R100. Hitoshi Matsumoto. 2013. ⚅

[the end]

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.

Fantastic.

Life. Daniel Espinosa. 2017. ⚄

[the end]

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.

But it is really fun. So exciting.

The Straight Story. David Lynch. 1999. ⚃

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.