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The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) what a great movie, Miyazaki doesn’t miss. Makes me want to drive around Europe in a tiny Fiat.
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Apr 28, 2023 12:55
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Jenny Agutter posted:The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) what a great movie, Miyazaki doesn’t miss. Makes me want to drive around Europe in a tiny Fiat. Great movie
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Apr 28, 2023 14:35
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A Man Called Otto: grumpy hanks is fun, and wisely the filmmakers realized that even angry Tom Hanks can’t be mean to children. Lots of boomer humor in this and it’s a bit too long. Watch it for Hanks on a plane where you don’t have to pay attention to all of it as you know where it’s going anyways. Also this might the first pro HoA I’ve seen.
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Apr 30, 2023 01:49
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Valley of the Dolls: https://youtu.be/aGFNGH9jHyM
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Apr 30, 2023 04:54
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Saw the French underground moto stunt riding drama Rodeo at the very nice Curzon Soho in London (excellent auditorium and screen, at least compared to my local Cineworld, though the ticket price does reflect this). It's a film following a young woman who joins a motorbike gang, and the lengths she goes to to be accepted as one of them. Hard to believe the lead actress is a first time non-professional (apparently the director found her on Instagram where she posts videos of her own stunt riding) along with nearly all of the cast, who acquitted themselves well. Some fantastic shots of real riders riding bikes fast. I'd heard about it from Mark Kemode's review, and I'm glad I caught it while I'm down in London - the cinematography looked amazing on the big screen, and although shot digitally had lots of lovely grain (which I'm assuming was a post processing filter), so along with the fantastic engine foley it's really worth seeing on the big screen if you can.
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Apr 30, 2023 15:33
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Carpet posted:Saw the French underground moto stunt riding drama Rodeo at the very nice Curzon Soho in London (excellent auditorium and screen, at least compared to my local Cineworld, though the ticket price does reflect this). This made me look up when it was opening in the US, and it looks like it opened and closed after a week last month with no fanfare. Indie distribution in the US loving sucks.
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Apr 30, 2023 15:45
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Reservoir Dogs: Huh, what a bunch of dumb assholes. Also ACAB. I might have liked it better as a stage play. Wouldn't take much rewriting. Actually, take the same plot, set it in 1930, give them better hats, and film it in B&W. This is basically classic noir as done by a 90's edgelord.
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Apr 30, 2023 16:11
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Black Lighter posted:This made me look up when it was opening in the US, and it looks like it opened and closed after a week last month with no fanfare. Indie distribution in the US loving sucks. Well even in the UK it's mostly limited to the Curzon cinema chain, plus a few of the regional arts centres that have also have a cinema screen.
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Apr 30, 2023 16:34
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poo poo I saw this past week: The Great Escape - Comparing this to A Man Escaped which I saw for the first time last year, you can really see the difference between classic Hollywood and classic Euro cinema. They're both ostensibly about the same subject: true world stories about escaping the Nazis, with a focus on the procedure of escape, and yet they approach their films in such different manners. The Bresson film reflects the subjectivity of it's protagonist: it's so minimalist and stark, there's nothing for you to focus on but the task at hand. The Hollywood flick, on the other hand, is a bombastic, boy-ish adventure story, that almost makes digging your way out of a POW camp seem like a good time. Well, up until that ending. It's a genre picture that's still full of great characters and intelligent setpieces, the kind of movie that makes you understand what Tarantino meant when he said people used to go to Hollywood for a good story. And it's true, just as the age of serialized TV that drags it's plots out to keep you binge watching has made me realized just how much talent it takes to write an episode of something Law & Order or Gunsmoke or any of those old shows where you actually had to tell a complete story, 20 times a season, a movie like this makes you realize the value of the straight story told well. And, gently caress, that cast. It's the Avengers for all the people your boomer dad thinks is cool. That motorcycle stunt. God they don't make em like this anymore. Tale of Zatoichi - So I started watching the Zatoichi series this week. The blind swordsman trope has been done so many times (including by Donnie Yen in this year's John Wick 4!) that it's interesting to see how accurate my preconceptions of the character were. For one, he's not even a Samurai! He's a massage therapist, who sometimes kills people on the side. Also he's a sentimental guy, even moreso than the Sentimental Swordsman. Every movie has some demure little lady falling in love with him but he can't be with because yada yada yada Demon Path To Hell, and a guy he has to kill but doesn't want to. There's a lot of pathos to these movies so far. Hell his name isn't even Zatoichi, it's just Ichi, like Frankenstein's Monster. So I was pretty surprised. I guess I was expecting something closer to the Lone Wolf and Cub series. I probably would have liked that a bit better, tbh, some really gory hack and slash action thriller. I'm 6 movies into this series right