Films Recently Watched

[Rubin Farr]

 

[cruising for burgers]

15 hours ago, DavieAddison said:

The Lobster

loved the dancing sequence on that movie...

[Crazing]

Robot Dreams 

[Rubin Farr]

More details after first screening:

[Squee]

14 hours ago, Rubin Farr said:

More details after first screening:

"Zero commercial prospects".

Gimme!

[iococoi]

Lost in Space (1998)

Quote

So Bad, It's Good Bad

 

[Crazing]

On 4/2/2024 at 10:05 AM, Squee said:

"Zero commercial prospects".

Gimme!

Adam driver kinda sucks. 

[prdctvsm]

 / 

[Mattthegoone]

American Fiction, i was a bit slow to the party on this one, loved it, great to see Jefffey Wright nail the lead role on his first big such film, kudos, best comedy I've seen in a good long while although it's not a genre of film I watch too often any more

 

[Rubin Farr]

Watered down remake, which was a product of its time; no ponytails or fake breasts, but there is man ass. Only Jake has any real charisma, it’s mostly bad actors and weird CG smear in the action scenes, like Scott Pilgrim. Then it gets mired in an episode of the week family drama. 

[Rubin Farr]

Going to check this out next week 

 

[Schlitze]

Stop posting trailers..it's tragic..everyone has the internet

The First Omen 7/10

[hello spiral]

On 3/8/2024 at 10:28 PM, zkom said:

I watched the Boxer's Omen, a 1983 Hong Kong occult film.

And this is the strangest movie I have seen in the last few years. It is fucking bonkers. You might think the trailer up there is some kind of collection of just the craziest scenes. No, I can assure you the movie is even crazier. Everything is so bizarre: the plot, the effects, the camera work, the rhythm of the movie, the sound design, the acting, the locations. And it barely has any quiet moments. It's just 1 hour 45 minutes of madness. Like a nightmare you would have after 4 days of binge drinking. I would imagine that if David Lynch and Terry Gilliam got together and took some acid and decided to make a kung-fu movie it would be something like this.

Rating: Flying severed tentacle head / 10.

 

I bought this on bluray about 6 years ago and afaik still sits sealed on a bookshelf with the rest of them. This might be a sign to crack it open.

[prdctvsm]

 

[usagi]

On 4/4/2024 at 6:11 PM, Mattthegoone said:

American Fiction, i was a bit slow to the party on this one, loved it, great to see Jefffey Wright nail the lead role on his first big such film, kudos, best comedy I've seen in a good long while although it's not a genre of film I watch too often any more

 

I also caught this recently and was unexpectedly charmed by it. I thought it'd be boring normie Hollywood comedy garbage but it was genuine and made me laugh out loud a few times. big credit to Jeffrey Wright who I've always liked, had it been someone else it might not have worked as well. similar shoutout to Sterling K Brown who I don't think I've really seen in anything else before.

[Rubin Farr]

John Waters’ first movie in 20 years 

[iococoi]

Quote

Don’t know what to watch? Let us choose! Over on @criterionchannl, we're trying something new: Click on Criterion24/7 and drop into a steady stream of must-see movies, any time you want.

[Silent Member]

On 4/3/2024 at 5:45 PM, iococoi said:

Lost in Space (1998)

 

I tried rewatching that not too long ago, just couldn't get through it. Big poo poo.

[may be rude]

civil war:

garland has gone public saying this could be his last film as a consequence of his experience dealing with people regarding it. i wouldn't want people getting in my face about it either. maybe he's telling people to fuck off and leave him alone.

i think the movie is great. 

the movie begs the question: what's the point of the movie? but i think most people will get the point of the movie. it has an oblique strategy. it doesn't pretend to tackle a broad or fancy story. it's a straightforward, limited tour through what an american civil war could look like. 

story, acting and characters were all good but it's really a wake up call to what people have been fucking with over here in the states. american democracy falling has some wild futures. americans go hard and they're nuts. didn't we do slavery like even harder, worse and longer than other countries at the time? like they had all stopped and we were still just leaning into maximum cruelty. we're fucking nuts over here. and the military is fucking insanely powerful. and info has power over that. that's why info is all fucked. and people's brains are fucked and a fascist is neck and neck with a great american president in the presidential race. 

definitely surrealist but also clarifies reality and leaves you mad that people are so careless and foolish as to risk allowing things to go so far.  

