Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Oct 8, 2020 13:44:33 GMT -8
I've never actually seen Akira and would honestly risk my health to see Akira on the big screen.
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Post by Jay on Oct 9, 2020 10:50:14 GMT -8
It's Spooky Month so I'm once more trawling streaming services in search of "movies whose VHS box art scared the dickens out of me as a kid but which I never got around to viewing." Fright Night was first up in that queue as a semi-established classic of 80s horror. I didn't really "get it" through the first half or so because it just seemed like an artifact, clever in its time for referencing late-night horror hosts and lamenting the rise of mindless slashers (the body count is rather modest), but ultimately unfocused and jumpy in its execution. However, in the last half or so, it seems to figure out what it's doing and what it wants to pay homage to (bit of 'Salem's Lot here) and turns out a memorable experience. Part of that is probably because they started wildly dumping money into practical effects, seemingly in an effort to give An American Werewolf in London a run for its money, and there were some transformation or gore / goo scenes that genuinely caught me by surprise and had me thinking "how did they do that?" I don't know if that's enough on its own to recommend it to anyone else, but it's one more off the list for me.
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 9, 2020 16:57:08 GMT -8
I always like it when people have esoteric reasons for questing films. When I was a teenager and taking practically every damn tape out of Blockbuster, I was a bit troubled by this (apparently Italian) box art for Phantasm: When I actually saw it a few years later, I don't recall anything like that happening in the film, and it wasn't very good either. Not quite the same thing, but I definitely watched this just because of the iconic hair: ...though in reality Kid's hi-top wasn't anywhere near as tall as that.
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Post by Jay on Oct 9, 2020 17:29:06 GMT -8
Funny in that Phantasm is also waiting in my queue although I doubt it will leave much of an impression on me either.
On the topic of movie box art, I noted eventually that the ones for Fright Night and Return of the Living Dead, Part II were surprisingly similar, i.e. ghastly cloud making a fanged face while hovering over suburbia, so I'd conflated the two in my mind for some time. I mention this because, while looking up the box arts, I realized that whenever it was I saw Return (years ago!) it hadn't registered with me that one of the main leads was Dana Ashbrook aka Bobby Briggs.
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Post by Jay on Oct 10, 2020 11:44:33 GMT -8
It's strange to watch Fright Night and Phantasm back to back in that both operate under the same basic premise: A snooping teen uncovers the secret, murderous identity of a centuries-old malevolent entity and proceeds to piss off said entity deliberately until, through the sagacity of its superior years, the monster decides that the wisest course of action is to engage in bizarre grudge match with the aforementioned teen instead of, I don't know, hauling up stakes and going anywhere else at all?
Whereas Fright Night is, frankly, boring until we get to the special effects of the second half, Phantasm is at least somewhat watchable on an aesthetic level, with some nods to earlier forays into surreal cinema. Despite having a weird portal to another planet that works like a tuning fork, a psychic medium and her granddaughter whom the young teen relies on for advice, hooded not-quite-Ewoks growling and attacking bystanders, a marbled mausoleum that seems out of place in whatever small Oregon town we're supposed to be in, a mustard-like goop that drips from the wounds of the evildoers, and yes, horrible chrome orbs that drill into people's brains, the whole thing comes off surprisingly grounded. Mike is dumbly following around his older brother for want of a role model. Jody is a sort of rebel who doesn't feel at ease being newly responsible for Mike after the death of their parents. Reggie is an honest shemp working a dumb job that doesn't seem to match his very receded hairline, but who is deeply loyal to his friends. And the Tall Man is Death.
That's probably what makes the movie work on a basic level, even throughout its stubbornness to not explain much of anything (I read where the film was cut down from three hours to half that). The themes, if you're willing to work with the symbolism, are fairly obvious. They are in fact so obvious that I'm rather puzzled and wondering if I've done something wrong when I read the early critical assessment that it was illogical. The story basically goes like this: Youth grapples with the prospect of death via his parents' untimely demise. He turns to an older, stereotypically "cool" brother in an effort to find someone to model himself after, but the brother is unexpectedly earnest about being a failure in his own right, no ideal to strive after. The threat is not much that can't be explained away with allegory. Hell, probably the most explicit bit of that is when Mike takes a severed finger from the Tall Man and puts it in a box for safe-keeping, but the finger then turns into a demonic black fly, and proves to be stronger and feistier than either of the brothers plus Reggie can immediately deal with. It's all just Death anyway. If we want to get technical about it, then the not-quite-Ewoks in their robes, revealed to be the revived dead crunched down to a dwarf-like state, are just representative of how memory reduces our capacity to imagine those lost to us: They're compressed and inarticulate. They are no longer recognizable people we must engage with, but a distillation of our memories of them. And if I'm getting real stretchy about it, then whatever hot and red realm those not-quite-Ewoks slave away in is basically history. We want heros, but the dead are scaled down to our own perceptions of their success and failures, and the living are clumsily in the process of their own becoming and thus unreliable models even if willing. In either case, the Tall Man cannot be thwarted, nor death evaded, as it will only keep coming back no matter what you do to lock it away or bury it. It's a bleak take on the whole thing, but I can see why it was an important movie for a certain age demographic.
