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Through a Glass Darkly I was thinking about how Karin's visions connect to the view of God Svidrigailov has in C&P quote:We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? but then I thought https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d37AmMw1x-o&t=9s
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Dec 29, 2022 07:14
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Emily the Criminal—6/10: Fine little crime movie, Aubrey Plaza is quite good in it. Weirdly low on tension throughout, and pretty predictable. John Wick—6/10: Very late to this. Turns out I just don’t care that much about the aesthetics of action scenes, and that’s basically all there is here. Keanu Reeves does not do a very good job acting in this movie. The hotel concept is fun. smug n stuff fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Dec 29, 2022 |
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Dec 29, 2022 15:35
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His Girl Friday I wish I could hold a gun to the head of every contemporary director and force them to watch this so we can get dialogue in a movie that doesn't totally suck rear end again. Cary Grants character is such a shithead in this movie, but Rosalind Russel's fiance is such a loving dweeb that you end up fully supporting the man in gaslighting the gently caress out of her until she runs back to him. Very impressive
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Dec 30, 2022 03:11
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Glass Onion (2022) it was fun in the first half but the exposition overload in the second was too much, and the funny catchphrases weren’t funny and were instantly overused. Honestly would love Johnson to return to his roots making dour genre pastiches, Brick is still easily his best work
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Dec 30, 2022 07:44
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Gaius Marius posted:His Girl Friday I wish I could hold a gun to the head of every contemporary director and force them to watch this so we can get dialogue in a movie that doesn't totally suck rear end again. Cary Grants character is such a shithead in this movie, but Rosalind Russel's fiance is such a loving dweeb that you end up fully supporting the man in gaslighting the gently caress out of her until she runs back to him. Very impressive Yes!! The scene early on in the office is some of the best comic dialogue ever. “You’ve got an old-fashioned idea of divorce!”
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Dec 30, 2022 15:01
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In the last week I’ve seen The Whale (4.5/5) which was maybe the most horrowing movie I’ve ever seen, Glass Onion (4/5) which I liked more than Knives Out, Amsterdam (3/5) pretty good overall but they could have cut an hour from the film and lost nothing, The Menu (3.5/5) which I enjoyed but not as much as I thought I would form the horror thread reviews and Puss in Boots (5/5) which was way way better than I was expecting. It was a pretty good week 
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Dec 30, 2022 15:55
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White Noise hit all my happy movie buttons. It's like Woody Allen without the ick of Woody Allen. If I could do it over I'd be a little stoned.
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Dec 31, 2022 01:44
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Trans-Europ-Express There's some connection between bondage and movie making both involving control and capture of a living person going on here, but the movie is either too clumsy to pull it off well or too clumsy for me to want to analyze it to that level. Robbe-Grillet worked a lot better as a part of a team than he does as a solo act.
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Dec 31, 2022 05:19
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Lesson Plan (2022) on Netflix. I didn't know Poland had a Baltimore.
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Dec 31, 2022 23:24
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Carillon posted:Doing a mini-movie festival here at our house. Started yesterday with: In the followup day we did: Late Spring: Pretty amazing. I loved the 'slice-of-life' approach. It's so beautifully shot. Very hard ending for me, it feels like she's been fully erased, and in part because she's not even in the final scene! Marriage is compared to a graveyard, and it really does feel like death. The only people still 'alive' at the end are the divorcee and the widower who lied about a marriage to get her off. I'm not certain how Ozu intended the film to be read, but I found it very compelling. 2001: A Space Odyssey: Just fun. Kubrick really doesn't seem to believe in exposition, which I'm on board with, so you have to put the pieces together yourself. I'm I think in the minority here of not loving the 'stargate' sequences, I think it's too long and doesn't hold my attention. That very much could be because I'm at home and it plays better on the big screen. My partner really liked that though, so perhaps its more a me problem than a display issue. Taxi Driver: Fine? I didn't hate it by any stretch, and thought there was some interesting choices made by the script. Overall it wouldn't work as well as it does if it wasn't being made by a team who all seem to be at the top of their game. The taxi drivers and their interactions together were the stuff I enjoyed the most, his obsession with Cybil Shepherd and then weird assassination attempt on Palantine not as much. At lot just felt pointless? Which is maybe the point, but idk. 8 1/2: Solid, but confirms I don't tend to love dream sequences or semi-magical realism type narratives. The whole film is also about a breakdown, though clearly very different than Taxi Driver. A lot of self-inflicted wounds here, but I guess part of that is he's in a rut and trying to break free. Happy to have seen it, but maybe it'll take another watch to understand where the brilliance others have found lies.
