day (but I remember the Mad parody version of this better than the actual movie).
Oh yeah! I remember that tree coming to life!
It’s been 40 years since I saw this, but some things are etched into memory.
Arrest Uri Geller!
This is so well made. I guess jump scares are frowned on these days, but this is still scary.
Well… OK… that special effect isn’t er very impressive now.
And once the Ghostbusters arrive, it’s just a whole lot less scary.
OK, I was wrong — it’s still scary! I need more pillows to hide behind!
Finally a professional!
This is a really swell horror movie. It’s an epic oddyssey — an entire journey. And while there are bits where the movie loses its tension, it’s mostly on purpose. Oh! And I appreciate how rational everybody is about the entire thing — most movies like this would spend half the running time with the woman screaming THIS CAN”T BE HAPPENING and the man having some kind of daddy issue (for Character Development purposes, of course).
t has received universal critical acclaim. “I would give up all my films to have Les Enfants du Paradis”, said nouvelle vague director François Truffaut.
It’s coming back to me now… I read a book of articles from Cahiers du Cinéma (three-ish years ago?), and they were raving about this movie there, so I got a copy.
The “paradis” they’re referring to is this — it’s slang for the balconies, and the film is about a vaudeville theatre, apparently? So perhaps an updated English title would be like, er, “Playing for the Cheap Seats”?
And… I’m not quite sure about this movie? I mean, it does have a convincing atmosphere — it reminds me of… of… Bergman? A couple decades later? Was he a fan? I can imagine he was. But… it seems a bit coldly calculated to me. At least so far. It’s about the “magic” of the theatre, and we’re introduced to all these actors and stuff that have their dreams about doing something stupendous. So we’re in the “Oscar’s genre”, really, which I’m not really that much of a fan of.
Perhaps it’ll become more compelling; I’ve just got two hours and twenty minutes to go.
That’s some bouquet.
It’s not that I’m not enjoying this, because I am. It’s beautifully filmed, and the performances are good, and the repartee is snappy. I guess I just find it hard to care for these characters? That is, they don’t really seem to have that much character? They’re broad caricatures more than anything else, I think.
It’s just impossible to recognise her through that veil!
Many of the 1,800 extras were Resistance agents using the film as daytime cover, who, until the liberation, had to mingle with some collaborators or Vichy sympathisers who were imposed on the production by the authorities.
I totally get that this is a film you’d choose if you’re French and you have to vote for “the best French movie ever”. It’s good, of course, and it’s a great tragedy, and it’s funny, but more importantly, it’s got that grand feeling going, like (for instance) Fanny & Alexander or Gone With the Wind. And quantity does have a quality all of its own.
So people in France have presumably been sat down for decades and being told “here’s this great movie”… and it is.
But while a great movie, I think it’s more about those externalities than the film itself, because there’s a bunch of French movies that are even better.
This is unusual in that it’s about a guy that’s not a Cassavetes stand-in (apparently) — instead it’s about an insufferable guy with a handlebar stache.
And unusually for a Cassavetes film, Criterion hasn’t done a release, so I had to get a Spanish DVD of this.
Gena Rowlands!
This movie seems even more improvised than Cassavetes’ movies usually are?
The first bit was *yawn* but once the film shifted to Rowlands, I’m totally riveted.
Nice bookcase!
That’s a colour scheme…
This alternates between being fascinating and being frustrating, so it’s very this.
Oh, imdb.
Exactly. This movie just isn’t that convincing. I mean… all the drama? Rowland’s quirkiness just doesn’t make sense, and Seymour Cassel is just wrong for the part of the Love Interest. (Being wrong here is part of the plot, but he just feels wrong for being the wrong Love Interest, if that makes any sense.)
One third into this movie, I thought this was some kinda genius movie, and then it’s kept on disappointing me for an hour.
It’s… interesting, though? And Rowlands is great. But…
Katherine Cassavetes is great as Moskowitz’s mother, though. Hm… Oh! Gena Rowland’s mother plays her character’s mother here? This is very meta. So Moskowitz is a standin for John Cassavetes? He sees himself like that?
So that was Cassavetes’ mother’s advice to Gena Rowlands?
Well, that makes things a lot funnier, of course.
But… I alternated between adoring this movie and being bored by it. So, er, uhm, like, let’s throw the die this way:
Man, this is so 2012. Everything’s been colour-graded to a desaturated teal.
Oh, that’s Cillian Murphy?
And, of course, Sigourney, which is why I got this movie.
OK, here comes the orange after the teal…
This is ridiculous. Is this movie really supposed to be this teal and desaturated or is there something wrong with this bluray?
It’s like… the person in change of the white balance button was colour blind or something? This is the most ridiculously teal movie I’ve ever seen.
Yes, that is Robert de Niro playing a Uri Geller character. Indeed.
See? When it’s not teal, it’s orange. They did this on purpose.
NOOOOES NOT THE SPOOOONS
This movie is somewhat compelling when they’re not talking. If it hadn’t been for the absurd colour grading, a lot of these moody shots would have been quite nice. But when they have to infodump on us what this silly movie is about, it’s like
This movie is such a car crash. And even though car crashes are easy to look away from, this is almost fascinatingly awful.
Yes, this is a movie from 2012, and somebody is walking for several minutes to go to a pay phone. Inside a school.
The imdb rating is just about a perfect score (if it’s higher, it usually something “popular”, and if it’s lower, it genuinely bad).
But on Rottentomatoes, it’s what you’d expect, because this is an awful movie. Just offal.
That looks like a very real street.
Anyway, after they kill off Sigourney (OOPS SPOILERS), the movie has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
This is most amusing. It’s a screwball comedy about a bunch of perfessers writing an encyclopedia, and it’s really really screwy.
Gary Cooper is the perfessor in charge of grammer, so he’s out doing research for slang, see?
Hey, that’s Gene Krupa?
And Babs!
Stanwyck, that is.
This is amazing! It’s like Bringing Up Baby II or something! Have I been living under a rock or something? Because I can’t recall seeing this film mentioned like ever.
*gasp*
This is totally delightful. It’s not quite perfect the way Bringing Up Baby is (it’s a bit flabby in the last third), but it’s wonderful anyway.
It’s shocking that no Howard Hawks movies are in the S&S Top 100, but on the other hand, perhaps not? If you’re listing the ten “best movies”, you’re going to go for something that had an emotional impact, not a screwball comedy. But watching this movie, I want to watch everything Howard Hawks has done, because this is pure genius.
Looking at his imdb, I’ve watched more than half a dozen of his films, but there’s so much I haven’t seen. I should get shopping.
I wasn’t going to watch this, because I assumed “oh, it’s gonna end with cannibalism”, because all films about haute cuisine end like that. But Mike at Redlettermedia said it doesn’t! And he said it’s hilarious, so I’m watching it anyway.
So far, it’s more amusing than actual “ha ha” funny…
Heh heh. “Not just a single vinyard, but a single row of vines.”
Heh heh heh.
I know it’s a joke and a “savage satire” and stuff, but I think that sounds great — I wanna eat at this restaurant.
And… I think they lulled me into a sense that I was watching a cookery show… and I was fine with that!
But this is an actual movie.
Well… It’s an original movie, fer sure. But there a number of cheesy bits (like with the burger) that were just *rolls eyes*.
And it’s not like it’s a low budget movie, which would excuse a lot of stuff. It’s a $35M movie, and it’s just very uneven. Parts are like “oooh” and then there’s a whole lot of “yawn” towards the end.
My impression is that people enjoy the political bits of this, which I can understand. But it’s just not all that.
Oh, this is directed by Joseph Losey, who did the intriguing Boom! film… And this is strangely gripping, too.
Hey! That’s Jeanne Moreau suddenly!
And this film is getting more and more mysterious. It’s great.
I wonder whether David Lynch was a fan of this movie. I guess if you’d describe it now, it would go “somewhere between Kafkaesque and Lynchian”.
This is some kind of masterpiece. It’s thrilling, moving and mysterious.
I do have one note, though: The very final thing, where we’re reminded of where this film began (so very ironic) really feels like an attempt at gilding the lily, and only manages to tarnish it instead.
(Although if you want to you could criticise it for foregrounding a non-Jewish character’s travails (mostly involving trying to prove that he’s not Jewish) during this period of real horror for Jews… But I think Losey manages that potential ickyness by making him deserve it, for some values of deserve.)
The reason I’m watching this (I mean right now) is because I just watched The Honeymoon Killers, and people talk about this movies as a sort of sibling movie — both released at the same time, and with Divine’s performance seemingly echoing Shirley Stoler’s performance. And I’ve seen this before (I think?), but it’s a long while ago, and I got this new 2K disc from Criterion…
Yeah!!!!
Futura!
Heh heh.
But but… then we get a really long sequence about Jesus? What?
Most excellent, Jesus.
Hey! That’s Mink Stole!
And Mink Stole is inserting her rosary into Divine’s butt while telling Divine about a Jesusey story? Is Waters just trying to go for BLASPHEMY… to the MAX! or is he working through some religious damage?
It’s also possible that Waters is just trying to pad the movie, of course. It has to be more than 90 minutes to get proper distribution.
Yeah, wipe down them there rosaries.
So many shots out of focus… even entire scenes. Is it on purpose or just because Waters is stoned? (He filmed this, and I’m guessing didn’t have a focus puller on staff.)
I’d like to consider myself a very tolerant, broad-minded and versatile film fanatic. I’ve seen and reviewed more than 3.000 titles in the horror, cult and exploitation genre and I’m constantly looking for obscure films that push my boundaries in terms of bad taste, gruesomeness and extremity. With my recent discovery of John Waters’ “Multiple Maniacs”, I think I found my personal limit.
The film holds a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Waters’ highest-rated film on the site.
This is a wonderful movie, but is it good? I hesitate to even doubt in His Watersness, but there were bits that I think didn’t quite work. (Like the Jesus stuff (which I guess was a parody/reference to Pasolini’s Matthew?).) So let’s go with a very controversial:
Filmed primarily in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, production of The Honeymoon Killers began with Martin Scorsese as its appointed director. However, after Scorsese was fired early into the shoot, Kastle, who had helped develop the film, took over directing.
So this is an indie low budget movie, I guess?
It really reminds me of John Waters’ films a little later — the performers are presumably not professional actors, and the lines are a bit stilted. But this plays things seriously, of course.
It’s nicely shot, though.
That has to be the killer, I guess…
The protagonists here are the bad guys, but they take an unusual approach: When films have villains as the main characters, they usually end up with portraying them as pretty cool. You know, “outlaws”. But here they work really hard at making the Killers totally repulsive.
OK, I just have to pause a bit here to google what John Waters thought of this movie. Oh, right:
My first thought watching Leonard Kastle’s grimy black & white crime romance The Honeymoon Killers was “Surely, John Waters loves this.” Without any evidence or background context it seemed obvious to me that The Honeymoon Killers’s mix of camp excess & horrific violence was an influence on Waters’s work, especially evident in the early scene where the killers’ first mark is shown atonally singing “America the Beautiful” at top volume in a bathtub. Even Martha Beck’s over-plucked eyebrows felt like a blueprint for Divine’s signature look, an over-the-top perversion of vintage bad taste in 1950s fashion. The truth is, though, that John Waters was already a fully-formed artist by the time The Honeymoon Killers was released. In fact, his film that most closely resembles Kastle’s, Multiple Maniacs, was released the very same year & already featured Divine in her full, knife-sharp-eyebrows glory. Waters’s work as more a kindred spirit than a direct descendant.
I’d forgotten that Multiple Maniacs was that early — I though it was more mid-70s.
Some of these scenes are just amazing, but in aggregate it’s slightly disappointing? They basically just shout at each other all the time, but it’s not really played for laughs? So I want to love this, but I find myself getting fed up with all the whining and bitching — it’s grating.
In Mr. Lo Bianco’s view, “The Honeymoon Killers” more or less directed itself. “The real heroes were the cinematographer and the editor, Stan Warnow,” he said in a telephone conversation. Seeking Love
I guess that makes sense — with two directors being booted out (and the third one never having directed anything before), the cinematographer is the person who’d be in control here.
And perhaps that’s the problem: There’s so many scenes that are difficult to read as anything but high camp, but it doesn’t seem to be on purpose. So it’s involuntarily hilarious, and cries out to be seen in a movie theatre with a very drunken audience who can throw popcorn at the screen.
And then it’s just horrifying.
So I don’t know… of course it’s one of John Waters’ favourite movies, and it may well be a masterpiece. Truffaut said it was the best American film ever or something.
There’s a lot here I love, but I was also annoyed by a lot of the film. So:
Finally a quality TV! I mean, this is Michael Bay? It has to be great? Right? Right?
But… we’re five minutes in, and there still hasn’t been any explosions? There’s just been *eww* “character development”.
Is this even Michael Bay? And why has he named his film after the classic Larry Cohen movie starring Julia Roberts’ brother?
Hey! It’s Maggie Gyllenhaal’s brother!
Man, this is tedious. WHERE EXPLOSION
We’re 20 minutes in, but I think something is finally gonna happen… Bay has meticulously introduced a whole bunch of characters (they’re an exquisite collection of all the clichés you need for an action movie), and perhaps soon…?
Gotta have a gigantic dog.
Finally. Half an hour in, we get some action scenes.
Michael Bay has mellowed out.
It’s frustrating. There’s occasional scenes that are a lot of fun and I’m thinking YES FINALLY IT”S GOT A MOJO GOING, and then it’s followed by three scenes without any nerve whatsoever.
I’m still hopeful that Bay will manage to get something going…
See? It’s a helicopter chasing an ambulance. This should be fun! But instead it’s just kinda meh.
But it does look quite cool. Bay relies a lot on shakycam, but it’s less annoying that it could be.
It’s like there’s a fun 90 minute action movie hiding in here: Drop 45 minutes of character development and scenes that don’t quite work, and you’re there.
Well, OK. Fine.
They’re really going for zany, but arrive at cringe instead. And I like stupid movies; I don’t mind that the plot is really silly — I think that’s a plus. But like this scene, where they break into a schmaltzy song because Maggie’s brother needs to calm down — that could have been really funny — but they didn’t really commit, and that made it *rolls eyes* instead.
Large parts of this movie are so tedious that ⚀ would be a reasonable score. But there were a few scenes that had nerve, and a couple of fun characters, and a three hankie ending, so:
Oh… this is one of them there movies — based on a musical stage show and then loosely transposed to the screen? These movies usually aren’t all that, but this is certainly well-known enough. I mean, it’s named after that grunge band!?
Uh-oh.
I’m guessing these are the Laurel and Hardy characters?
Actually… this isn’t all that bad? It’s kinda amusing? And the sets are so over-the-top…
Wow, that’s some hairdo. I guess that’s… Tommy Sands?
And that’s Annette Funicello.
OK, this song is kinda not very good.
Changed my mind again — this isn’t very successful. But I can totally see what somebody like Laurel and Hardy could do with this material. These schticks could be hilarious, but here they just aren’t.
OK, Disney made this movie for, like, six-year-olds, so I’m totally in the target audience. But I’m really childish! So I think this is just… not firing on all cylinders.
OK, this guy is good. Uhm… Ray Bolger.
OK, I’m bailing.
It’s certainly well-made, but it’s like… sensory videos for babies? I.e., it’s probably nice for three-year-olds.
Oops; this is three hours long. Movies sure are long these days…
So culture.
Gosh! I wonder what he’ll find when he returns home unexpectedly…
I like the pacing the movie has… but so far it’s been kinda… normal? But this is based on a Murakami short story, after all, so soon something semi-mystical should happen.
Could this be the semi-mystical event?
I like the interiors here. Well, throughout the film — they’re very thoughtful.
Whaaa… and now we get the opening titles? 40 minutes in? So I guess that was the prologue.
Well, that’s a really good explanation for him having a driver!
Nice jacket.
The multi-lingual theatre performance schtick is pretty weird. That is, all the actors are speaking different languages. But as we’re watching the film subtitled anyway, it makes absolutely no difference to us.
I think the most accurate genre designation for this movie is “Oscar bait”. It’s a serious, very serious, film about grief and stuff, but more importantly, it stars a (theatre) director and we witness a bunch of actors rehearsing (etc) for a play.
I think that the dictionary definition of “Oscar bait”.
It’s not that I dislike watching people rehearse for a play — I love Noli me tangere — but those scenes here doesn’t really feel real. They seem really contrived.
They’re sightseeing around Hiroshima, see.
The colour grading in this film is a bit much, isn’t it?
Oh, sorry, I kind of zoned out there for an hour. Did anything happen?
Man, this got so much worse than I thought it would. I now understand perfectly why it was nominated for All The Oscars.
This is quite odd, which I guess is the point. I got all of Jeff Baena’s movies after watching his most recent one, Spin Me Round, and it was just the right amount of zany fun. I’m just ten minutes in here, but this is not… that movie.
Wow! Can on the soundtrack! This is some kinda hipster movie!
Oh, OK, it’s a comedy/horror movie…
It’s just a bit frustrating, because it seems obvious where all this is going now, it’s taking its time.
OK, zombies liking smooth jazz — that’s a solid joke.
They’re going for zany chaos instead of doing actual jokes (with soft jazz blaring), and it’s just a bit exhausting.
I’ve watched quite a lot of movies from 40-45, and surprisingly (to me), very few actually deal with the war at all. But it’s not that strange — audiences want to be diverted, right? But it looks like this is going all in on the war?
Oh, it’s .. it’s… whatsername. Georgia Caine — she’s in a bunch of Sturges films, in small roles.
He’s tall!
Google Translate says that that may mean something like “joyous road”…
This is very funny.
It is somewhat surprising that they’d make something like this at this time — the premise is a guy that’s failed out of the marines (for having hay fever) after a month, but is then mistakenly taken for a war hero when returning home. Hi-jinx ensue. So that’s a normal enough premise, but his soldier buddies (who’ve arranged the whole thing) are slightly sinister, and keep on lying. It’s just a bit… off colour?
I.e., the implication seems to be that all tales told by returning soldiers are lies.
This movie just doesn’t let up. There’s so many chaotic, zany scenes… I don’t think I’ve quite seen anything like it. It should be exhausting, but instead it’s exhilarating.
(He’s the villain.)
It’s very funny, and it’s extremely well made (in that Studio way), and it lands the ending.
Hail the Conquering Hero. Preston Sturges. 1944. ⚄
A new restoration is always a reason to watch an old favourite again. This is a 2K version from Studiocanal, and looks really nice. (I think I’ve seen this before in a small cinema, on VHS, and on DVD.)
I remember the colours being more unreal and deeper, though?
It’s such a lovable movie… it’s not exactly slow and gentle — it’s pretty brash in parts — but it’s got a magical glow and a satisfying progression of nonsense that build into something more.
Now, that’s more like the colours I remember.
This movie is perfect — I have no notes. The soundtrack, the cinematography, the pacing, the performances: It’s all exactly the way it should be.
Perhaps there’ll be a 4K version, so I’ll have an excuse to watch it another time?
And I hope they get their acts together and make a 2K release of Zuckerbaby, which is Percy Adlon’s other Great Movie.
So it’s about these people who have the super-power to do really, really cool stunts. That’s cool.
Marky Mark is a blacksmith!
I bet that guy’s nice…
This is big and stupid and prone to random bursts of violence. Excellent!
I wouldn’t have recognised Marky Mark here — he’s gotten smaller? Except for his forehead?
Unfortunately, this film seems to work only when there’s a big action scene. When they’re infodumping at each other randomly, it’s kinda boring.
But it’s well made. What was the budget on this? The greenscreening and compositing is really well done, and things look convincingly non-CGI-ey. I mean, a lot better than any random Marvel movie, for instance.
They really have a thing for drowning people in this film — this is the third time they’re kinda-sorta drowning somebody?
If only all scenes in all movies could be Marky Mark riding a bike, jumping onto airplanes! It’d be a better world.
So is this movie fun? Yes, but only intermittently. I don’t really mind the plot not making much sense (the Evil Ones want to kill off the entire population of Earth because they’re tired of being reincarnated. Sure! No notes. But! They also have a weapon they’re terrorising the Good Guys with — which is putting their souls onto computer chips so that they’re not reincarnated. So… wouldn’t it be easier just to chip themselves instead of all this malarkey?), but two thirds of the film is basically just boring scenes of exposition. I guess that makes sense from a budgeting point-of-view, but it’s a drag to watch.
This starts off quite well, at least. The editing is a bit annoying — overly rapid.
I wanted to watch this because I read a few really negative reviews of it that made it seem interesting. That is, all the things they mentioned as flaws seemed like positive elements to me — an old-fashioned romantic comedy, without any drama or the dreaded “character development” stuff.
It’s cute!
It’s very amiable and quite amusing, but the gags could have been better?
Without the charm of Roberts and Clooney (and they are indeed very charming), this movie would have been pretty pointless. As it is, it’s kinda boring in places? But it works. It would have been nice if it had more jokes…
Anyway, this is a very unrestored DVD — I’m guessing the film is in the public domain? My DVD looks very er cheap.
But they’re not playing football!
And then we’re onto the modern footage? Huh. Harold Lloyd doesn’t look that different… was that er just a fib? I guess Wikipedia says it’s accurate.
Wow. The producer, Howard Hughes, pulled the film, and re-shot parts of it and released in as Mad Wednesday four years later. And:
Both versions of the film, as originally released and as altered by Hughes, still exist. According to All Movie Guide’s Hal Erikson, the shorter version plays better for audiences, while the original is richer in its comic invention and characterizations.
Er… Damn those audiences, who like the less rich film better!!!1!
Time passes…
I absolutely adore some of Sturges’ earlier movies, but this is his first after he was booted from the studio(s), and… it doesn’t have the same zip as those films. Things just seem a bit off? The cinematography is rather pedestrian, and the editing is positively plodding. I guess it lacks the professional sheen of the major studios?
It tries really hard, I guess? It’s aiming for hilarious schtick, but it lands at vaguely amusing instead. (But I think mileage will vary — it’s like an oldee tymey variety show skit.)
Now I changed my mind! This is pretty funny.
Nice kitten.
Geez. That cat seems a bit overly playful…
AAAAAA
This starts off a bit janky, but then it turns into something totally different — something hilarious. And then it turns into a hi-jinx thing with Lloyd (and a lion) hanging off of a tall building (and that scene is totally insane and exciting). And then we get a romance at the end!
It barely coheres into a movie, but it’s really fun. I’m not sure how to throw the die on this one… The start is a ⚂, and then it’s a ⚄. So let’s go with:
The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. Preston Sturges. 1947. ⚃
Oh, yeah, this movie flopped big time, didn’t it? And I think I can see why already — I’ve read some of the press on this, and Eichner was going “finally, a gay rom com”. But it’s way zanier than that. It’s got a total screwball comedy vibe. The jokes come so fast and are so tight it makes your head swim.
This has so many good gags. But there’s something odd about the pacing or the edit or something. This goes gag, gag, gag, gag, emotional plot scene, gag, gag, gag, and it just doesn’t quite connect up.
I don’t mean to make totally unreasonable comparisons, but I rewatched Bringing Up Baby a few weeks back, and it’s also a gag-heavy film that’s also a romance, but they were able to mix the elements flawlessly. Here they sort of stop and signal “ok, this is the serious bit” and it’s a bit weird.
*gasp*
I really like Eichner, but it’s a lot to ask him to carry a film like this. Because the other lead is … really leaden.
*snicker*
*snicker*
Oh, yeah… we’re in the third act? This is kinda tedious now.
This is more of a ⚂ movie — it just doesn’t quite work. But there’s a bunch of funny scenes, so:
I’m not quite sure why I bought this film… uhm… oh yeah — I was watching a movie doc about 80s special effects, and somebody there said that this movie had the best practical creature effects ever? Or something? I may be misremembering this totally…
Wow… is that matte painting? Surely that can’t be a real set — it’s huge.
Evil-Lyn!
I’ve never seen the cartoon this is based on, but I’m fascinated by the names already.
I think it’s a real, huge set! Wow. So much MDF.
But it’s really oddly shot. You’d think they’d want to show it off better than this — do some epic shots of people posing here, instead of shooting Dolph from the back half the time. Hm…
Oh, this is Goddard’s first and last directing job. He went on to design amusement park rides!
This film, along with Superman IV, led to Cannon and Golan/Globus eventually going bankrupt.
Now kiss.
Yes, yes, I know this is meant for children, but even as a movie for ten-year-olds, it’s kinda badly made? And boring? I had no hopes whatsoever for this being watchable — I mean, it’s a He-Man movie by Cannon! But it’s so much worse than you could reasonably expect.
It’s like they have no idea how to place people in a shot.
Oh the snark.
Accurate.
How do you spell “blocking” anyway?
It’s basically filmed like a no budget 50s film — but the thing is that this had a pretty decent budget — $17M, which wasn’t peanuts for Cannon. And they apparently spent all that money on the sound stage and moisturiser for Dolph, leaving no money to hire a crew that knows how to point a camera towards actors. Or perhaps the director just wouldn’t let them do their jobs?
I thought I’d seen all of Godard’s 60s films, so I assumed that this was a more recent one. But nope.
I guess he’s both against artificial lighting and using a reflector now?
This is quite different from his earlier movies? Not as immediately likeable; more chaotic.
Godard did two other films the same year: La Chinoise and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. That’s pretty astounding.
Damn straight!
It’s… it’s a comedy, but the gag is that everybody’s terrible, and everybody shouts all the time. I’m just half an hour in, and I’m already exhausted.
Oh, there’s that guy…
Man, they had a huge budget for car wrecks for this film…
This has all of Godard’s 60s ticks and schticks, but it just seems to scattered and self-indulgent. That is, it looks like everybody involved enjoyed themselves, filming one silly scene after another. But it just doesn’t seem to cohere into anything interesting.
It might just be me — there’s something about late-60s “absurd” comedy that rubs me the wrong way. I couldn’t stand The Bed Sitting Room either, for instance. (It’s all LOOK HOW ABSURD WERE ARE BEING!!! WE”RE BEING TOTALLY SOCIALLY CRITIC AL AND STUFF!!!.) But everybody else loves this movie, so I’m probably just wrong.
So this is a straight-up documentary? I like it — most documentaries suck, but this is not the normal TV kind of documentary, with sound-bites from a bunch of talking heads. Instead it’s longer takes, with people just talking normally to each other (and not to the camera).
And then music and perfomances, and again, longer takes. I love that.
I’ve seen Grace Jones only twice — last time last year, and she was awesome! She gave it all; she was funny; she totally had her voice still; and it was a bit scary.
Oh! This movie from 2017, so I thought it was about er stuff from 2017. But it’s about the recording of the Hurricane album, which was released in 2008. Did this movie languish for a decade before it was released?
We’re getting complete songs from the album, live. I love that. This movie doesn’t even make any pretence towards catering to an audience that aren’t already hypnotised by Grace Jones — there’s no contextualisation, no recap of her life; we’re just dropped into the recording of the album and the press she’s doing and her visiting her family.
Yum yum yum
I admire the insistence of not giving any context — no voiceovers, no explanatory texts — but it leaves some of the drama totally mystifying.
You just imagine Grace Jones flying around with a full crew of people taking care of everything. Instead she’s doing her own makeup, she’s shucking the oysters herself, and she’s taking care of business herself. She’s such a nerd!
I love this film. But it’s so bewildering! I didn’t know you were allowed to make films like this any more! Perhaps you aren’t? Is that why it took that long to release this film? I don’t think I’ve seen a documentary made during the last five decades that’s this obsessed with not explaining what it’s about; that’s withholding this much information. (Even documentaries that try to hide the film crew ask leading questions like “tell us where you are” and then just edit it so that the response seems natural, but nope.) So on one hand, I love watching this, but on the other hand, I can barely stop my fingers from trying to google what’s going on here.
The documentary is fascinating and enjoyable but it still only gives us half a picture of its subject. Again and again, we clamour for more information. You’ll need to go elsewhere to get hold of any of the everyday details about Jones, her life, career and many collaborators.
But it’s great; I could have watched four more hours of this.
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami. Sophie Fiennes. 2017. ⚄
Oh, right — Amy Heckerling… Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless. This is gonna be awesome.
Alicia Silverstone!
Krysten Ritter!
OK, this has to be the best movie ever.
Nice.
Heh heh.
You’ve gotta be kidding me!!! SIGOURNEY, TOO!?
So topical! A few years ahead of its time.
Oh, yeah, this is super goofy and silly. It’s kinda halfway between Scary Movie and The Nanny.
IS EVERYBODY IN THIS MOVIE!? MALCOLM!!
Larry…
OK, I give up. This movie really does have everybody. Does Heckerling have the best rolodex in the business?
I ALREADY SAID I GIVE UP
This movie is the silliest thing ever and I love it.
It’s just good-natured fun.
But! We’re coming up on the one hour mark, so the third act’s gonna happen now. Are they all gonna get killed or something to adhere to movie writing conventions?
Nope! This movie defied all conventions, and avoided the Dreaded Third Act Disease. Instead they went for a super affecting ending, but still funny.
This is very true. It almost doesn’t work, but then it does. It’s a lovely little unassuming trifle of a movie, and it’s adorable.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a Woody Allen movie… he’s probably made some since this one…
That’s a cute meet-cute, but kinda totally phoned in? Kinda like a parody of one, without being funny?
I’ve been there!
*gasp* The the actor playing Woody’s wife is only 20 years younger than he is! Is that a record!?
This movie is slightly on the orange/yellow side?
But looks good with the green.
Heh. This guy is totally trying to do Woody 1976-ish.
Baldwin is great as imaginary friend. Or are the rest of them imaginary, and he’s the real one? Hm… I guess that sounds more likely.
Harsh. But accurate. I think he may be referring to the Italian-famous-schmuck-fantasy storyline? Probably.
Because this is the most boring of the storylines — it’s just a single joke that lasts half an hour. Perhaps if they’d cut each storyline down by a third?
Hasn’t somebody done this gag before? It seems really familiar.
It just gets more and more tedious. It’s like they forgot to actually write the movie.
It’s got a couple of funny bits, but it mostly feels interminable.
Anyway, I saw this in an actual cinema in the 90s. You know, one of those places where lots of people sit in the same room and watch the same film? I know! It sounds like science fiction, but it was actually a thing.
I remember liking this movie quite a lot?
The shakycam is kinda overwhelming, though.
Uhm… this isn’t as good as I remembered. It looks good, but slightly cheap?
Oh, wow — I was wrong there. It’s a big budget… and it totally bombed! Totally.
Well, they didn’t get their money’s worth on the sets — everything looks slightly back-lot-y, and I’m not even sure they’re actually back lots.
SO MUCH DRAMA
It just seems kinda fake? It’s like they had to put in a scene here like this for character development, and it’s just kinda dull.
Is that Nine Inch Nails? Doesn’t really sound like them, but perhaps it’s from after I stopped listening to them…
Looks like a fun club.
*gasp* The perversions!
This guy is a really bad actor.
It’s pretty accurate.
Man, the plot here is so… I don’t want to say convoluted. It’s just kinda silly. And the movie whiplashes between being kinda expressive and then dropping down into TV series cop show dialogue. It’s jarring.
SO MUCH DRAMA
And the basic mystery — “who’s the deranged killer” — there’s basically just a single person it can be, which is so sloppy. (I mean, I guess they want us to think that the killer is that other guy, so it’s not him, and there is only a single person remaining.)
I was really disappointed — I remembered this being a lot better. And it’s got some really memorable scenes, but then there’s all the rest which is totally forgettable. It’s not that it’s overly long, either — I mean, it’s two and a half hours, but it doesn’t feel padded, and you couldn’t really cut anything without losing some plot. It’s just that so much of it’s kinda boring.
Wow, this isn’t what I expected in a Knives Out sequel at all. But it’s a lot of fun.
This movie is so subtle!
It’s a testament to… something… that scenes like this don’t scream AAAH ALL THAT GREENSCREEN AND CGI when we’re looking at it in context — we’ve become used to scenes like this that we don’t blink an eye.
So the rich guy is a total moron? Sounds predefinite accurate.
I remember Knives Out being more of a straight murder mystery? This is more like an all out satire? All funny all the time?
Or… OK, instead of “satire”, it’s “broad comedy”.
It’s almost fascinating that they don’t even bother to CGI and composit shots to look more realistic than this. It’s like — “if all the movie looks like shit, then nothing stands out too much, eh?”
Sanctuary did this better 15 years ago.
Oh, OK.
This movie is just very frustrating. It started off as a broad comedy, and it was pretty funny. Then we’ve gone through all these tedious scenes of standard mystery TV series machinations, and while I recognise that they’re “sly parodies” of this sort of stuff, it doesn’t quite work on any level — it’s not actually funny, and it’s not good mystery stuff, because it’s structurally obvious who the murderer is.
(Well, I say that now, but I don’t actually know yet!)
But even if I’m wrong, I’m already annoyed and somewhat bored, just like I was with the first movie.
And it’s two hours and twenty minutes!!! I feel like they could already have cut a half an hour of the first hour and fifteen minutes…
But there’s a bunch of really amusing lines here; you gotta give them that.
Heh heh.
I admire them using the Netflix billions to take the piss out of billionaires and stuff — and they do it well and they do it thoroughly, with plenty of good gags — but the movie just doesn’t work for me. It sags and the repartee falls flat a lot of the time, and spending this much time on this extended joke just isn’t worth it.
So while I rate the thought process behind this ⚅ or higher, and the mystery itself was kinda fun, and the performances are good, I spent most of the time watching this bored out of my skull. The “cinematography” (i.e., compositing people standing in front of greenscreen onto scenery) was incredibly basic and at times risible (I wondered whether Johnson was taking a subtle dig the phenomenon at certain points, but I don’t think so), and the excessive length (they could easily have dropped an hour), so:
Ah, one of these old films with Liza Minnelli and Grace Kelly… or something like that.