Edited April 13 by may be rude

[Alcofribas]

On 4/11/2024 at 10:20 PM, may be rude said:

garland has gone public saying this could be his last film as a consequence of his experience dealing with people regarding it. i wouldn't want people getting in my face about it either. maybe he's telling people to fuck off and leave him alone.

not so. you can read what he initially said about this here where he claimed he's focused on screenwriting and stepping back from directing "for the foreseeable future" bc it's stressful ("This is the deep sense of responsibility to cast and crew that “literally keeps me awake at night”. He is less burdened by the controversies that have been swirling around Civil War"). here he again clarified he's taking a break and "stressed that his comments have nothing to do with his feelings about how “Civil War” [...] played out."

anyway, i thought this movie was a very visceral and engrossing film (some truly excellent action scenes) with almost no substance whatsoever. like many of the trendy movies of our era, we are shown some problematic stuff without any analysis. this is the perfect movie of our time: a film about american civil war with zero politics, a total absence of anything but the most superficial points. there is no explanation, everything just is. i could of course be interested in such an ambivalent movie if it was interesting but i'm afraid this is kind of just a walking dead episode but...politics. 

in interviews with garland he's said he "wanted to put the press as heroes" of the film, yet the journalist heroes of the film are anything but. we're shown that they want to get to dc "first" to get an exclusive interview with the president (the president has not done an interview in 14 months and their plan is to go to dc and...? just go to the white house? or?). they spend the entire movie driving around, occasionally taking photos (two of the journalists actually don't do any journalism whatsoever, they're just driving around and looking at stuff? journalism must be to witness, privately), and basically doing nothing (dunst almost finishes uploading...something...to...where?). the clips we see of their journalism are just horrifying shots of conflict and death. there's no context for any of this other than "civil war" and there is no justification for why these journalists are special or heroic in any way. they are basically thrill-seeking cynics who are portrayed as having no impact on the situation of the war in any way. they follow fighters, snap a few pics, drive to next location. 

bc the war is in full effect from the start of the movie, we cannot even know what role the media is playing in the conflict. two random disparaging comments about the new york times and embedded journalism. if anything, i'd think the film is an indictment of journalists as totally aloof and uninvolved, with no sense of their responsibility other than to take photos of war. which is fine i guess but what is the point of this?

in the end we are treated to a series of contextless violence with no attempt to analyze how we got here or what we can do to get out of it. so maybe garland is being ironic when he says he wants to make the press heroes bc this contextless barrage of conflict images is everything wrong with the media. we are never told why anything happens, we are never given history, we are never allowed to see who is really responsible, we are presented with a version of reality that is meant to feel inescapable. this is true of both the media and garland's film.

 

Spoiler

to give a sense of how poorly written this movie is consider the final sequence. a militia is storming dc, intensely making their way to the white house to kill the president. dunst is almost catatonic undergoing some kind of traumatic breakdown. the young journalist who has barely managed to shoot a photo is suddenly leaping out into action getting the most kick ass journalism shots. out of nowhere, dunst snaps out of it and leads the journos to the white house. the militia follows them and they just walk into the white house. dunst is back in full journo mode. the militia is easily destroying the like 2 secret service men fighting them. the young journo literally leaps into the center of a gun battle and dunst leaps in front of her, pushes her to the ground, and is killed by gun fire. the militia walks into the oval office. the president is there. he's hiding behind his desk. in the oval office. at the white house. 

 

[Alcofribas]

one more thing i have to add about civil war that stuck with me

Spoiler

there is a scene of a black man being set on fire. it's unclear where this is supposed to be taking place but compared with the rest of the movie this seems like it's taking place in another country. the black man is set on fire by other black men. i think a movie about an american civil war that shows a slow motion image of a black man being set on fire by other black people in another country is a shockingly cowardly decision and really sums up how feckless garland is with this. 

 

[dr lopez]

thanks alco. feel absolutely no need to see this. wasn't going to do it before but now reading your post i can certify this as a 0% rotten on d-lo tomatoes.