now and while they tend to have decent climaxes and I like the central character, there's a whole lot of these movies that's just Yakuza guys sitting around in tea houses going "There's no way Ichi will wiggle his way out of THIS one!". And the swordfights aren't that great. They're getting better but it's still the early 60s, action choreography is still a new concept. And there's no blood, so that sucks. Maybe when I'm finished I'll rank the entire series but there isn't much to comment on on most of these. Evil Dead Rise Might be the worst of the series, but it's got nice production design, some cool shots (if you like split diopters you're going to love this) and plenty of blood. The script is smart about having a lot of set up and payoffs, but like with the 2013 remake I won't be remembering any of these characters after too long. The appeal of Evil Dead isn't the scares, it's partly the gore, but a large portion of it is seeing Bruce Campbell do Three Stooges gags with Deadites. And as long as these spinoffs, reboots or whatever don't have that they're never going to feel like true Evil Dead to me. Scott Pilgrim Vs The World - This came out when I was a teenager and as a gamer geek maybe I should have been the target audience but ehh even back then I saw things like the tagline "An Epic Epic of Epicness", the use of video game references and all that nerd poo poo... it just reminded me of the kind of people who say "squee" unironically, wear Invader Zim or Undertale shirts, that sort of thing. And this movie is basically what would happen if Tumblr wrote a Kickassia! sequel. But it actually works, it's not cringe, and that's a miracle of filmmaking in and of itself. I don't love it, I don't relate to Scott and I don't think he has much chemistry with Ramona (he should have ended alone tbh), but it's entertaining and even pretty charming. Guess I should have given it a try earlier.
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May 1, 2023 05:47
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Mantis42 posted:poo poo I saw this past week: I saw this and The Guns of Navarone so much as a kid. Awesome movie.
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May 1, 2023 07:39
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Mantis42 posted:poo poo I saw this past week: Been wanting to rewatch The Great Escape for a minute now. Such a great flick. Also I appreciate that the end of Scott Pilgrim to be a little less than optimistic - Scott is a heavily flawed character that might as easily end up as another ex to Ramona, but at least he's starting to own up to having been an immature dickhead in his relationships.
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May 1, 2023 13:00
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Tommy Boy : granted this is a rewatch but I'm struck by just how many of Farley's jokes are about him being an oaf and how many of Spade's jokes are about Farley's weight. Spade's character is the perfect uptight Type A personality for the more free spirited Farley, who basically plays Bluto from Animal House. But at the same time there's still this real Goofy charm, like Dan Akyrod doing his best Chicago accent, Rob Lowe as the handsome but also stupid bad guy, Bo Derrick who is in this movie for really one joke that references "10" and then not given much to do, Brian Dennehy who sells the loveable Small Businessman and Good Dad so well it makes you root for Callaghan Auto after he passes. It's a solid 3/5 even 20+ years later which a lot of 90s comedies don't come close to
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May 1, 2023 13:46
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I also don't recall any blatant homophobia/transphobia or other unfortunate poo poo unlike a lot of comedies from around the same time. It's still a fun watch.
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May 1, 2023 14:01
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Apocalypse Now Copying from Genchat thread: Finally watched Apocalypse Now and wow it’s awesome. I went with the theatrical version as shorter run time was more appealing at the moment. The whole thing is this crazy dream up the river before a giant Brando reads poems in a castle full of decapitated heads. Guess I’ll need to check out the Final Cut at some point.
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May 3, 2023 03:34
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How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022) A fictional crime thriller based on the non-fiction environmentalist book. The movie is split between the heist material and the group getting together—cutting back and forth between them—with the latter focusing on philosophical conversations inspired by the book about why one should blow up a pipeline. It's solid as a thriller, and the characters are interestingly varied and well-acted, even if the movie never goes all that deep on them as people. A good watch if you're at all sympathetic to its political viewpoint.
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May 3, 2023 05:47
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Ponniyin Selvan: I Fantastic Indian epic. A trusted soldier in the Chola princes army must race across the empire while avoiding potential coup plotters and rebel armies to try and figure out what the hell is going on with the plot to cut the princes out of the succession and to get word to the princess and the emperor. Great fight choreography, very twisted and double dealing politics with spies and double agents everywhere, religious debates that I fully don't understand the implications of, gorgeous shots of the scenery and some nice looking buildings. I even liked the musical interludes. The only detriment is some awful, Rome Total War level cgi. Which isn't that huge a detriment for most of the film where it's used just for some background work, and then it all goes to poo poo in the climactic final fight on a ship. A CGI ship, that's breaking up, with a CGI storm raging around it. Yeah, it's pretty bad and leaves you with of a bad taste in the mouth after everything else was so good. Glad, I'm gonna get the chance to see the second part in theatres.