Paris! This movie may be paid for by the French tourist board.
Grace!
Hey! That’s Leslie Caron! I saw a movie with her just the other day… what are the chances… And that was with Fred Astaire. So she only needs to do a movie with Ginger Rogers now.
That’s how I always read my books.
Minnelli was having fun with the framing here.
And in general, everybody’s goofing it up to the max.
*gasp* Modern art!
Did I Got Rhythm originate with this movie? Sounds unlikely.
MGM executive Arthur Freed bought the Gershwin musical catalog from George’s brother Ira in the late 1940s, since George died in 1937. Some of the tunes in this catalog were included in the movie, such as “I Got Rhythm” and “Love Is Here to Stay”.
Yeah, I thought that was an older song…
This is most amusing. It’s got a more solid storyline than these things usually have — there’s at least a couple love triangles and stuff, and a struggling painter and a struggling composer and a struggling dancer.
Such very film trickery.
But… while this is amusing and exceedingly well made (it won All The Oscars of the year), it’s more than a bit staid. It started off so well, with zany bits, but it’s seriously lost its zip and panache.
Heh heh. This starts with this shot for a couple of minutes — like a cheeky comment on Akerman’s way of filming. Then a rumble that we understand is an elevator, and then Akerman appears. It’s fun.
“And a camera there? Oh my god.”
Yay. She said “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” the correct way! People never do that.
Heh, they’ve just told her she can’t smoke here. “Don’t worry.”
So this is basically just a filmed interview. The questions he asks are inane like “what is cinema” and “how do you do framing” — reading them up from a sheet of paper, obviously, one after another, and not engaging in any kind of conversation. I think if we’d get a closer shot, we’d see Akerman’s eyes rolling all the time, but she gives really good answers, about not being interested in naturalism, and ways of making a movie as tense as a Hitchcock movie without anything much happening.
It’s a fun conceit — doing an interview that tries to mimic an Akerman film, but they mostly manage to illustrate how difficult it is doing this sort of thing in the way Akerman does it and make it have tension.
And he’s really a kinda bad interviewer. Akerman soldiers through and says interesting stuff, and that saves it.
What’s Studiocanal’s deal anyway… they’re involved in a lot of stuff like this — restoring random movies. I mean, they’re French, after all, so doing a 4K restoration of an 80s Stephen King horror movie seems so… random. Did I mention random?
It’s the Stephen King Cinematic Universe!
Seem accurate.
Is that accurate, though?
This is very odd. I think I must have seen it before, but I have no recollection of the film. I assumed it was a straight-up horror movie, but it seems very broad — I guess it’s meant to be funny? Did the scene where they electrocute the cat bring down the room, though?
More crossover action!
So the gag here is that James Woods signed up for an anti-smoking treatment — and the treatment is, basically: They’re watching him, and if he lights up, they’ll torture his family.
I have no idea how the cat and the ghost doll ties into all this.
It’s very meta.
Director Teague didn’t do a lot of directing — his most famous contribution up there, Death Race 2000, was for second unit stuff. He’s directed a bunch horror/action films in the 80s, basically.
Oh! This is one of them there anthology movies? With the cat doing the link segments?
So I guess there’s gonna be three of these Twilight Zone/Roald Dahl-ish half hour things?
I guess Teague’s second unit career really shows in the cat scenes — they’re really good.
This one is really scary! Eeek!
Well, that was fun!
This reminds me… there were a number of these anthology horror movies in the 80s, weren’t there? I wonder why… I mean, it doesn’t seem like a natural format for something you watch in the movie theatres, and these films weren’t meant for the straight-to-video market, either.
50s nostalgia amongst 80s filmmakers? They all just want to do Twilight Zone and there’s no network that wants to do them?
Oh, that’s Drew Barrymore? (I had a sneak peek at imdb.)
This film is a lot of fun. It’s not exactly perfect — the bits are 30 minutes long, but seem padded. As TV episodes, they’d have been 22 minutes long (with ads added), and perhaps that would have been better?
Still, a lot of fun. It’s a bit weird, though — what was the cat doing in the first two bits, anyway? (It’s a major character in the third bit.)
Against the director Lewis Teague’s wishes, the studio cut out a prologue that explained the cat’s motivations. They considered it “too silly.” As a result, many viewers were confused by the connection between the three stories.
Heh heh. This is a still from the intro that was 86’d by the studio. I can’t imagine why!
The DVD commentary is supplied by director Lewis Teague. He states during it that in the ‘Quitters Inc’ segment (when the cat is being shocked while standing on the electrified floor) the cat is actually leaping around wildly because the animal handler (hidden under the floor) is blowing compressed air on it to surprise it. The cat is not actually being shocked.
This looks like it’s going to be one of those minimal Akerman films, which makes a change from the previous two films in this box set. They were more traditional, with people being interviewed and stuff.
So far (fifteen minutes in), we’ve had four long takes, each looking out this window to the neighbours — shot through these drapes. The neighbours are puttering around in their rooftop garden. And the sound is the natural sound from Akerman’s apartment (presumably), with her answering the phone. But also doing a voice-over… about two of her cousins committing suicide, and her family in general.
It’s riveting!
Part of the attraction is the sheer Peeping Tom aspect of it all… nobody could actually sit staring at their neighbours like this. But here, we have no other choice.
*gasp* Outside!!! It cannot be!
Oops. This is a DVD, and it’s interlaced, and the deinterlace seems to be hitting the resolution of the drapes, so everything’s all shimmery all of a sudden…
This needs a blu ray remaster.
Is that Akerman? It kinda looks like it?
Oh, yeah, this is a movie about Israel and being under siege.
Oh, right, this is the infamous super-hero bomb? I’m already impressed with how nonsensical it is, and we’re only a couple minutes in.
I’m fascinating by how abrupt this movie is. It’s not using the normal super-hero storytelling devices and aesthetics at all. Perhaps some of that’s due to budget constraints — using cheap subway tile in this laboratory, and then having the rest of the set be in pitch darkness — but it’s refreshing to see something actually filmed on a set instead of just being greenscreen and CGI, which is the standard now for even the simplest of scenes.
(Although parts of the office is CGI and that is probably a CGI mouse.)
Hey! That shows Jared Leto’s dedication to the role — at the start of the movie, he was a forty pound weakling, but during the filming, he bulked up to Charles Atlas size!
Hm… the film’s kinda lost something now… it was weird and abrupt at the start, but in a good way. Now it’s more… abrupt but somewhat boring.
It’s still odd! I’m wondering what happened to this movie, so excuse me while I pause to google.
So this was filmed in 2019 in London. But later that year, Marvel/Disney reached an agreement with Sony to tie things more deeply into the Marvel movie timeline, allowing the Spider-Man-verse (which this is part of, sort of) to be part of all that. This led to reshoots. The movie was meant to be shown in 2020, but then Corona happened, so it was postponed to 2021, and further reshoots happened to keep up with the Spider-Man films. Then premiere was postponed to 2022, and more reshoots happened, and then we got what we got.
The negative reception toward the film generated an ironic meme culture surrounding it with “praise”, which led Sony to re-release it into 1,000 theaters on June 3, 2022. This re-release also performed poorly, making just $280,000 over the weekend.
It bombed twice.
The film does feel really, really tightly edited. Perhaps over-edited? Like someone has tinkered with the film for more than two additional years, getting everything super tight? And I like that! It’s not like any other super-hero movie… I could imagine they just keep moving the date back year after year, never ending, doing reshoot after reshoot: The Movie On The Edge Of Forever.
Seems more like an episode of something rather than a film
I understand what he means, because it’s way off model for one of these movies… and I’m starting to like it more.
*rolls movie again*
OK, that’s a cheap joke, but heh.
*gasp* Kitty!
I’ve seen super-hero movies that are a lot worse than this. Like — most of them? The start of this is pretty intriguing, and then it gets iffy, and then at the end it’s more traditional. It’s a mess, kinda. I think ⚂ would be a more reasonable rating, but I’m never reasonable, so:
This screen is very wide. And it kinda looks like they’ve used a lens that’s kinda fishy? When a car drives across the screen, it makes strange contortions…
Hey, that’s…
Yes, it’s Fred Astaire!? Wow. From 1955?
He still looks pretty spry.
This is quite amusing. It’s quite light in the Astaire dept — he’s done half a dance and a couple of scenes.
But it’s still quite nice.
OK, here comes the dancin’.
The movie is slightly odd — it’s a 2 hour+ extravaganza, but the story is so… un-epic.
It’s also kinda “eh” in that the premise seems to be that the old Astaire character is gonna end up with the 18-year-old Leslie Caron character — he just has to wait a couple years for her to be all growed up first.
That’s a nice green colour.
It’s a strikingly… transparent film. I mean, it’s just so professional? It’s generically well-made without any distinguishing thing about it whatsoever. The name of the director, Jean Negulesco, doesn’t ring any bells at all, but he’s done a whole bunch of movies:
Of those, I’ve seen… How to Marry a Millionaire, and… no, that’s it, I think? Huh.
Wow, that’s some Manhattan matte painting. It’s like a perfect, if feverish, vision of Manhattan-ness.
Well, OK, the movie does explicitly call out the creepy differences in age and power between the Astaire and Caron characters, so it’s got that going for it. But that’s only done as the third act drama bit — the thing that’s getting between them and their eventual blissful happiness, so…
Hey! Now the sofa is more blue than green…
Teal. Teal.
This is not a great film. I’m not even sure you could call it “good” on any reasonable scale. But it’s a perfect example of its genre — it distilled from a whole bunch of films that are actually good. It’s kinda flawless in that way? So I really enjoyed it — a lot, but your mileage will vary. I wasn’t bored a second. So:
Anyway, this 2K restoration is kinda odd — I mean, I guess it must be a problem with what they’re restoring from, but things are very soft-focused and noisy at the same time, which is an unusual combination. That is, there seems to be an abundance of film grain, but at the same time, nothing is as sharp as films from this period usually are. It’s odd.
Oh, I just read the restoration notes — it’s based on a nitrate negative duplicate (which I guess means third generation?) which was riddled with mold. It was scanned with a “wet-gate” scanner, which removed the mold, but left us with what we’re seeing here… but I swear I’ve seen earlier DVD versions that looked… better?
Or perhaps I’m misremembering:
This is the earlier DVD I watched, and it’s got none of the details of this version. But… it does look kinda swell anyway?
Nice kitty.
This film is exceptional. I mean, on one level it’s a descent into a hellish nightmare — Cary Grant is trapped (literally and not) in a mad world all of a sudden. But the film seems so say — well, what if you gave it all up to anarchy? Wouldn’t that be fun?
And indeed it is, while with just a itsy bitsy twist this would be a horror film.
This is a wonderful movie, of course. The Criterion restoration is a bit… the focus seems to be preserving as many details as possible in the (bad) nitrates this is sourced from. And it’s just isn’t all that pleasant to look at, unfortunately.
Once again, I have no idea what this is… it looks like a documentary? But this time, I guess the South in the US?
Eek! People are talking in this one! In D’Est, there was no talkin.
This DVD really isn’t ideal — it’s interlaced, so it’s all smudged when doing tracking shots (which Akerman loves to do). It’s also anamorphic 16:9, which makes the resolution even lower, and it’s all just kinda… not sharp.
And there’s no subtitles, and I’m not quite sure what people are saying?
I’m just saying: This is not an ideal way to watch this film, so I’m not sure my take on this is right, but it just feels a bit half-assed, as Akerman films go. That is, she’s using her well-known techniques (long shoots that call for great framing and tracking shots that can be contemplative), but she’s here mixing in Americans talking to the camera and, and 16:9, and… it’s not shot on film? Is this video? Digital video?
Must be digital video, I guess, but this looks quite good for early DV. I mean, it has the usual problems (everything that’s over a certain brightness is all #fff, so you lose details in the bright bits)…
… but it’s quite nice in lower light conditions.
I mean, I totally understand Akerman wanting to do this documentary — she happened to be here after this horrendous murder, so doing anything but a straightforward documentary about racism would be impossible, I guess?
But the film just seems overwhelmed by its subject matter (which is natural).
But why can’t they hire real hairdressers? His white bits look like somebody glued on some white hair onto a dark-haired wig.
And I guess the white bits moving around are just to signal that we’re in a different part of the Multiverse now?
Still, bad wig in this universe, too.
My theory is still that Disney half-asses scenes like this on purpose: When everything looks fake, they can cut down on spending on the big actions scenes. Because then they don’t stick out like sore thumbs. But I’d prefer that, if the normal non-action scenes could look better. Instead everything is half-assed greenscreen and CGI like this.
Wigstock.
Uhm uhm. This seems awfully abrupt, doesn’t it? I mean, Wanda can rewrite reality, so she’s set. So why this sudden total heel turn?
And the entire Multiverse thing — I see the attraction for people writing movies, because you can do fun stuff like in the third Spider-Man movie, having the different Spider-Man actors meet. But long term, it just lowers the stake of absolutely everything: If you blow up one universe, then there’s another you can go to, and if you fix one universe, there’s an infinite number of universes where things went wrong. So it just makes nothing matter — bad or good.
Hey, it’s… Ash!
I’d forgotten that Sam Raimi did this — and I’m surprised that Disney let him after running the Spider-Man franchise into the ground back when.
Can Raimi do the same with the “Marvel Cinematic Universe”!?!
OK, I’ve started zoning out because this is kinda dull. But I have to give Raimi props for the special effects — this movie does look better than most Marvel movies, and I was a bit unfair at the start there.
Raimi reportedly began shooting with only a half-finished script, and it shows.
It does — it’s like nothing is happening in this movies, except for people running around.
Man, that’s a lot of fan service. Which I approve of!
Oh man, still half to go.
MAKE IT STOP IT”S SO BORING
But I kinda want to see how this ends. I wonder how pissed off Elizabeth Olsen was with this movie. It seemed like it squandered a pretty interesting character arc for… nothing. Perhaps they’re gonna put in a And Now She’s Nice Again (i.e., the Sylar move) at the end?
OK, I withdraw the nice things I said about the CGI.
Sometimes the subtitles are way way off.
Well, that was really boring. It’s like… nothing of interest happened, and the only new thing we “learned” about the MCU was the dreamwalking thing, and it was totally lame. They wanted a movie that followed up from Wandavision and the Spider-Multiverse thing, and they forgot to actually write it? And instead they just started filming a bunch of “neat” scenes?
So while I was bored out of my skull watching this, a couple of the scenes were, indeed, pretty neat, so I’m upping my throw of the die to:
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Sam Raimi. 2022. ⚁
Huh… it’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie with Bogie? *ponder* I’ve mostly seen hoiti-toiti films lately — did Bogie miss out on all those films?
I’ve missed him, I realise now.
I’ve seen this before, of course, but it’s been a minute. And I’ve recently seen Ray’s first three movies, and they all stunk. But this is as good as I vaguely remember.
This is so noir. All those sharp shadows everywhere, the meta qualities, and the cynicism pervading everything.
That’s some suit.
Ray is really subtle with the dick jokes.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Anyway… the first hour of this film is just kinda perfect. And then the last third alternates between boredom and exasperation — when it’s clear that Dix Steele is a psychopath, it’s not really interesting whether he killed Mildred or not. The excitement is then in whether Laurel can get away from him without getting killed or not, and that’s exasperating, because she’s just not trying that hard.
So the tragedy the film seems to be going for — with the resolution to the murder mystery that arrives too late to make a difference — dissipates completely. Instead Laurel getting out of the movie alive is the happy ending, which negates the tragedy I think Ray was going for with the end of the relationship.
*time passes*
I’m now watching one of the extras on the disc here, and Ray explains how they first shot this film with a totally different ending: Bogie kills Laurel, and the cops burst into the apt (which was Ray’s first Hollywood apt) and arrest him. But as he explains — romances (and marriages) don’t have to end in violence! (Gloria Grahame, who plays Laurel, had just divorced Ray, but nobody on set knew that yet.) “This is a very personal film.”
That certainly… puts another twist on the entire thing.
This is the third and final movie in the Apu series (which started with Pather Panchali, which is usually on the Top 100 Films Ever lists).
Well, this seems like a perfectly nice “optimistic young man goes to the big city and gets his hopes dashed (before (presumably) becoming a famous author or something)” kind of film, but…
Nice bokeh.
This is a really sweet movie — it kinda reminds me of Italian cinema from around the same time? I mean, the slightly abrupt changes from comedic buffoonery (how Apu got married, for instance) to the good-natured scenes of domestic comedy… it works, but also feels like well-trodden ground.
It’s hard to stop smiling while watching this movie, is what I’m saying.
But if he’s following the set tropes, I’m guessing something horrible is going to happen about now? I’m guessing a childbirth death? (I mean, I’m only guessing that the wife is pregnant (or indeed has ever had sex) — they said “I guess you want to be with your parents at a time like this”.)
Indian movies take prudery to another level altogether.
Here it comes, here it comes…
*sigh*
I mean, I always hope I’m wrong about directors following these templates…
But now the budding author has learned about love and loss, so his journey can continue on. I mean, that’s what’s important, after all.
(Yes, I’m dissing a 1959 film for doing the Sensible Pixie Dream Wife plot.)
Oh, the baby survived? This is the first mention of a baby (or the possibility thereof) in the film at all.
OOPS SPOILERS
The plot is very childish — the magical wedding, the “ooh, if my wife died, I’d be so sad and deep”, etc. But plot schmot, who cares: It’s a very enjoyable movie on a scene to scene basis (looks great; good actors), and that’s what’s important, after all.
Uhm. This is directed by Andy Serkis? Gollum? He’s making some really odd choices here — first of all, many scenes here are so dark you’d think they were episodes of that final Game of Thrones season. And when he’s not filming people in pitch darkness, he’s obscuring their faces behind all sorts of things. Is this all elaborate revenge for all the years Serkis were doing CGI capture and never got his face on the screen?
It might just be the normal strategy for hiding how bad the CGI is — if you film the entire film in darkness, the CGI will be dark, too.
It’s got a budget of $110M, and I’m guessing the stars got half of that, so it’s got a pretty small budget for the CGI.
I’m kinda enjoying the banter and the frenetic pace of this — it drops us into the middle of things and doesn’t stop moving. And some of the gags are pretty amusing. But still it doesn’t all seem to connect? And I think it’s perhaps because it just looks kinda… #000000.
Tom Hardy is really charming here (when you can see him on the screen).
I think there was a fight scene, but I’m not quite sure.
Little Simz!
OK, now it’s just boring.
I think this movie had something going at the start — it was pretty amusing, and the banter (while clumsy at times) worked. And then it mostly stopped being funny, and there wasn’t much there except a couple fight scenes in the dark.
Looks like this is a documentary? And there’s no commentary, and so far nobody has spoken.
From the title, I guess this is from the east of something, but I’m not quite sure what yet. East France? Belgium? Europe?
OK, now there’s a radio playing… the singer sounds he’s from eastern Europe, I guess.
OK, that guy is talking. Definitely eastern Europe? No subtitles.
Is that cyrillic? So perhaps this is in Russia?
Jeanne Dielman II: This Time It’s Salami!
I wonder what the people who were shocked by Jeanne Dielman would say about this movie — I find it intermittently riveting, but then I drift off a bit. It’s just pure… film? I mean, Akerman points the camera at people, and that’s apparently all she does, and the result is something as interesting and captivating as this. But it’s also 10x as “boring” as Jeanne Dielman was, which had, you know, a plot.
I’m also wondering how she did all the slow tracking shots. Did she drive a cart around with a mounted camera very close to people? Had they been told that she would do that? Some people clearly avert their faces, because they don’t want to be on the film. Some people look straight into the camera. A few people talk. Most try to look natural. But what are they all waiting for?
Possibly the bus?
When this scene started, I assumed that we’d gotten to the last bit, and that this would last for 12 minutes, but instead it was a pretty brief take — just three or four minutes. Really nice tune and performance.
Wow, this is like an old-fashioned, no-nonsense, non-referential disaster movie. It’s got the science nerds, the military, the president I mean prime minister, the monster… it’s like all those movies you’ve seen… but it works! It’s like, say, Godzilla, but without the pompous boring bits (i.e., “character development”). I’m totally into this.
I hope they don’t screw it up but just keep going like this.
Classic.
Well… OK… I thought they were gonna skip some parts of the formula, like the protagonist visiting their father and having an argument (since this film is less than two hours long), but they squeezed that in, too. It was a moderately amusing Daddy Issue set of scenes, but it was still kinda dull (as always).
I guess you gotta have character development if it’s gonna be on Netflix.
Well, OK. It did hit all the right notes, and landed a pretty satisfying (and was faithful to the genre), but it got a bit boring here and there. Not a lot — there was, like, 15 minutes of flab?
This is a pretty odd short — it’s basically just this guy showing off various swimming techniques. It’s almost an instructional video, but it’s tres artistique.
I bought a Complete Jean Vigo box the other year — it’s not big, because Vigo only did four (pretty short) films. I’ve watched the most famous ones, L’Atalante and Zero de Conduite, so I thought I’d finish up with the last two.
This one is silent and… kinda odd. I mean, odd in that it seems like Vigo is just going around Nice filming stuff at random. But parts are animated?
OK, there are bits here that seem slightly scripted…
Vigo seems to spend most of the film devising ways to film up womens’ skirts — first while they’re sitting, and then while they’re dancing, and finally he just has them walking across an open manhole.
I’m really enjoying this. Waititi has turned the silly up to 11, and I think it works.
The only annoying this so far is, as usual, the cheap-looking CGI and especially the compositing. Marvel! It’s always this way!
Heh heh heh. Love the helmet.
So the previous movie was a somewhat traditional super-hero movie, but funny. This is a comedy that features super-heroes, which is something altogether different, and I’m totally on board for that.
But… it’s flip-flopping between really really stupid gags (which I like) and then out heroes are killing a bunch of people, and that’s just hard to enjoy fully.
And sometimes the jokes are even stupider (like Thor pouring beer over that axe), and then they’re talking about cancer, and…
Somehow the mixture suddenly got boring.
I changed my mind about the CGI, though. Well, OK, they’re making it easy for themselves by having most of the CGI stuff happen when it’s very dark, which is an old trick. And by not compositing CGI over real stuff, because that’s harder to make look real. But within those constraints, it frequently looks really nice.
This kinda isn’t a very good movie, but there were some scenes I really enjoyed, and some bits here and there I loved, so:
It’s gotten middling reviews, but that’s a lot better than most Hellraiser movies, so…
As everybody knows, they have a very limited colour palette in Serbia.
But now we’re back in the US and they have colour there.
It’s a new configuation!
Tee hee
Then they forgot the colours again, and they’re not even in Serbia.
But … this is like so much better than every Hellraiser movie since the second one, there’s no competition. It’s like a real movie, you know? Good actors, professional cinematography, an apparently intriguing plot that is slowly revealing itself…
I’m sure once everything is clearer, it’s gonna turn out to be really stupid, but so far, it’s really good. Like an old fashioned horror movie.
Uh-oh.
This is still good, but the one mis-step so far is…
the design of the Cenobites. I think they wanted to take it a step further — in the original movies, it was people in leather with some S&M stuff. This time around, they seem to go with flesh sculpting? Which just takes it from “eww!! scary!” to “eh? is that CGI or is it latex?”
The colour grading on this movie is just… excessive.
OK, it was kinda grisly towards the end, but at least it wasn’t torture porn.
That was… kinda good? It could definitely have been more scary, but it was creepy enough. And they managed to make excellent use of what little Hellraiser “mythos” there is — it was definitely the most well-developed movie in that dept of them all.
So… Good job. That’s not an easy thing to do, as all the previous sequels show. It’s not without problems — it doesn’t really feel too long, but it could have been snappier? And the colour grading could have been less boring? But… If I’m rating this on a Hellraiser scale, I have to give this a:
Five years ago (oo, it feels a lot longer ago…), I had a blogging project where I attempted to watch one movie (and make one cocktail) from every country on Earth. (So that’s about 200.) For Greenland, I wanted to watch this movie, but ended up with Inuk instead. And the reason was that it was only available on Greenland — and nobody there wanted to sell it to me — and in the Greenland embassy in Denmark (and the guy who was going to buy it for me forgot to when he was over there).
But today! I got this in the mail! Thank you, Adam! (Along with another movie by the same director.)
So now I’m watching it.
This is very pretty. The actors are obviously not professional, but they’re doing a good job.
Oh! I’d forgotten that this is a horror movie! That was a scary scene.
It started off like a serious, social drama kind of movie, so the sheer surprise of suddenly turning into something else was a lot of fun.
The guy playing Piitaq is good.
Immer dabei.
They’ve got the classic slasher cast of protagonists — the smart girl, the nerdy guy, the goofy guy, the jock, the doomsaying girl…
So I guess the final girl is The Final Girl?
NOOO DON”T PEE ON THE SACRED ANCIENT BURIAL GROUND
And: That’s some splashing.
I think they’re aiming for “day for night” here but didn’t quite know how to do it? They’ve basically just turned the contrast and saturation way down, so it doesn’t look… it doesn’t look like anything.
I quite liked the pacing for the first half of the movie — things moved slowly, but it made sense in a way: We got to know the characters and it was building tension. But now that we’re in the horror part of the movie, it just drags. It should have a sense of urgency, but instead it’s just… very… slow…
So many scenes like this that are like they just didn’t want to miss a single frame of footage when editing. Or did they switch genres? Suddenly now it’s a comedy horror movie?
I think the first hour of this was fine, but after that, it just dragged. I mean, really.
But there’s a lot here that I liked anyway. Good cinematography, and the editing was swell in some scenes, some good performances and some nice plot twists.
Not much of an imdb score, but:
51 people really, really liked it!
(I don’t know how many of those appeared in the film.)
There’s lots of extras on the blu ray, but they’re not subtitled, so…
I watched Baena’s Spin Me Round yesterday, at it was awesome, so I ordered all his films on bluray — except this one, which is Netflix only. So I’m watching that now.
So this has basically all the same actors as Spin Me Round? I like that.
But what is this? Spin Me Etc was a sarcastic look at Olive Garden and rom coms… is this a sarcastic take on horror movies?
That’s the guy from Search Party?
Molly Shandon is awesome.
I’m still not sure what this movie is — the protagonist is working at er like Yarn Barn, but a parody one, and everything is like wha and amusing — but is this going to be like a serious thriller / sci fi thing? I was expecting more funny and less strange.
But with shots like this…
I still don’t know what to make of this! Just when I think it’s a parody of a horror movie (see above), the next scene is apparently played straight. But perhaps I’m missing what Baena’s being sarcastic about.
I’m really enjoying this superpositioned feeling of is it/isn’t it?
OK, this is just so sarcastic.
But then it turns out that he thought they were kidding around and then he’s shocked to find out that she’s serious!
THIS IS SO COMPLIMACATED
Even just the wig…
Well, this was a lot of fun. If I’m to make a guess, I think the director saw Serial Mom obsessively as a teenager and then decided to model his film career on distilling the snark from that movie into everything he does… So it’s beyond meta and back into sincere and then past that again.
So what did the critics make of this?
Rawly convincing…
I guess…
A thoughtful approach to mental illness.
Unsettling look…
The metaphor and pathos…
Conspiracy theory movie with sci fi gimmicks…
So basically nobody is interpreting this as a sarcastic look at a movie of this genre — the wig wasn’t clue enough?
On the other hand, perhaps my viewing of this was clouded by their next film, Spin Me Round — and perhaps this was meant sincerely?
*doubt*
I think it’s a future cult classic. But it’s a bit flabby. It should be funnier.
Wow this is something. It reminds me of a Robert Altman movie, but on speed.
Is that… Yes it is.
She’s amazing.
Heh heh.
Yes OK.
OK, spoiler time, and I had to pause the movie here. (And this is really good! It’s great!) But I wondered whether anybody had made the connection.
And the answer is no. But the basic gimmick of this movie — being able to exchange yourself with selves from an infinite number of alternate universes — is exactly the same as Matt Howarth had in Those Annoying Post Bros back in the 80s. Did the writers here read that and think that that was a fun concept? Because it is.
They even have her go to a universe where she has hot dogs for fingers, which is such a Post Bros thing to do.
OK, unpausing…
OK, that’s a lot of raccoon screenshots, but I forgot to screenshoot (that’s word) anything else, because I was kinda caught up with watching the movie.
It’s really good. It’s not perfect — I felt that there were bits in the last third of this movie that kinda sagged. But it’s unique and really fun to watch.
And good performances. Of course Michelle Yeoh who is great in everything, but overall really good performances, and it looks great, and you know — it fun and it’s moving.
Hello! I’m continuing my series of Movies That Mike recommended. I watch all sci-fi movies anyway, but I may have missed this one since it’s a Made For TV Predator Movie, which er doesn’t sound that awesome?
But this looks really good.
Gurl!
Hm… are all the animals in this movie CGI? There’s been a bird, an insect, a rat and now a snake, and they all looked fake as hell.
OK, the dog is real.
Oops spoilers.
Indeed.
But that was a good quicksand scene.
I mean bog hole or something.
Man, that’s a bad CGI bear.
But using CGI is kind to animals so whatevs.
Well… it’s OK as Predator movies go. It’s very similar to the first Predator movie, I guess? So if you like that one, you should like this one.
I’m randomly watching this because Redlettermedia made a good case for it. I’m totally unfamiliar with director Jeff Baena but the clips did look hilarious.
I had to stop watching halfway in because I didn’t want to get all spoilererd (that a word), though.
Yum! Olive Garden looks delicious!
This is… this is like a John Waters movie, but on the down low. It’s so cynical, but the jokes are like “ha ha” instead of “HA HA HA”!
This is teetering on the abyss of cringe humour (which I can’t stand at all), but then always (so far at least) pulls back into something more funny and interesting.
Every single shot is sarcastic. Like this classic romantic scene where they’re powering through the water on a huge speed boat…
… but then we get a shot of the bow and the sea and it’s barely splashing at all.
A sarcastic bow shot. Not many films have that.
This was really funny. I laughed out loud a bunch of times, and especially in the last half of the movie (and I’m not including any shots of that because I don’t wanna be all spoilerish).
So now I’m getting all of Baena’s previous movies.
It’s a solid movie. I think there will probably be people that watch this and don’t quite get that it’s a parody? Because they play most of these scenes so straight. And in a way, that’s a bit smarmy because you get the “oooh I’m so smart S M R T” audience factor, but it really works on every level, I think.
I know an innocuous rom-com should not stir such ire in me, but “Spin Me Round” represents so much of what I hate in movies. It’s an exceedingly pedestrian paint-by-numbers script with token people of color, character types rather than multi-dimensional characters and a blandly ridiculous plot that drags on for almost two hours. I mean, why try to be original when you can just throw in a trope?
I think it’s perfect in a way — I think it does exactly what it sets out to do. But I also think that it could have been pushed a bit further to make it more hilarious than archly funny? So:
This is so cute! I’m totally invested in this movie now.
I haven’t stopped smiling since this movie started, and I’ve laughed out loud a couple of times. It’s just kinda perfect? It’s based on Pride & Prejudice, right? It flows so well; there’s no dead wood, no padding.
So I’m slightly dreading whether they’re gonna do a totally dour and dramatic third act or something, but I have high hopes they’re not gonna… let’s see…
The dreaded third act did sort of happen, but not as dreadfully as expected? Drama happened, but it wasn’t that awful.
Yay! Sci-fi! It’s been a while since I’ve seen a proper sci-fi movie.
But on the other hand, this is Roland Emmerich, so it’s gonna suck. But I’m fine with that.
It was so much work watching this movie. It’s a 4K movie using Dolby Vision, which my mpv didn’t support. But! The mpv people have written support for the format over the last few months in the form of a new library called libplacebo. But getting that to compile required upgrading my OS… a lot… which then broke some of my obscure peripherals (like the DisplayLink monitor that I use to display some info).
But! It was probably the least breakey ~5 year upgrade I’ve ever done? It’s surely the Year Of Linux On The Media PC now.
I kinda liked the first scene here, but then this movie takes a nose dive in interest?
There’s nothing really bad about these scenes… sure, they’re a bit boring, but not massively so?
It’s kinda by the numbers? But I’m not annoyed.
Nice matte painting! I mean CGI.
Emmerich gets more out of CGI artists than most directors these days. It actually looks kinda scary and pretty and awesome.
But I can see why everybody hates this movie: The mood is a bit… down? This isn’t quite what people need this week?
It’s him! Heh heh.
Oh, Emmerich has done a whole lot fewer movies than I thought he had. I’ve only seen a handful? Less than a handful. I was thinking this was Michael Bay.
It’s been like an hour of… nothing? I mean, character building. Nobody has actually used the phrase “you’re not my father! you weren’t there when I grew up!” but you can see that the characters are thinking about saying it.
Hopefully something will happen in the second hour.
But people love this sort of stuff! I’m not quite sure why people hate it in this movie…
This is a really cheesy movie. In a good way.
But I guess it has some issues with tone and pacing. If it had been zanier, it’d be easier to read, but it started off like it was, like, A Serious Sci Fi Movie. But it’s not really — it’s nice and goofy.
It’s the Moon! Run away!
Oh, now I get what this movie reminds me of! It’s totally like one of those 50s sci-fi movies where they have to send out a team of scrappy people into space to tackle some threat. But updated with better graphics.
This is totally MST3K fodder. In a good way.
Yeah! Laser cannons!
Yee haw! They did that scene! Classic.
