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Post by Jay on Oct 31, 2019 13:40:22 GMT -8
I decided to partake in some seasonal content, but the pickings were somewhat slim, so I queued up a lesser, earlier Romero flick in The Crazies (1973).
Romero has that weird mish-mash of sensibilities in that he's drawn to the gore of horror films, but also can use them to make subtler social commentary. In this case, the basic premise is that a plane carrying a biological weapon has crashed in rural western Pennsylvania (where else?) and now the military is coming in for clean-up. The trick-- or "Trixie" as the agent is named-- in this case is that people aren't rotting or eating each other but instead showing various manifestations of an increasing and irreparable insanity. Outside of the group that's being followed, who have their own tells (Lynn Lowry's eyes do a lot of work for her) and are often set off by musical cues, it's mostly left ambiguous as to whether or not the individuals on either side are infected or merely cracking under the pressure / responding to attempted martial law. Sure, there's some overt violence and one dude is stabbed with a sewing needle repeatedly, but there are rarely physical tells otherwise.
The film's cultural analogue would be the Vietnam War, and two of the core cast are identified as veterans of the conflict, capable of carrying out guerilla tactics against a hostile military presence. I would suppose that the easy stroke would be to compare the townsfolk to the population of Vietnam, some outright hostile, others merely responding to the incursion of a military force. Where Romero complicates it is that the military themselves are only marginally competent, having no contingency plan for what to do with their downed bioweapon and frequently failing to summon the manpower needed to respond. Some of the guys in the white suits are obvious bad eggs, and happily loot the bodies and homes of "the Crazies," but others are trying to maintain order within a system that runs slowly and plans poorly. Besides the repeated calls back and forth about this or that being delayed, a recurring trope is everyone getting frustrated with the need for a voice ID print to confirm before going through secure communications. It's used to excessive ends, but ultimately is one more component in an obscure chain of command where appeasement and results both seem impossible. In perhaps the most chilling move, and one sympathetic to at least the individuals within the armed forces (never the institution itself), the head of command is informed at the end that while this round wasn't an unqualified success, he's gained valuable experience which will allow him to transfer to the next outbreak, rife with the same problems as the last one.
The Crazies isn't a great film, but it is compelling to watch much of the time, even through its moments of rather obvious commentary.
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 1, 2019 12:16:50 GMT -8
Hey, at least he didn't call them "despicable". Heh. Though it's considered a classic, and one of the greatest films of the 80s, I don't think you'd like Raging Bull, as it leans very heavily on repetitive, self-destructive macho behaviour. But you'd probably be able to enjoy GoodFellas, as it moves along at a good clip, and is quite comedic in nature. You'd also see its influence all over The Sopranos. I've long been meaning to watch GoodFellas, since it would probably help me catch all those jokes in the "Goodfeathers" segments on Animaniacs. (The episodes would frequently parody famous films, but with New York pigeons in main roles - "West Side Pigeons," "Pigeon on the Roof," and Spielberg's personal favorite, "Raging Bird.")
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Post by Jay on Nov 1, 2019 20:35:51 GMT -8
All right, more horror.
I just watched Train to Busan (2016), a movie with an unassuming name about a zombie outbreak in Korea. Unlike many other media entries that would drop us in the middle of things, in Train, we start out with the outbreak and relative normalcy. However, the zombies themselves are fast and the infection spreads faster as the nation quickly descends into chaos. How exactly that happens when the outbreak is localized at the outset, well, that's difficult to tell, but also hardly the point. The point is that one infected person slips onto a bullet train and all hell breaks loose from there.
It's a novel premise, and worked for all its worth, with various impediments and detours blocking the main group from arriving in Busan. There's only so much you could expect to happen, and yet it navigates its twists and turns competently and without ever becoming repetitive. Credit here can go partially to the conception of the zombies, who are cleverly choreographed and operate under specific rules with specific drawbacks. At no point in time does their sense of threat ever wholly disappear, and indeed it shouldn't.
