Man, even some newer films have complicated restoration jobs… They only had access to a negative with burned-in English subtitles?

Anyway, this is the second film from the Scorsese box set.

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 now I’ve started on the Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 2 box set because I’m no longer afraid of commitment.

Mort aux vaches!

One for the money…

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:

Insiang. Lino Brocka. 1976. ⚃

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?

I’m already incredibly bored.

Oops:

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:

The Green Knight. David Lowery. 2021. ⚀