I had so low expectations of this movie, but I really should have guessed that the amount of stick this movie was getting had to mean that it’s a quite nice movie. And it is. It’s a quite nice, goofy movie.
Googling a bit of reactions to it, I see nerds complaining about how stupid and unlikely it is… which is a bit like complaining about James Bond movies not being accurate.
Now, this isn’t a perfect movie. The first hour is inexplicably flabby. There’s about 90 minutes of material here, but padded out. So:
And it’s… the worst. I mean, I like Red Letter Media, but this one just the most boring ever. Moonfall is 10x more entertaining than that episode, because they basically just retells the plot (as if that’s interesting?) and then complains that the plot isn’t quite realistic in some bits?
And now it’s… Liquid Liquid!? I’m so aboard with these New York Downtown music choices.
I’m enjoying this movie so far, but it’s like… it should look better than it does? It’s so… digital. It just looks so digital. From 2002. You can’t actually see the pixels, but it feels like you should. I’m guessing the shot above is mostly rendered? For no particular reason? If it’s not, they’ve managed to make real shots look really fake.
This is quite amusing.
OK, it’s a bit slow now, but amiable.
Now it’s kinda boring?
Spoilers!
There’s now been an hour (at least) of “character development”. I’ve never been so bored in my life.
I mean, I do like some bits of this. And it’s really a perfect fan service movie — people nostalgic for … well, everything… are getting what they want.
But… there’s like nothing interesting in the plot? It’s like they forgot to write a plot? And there’s so many boring scenes inbetween the fun ones? It’s like… if they had written a proper movie, and had the Spider-Men fun stuff be like a third of that proper movie, then it would have been awesome. Instead it’s just like those fan service bits, and not much else.
Whatever studio Disney’s using for the special effects and compositing… It just looks so cheap and weird all the time. I mean, even in simple shots where this guy is supposed to be standing in front of some trees.
It’s very 2020.
Did they really have to spend ten minutes introducing his parents’ backstory? Seems weird.
Weird colour grading. Everything is desaturated except the reds.
Oh! He’s Chinese! Red! Such symbolic!
OK, that was a fun fight scene. Marvel fight scenes are usually so … bad … just uncoordinated people posing, but that was pretty exciting.
But it wasn’t over!
That was definitely the best action scene of any Marvel movie! Wheee!
OK, I’m resetting my expectations. Perhaps this is a really cool movie? I like the actors, too…
This is a lot of fun. All the flashbacks are holding back the narrative, though. And none of the flashbacks really seem … necessary?
OK, not this movie is really really boring.
So much exposition. That doesn’t really seem necessary at all.
It’s a schizophrenic movie. There’s a bunch of scenes that are really fun — the action scenes are on a totally different level from other Marvel movies (which are mostly about actors striking awkward poses and waiting for somebody to CGI in some energy bursts, or striking awkward poses waiting for the director to tell them to make a “I’m totally hitting this CGI monster now” pose).
The action scenes here are really fun.
But then there’s the other stuff, which is pretty dire.
Hey, isn’t that… I think it is?
OK, I’ve lost all interest in this movie now. There was like several hours of training? And character building? I don’t know; I zoned out.
I’m just disappointed. It started off so well — funny and exciting and interesting. But then the last nine hours (training camp and boss fight) were brutally tedious.
Without that bus and scaffolding scenes I would have given this a ⚁, but:
But I like these scenes. It really looks like it’s on location, and not a green screen extravaganza.
Yeah sure.
Man, this is kinda boring? I mean, every scene is just … some info dump and then “character building”, but we don’t care about these characters (yet), so it’s just not that fascinating.
Yeah sure
Have they gotten the same video game designers to do all of these?
Cosmic!
That’s some nice matte painting I mean computer rendering.
I realise that this is supposed to be all “heh, this sure is amusing! I am most amused!” but it’s just please no.
You read so much about Evil Movie Studios getting all up in movies and making horrible edits… but watching this, it’s like… Studios don’t care any more? If this had been in the 80s, they’d have cut an hour and it still wouldn’t have been any good.
Like… it seems like they’re fighting some random monsters? In a forest? For half an hour? And I don’t even know why? And that doesn’t make them seem very Eternal? Like what? What’s that all about?
Except having half an hour in a dark woods so that the CGI would be cheaper?
Perhaps the thing Disney learned from the Star Wars movies was — let the directors do what they want? At least Disney won’t be blamed for anything, and anyway there’s no way to save a movie?
Because this is the stereotypical movie that would have been re-edited down to half an hour, and then Alan Smithee would film 60 minutes more to splice it into the movie, and it would still bomb.
I mean, even skimming the script, it had to be clear that this movie didn’t really work. On any level.
Teh movie biz is weird.
But there are some nice visuals in here. So it’s got that.
That’s a lot of CGI. The first five minutes were, like, a CGI car running through a CGI fence and then into a CGI corn field… it’s a bit like watching a youtube of somebody playing a dull video game?
Now there’s humans, at least, but all playing against greenscreen.
Such real.
Such actual.
Is this Sanctuary? Didn’t CGI get any better in the decade(s) since Sanctuary? Did this thing have a budget?
OK, so this wasn’t a no budget movie…
Man, the corny lines…
This is brutal.
Ah! Paul Rudd! That’s where the budget went!
OK, I laughed out loud at that obtuse joke. And now I’m kinda enjoying myself.
This is really… amiable now. They’ve got some good actors here — they’re pulling this off?
I love how they finally tied this into the original Ghostbusters movie(s).
I thought I was getting used to the Sanctuary aesthetics (i.e., all people filmed on greenscreen and then backgrounds composited into the shots), because basically all the shots are that way. But then it gets too crude (like here) and I’m back to eeek
This movie feels like it’s a condensed TV series season? It’s got TV aesthetic and pacing, but instead of having to watch six hours of stuff, we’re just getting two hours. So it’s great that way.
But as a movie? Hm…
They couldn’t even film in a real store? Man, that’s lazy CGI.
That’s a good 80s movie ending. I really enjoyed that. So — it’s like… that’s a good way to make a sequel/homage? And the kids were really great. But this movie is really at least half an hour too long — just scenes and scenes of things that are without interest.
I’ve heard so many bad things about this movie that I assumed that it had to be awesome, but… that opening sequence? It was kinda boring? None of the action scenes quite … fit, and the talky-talky parts were zzz.
Keanu!
Nice office!
So meta!
Are those blue glasses a subtle hint?!!?
IT COULD BE
This is getting funnier by the scene.
Wachowski really likes this framing — blurry at one end of the frame and then a person talking almost at the camera at the other end of the frame.
Anyway, I’m really enjoying this. It’s a fun movie. Then again, I can see how people that had a religious relationship with the first Matrix movie would dislike this. And… there’s so many meta bits, and people hate meta.
But… the action scenes are as striking as in the Wachowski’s earlier movies? Did Lana’s sister do the action scenes before?
Heh heh
OK, the movie’s kinda slow now… I’m not sure all the soul searching here is really necessary.
In some ways, it feels like I’m still waiting for the movie to begin, two hours in.
This bit… where the movie turns into a fast zombie movie? Not that entertaining.
eh
Anyway, I really liked… bits of this movie? But there were bits that kinda dragged. And it’s disappointing that the action scenes were more like “whoo?” than “whoa!”
I wouldn’t normally watch a movie like this — it sounds super dreary. I’m guessing this is going to be all “people are so stupid!” with TV aesthetics, and…
My god, this is tedious. It’s like watching an ever-so-slightly stupider version of real life in 2020. And things don’t get stupider than real life in 2020.
Oh, Meryl Streep is playing Trump? Well, OK, but it’s still not actually funny — it’s just annoying.
The only reason I tried watching this is because it’s a movie people write a lot about, and:
You know: it’s a Netflix programmer– those are always like 20-30% “Here’s the stuff” and 70% badly-edited scenes shot in a non-descript Holiday Inn(?).
I agree with everything he’s writing there, but the first 30 minutes were brutally boring. As with (almost) any Netflix movie. I shouldn’t have let myself get sucked into watching an awful Netflix movie, just because a bunch of assholes are upset about it existing. I love that those assholes are upset. But I’m watching Lubitsch now instead.]
So I guess this script has been generated from Netflix user polls? “Do you like: 1) Dogs”
Right.
The aesthetics of this is just offensive. It’s “Netflix gave us almost no money but we have to shoot this thing anyway” aesthetics.
It’s so weird how all the actors here remind me of… somebody more famous. So this isn’t Stellan.
And this isn’t that guy from those shows.
(I could be more erudite, but I’m so drnk.)
Or is it that guy?!?!
No
I can’t be?!
But that’s her!! Isn’t it? Yes it is! Veronica’s Closet!
And that guy is the guy! From… Ugly Betty? IMDB agrees with me.
Perhaps all of them are what they seem.
And they’re all from sitcoms from 20 years ago!
This is quite amusing.
What! It’s her! Isn’t it?
From 2 Broke Girls!
Yes!
This movie has all of the sitcom actors!
But this is fun. It’s got serious pacing issues, though.
This is so cute.
It’s very modern. The precariat and all.
This is really cute. And I love all the actors. And it’s really cute. Did I mention that it’s really cute?
But it’s got bits that just aren’t that exciting? I feel terrible writing this, because I love every individual scene. I’m just not loving the aggregate.
So is this a Brazil rip-off? It’s got that Terry Gilliam thing going. Kafka Lite.
This is Ayoade’s second and final movie, so I’m guessing it didn’t do well.
So it was an utter box office failure.
I wonder what the Dostoyevsky novella was like before the script writer Brazilised it.
This is bad.
Really bad. It’s like a mash up… all these things. 91 Von Trier and 84 Gilliam and 82 Scott and quotes from Hitchcock and bits from Kieślowski and sound from Lynch and possibly Tarkovsky and the mood from 71 Cronenberg… put Jesse Eisenberg in it.
So we’re getting all the directors Ayoade likes but it’s not going anywhere.
Hey, isn’t that…? I think it is.
So now we’re doing Kaurismäki?
I think one of the many problem this movie has is that the viewpoint character has absolutely no… character. We’re not even given any hint about why we should care about him? He’s supposed to work as a blank you’re supposed to identify with, I guess? But the only traits he’s given is that he’s kinda creepy? Using a telescope to creep on women I mean His True Love? So this is a movie for creeps?
But skip all that, and perhaps we’re just supposed to be interested because of all the… Kafkatuity (that’s a word) of it all. But….
Perhaps it’d work with a different actor. Jeremy Irons?
It’s just how I’d imagine a movie by Richard Ayoade, if I had imagined it, which I hadn’t. But I read a couple of books of his, and I got his movie, because he seemed like a right smart un.
Darren Evans (the guy playing Chips) is absolutely amazing.
I wonder whether this is autobiographical. I can hear Ayoade’s voice in all the lines.
I’m loving the cinematography and the scenes and the actors… but I’m not loving the movie? It seems kinda choppy? And it can’t make up its mind whether it’s going for cringe or honesty?
I mean… Everything seems obviously autobiographical (I mean, bits of it), but with all the specifics filed off. So we’re left with a generic movie about a nerdy British teenager with a generic relationship with a Magic Pixie Dream Girl (with a Louise Brooks wig), and it’s all rather odd.
I really like Ayoade’s books, but he really lost the plot here. It’s so generic. It could have been made by any nerdy British director.
Uh-oh. This is a Netflix movie — so I’m guessing the script is basically gonna be auto-generated, and there’s gonna be a surprising (but not really) combination of actors people really like?
Such CGI.
Oh my god! I laughed so much! Aloud! Is this the best movie ever made? I think it could be!
It’s a movie saying “yes, I know you’ve seen this kind of movie a million times before, but fuck that shit”.
Every scene is a wink and a nod and it’s hilarious.
This is so November 2021. It couldn’t have been made a week before or a week after.
OK, this isn’t the best movie ever. It started so well — with all the fun and all that stuff — but it’s just getting more bogged down, scene by scene. I mean, all the scenes are going for wild-cap fun, but it’s not quite there, so it all collapses.
They’re going for mad-cap silly adventure, but they’re kinda not hitting the beats? I could totally see this movie being totally hilarious with just a bit of editing? It’s not that it’s too long or anything, but the individual scenes just feel off.
What a frustrating movie. Because it’s so close to being a perfect popcorn movie, but then just fails. I just want the movie to succeed, because it’s really charming, but it just doesn’t. It just needs… something. It’s got the repartee and the plot and the charming actors — it just needs to be a bit more zippy?
Anyway! Hi! I’m watching Dune, and I’m totally drunk. Welcome to the Drunk Dune Blog.
Oooh! Such minimal.
I think I’ve seen most of Villeneuve’s movies, and they’re all kinda “er… shouldn’t this be better?” So my expectations are lower than low.
And I haven’t read the books either, because all old sf basically sucks (but I’ve read all of the rest of the old sf books. Every one, just not Dune. And they all suck, except the Bester ones).
This looks very pretty, though. And I love that there’s no jokes? So far? He’s totally leaning into the seriousness of the concept? (Lynch didn’t. And I think that movie is very enjoyable.)
I like the character beats… Villeneuve gives the actors pose time.
See? Gorge!
It’s Dave Navarro! I mean Ronon Dex!
And Timothee. But I knew that already.
Pretty.
Man, Lynch’s special effects in this scene were 100000x cooler. But it’s more convincing in this version.
I’m really enjoying watching this! It’s like an anti-Marvel blockbuster movie — there are no jokes at all, and everything is played totally straight, so to speak. Which can be even more risible if the movie can’t support that level of gravity (see: All Nolan Batman movies), but Villeneuve is carrying it off.
I assume that all these scenes are greenscreen, but they’re pretty good. I mean, the bokeh looks convincing. Did this have All The $ as a budget?
It’s disturbing to watch scenes that are… kinda… word for word as they were in the Lynch version, like this one.
But without Lynch’s exquisite oddness. His version of this scene was mysterious and inexplicable, while this one was totally straight-forward, even if it was the same scene, line by line.
I love the scale of this. I know it’s just CGI, but it feels … big.
Is that Stellan in a fat suit? I think it is! Is it?
And no pustules!
I understand why Lynch dropped this scene, because it’s fucking stupid. They had a flying thing that could carry of the entire tank… harvesting thing? But it couldn’t take about 21 people?
But if you ignore the sheer idiocy of it all, it’s a good scene.
Timothee’s going native!!!
You can tell by the colour grading.
This makes the Dune book seems kinda cool? So I bought a copy now. It’s not gonna kill me to finally read it.
Probably.
But it probably sucks! Probably doesn’t even have Siân Phillips!
Yeah, that’s a budget. And Villeneuve shows all those mega-megabucks on the screen. But subtly.
I think this movie is like a local maxima? That is, if you wanted to make a movie like this, it’s could not be better than this. It’s kinda perfect as a movie of its kind.
It’s exhilarating in its calmness.
And I can see how much Villeneuve has struggled with (I’m assuming) the basic premise of “white guy goes to Arabia and becomes boss master” and is trying to obfuscate that as much as possible.
And he’s kinda succeeding? I mean, at obfuscating?
Ooops! And then it’s over!
Well, I’m definitely watching the next episode.
I’m giving this all my thumbs up. It’s Villeneuve’s best movie.
This is the second movie in the trilogy that started with Pather Panchali. Which was a lovely movie, but I’ve put off watching the last two movies in the trilogy because… er… I dunny.
This is lovely. It’s so exquisitely picaresque, but in a gentle way. I love the wide depth-of-field shots he’s using in most of these scenes..
… but then dropping to these low-f shots in the closeups. It’s so pretty!
Action!
They don’t treat the kittens well in this movie either!
Oh! So that’s what a synecdoche is. This is very edumacational.
I love how this movie is without any real conflict. We’re just following this guy along while he’s growing up.
I’m halfway through the Queerty movie series, but I couldn’t face watching another one of those … er … worthy … movies tonight, so I’m watching a couple of blurays I got in the mail from Criterion instead.
I’ve almost forgotten how good blurays look after watching streaming movies for a couple of months. All that grain that’s been smoothed out to make the movie compress better, and correct aspect ratio, and no banding.
I mean, it’s 2-5x the streaming bitrate, so it’s just… prettier.
This is a very odd movie, though. I mean, I have absolutely no idea what it’s going to be about, and we’re ten minutes into the movie.
I just seen a couple of Ray movies before — Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without etc — but I think Ray was celebrated by the Cahiers crowd? And I can see why: This is very interesting. I mean, the framing of the shots and stuff.
This is very odd, though. It’s just about some random guy getting cancer? Or something? So it’s like a Sirk weepie, but without any… context?
I mean, it’s too bad that James Mason is all hopped up on cortisone… but… I feel like we haven’t really been given any reason to care? Douglas Kirk is always very careful to introduce the characters and make us feel for them. Ray seems to be taking it as a given that we’re caring about James Mason?
The cortisone’s kicking in!
The mirror shatter’d!
He’s so high.
Oh, OK, now I get what Ray’s doing — the more insane he’s getting, the more people agree with him. So subversive!
This movie’s got something for sure. But… it’s neither gripping not entertaining. It’s like the movie itself is an abusive spouse.
I love the cinematography and stuff, but.
Is Ray’s point here that American politics and religion is literal drug induced psychosis? Well of course it is. I guess this was a very subversive movie and all in the 50s, so you have to give props to Ray for that, but.
It just feels like a movie that’s making a point that could have been a tweet.
This looks pretty stylish. It’s in 1.66:1, no shakycam and the edits last longer than half a second.
But… er… the performances are kinda… er… earnest…
This is really well made. It’s got a nice flow, and it’s got great music going on the bits that need music, and it’s silent otherwise.
So is this a magic realism thing? After half an hour, it’s finally clear what the movie’s gonna be about — it’s this guy who was a poet during the Harlem Renaissance (i.e., the 1920s) who’s meeting up with this young gay guy?
(They didn’t have colours back in the olden days.)
I love all these shots from around Manhattan. But it’s such a choppy movie. There’s scenes here that are like “ooo” and then there’s scenes that are “zzz”, and it’s just bewildering.
The soundtrack is still fantastic.
But the magazine they’re publishing — Fire!! — sounds really cool. And there was a reprint in 1985? *shopping*
This may not be a “good movie”, but it’s interesting, and I’m glad I watched it.
As with so much of Polk’s work, Blackbird relishes in frank, gay sexuality and uses a mix of humor and drama to keep the plot moving. It also suffers from the same problems as much of his work: a story that gets a bit too didactic in places, sexual fantasies that at times seem at odds with the rest of the plot, and budget limitations that make the seams show.
And I have to say that some of the performances are pretty… bad…
It is a somewhat odd movie, I have to say. Each individual scene work, but the mix is strange. But it’s fun.
Noo! They cut this bit short. I mean, I love concerts and stuff, so I would like half an hour of this because it sounded cool, but they cut it off after ten seconds.
The cinematography isn’t very intrusive, but all the scenes look really cool. I mean, look at that greenery in this scene — it’s better than natural.
This is so funny!
I love this so much. It’s so 90s meta. There’s some scenes that are kinda “eh?” but in context they’re “oooh”.
It’s just a super smart and interesting movie.
OK, I’m drunk and stuff, but this is just such a perfect smart meta movie, and I love this sort of stuff. So:
Hang on. Haven’t I’ve seen this movie before? Oh well. I remember nothing about it, except… no, I remember nothing.
Obviously.
Picard!
It’s Gollum!
Man, this movie is such a mess. It’s super high stakes, but the individual scenes are so low stakes. It’s just plodding along.
Oh yeah! This scene! It’s so cool.
Bryan Singer is such an odd director. Some scenes are “yay whoo” and other scenes are “zzz”. It’s like he was only interested in certain scenes and then the rest are just… there…
It doesn’t make for thrilling viewing.
Perhaps he was (allegedly) off the set molesting somebody during the boring scenes?
That wig is kinda… bad? Makes Tyrion Lannister’s head look really big.
This is part of the Queery movie series, and their defence of this movie is kinda… er… It’s not as exploitative as Woody Allen movies? That’s a take.
But this just isn’t a good movie. There’s scenes that are really fun to watch, but it just doesn’t work as a whole.
Such lab. That’s how all labs I’ve been in look like! No lights in the ceiling and something bubbling off in the corner. It’s like I’m back at CERN!
Man, this is brutally tedious.
Anyway, there’s bits here that are totally “whoooo”, but it’s mostly just boring.
I think this is one of them there New French Extreme Cinema kind of things? I mean, Noé and Breillat and people… Hopefully there won’t be cannibalism this time.
The trade here is rough!
But has this been edited for Amazon Prime?
This is pretty good, but it doesn’t seem very… realistic. But perhaps it’s meant to be a fantasy.
Lots of waiting around in this profession.
But with perks!
Organise! The union forever!
The workers gets a lot of fresh air, at least.
OK, and then it goes all eek. (I had to skip a scene. Fucking New French etc.)
Yay.
The visit to the doctor’s office was really, really touching.
But again — this is so … unrealistic. I mean, injecting GHB into your urethra to roll a trick? THAT”S NOT HOW WE DID IT IN MY er I mean, that’s a lot of work for something you could do with a lot less preparation.
Credit especially Félix Maritaud, who is totally convincing in the role of Léo, and committed to going to the extremes of degradation that the role demands. This might be a career making role…he’s that good.
His performance is magnificent. Utterly astounding. And it seems like kenru’s prediction was correct:
His schedule has been totally full.
And there’s Noé! Hah!
Awkward!
This is almost brilliant. There’s scenes that are totally ⚅, but.
Oh god. It’s even got the fairy plinkety things on the soundtrack. You know the ones — the hanging metal thingies that the percussionist kinda makes go twinkle twinkety?
It’s probably got a name.
THOSE SHOULD BE OUTLAWED
After doing some image googles, it’s called a mark tree? Or “bar chimes”.
Such desaturate.
Speaking of cinematography — isn’t it ironic that Netflix has no problem showing movies in 2.35:1 aspect ratio, while real, actual movies (filmed in similar formats) are chopped down to 16:9?
Oh! These people are supposed to be like 17? Now the movie makes more sense.
This is dire.
I totally see what they’re going for. I mean, a dorky version of Cyrano sounds like it would be really fun. But instead it’s just there. There’s nothing here. It’s like Netflix only got the elevator pitch, OK’d it and then they forgot to write the script. Or hire hairdressers.
So they got an AI to generate it, because they were in a hurry.
There’s some scenes here where you think it’s finally going to be fun — but then instead of going to, well anything, the scene just peters out.
Not even a standard dressing up montage scene? WHAT KIND OF MONSTER ARE YOU
Oh god. Now they’re talking about religion. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more dire.
Oh, this is one of those movies. I mean, the protagonist is dying.
Huh, this only won the Oscar for best writing… It feels like Oscar bait, but low budget, so perhaps the right amount of Oscars.
OK, I’m enjoying this more now. It’s just really choppy — the scenes don’t seem to connect with each other. It’s one scene after another… but I guess it’s a budget thing. It’s in the uncanny valley between a stage play and a movie.
So it’s not just me!!!
There’s fun scenes here, but the big dramatic ones are risible.
Hey! It’s one of the Skarsgårds. Er… it’s the one from that vampire TV series? Er… True Blood.
Wow, this is weapons grade silliness.
Well, that’s another familiar face — I saw Hard Candy the other week.
I like the performances here, and it’s got the right look. But the story is a bit *rolls eyes*. So it’s about… an environmentalist Manson family thing? Perhaps it’ll get better.
Process note: I’m watching all the movies Queery are recommending, but I’ve skipped more than a couple. Because I’m not watching the documentaries (and there’s a surprising amount of them) because I hate documentaries sooo muuuuch, and I’m also skipping movies that I’ve seen before recentlyish. Like Ben Hur. So I’m already halfway through their list! After just a couple of months.
OK, carry on.
Oh such moral quandary!!! It turns out that the it’s not just Manson and his cohort that’s bad!
This movie is growing on me. The mood’s good. It’s got a moody mood.
It’s just… that whenever something’s happening, it’s kinda annoying? The scenes where nothing happens work, but the action scenes just aren’t very watchable. It’s like SO MUCH DRAMA with shakycam and shouting and arguing, and it just doesn’t work.
Wow. They’ve gotten the perfect child to play a young Bette Davis.
And… they’ve cropped the movie down to 16:9. *sigh*
Heh. When the opening titles started, they switched to windowboxing (so that the text isn’t cropped), presumably to make it less obvious that they’re cropping the rest of the movie… CLVR.
But you are, Blanche. You are!
This movie is properly nightmarish! But it doesn’t… really make that much sense? I know it doesn’t really have to make that much sense, but… Blanche could just shout out the window to the neighbour? And then the movie would have been over after ten minutes?
Is this room greenscreen? If it is, it’s extremely good greenscreen. It just looks to detailed to be real… I don’t think it can be greenscreen, though. The set designers have been meticulous! Amazing.
But, man, this is a bad movie. It’s colour graded into “beige” because everybody knows that The Olden Times didn’t have so many colours. It’d edited into three second shots, and everybody’s up in everybody’s face all the time.
It’s like … really annoying.
So did it win all the Oscars? I’m assuming it won all the Oscars.
Man. None of the lines have anything to do with what anybody would ever say. I can see this working as a theatre play? Some of the lines sound like they’d work in that context…
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a 2020 American biographical musical drama film directed by George C. Wolfe and written by Ruben Santiago-Hudson, based on the 1982 play of the same name by August Wilson.
It’s another Netflix movie all right.
So much fake drama.
I like some of the monologues. Well, OK, I liked the one monologue that Ma Rainey did about Coke. The rest are kinda bad.
I hope there’s a twist soon. Is Page gonna kill the perv soon or what?
Perhaps Page is a vampire!? That’d be a good twist.
Oh!
It’d make sense, even!
Yup. Vampire. But one of those vampires that can be out when it’s day?
This is getting kinda tedious… when’s the vampire stuff starting!!!
OK, so she’s not a vampire, but she’s definitely torturing the perv.
I’m so shocked at the twist!
(It’s basically Buffy, but a decade later.)
What!? She hates Goldfrapp? That’s a twist!
It’s just… kinda boring? I mean, nobody watching this could possibly care whether this guy dies (or whatever), so is the tension supposed to be whether he escapes and kills Page or something? But… it’s a bit hard to care about that, either?
His fake stories are so boring!!! This is just badly written.
Yeah, right.
All the twists are just so… obvious. And it never ends!
She is not to be confused with Linda Lee Danvers, the secret identity used by the Kara Zor-El incarnation of Supergirl prior to the events of 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths.
It’s some kind of geek thing.
This movie has 4.4 on imdb, but I think Those People are totally misreading this. It’s just a bunch of silly silliness, and they’re talking about it as if it isn’t on purpose?
Howard Jones on the soundtrack again!? I mean, it was a big hit, but the same hit twice in the same movie?
I love it!
I love how low stakes this is. The plot is that … they’re arguing over who’s getting the hot gardener!?
Romance-o-vision!
I wonder how they got this made. Surely the studio would have wanted a serious movie? Like Superman? And instead they made this very tongue in cheek comedy thing?
That never works. I mean, commercially. It annoys the nerds and normal people don’t care.
Unless you really like the superman movies, or are under the age of six, the movie would probably be utterly boring. The only good thing that I can say about the movie is that I like it, but I don’t know why.
Magnificent.
Just when you thought that Faye Dunaway had chewed up all the scenery, Peter O’Toole shows up again. It turns out that there was some more scenery left after all.
I love how they manage to always have the lights on Dunaway’s eyes.
This is a pretty expensive movie, right? $35M in 1984 dollars — that’s a lot. And the movie mostly looks really good. But whenever they cut over to a greenscreen scene, it’s the quality of… what somebody could do with home VCR equipment at the time. It’s so weird. Did they run out of money? Or did the VFX company just a bunch of geeks that hated the movie so much that they wanted it to fail?
Dunaway and O’Toole earned Golden Raspberry Award nominations for Worst Actress and Worst Actor, respectively. However, Slater was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Actress. The film’s failure ultimately led producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind to sell the Superman film rights to The Cannon Group, Inc. in 1986.
I want to give the movie a ⚅, because it’s so bonkers. But at the end of the day, it’s a competition I mean, the last third drags. So:
An unattractive cast in an unattractive film! Verow has been directing films for many years, but he has yet to learn how to cast them and make them.. Like another reviewer, I too couldn’t finish it.
I love it! It’s sort of channelling old, no-budget movies — everything is awkward and hesitant, but on purpose? It’s like a very meta take. I can’t stop sniggering; everything’s so perfectly on point.
I mean, I think it’s on purpose. It’s funny anyway.
I love the performances. The actors are so into this.
I did! I get it!
I’m gonna give this an unreasonably high score, because I laughed, I almost cried, I got angry, and mostly I smiled a lot. This is a really special movie.
But I do understand why all those people on imdb hate it.
Oh! This is a “reality TV show” (of the competition kind) parody. Seems fun so far — the concept seems to be that they have to kill each other? So it’s the usual plot (how many of these trenchant commentaries on the entertainment industry have there been with this plot? a couple dozen?), but it seems pretty sprightly.
“A self inflicted knife wound to the back…”
I mean, the main concept is hackneyed, but it’s so well done. All these little details…
And now it’s in full character development mode. I.e., deadly dull.
I love how unsubtle this is.
OK, I laughed out loud when they played Love Will Tear Us Apart Again on the stadium sound system.
There’s a lot to love here, but it sags in the middle.
OK, it’s a mid-size budget… And it bombed at the box office! Totally!
I’m really curious what’s the story behind this, and how all these A-list actors ended up here… were they all friends of Sigourney Weaver? She’s known for doing no-budget movies that she likes… Friends of George Plimpton, who wrote the book this is based on?
Oh, the other Capote movie that year had had a smaller budget and… didn’t bomb. I think I’ve seen that one.
This is pretty good. It’s really enjoyable — it’s kinda of frothy and fun.
OK, it’s kinda boring now. They really had something fun going for the first half, but now it’s all… character development.
I’m guessing the director kinda made a lot of this boring stuff up? It’s… just… tedious.
I can understand why this movie bombed. It’s so schizophrenic. I mean, it’s like the first half of the movie was designed to appeal to somebody who would never, ever want to watch the last half of the movie.
So — Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming directs and stars in this movie… and it starts with ten minutes of them being all athletic and stuff. It’s a bit… er… it’s a choice?
This is pretty odd — it’s like one of those … psychological drama thingies? Think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf via 70s Cassavetes (no Altman)… but… in 2001? It’s a movie out of time.
OK, I’m getting into it now. Jennifer Jason Leigh is brilliant here.
OK, this bit is kinda embarrassing. I mean, it’s meant to be, but it’s still a bit… you know.
And then they all dropped acid! I mean, Ecstasy, but they’re kinda behaving like they dropped acid.
So I guess there’s gonna be some tragedy, too? You can’t have people doing drugs without people dying, I think.
It’s a frustrating movie. There’s brilliant scenes in here, and then there’s… the Too Much Drama scenes. I mean, the scenes themselves aren’t particularly predictable or anything, but they happen when you’d predict they would.
This is pretty good. It’s got good lines and actors and stuff. The cinematography is really basic, though. It’s just over shoulder/over shoulder/over shoulder/over shoulder.
And then it turned, like, super serious…
What a downer.
This is like a … manic pixie girl movie, but for once the tragic manic girl is the main character. I guess that’s progress and stuff, but it’s not cute.
OK, but that bit doesn’t last forever. It just seems like it did.
Four fifths of this is really good, but that part where all the drama is: It’s kinda bad.
Man, the cast of this movie… I surmise that it was a total flop when it was released, but they sure did pick some interesting actors.
But I can understand why — it seems really out of step with 1985. It’s more like a 70s movie? It’s all earnest and stuff. I’m guessing the director is a Robert Altman fan?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Altman’s great.
On the other hand, it’s got Hill Street Blues energy.
It’s got a mood kinda in the middle of Hill Street Blues and Twin Peaks? Which is very of its time, I guess.
I don’t think you can bomb worse than that, so I guess the studio didn’t really release it? Just pushed it to a couple of theatres on Long Island?
And it’s so weird — this is almost an amazing movie. It’s so close — the performances are great, the sets are fantastic, and the mood really works. But it’s so … weird. It’s kinda formless? Which I like… not knowing where anything is going or what the movie is even about… but you have to have faith that this is going to cohere somehow, and the movie hasn’t really earned that trust.
There’s so many interesting things in this movie that I want to watch all of Alan Rudolph’s movies.
This veers between something as scintillating as Liquid Sky and… something not like Liquid Sky.
It’s simply Divine!
I could see me giving this ⚀ or ⚅ depending on the day. It’s unique.
It’s like Robert Altman x Twin Peaks. But before Twin Peaks.
I’ve never seen any of the original Elvira stuff — I guess it was a kinda local phenomenon?
Such banter! I love it.
But the rest of this movie is the 1988 movie Elvira: Mistress of the Dark? So confusing! I think I was that one back in the day? And I remember it being pretty amusing?
This is really sweet! And fun. I keep forgetting how much fun these genre movies from the 80s were. The 80s were like a rerun of the 50s, right? I mean, for movies. The 70s were all serious and gritty, and the 90s were all post modern, but there was a whole bunch of really sweet, entertaining movies in the 80s.
You can’t not like this movie.
That said, it does seem to spend a lot of time spinning its wheels.
Eep! And then we’re back to Elvira commenting the Elvira movie.
Heh heh. I assume that’s a reference to a real review.
I like this a lot, but there should be more jokes per time unit.
Most amiable.