Our protagonist is an ethically dubious white collar type who works on South Korea's equivalent of Wall Street. The train, in this case, is taking him and his daughter (whose birthday it is) to visit his estranged ex-wife in Busan. Accompanying them on the journey is your usual motley bunch for a zombie flick: A working class bruiser and his pregnant wife, a traveling baseball team, a COO who is even more self-serving than the protagonist, a traumatized homeless man, a couple of gossipy old sisters. It's a group that could easily slide into archetypes and stupid behavior. Thankfully, there are no dogs to be saved and no instances of some jerk hiding their infection only to get everyone else killed. The group mostly succeeds in not being stupid and, outside of glass conveniently breaking or not, the potential missteps are largely in service of the film's message.
With the protagonist and the COO as foils, the message is effectively about the country's ultra-competitive culture, critiquing those who would do anything to survive. What good is getting ahead if society collapses as you do? Indeed, the tension between altruism and selfishness provides the track which the film runs on. As it draws on, you begin to interpret the mob of zombies as symptomatic, a group willing to kill anything in their path to get ahead, never satisfied but for a moment. It makes the character tensions all the more palpable, and perhaps elevates it from merely being a well-executed take on the fast zombie conceit.
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Post by guttersnipe on Nov 3, 2019 10:36:17 GMT -8
A lot of people have said it feels like a '70s Joker. I had to snap this from a window at a Queenstown cinema:
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Post by ThirdMan on Nov 3, 2019 13:34:49 GMT -8
Yeah, it's definitely not for kids. Though I'd be curious to hear from anyone under ten who's actually seen it...heh.
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 3, 2019 17:00:47 GMT -8
I can say, thankfully, that there were no kids at my screening of Joker. I always hate it when parents bring their kids to R-rated movies - ruins the experience if I keep thinking "Should an eight-year-old be watching this?" throughout the film.
Also, it looks like Joker is fast approaching the global billion-dollar mark. Gonna be wild if it does more bank than The Dark Knight.
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Post by ThirdMan on Nov 3, 2019 22:55:26 GMT -8
Well, with ticket price inflation, box office records are gonna constantly be broken. And even without China (in this particular case), American films are making significantly more money overseas than they used to. JOKER isn't gonna get close to what TDK made in North America, but it's clearly already passed it overseas.
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 4, 2019 17:32:18 GMT -8
Right, but Joker is an R-rated film without the spectacle and scale that typically accompanies major superhero blockbusters. This is especially unusual when you consider that nearly 70% of its earnings have been overseas - typically the sort of thing you expect from effects-heavy films with massive budgets (e.g. Aquaman).
Obviously, the Batman brand carries a lot of sway. But no one could have expected the film to carry this much box-office.
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Post by ThirdMan on Nov 4, 2019 17:59:42 GMT -8
Oh, without question, it's performed spectacularly well. I originally figured it would top out around $500 million worldwide.
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 24, 2019 8:46:34 GMT -8
Frozen 2 is visually magnificent, with some of the best animation Disney has ever produced. Story has some issues, though. I'll say more when I post a review to the site.
Meanwhile, Ford v Ferrari is high-powered entertainment, boosted by a terrific performance from Christian Bale. (Matt Damon is good too, but he's sort of second fiddle to Bale's Ken Miles.) The racing scenes are spectacular, particularly the climactic showdown at La Mans. If only they had shaved off about 20 minutes from the runtime (particularly during the second act), this would be a serious contender for my Top 10 of the year.
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 26, 2019 20:05:23 GMT -8
Knives Out is pretty fantastic. Great script, sharp sense of humor, and a terrific cast that's essentially a who's who of contemporary TV and film actors. (Katherine Langford needs to be in more things - shame on you, Endgame.)
Props for Rian Johnson for keeping the mystery taut while preventing the twists from overwhelming the narrative, and for invoking the style of past whodunnits in creative and subtle ways. (Okay, not entirely subtle - there's a direct reference to Clue, but it's made to the board game and not the movie.) A highly satisfying film.
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Post by Jay on Nov 28, 2019 17:34:12 GMT -8
I don't know why I'm on a kick of seeing South Korean films about troubles with late capitalism but oh hey, I saw Parasite today, which won a Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, which means that I have seen one film that was praised at Cannes this year. (I still haven't seen Joker.)