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Jan 1, 2023 03:13
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Carillon posted:In the followup day we did: May be an insufficient bongrips issue, frankly.
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Jan 1, 2023 05:05
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Carillon posted:In the followup day we did: Breetai posted:May be an insufficient bongrips issue, frankly. Carillon posted:In the followup day we did: I Wanna Dance with Somebody The cat who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody wrote this, which should tell you everything you need to know about the level of quality to expect in the writing. What it doesn't tell you is some of the absolutely bizarre directorial decisions, like undermining her Anthem performance by shooting CGI planes and people clapping at the TV instead of just using real footage or at least recreating it with the actress, using way more shaky handheld footage before she becomes addicted, never actually explaining when she first got into drugs, having a fifth of the movie dedicated to her producer. Tons of terrible choices...but it also has like 40 minutes of Whitney singing and her story even poorly told is powerful enough to affect me.
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Jan 1, 2023 08:06
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Breetai posted:May be an insufficient bongrips issue, frankly. Haha that definitely explains why they liked it more then. Gaius Marius posted:Have you seen Pickpocket? It's the rossetta stone for everything Schrader has ever wrote. I haven't, I saw Schrader's First Reformed and really enjoyed that one. It touched on the dispair of the world about things beyond our control, but had an interesting approach. I also didn't really appreciate Raging Bull, so maybe I'm a late Schrader fan.
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Jan 1, 2023 09:19
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Dancing on Glass (2022) on Netflix. A pretty good ballet movie. It's hard to enjoy ballet, knowing what a meat grinder it is. Having a literal murder in the middle of a performance is almost too on the nose. It's an interesting look at the line between having to make sacrifices to achieve greatness vs physical and psychological abuse, especially since the girls' families are lovely in their own ways, and many of the criticisms of the dance industry could also be said about modern hyper-capitalistic work cultism. There's a lot of manipulation that's very real to life. Like how they are being pressured to make sacrifices by someone who is using them up like Kleenex to fulfill their own ambition. Reminds me of the episode of Friday the 13th: the TV Series where a choreographer utilizes a demonic music box that makes people dance themselves to death, which in turn reminds me of various folklore where people are compelled to dance themselves to death. Now I'm going down a rabbit hole. The music was good too.
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Jan 1, 2023 09:43
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Babylon The grand bacchanal scenes are great, and the whole stew of themes it has going on with film, and memory, and what Hollywood is is great. But it lacks a sort of cohesion to pull you through the film. Its lack of principal protagonist and consistent timescale forces it to lurch along in stops and starts. Still great though, one of the better movies I've seen this year.
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Jan 2, 2023 01:37
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White Noise - I should love this but instead I found it incredibly annoying. Don't write dialogue like this 4/10
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Jan 2, 2023 05:50
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Mantis42 posted:White Noise - I should love this but instead I found it incredibly annoying. Don't write dialogue like this 4/10 I agree, but apparently it's a nearly straight-up adaptation of a book (that I'd never heard of), and people who hated the book found the "your wife has important hair" line insufferable whereas I thought it was really funny in the movie. There were 15-20 minutes of insightful satire embedded in a repetitive 2+ hour slog.
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Jan 2, 2023 06:29
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Mantis42 posted:White Noise - I should love this but instead I found it incredibly annoying. Don't write dialogue like this 4/10 It's just a matter of taste, not a matter of 'don't do this'. The film is getting a lot of flack about the dialogue but it doesn't mean it shouldn't have used the style, it's just not for everybody. I thought the dialogue was funny and worked when it turned more serious, too. In fact, I liked it because of the style. Fiction doesn't need to represent everyday or established speech. Do you have the same feeling about Wes Anderson, or Hal Hartley films? Because they have a dialogue style very similar to this. I thought White Noise was really good all the way through. I do not understand the word slog applied to this film, it's so varied as it moves through its sections. Pretty much the only part I was a little disinterested in was the stuff set in the university, but even that had a good climax in the Hitler-Elvis seminar, but you have to be keyed in to what that whole thing is about. roomtone fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Jan 2, 2023 |
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Jan 2, 2023 06:39
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I mostly like Wes Anderson, but I think he's devolved into self parody with The French Dispatch. I don't think the dialogue is similar, it's more like watching four Woody Allens at the same time or something. I get what it was going for but I found it obnoxious, outside of a few gags that landed.