Oh! There’s more movies? It’s a series of specials? I’ll be checking them out.
So… is this gonna be a romance between the Mossad (I mean “Mossad”) guy and … the grandson of a Nazi guy!? I’m starting to see a pattern in Fox’s movies.
I’m enjoying this movie, though. The actors are fun, and it’s really silly.
In a good way.
Hey, it’s that guy from The Bubble.
Nobody’s died yet! I forgot that somebody’s probably gonna die. Er… I think it’s… It has to be Axel. Yeah, that’d be tragic and ironic.
So who’s dying dramatically in the third act in this one? Is it Yossi? Could be… I guessed wrong in Fox’ previous movie. I mean, about who died and who survived.
But I think not.
Least. Awkward. Date. Ever.
It’s fascinating — they’re making the movie about the character gaining weight and stuff — so did the guy bulk up for the part, or did the screenwriter think “hey, he’s fat now, let’s write a movie about that”.
They’re trying to establish character by having him be snotty towards a kid asking for Britney… and he’s telling her to listen to The Rolling Stones instead… to widen her perspective?
Just how oldes is Eytan Fox anyway? Is he like ancient? Or perhaps he just has not taste in music?
But the background music to the scene was Le Tigre? So he’s got a great person doing the soundtrack?
But this is pretty good. It’s like a proper romantic comedy. But I fear the worst: There’s gonna be a third act where at least one of them dies.
I’m really enjoying this movie. It’s fun and fresh. I can’t stop smiling.
Oh! Now I know who they’re gonna kill off in the third act: The really gay roommate.
>
Sometimes I think my cynicism about movies is a bit over the top — I mean, I get annoyed at movies before the annoying thing even happens.
So I was totally wrong about the gayest guy dying in the last act. Instead it was the other two gay guys (and a sister, too).
*sigh*
OOPS SPOILERS.
But seriously. The three act structure is the worst thing that has happened to movies ever.
The Bubble 2006 – Was really great until the very end then it goes off the rails. Not just me either, pretty much everyone and their mum hates the stupid ending.
Oh man, this is kinda annoying. I mean, the soundtrack. “Dum dum, dum? Dum dum dum dum? Dum dum, dum? Dum dum dum dum?”
This looks like an early digital movie? The white bits are all blown out and haloing. Was it filmed on a Canon EOS from 2005?
Or it might be the Amazon Prime streaming that’s … “optimised”…
There’s so many familiar-looking actors here…
Oooh! OK, now the movie’s looking more promising.
Is that… James Caan? I think it is.
I assumed that this was gonna turn into a road movie or something, but it’s just set in this retirement home?
I like the performances. Especially Jane Curtin — she’s brilliant here. But it’s just not that funny. They do all the set pieces, like dancing in the bedroom, and getting high, etc… but it’s just not sizzling like it should.
Aaargh! How annoying. They’ve trimmed down the left/right edges to get it into 16:9 format (it’s 1.88:1 originally).
The ignominy!
The colours are really 70s — or as it’s called, US 80s Suburban, I guess.
Anyway, this is most amusing.
The casting is pretty odd. There’s several of the actors that are of the same kinda general type, and when they’re not both on the screen at the same time, I keep forgetting they’re not the same person. But perhaps that’s done on purpose.
I was all aboard for the first hour — it’s very, very amusing, and rolls along in a perfect way. It’s a Nouveau Screwball movie, with perfect 30s pacing and stuff.
But when we get to the dreaded third act, and the guilty part starts getting revealed, we just go into total Plot Recap Mode. And they try to make it ridiculous and funny, but instead I’m just sitting here thinking “surely they can’t mean to actually recap the entire movie” but then they do.
OK, then it gets more amusing again. But still not actually good.
Ah! Doily TV! I thought that was a Eastern European phenomenon.
I guess this movie is set before Grindr.
But I jest! I’m all in here. I love the cinematography, and the pacing seems perfect, and it seems just kinda quite riveting.
I guess it’s something I picked up from watching Chantal Akerman’s movies: There’s something magical about hallways and doors in movies. Whenever there’s a hallway in a movie, I just pay more attention.
This is so lovely! And gorgeous.
I’m dreading a third act where everything is going to become all complicated and at least one of the codgers are gonna die, because that’s what always happens in the third act.
I can’t stop smiling while watching this movie. I mean, even in the heart-breaking parts of this movie.
I’ve been kinda disappointed by this Queerty movie series… I mean, I hate choosing moving to watch — left to my own devices, I’d only watch sci-fi movies, Nouvelle Vague movies and screwball comedies, so I come up with these “projects” to make myself watch other stuff. And the Queerty selections haven’t been bad, by any means, but they’ve been very normie.
But this is a great movie. And I wouldn’t have watched it left to my own devices.
What… the fuck? Is this gonna have a christian ending? NOOOO
People from Hong Kong are weird.
Yeah, I suspected the ending was going to suck, and it did. But the rest of the movie was great.
Pro top: Just stop watching seven minutes before the movie ends.
I watched The Birdcage the other day. I mean, I knew that it was a remake, but I didn’t realise that it was a straight up (so to speak) scene by scene remake.
That’s the Hank Azaria character. Such whitewash.
Wow! They have actors that are age-appropriate for the roles! Well, that’s very different from the remake. It was really confusing with the actors in their 30s playing teenagers in the American version.
OK, the American version has dropped some of the lines, but they’ve kept, like, half of them, and they’ve kept at least 90% of the scenes.
But The Birdcage was a movie with a huge budget, and this looks like it was made on a shoe and a string. It’s charming, but it basically looks like a made-for-TV movie: It’s basic.
“Budget FRF 7,000,000 (estimated)”… well, that’s more than I expected. It’s basically $1M. But in 1978. It looks way cheaper than that. I mean, it looks like it was filmed on hi-def video. Surely that can’t be true?
I seriously thought that Robin Williams had improvised a lot of the lines, but they’re totally here in this version, too.
It’s fascinating seeing such a faithful remake. I mean, the original of a remake like this. It’s like watching Gus Van Sant’s Psycho first, and then Hitchcock’s. Only… this time the remake is better than the original? That just doesn’t happen a lot?
I mean, I like this version, but every single scene is better in the remake. I mean, the remake probably had a budget that’s 100x more, but…
Now the movie finally got moving!
And then it’s over!
Well, I have to say… Nichols did everything right when he remade this movie. He kept basically everything, but emphasised the funny bits and made them a lot funnier. So his version is longer, but the extended parts are all fun.
This movie is gimmick after gimmick. It’s got a gay, dying father, a protagonist who’s an artist, and a girlfriend who looks like she’s of the not-so-manic pixie kind (so presumably she’s also dying at the end)… There’s even a fucking cute little dog! So cute!
It’s not that individual scenes are horrible… but it feels very manipulative and schematic. It’s like they wrote the script based on a checklist.
There’s even a bookstore! They’re really going for it here. Was this script auto-generated?
Much of the film is autobiographical, and is based on director Mike Mills’ experiences after his own father came out of the closet following his mother’s death.
Sorry! If only there was a way to edit what I’ve already written…
This movie has a kinda unusual aspect ratio? It’s… 1.68:1? That’s unusual.
I love the oddball lighting in this movie. Every other scene has some strange lighting setup. I guess they’re going for a noise thing? But it’s so uneven — some scenes look absolutely natural, and other scenes we’re suddenly in Fritz Lang territory.
Cool, eh?
Dramatic!
“He’s the perfect barometer of public morality.” That’s a good line. Rolls off the tongue.
This is pretty good… in parts. Then it gets really boring.
This is really cool. Very odd and unexpected structure.
The cinematography here is captivating. It’s a carefully limited set of colours, but it doesn’t feel oppressive, as so many of these colour-graded movies are.
I love these abstract, but luxurious sets.
It’s like it goes over the same scenes, over and over again, and we’re hoping it’ll end in a less fucked up way.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this. I mean, it’s Groundhog Day, but serious. I’m in awe.
Groundhog Day movies are usually played for nerdy laughs, which isn’t really the case here.
But… there’s a few too many iterations that aren’t… that interesting?
Like, this iteration isn’t captivating. The movie had been absolutely riveting up until … it kinda fizzled. It was a ⚅ until the last half hour.
Man, this has some cast. Robin Williams, Gene Hackman, Nathan Lane, Dianne Wiest, Hank Azaria, Christine Baranski…
Ben Gazzara! I was thinking “hm, Hank Azaria sure looks young to have been in all those Cassavetes movies in the 70s”, and that’s because… he’s not Ben Gazzara.
Oh, yeah — now I understand why I thought the plot was kinda unreasonable when I saw this in the 90s — the son is supposed to be 20, and the daughter-in-law-to-be is supposed to be 17, so they’re kids, and kids by weird things. But Futterman was 29 and Flockhart was 32 at the time, and that’s what they look like, so I kinda thought they were… weirdos.
It’s a classic for a reason. It’s hilarious and it’s got real nerve.
Man, the bitrate here is ridiculously low. It’s like less than 2Mbps? So there’s banding de luxe.
Hey, this is properly scary. I think I saw this at the time, but I don’t remember it being this spooky. It’s like a proper horror movie.
This is so scary! It’s a lot of jump scares (all the mirrors don’t help), but it’s got a real intense atmosphere. I had almost forgotten that horror movies could be this scary — horror movies these days is just people being tortured, and that’s a whole nother thing.
This movie’s really unrealistic. I mean… Virginia Madsen married to this guy?
I’m joking because I’m totally ascared of this movie.
I loved the first two thirds of this — I haven’t been this scared watching a movie since I watched Love, Actually.
The last third, though, was a let-down. There was some good stuff, but it was mainly just kinda… sad… I mean, melancholic. I liked that it went kinda insane, but it could have gone even more insane?
So I’d give the first two thirds a ⚄ and the last third a ⚂, so:
Oh yeah, I forgot that I could write something about the movie here… I was futzing around with the streaming setup and stuff. This movie is only available in the US, so I had to resort to nefarious means to watch it.
I like the general look of the movie — it moves slowly but in an assured way, and the actors are really good. But the basic plot here is very strange indeed — it seems like it’s happening in the … 70s? 90s?
I guess the time period is… “now, but forget about cell phones, because then the plot wouldn’t quite work, OK?”
I like the movie, but… It’s hard to get over how much that final sauna scene didn’t make much sense.
It’s kinda… washed out? It looks like an HDR movie not being displayed as an HDR movie? I’ve got HDR switched off on the Apple TV, but… I guess… the Youtube app didn’t get the memo?
I’m still not sure whether this is supposed to look like this — all super-desaturated and with a lousy black level… but I bought it on the Blockbuster app, too, and it looks the same there.
So… either it’s supposed to look like this, or the filmmakers uploaded the wrong version of the film to everybody.
I guess?
At least it’s not cropped on the left/right like the movie I just watched on Itunes Movies.
It’s ridiculously beige.
And then it turns out that they’re both on Grindr!
Oops!
It’s super awkward.
Awkward!
But funny. Very funny. The father’s priceless.
The general desaturation here gets even more extreme in the sauna scenes… so… perhaps… it’s an artistic choice?
I’m still guessing it’s a technical problem somewhere.
So much banding, too… pretty low framerate, I guess.
God I hate everything about streaming. Except the, you know, getting the movie immediately part. That part’s nice.
OK. That’s just what this movie is. There’s some really fun scenes, but there’s also a bunch of scenes that just seem like padding. Was this originally a short that was then expanded or something?
I’ve seen this one before, of course, but it’s been decades and decades. I remember… thinking… it was really good?
I know, that’s a really controversial opinion, but I’m sticking by it!
Er.
Well, OK, I don’t know yet whether I am or not.
What a dump!
Fabulous!
My god! Taylor and Burton are so good!
And I love this set.
I had to look it up — Taylor is playing the old cougar, and Segal is playing the fresh meat… and… Taylor is 34 and Segal is 32. It’s the perfect storm: Hollywood hates using young guys, and hates (even more) using older women, so you end up with casting like this.
I mean, you can’t fault the Taylor casting, but they could have fixed it by using a younger guy for his role.
Oh! I just realised that Apple is doing this in the wrong aspect ratio? It’s a 1.85:1 movie, but it’s displayed in 16:9.
APPLE! WHY YOU DO THIS! I”M MISSING LIKE 15% OF THIS MOVIE!
I don’t know… I really expected to totally adore this… and… some scenes I do. But it just seems to lose all energy with annoying regularity? I might just be me. The way Nichols slathers romantic music behind some of the more sentimental scenes is also pretty cloying.
Taylor is flawless. The rest isn’t. It’s a cultural touch stone for sure…
It won all the Oscars, but not for best movie or best director. So passive aggressive of the Oscars people.
Queerty pointed out that there’s never really been a good film version of the play. I watched the 1958 movie last year, and… I mean, I get their point: The script doesn’t make a lick of sense. Because they had to cut out all the bits about Paul Newman’s character being gay.
But if you overlook that little detail, it’s pretty spiffy.
So I’m watching the 1984 version they recommend.
This is with Jessica Lange (yay) and Tommy Lee Jones (uhm) from a made-for-TV production (er).
Hm… Oh, it’s from Showtime. Well that’s hardly TV at all.
Lange is fabulous.
This is really good! Thank you Queerty. It really leans into the theatrical qualities — not trying to go for a “tv realism” thing at all, but is filmed theatre, as it should be.
The casting of the no-neck monsters is pretty odd — why didn’t they get fat kids?
I’m surprised by how good Jones is. He totally avoids all the showboating and plays Brick way toned down. It’s a great contrast to all the other actors who are taking the suthen thing to 11.
I’m streaming these movies in this blog series because… I want to experience the pain people experience when trying to watch movies.
So this is from Youtube… from a VHS tape, apparently?
I’ve never seen any of Paul Morrissey’s movies for Andy Warhol… but I thought it was gonna be a lot weirder than this?
This (so far) looks like a totally normal mid-70s horror movie? A sort of mid-Europe kind of thing? There used to be a lot of them around.
OK… now it’s… not… so typical.
This is quite amusing.
Eek.
Oh yeah, this was part of the 70s gore thing? I’ve seen virtually none of those movies, because… Well, I used to love horror movies, but none of the 70s gore movies were available at the time… and then I lost interest in horror, so it never happened.
Did I kvetch about Youtube Premium yet? I signed up because I wanted to be able to buy movies and stuff… but… there’s no way to actually search for movies to buy! If you search for “avengers” you get this:
I.e., a hodge podge of normal youtube content and movies. And in that search one of the movies actually landed first, which is unusual…
It’s like Google hates their customers.
This is the weirdest sex scene ever. She’s giving the area close to his arm pits a blow job?
Hitchcock edited the film “in camera” (shooting only what he wanted to see in the final film) to restrict the producer’s power to re-edit the picture.[3] But Selznick relished the post-production process; he personally edited the footage, laid in Franz Waxman’s score, and supervised retakes and extensive re-recording of the dialogue of Sanders, Bates and Fontaine. Rewrites and reshooting were called for after a rough cut was previewed on December 26, 1939.
I mean, I get the charm of movies like this… giving you a view into “how it really is”. (This is about Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign.) It’s well made — it’s very 70s, but with people’s faces powdered instead of shiny (the latter is, of course, the foremost marker of 70s cinema).
It’s all about matte vs shiny.
It’s very neutral. I mean, as a movie — the cinematography and the performances.
Now things got more entertaining!
This movie makes me so nostalgic for the 90s. When you could make movies like this — about politicians being basically decent.
Oops. I guess we’re in the third act now, where things to all dramatic.
…
Yup.
I hate that. I don’t think anything has been more destructive for film than the idea of the three act structure.
This is bizarre. Nichols is saying that … New York is just radical loons because… they want… “$ for AIDS research”…
I guess that’s the moderate position. And I guess Nichols is very “moderate”.
I hope this isn’t representative of Queerty’s taste level… because… this just isn’t that interesting. I mean, it’s not a bad movie in any way — but it’s so…
This is basically an excuse to do a lot of Irving Berlin songs — not a very ambitious movie.
But that’s fine. Sometimes these things can be pretty amusing.
We’re half an hour in, and Astaire hasn’t danced yet, which seems like a waste. I’m guessing… they didn’t have him for that many days, so they had to keep his dancing scenes to a minimum?
No sooner kvetched than he appears on screen! Putting on the Ritz! I’m flabbergasted!
Ever the perfectionist that he was, Fred Astaire spent a grueling 5 weeks rehearsing his dance routines for the “Puttin’ On the Ritz” number’s challenging and most irregular rhythmic tempo.
Most of the numbers are good — it’s the bits inbetween that’s the problem. It’s a very soppy romance (sort of), and it’s just kinda charmless? The chemistry between Crosby and Joan Caulfield isn’t there, so it’s a bit hard to care?
I’m not sure editing it down by, say, twenty minutes would have helped either — it’s just not very interesting.
This guy’s supposed to be hilarious, I guess? But he’s just kinda vaguely amusing? And the movie spends an inexplicable amount of time on his gags.
A snippet of White Christmas. *sniff*
And it is an extraordinarily white movie for a song and dance thing like this, come to think of it.
This is kinda high concept for a Cassavetes movie: It’s Gena Rowlands (yay) on the lam from the mob (eh?) with a whiny kid (eek).
With a cat!
But then they lost the cast. Boo.
Now that’s a nice pan.
The kid is doing the best he can? But it’s pretty horrible.
Actually… the kid’s getting better… did they film this in sequence or something?
I love these shots of 70s New York.
Now that’s a hi tone hotel.
She’s tough.
There’s a bunch of things I love about this movie. Rowlands, of course, but also just random things like how they depict cabbies being totally unfazed by picking up dames that are waving guns around. It’s like a tough guy (and gal) New York fantasy… it’s great. And it’s fun.
But.
It feels repetetive? How many mobsters is Rowlands gonna stick up before the end of this? It’s not like any of those scenes are boring or anything, but they didn’t seem to… have any effect on the story?
I’m wondering what Cassavetes and Rowlands wanted to do with this movie. Is it just a goof they did to pass the time? Did they pitch a “straight” action movie and a studio paid them?
I’m just saying that this seems like a very odd movie in their oeuvre.
The young boy Gloria was protecting, played by John Adames, tied with Sir Laurence Olivier (in The Jazz Singer) for the Worst Supporting Actor Razzie award of 1980.
Fascinatingly, the versions of tracks (like A Certain Ratio’s Back to the Start) are versions I haven’t heard before.
It looks like this DVD was mastered from VHS cassettes… but whatev. I love this! And the audio quality is great.
… which makes me wonder whether LTM took the audio from somewhere else, because the audio/video sync isn’t… awesome?
I’m captivated by these videos. This is music I’ve listened to all my life (er sort of), but I’ve never seen any of these people before. They’re so young! And awkward!
Vini!
With nail varnish!
Oh, Manchester. So much to answer for.
This is such a wonderful track. Marie Louise Gardens. I think it’s the best thing Durutti Column did.
Oh wow. New Order’s doing Everything’s Gone Green live, and missing most of the cues, so it lasts twice as long as normally.
And they forgot to switch Bernard’s mike on.
Oh there it is.
It’s so New Order.
By now he’s just saying random stuff.
Now I really want to watch a video of some early New Order gigs, but that probably doesn’t exist.
Malaria!
Awesome.
*gasp* Tuxedomoon!
*phew* The Jinx version was teh awesum.
Tuxedomoon 4 ever. Well, OK, Peter Principle died, so I they don’t actually exist any more, but… anyway!
Nice hairdo.
I love LTM Records — James Nice is so obsessive — but often his maximalist impulse gets in the way of creating a strong… thing. When re-releasing an album, he puts a bunch of … incidental stuff onto the CDs. Which is great! Sort of! Because you don’t want to listen to that stuff more than a couple of times, and it gets in the way of the enjoyment of the album itself.
And it’s basically the same problem on this DVD: There’s stuff here that’s absolutely classic, and there’s stuff here that’s just curiosa. And he put all of the latter towards the end, so it’s…
So my enthusiasm is dwindling. For the first hour, I had this DVD pegged as a ⚅, but nope.
The film is the fourth film in the Frankenstein series by Universal Pictures and was the follow-up to Son of Frankenstein.
I guess this was like a TV serial before there were TVs — it’s got flashbacks and everything.
I’m enjoying this: Sure, it’s pretty cheesy, but it’s fun.
Poor Lon Chaney Jr. — he looks really uncomfortable under all that makeup. Especially with his eyes closed all the time.
So this is about Frankenstein’s (other?) son deciding to switch out certain of the monster’s body parts (but as you can see, some of them don’t need swapping out).
For what it is, it’s entertaining in spades.
The Ghost of Frankenstein. Erle C. Kenton. 1942. ⚃
It’s basically a number of loosely connected skits, I guess? But they’re very amusing skits.
And now it’s a cartoon!
Hybrid!
This is everything that is amiable, but they could have spent a bit more time on the er plot. (There’s a race between two cruise ships, you see.)
Now there’s Wagner! There’s something here for everybody.
I must have missed something in the plot. I don’t get why they’re all so rude to this one woman? She shatters mirrors when she looks in them, and they all hate getting kissed by her… is she supposed to be really ugly?
Wha…
Out of nowhere, there’s now this huge, huge (and bizarre) show thing.
I’ve seen many movies from around this time that are basically just a string of vaudeville bits — but this isn’t that. It’s much weirder.
The Big Broadcast of 1938. Mitchell Leisen. 1938. ⚃
I’ve seen the original version of this (and it’s awesome). This is supposed to be totally horrible? Like everything Cage has been in since… 1991? It’s apparently so bad that it’s meme-worthy. Something about bees?
Oh wow. 3.7? This has to be awesome!!!
So I’m finally watching it.
Well, that opening wasn’t too bad?
Bee products!
… what? Was something edited out? They dared the cop to look in the canvas bad that’s dripping blood… and then it gave a spasm… and then the cop just walked away while they’re laughing?
What?
OK, I thought this movie was gonna be just ordinary… boring, but it’s instead really … inexplicable?
For some reason, the name of the director seems familiar to me, even if I have seen exactly zero of his movies. And they all seem really dreary. Hm… Perhaps I’m thinking of Bruce LaBruce? Or is it because I’m mixing up In the Company of Men with Company of Wolves by Neil Jordan (from the Angela Carter novel).
It might be the latter.
This is curiously bad! It’s not ha ha bad, or “I’m falling asleep now” bad, but just kinda in incomprehensively bad? I mean, because I can’t quite put my finger on what’s making it this bad? The scenes should, like, work? But they don’t?
Is it all down to the editing? Could this have worked if it just… had scarier music or something?
I mean, this should be a tense scene! But after she said that, he just looked nonplussed and walked away.
I think basically the script was written by somebody doing a lot of coke.
I can’t believe that this movie was made in 2006. It’s not that it’s … retro .. it’s just… out of time. And that should be a positive thing! But…
I mean, it’s a very 80s movie. Did LaBute try to get a Lynch vibe going? I mean, it failed if that’s what he attempted, but there’s certain scenes where I can see somebody could have been going “OK, this it totally be Lynch”. (Lynch as in Twin Peaks s1.)
Oh, there’s the bees.
I still don’t understand it. The story is still a good one, but the scenes somehow just go “eh?” instead of mounting into a miasma of horror, like it should do.
Some normie reviewer used the word “nihilism” when talking about this movie. I assume that they’ve never been on the internet — and that this is just gonna be 130 minutes of edge lord tiresomeness.
It certainly starts off that way… and with shockingly bad greenscreen work.
Are these people that’s gonna be shockingly killed off straight away? Since they’re unknowns, I assume so…
I’m kinda surprised at hos slow this is moving? I had assumed it was gonna be CUT CUT CUT BOO YA, but it’s moving at a very sedate pace…
Yup. Edge lord city.
Gunn’s got pretty bad taste in music, eh?
*sigh*
And now we’re getting rolled back to explain what we’ve already understood? To give everybody their origin stories or something? *double sigh*
Gotta get some daddy issues in here. But Idris Alba is always fun.
Even more daddy issues! In the same scene!
Man, you can tell what jokes they’re gonna do half a minute in advance…
It’s so political!
It’s not that this doesn’t have jokes that kinda land? It’s just that the pacing is so lethargic… but I guess the point is to let stoned people keep up and get their “dude! did you see that! *punches air*” out of the way before the next gag, which means that you have to have at least five minutes between anything resembling a joke?
I guess this could have been pretty entertaining if it had been cut down from 130 minutes to 80?
Just when you think it can’t get any more tedious, we get a flashback to Ratcatcher 2’s childhood.
It really is just daddy issues all the time.
I liked the flower fight scene. The fight choreography in general is pretty good for a super-hero movie?
And now they’re playing Pixies?
OK spoilers, so stop reading now:
Is this the reason that otherwise seemingly-reasonable people are giving this a high rating? This “shocking indictment” of US politics? Lemme pause to check…
…
“Subversive.” Check.
“Fast-paced”!? Did she watch it at 2x or something? Ludes much?
To sum up: There’s some good jokes in here, and there’s some other stuff that works. But it’s mostly just kinda boring?
I did like the denouement to the big boss fight, so I’m upping the die a bit.
So this is a parody of some American movie talk show? Hm… It’s a Charlie Rose parody, do I’ve never seen that.
This kinda amusing? The conceit is that this guy is interviewing basically six extras from Anderson’s movies. I mean, guys that have (at most) one line in The Royal Tenenbaums.
Well, it’s a fun concept, but there isn’t actually any payoff, so…
This is a behind-the-scenes film from Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. If I understand correctly, they used a video camera during rehearsals (manned by Sami Frey) — to, among other things (I think Akerman said) make it clear to Delphine Seyrig that they were really making an actual movie, and not just putting her on. I mean, demonstrating to Seyrig that the long scenes of Seyrig doing stuff in the kitchen actually worked, and weren’t too long. I mean, the director was 25 at the time, so I understand that it was… er… useful… to be able to show Seyrig on the screen that the scenes made sense.
This is kinda fascinating.
That’s how you do a behind the scenes docu. *slow clap*
So, Akerman is doing an episode of a TV series (?) called Cinema of our Time, which (I infer from what Akerman’s saying here) is usually a thing made by one director about another director. Since everybody’s already been done, she does this about herself. Makes sense to me.
It’s … hm… It’s not very dynamic, and it’s impossible to do a flattering screenshot of somebody who’s talking all the time.
This is basically about Akerman talking about how she just doesn’t know how to do this thing, but she’s doing it anyway, because she signed the contract. Which is an amusing conceit and all, but then perhaps there should be more jokes?
I know! I’m so shallow!
OK, now she did a good joke about a cow. I laughed out loud.
I’m watching the extras from the Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles DVD. There was a really interesting interview/documentar with Akerman about the movie — insightful and surprising — and she described what it was like being 25, and suddenly being declared a “great director” (after the screening at Cannes, where most left the theatre, but the people who remained all invited her to screen at different film festivals). She said that she worried how she was going to do something better than Jeanne Dielman for her next movie — and that she wasn’t sure she’s ever done that.
Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe is a short documentary film directed by Les Blank in 1980 which depicts director Werner Herzog living up to his promise that he would eat his shoe if Errol Morris ever completed the film Gates of Heaven.
I just watched Fitzcarraldo, and I have somehow bought the Les Blank documentary about it, too? So now I’m watching that.
Such concept.
Oh! I have this because it was included on a Herzog box set I bought.
It’s really boring so far! Very dry, and with a voice-over explaining everything.
There were a lot of rumours about Herzog doing horrible stuff?
Heh. Jason Robards and Mick Jagger were originally in this.
After 40% of the movie was finished, Robards got ill, so..
“I live my life or I end my life with this project.”
Blank apparently didn’t have sound going for parts of the movie either? It’s quite disturbing the way he flies in a sound bed (with foley, I think?) for most of the non-interview scenes.
I don’t know what it is about this documentary… it’s mostly just tedious? And then there’s a random scene that’s riveting? Almost by accident?
It’s just… There’s too much chatter to work as a poetic take on being in the jungle… and too little happens to pay attention to it otherwise…
One thing is clear — Herzog is an asshole.
Wow! They really did send a ship down the rapids! With Herzog, Kinski and a small filming crew aboard!
*gasp* Decadent! (He’s giving champers to the horses.)
Oh, Popol Vuh? I’ve never listened to them… They were doing film music by this point?
Oh, Kinsky looks… older…
He was 56? Right.
That’s oldz.
I think I’ve probably seen this before? Hasn’t everybody? But… I can’t actually remember seeing it, so perhaps I somehow missed it?
I’m enjoying the pacing of this… Herzog makes the scenes oddly long, which appeals to me.
It has more of a straightforward plot than I expected. At least so far.
Is that an ocelot!?
Seems a bit worse for wear…
This was filmed without sound (dialogue added later, vaguely tracking with people’s lips). I’m guessing the actual sound was total chaos — there’s so many people appearing on the screen, most of them not actual actors…
The eerie silence certainly adds something.
Kinski is so… moist…
We’ve all had that experience!
OK, I’m kinda zoning out now… I thought the movie worked perfectly until, like, 90 minutes in. But after that it’s been … just about getting the boat over that hill? The first ninety minutes had a road quality movie — travelling up that river… It is its own logic. But once it gets this static, I’m just wondering how many of these extras were hurt during these scenes — it doesn’t look like they had much of a safety net…
Oh, and now they’re getting hurt on screen, too. I mean, I realise that that’s not real, but it all just looks… uncomfortably reckless?
Oh! This is a made-for-TV movie… How odd — Tati’s movies are so meticulous that it’s hard to imagine him just letting go and filming on… Oh, the restoration thing said it was filmed on a mix of video, 16mm and 32mm, so the aspect ratio is gonna change during the movie?
So… is this just a parade of visual gags and goofs? For an hour and a half? (There hasn’t been any dialogue.)
It’s Tati!
This is all quite amusing… it’s framed as a kind of circus performance, but it’s basically a self-conscious vaudeville show? (It’s a bit meta.) Postmodern vaudeville?
OK, this bit where he’s miming a guy fishing is… er… as entertaining as fishing is…
I think these guys are… doing… some kind of skipping rope thing? But the rope is thin and white? And the backgrounds are white? So I’m not quite sure they’re just dancing?
… oh! It’s a bolo thing?
Heh heh. Slo mo tennis match.
I can see this movie working as a kind of… Christmas Day staple? I mean, something vaguely amusing on the TV that you don’t have to pay attention to, but watching when your favourite bits appear… I’m saying that it’s kinda boring, but it’s got atmosphere? It’s got a kind of magic? It’s got a languid flow?
I want to love this, but I don’t. Watching it now at random, there’s just too many of these performances that aren’t that interesting? So it’s hard to keep paying attention.
I watched the sequel to this the other week, and it was kinda fun? So I thought I’d watch the, er, movie before the sequel… Is there a word for a movie that got a sequel later?
“The original one”? That seems lame.
Oh no! This movie does the low-framerate thing when there’s action! I hate that so much!
There’s some scenes here that work? But there’s way too much plot and boring bits between the fun. It’s hard to keep being interested, and I find myself distracted by more interesting things, like perhaps I should dust the top of the door over there…
The fun bits are indeed fun (and it’s clear that the director was most into the car gags (and they’re really good)), but there’s at least an hour of boring stuff in between that could have been cut. So it’s difficult to get excited about this movie.
OK, the first two movies were very Netflix. I.e., they kinda sucked? But… if you’ve said A you have to say BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.
Right?!
Right.
So this movie is the least 1666-looking horror movie set in 1666 ever.
I guess they kinda colour-graded it into beige and now it’s 1666? And they’re talking in a kinda really fake Dublin dialect?
This is, incredibly enough, even more boring than the first two movies.
It’s like they didn’t even care any more… I mean, why care in the doing the final movie in a trilogy? It’s not like it’s going to affect the viewership? So the economical, sensible thing is just to spend no money or effort.
So this is supremely sensible.
Now I’m regretting ⚁-ing the first two movies, because this is so bad that it’s like a minus nine on that scale, and there’s just no Unicode for that.
So… they asked the hairdresser to do a really seventeenth century weirdo hobo hairdo… and they made this? This precisely cut? This took some skill to do — look at the tips of the hair (probably a wig?) tracking his jawline.
This movie is so boring that I’m bitching about the hairdressers.
That’s a level of boredom seldom achieved.
This may be the most boring horror movie I’ve ever seen? And you know how boring some of those movies can be?
OK, when it gets back to the present(ish) it gets radically less boring. The first hour of this was excruciating! The worst I’ve ever seen! Ever! But now that they’ve done that bit, it’s not so bad?
This bit is kinda fun? And looks a lot better than the rest of the series.
So the last half of this movie wasn’t … horrible? I mean… it wasn’t good, but it wasn’t that awful? I mean, not as awful as the first half, but nothing is, is it?
But ending the movie on an Oasis song is cruel and unusual punishment… Oh! But now there’s Pixies! Gigantic! Gigantic! Gigantic!
Well, that’s sweet.
And then more Pixies? While the titles roll? Mr Grieves? That’s fun. It’s kinda perfect.
OK, whoever did the music in this trilogy was pretty smart.
OK, I didn’t like the first part of this much, but… Now I’m watching the next movie?
Funny how that happens.
What?! Now they’re playing the Nirvana version of Man Who Sold The World? That’s so… wrong…
I mean, the song is from 1972, I think?
…
Oh! This is a continuation of the first movie? Er… but isn’t this supposed to take place in 1978? But those interiors look so 70s?
Hm.
OK, I should be paying more attention.
Oh! Now it’s a flashback thing!
I thought they were gonna do all clever structural things or something…
Well OK.
You can tell that it’s the 70s now by the shorts.
