Color Out of Space. Richard Stanley. 2019. ⚂

Hm… Richard Stanley… that name seems familiar…

Oh, he did Hardware.

[half an hour passes]

Well, I’m not hating this… it’s like an 80s slow-build horrorish movie? It’s kinda nice how they’re giving the characters space to do some er character development… On the other hand, it’s not wildly riveting, either.

I wonder whether this is a really low budget movie? Some of the shots are kinda iffy, but others look kinda expensive?

Oh, it’s kinda low-ish budget… and it’s totally bombing at the box office. And I guess it premiered before Rona, so that’s not the explanation?

I guess it just bombed, so we’re probably not going to see the other two Lovecraft movies the director had planned.

[forty minutes more pass]

Oh, I guess the older son is supposed to be a teenager? I read him as a developmentally challenged 30-year-old…

Well that makes more sense!

Anyway, besides casting challenges, I still like this movie… it’s very retro. But it’s getting kinda boring. All the characters are so… in denial… anybody would just… leave. Instead of staying to look at all that pink/purple light. So it’s hard to stay focused on the movie.

[the end]

I was totally there for the first hour, and the last fifteen minutes are good. But this movie has about half an hour of sheer boredom in between those parts. Just… why?

This is almost a very good sci-fi horror movie.

Parasite. Bong Joon Ho. 2019. ⚃

I thought Snowpiercer was dull, but Okja was OK… So even if this movie won all the awards, I thought that it still may worth watching? So now I’m watching it.

[forty minutes pass]

I’m shocked! This doesn’t suck.

I love all the actors in the family of grifters. The rich family… not so much — they’re over in panto country.

There’s a lot of striking shots — the cinematography is very good — but it’s undercut by too vigorous colour grading. A bunch of the scenes feel like “eh, OK, enough with the cold blues”…

[another hour passes]

I really like the heist movie parts of this film — only the heist is to be able to work as servants. It’s fun! It’s exciting! But the movie is pretty lethargic otherwise.

I wonder whether it won All The Oscars because people in Hollywood saw this as a horror movie? “Those people could be conspiring to get hired by me next! It’s so scary!”

It’s very watchable, but it loses all the narrative tension every four minutes. If tightened up (by at least half an hour) this could have been such a fun and wild movie. Instead it plods when it should zing.

[the end]

I like a bunch of the scenes. But…

The Old Guard. Gina Prince-Bythewood. 2020. ⚀

I wasn’t going to watch this — I mean, it’s Netflix: It’s gonna suck, right?

But I read a review by somebody I respect that said it’s good, and… here I am.

Ready to be disappointed, even if my expectations can’t be lower.

[twenty minutes pass]

I guess it’s possible to be more bored than this? It seems possible? It’s possible.

But unlikely.

[twenty minutes pass]

Did I mention… Worst CGI Ever? When that plane took off it burned off my retinas by just being too awful and I’m now literally blind.

Oh, now I know why I’m watching this piece of crap. It’s all jwz’s fault.

SHAME.

[an infinite amount of time passes]

There’s nothing here… nothing. The cinematography sucks, the performances are moronic, the soundtrack is embarrassing, the plot is nothing, the… the colour grading is the worst I’ve seen in quite a while.

Could this possibly be the worst movie ever made? And I say that as somebody who watched all “Netflix Originals” from 2019, so I know how bad movies can get.

And this is worse.

[thank god, it’s the end]

I feel I was too positive in my appraisal of this movie up there.