I was told by the Internet to go in without much in the way of information. Thus, I don't know how much of a "review" I should give it as a lot of it would be spoilers. I'll instead note a couple of things.
One is that the title is especially apt while also being ambiguous. No one ever utters the word during the film. Neither are there any associative speculations on who might be guilty of some form of parasitism. Yet the term could easily be applied to just about any of the characters, and with good cause. Another observation would be that that there isn't really anyone to root for, nor root against. All the characters are realistic shades of gray and have reasons to be who they are. The film never hits you over the head with any speeches or efforts at self-justification or even backstory. The most speechifying we get comes from the importance of "a plan" as some way that we anticipate and prepare for the future.
As the trend goes, I can anticipate this being remade for an American audience much like Oldboy was and various Japanese horror films have been. I also imagine that all the nuances and subtleties will be wrung out of it and the comedy made more clownish while the villains, more villainous. It will be a shame, since there aren't many answers offered by the movie and to simplify it in that way would ruin the effect.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Nov 28, 2019 18:45:27 GMT -8
I don't know why I'm on a kick of seeing South Korean films about troubles with late capitalism but oh hey, I saw Parasite today, which won a Palme d'Or at Cannes this year, which means that I have seen one film that was praised at Cannes this year. (I still haven't seen Joker.)
I was told by the Internet to go in without much in the way of information. Thus, I don't know how much of a "review" I should give it as a lot of it would be spoilers. I'll instead note a couple of things.
One is that the title is especially apt while also being ambiguous. No one ever utters the word during the film. Neither are there any associative speculations on who might be guilty of some form of parasitism. Yet the term could easily be applied to just about any of the characters, and with good cause. Another observation would be that that there isn't really anyone to root for, nor root against. All the characters are realistic shades of gray and have reasons to be who they are. The film never hits you over the head with any speeches or efforts at self-justification or even backstory. The most speechifying we get comes from the importance of "a plan" as some way that we anticipate and prepare for the future.
As the trend goes, I can anticipate this being remade for an American audience much like Oldboy was and various Japanese horror films have been. I also imagine that all the nuances and subtleties will be wrung out of it and the comedy made more clownish while the villains, more villainous. It will be a shame, since there aren't many answers offered by the movie and to simplify it in that way would ruin the effect.
To be fair, Bong Joon-ho's been making quite anti-capitalist films recently, hasn't he? To be fair though, he never depicts characters in broad strokes, and he has said he does have hope that things will improve. Haven't seen Parasite yet, but am very much looking forward to it (I am watching another recommendation of yours, Halt and Catch Fire at the moment).
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Post by ThirdMan on Nov 28, 2019 20:53:45 GMT -8
Jay -
Joker won Best Picture at the Venice Film Festival. It didn't play at Cannes.
Re: Parasite, while the director doesn't usually paint in purely black-and-white terms, he's definitely given to offering fairly over-the-top characters in a number of his films. Look no further than Okja (Jake Gyllenhaal...aye aye aye), The Host, Snowpiercer (Tilda Swinton), etc. But the characters in Parasite are more grounded than in some of his other films. It's definitely among the best releases of 2019: my current placeholder favourite. His Mother (Madeo), which I saw at the VANCOUVER International Film Festival, was my favourite film of 2009. I do think his Korean-language films are a bit more nuanced than his international-cast ones (though those are certainly good as well).
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 29, 2019 7:32:15 GMT -8
I'm going to try to watch a lot of 2019's most beloved films before year's end, but I don't know if Parasite will be among them. Not out of pure choice - I loved Okja - but because some of these films aren't as easily accessible as I'd like them to be. Why can't more of them be on Netflix?
Speaking of which, I did watch The Irishman, which is extremely long but often quite good. The use of de-aging technology for De Niro and Pesci doesn't quite work (especially in the scene where a young version of the former gets into fisticuffs outside a grocery), but the film has a compelling through-line and several poignant moments, particularly ones directly tied into real-life history. The undercurrent of dark humor helps as well, and gets the film through some of its slower spots.
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