Oh, cool! Now they’re doing Moonage Daydream! But the original Bowie version!
Man, they’ve really thought the soundtrack thing out. I’m not so embarrassed that I didn’t get the significance of the cover version of the other Bowie song used first.
Exactly!
This is… it’s a horror movie for the recap generation? Most of the movie is people recapping some old horror plot?
It’s totally unscary, and it’s so. so. boring.
I thought they were gonna do a pastiche of a 70s horror movie or something, but it’s just… a lot of plot. That’s not interesting at all.
There’s certainly an … aesthetic here.
I think it’s called “put the camera really close to the nose and have the female actors scream”.
Oh! That’s the red moss! I thought it was poop! Since they’re under the toilet!
That’s less gross.
Such colour grading!
This movie is kinda weirdly bad? That is, the elements in this movie aren’t that bad, but put together, it’s kinda boring?
It’s really like a couple of episodes from a TV series welded together. It’s way too long — I can see that this could have been a kinda fun, not-particularly-good horror movie if it has been half an hour shorter? As it is, it’s just… really dull?
I thought this started off pretty well? And then I sort forgot to watch for a couple minutes and now it’s really boring?
So it might just be me. It might be more exciting if I were actually paying attention.
High-schoolers these days.
OK, this kinda works? The scary scenes are pretty scary, and the rest of the scenes are… there?
This is the darkest police station ever. I mean, even on a horror movie scale.
I do like the Scooby Gang and how they try to be logical about it all. It’s quite Buffy… Oh, I get it: It’s a 90s horror movie, and that’s what they were about back then.
Oh my god. The practical gags here are hair-raising — Tati is doing all this stuff on and around the highway, and the cars look like they’re really zipping along, just meters from him.
This is most amusing. It’s so meticulous — all these little details… the colour schemes and the cinematography… all the little gadgets in the car itself and the plot that makes you pull your hair…
But I haven’t actually laughed out loud? The previous Tati movie I watched had me rolling around on the floor, and the previous Tati movie (chronologically), Playtime, was so stunning words fail me.
So I’m feeling, perhaps unreasonably, a bit disappointed?
OH MY GHOD! That “slo mo” car crash was a thing of sheer poetry.
Hehe! So hipster. They’re using The Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping song for the party music at the Xmas party. As if any of these people are hip enough. This movie is so unrealistic!
Daddy issues!? Already!? They usually save that for the second act when they’re padding out the movie before the CGI starts again in the third act. But here it is on the fucking first act!?
This is … boring. I expected that this would be very stupid, but it’s just tedious?
Wow. It took 35 minutes of exposition and “character building” (i.e. “you’re not my father, you weren’t there for me when I grew up”) for the movie to finally start.
Well, I hope it starts now. I could be in for another half hour of alien daddy issues, I guess?
OK… I guess… it kinda started? It’s still boring, but at least there’s some plot happening.
It’s just kinda badly made?
There’s none of that on the screen so far. Perhaps Chris Pratt was half that budget? The director’s only previous movie was apparently The Lego Batman Movie?
OK, that’s a nice monster.
Boo!
But, like, couldn’t Future Humans have come up with guns that are slightly more efficient than… those… put-put things people from “our time” are using?
Ah, right! This is the second act Daddy Issue scene. The first one was just a fake-out to make us think we wouldn’t have to do this scene in the middle of the movie, too. Fooled us!
(He wasn’t there for her when she grew up.)
Character: Developed.
Man, this is stupid. Guess what happens next! Yes, I’m guessing the same thing.
Science!
Surprise! You guessed right.
Wow. I mean, I assumed that this wasn’t going to be very clever or anything — It’s Amazon, after all — but this was so … totally brainless? Not even an attempt at even making a sliver of sense, from the micro to the macro?
It’s a horrible, terrible, tedious movie.
But I did like the CGI monsters, so I’ll give it a:
This is such a delight! It’s an Esther Williams vehicle, and it’s just perfect. Everything is super-silly, and it’s got one good gag after another (the recurring “England sure is foggy” bit is really fun), and a bunch of one-lines.
It’s all so… frothy.
Well, that was a lot of fun. I think the actual tense final scene was kinda… not really necessary? It would have been better without it?
That’s so Norway. That’s practically my house. We all live in… er… silver… triple wide? trailers? Not in a trailer park, but in a forest somewhere….
I KNOW! I’m complaining about realism in a Marvel movie.
Sorry; won’t happen again.
Man, these fight scenes are kinda… not very good? The greenscreen work is horrible! The compositing is barely adequate — the all-CGI bits look so fake.
Heh, OK, that car chase scene was pretty amusing.
Heh heh heh. That’s a good joke. I guess it’s a burn on Whedon.
But it’s… it’s kinda charmless?
This was really tedious. But there was a couple of jokes that landed, and there was one action scene that wasn’t totally boring, so it’s not a ⚀.
Nooo! This is a documentary about The Catherine Wheel? I thought it was gonna be the ballet? Boo! I hate documentaries! So much!
I wanted to see the ballet!
Perhaps we’ll get the performance after this horrible documentary? This DVD is 90 minutes and hopefully they can’t do a 90 minute documentary…
Well, as documentaries go, that wasn’t bad. I was just disappointed that this wasn’t the show.
But there’s also the show!!!!
Oh my Emacs. I’ve listened to this album so many times…
… since I was a teenager. It’s such a beautiful album by David Byrne…
Oh! This isn’t just a ballet! It’s a whole technological thing!
It’s got all the video fades available at the time!
I love this, but isn’t this more like… er… pantomime than ballet? I mean, they aren’t dancing much? But they’re like acting a lot?
OK, now there’s more dance.
The dancing doesn’t reference the music much at all. Was this originally choreographed in complete silence? And then David Byrne was brought on to score the dance after it was filmed or something?
Well!
That was something. The first … two thirds? weren’t very ballet at all, but seemed to track the music somewhat. The final half hour (ish) was totally ballet, and it was so weird — the songs changed, and the dancing didn’t alter at all.
I loved all of it, but it was very strange.
I also wonder how it was filmed — this DVD looked very smudged, but I couldn’t see any video artefacts — was this filmed on film (like 16mm)? Or was is high grade video? If it was film, I wish somebody would make a blu ray release of this, because I’d totally buy it again and watch it again on blu ray.
Oh my ghod! They totally had me there! I thought that this was gonna be the cheesiest movie ever. But it’s a comment of cheesiness in movies instead!
Well played.
Esther Williams is very… tan… in this movie.
Oh, the … tannity… was only for the movie within the movie.
It’s all so meta.
It’s an odd movie — it’s got all these characters spouting off on… stuff…
I mean, we’re twenty minutes in, and I really have no idea what this movie is even about.
I like what I’m seeing, but I’m totally befuddled.
This bit is amusing.
Oh! I just realised that this is from 1948. So it’s one of the first colour movies that just is a colour movie because that’s what they make, and not for any artistic reason, or because it’s a huge big-budget movie.
And the colour looks great. Technology happens.
Jimmy Durante is the only actor that’s like… giving any emotion here… but that’s fine.
Drunk thoughts time: Some people is just weird thinking is dead a long time ago, like Durante. I mean, he was already old in all the movies I’ve seen him in, so he seemed kinda… eternal?
I like this movie, but the plot is like whaaa. And kinda abusive? I think they were going for a complicated meet cute, but the meet cute doesn’t happen until the halfway point of the movie, and it’s very… odd.
But the scenery is so beautiful. I want to be in all these locations, which is what matters to the filmmakers?
I’m really enjoying this, but it sure would have been nice if the jokes had been like actually funny and stuff. Instead this is a kinda generic? movie… it’s like they had an outline for a script, and they had asterisks going “write a joke here” and then they didn’t have the time.
It’s fun, but it’s not funny.
Tee hee.
But this is just inexplicably long for the amount of plot they had here. It’s like aiming for a 70 minute movie, but then the result is a 110 minute movie, and it’s just not that amusing.
There’s scenes in here that are really delightful, but as a movie, it just doesn’t quite work.
Tati’s doing these houses as his vision of a modernist nightmare… but I really love these houses! I so want to live here!
So this is his vision of how architecture should be, I think? And I like this too.
Heh heh. This is very funny, though.
I love it!
This is where I want to live! All concrete and angles and stuff.
No! This is what I want my living room to look like!
My dream garden!
My dream living room!
That’s what I want my windows to look like!
And my lawnmower!
That’s totally what I want my hallway to look like.
I really enjoy this movie, but the pacing is pretty weird. I was all aboard with the house stuff, but then we shift to the factory (for some I Love Lucy stuff), and the er plot of the movie kinda sorta evaporates? I had this problem with Playtime, too — the segments just didn’t seem to connect?
But, I mean, every shot here is genius, so I’m just quibbling… but it seems odd that nobody would just go “er, M. Tati, how does what do you say all this like connect into a whole”….
Gorgeous! I want that garage!
Tati predicted the Roomba.
I loved watching this movie. I mean, every scene is just genius. And the (five?) little dogs tying it all together. It’s fabulous. But there’s just this slight disconnect between the scenes: If it hadn’t been for the factory stuff, I think this would have felt like a more complete movie, instead of a collection of meticulously engineered tableaux? I mean, all these scenes are just so … amazing.
Oh! This is a sequel to The Hitman’s Bodyguard! Which I haven’t seen! Should I…
No, let’s just go with the flow.
This is most amusing!
I like this! It’s very, very silly. But I’m getting a whiplash from switching between good practical gags and very bad CGI gags all the time. And every shot is like three seconds long.
Max.
I see what they’re going for — overwhelming the viewer with fun chaos, but I’m not quite on board?
On the other hand.
So Hayek is married to Jackson? He’s like a couple decades older than she is? That’s movies for you.
When this movie works, it’s awesome. But there’s like all these little things that make you go “huh?” and then you’re out of the silliness of it all. It’s like… there’s too many things? And then there’s not enough things? It’s a pacing issue.
So generic!
Well! How do you score this? This was very funny — I laughed out loud a lot. But on the other hand — it’s so choppy! You’ve got these great action sequences, and then these super-cheesy CGI things that makes you go “er wha…” Did this have zero budget left after they finished shooting it? Nothing for the effects people?
I got this DVD because it was mentioned in an article in Sight & Sounds magazine and it sounded interesting… and it is! It’s very strange. It’s got a pacing I’m not used to at all — wherever I thought the first film here was going, it totally wasn’t.
Yeah, this is three short films glued together, apparently?
And I can’t imagine what the director went through to be allowed to make something this… er… ambiguous in Iran. She must have nerves of steel.
It’s weird — I don’t associate Iran with all this seafront. But, I mean, Iran has a huge coastline… Teheran is rather inland, so I guess that might be the reason? And looking at Google Maps, it looks like the coastline to the south is really, really arid? Like in this movie.
The last two stories are kinda allegorical… but I was so worried for the old woman in the last bit! مشکینی really made the viewer care… on such a flimsy premise. So weird.
And then she tied it all together. It’s a marvellous, strange, beautiful movie.
The ending is very, very moving, but it’s hard to pinpoint why.
The Day I Became A Woman. Marzieh Meshkini. 2000. ⚅
Oh… I think… I bought it because I was watching the commentaries on a horror movie, and the special effects guy said that this was the best? Something like that?
Buying this based on that sounds like something I’d do.
But I don’t know anything about this. And the first couple minutes look awfully cheesy.
That’s not an extensive movie directing career… but he’s done a tons of TV shows. Including two Twin Peaks s2 episodes. And just…
… an endless number of TV things.
Bit I guess it’s not CSI: Fumblebum, so it’s a bit more high class.
As I guess you can tell by my imdb-ing so much while watching this: I’m really, really bored by this. I give it ten more minutes, and then I’m ditching it.
This movie explores the depths of human emotions. It incorporates dramatic struggles ranging from a family being ripped apart because of a divorce (all too common in this work-a-day society), and a complex friendship being stretched to the limit because of the legendary California Videogame Championship.
So this is a movie beloved by assholes?
OK, five more minutes and I’m ditching this. Unless something interesting happens.
Well, OK, there’s a plot forming…
OK, I’m ditching this at 28 minutes.
It’s not … The Worst Movie Ever or anything, but I have zero interest in watching this.
OK, rewind: When I watched Playtime the other year, my mind was going “Tati… Tati… I’m sure I remember a Frenchey comedy director from my childhood…” And the thing was, I just remembered one single scene: People, holding parasols and stuff, running down into the underground (on steps) and then coming back up again somewhere else, unrealistically fast.
I tried googling for that, but I came up with nothing.
Whodathunk.
BUT THIS IS IT!!!! This is the scene I remember from when I was like… ten? I remember watching it on TV with my family? I remember laughing until I almost died? But I also remember it being in colour? So obviously my memories are suspect, but…
I’m so excited now!
OK, unpause the movie.
I didn’t type anything while watching this, because I was too busy laughing. I’ve LOL-ed out loud more over the past 90 minutes than in the preceding three months.
That was just… the funniest thing ever. I guess you could say that the humour is on a Buster Keaton/Mister Bean *shiver* tip, but it’s not maudlin like Keaton and it’s not embarrassing (or unpleasant) like Atkinson usually is. It’s super duper silly… but there’s also all these details: There’s so much subtext to these scenes. For instance, I love how that British woman takes to Hubert, but he’s oblivious… and that it doesn’t end the way you’d guess at all. Tati doesn’t succumb to the obvious impulse of making his Hulot the hero here, but letting him remain… unresolved.
This is simply a wonderful movie. It’s so meticulous. And gorgeously shot. I’m not surprised that I remember this as a major event from when I was like ten.
How odd — it looks like this has been dubbed into German? There’s no English soundtrack in this .mkv, but the lips definitely don’t match up to what they’re saying…
There are two different versions of the film, one in which the actors speak English, and one in which they speak German.
Hm… Oh! There’s another file here — where they speak English, but otherwise identical? The lips match up a lot better here.
It still seems like it was filmed without audio and the voices were looped in, but it’s less strange in the English version.
Yeah, that’s a Herzog shot.
Anyway, this is the most “traditional” Herzog movie I can remember watching? That is, this could have been basically any Italian/German/Soviet copro-duction from around this time?
But I mean, only good.
Klaus! Finally!
It’s so cosy.
Oh, wow, now it’s not a run-of-the-mill movie any more.
Once Klaus is here, it’s all suddenly fascinating. I love how he plays Dracula as both terrifying and pathetic at the same time.
I love this! I haven’t seen the Murnau since like the 90s, so I don’t remember it in detail. But is this a scene-by-scene remake or something? So many of the shots look familiar, but I haven’t seen this movie before.
Several shots in the movie are faithful recreations of iconic images from Murnau’s original film, some almost perfectly identical to their counterparts, intended as homages to Murnau.[
Man, that’s a lot of rats. If there’s “No Rats Were Hurt During The Making Of This Movie”, I don’t believe it.
So he was only *counts on fingers* 21 when he died! That makes a whole lot more sense! I found it so bizarre that all these people would take care of this middle aged dude… I mean, people are more sceptical towards teh oldes than teenagers.
I mean, I love his performance here, but it was confusing.
(The er bird ate a frog.) I don’t think I’ve seen a single Herzog movie where some animal hasn’t been killed on screen? I mean, I’m not horrified or anything, but it’s definitely a Herzog schtick?
Did that guy just tell that riddle wrong? He said “there’s one guy from the village of truth, and one guy from the village of lies, and you have only one question to determine which is which”. Which is, of course, absolutely trivial, and Kaspar nails it (upsetting that berk up there). Is that… a commentary from Herzog about how stupid people were in those days or … what?
I forgot what the real riddle was, so I had to google.
I really like this movie. Herzog makes some really strange choices (especially in the pacing), but it works? It somehow feels a bit abrupt, even if not a lot happens? It’s odd, and I respect that.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Werner Herzog. 1974. ⚄
Oh! This is from 1990, while I and II were from 72 and 74… and bizarrely enough, there’s just 16 years between 90 and 74 — it seems like it should be 26 years? It’s like a different era…
This is like a callback to the first movie? The party and the mob boss doing his bossy stuff?
But… I love Pacino, but he’s not Marlon Brando.
But it’s not the actors — this has got Dianne freaking Keaton, and the lines just seem so …
What’s the technical term…
Moronic?
I think that’s the technical term?
No actor can salvage these lines.
It’s hard to say just why this movie sucks this much. It’s just… an accumulation of defects? The cinematography is so pedestrian that it’s just… did anybody claim credits for this? Every shot is “yes, that sucks”. Even the colour grading is just bad.
The lines suck, the actors showed up, there’s no plot worth paying attention to…
Look at that shot. It’s so ugly that the only reasonable explanation is that Coppola made this movie to atone for his sins: He made mobsters look cool in the first two movies, so he’s trying to make them look like the total dorks they are in this movie.
I just don’t understand this movie — what’s George Hamilton doing here? It feels like a movie that has had a few hours cut out of it, and it’s three hours long.
Perhaps this was just a movie ahead of its time? It could have been a twelve episode New Era of Quality TV series and it would have been hailed as a masterpiece.
Wow… Coppola had done a lot of… stuff… between II and III. I think… mostly now critically well received? I’ve seen all these movies, and… er… I think I loved One From The Heart at the time? I was 13? And the rest are… what they are…
It’s so pedestrian. I can’t get over it.
And I totally don’t understand what the point of the Vatican plot is, except that it’s saying “these mobster people sure are stupid”.
OK, that’s a nice shot…
And that’s horrible!
It’s like there’s accidentally shots that are interesting?
…
Wat.
This is a horrible movie!
What’s wrong with these 68% of people!
Yeah… but that’s the redeeming quality?
That’s a reasonable interpretation. I thought that Coppola was trying to make as much of an ass of Michael Corleone is possible (to hammer in the point that he’s a total moron and a buffoon), but it’s a reasonable interpretation…
But… this bluray is 16:9, i.e. 1.77:1… so this is a fucking tilt’n’scan edition? Or… er… math is hard… Is it a fucking pan’n’scan edition?
I’m too drunk to do maths.
This is just unimaginably bad.
How did this happen? Was this financed by Golan/Globus who thought they’d have a winner on their hands or something? It’s totally like one of their movies, only more portentous.
Did Coppola have religious damage? Is that why he made this movie? I mean, the real reason he made this movie was probably because he got a bunch of money to do it, but… why not do something fun instead of this dreary march towards nothing?
OK, I’m going with my first instinct: Coppola did this to show that mobsters suck and aren’t any fun.
The Godfather Part III. Francis Ford Coppola. 1990. ⚁
Grant only started acting a couple years earlier, but had already done a bewildering number of movies:
Can’t blame the producers.
This is so, so, so close to being a screwball comedy classic. The plot zings, the characters are perfect, they’re all hamming it up to eleven…
But it’s just slightly staid? Not the plot or anything, but the directing and the editing? There’s scenes here where I’m going NO! PUT THE CAMERA OVER THERE SO WE CAN SEE THE (PROBABLY) HILARIOUS REACTION SHOT! And CUT HALF A SECOND AND THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECT!
I’ve never seen a movie where it’s so clear what the technical problems are — it’s so frustrating.
This is the third Topper movie. The first two were quite tightly intertwined… but this one is basically just Topper on a new, random adventure with some new ghosts.
Oh, right, Cary Grant was in the first Topper movie? But he’s not in this sequel? How odd.
Oh yeah, this was the movie these two people died and then turned into ghosts and helped that other guy with his life!
It’s very high concept.
And I guess it was very successful since they did a sequel?
This is basically the same thing, only without Cary Grant — there’s now only a single ghost, but that ghost is still trying to help Topper (that guy to the right up there).
So it’s all these gags where he’s talking to an invisible woman, and people looking funny at him.
And Topper’s wife.
This is most amusing.
It’s really silly.
The ghost gags (here’s the ghost dog) are more accomplished than in the first movie, and it’s a lot less convoluted.
It’s just pure… silliness?
Some of these scenes are transcendently silly.
I think that was better than the first movie: It went right into the slapstick without all the emotional stuff first.
The director here, Henry King, is unknown to me, but he’s a real veteran:
Like, a dozen movies per year starting in 1916. But of course, slowing down in the 30s, with only a couple movies per year.
The plot is a classic — an up and coming band playing in various clubs to ever-growing success. It’s such a classic because it’s the easiest way to allow a director to string together a huge number of new hits (all by Irving Berlin here). You just need some conflict between the musicians, and you’re there.
This time around, the plot between the songs is kinda creepy: The band leader is this posh creep I mean upstanding guy, and he’s gonna Eliza up the fabulous singer I mean slovenly slattern singer.
Tyrone Power is supposed to be all sympathetic and stuff, but he comes off as a creep, and Alice Faye is perfect to begin with, but he’s coercively moulding her.
“We Are Not Too Proud To Fight”? That’s an odd slogan?
So — this is based on hundreds of hours of audio recordings that Brando did, and he talks about his life, his career, and his mother. “I like remembering about her.”
It’s pretty neat. The edits are way too aggressive for me, though — Brando is very chill, very laconic — but the director drops in a new image second, like. He’s constantly panning over the images or moving the camera, and it’s annoying.
Brando had his head laser scanned, and I like these renderings:
There was enough information on those files, right down to the pores on Brando’s skin with this scanning technology, which they used for “Terminator 2,” apparently. They used the same scanning machine when they were trying to construct that liquid metal character. So these were very detailed scans, but to do it with flesh tones and bring Marlon’s life in that way, it just didn’t feel right for me. I wasn’t seeking to make it look photo-real or to bring him to life in that way.
I don’t know why I have this DVD — I don’t watch documentaries, and especially not documentaries about actors — but this is pretty good.
It’s so polemical, though — it scores this bit (where he refused the Oscar and his talk about Native American rights) as if this is his tragic breakdown or something.
Or if that’s not what the director’s going for, that’s kinda … badly edited.
The movie tries so hard! It tries way too hard. And the first hour is basically fine, but the movie tries so hard to make you cry the last 30 minutes that it gets really annoying. It tries to make a life into a story, with a storytelling arc, and it almost ruins the entire thing.
For Chicago Board of Censors cut: “in Reel 1, the captain shooting man and his falling, two scenes of men with captain being shot and falling, striking man on head, Reel 3, scene of boy being frightened by lion and jumping up showing his sex, woman standing over kettle showing breasts, Reel 5, first two scenes of maid on man’s lap in closet, three choking scenes, Reel 7, two closeups of Negro leering at woman and four scenes where he carries her off.”
Sounds very risque.
I’m not sure what the story behind this DVD transfer is, but the weirdest thing is that the soundtrack is all wobbly. Which you’d think they could surely have fixed up. I mean, that bit isn’t from 1918. It’s so bad that it’s kinda painful to listen to here and there.
It’s pretty good. But it’s awfully abrupt in this version (missing half the footage).
I remember loving this movie when I saw it when I was like… what… twelve? Something like that? And I’m digging the mood; I can see why I would have liked this movie at that age.
But… I’m oddly unmoved by this now. Bergman is supposed to be, like, a tragic figure (magic pixie party girl?), but she’s more… clingy and annoying.
Subtle!
I mean… it’s Hitchcock, so there’s scenes here that are really exciting. I think… two scenes? And then there’s the rest.
It’s generally well liked, though, so perhaps I’m just not getting into the swing of things. I find myself distracted all the time… This thing should be right up my alley — it’s artificial and awkward, which I like, but it’s just hard to care that much.
Oh, OK, that’s exactly what I was thinking. Especially the “boisterous” bit. So it’s not just be. And there’s only two (2) reviews on rottentomatoes, which means that this is a largely forgotten movie, I guess?
OK, I’m bailing on this movie after 70 minutes. I just have zero interest in anything that’s (possibly) happening on the screen.
It does look quite nice, so I’ll give it a ⚀ more.
Let me explain: In 2017, I got the bright idea of going looking for box sets of screwball comedies and musicals. I couldn’t believe that there were, like, a 50 DVD box set available for almost no money! So I got two (or was it three?) with a total of about… 70? 80? movies in total.
It turned out that these were all public domain movies. The reasons for the public domainity (that’s a word) varied, but it’s mostly one of two: 1) The studio that had produced them had gone bankrupt (and nobody had bought the rights), or 2) the studio hadn’t bothered to renew the copyright.
Both of these things happened because the movies in question were mostly B movies, or nobody could imagine that anybody would ever want to watch them again.
So we’re not talking… quality films. For the most part.
And since they’re in the public domain, there’s no money in restoring them, so I’ve been watching some pretty wretched DVD transfers.
But… it’s been kinda interesting anyway? Sure, most of these movies are pretty bad, but… I’d been getting such a skewed version of the 30s/40s from watching only the classics? Before watching these movies, I thought that Hollywood were only doing fabulous movies in the 30s.
And they weren’t.
Another kinda interesting (to me) thing about these movies are that more than a handful have Black actors in the leads, which you just don’t see from the major productions of the time.
And I got to see a few 30s serials, which was amusing.
So… all in all, it wasn’t all bad… but… I wouldn’t really recommend the experience. It’s a lot of hours that I could have been watching better movies.
This is very Technicolor.
Some of the gags here are kinda amusing, but the songs just aren’t good enough to save this movie.
This is pretty wild and weird. It’s about Autry being a double, and then hi-jinx ensues (which is traditional enough), but it’s wrapped up in a movie-making thing, and then there’s horses and tricks and stuff, and it’s all very… odd…
It’s like they didn’t quite realise what the formula they were supposed to make was.
I’m enjoying this, but, you know — you can’t really call this a “good movie”. The actors are hamming it up in a very pleasing way, and the cinematography is actually kinda ambitious for this sort of thing…
It’s almost genius. If the jokes had been just a bit funnier, this might have been a cult favourite. Instead it totters on the verge of being awful in ever scene, but somehow manages to make you go “that’s not bad!” all the time.
It’s weirdly inspired, is what I’m saying.
But not actually good?
OK, in the last 15 minutes they mostly abandon the story and just show scenes from a horsey show (which looks like an actual show). And… that’s just not that much fun. But it’s kinda interesting.
The plot races by in the first 40 minutes, and after that we get a series of musical numbers. That’s pretty much the formula for all early musicals with the only variation being whether the musical extravaganza comes before, after or in the middle of the story. In this case it was at the end, and I actually enjoyed that format. It was as if the filmmakers were telling us, “OK now that the silly plot is out of the way, here’s what you really came here for.”
I like how these sets have no ceilings.
I’ve seen one of Josh Binney’s movies before, and that was also pretty … marginal? This one is better, but the actors are really astoundingly bad here, too.
I’m digging this.
I like the tunes, but this is barely a movie at all.
For some reason I thought this movie was by Cronenberg. But it’s Jarmusch! That’s a weird disconnect to have.
In any case, I don’t know why this bluray has languished on the shelves for years now…
I’m really enjoying this movie… but it sure stakes a lot on the viewer finding Adam Driver’s face fascinating.
And Driver’s a good actor! But… Fascinating? I’m not sure…
OK, I’m rolling back that comment up there slightly — I loved every minute of this movie. As is often the case with Jarmusch movies, I just couldn’t stop smiling while watching this. Jarmusch taps into a continuity of… amiable bemusement like no other director.
All the characters here were lovable (except that evil dog), and it’s all… perfect.
Is this just going to be a bunch of musical numbers associated with Jerome Kern?
I like that they show the songs in full. Kern did write some good tunes.
The biographical story in between the numbers isn’t that bad? It’s not outstanding (in a field) or anything, but it’s fine.
So I’m wondering why MGM let this fall into the public domain:
The film is one of several MGM musicals – another being Royal Wedding – that entered the public domain 28 years after production because the studio did not renew the copyright registration. As such, it is one of the most widely circulated MGM musicals on home video. Warner Home Video gave it its first fully restored DVD release on April 25, 2006.
Which doesn’t explain anything. But perhaps MGM felt there was no money in this movie? And I can see that.
It’s got all the stars.
Frank! He does Ol’ Man River! Is that even allowed!
I didn’t know his register went that far down. And he’s singing without his normal phrasing and er vibrato — it’s kinda fascinating.
I guess two thirds of this is just people performing the songs? So I can see why some would find this a pretty tedious movie, especially since it’s more than two hours long. But I found it pretty enjoyable… but I may have found it tiresome in a movie theatre.
Till the Clouds Roll By. Vincente Minnelli, George Sidney, Richard Whorf. 1946. ⚃
Oh my god. Rowlands is totes amazeballs. Totally riveting.
This movie is fabulous. Cassavetes playing the heroically pathetic rich (but cultured) guy, and Rowlands playing the distressingly crumbling woman… it’s… it’s like nothing else. It’s not even like any other Cassavetes movie. Did the Golan/Globus money finally free him to make the movie that he envisioned? After all those years of financing his movies himself?
Rowlands is always good, but Cassavetes has never been better (as an actor) than in this film.
The last fifteen minutes were really frustrating to watch. I mean, that’s the point. But it was hard.
I’m now watching the documentary extras on this Criterion bluray… And it turns out that Jon Voigt was meant to play the guy! But he pulled out three days before shooting was supposed to start, and Cassavetes himself stepped in. That’s… just mind boggling. With Voigt in that part, it would have been such a different movie — I can’t even imagine it. OK, I can, but all I’m imagining is… sheer horror.
I got this Cassavetes box set, and this is the remaining movie from that set. It’s Cassaveteses (that’s a word) first film?
Yes.
Oh, this is very Nouvelle Vague.
But it’s not Godard — it’s not all thought out and stuff. It’s… it’s not that accomplished? I mean, I like it, but it’s just got these technical problems (with lighting, mainly, and, well the actors not being French, which is very technical indeed) that seem to make it totter on the verge of being an American B movie instead of an art movie.
So this is Cronenberg’s second movie… and I guess he’s still at the university? It’s got that kinda vibe.
His first movie, Stereo, was a lot more visually interesting, but it barely had a plot at all. This one has more of a plot, and isn’t visually interesting at all.
So we’re kinda edging into Cronenberg’s first commercial movie — Shivers — which would arrive five years later.
I love this architecture. So much concrete. Brutalism!
Gorgeous!
That’s how I want my living room to look like! Except the floors.
Anyway, I remember watching this movie at the Cinematheque in the early 90s/late 80s. And the only thing I remember about it is that the architecture was awesome, but the movie itself sucked.
Which is basically what I’m thinking now, too.
This is the final Cronenberg movie in my (re-)watch of his movies. This is very studentey, of course, but the visuals are very interesting.
This is what I want my next flat to look like!
This building Cronenberg is shooting in is just so gorgeous.
There’s not really much of a movie here, but Cronenberg keeps the interest up just by the visuals.
Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic). David Cronenberg. 1969. ⚂
OK, I’m riveted by this movie, but I’m also remembering that I’ve seen Triple Frontier by the same director, which totally sucked.
But that was a Netflix movie, so perhaps that explains the suckitude.
I was thinking “boy, Redford looks kinda harried here… he’s, like, 55?”
WHAT THE FUCK!!?!?
77!?!? He’s the spryest 77 ever in the history of ever!
Now I’ve flipped from “wow, this movie is awesome” to “this movie is elderly abuse”!
The first half of this movie is absolutely fabulous. All his travails on the boat are so gripping, and Redford’s performance is fantastic.
But then we get the last half of the movie, and it’s just… snoresville? It seems like they wrote themselves into a corner, and didn’t know how to make that part interesting. It’s a shame, because they really had something special there.
So I’d give the first half of the movie a ⚅, and the last half of the movie a ⚁, which means we’re at:
This is also by Joseph Kohn! I just watched Rock ‘n’ Roll Revue, which was totally brilliant — every performance perfect.
So I guess this is… part II? It’s even got some of the same performers. But it’s twice as long?
I’m excited! But worried? Perhaps there’s gonna be fillers since it’s longer?
OK, it starts with a longish skit… which is pretty amusing…
Yeah, this DVD transfer is… it’s really really bad. But it’s bad in ways I’ve never seen before! Artefacts are kinda constant? It’s like if someone projected the movie onto a really badly painted, very textured wall… and then somebody filmed that? It’s got more texture than seems possible, is what I’m saying.
Rhythm and Blues Revue is a plotless variety show, one of several compiled for theatrical exhibition from the made-for-television short films produced by Snader and Studio Telescriptions, with newly filmed host segments by Willie Bryant.
So perhaps all those artefacts are from the television-to-film transfer?
Anyway, the audio track isn’t bad.
Faye Adams! What a voice.
This one isn’t as tautly edited as Rock’n’Roll Revue, but the performances are really good. They’re hamming it up for the camera, of course, but the music’s fine. Really fine.
So it’s kinda cheesy, and it’s not as good as Rock’n’Roll Revue — it’s got more novelty acts. But the good bits are great.
I missed this woman’s name, but she’s fabulous. And very funny.
Nat King Cole!
I haven’t got any of his albums. I have to fix that. This is amazing.
I’m fine with that. We start off with Duke Ellington?
Yup.
It’s really nice!
I like all these tunes.
“Your cash ain’t nothing but trash / but I’m sure gonna get me some more”
And there’s skits!
Dinah Washington!
Gorgeous song.
Nat King Cole.
By Emacs! He’s amazeballs!
This is brilliant.
Heh. Kohn did ten music pics over a two year period? And then nothing? I wonder what the story there was, because there’s nothing here I don’t like: The performances are fantastic (especially that Nat King Cole thing), and the cinematography is fun and bouncy, and it’s tautly edited (no boring bits), and it’s… just a joy to watch.
If you’re not into watching live performances, you might not find this fascinating, but for me it’s:
Film director Bud Pollard appears on screen to tell us of Bing Crosby’s rise to fame, using scenes from four early Crosby shorts to illustrate his fictional biography.