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May 3, 2023 10:16
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SISU - Not getting tired of these John Wick-esque "Feared legend kills a bunch of dudes" [this time with Nazis] movies anytime soon. poo poo went hard. Final 2 minutes were a reach though. Evil Dead Rise - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rpp1-8q2EM Sir Kodiak posted:How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022) The fact this movie was deemed "dangerous" enough to trigger FBI warnings shoots it right to the top of my MOTY list.
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May 3, 2023 14:55
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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) This was pretty good and leaps above the low bar set by the previous cinematic attempts with D&D. It's got a good feel for the game without being too beholden to it, with the high-fantasy stuff taken as a given and the plot building on top of it. It's not "oh my god, there exists such a thing as an evil wizard," but digs into a specific evil wizard doing specific things that characters entirely familiar with the concept of an evil wizard respond to within the context of a setting where that sort of stuff happens. The technical filmmaking is just okay for a production at this scale, with some rough CGI in places, fight scenes that get across what happens but without much style, and generally just-okay visuals. That Avengers jank of a writer just trying to get their words on screen without much thought as to the look of a movie. In this case, with the exception of some wonderful practical creatures that a lot of care obviously went into. And I did like the writing, which walks the line between snark and sincerity better than most. And the cast is game, though Sophia Lillis is left notably short on the character front compared to the others. A must-see if you have affection for the source material, and a solid fantasy-comedy in the vein of The Mummy (1999) or Guardians of the Galaxy otherwise. Nightmare Cinema posted:The fact this movie was deemed "dangerous" enough to trigger FBI warnings shoots it right to the top of my MOTY list. Yeah, if I were to go based on politics, it's my favorite movie I've seen in quite a while. Been a decade since I saw a movie argue that property destruction is acceptable to save the environment and I hope it's not another decade to the next one.
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May 5, 2023 03:12
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Elevator to the Gallows Second go around and this motherfucking kid in the jacket is absolutely my least favorite character in film, or one of them at least. Just an absolute loving poseur motherfucker who ruins everything for everyone because of his pathetic, weak willed nature. The Color of Pomegranates Beautiful
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May 5, 2023 03:19
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Skin of the Wolf - This is how every jackass with a $70,000 pickup truck and a rifle imagines themselves, but the only resemblance is the relentless misogyny. This movie expresses a lot without much dialogue, which is good because the less this guy talks the better. Spain is absurdly beautiful.
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May 5, 2023 04:43
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Star Wars: A New Hope: Watched for the first time because a local theater decided to put it on as a "May the Fourth" event. I had seen Episodes II and III as a kid, but never any of the originals. It was fun, but I was surprised a little by how spare the film was when it came to characterization and also by how sudden the transition from Leia's prison escape to becoming rebel fighter pilots was. Certainly delivered in terms of classic derring-do. It was also cool to spot the influence of all kinds of genre movies (my friend who came with me said his parents told him they didn't like the movie when it came out because it reminded them of westerns, which they didn't like).
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May 5, 2023 05:46
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Ad Astra was finally in the mood for it. Good stuff, reminded me of Asimov and other classic sci fi. We need more sci fi set in near future solar system space! I want clunky space ships that are sort of futuristic but still tangibly close to our tech. Moon rovers go brrrrooommm (muted). I loved the first 2/3rds and tbh was more loving the episodic quest line levels BRAD was playing through more than the overall storytime. So overall I liked it and am a sucker for that kind of thing. Didn't like the obviously studio mandated voice overs.
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May 5, 2023 14:48
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Dead Ringers (1988) I’ve still got some big gaps in my Cronenberg watchlist (mostly later stuff like History of Violence, Crimes of the Future, Crash, etc), but of all the ones I’ve seen so far this one may end up being an unexpected stealth Top 3. Need to let it sit in my brain for a few more days, but I kinda loved it. Jeremy Irons is great as the twins and the light-for-Cronenberg visceral horror is used really effectively for how sparse it is in the movie.
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May 6, 2023 11:05
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Airport Airport '75 Airport '77 It's really difficult to tell how well these hold up because I just can't watch them with a straight face. I wasn't always certain what parts were intended to be a joke. It's more like a game of spot what was parodied.
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May 6, 2023 22:10
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Surely you can’t be serious?
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May 6, 2023 22:12
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Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was pretty good, but mostly made me think about how lovely being a preteen girl must be, not just in 1970 but in every year, everywhere, always.
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May 7, 2023 00:01
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Buttchocks posted:Airport I'll only spoil one moment, because the whole thing has to be seen to be believed, but it's a doozy: someone shoots a heat-seeking missile at the Concorde, so George Kennedy pulls a loop-de-loop at Mach 2 and leans out of the cockpit window to fire a flare gun as a decoy. It works!  "You pilots are such... men!" "They don't call it a cockpit for nothing!"