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Jan 2, 2023 06:54
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roomtone posted:I thought White Noise was really good all the way through. I do not understand the word slog applied to this film, it's so varied as it moves through its sections. Pretty much the only part I was a little disinterested in was the stuff set in the university, but even that had a good climax in the Hitler-Elvis seminar, but you have to be keyed in to what that whole thing is about. Being in academia, I found those parts most amusing, but like everything else it just started to wear thin. The settings and tone vary but the characters and dialogue style remain the same (fast-paced quips and overlapping conversations merging into a white noise murmur got aggravating) and after a while it just felt like watching dozens of absurd comedy sketches in a row with more or less the same setup and punchline.
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Jan 2, 2023 07:01
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White Noise (2022) pretty interesting, maybe the most arch movie I’ve ever seen. I grew up with a professor father and being around his professor friends so the satire definitely hit. Maybe that’s why I more enjoyed the back half of the film when there was less of that dialogue coming out of the mouths of children. Great credits sequence, one of the best I’ve seen even if baimbach did rip himself off from Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)
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Jan 2, 2023 07:08
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Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, I backed into this one via a Hikaru Utada song and knew about Bowie but wasn't expecting Beat Takeshi. I didn't feel like I understood the captain's motivation all that well. Was it as simple as a super bro crush, or did he scry Celliers' shame somehow and see his own reflection there?
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Jan 2, 2023 07:22
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eXXon posted:Being in academia, I found those parts most amusing, but like everything else it just started to wear thin. The settings and tone vary but the characters and dialogue style remain the same (fast-paced quips and overlapping conversations merging into a white noise murmur got aggravating) and after a while it just felt like watching dozens of absurd comedy sketches in a row with more or less the same setup and punchline. There was a strong throughline in the film of examining how people avoid their inherent fear of death through any appealing method. So you have the academic distancing via pop cultural analysis, talking about how when you are part of a crowd you can drown your own fear and get swept up in a collective, you've got natural disasters making it real rather than theoretical, you've got relationships, religion and medication as at least partially failed solutions/distractions, along with all forms of inquiry and culture. Pretty much the whole movie was just taking funny or sad looks at this from different angles, moving from section to section into different genres while the characters preoccupations remain the same because it's all basically about a fear of death, or a denial of that fear. At least that's what I thought, and that's why it had me. I don't think theme is enough to hang a movie on, or even necessary, but I was ready to roll with the style of dialogue no problem so it didn't get in the way, and I liked how it allowed characters to be verbose about things because it's more complex an idea than it seems at first, which makes sense since this is all boiled down from a book which I'm now likely to read soon. Actually come to think of it, the verbosity is all part of the distraction the characters are creating for themselves. So you took it as sort of, a series of jokes on the same topic, and yeah that is part of what it is, but I thought that was a strength because the jokes are about different parts of that topic. But I suppose you have to be interested in the topic at the time you watch the film. Not for everyone, that's fine. I just don't like the idea of people dismissing the film with 'annoying dialogue!' as if it didn't actually have anything going on, when it did. roomtone fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Jan 2, 2023 |
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Jan 2, 2023 07:26
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roomtone posted:There was a strong throughline in the film of examining how people avoid their inherent fear of death through any appealing method. Yea I got that, it's pretty upfront about the themes. If it was written by Charlie Kaufman it might have been more up my alley.
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Jan 2, 2023 07:31
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Resurrection: (with a Men (2022) spoiler) What with this and Men, 2022 was a pretty good year for mpreg. Anyway, loved the look and vibe of this one, glad they went all the way with the baby actually being in there. Not sure just yet what the final shot is supposed to be though, was expecting something to happen as it was giving off that 'fake happy ending' feel. Beautifully shot film, annoying that it never got a theatrical release in the UK, but snapped it up on Blu-ray as everyone in the horror thread was raving about it. And that monologue was 
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Jan 2, 2023 08:44
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watched this place rules, the new jan 6 doc from andrew callahan. it was okay. mostly just vox pops of drunk or crazy people. i suppose there's humour in this if you're a gleeful crackpinger but to me it was just a kind of depressing barrage of poo poo with no real catharsis. roomtone fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Jan 3, 2023 |
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Jan 3, 2023 04:40
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A Man Escaped Perfect
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Jan 3, 2023 05:42
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the souvenir part 2 i'm not really sympathetic to the main character in this, because she is a weak personality who gets buffeted along in her film school career purely due to privilege. the film presents this as matter of fact and that's the right way to do it, but it doesn't make me care. it's autobiographical. there are men who undermine her at points. i thought part 1 was decent, but also fairly boring. in part 2 though, especially at the climax, it does feel like things get very obvious in the way ayoade's character mentioned. she goes into the surreal depths with her junkie boyfriend, he dies, she leaves and starts running through the fields back towards life. the last shot of the movie is of the movie being made. everything is self-rerential. layers. but so what. i dunno, this just feels like something for the filmmaker themselves rather than something i can connect with very much. it had some scenes with interesting conversation and the process of watching film students work and argue at least interested me, because i've got that experience, but these are surface level things. it never hit me emotionally. roomtone fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Jan 4, 2023 |
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Jan 4, 2023 03:04
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Banshees of Inisherin - This loving ruled. I've always liked McDonagh's writing style but always had somewhat mixed feelings about his films overall, not here. This is his full maturation as a storyteller and his best film yet. 10/10
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Jan 4, 2023 22:46
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Brooklyn Great first half, watching Saorise adapt to America and fall in love with the Italian was great, back half was weaker, at least I never felt a real belief that she would ever actually stay there, and the plot device to crack her Irish illusions was a little hamfisted.