As you’d expect from this sort of thing, the technical quality is pretty bad. I mean, these are shorts from the early 30s that have been transferred onto new film in 1947, and then this is an unrestored DVD copy of that.
So you can barely see what’s going on, and there’s more hiss than sound on the audio track.
Bing Crosby sure had a nice voice. And these shorts look like they’re really fun! But they’ve been edited down to just a scene or two, so they don’t really… make much sense?
But I’m kinda enjoying myself?
Accidental blackface.
I love how no lions were hurt during that special effects scene.
“I may act gay / that’s just a pose / I’m not that way”
By any sensible scoring system, this should be a ⚀. But nobody has ever accused me of being sensible! I really enjoyed watching this: The tunes are great, Bing sounds great (between all the crackles), and the gags are really silly. The racist bits aren’t even that racist!
So:
The Road to Hollywood. Del Lord, Leslie Pearce, Bud Pollard, Mack Sennett. 1952. ⚂
I’m watching the last few movies from a couple of public domain DVD box sets I bought in 2017. I think there were about 70 movies in total in those sets?
I’ve got… eight movies left.
Well, this is in colour, which is unusual, but it’s totally unrestored… I wonder where it’s sourced from? It looks very soft (which might point to a TV transmission at some point in the er provenance), but it’s got scratches that are totally sharp. So… it’s from a film copy?
This is one of a handful of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions of the 1950-1951 period whose original copyrights were never renewed and are now apparently in Public Domain; for this reason this title is now offered, often in very inferior copies, at bargain prices, by numerous VHS and DVD distributors who do not normally handle copyrighted or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer material.
In her autobiography, Lana Turner revealed that she thought the script for the film was stupid. She fought against doing the film, but lost.
Oh yeah, this is a musical. Turner’s vocals have been looped in, apparently.
Director Hartman had been working in movies since the early 30s, but mostly as a writer (and composer). He only directed this handful of movies… and… based on this one, it’s odd that he even got to make this many movies.
But apparently the three 40s movies are supposed to be good?
OK, this is just totally without any sort of interest, so I’m bailing after half an hour. Too bad, because Lana Turner can be fun.
Let me see if you can detect a certain pattern in the names of the roles Ritter was playing:
No? No pattern?
Geez.
This is most amiable. I guess this is one of those B movie things? I mean, it’s not part of a serial, but it looks like it’s Extruded Western Product — they had to keep the kids entertained, week in, week out at the movies.
It’s cheap and cheery, with gags, music and action.
That said, it’s not actually like good — there’s no reason to watch this unless you’re really curious about what one of these movies were like. (Which I am.)
I saw this movie at the time, and I was… unimpressed? Yeah. I thought it was kinda… sophomoric? Jejune? One of them there words. But that’s all I remember: I remember nothing of the movie itself.
So I’m excited to watch this again, because I’ve grown to appreciate Tarantino in some of his better movies (Jackie Brown, Once Upon etc, etc).
It looks kinda cheap? Was it really cheap?
It was!
What? I thought it was super duper successful? I guess not…
OK, resetting expectations again…
OK, I’m kinda bored now. Everybody talks in exactly the same voice, and it’s getting annoying listening to the same guy shouting at himself all the time.
At least it has a happy ending.
I liked the timeline, but the rest was kinda … snooze-worthy.
So: I was right the first time around when I watched this when I was 25.
Oh! This is one of the remaining movies from that 50 movie DVD box set I bought many years ago — it’s all public domain movies (mostly because they’re from smaller movie studios that went bankrupt).
So this is an early talkie… and Erich von Stroheim co-directs and stars in this one.
This is so oddly paced. I mean, I’ve seen a bunch of these early talkies, but this just doesn’t quite connect. It’s a weird farce, but it’s paced as if it’s an Ionesco play.
OK, I’m bailing on this one after 35 minutes.
The Great Gabbo. Erich von Stroheim and James Cruze. 1929. ⚀
Ridley Scott was 28 when he made this… and… it’s so juvenile? I would have guessed this was made by somebody much younger. It’s about how annoying his mum is and stuff.
This is… not what I expected from a Tony Scott movie? It’s… it’s really powerful? And strange? And sad?
It kinda feels exploitative? “Look at these odd people from the countryside.” But… It’s riveting?
The 2K restoration by the BFI is quite nice… the image generally looks great, but they haven’t done a lot with some specific glitches, which would require a lot more manual work, I guess?
But it looks great. For the most part.
Rosamund Greenwood is absolutely amazeballs here. She’s totally this character.
I also really like how Scott sets up an O. Henry twist… and then it fails.
Well… this is kinda nice, innit? Stuart Walker isn’t a name I’m familiar with, but this seems quite modern for a British movie from 1934? I mean, it seems very technically accomplished — all mod cons, with a very mobile camera and actors that don’t look like they’d rather be on a theatre stage.
Oh, he was involved with all those Bulldog Drummond movies, but stopped directing the year after this movie.
I’ve seen other versions of this Dickens thing, of course, so the plot itself isn’t very … exciting? to watch? But it’s still nice.
The first hour or so was very slow — all faffing around — but once the action started, it’s quite fun. Feel-good gore?
Well, I made it! I watched all three Hobbit movies in one day. I’m not sure I agree with everybody that says it’s obviously too long — if it had been a nine episode TV series, nobody would have blinked an eye. (It probably would have been a 24 episode TV series, though.)
But… there are bits that do drag. I didn’t feel the first movie had that problem — sure, there was a 45 minute supper scene, but it felt natural. But in the second movie… eh.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Peter Jackson. 2014. ⚂
Anyway, this starts off right after the first one, but it’s more… ponderous? I mean, the first one didn’t exactly zip, but I was on board from the start, and this one asks a lot of the viewer (to stay interested).
So evil! Sort of!
This fight/chase scene had me laughing out loud. It’s amazing!
Somebody called the Hobbit movies “Peter Jackson fan fiction”, and it’s accurate in more ways than one: There’s so much fan service here, what with the whirling Dwarf dervish, and Legolas getting to be even smugger while killing orcs. It’s perfect!
Bollocks.
This Hobbit episode too a strange turn.
This is the highest-tomatometered of the Hobbit movies, and that’s just… that’s just… that’s just typical, because it’s a lot worse than the first one.
Oh, yeah — the second episode ended on a cliffhanger.
Man, this was so much worse then the first movie. Basically nothing happened. But there were some fun fight scenes.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Peter Jackson. 2013. ⚂
Frodo is looking distinctly older here than in Lord of the Rings. How long time passed between the two trilogies, anyway?
Slightly confusing start, even if I knew that that that’s that (is that enough?) what’s happening.
This is most amusing.
But I’m bewildered by some of Jackson’s choices when it comes to cinematography and make-up. Not only does he cake the actors so heavily in powder that you can’t see the skin at all (well, on the bits that aren’t covered by rubber), but he also blows the lighting out, so everybody looks like they’ve been lit by… the 70s? It’s got that 70s TV look?
Does that have something to do with filming in 50Hz? It needs more light?
Man, those are big feet!
Imagine the hydropower they could have built!
The Gollum animation is pretty awesome.
Some people on the interwebs are way too enthusiastic about this movie… but I think it’s pretty spiffy? Not quite that spiffy, but it’s really entertaining, and the three hours whizz past.
This is still on a fantasy scale:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Peter Jackson. 2012. ⚄
Ooohs! There’s a logo I haven’t seen in a few decades…
I’ve seen this before, of course, but not since … oh! 1990? I thought this happened in the 80s…
I love that decor!
I remember nothing of the plot, but watching this, I’m automatically assuming that everything that’s happening is part of the Rekall trip, and I’m guessing I’m not supposed to assume that? I watched eXistenZ (again) a couple years back, and that was really subtle about what’s part of the game and what’s not… it’s like… a refinement of what’s happening here? Was this the first of these movies where we’re not supposed to know what’s … the trip inside the film?
Of course, I could be wrong, and this is all real!
If this is all in his head, I think they’re kinda cheating by showing us scenes that he couldn’t possibly be seeing? With people he’s not supposed to know anything about?
Stereo vision!
Sorry! Sorry! This isn’t that kind of movie. This is super fun — it’s a total Verhoeven gauche, silly lark. Every scene is weird and awkward and flabbergastingly entertaining.
Oh! I remember this scene!
It’s still teh awesum
Oh! I thought the red pill to return to reality was a Matrix thing — but here it is in Total Recall.
Err… is that noted Shakespearean actor Jack Lemmon?
It is!
Uh-oh.
Is that… snow?
This is not an auspicious start. Everything looks fake in a “bad movie” way, not in a theatre way.
Heh. I, Claudius is playing Claudius?
These scenes look so weird — they never move the camera when filming from this side, so I’m assuming it’s a composite shot of some kind? Looks really fake. But then they show the hall from another angle, and it’s indeed pretty big…
Mais oui.
It’s… it’s whatsisface!
er… Charlton Heston!
Perchance to rub.
I watched the Olivier Hamlet the other year, and he totally played Hamlet as if he really might be insane… which makes the plot make a whole lot more sense. Branagh never leaves us in doubt that he’s playing mad…
Which leaves the viewer (i.e., me) open to go “but… why… why doesn’t he…” etc etc, because surely his plan for revenge isn’t the optimal one, now is it?
But this version’s got one thing going for it: It’s got all the witty repartee (and Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern) that Olivier cut out of his version to get it down to two and a half hours.
Some of the scenes look so cheap! That’s the worst greenscreen ever!
And it’s got a substantial budget and all… and it totally bombed?
OK, it’s a bit wobbly, but there’s an impressive amount of dolly shots here — in a huge room with mirrors all over the place. It’s like they wanted to maximise the difficulty settings on the cinematography.
The performances are so … uneven. Jacobi and Christie give measured, subtle performances, while several of the others (including Branagh himself) are shouting out every line to the rafters.
Billy Crystal?
I guess.
Mork! Where’s Mindy!
Anyway, this Hamlet has stuff I can’t recall having seen before — I guess all the versions I’ve seen (and read) have been abridged? But these bits I can’t remember are fun! I mean, that shouldn’t come as a surprise, and I understand why they’re normally cut, but … that makes me enjoy this even more.
Because it is really enjoyable. Branagh makes a whole bunch of… odd choices… and the stunt casting of famous American actors is pretty distracting… but… Shakespeare shines through. That’s enough.
So I don’t know much about this movie, but I’m guessing its another one of Tarantino’s “this is how history should have happened” movies (see Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood)?
So I’m hoping this is just three hours of Jamie Foxx killing Southern white guys and then ending slavery, either singled handed or abetted by Leonardo DiCaprio.
Let’s find out!
Fuck yeah!
This is already the best movie ever.
Christoph Waltz is a hoot.
Buuuut… this isn’t the best movie ever any more. It’s getting bogged down? But I do like that DiCaprio is all evil and stuff.
I’m getting kinda bored? I think it’s DiCaprio’s fault?
Basically, this movie ground to a complete halt when they arrived at DiCaprio’s den. It was zipping along, being funny as shit, exciting as fuck, and then: Bam! Crash! And now nothing worth watching has happened in… an hour? A couple hours? It feels like a long time; I’ve started checking email.
Oh, that’s the meme thing?
Samuel L. Jackson’s character is fun, of course, but the movie is still tedious beyond belief.
I hope there’s a lot of killing happening soon. C’mon Tarantino!
Yay
Quentin? I guess?
The final scene was great. But…
OK: The first hour or so was super entertaining. Then we get to the DiCaprio heist bit, and that is literally in-credibly boring. It’s… it’s…
And then there’s five minutes of fun at the end. So I don’t really know how to throw the die on this one. I mean… the seventy two hours the heist bit lasted definitely isn’t worth seeing, but the start is so much fun?
I loathe this movie from the first scene! That music box! Those “remembrance” effects! Could this be the worst movie ever?
Oh! I thought Casey Affleck was playing developmentally challenged or something, but he’s playing a 19-year-old. (He was 32 at the time.)
Anyway, the reason I have this is because I bought a box set almost a decade ago, and it’s taken me this long to watch them all.
The Westerns Dynamite DVD Collection. It’s kinda interesting:
The Desperate Trail (1939)
The Three Godfathers (1948)
Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948)
The Searchers (1956)
Rio Bravo (1959)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
How the West was Won (1962)
Chisum (1970)
McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971)
Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
Cahill US Marshall (1973)
Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
Tom Horn (1980)
Pale Rider (1985)
Dances with Wolves (1990)
Unforgiven (1992)
Wyatt Earp (1994)
Last Stand at Saber River (1997)
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
That’s a solid collection of movies, with a variety of approaches… from 1939 to 2007, with an emphasis on the 70s. I think… most of these movies are pretty spiffy? It’s only when we reach the 90s that things get a bit dicey. I think the only actually good movie here after 1985 is Unforgiven?
Which might also be a reflection of how few westerns are made these days.
So much bathing!
I’m bailing on this after 45 minutes, because it’s 1) absurd and 2) boring and 3) not stylish enough and 4) did I mention ugly and boring?
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Andrew Dominik. 2007. ⚀
Oh, deer? This is on of those epic epic westerns? It’s over three hours long, and…
… it’s got a gazillion actors.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this. It’s by Lawrence Kasdan, which is a very familiar name, but I’m not quite sure … from where?
Hm! I’ve seen a lot of these. I mean… more than half? Two thirds? But I’m not sure I’m… a fan? I think a lot of these are in the dreaded Oscar Territory?
Well, we’ll see…
This just looks so … fake. I mean, everybody’s got 1994 blow-dried hair…
… and I don’t know what it is about Kostner… I’ve never understood the charm. I mean, he seems like a nice guy, but…
This is super hokey. I may not survive this movie. Everything here is annoying me — the sugary soundtrack, the relentless pathos, the cutesy scenes…
This movie tries so hard! Every scene is The Most Emotional Scene ever. And it’s … I mean, what’s going on here is very emotional, and should touch anybody, but they lean so hard into the sentimentality that the mind reels. And so my eyes remain resolutely dry.
I’m bailing on this after 80 minutes, because it’s tedious as fuck.
What!? Is this gonna be one of those western epic epics?
Huh… no, under two hours.
The titles are over after eight minutes… they’re really going for that epic epic feeling, at least, even if the movie’s not that long.
Pollack? He’s done a whole bunch of very mainstream comedy/drama things, right?
Ah, right. Oscar bait stuff.
I like this movie. And I like Redford’s beard. It’s very 1972.
*gasp*
He shaved!
I think I understand now why they did the overture and the very, very slow start — it’s to say to people “calm the fuck down”. Because this isn’t your normal western movie. It’s … kinda tranquil? Lots of amusing bits, though, and some action here and there.
I think this was just about perfect until the “third act”. (I hate the three act structure Hollywood pictures use soooo muuuuuch.) But even that didn’t make the movie suck…
Because I’ve never seen any of these, and they’re kinda legendary in British film. I mean, as a touchstone of the worst you can make.
So I googled “what’s the best (or least worst) carry on movie”, and people generally seem to agree that this is the one to watch.
How horrible can it be!?!
This is hilarious! Could this be the best British movie ever?
This is so silly! There’s nary a single line without a couple of double entendres. It’s like watching… a slightly more pervy version of Mad magazine.
And these actors!
The actual jokes, though, are kinda lame? Surely they could come up with something with more zing than this? But the editing is so on point. Zip zip zip from scene to scene; not a second to consider anything.
I guess you’d call this “bawdy humour”? I can sympathise with every British person thinking that the existence of these movies is beyond embarrassing, but… it’s so cute!
And I want that red/white/black blanket.
I do wish people would shout less.
Aaahh.
It’s so silly.
But this is really the most dismal camping site ever. Did it rain the entire time they were shooting this movie? Was this filmed in like February? They all look so cold! Give them more clothes to wear!
It’s a rave!
I’m really, really drunk, but I thought that was funny. I had expected, like, a German semi-porn thing with awkward pauses and stuff, but it zipped along, knocking down all the entendres in every line, and wasn’t much embarassing at all. But I’m not British; I could well see that Brits would want to dissociate themselves from the entire phenomenon.
On the other hand, I don’t think I’m gonna watch the entire series, either.
Oh! This isn’t the John Huston movie from 1960 — it’s the Clint Eastwood movie from 1992!
(I bought a box set of western movies.)
I’m enjoying this — it’s quite odd? The plot is just weird. I mean, it’s probably just me: I wasn’t totally paying attention at the start so I didn’t quite catch while the … sheriff? (Gene Hackman) didn’t flog that knifing guy… which led to the hookers putting out a bounty on him.
Heh heh. Morgan Freeman and Eastwood’s got really good buddy chemistry going on.
I admit it, I was going to put this movie on and do some computer admin stuff here while this was running in the background, but … I can’t take my eyes off of the movie.
This is good stuff — the cinematography is nice, the actors are really having fun… it’s sad that Eastwood is totally deranged these days, but this is… shockingly good.
OK, now it sucks. This scene is all deep and stuff, and it’s risible. This movie only works when it’s slapstick.
Well! Eastwood nailed the ending. I expected every shot to end in the obvious “ironic” thing, and it didn’t.
So you’ve gotta give him some props for that. On the other hand, there were scenes that just didn’t work well… it’s… it’s a mixed movie? It’s a very strong ⚃? Let’s go with that.
The problem with buying films on DVD (and blu-ray) is that they just sit on the shelf until you finally make yourself watch them… if you want to or not.
So here we are.
I was drunk one night when I bought all the Branagh Shakespeare movies I hadn’t seen. My reasoning was that Henry V was spiffy (it was, wasn’t it? I haven’t seen it since it was released), so surely the other movies would also be good?
But then I remembered that Branagh got Hollywoodified — especially the Shakespeare things — and… my enthusiasm for the project dropped. So I got this in 2015, and I still haven’t watched it.
But the shelf is forever! And this is the oldest unseen movie there, so I gotta do what I gotta do.
I’m encouraged to see that the guy from Scream is playing a role.
(That’s a joke. Not a good one.)
Oh! It’s a musical! Now I’m intrigued!
None of these people can dance!
This is horrible. But it looks like they had fun while vamping?
Was this made for TV?
Huh. Did those $13M go to pay Alicia Silverstone and the guy from Scream?
And that gross seems to indicate that it wasn’t actually given a general cinema release, if it wasn’t made for TV?
Branagh cast the film without much regard for singing or dancing ability; as in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, the film was meant to highlight energy and enthusiasm rather than smooth competence.
But one of the delights of a good musical is watching really good dancers move around on the screen… Being a good dancer isn’t “competence”, and enthusiasm is a different axis altogether.
Love’s Labour’s Lost was not a box office success. It opened on 2 April 2000 in the United Kingdom, earning £143,649 in its run on 186 screens. It later opened on 11 June 2000 in the United States, playing on two screens and earning $24,496 on its opening weekend.
OK, unpause the movie.
Well, that’s $1M just there. I hope there aren’t any midges on that lake. Those lamps are gonna attract all the insects…
It’s fun watching Silverstone spouting these lines. She really leans into it…
There are scenes here that kinda work, and then there’s stuff like this, which is just inexcusable. It tries so hard to be zany, and fails.
But now I’ve kinda started enjoying this.
It’s like looking at children playing at being in a movie.
This movie isn’t as horrible as it seemed originally. There’s a few scenes here, where they let Shakespeare’s witty patter just play out, and it’s really amusing. (The whole thing is basically Shakespeare on autopilot.) There’s scenes that make me go “THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE EVER”.
But most of the musical numbers are just dire.
So it’s not an abject failure. I think about … one third of this is really entertaining? But the rest… oy vey…
Le petit soldat (transl. The Little Soldier) is a French film, written and directed by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in 1960, but not released until 1963.
So is this his first movie? Hm… no his second.
This DVD transfer is absolutely horrendous. Hm… Oh! Criterion released a blu ray version of this last year… should I bail and get that one instead? Hm…
I kept on watching, but … I shouldn’t… I mean, I think I’ve really enjoyed all of Godard’s other films from the 60s? (This is the final one I haven’t seen.) And I’m just not connecting with this one? At all? It may be due to the DVD transfer. Or… not…
But the movie’s picking up now. The photoshoot scene with Anna Karina was great.
The scenes of torture aren’t a lot of fun to watch. And they’re like… very… didactic. “Here’s how you waterboard, here’s how you electrocute.”
That song basically recaps the entire movie. I had totally forgotten.
Oh, yeah — Robert Wise did the first Star Trek movie.
Well, there’s a trigger-happy asshole if I ever saw one.
This is pretty good. I mean, as 50s sci fi movies goes, it’s really well made. But the central premise is kinda, you know — hokey: Why send one single vulnerable guy (with a robot sidekick) for a mission like this anyway? They could have worked around that by making Mr. Carpenter less human, but… he just seems like a normal dorkish guy, so…
Such matte!
The Day the Earth Stood Still. Robert Wise. 1951. ⚃
Oh! This is an anthology movie? I just noticed all the directors…
I’m pretty sure I watched this on VHS back in the 80s, but I have no recollection of what the movie is about. Or movies.
Was this primarily a showcase for super wide screen movie technologies? The super-wide lens here (with a very deep field of view) seems almost supernatural.
How the West Was Won was one of only two dramatic feature films (the other being The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm) made using the three-strip Cinerama process. Although the picture quality when projected onto curved screens in theatres was stunning, attempts to convert the movie to a smaller screen suffer from that process’s technical shortcomings. When seen in letterbox format, the actors’ faces are nearly indistinguishable in long shots.
I’m assuming they’re talking about on small screens?
I mean, look! That oars bent! This is so otherworldly — everything looks subtly wrong… like I’m on acid or something.
AM I?!?!1!
So that’s what a Cinerama camera looks like, and explains why the angles are off.
The odd angles here means that they try to keep the actors in the middle third of the screen all the time. It looks so obsessive! But it’s for technical reasons — when people move around between the lenses, it looks all wonky.
So no wonder this was only used for two feature movies — it must have been a nightmare to film.
But it looks really cool!
I’m guessing this ditch is really straight? Cinerama!
Ouch!!!
For most of the movie, the camera is totally stationary, but a couple of the directors try to move it around a bit (bit not a lot, because that’d make people sea sick). But putting the camera on the train, for instance, in an action scene, totally works.
Still that symmetry.
I don’t know how to throw the dice on this one. It’s such a delight to watch — just because of the Cinemascope which makes everything look all wonky (in a good way). Every scene is like “yah”.
And the action scenes are amazing.
But the storylines are pretty… er… basic… or barely there.
So it’s lovely. But is it worth watching? I’ll give it a weaselly:
How The West Was Won. John Ford, Henry Hathaway, George Marshall and Richard Thorpe. 1962. ⚃
Oh, right. I bought a Shirley Temple DVD box set almost a decade ago, but forgot to watch this movie… The other ones were pretty good, if I recall correctly?
This is taking some time to start revving… It’s all very charming and stuff, but it feels like they’re moving people around so that they can start the movie.
Shirley Temple’s father here is a blackguard and a cad (I’m quoting his brother-in-law), so the plot here is basically that he’s asking for money to disappear from their lives… but I’m guessing there’s gonna be a big sentimental finish after he realises that he can’t etc. And I’m fine with that.
Shirley!
Well that didn’t take long.
Oh my god… Temple had to say all these long, convoluted lines! She memorised better at … six? Then I’ve ever been able to.
I don’t remember Cooper hamming it up like this! I think of him mostly as a … pretty dour actor? But he’s totally getting into the silly swing of things here.
This is a cute movie, but instead of zipping along like a screwball comedy, it’s rather… ponderous? It seems like half of the scenes last twice as long as they should — it feels like they’re padding the time or something? It’s 80 minutes as it is, and edited down to a pace that would keep the comedy popping, it would have been less than an hour.
There’s good scenes here — especially at the start. But it promises a movie of hi-jinx and heists, and instead it’s just… sad and melancholy.
That’s not a bad opening scene! These shootingest guys are so eveeel that they kill a cow… and… THE LITTLE DOG!!! IS THERE NO LIMIT!
But seriously, it’s kinda wonky? Like all the stunt guys weren’t quite told where to be, so there was a lot of hesitancy? But it was pretty good anyway.
Poor cow.
Hey! This is a lot of fun! I mean, it’s funny! I don’t think Clintwood going for humour exactly, but this is “whoo! yeah!” in the most basic way.
It’s so silly! They’re just hitting that boulder? What about driving a steel pole into it or something to split it instead? I know, I’m not a master rock hitter or anything, but … that just seems like the … bare minimum… you should do.
Oh, that’s a name I haven’t seen in a while… was that a 70s thing? Yes it was. This must be the final First Artists movie, perhaps? It was set up as a thing for the hot actors who wanted to make movies slightly outside the system, but not really, like Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen (quoting Wikipedia).
William Wiard is a name I can’t recall seeing before, but he made a buttload of TV… and this is his only film?
I was a bit distracted while watching this, but… I kinda wasn’t feeling it? There were good bits, though.
This short was included on the Swing Time DVD… it’s really funny so far.
This is super corny and very amusing. The production values seem to be a lot higher than usual for this kind of thing.
This is (as usual) just an excuse to string some musical numbers together… and the cinematography is a bit… wonky? But man, these number are poppin! I can’t take my eyes off of the screen.
Mack has done a gazillion of things, and it pretty much looks like all of them are shorts? So this was his thing.
Now, OK, this isn’t a cinematic masterpiece, but for its genre (“stringing together vaudeville acts into a b movie”), it’s absolutely perfect — I’ve never seen anything as good as this in that genre. There’s not a millisecond of time wasted: It’s all zingers (some of them good) and singing and dancing (some of it excellent).
The awful landlady weaponizes the British monetary system. She first offers it to her for “3 pounds”, then “50 bob”, and then “2 guineas”, which is “42 shillings”.
Let’s see… I have to google this… just wait a minute…
So 12 pence is 1 shilling (which is the same as a bob)… And five shillings is a Crown… Four Crowns is one pund? So… A pound is 20 bob… And A guinea is 21 shillings…
Oh! She didn’t cheat her! The landlady did reduce the price on every offer. So perhaps she isn’t awful after all?
This is really good! Really odd, but really good. After half an hour, I’m still not sure what it’s supposed to be about, and I like that.
Ah! English cuisine!
OK, now I just don’t understand where this is going… but in a bad way. The people just seem kinda… random.
Everybody’s trying to help Jane get an abortion… without saying the words “abortion” or “pregnancy” or anything related to that, which makes a lot of these conversations kinda abstract. Or rather… excessively genteel.
Was this a British censorship thing?
The cinematography’s good… and I like Leslie Caron and Brock Peters. The storyline started off really intriguing and scary, but now it’s just… getting kinda annoying: It’s now a relationship drama with lots of … drama…
I mean, yes, the point of this movie is that being a single mother is a horrible, horrible, horrible fate, so everybody tries to help Jane with that problem… without asking Jane what she wants. But… it’s…
OK, perhaps this was really incisive and stuff in 1962? But it’s … I’m trying to avoid saying “annoying”.
Oh my god! This song was sampled at the start of The Queen is Dead by The Smiths! I’ve heard it a million times!
It’s so spooky finally hearing sampled bits.
For once, I think the casting is on purpose. A pet peeve of mine is that I can’t tell people apart — these two look the same, the three older women are indistinguishable, the two boyfriends are identical — but I think they did it on purpose here, instead of the normal thing where the casting agent just likes a specific type of woman/man.
…
Aha! I’m watching the extras now, and the author of the book on which this movie was based says that the director totally butchered the ending. In her book, the protagonist grew and become an independent woman, while in the movie she goes back to her family in France.
I’ve never seen a Preston Sturges movie I haven’t liked… But this feels so choppy. The different time periods and the odd chronology… It’s so odd! I’m just not feeling this?
The maudlin music doesn’t help either.
Oh, yeah, this is about a dentist.
This is a really … nerdy… exploration of dentistry history. There are funny scenes, but… it’s… it’s so weird. Was this financed by The Dentistry Society of the US?
The movie was filmed in 1942 but not released for over two years, and the released version differed from what Preston Sturges had wished, although he publicly accepted the film as his own. Paramount Pictures disliked the film Sturges had made, and pulled it from his control, re-titled and re-edited it, in the process making it (especially in the early segment) more confusing for the audience to understand. The studio’s released version was marketed in a way that made it appear to be one of Sturges’ comedies. The film was not well received by the critics or the public, and marked the end of a sustained run of success for Sturges, who had already left Paramount by the time the film was released.
So this is the start of Sturges’ downfall. I’ve seen all of his previous movies, and they’re all wonderful — masterpieces, really. Breezy, smart, funny — of the sort you’d imagine he’d be able to keep on doing.
But this is a pretty bad movie. The studio editing probably didn’t help much, but the individual scenes kinda lack zip.
I’m not quite sure why I have this DVD… perhaps I bought it for the 1940s movie project, but didn’t use it?
It could be the Raoul Walsh connection — he’s pretty spiffy, isn’t he?
Anyway.
So this is Errol Flynn as Custer, the guy who had that stand. Hm… West Point? Is that a southern or northern thing? Oh, it’s in New York.
And then they play “Dixie” while they let the officers that have decided to fight for the secessionists march off south. This is portrayed as the heroic thing to do.
Well, yes.
Flynn accidentally negs Olivia de Havilland, so: Romance.
I guess the point of this movie is to stir patriotism for the fight against Nazi Germany, but it’s a bit annoying: There’s a stirring orchestra er stirring all of the time, and I’m getting a bit stir crazy.
Flynn’s pretty good in this? He’s convincingly jaunty.
What… is that Hattie McDaniel? She looks so much younger than in Gone With The Wind from a couple years earlier.
She’s totally hamming it up. I love it.
Callie tells it like it is.
McDaniel’s got all the lines.
I started watching this movie in a kind of bad mood, but it’s really winning me over. The funny scenes are very amusing indeed, the action scenes are plenty exciting, and the romantic scenes are very awww.
It’s firing on a lot of cylinders.
He’s a celeb now.
He’s so evil!
Anyway, I assume that this is all a fantasy, but it’s a pretty nice fantasy… but… it’s really dragging in parts. I feel like an hour could have been cut without losing anything of value.
They Died With Their Boots On. Raoul Walsh. 1941. ⚃
OK, I’ve started watching the DVDs that are at the bottom of the stack of unwatched movies… and they’ve sedimented there because of various reasons.
This one is there because I have absolutely no idea why I bought this movie. Neither the name of the movie nor the name of the director rings any bells.
But that’s a stylish opening sequence.
This is really fascinating. They’re really emphasising the format of the movie — everything is all horizontal and symmetrical.
And then there’s these.
I’m really digging this. The only thing that’s … disturbing is the guy reading the text. He’s got such a deep, sonorous voice, made for reading poetry, that it just seems fake.
But then we get into… boring stories about drugs and stuff, and while the cinematography is still wonderful, it’s just kinda not very interesting?
Nooo! Now they’re doing Like a Rolling Stone on the soundtrack.
I remember Béla Tarr being hot shit in the 90s? It least I can remember his movies being a thing at the Cinematheque…
But there isn’t much talk about his movies these days, are there?
This is a very pretty movie, at least.
There’s a lot of soup in this movie. I love soup.
It’s a soup kitchen!
I think my problem with this movie is… that I can’t really tell what this is supposed to be … is it a “this is what it felt like during the Eastern Bloc years” kind of thing?
That is, it’s all symbolic and stuff? Or is this supposed to be more realistic?
Of course, I’m kinda drunk, so take that into consideration.
But it feels like some of these scenes wanted to have more resonance than they’re having.
And instead they’re kinda random. Like they’re trying too hard, what with the naïf as the protagonist, and the scheming aunt, and the whale, and…
It feels like it’s almost a parody of this type of movie.
Hey! This reminds me… did I watch a Tarr movie before and wrote exactly the same sort of nonsense? I DID!!!! I had forgotten!
Perhaps I just don’t like Tarr. It just feels like somebody that’s trying to tap into the Bergman/Tarkovski nexus without having anything interesting to say.
And without having their amazing cast.
This is close to being a parody of European art movies. The scene where they’re beating everybody up in the hospital, but then two guys see a naked old guy and suddenly realise that beating up people isn’t nice, and then everybody slinks out (all five hundred of them, only two of which had seen the sad naked old guy) while bad, sentimental string music is playing…
Oh, yeah. Wim Wenders. He was hot shit in the 80s. Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, and then… did we forget about him or did he make some bad movies or something?
He’s made a buttload of movies! I think I lost track of him after Until the End of the World, which felt like a… whatchamacall them… EU mish-mash. That is, it had huge financing from all over Europe, so there was one French actor, one German, etc.
And this movie starts with a paean to open borders, so…
But I’m really enjoying it so far. It feels like a nice, small, quirky movie.
This is most amiable, but it’s only subtitled in English when they’re talking a different language… and their English is kinda… er… not super clear?
I wonder what the story behind this is. It looks like it has a kinda small budget? Was it made for a TV channel? Until the End of etc had a pretty huge budget and… wasn’t that successful (but it didn’t bomb or anything)…
Lisboa is very pretty. Haven’t been there since I was like 19, though.
… yeah! It was the summer of Pump of the Volume. 19.
I like these long stretches of music.
This movie has some scenes that are absolutely fantastic, and I love the mood Wenders creates here. But it has some pacing issues.
Hm… this seems quite familiar. Have I seen this recently?
I chose this movie because it’s the oldest movie in my /dvd/ directory that’s not marked as being seen…
Oh well. It’s super stylish so far, so I guess I’ll just watch it (again).
The mid-60s was a strange time for Hollywood — this is basically a 50s heist movie farce, but with some nods towards more modern sensibilities. It’s so awkward!