 

Men was one of the worst movies i've ever seen

[dr lopez]

On 4/4/2024 at 3:11 AM, Mattthegoone said:

American Fiction, i was a bit slow to the party on this one, loved it, great to see Jefffey Wright nail the lead role on his first big such film, kudos, best comedy I've seen in a good long while although it's not a genre of film I watch too often any more

 

decent film that provided a few chuckles. Jeffery Wright is indeed a good actor but I enjoyed the affable but unscrupulous literary agent the most. Thought the white characters were completely broad and unserious, which I took to be a sort of not-so-subtle inversion of cinema's long racist history of black roles being dehumanized and existing as negative stereotypes (or the "magical negro" ofc) That is a fine directorial decision, but it sort of ruined the otherwise sensitive and nuanced feel of the film and unintentionally less funny.

 

Keith David remains a king, my other thought.

[J3FF3R00]

On 4/4/2024 at 12:11 AM, Mattthegoone said:

American Fiction, i was a bit slow to the party on this one, loved it, great to see Jefffey Wright nail the lead role on his first big such film, kudos, best comedy I've seen in a good long while although it's not a genre of film I watch too often any more

 

 

15 minutes ago, dr lopez said:

decent film that provided a few chuckles. Jeffery Wright is indeed a good actor but I enjoyed the affable but unscrupulous literary agent the most. Thought the white characters were completely broad and unserious, which I took to be a sort of not-so-subtle inversion of cinema's long racist history of black roles being dehumanized and existing as negative stereotypes (or the "magical negro" ofc) That is a fine directorial decision, but it sort of ruined the otherwise sensitive and nuanced feel of the film and unintentionally less funny.

 

Keith David remains a king, my other thought.

I really wanted to like this one. I thought the concept of the movie was brilliant (not a spoiler: black author having trouble selling his intellectual brand of fiction anonymously hate-writes a book based on white-guilt-fed “urban” stereotypes and fails up to massive acclaim, sorta a la The Producers, but unintentionally defying his own act of heart-felt protest) but the whole thing felt a bit loose in execution. Lots of unlikable characters in general except for his criminally underdeveloped female love interest. 
Granted, I’m also not normally a big Jeffrey Wright fan. 

[Alcofribas]

On 10/25/2023 at 8:55 AM, usagi said:

imma pass then tbh, I think this approach is ultimately a disservice to the viewer and to a better understanding of things generally.

i've been thinking about this little curtis convo for a few months now but haven't taken the time to really organize my thoughts. i don't intend to dive deep here but i do want to say that i think the "loose with the facts" criticism is quite overblown. i think there is a tendency to privilege a notion of an academic relationship to facts because his movies are "documentaries" which are popularly believed to be a kind of objective, historical medium. i see curtis' project differently. he is using the medium to tell stories, taking this massive archive of bbc footage to tell quite different versions of "reality" than that footage was ever meant to tell. naturally, he has to maintain a certain minimum friendliness to the bbc to be allowed to do this, which i think is reflected in his overall project in certain ways. 

my own feeling about his work is that he manages to diagnose and incriminate the power structures of the 20th century without ever making them feel like the only reality. the overall feeling at the end of one of his films is not helplessness, cynicism, or the feeling that power is unchangeable. he is able to lay out the massive corruption at the heart of power and the consistent failure of resistance while somehow also creating this mood where you somehow feel that nevertheless, these things actually aren't inescapable conditions of reality and that we can change this. i don't quite know how to describe how he does this. i think part of it is that he has this tendency (for which he is often criticized) of repeating these themes and examples of certain things that he will just leave open-ended. i think part of it is the way he uses musical motifs which create these eery moods over which he speaks in a frank and friendly way. i think part of this is also that he is using these objects of facts (archival footage) in a new way, creating something new from them. all this has an interesting psychological effect imo. 

i want to be clear i think he has a lot of the facts absolutely right and a lot of the criticisms i've encountered seem overstated and inappropriately academic. he is a popular filmmaker using the bbc to tell what for many viewers are radical stories about global power. to me, it's very cool stuff. the left needs more shit like this, without question. too much leftist art is either liberalism with radical feathers or dull, sanctimonious school lessons. a lot more people are going to become interested in radical thinking, or just possibly look beyond corporate propaganda, if they see movies like this than if they are given das kapital or whatever. i personally quite like his movies, they're thought-provoking, sincere (no idea what was meant by "stolen political posturing" itt), and really pack a lot of interesting history and ideas into an enjoyable, flowing narrative. 

i also think he's a funny guy. for several years now he's talked about how the age of individualism is an error, how collective movements have been corrupted by it, how the most "radical" thing you could do today is experience and do things without telling the world...and this mofo is out there making 8 hour films where he just riffs his ideas about society and culture. gotta love it