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Jan 5, 2023 04:48
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Babylon - the frankenstein's monster of rise-and-fall narratives Damien, the proud geek: "cinephilia is a sickness. you are all vulgarians. but then so am I." Gaius Marius posted:A Man Escaped Perfect
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Jan 5, 2023 16:06
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Soft & Quiet - I need to lay down.
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Jan 5, 2023 16:33
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I think it's already been mentioned but Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is actually really loving good and better than any expectation I had, especially for a DreamWorks movie. And the design of the Big Bad Wolf genuinely terrifying for a kids film.
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Jan 5, 2023 16:43
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My first couple of movies of 2023: Howl's Moving Castle: I've seen this before of course but recently read the kid's book it was based on and wanted to compare the two. It's actually wild how different they are - the war that the movie's plot is wholly based around isn't in the book at all! Overall I like the book a bit better, but the movie is really striking, and, of course, beautiful. 2001: A Space Odyssey: I promise I'm not just copying user Carrilon here - my local rep theater is doing a series of "art-house sci-fi" (missed eXistenZ yesterday because I had to do work, boo), and showed 2001 in 35mm. Hadn't actually seen (all of) it before - I watched the first 30 minutes in high school and fell asleep. Incredible moviegoing experience! I feel like the general, pop-culture discourse about why this movie is so classic doesn't focus enough on the sound, besides, like, Also sprach Zarathustra. So, so cool, especially the use of the Ligetti stuff. My wife had to cover her ears during the encounter with the monolith on the moon, before the shrieking at the end of the scene.
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Jan 5, 2023 17:29
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smug n stuff posted:2001: A Space Odyssey: I promise I'm not just copying user Carrilon here - my local rep theater is doing a series of "art-house sci-fi" (missed eXistenZ yesterday because I had to do work, boo), and showed 2001 in 35mm. Hadn't actually seen (all of) it before - I watched the first 30 minutes in high school and fell asleep. Incredible moviegoing experience! I feel like the general, pop-culture discourse about why this movie is so classic doesn't focus enough on the sound, besides, like, Also sprach Zarathustra. So, so cool, especially the use of the Ligetti stuff. My wife had to cover her ears during the encounter with the monolith on the moon, before the shrieking at the end of the scene. It's soooo good on film. I got to see it that way on an imax screen a while back and it was awesome. A fun fact about the classical music is that all of it was actually placeholders, they were gonna do a fully original soundtrack but Kubrick liked it so much he kept it
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Jan 5, 2023 17:48
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smug n stuff posted:My first couple of movies of 2023: Oh man! I saw it at home, so jealous you got to see it on the big screen!
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Jan 5, 2023 19:52
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Licorice Pizza - Love PTA's character work and direction but it's a little meandering for me. Was this shot on film? It looks like a real movie. 7/10 e: Was Gary's mom supposed to be rich or something, where the gently caress did a 15 year old get the money for a waterbed/pinball business? Mantis42 fucked around with this message at 23:18 on Jan 5, 2023 |
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Jan 5, 2023 23:06
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Mantis42 posted:Licorice Pizza - Love PTA's character work and direction but it's a little meandering for me. Was this shot on film? It looks like a real movie. 7/10 Shot on 35 if I remember correctly.
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Jan 5, 2023 23:44
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Gary’s a child star.
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Jan 6, 2023 00:25
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I didn't get the impression that he was that successful, but then I guess this is the era when the boomers could get a college education for the price of a circa 2022 big Mac.
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Jan 6, 2023 00:48
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