Should they go all meta, or play it straight? Instead it’s in a kind of in-between state where you kind of imagine the audience in the cinema is going “eh? eh?”
I mean, it’s funny and stylish, but it’s awkward.
I mean, Peter O’Toole in a screwball comedy?
Everything here basically works… Hepburn is great and Hugh Griffith is perfect as her father and the scenes are fun. But as a 50s movie this would have been 40 minutes shorter. This movie feels like it’s stalling every other scene; kinda sputtering all the time when it should be zipping along.
OK, I watched a few Preston Sturges movies randomly the other year, and they were (almost) all fabulous, so I bought all the rest of his movies. (Well, the ones I could find.)
And this is amazeballs! It’s a cynical (but sentimental) screwball comedy, I think.
Claudette Colbert is spot on.
Unfortunately, despite his impressive torso, Joel McCrea is basically just… there…
Did I mention that this is hilarious?
I wonder whether the group of very drunk white men shooting off their shotguns (often in the direction of the staff) is meant to be as unnerving as it is, or whether this is all good fun. I think it’s the former.
But then there’s these pure slapstick scenes that are totally uncomplicated.
OK, incisive thought of the day:
To this day, they’re using obviously fake glasses on actors (no real glasses are flat like this). Is that an aesthetic choice? Because directors like the way they reflect light? I mean, it’s striking… but every time I see this I’m thinking “fake glasses”.
I know! So deep and incisive.
It’s true!
It’s true!
This is so funny. OK, McCrea isn’t the best actor in the world, but it works here because Sturges is a genius.
I laughed, I didn’t cry, and then I laughed some more.
Last year, I bought a while bunch of old werewolf movies… basically because (I think) I wanted to re-watch this one: The Angela Carter movie that I remember being really taken with when I saw it on VHS as a teenager.
Ah, right — this is the movie that made me think Neil Jordan was a good director, and made me watch a whole bunch of his films. All of which are horrible. *gulp*
I did not remember that!!!
“and introducing”? Was this a made-for-TV movie?
This is so weird! I don’t remember anything about this movie except it being all weird and stuff, and it’s certainly not disappointing in that area.
Ah, yeah… it’s Angela Carter, so…
… it’s story within story within story. I remember this being, like, an anthology movie? And it kinda is, but it isn’t — it’s a series of short stories told within the context of the girl dreaming about the grandmother telling stories to her sister.
Or something!
I know! It looks really cheesy, but watching it was totes thrilling.
Word to the wise.
I remember being in London in 1993 (for the Thirteen Year Itch festival) and going to… Blue Moon Books? and buying a stack of Angela Carter books. No! Silver Moon!
That was an awesome bookshop.
Nobody talks about Carter these days, do they? I have to admit that it’s been a while since I’ve re-read any of her books, too… I’ve read them all, except the collected screenplays book…
I love this movie… but the good doggies they’ve got playing the wolves in some of the scenes don’t really look like big bad wolves now do they?
Eek! Where’s the RSPCA!
Whoa.
You know, sometimes when you watch movies you were really impressed by as a teenager? And I remember watching this with a friend (we used to watch a lot of horror VHSs) and we were both “whoa. dude”.
I’m still “whoa. dude.”
This feels so… uncompromised? It’s so Angela Carter. It’s such a mish-mash of things that shouldn’t make sense but then it does and it totally reverberates through everything: Everything makes sense on a level that’s hard to articulate.
I watched this movie a couple years ago and I told everybody I knew that THIS IS THE FUCKING BEST MORONIC MOVIE EVER.
But then a friend said “meh” so now I’m rewatching it to check whether I was right.
THIS IS THE BEST FUCKING MORONIC MOVIE EVER!!!1!
I don’t care what anybody says — that’s the best first twenty minutes of any action movie ever.
It exhilarating in its crassness. Michael Bay has obviously had to defer to people who thought he was too much before, but now he’s just giving it all: Balls to the wall, with no filter whatsoever.
It is perfect.
But then there’s half an hour of less amusing stuff that I’d apparently forgotten about… or perhaps I was just too drunk to actually notice…
It really is as good as I remembered! It’s totally unhinged, totally gauche, totally stupid, and totally delightful.
This movie may be the most crass thing I’ve seen in my life. It’s a work of art.
This is brilliant! It’s so original and stylish and funny.
I’m having a bit of a problem with the casting, though… I often can’t tell the male actors apart (because the director is casting men that look pretty much like himself (only better looking) in every part)… and here there’s at least three? five? I can’t even tell! female characters that I can’t say whether they’re supposed to be the same person (in different wigs) or not.
This is so good.
Oh… but he’s got a Russian soul now… so why is he wearing his shoes to bed?
Oh hi there! I’ve been a fan of July since… er… for a while? I didn’t discover her until late. But she’s pure genius and this is… so July.
So this is totally amazing… it’s a story about a family of very low level grifters…
But how old is she supposed to be? It’s an American movie, so she might be supposed to be er 15 to er mid 30s (I’m guessing the actor’s actual age)? It’s so confusing!
Manhattan! I remember that! From the Before Times.
That was a beautiful scene.
But then the movie leans in, really heavily, to cringe humour, and I hate that.
So much.
It’s like it lost faith in itself and went for the easiest way out possible. I’m super disappointed after the first hour, which is really pure genius. It feels compromised somehow — like it lost faith in itself.
This is a quite pretty movie. I’ve been a bit disappointed with previous Rossellini movies I’ve watched, but this starts off very nicely indeed.
I’ve never quite understood where Rossellini fit in… he doesn’t seem like a neo-realist, and he’s certainly no Nouvelle Vague director… he seems to exist in a grey area between art movies and commercial movies? But I’m totally uninformed; I know nothing.
If you read film interviews and articles from the 50s, Rossellini is always mentioned… but he seems like he’s largely forgotten these days, except as the father of a different Rossellini.
Ingrid Bergman is wonderful here, though.
I’m watching a 2K restoration by the BFI, but… it could have been restored some more? There’s all irregularities on the brightness that could have been fixed, and the audio is quite hissy. But it’s typical that the BFI would do this box set: They’re the champions of movies that fall between the cracks.
It’s a bit hard to get into the Bergman character’s head space… OK, here’s a plot recap: She (for some reason) was in an Italian post-war camp (she’s from the Baltics), and wanted to ship out to Argentine, but they didn’t take her. So instead she marries this Italian guy and goes off to this island. And is super. Depressed. About. It. All.
Which makes no sense! She was going off to an uncertain future in South America, but instead she marries this hunk, and goes to a gorgeous island in Italy! With a huge house!
Sure, it’s dilapidated, and there’s no jazz clubs on the island, and everybody would balk at that, but… She hunk is super nice! The neighbours are great! The views are incredible!
So Rossellini has really stacked all the cards for Bergman’s character, but we’re still asked to see her as a tragic character, and… that’s just odd?
Perhaps it’ll resolve itself.
OK, now the husband is an asshole.
The casting here is really odd. That is, there’s two hunky guys… and I can’t tell them apart. Which makes a lot of the scenes confusing: Is that her husband or the guy her husband thinks she’s having it off with?!?
This little island seems more populated by the minute.
Oh wow. The tuna scene is amazing.
OK, I was totally into this until the last… fifteen minutes? And then it kinda faded.
But speaking of the BFI — the extras on this bluray are fantastic. First we get a 40 minute interview with Ingrid Bergman from like 1981, and it’s incisive and interesting. Then we get a (quite recent?) fifty minute Italian documentary about Stromboli… and the movie that Rossellini’s er wife? was doing concurrently with Stromboli. It’s really good! Nine thumbs up for the BFI selections.
It looks like this:
Stromboli, Land of God. Roberto Rossellini. 1950. ⚄
I’m mopping up the Clive Barker: Last year, I read a bunch of Barker-based comics, and the year before that, I watched all of the Hellraiser movies. So now I’m watching the other movies he directed… and this is the final one anybody allowed him to make?
Nightbreed wasn’t very good, so my expectations here are very low indeed…
And it totally bombed at the box office, which explains why nobody wanted him to make any further movies, I guess.
Well, that’s not a pose you see very often in movies.
This is kinda hokey… but it’s really really weird, and I like that. It’s got the marks of a filmmaker who doesn’t give a fuck any more, but just wants to do what he wants to do, while Nightbreed was like a committee had been fucking with it.
And suddenly! It’s that guy who isn’t Captain Kirk!
On seeing Barker’s cut of the film, MGM decided that it was too long and there was too much time spent on dialogue scenes that occur in-between scenes involving death or horror elements.
I assume that this is euphemism for “MGM saw all the gay stuff and freaked out”.
Dance!
This is a quite bad movie — the pacing is so wonky that it destroys most of the tension — but it’s quite original, so you have to give it kudos for that.
Hey! It’s Cary Grant! Steering a car with his feet!
I think this is the best start to a movie ever.
This is so much fun… but these two screwballs aren’t Topper — it’s the staid bank guy. Grant and Constance Bennett play the perfect dream team: They’re rich, they’re funny, they’re drunk. They’re perfect!
And then they’re dead! DEAD! Half an hour into the movie! WHAT IS THIS!
Ghosts, that is.
OOPS SPOILERS
I like the little touches like bringing back the bell hop Topper had gotten fired (inadvertently) from his previous job. But these are the 30s…
So the main gag here is that the ghosts are invisible much of the time, so you have scenes like this, where there’s an invisible Bennett in the shower. These gags are well made! So I totally understand that the audiences at the time were amused… as I am now.
The plot, though. Oy vey. It’s basically Topper getting un-emasculated… Masculated? Hm. Because his wife is a bitch, but then she learns to be less bitchy over the movie, and it’s just a bit … eww?
The thing is, when I was a teenager, I didn’t like Pet Shop Boys. I had a friend who was totally into them, and they were on MTV all the time, so I got their music by osmosis…
It wasn’t until the mid-90s that I started listening to them and discovered they were geniuses.
But this is Pet Shop Boys, in their imperial phase, where they could do no wrong: Every single they released went to number one, and so why not make a movie?
It’s been unavailable for more than three decades, but the BFI made a 2K release recently, and that’s what I’m watching now.
So I’m wondering, of course: Can it be as awful as they all say it was?
Hm…
Rough trade alert.
English breakfast.
The thing about Pet Shop Boys is that they’ll get artists they like to do certain things (videos, set designs, costumes), and then they’ll be apparently totally hands off — or at least that’s my impression. That results in things like the Home And Dry video:
This has absolutely zero potential to be shown on any video clip show, so you really have to admire them for sticking to their guns and letting the people they’ve chosen to do their thing.
So I’m assuming that’s what happened here, too. Because… what’s happening here doesn’t really seem to line up much with what anybody would want to see in a Pet Shop Boys movie.
And it doesn’t look super cheaply made, either. I hope the record company footed the bill.
This edition comes with a nice booklet. At this point I’m really more interested in reading that booklet — because perhaps it can explain how this movie happened? What went wrong?
I notice that it took a long, long time before the director got to make another movie after this one… but then again, he didn’t make a lot of them before this movie, either.
I think they’re going for a The Bed Sitting Room vibe (the late-60s movie)… and I didn’t really like that movie, either. So perhaps it’s totally brilliant! It’s possible.
I like the tunes. The rest is mostly a miss for me.
This is kinda fun. The performances are pretty engaging (especially Ethel Waters)… but the storyline doesn’t do much for me. And the pacing seems rather ponderous, even for a sentimental movie like this.
This movie is so amiable that I feel like I should love it. I mean, I’m smiling a lot, and the music’s good. But…
Love this song. Ethel Waters.
It’s these scenes that make me zone out. The musical numbers are delightful, but the main plot (where this guy is being watched over/guided/tempted by angels and devils) just doesn’t have a lot of zing. It just kind of drags.
OK, Lena Horne in the house. Perhaps it’ll pick up now.
I hope she got hazard pay!
Didn’t love the ending, either.
Cabin in the Sky. Busby Berkeley & Vincente Minnelli. 1943. ⚃
This movie is a mixture of very funny and accomplished physical humour and… well… cringe stuff. I can’t stand the cringe. But the physical humour is very funny indeed.
I’ve only seen one Tati movie before: Playtime, which was totally magnificent. This is Tati’s first movie, so I probably had exaggerated expectations… but… while Playtime was exquisite, this movie seems kinda… normal?
There’s nothing in the mise en scene here that’s extraordinary, I think?
OK, I should be drunk enough to watch this now. Let’s go!
Now it’s more 2.4:1…
16:9 again!!!
NOLAN!
Oh, Nolan.
This is really fun. But my main question is: Why is Washington wearing a comedy beard?
He’s able to grow a very nice beard all on his own, so this fake one just seems weird. I guess they didn’t have time… or somebody that knows how to make a fake beard…
Oh! This is the scene!
[youtube https://youtu.be/s2FXfFeRtJo]
It’s a good summation, especially the disconnect between the two people in the scene: Obviously Washington and Michael Caine were never on the same set.
Hey! It’s the Opera in Oslo!
Such Norway.
The sheer silliness of this movie appeals to me enormously.
“This sure is the stupidest way to talk about secrets ever, right?” “You mean on a radio?” “Yes!”
Has Nolan never seen an actual beard? I googled “tenet beard” and there’s all these discussions about whether the beards are CGI or not, and I can totally sympathise. But now, it’s just glued on, I think.
I’ve never been in Tallinn… but it’s so amusing (well to me): Every scene here I’m going “THAT”S IN OSLO… but where?” and then I realise that it’s not in Oslo. Tallinn looks very Nordic, is what I’m saying, and not Eastern Europeish at all.
I should go visit some day.
Heh heh. Magne Viking. That sure is a Norwegian boat name!
This is a very entertaining movie. It’s like James Bond, but stupider. I know that seems impossible, but it really is.
I think some people are really annoyed by how silly the movie is (and are loathing it), and some people think that it’s super-intelligent (and loving it). I, on the other hand, love silly movies, so I really enjoyed it.
But there were parts that really dragged. It’s got at least half an hour of pure flab. On the other hand, it’s really pretty.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Zack Snyder. 2021. ⚃
Yes! It’s 4:3. Nice.
This reminds me of something… Yes!
The harshest criticism of Zack Snyder ever.
That looks so real!
Are these 3D models Snyder had left over from 300?
Is that supposed to be Darkseid? It’s not a very good rendering…
I’m kinda enjoying this movie, though. I like slow, and I like stupid nonsense, and this is slow, stupid nonsense.
If you’re looking for a ponderous, pompous movie that doesn’t make much sense, you’ve come to the right place. Why not lean into that shit: Do colour correction so excessive there’s not more than a colour and a half per scene? Have all scenes happen in a very energy-conscious world where a laboratory only has a single 40W light in one corner? Have everybody stand around spouting portentous shit at each other?
Why not!
Hey! Somebody wrote that this scene was creepy. But Snyder plays Song to the Siren, and it’s a totally touching scene.
It’s sports time!
OK, bored now.
What… is that flap there? Is a loin cloth really necessary?
Is that even possible!?
I thought the first two hours were fine, but once it got to the Superman bit, the movie has totally stalled. It’s been an hour of… er… “character development”… and that’s just boring.
But now it looks like it’s gonna start moving again?
Yes!
That was a really entertaining action scene. Probably the best super-hero movie action scene ever.
This special effect doesn’t seem… er… thought through.
I didn’t recognise Lucille Ball!
Lucille doing burlesque.
Look, see?
I’m enjoying this movie, but it’s not quite gelling for me. The pacing just seems off. If it’d been a bit more zippy, we’d be in screwball territory, but instead it’s a drama with some funny scenes here and there.
David Cronenberg! I didn’t know that he was in this…
But… perhaps I haven’t seen this before? I thought I had seen all horror movies from this era, but I must have missed this one for some reason or other.
It’s scary!
OK, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that the creepy psychologist is the serial killer, and not the hunky lead.
Oh! I read the comics adaptation of this less than a year ago? Oops. And that was probably why I got this blu ray in the first place.
OK, then I’m not so clever after all for guessing who the killer is. Darn!
This is the worst music ever. Did Barker write it himself?
Perhaps? Perhaps not?
That’s certainly a facial design.
The performances are almost fascinatingly bad. I don’t just mean this guy, whose previous credits are (on Hellraiser and Hallraiser II):
and
but even the professionals — I mean, I’ve never seen Cronenberg this… well, awkward.
So I guess it’s Barker’s fault.
Such shoulder.
So is this all a metaphor for finding a gay bar? Clive!
Is that the guy from Hill Street Blues?
Yes!
I thought his name was Sicking or something, but that’s somebody else.
Barker previewed the first cut of Nightbreed with a temporary soundtrack that did not go well, as people were confused by the characters’ motives. He made some changes and the second test screening was much more successful. However, the ending with Decker’s death was not well received and Barker changed it.
It had a pretty high budget (at the time) of $11M, but only made $16M at the box office, so… it didn’t exactly bomb, but didn’t make back the money.
He was given a budget of $11 million, which was a considerable increase from the $2 million he had to work with on Hellraiser. His goal was to make the Star Wars of horror films.
Barker had signed a contract for a followup movie, but that never happened, naturally.
Well, Demy’s earlier movies were pretty quirky… but this is beyond quirky!
No shoulder padding at all.
SWIPE LEFT SWIPE LEFT
*Schwing*
Uh-oh.
It gets more WTF every second. I have no idea where Demy is going with all this… is this some kind of super-political take on something? Is the king really Charles de Gaulle? Is this a satire? What. WHAT IS THIS EVEN
WHAT IS THIS
OK, this suddenly snapped into focus for me.
It’s funny! And kinda sad? But mostly funny!
And it’s gorgeous. The shots are so… Demy. And, of course, both Deneuve and Seyrig are fantastic.
I do feel a bit sorry for the poor horses. I hope the dye they’re using is non toxic.
Oh, yeah, this was that final Fox X-Men movie that was pushed back and pushed back for years? And re-shot and re-edited? It’s gonna be great!
Well, that start wasn’t too bad… I like the decor…
Therapy time.
Isn’t that that Pietro guy? Hm… Uhm… nope. Oh! He’s playing Sam Guthrie? SAM!?!
Oh! Maisie Williams!
That’s better casting.
Yeah yeah, I read New Mutants as a child.
Nice doggie. Looks a bit old to be Rahne, though?
Ah, the classics.
This is quite horrorish. I kinda like it. I mean, it’s a bit confused, genre wise — I wonder whether this was originally a horror movie, or whether that’s what it turned into after a bunch of re-edits.
But it’s fine — I’m enjoying watching this.
I think this movie kinda worked… I mean, I’ve seen a whole lot worse super-hero movies. But I think Boone flubbed it — it’s a bit grey and morose instead of scary and funny.
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Peter Jackson. 2003. ⚅
OK, the third and final movie. The first one was fabulous (except for the colour grading on the 4K version), and the second one was kinda… disappointing.
Perhaps this will be great?
Trey drunk.
Puff puff.
Preciouses.
Clearasil!
Herp derp.
OH NO!!! HE”S JOINED BAUHAUS! THE GOTH HAVE TAKEN HIM!
I guess Sauron doesn’t offer dental care on his health plan.
OK, I’m getting kinda punch drunk (in addition to drunk drunk) after watching all three Lord of the Ringses (extendedses editiones) movieses in one day… but this was a really good movie! I know, so controversial.
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Peter Jackson. 2002. ⚃
Oops. 2002 called and wants their CGI back. I guess it’s more disturbing in a movie like this where there are so mane gorgeous actual shots of things, and then there’s… this…
Anyway! I’m excited to start on the next Lord of the Rings movie. I don’t really remember what this one is all about… I did remember much of the first movie, and I remember the ending of the last movie, but I have no idea what’s happening in this one.
I think Toklien was kinda against the industrial revolution?
Eeeeevil!!!
Oh yeah! This is the movie with the ents! So it’s the big fight against Saruman!
It’s all side quests this movie, I think.
Nice forest.
Jackson is upping the comedy routines in this movie, because there’s… really not much happening.
I mean, there’s a lot of stuff happening, but it doesn’t really seem to be … pertinent?
It’s a good strategy, because this is very entertaining. As a movie, it makes no sense, but it’s fun to watch.
Ouch. That CGI.
There really isn’t much going on in this movie. I admire Jackson for committing fully to filming four hours of filler scenes (I’m guessing) in a quite stylish way, but I’m kinda bored now, and I wasn’t bored at all during the first movie.
I hope something of significance is gonna happen sometime soon.
An, no, nothing of significance happens.
I had a peek at imdb. The first movie has an 8.8 rating (fair), and this one has an … 8.7 rating. People are insane!
I mean, it’s just… who cares about these horsey people? For hours and hours?
Such blue.
I feel that we’re not really getting much from the orc side of things. What’s the orc motivation for going to war? Do they want more meat in their diet? Is there an ocrmaiden at home they’re fighting for? What are their opinions on Emacs key bindings?
Well, that was disappointing. The first movie was fabulous, but this… wasn’t.
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Peter Jackson. 2001. ⚅
I had forgotten that this movie starts with a recap of The Hobbit. Sort of.
Anyway, I’ve bought the 4K Extended box set, and I’m gonna watch all three movies in one day! Haha! If I don’t fall asleep, but I remember these movies being quite spiffy? I haven’t seen the extended versions before, and I probably saw them on DVD originally, so I’ve seen only a couple percentages of these movies. Pixel wise.
Speaking of which, each movie comes on two 4K discs, so each movie is 150GB big! The bitrate peaks at >105Mbps! Looks great! My TV machine has a load of 4.5, but there’s no choppiness, so it’s just fast enough to play this movie.
But kinda overly colour-corrected?
I’m really into this. It’s like exciting and stuff — even if it’s slow. Or perhaps because it’s this slow?
One thing Jackson totally has going for him is using the environment in this way. Most US fantasy movies look like they’ve been shot just outside of Vancouver (because they have been), or if made in the past couple of years, on a green screen sound stage. Sure, there’s lots of composite shots here, but this would have been a very different movie if the surroundings didn’t look this gorgeous.
I mean…
One does not…
OK, not all the compositing is flawless — that does indeed look like four hobbitses greenscreened unto some footage.
I’ve heard that there’s gonna be a new 4K edition later this year — where they’ve fixed the colour grading. Because whoever did this edition went overboard with having every other scene in basically one colour. And it shifts weirdly between this reddish colour and a very cold blueish colour.
But I’m really enjoying this movie anyway!
OK, that’s shockingly bad greenscreening.
I’m shocked at how good this is. I laughed, I cried, I smiled almost constantly, I wasn’t bored a millisecond… The mix of deadly, mawkish earnestness and humour really shouldn’t work. But it does.
I’m not sure what parts were added for this extended edition? Because nothing seems padded: It’s not often you watch a movie that’s almost four hours long and think “that was just the right length”? This really shouldn’t be called “extended edition” — the other version should be “the short version”.
But it seems like the quest is already over after this epic! But there’s two more movies? How!
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. Paul W.S. Anderson. 2016. ⚀
Yup. As usual in the Resident Evil movies, the cliffhanger from the previous movie is basically… just ignored?
And Anderson has adjusted to the times: The action scenes that used to be fun to watch are now basically just millisecond-cut montages of total confusion.
I’m guessing that’s just to cover a lower-than-usual budget: If you can’t actually see what’s on the screen, you don’t have to use as much money on it. Let’s see…
Here’s the 2012 movie:
And here’s this movie:
Wow. A much smaller budget, and a much higher cum gross.
It gave me motion sickness 20 minutes into the movie. Every action sequence has 3-4-5 cuts every other second The camera is shaking even when all the characters are static.
I find myself looking away from the screen all the time — the editing and shakycam is indeed sickening.
Well, that wasn’t so bad…
Oh god. It’s not enough with the zombie drama? You gotta gin up this sort of fake drama, too?
I wonder whether Anderson was told to make it young and happening, and this is what he came up with? I mean, it was successful — you can’t argue with that cum gross on that budget. Perhaps the next movie will be all people standing around shouting at each other for two hours?
Saves money on zombie makeup.
This is really bad. I would normally ditch a movie this awful, but I’m morbidly curious as to how they’re going to end this. One thing’s for sure — this isn’t the final chapter of anything, but the endings of these movies are sometimes amusing. Even if the next movie completely ignores it, and I think they all did?
Resident Evil: Retribution. Paul W.S. Anderson. 2012. ⚁
Huh. This one starts with a recap of all the previous movies. I don’t think any of the other ones have?
Yeah, it’s getting a bit repetetive? In every movie, they defeat the evil corporation, but then in the next movie, it turns out that no, the evil corporation has more resources. I mean, I get it, but it does show a certain lack of … planning?
Then again, it’s a video game movie series, so whatevs.
Stonks!
Anyway, it’s like Anderson heard what I was kvetching about — so far, the movie has been all recreations of scenes from previous movies, so it’s really leaning into the “repetition” thing, only in a meta way.
Jovovich seems to be trapped in a simulation or something? It’s fun.
But then… a bunch of exposition… and…
… it seems like the world isn’t as affected by the virus as the previous movies led us to believe?
*sigh*
It’s totally lost all tension in just a couple minutes. That’s an amazing feat.
I like do action movies that are all action — not having to think about a plot can be liberating. But this one is… kinda plotless? But still has a lot of boring scenes (“character development”) in between the fun action scenes? The pacing is all wonky, and the feeling of tedium carries over from these scenes into the action pieces.
It’s just badly put together, and I expected more from Anderson. This is definitely the worst one in the series. Well, so far.
Such athletic!
I’m not sure why the Wesker (?) character is CGI now?
Perhaps we’ll find out in the next episode?
I mean, movie. But I’m not really expecting much here — half of the movies have ended this way, just for them to er forget in the next movie.
Paul W. S. is back? Cool. I mean, he’s not … you know, good, but he knows how to make a video game movie.
An army of Milla!
New-form zombies! More like Parasyte horrors, I guess?
Hey! It’s that guy from… Legends of Tomorrow.
Anyway, this started off really fun: High energy and snappy scenes. And then it conveniently dialled back the Milla Superness, so that she’s now more conveniently fabulous. Which is cheaper, special effects wise, I guess.
But now there’s all this… character development… Who wants that!?
Weapons!
OK, it’s not a perfect popcorn movie — but it’s pretty good? I mean, I was entertained… most of the time.
Resident Evil: Afterlife. Paul W.S. Anderson. 2010. ⚃
I’m going… “did I rip the previous movie two times or something?” Because the first scenes seem identical to the Apocalypse movie?
But no! Fake out!
I’m impressed.
So this is by Russell Mulcahy, who made the Highlander movies back in the 80s (after doing a whole bunch of music videos, most prominently for The Tubes). But look at his career after this movie:
Why did his career crater after this movie? This one was pretty well received (as these movies go) and made quite a lot of money?
Well OK
The The Birds homage was fun.
There’s like intermittent brilliance here (well, for a movie like this): It’s expanding on the milieu previously established, and making it all more interesting and sinister.
And some really fun action scenes. And that evil corporation guy? He’s so evil!!!
So all that is fine, but then there’s things that … are just annoying? For instance, that guy who’s infected but doesn’t tell anybody? Who does that? I mean, he knows that he’s turning into a zombie, and nobody wants that to happen? So that’s just annoying.
The CGI is pretty nice for a 2007 movie.
I love the ending, but I’m guessing they’re going to pretend that that never happened in the next movie? Because following up on that would be… expensive to shoot.
Resident Evil: Exctinction. Russell Mulcahy. 2007. ⚃
Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Alexander Witt. 2004. ⚁
So futuristic!
This is kinda odd? Is this supposed to be a… light-hearted take on the Resident Evil thing? It seems like they’re going for a comedy thing?
What the fuck is this even? I mean, it’s not so much “what’s going on?” but more “why should we care?”
The choices made here make no sense at any level: Every scene is just really boring? And awkwardly filmed? It’s like a Z movie with a higher budget? WHAT HAPPENED
Oh right.
Every scene so far has been oddly paced and without any tension.
Oh, and the reduced frame rate action stuff? That looked really janky even in 2004.
This movie looks more expensive than the previous one. And not just 30% more expensive (which it was), but a lot more.
Yeah, they’re stepping up the humour thing, and it’s really… insulting.
Every scene is like is was designed by an eleven-year-old. Everything is like “whoa!” all the time. ALL THE TIME! (If you’re that age, or if you’re like me, a very old very drunk man.)
This really has no reason to be this exciting! I mean, this may be the stupidest movie ever, but I’m totally in.
What was the budget for this thing? Ten bucks?
That’s more than I guessed!
It’s just so cheesy. Fantastic. It’s not like all the sets are made of MDF and duck tape… it’s more like plexiglass and plastics.
And the generic “Now That’s What I Call Industrial Metal” sound track!
Yes! Kill all the dogs!
OK, now the movie is starting to drag? The computer had to deliver like fourteen hours worth of exposition, and it was all stuff we’d already figured out, so that’s boring.
The problem with this sort of narrative (see Life for a more recent example) is that the thing they’re fighting (really) is a contagion that’s so virulent that the only logical thing for any protagonist to do is go “OK, we’re probably all infected, so the thing to do is 1) nuke this facility/send it into the Sun, and 2) kill ourselves, in whatever sequence makes the most sense”, but instead they have Milla and her gang escaping the compound. OK, Milla is really confused (she had her memory wiped), so that’s an excuse, but the soldiers? Nope.
Well, perhaps it’s a commentary on how badly trained soldiers are these days.
It looks like Sanctuary! And they pioneered the no-budget greenscreen look a decade and a half ago. How is this possible!
I’m a glass truther: When you have a character wearing glasses, it’s pretty obvious when the glasses have no curve to them whatsoever — because they’ll just reflect light in that flat way. So when somebody is wearing fake glasses like this, it just looks totes fake. It’d be better if there wasn’t glass in the frames at all — then it’d just be a fashion accessory.
Anyway, I’m quite enjoying this movie — people are saying it’s the worst atrocity ever in the history of movies (I think Twitter is saying), but it’s kinda fun? It’s cozy? It’s not good but it’s fine?
They switched her glasses out for realer ones!
Well that rant was totally wasted.
I hoped I was going to go all contrarian and THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE EVER but I don’t even get what this movie is about on a basic level. What are these people even about? This is just a weirdly put-together movie.
It’s not like… “hey! this super-hero movie isn’t that good”. It’s like… “how come nobody stopped this from getting to our screens?”
It’s just horrendously awful. I mean, even on a DC super-hero scale. And that surprises me, because I liked the previous Wonder Woman movie.
Or even “awful” makes it sound like I’m going “yeah, I can see what this is trying to be and it’s not doing that”, but I don’t even comprehend what it’s trying to be.
It’s like a movie out of a different dimension. A dimension where they filmed all the scenes they vaguely talked about being in the film.
The flying scene was awesome, though. And like all the other scenes in this movie, it’s… “what?” “why?” “why now?”
Even on a basic plot summary level, I can’t say why Barbara was the baddie. How did that even happen?
This movie is really a ☐, but I bumped it because I like the flying scene.
But it’s remarkably bad, even on a super-hero movie scale.
This thing has a good thing going: The premise is fun, and it’s got a couple of good actors (and then there’s the male actors), and it’s sparkly fun.
But… oy, the greenscreen and the constant CGI. It looks like something made for a low-budget Canadian sci-fi tv series fifteen years ago (yes, I’m talking about Sanctuary).
And the singing… oy… everybody has been autotuned to total musical perfection, which means that every time somebody sings, it’s that horrid, off-phase gruesomeness. (I’m not talking about The Cher Effect, but when they actually use it to correct the pitch. I kinda like TCE, but when used “subtly” for pitch correction… oh, the horror.)
So I’ve put some DJ\Rupture on to drown out the movie whenever somebody starts singing, and I’m surviving.
[ten minutes pass]
Oh, when Meryl Streep sings, it doesn’t sound that awful. Did she get them to switch the machine off?
[er… an hour passes? this is a long movie]
It’s a pretty amusing movie, but there’s these… character development bits… that are really tedious. I feel like there’s a fun movie in here somewhere. If it has been half as long.
*checks how much time is left*
OH MY FUCKING GOD THERE”S ONE MORE HOUR LEFT!!!
OK, I’m taking a break to bake some cookies.
[time passes]
I’m back!
Mmm… cookies…
[more time passes]
The movie seems even worse now? Even if the cookies kick ass?
Oh, I forgot to watch this in when watching the other Psycho movies.
Hm… this is a made for TV movie?
Uh-oh:
[fifteen minutes pass]
This is a pretty odd movie: It’s a comedy (I think?), but the gags would seem stale to a three-year-old, and the rest is kinda creepy.
[half an hour passes]
It’s a strange approach to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope: This one is really needy, but she does goad the protagonist into doing things, so I guess it’s not that odd.
[twenty minutes pass]
Actually, I don’t hate this. It’s a cheerily inept, unassuming little movie. All the performances are bad, but they’re not really trying to be good, either, so that makes it better. The set design is rather impressive for a movie with this kind of budget, but sometimes it’s more obvious that it’s all plywood and Styrofoam (and scale models) than at other times.
I mean… how can you not like that shot of the guy putting up er spackle up there? That’s the level of proficiency this movie is aiming for.
I feel like this could be a cult classic if only people had seen it, but it’s apparently never gotten wide distribution? (It was included as an unannounced extra on the Psycho box set.)
[ten minutes pass]
OK, now I changed my mind again. This is pretty excruciating.
“Look at my face… my lines…”
*gaze*
OH MY GOD WHAT A HAG.
(Yes, that’s the actual line from that scene.)
[the end]
I liked the ending.