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May 7, 2023 00:52
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Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3 - Mixed on it. Had some teeth not typically seen in the MCU (as well as visuals that actually looked pretty good / finished), but it suffers the same dragged out 2nd act issues / bloated 3rd act involving giant thing blowing up in the sky that's super played out by now. Better than the 2nd one at least.
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May 7, 2023 15:41
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After Yang (2021) A24 sci-fi drama about a childcare robot that breaks down, the family coping with that loss, and the family patriarch investigating the robot's history as part of his effort to get it repaired. The sci-fi elements largely exist to give a way to literalize what might have been metaphorical in a story about death and loss—rather than discovering the journal of someone who passed, they can literally pull his memories from his heart; rather than the robot falling for a woman who reminds him of someone he knew who died, she's a clone—but I appreciated how low-key the worldbuilding is, just letting you take it in as it comes up. A solid film about how making a servant dedicated to caring for others ends up making someone superior to humanity, for a surprisingly positive story about the potential for our technology. Currently free on Tubi.
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May 7, 2023 19:41
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Nightmare Cinema posted:Better than the 2nd one at least. I'm the exact opposite. 2 is easily the best and 3 is the worst, far too dour ino
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May 7, 2023 22:15
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Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: yeah okay so that happened. It was fun to hear the quote from Sublime's cover of "Smoke Two Joints". Main character's UK accent slipped out a few times.
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May 7, 2023 22:48
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Suzume - what a fantastic looking film, so many nice little touches with the animation, landscapes, and background details, and the audience I saw it with was well into it. Ended up blind buying Weathering With You on Blu-ray for a fiver after seeing it. Return to Seoul - another fantastic looking film, with a great central performance from Park Ji-Min in her first acting role ever. The first half of the film was what I was expecting from the trailer (which I saw about three times before other films last week) and while the second half went in a slightly different direction, I was still entirely on board for it.
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May 7, 2023 22:57
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Carpet posted:Suzume - what a fantastic looking film, so many nice little touches with the animation, landscapes, and background details, and the audience I saw it with was well into it. Ended up blind buying Weathering With You on Blu-ray for a fiver after seeing it. Suzume - a movie in which an oblivious high schooler tries to get in with one half of a college age gay couple. It really is gorgeous though, and I think I prefer it to Weathering with You. WwY has a very odd ending the protag basically destroys Tokyo, which feels really off putting.
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May 8, 2023 00:36
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Mantis42 posted:I'm the exact opposite. 2 is easily the best and 3 is the worst, far too dour ino Absolutely and a lot of that comes down to the villain. High evolutionary was kinda meh, and kicking around a bunch of cute animals like in 3 is a cheap and lazy way to get heat on a character, but "it broke my heart to put that tumour in my head* in 2 was amazing and got a bunch of audible gasps and one full volume "you motherfucker" in the theatre I was in.
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May 8, 2023 01:36
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The first two films were just better paced and had a stronger balance of tones, even if they did do the Marvel thing of undercutting some of the serious moments. But in 3 the comedy is even more out of place because it comes so infrequently and isn't very funny. It feels like studio notes almost. I didn't hate GotG3, but it's the worst one. OTOH it was the last Marvel movie I was ever interested in watching so there is a massive feeling of relief and freedom.
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May 8, 2023 02:20
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The Card Counter Robert Bresson's Sydney. A film that somehow is lesser than the various films it takes inspiration from, and yet is greater than the sum of it's component parts. The way they shoot the casinos and small towns is absolutely hideous, but in a way that evokes specific sense memories of driving down those same sad roads and walking down inert halls. Bill Tell is almost comical in how much of a schraderian sad man, but Issac plays him with enough pathos that his internality comes across; a man too guilty to live and to guilty to kill himself. The score can be a little overpowering and doesn't quite work the way that I'm sure Schrader intended e.g in his own Pickpocket scene, and Tye Sheridan felt totally aimless and not in the way the character was supposed to feel. Overall pretty good.
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May 8, 2023 03:29
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I haven’t seen 3 yet but I find that Gunn has a really hard time balancing the tones in his films. The only one that I feel gets it right is GOTG2. When they’re not working his jokes land with such a deadened thud, it’s like watching a standup bomb on stage (Thor 4 unfortunately fell victim to the exact same thing).
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May 8, 2023 03:29
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Sir Kodiak posted:
First Reformed almost does something similar but I thought it didn't go far enough
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May 8, 2023 03:38
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Dr. Yinz Ljubljana posted:First Reformed almost does something similar but I thought it didn't go far enough That movie isn't so much about ecoterrorism as it is man vs. religion, so it works fine as just the saison.
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May 8, 2023 16:37
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Nightmare Cinema posted:That movie isn't so much about ecoterrorism as it is man vs. religion, so it works fine as just the saison. Which is why I wish the priest had blown up the oil executive at the end
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May 8, 2023 19:35
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