It’s a very confusing movie, but it’s got all the ingredients for a successful, silly riff on Psycho? And I’m totally up for that. But it flubs it seriously in the last third of the movie: It makes sense, plot-wise, but it’s just so boring.
And the twist ending was always obvious, even if I appreciate both the sentiment and the actual reveal.
So… Don’t watch this, probably? But it has its charms, if you’re willing to look for them.
I’m guessing this is the most controversial movie ever made? A couple of days ago a character in some TV show was describing his girlfriend as “she preferred the new version of Psycho”, and that summed up her character as the lowest of the low.
So I’m all excited to watch this movie again: I betcha it’s better than the Hitchcock movie.
[twenty five minutes pass]
I’m really digging that Van Sant is making a facsimile of the original movie? At least I think he is? Only in a different aspect ration, with different actors and in colour. It’s asking the question: If we made the that old classic today, in the same way, would it be as good?
It’s a dare, and I vaguely remember movie critics at the time being really het up about it. They don’t like being challenged.
Because, of course, the answer is “no”. But it’s still really entertaining to watch.
I have to admit being really, really shocked when Norman Bates came running down the stairs to open Janet Leigh’s car door, I mean Anne Heche, and… IT”S NOT ANTHONY PERKINS.
That was jarring.
Vince Vaughn?!
[the end]
Watching this, I’ve been reminded, somehow, that I’ve seen this before… probably in the 90s? On rental DVD? And I vaguely remember liking this then.
This time over, I… I like the idea, because it’s just such a dare. But the movie itself lacks nerve. Vince Vaughn just isn’t scary like Perkins is, and that deflates everything. And whatsisname that plays the detective just doesn’t quite work. The rest of the actors are fine, I think, but it’s still a lot to ask.
So after… three quarters of an hour? I just grew bored with the entire thing.
I’m watching the documentary now, which is amazingly critical towards the movie. I assumed that the studio wanted Van Sant to make a traditional remake of Psycho, and then he fucked with them by making this instead. But no — this was a project he’d suggested to them for years, and they always said no. Until he’d made Good Will Hunting, and then finally allowed him to make the Psycho remake.
Oh, the soundtrack is by Graeme Revell? I’ve got a couple of SPK albums… they’re… uhm… well, I don’t listen to them a lot.
Still, perhaps that means that the soundtrack isn’t the same boring stuff as usual.
[half an hour passes]
Well, the soundtracks seems… OK? Not very special: The normal dramatic violins all over the place. (And violas.)
The structure of this movie is pretty interesting: It’s based around a radio talk show, and Norman Bates calls in and spills all the beans to CCH Pounder, the host of the show. So we get the backstory told in flashbacks, and we’re wondering how this is going to tie up to the present (because it really has to): Is the psycho CCH Pounder has in the studio going to turn violent and kill the psychiatric experts? Is Norman just killing time until he’s gonna stab somebody? What?
So it’s a good idea, I think, but… it’s pretty boring. The guy who plays Young Norman is OK, but the things that happen to him are pretty tedious.
Spoiler: It turns out to be the mother’s fault.
[forty-five minutes pass]
So this movie is just an excuse for watching Young Norman inexpertly kill a bunch of women at length? I’d worry about Mick Garris after watching this.
[the end]
OK, this is really a ⚀ movie, but it’s a modest made-for-video movie, and you have to give these things some leeway. For what it is, it’s not as bad as it could be. CCH Pounder is good, and so is Perkins, and … it’s not a good movie by a long shot, but it certainly could have been worse.
I think I probably saw this on VHS back in the 80s, but I’m not sure. Psycho II was surprisingly fun, so … perhaps this one will be, too? But I’m not holding my breath.
[half an hour passes]
Oh, this isn’t very good. (I know! You’re shocked, too!) It’s been thirty minutes of manoeuvring people into position so that the movie can start, really, and I’m guessing the er meat of the movie is going to be Perkins running around stabbing these people?
I checked whether Perkins had directed anything else, and indeed:
It’s Psycho meets The Naked Gun. That sounds just awesome.
[twenty minutes pass]
I think Perkins is aiming for a kinda … frothy, absurd horror thing: Like Little Shop Of Horrors, perhaps? A kinda 60s horror comedy kind of thing? And there are scenes that work on that level, but the pacing is just way off, and the funny bits aren’t funny enough.
[the end]
There’s some scenes here that a fun to watch, but … this is not a good movie.
The odd thing about a sequel to Psycho is that it took over two decades for it to happen. Hitchcock died in 1980, though, so perhaps they couldn’t get any traction for it before that?
I did see this one on VHS back in the 80s, and I remember it being… a better than average 80s horror movie? The reason I’m watching it now isn’t because of any great nostalgia towards it or anything, but I somehow bought a Psycho box set (with all the five? six? movies).
And since there’s nothing horrifying going on in the world, I might as well start watching now. (I skipped the first one, because I re-watched that some months back.)
[forty minutes pass]
Hey, this isn’t bad. I mean… it’s no Psycho, but few movies are. This is pretty tense and well made. I mean, they managed to make a scene where Perkins I mean Norman no I mean Perkins was chopping some iceberg lettuce exciting. That’s good editing.
[forty minutes pass]
Uhm… it’s OK, I guess? But some of these scenes are getting pretty tedious. They had a good thing going, but then there was a couple of boring scenes, and then I lost interest. That’s the problem with movies of this ilk (what species of deer is that, anyway?) that it doesn’t take much to spike the interest.
With just a bit of editing… just dropping, say, ten minutes… this would have been a really fun little movie: It’s got a pretty interesting plot, as a slasher movie goes, performances that are just the right side of scenery chewing, and doesn’t annoy in any way.
[the end]
That was a good twist at the end there, I think? I mean, the many twists.
This docu was included on the Criterion bluray of Demoiselles, and is about both the movie and the celebration Rochefort did 25 years after the movie.
It’s really good, but it’s Varda, so that’s no surprise. It’s a really loving portrait of Demy at work: Watching him work is a lot of fun, because he’s the opposite of the psycho auteur director you often see in these things. He’s funny, friendly; really concentrated on getting the film made; professional, but never neglecting the “merci” to everybody.
This being Varda, we also get a lot of shots of random people and their thoughts about it all. It’s really amiable and interesting.
The Young Girls of Rochefort. Jacques Demy. 1967. ⚅
I was like… is that Gene Kelly? It can’t be Gene Kelly! It’s just some French guy that kinda looks like Gene Kelly. I mean, he doesn’t even look that much like Gene Kelly. Is that Gene Kelly? And then he danced a bit, and yup it’s Gene Kelly.
Anyway!
This is probably a less personal movie than the Umbrella one, but it’s fantastic. It’s got better tunes, and incredibly enough, it looks even better: It’s got the best set design ever. Every scene is a delight to look at.
It’s also a much more traditional movie: It’s got a clockwork logic where it’s obvious that everybody’s going to end up with each other. It’s got I don’t know how many star-crossed lover pairs, and you root for every one of them, and the movie delivers.
I’m usually liveblogging these things, but I couldn’t this time. I was just too into the movie to do more than take a pee break.
I don’t think there’s many movies that are more… just what they aim to be… than this movie. It’s totally on point: Envision a coked-up distillation of all undercover cop movies ever, but with surfing, and this is it. It’s got everything: The mismatched pair of cops; the angry sergeant or… whatever he was… giving them a hard time; the love story entangled with the villains; the show-downs; the…
It’s all those clichés: But perfectly made. In addition, there’s a bunch of skydiving and surfing scenes. There’s not really any plot to get in the way of the sheer rush of watching pure, unadulterated idiocy: It’s the perfect movie that sums up Reagan’s 80s better than anything else.
It’s so stupid! I love it!
And I haven’t even mentioned the sick action cinematography and editing: That chase scene (on foot, even!) has to be the best one ever. It’s all so perfect: The pacing, the stupid dialogue, the casting, the line delivery. It’s all flabbergasting: You can only sit there and take it in in slack-jawed wonder.
Now, despite all that, it’s not totally perfect. It sags a bit in the last… third? Last quarter? I mean, it’s fun all the way through, but the moronic grin I had on my face for the first 90 minutes kinda wilted for a bit and I started thinking a bit about fixing Emacs bugs again, but only for short stretches.
And… I’m guessing Swayze did all his own stunts and Keanu… didn’t?
I’m not quite sure why I bought this move? Because I’ve been watching a lot of werewolf movies lately? It might just be associative thinking.
But this is definitely not a movie I saw as a teenager… and I can see why. It’s a very 70s movie — not a slick 80s American horror movie at all. There was a phase change at some point, where they learned to powder the actors’ faces so they didn’t look shiny any more, and they told the actors “pretend you’re not in a Robert Altman movie”, and then suddenly! the 80s had arrived.
But this is a solidly 70s movie, with shiny faces and all.
And it’s a low-budget little movie and all.
[forty-five minutes pass]
OK, I was kinda onboard with watching a low budget horror movie… but this is incredibly tedious. I think I now remember why I bought it — I watched a DVD extra where one of the special effects guys said that this was the best werewolf movie. And, yes, the werewolves (and prosthetics) are pretty nice (for a movie of this budget), but the rest of the movie is…
I mean, there’s sort of a plot, and sort of a drama in here, but it’s just really hard to care.
Perhaps the nudity is why this movie has got a 6.6 on imdb. It’s a kinda repulsive movie?
[ten minutes pass]
That’s a really good werewolf! Really good!
[the end]
The featured review on imdb makes a case for this movie being all subversive and referential and stuff:
I think they’re reading too much into it. It’s a plotless werewolf movie that has a bunch of references to other (were)wolves in it, but that doesn’t really make it clever or interesting: It just makes it a plotless werewolf movie with a lot of references to ther (were)wolves. That’s easy and simple to do, and they did it. Obviously their focus was on making the werewolf transformations fun to watch, and they are.
Janus Films is an American film distribution company. The distributor is credited with introducing numerous films, now considered masterpieces of world cinema, to American audiences
So it’s an American distributor of European art movies. No wonder that logo pops up in so many DVDs…
[five minutes pass]
OH MY GOD. This musical is durchkomponiert? I mean, it’s not a normal movie and then sometimes they break into songs, but it’s songs all the way through?
Golly. I can’t remember the last time I saw that… If ever…
[the end]
I loved watching this.
Just some er notes: There are very few actual songs in this movie. It’s mostly people singing in the upper registry of their voices in a kind of… tune-ful but aimless way. Imagine: If you were going to sing “I’m going to buy some bread”? That’s what they’re singing: Those exact same automatic notes that everybody would sing if challenged to sing something without having a tune.
But it’s fine! I don’t understand why they didn’t write more melodies, though.
The colours, set design and cinematography is exceptional. I mean, are. But I’m subtracting one ⚀ because there’s no actual music here: It’s just automatic tune lines. The background jazz is kinda nice, but… why didn’t they write any tunes for these people to sing? WHYYYYY
I’m no Mae West expert… I mean, I know she was a sex pot actress, and I’ve probably seen her in (many?) movie before, but I … just can’t remember? So I was shocked to hear her talk in this: She basically sounds like a 30s Snooki!
I love it!
It’s just amazing. She’s sneering all the time, talking in 30s gangsta talk: “See here, whatcha talkin aboot!” It’s riveting.
[ten minutes pass]
Cary Grant! Oh yeah, this is his first really big movie: Mae West allegedly saw him on the lot and liked the look of his gams. Or something!
He’s so… inexperienced. He doesn’t position himself to his advantage in front of the camera, so there’s a lot of odd angles. And he hasn’t quite landed on a dialect yet, so some of the vowels sounds like he’s an inbred lerd. It’s hilarious.
I love this. I have no idea what the plot is, but I love this. It’s not a “good movie”; but it’s so weird that… that…
It’s that weird.
[the end]
I’m still loving it! West is hamming every scene up to the max, and the rest of the actors are trying to keep up with her. It’s delightful.
I still don’t quite know what the plot was? Did this have a plot? Who needs a plot! It’s great.
(And kinda shocking. The scene with the killing is … “eeeh?” I guess it’s funny because she talked with an eastern European accent?)
Now I want to watch all movies Mae West was in to see if they’re this good. It’s impossible not to be charmed by her in this movie.
Louise Beavers was the only African American actress to be brought aboard the film by West personally. She wanted a black woman to appear opposite her; when she did stage and screen work, West made it a point to act with black American actors and actresses, helping to break racial discrimination in entertainment.
But I think they’re trying to say that West was fabulous.
The actors are very easy on the eyes, of course: Everybody from Jeanne Moreau to Paul Guers and and Claude Mann. But… I mean… I think gambling is the ne plus ultra of tedium, and this is mostly images of these people standing around watching roulette.
And these are horrible, uninteresting people!
[the end]
I think I understand what Demy is going for? The entire passion thing and a romantic, dreamy existence? But I found the guy’s jealousies annoying and the woman’s obsessions boring.
And that’s Jeanne Moreau. Making her seem boring is an achievement.
Yes, yes, I know, but I got this as part of a box set of westerns that turned out to be surprisingly good: Nary a stinker betwixt em. So despite Costner and his very badly applied fake beard, I’m watching this thing, which I assume is probably going to turn out to be the worst movie in history? Let’s find out.
[fifteen minutes pass]
I’m not sure whether this is a really horrible movie or whether it’s kinda funny? I’m leaning towards the former, but at least Costner got rid of the badly applied fake beard now (or is it real, just really… bad)?
But:
Takes like this makes me want to like it more.
[an hour and a half pass]
And I do! I’m totally flabbergasted: This is a very watchable movies. Sure, everybody’s way too clean and have too fabulous blow-dried hairdos, but it’s quite sweet. It does have a built-in gravitas that’s rather grating: We all know how this story ends, and it doesn’t end with these Sioux riding happily off into the sunset.
[the end]
I’m a bit conflicted. This is such a pedestrian movie in so many ways: The vistas should be breathtaking, but instead they’re… there? Did this movie even have a cinematographer or did they just get a camera operator on the cheap? Well, OK, perhaps it’s a… choice…
Nine hours of looking at Costner’s ever-less-follicled face is a lot. But it’s… it’s fine, I guess?
This is supposed to be the bleakest, most misanthropic movie ever.
:
“Bridesmaids is Michael Haneke’s Bachelor Party” – Noah Berlatsky
I’m excited!
[half an hour passes]
This is really bleak!
Look! She put fondant petals on top of the cupcake! Those may be classified as “edible” according to veterinarian standards, but nobody would want that shit anywhere near their mouths, so putting that on a cupcake is just… bizarre.
[the end]
This was a gruelling, horrible slog. But… I think they were aiming for funny and light-hearted, somehow? Despite everybody in this movie being horrible human beings? Including the main character?
Aaah. The 80s. Remember the 80s? No? Well, let me tell you a story: It was the decade where you could see the poster for a movie, and it had the words “Nicholas Cage” on it, and you didn’t run for your life.
It was a happy age.
[twenty-five minutes pass]
This is such a fun movie. It’s a bit hyper, sure, but it’s got the right tone.
[the end]
I loved the first ten minutes, and then I really liked the next half hour, and then… uhm… there were scenes that I loved? I mean, it’s a really sweet movie, but it’s got stretches where it’s just treading water.
I feel like this could have been The Best Movie Ever if it had been a bit… tighter. It’s got so many good gags, and not a surfeit of plot, so it should be just perfect, and it isn’t.
Céline and Julie Go Boating. Jacques Rivette. 1974. ⚅
The last Rivette movie I watched was the thirteen (?) hour long Out 1: Noli me tangere, which was in partly brilliant, and partly… quite good?
This one is a short movie: Just over three hours.
[forty minutes pass]
This is a lot of fun. I’m guessing the dialogue is mostly improvised, but it has this mysterious, almost… meta character to it: It’s like we’re watching two people who are lying to each other, but both of them are playing along; they’re doing the improvisational “yes, and” thing, but not for this movie: Instead this movie is about these people doing this “yes, and” thing in real life (but scripted).
Or… their realities change based on whatever lies they’ve just told. I mean… “Rue du nadir aux pommes”?
It’s so weird and… thrilling to watch.
[the end]
OK, the plot isn’t at all what I thought it was when we last spoke. It’s much stranger!
It’s… it’s… a kind of ghost story? But really funny? Oh oh! It’s kind of like a seventies Doctor Who series, but French.
It’s really funny, it’s sweet, it’s intriguing. I love it to bits, and now I’m getting all of Rivette’s other movies.
This is a documentary, er, interview film with the three main actors from Mai Zetterling’s move Flickorna (The Girls). It’s a brilliant movie, but was apparently quite controversial, and not a commercial success.
So we meet the actors again, 30 years later, and two years after Zetterling had died.
[fifteen minutes pass]
So… this isn’t quite a documentary movie: It’s quite nicely staged, and even if most of the talk seems improvised, there’s a lot of blocking (and I’m assuming retakes) going on. But it’s absolutely charming. And so well shot: One gorgeous take after another. And quite amusing.
[fifteen minutes pass]
The subtitle here is “A tribute to Mai Zetterling”, but… geeze… these three women didn’t really have much respect for her. It’s like “But how come she got to make these moves?” “Well, perhaps they found her exotic, being all international and stuff…”
And it sounds like Bibi, at least, didn’t even like Flickorna, but thought it was a rather stupid movie.
[the end]
Well, Zetterling didn’t really get mentioned much… but this movie was filmed at the house Zetterling built up from a ruin, and envisioned being an artist’s retreat. It looks like a lovely house in a fantastic location, but Zetterling died before it was completed, it sounds like.
This is it! The final movie of the Woody Allen box set I bought some years back:
This is one movie I don’t recall… I think it’s from after I stopped watching his movies? Let’s see!
[ten minutes pass]
Wow, this is an odd movie. Sure, it’s a pastiche (and possibly a parody?) of expressionist German cinema, but… just… what? Perhaps it’s just a horrible, horrible DVD transfer, but everything is washed out and awful: It looks like it was filmed on colour stock and then the colours were dropped out? But surely that’s not possible?
And the … performances… Yes, I know, it’s meant to be funny, but it’s not. It’s like a parody in search of a subject.
Recalling the film’s critical and commercial failure in his 2020 memoir, Apropos of Nothing, Allen joked that “the filming of Shadows and Fog went off without a hitch except for the movie.”
It really, really bombed.
[ten minutes pass]
It’s got all these famous people… was this movie just an excuse to hob-nob with all these actors?
Wow. Watching Michael Caine playing the Woody character (well, one of them in this movie) is… kinda horrifying? When Allen does the character himself, it’s amusing, but when Caine does it, it’s really, really scary.
Man, this is a dark transfer. Is it supposed to look like this? I got a DVD box set… should probably have waited for the 2K box set, but that still hasn’t happened? Oh, there’s two boxes with six movies each? But that project stalled in 2016. Allen isn’t the … most happening thing happening now, I guess.
[fifteen minutes pass]
Oh, right, this is the one that starts off with Allen (44) dating Meriel Hemingway (18).
[the end]
This movie is catnip for people who love Manhattan. All those shots of New York looking so romantic…
Diane Keaton is absolutely amazing in this. And I guess it’s one of Allen’s best performances as an actor? And, you know, Manhattan. And the relationship complications are probably the best plotted of any of his movies? But. I found it kinda hard to really connect with this movie, watching it now. I remember loving it when I’ve seen it before (probably a handful of times in the 80s), but I’m not really loving it now.
I bought a Woody Allen box set the other year, and it’s taken me er years to get through it, so now I’m just gonna watch the final four movies.
It’s a concept.
I haven’t seen this movie since… I’m guessing the early 80s? I wonder where I saw it, though. VHS? Did they do a re-run at the cinema? Something?
I have no idea. I kinda remembered the … main digressive feeling of it all, but I didn’t remember that it’s essentially a Robert Altman movie, but with more jokes. And I love Robert Altman movies!
[the end]
But I was kinda vacillating between thinking “this should be funnier” and “aww, this is the best”.
Diane Keaton basically makes this movie worth watching.
I’m usually kinda liveblogging these things, but I was just flabbergasted by the originality of this movie. It’s like nothing else. I mean, on one level, it’s a goofy Japanese exploitation movie, but it’s just so… odd…
It’s riveting and very funny. I don’t even know what this is. Whenever I think I’ve figured it out, the movie’s ahead of me and morphs into something else.
Wow! This was so much fun! Until like… the last twenty minutes?
Spoilers are now going to follow. Do not read this if you want to watch the movie, because it’s a fun movie, and what I’m going to write here is going to spoil everything good about the movie. So here’s the logo a bunch of times to provide some spoiler space:
OK? Now there’s spoilers.
First of all it was so obvious the they were playing games with the pods, so when the big reveal at the end was happening, I was rolling my eyes so hard that my eyeballs fell out, and now I am literally blind.
Second of all: If you think about the premise just a millisecond: They grew the hostile alien from a single cell. Which means that this isn’t Alien, which it’s kinda similar to. You don’t want a Xenomorph landing on Earth, but the monster growing from a single cell makes everything irrelevant: Once that happens, there’s no way to be safe without plunging the space station into the Sun, and perhaps even that’s not enough.
In any case: They were all dead already, and nothing they did in the movie mattered.
So it’s a conceptual failure, but it’s so exciting to watch. It’s like a version of Alien without any political framework. That’s both good and bad: Alien had a lot to say about corporations and stuff, and this one is just pure, mindless entertainment, trying to offend nobody.
I bought all of Lynch’s movies the other year on bluray. Of course I’d seen them all before, but I thought it’d be fun to watch them all again. And, indeed, it was.
Fun, that is.
But I resisted watching The Elephant Man, and I didn’t want to watch The Straight Story, either. The first because I seemed to remember it being kinda bad, and the second, because I seemed to remember that it wasn’t… all that interesting? It’s Lynch’s Disney movie?
So why not watch them both the same evening?
[forty minutes pass]
This is just the heart-warmingest movie ever.
[the end]
I was totally on board for the first third of this movie. I was wondering why I didn’t remember this as a totally wonderful movie: Farnsworth is perfect as the old guy (amazing casting), and I was sobbing all over the place.
But… then it all kinda dissipated? Not that any scene in particular was bad or anything, but the momentum seemed to disappear. And this is a road movie.
So I got a really fancy edition of this movie. It’s on 4K, and a book, and a bunch of extras.
And a pop-up cathedral!
I guess! Very fancy indeed.
But the thing is… I’m not really looking forward to watching this? I mean, I don’t remember anything much from this movie, except the guy with the head moving around on stage er on the set, and that’s it. Except that I didn’t like it when I saw it as a (young) teenager, and I’ve never seen it since.
On the other hand, it’s David Lynch. It’s got John Hurt. John Hurt!!! How bad can this be?
It’s Karl Urban!
[forty minutes pass]
I’m not sure what I think of this movie now. It’s got a bunch of (what would become) standard Lynch bits, like the constant ever-shifting drones in every scene… but it also seems kinda jejune: By withholding showing Merrick to the movie audience for such a long time, Lynch is obviously making a commentary on how we, the audience, is just as complicit in the sideshow as those horrible characters gasping at Merrick on screen.
It’s so deep.
But then when Lynch finally does show him, it’s as a big anticlimax, which is (again) a tweaking of the audiences’ noses, but… it kinda works?
[thirty minutes pass]
Lynch is so good at manipulating the audience. Yes, it’s got all the beats and depth of a TV melodrama, but he does it so well.
[the end]
Man, that last bit of this movie is brutal. I mean… brutally boring. The entire kidnapping thing just felt so unnecessary, but I guess without it, there would be even less of a plot here than it is. It would basically be… “doctor finds ugly guy and then everybody in the audience cries a bit”.
I kept asking myself what the film was really trying to say about the human condition as reflected by John Merrick, and I kept drawing blanks. The film’s philosophy is this shallow: (1)Wow, the Elephant Man sure looked hideous, and (2)gosh, isn’t it wonderful how he kept on in spite of everything?
[…]
The direction, by David (Eraserhead) Lynch, is com-petent, although he gives us an inexcusable opening scene in which Merrick’s mother is trampled or scared by elephants or raped_who knows?_and an equally idiotic closing scene in which Merrick becomes the Star Child from 2001, or something.
He seems personally offended! Tee hee. That almost makes me like the movie more.
I was surprised by how much I like the first half of this movie, and I was thinking that my teenage self was a total moron. And then the last half… happened… and then I understood why I didn’t like it back then.
Is this Lynch’s most mainstream movie? It could be…
StudioCanal has done a great restoration and 4K transfer job. This bluray looks really good.
…
There’s like hours of extras on this bluray!
The first one is pretty traditional…
Heh: “When it was shown in Japan, it did so well in Japan that…
well, I think it’s the only reason that I saw any money on the backend
of it because there wasn’t time to hide it.”
Heh heh. He also talks about the Oscars and how you have to go campaigning if you want to get one, and how that’s repulsive to him. So the movie got eight nominations and not a single win.
“Film! It’s ancient technology! I’d die if I’d have to work with celluloid again.”
Stina Ekblad could read the phone book and it’d sound profound.
[fifty minutes pass]
But this movie doesn’t quite work? Every scene is like… almost fabulous, but then there’s something that’s… off. I mean, the actors are great. The set design is absolutely amazing; every single room is like “whoa”. But it’s like… the rhythm is off? Sometimes the editing just seems downright amateurish. But perhaps the problem is the cinematography? Hm… There’s twopeople credited with the cinematography, and one seems to have done mostly TV, and the other had only done a single movie before this.
[the end]
I really wanted to like this movie, but…
Anyway, this concludes my Mai Zetterling festival. She’s definitely a distinctive director, but wildly uneven. That is, some of the movies are totally amazing, and the rest … aren’t? But there’s a sensibility behind these movies that makes watching even the … bad ones? pretty interestng.
This is the third Zetterling-directed short from the Love anthology movie. This one is written by her, too.
[the end]
So this is from an anthology film about love, and Zetterling is contrary as usual: Most of this short is a sumptuous dinner prepared by a mother for her son.
The subtext here is all kinds of “eh?” and “urr”, but it’s a really enjoyable little movie to watch. Those dishes look delish!
Perhaps the most odd thing about this is that the mother and the son look pretty much… in the same age group? I tried googling what age they were, really, but the woman, Maureen Fitzgerald, has the most common name in Irish history? And the son was born in 1945? So he was late 30s? Which is what the mother looks like, too?
Oh, Zetterling directed three of the shorts in the Love anthology movie, so this is the second one. This one is written by Edna O’Brien.
[the end]
This is very odd. Like the scene where they’re eating oysters (on the shell) off of that woman’s body. Like… how did that happen? Did the guy sit there shucking oysters for ten minutes first before they got it on? Did he call room service (at his private apt), and then they got oysters on the shell delivered, and then they arranged them all over her boobs? They’re usually chilled? But if they weren’t, they’re now eating lukewarm oysters? That’s kinda disgusting?
So this is a short directed by Zetterling and written by… JONI FUCKING MITCHELL!?!?! WHAT THE!!?
OK, now I’m all aboard. Let’s watch.
[the end]
What a plot! Mitchell (in blackface, reprising her role from the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter), goes into a happening disco, playing spiky new wave music, turns the music off, and puts some easy listening jazz on…
And then has a convo with a guy that says he’d ask her to dance if it wouldn’t make him feel like such a fag.
It’s complicated, is what I’m saying.
I like it. It’s all kinds of offensive, of course, but I think it achieves what Mitchell wanted? I’m guessing? It hasn’t been restored at all for this release, though. It looks like it was recorded from a SECAM broadcast onto VHS and then digitised for DVD.
Zetterling makes visually striking movies without er that much er plot?, and this is a British down-to-Earth social realist movie about two girls on the lam, so… how is that going to work out? Well, so far, not that brilliantly: You see Zetterling’s flourishes here and there with some interesting angles, but it seems like we’re going for early-80s British earnestness from the rest of the team.
So… this could be a total train wreck. But so far I’m intrigued.
[twenty minutes pass]
I’m kinda really enjoying this? I don’t understand what Zetterling is trying to tell us with some of these scenes (is the viewpoint character shocked at the other girls cavorting, or is she jealous? it’s impossible to tell), but it’s a fun movie so far.
And it’s fun watching really young versions of British actors I’ve seen like a gazillion times before, but later in their careers. Like… Miriam Margolyes… Kathy Burke… OK, I think those are the ones I recognised.
Burke is great fun here. (Magda from AbFab.)
[the end]
I really enjoyed this. I liked how resolutely the story is focused on the borstal prisoners — the guards are only vaguely present, and are more fixture of the environment than actual characters. I was sometimes confused about what the conflicts where, but mostly because I couldn’t remember which character was called what name, I think?
It’s a solid piece. It looks good, the performances are good, and it’s just kinda interesting.
Outstanding English-language effort by the great Swedish actor/director Mai Zetterling (anyone who have seen her brilliant Night Games will agree she kicks Bergman’s sorry ass!).
I was going to make an effort to blow through the Elia Kazan box set, but I just couldn’t face another worthy middlebrow movie tonight.
So I’m back to the Zetterling box set instead. It’s a nice box set.
Even got a poster:
[twenty minutes pass]
This is a very odd movie. I mean, most of Zetterling’s movies are… er… out of the mainstream? But this is very odd indeed; I don’t quite know what to make of it. It’s also too short to be a feature movie — was this made for some experimental TV thing at SVT?
[ten minutes pass]
Well, OK, this is a movie for very young children, I guess? Think Teletubbies, but slower? And even more psychedelic?
And the overcooked spaghetti… *shiver*
[ten minutes pass]
This movie is intermittently gorgeous. It’s so inventive and odd. But… I think you’d have to be a lot drunker than I am to make these scenes connect in any way. It’s one “wha” after another, which is perhaps the right thing for an audience of four-year-olds, but…
[the end]
Twenty minutes was cut out of this, and then it was shown on TV at the time. And… I do understand why. Because this doesn’t quite work. And I’ve seen Noli me tangere (and liked it): I’m totally qualified to watch movies where nothing much happens for a very long stretches of time, but this just doesn’t work.
I do love the non sequiturs the parents are spouting: It’s so aggressively from the point of view of the children: Parents are always talking about things that’s can’t be understood, and Zetterling makes that happen in a very tangible way.
But, like… no. I want to love it, because it’s totally gorgeous, but it just doesn’t work.
OK, I bought a Kazan box set a couple years ago, but I’ve never made much headway into it because Googling these movies reminded me what a snitch he was, and I think that… subconsciously? … made me less than enthusiastic about watching these movies.
But enough of that! Here we go! A bunch of Kazan! Unless I watch something else instead!
[half an hour passes]
Man, this is a difficult movie to relate to: I have no idea where Kazan is going with this. I think he’s… not an awful person, but… OK, Imitation of Life (by the magnificent Douglas Sirk) was a decade later, but there’s no doubt where he’s going with the plot.
So I paused it here, and:
And the links to the reviews are just as confused as I am. Several of the negative reviews linked from the tomatoes are out-and-out Nazi sites (well, that’s my interpretation of the vocabulary while skimming), and the other ones…
Of the various racial pictures to be presented this year, Pinky gets my vote as being the most phoney.
I’m guessing that from 1949?
So now I’m even more confused. Because I’m sort of thinking that the movie is (inadvertently) racist, but if the Nazis hates it that much, then… Perhaps not?
OK, re-rolling.
[the end]
What a rollercoaster. I kinda hated the start, then I adored the middle bits with the interaction between the four central characters (Ethel Barrymore, Jeanne Crain, Ethel Waters, Evelyn Varden), which is just all kinds of amazeballs: The mischievous Miss Em and the (semi-)instant rapport with Pinky is really fun to watch.
And then there’s trial which is just kinda… not fun? And Judge Whatsisname (Pinky’s lawyer), who’s portrayed as a wise character, but doesn’t… contribute anything? And then what he says when the trial’s over? What? Is Kazan trying to say “all white people suck”? Is that it? Because I don’t think it is, but it’s what this movie does say.
So after giving up on the movie again… Kazan lands the ending!
What!
It’s all kinds of confusing; it feels like a Frankenstein monster of a movie.
Ford was forced out of the film due to his clashes with Ethel Waters, the black actress and singer playing Pinky’s grandmother, and his totally ham-handed approach to the film’s nonwhite characters. “It was a professional difference of opinion,” Zanuck later recalled. “Ford’s Negroes were like Aunt Jemima. Caricatures. I thought we were going to get into trouble.”
[…]
The NAACP read the script for Pinky at Zanuck’s request, although it wasn’t a five-star review. Roy Wilkins, the editor of the NAACP magazine Crisis, criticized the “underlying theme that agitation was wrong… [that] good-will will eventually correct matters, and — most dangerous of all — [that] segregation should be accepted.” He was no fan of Ethel Waters’ character Dicey, whom he called a “female Uncle Tom.” Wilkins’ opinion was essentially the consensus among the NAACP members who reviewed the script. The movie would need retooling, they suggested, to correct Pinky’s “lack of militance.”
[…]
The real trouble started when Pinky arrived in Marshall, Texas. Just days before the movie was scheduled to debut in February of 1950, the city used an old ordinance to form a censorship board and ban Pinky on the grounds that it was “of such a character as to be prejudicial to the best interests of the people of said City.” W.L. Gelling, the manager of the Paramount Theatre, would not cancel his booking. He was going to show the movie anyway, so he was arrested and spent the night in jail. The city of Marshall convicted Gelling of a misdemeanor and fined him $200.
So it’s a proper controversial, important movie. I haven’t been able to google whether any parts of the John Ford scenes survived or not, but it’s a seriously oddball movie that doesn’t quite work. But the bits that work are delightful.