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Post by Jay on Oct 11, 2020 21:45:08 GMT -8
Less because the box art made an impression on me and more because the term has re-entered American political discourse over the last four years, I watched C.H.U.D. last night. It's hard to really characterize my take on it because it's not a good movie, but neither did I lose interest while watching it. Mostly, the execution is confusing, and it's neither totally the fault of the script nor the casting / direction. On the casting side, Daniel Stern, aka the non-Joe Pesci half of The Wet Bandits from Home Alone, has to hold on to a deuteragonist dramatic role and you have Kim Greist, previously only familiar to me as the butch, truck-driving love interest from Brazil, playing the main character's girlfriend and playing it very blonde and femme. For direction, there's the weird choice of "we are adamant about not showing the monster in full" until halfway through the movie and then, the end result is not distinctive enough for it to be startling or surprising when the reveal does happen, nor how often it does. For the script's failings, the police officer whose wife is murdered in the opening scenes has a role in that plot that's tertiary if not quaternary. His biggest move is to confront a known government plant in a dark secluded area, outside the view of the public, even though there's a high probability that he'll have a gun pulled on him to silence him (guess what happens?). There's also Greist getting preggers and then being bitten on the ankle by a C.H.U.D.-- after she decapitated said C.H.U.D. with some help from her boyfriend's sword collection and after it has been established that those bitten by C.H.U.D.s are subject to the same rules as regular zombies-- and yet five or so minutes later the movie ends and no one particularly cares or makes note of it. Probably one of the more perplexing scenes comes right before the climax, when Greist, exploring the sub-basement of her apartment building, encounters the mangled dog killed in the opening scene and then decides to stay in the building, return home, and take a shower. For reasons. During this time, a C.H.U.D. begins to creep up from the still-unlocked sub-basement and shortly thereafter, the shower starts to clog. You would think some C.H.U.D.-ery is afoot. Greist takes out a coat hanger, fashions it into a hook, and then pries at the obstruction, only to let loose a spray of blood like, I don't know, a pressurized tampon?, splattering her and the stall completely. Two scene shifts later, she's nonchalantly putting on a fuzzy pink sweater and there's no indication that the C.H.U.D. was injured or in any way responsible for what preceded it. THEN WHO WAS DRAIN? Damned if I know. There may be a competent film buried in there but this ain't it.
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Post by ThirdMan on Oct 12, 2020 2:54:18 GMT -8
That is one mother of a paragraph!
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Post by Jay on Oct 12, 2020 10:32:32 GMT -8
Probably much worse on mobile! When I draft it on desktop, it doesn't seem like that much. I just don't have short thoughts about anything.
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Post by Jay on Oct 17, 2020 10:21:39 GMT -8
Is The Re-Animator a mid-80s adaptation of a lesser Lovecraft work, posing as a Frankensteinian antidote to the then-in-vogue trends of vampires and werewolves and zombies, or is it an extended metaphor for what it's like to be in graduate school? Is Herbert West not that pretentious, peacocking prick in your seminar who wants you to know that he's already read all the theory and thinks that it's a joke that his genius goes unrecognized? Is Dan Cain not the well-meaning kid from a humbler background who wants to do right by others but ends up seduced by the prospect of power? Is Dr. Hill not the epitome of a bad advisor, behind the times, willing to steal student work to advance his own career, and with a lecherous legacy that goes unchecked? I think a more contemporary take on it would probably have to emphasize the cruelty of Dean Halsey, beyond his withdrawal of funding, and it would have to come with something to do with the female lead beyond shrieking and weeping (graduate school is especially exploiting of women after all, beyond the sexual stuff). Otherwise, it's all right there.
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Post by Jay on Oct 28, 2020 11:31:35 GMT -8
I have not been neglecting my Spooky Month responsibilities but instead have invested my time in re-reading Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot so that I could tackle the apostrophe-reduced Salem's Lot miniseries from the 70s. I shall now report on my findings, though this is the Film forum and I am obligated to keep my focus there.
Salem's Lot is regarded as one of the most important vampire films created and I think that for certain scenes, it earns it. The floating children have been referenced and even parodied for ages and remains eerie for its technical prowess and the expressions on their faces. Barlow as a mute, Nosferatu-type with fangs like a mass of mutated root vegetables is weirdly compelling in his twitchiness, even though he's as blue as Doctor Manhattan. As adaptations go, it smartly combines characters and their plot arcs in a way that feels natural, and the characters under Barlow's thrall are creepy without being stereotypical. Straker was not exactly what I anticipated... the book's description meant that the only image I could possibly generate for him was basically Michel Foucault... but as a proper Englishman in a black suit and bowler hat, he does carry some of the weird "European invaders of small-town America!" undertones present in the novel.
As adaptation, it probably only meets is partway, half if you're being ungenerous, maybe three-quarters if you're feeling it. I don't envy the crew for trying to make a three-hour miniseries of it (worse if they had stuck to two-hours as was originally billed), on network TV no less, and they manage to create a good amount of atmospheric dread with very little in the way of a blood budget. The changes to Barlow and the characters, they're all fine and smartly executed, but the overall work is inconsistent. Many clever bits of dialogue are adapted directly from the book, but without the context or the characterization to make proper sense out of them. Whereas the book had a tight grip on its lore, the vamps in the miniseries obey the rules only as the plot serves: Sometimes they need to beg entrance, other times they just float on in. At one point, instead of the conventional garlic strung around as a ward, they put up hawthorn, and no one bats an eye. I feel like if I were just watching it or the sake of watching it, maybe it wouldn't be bad, the rationales for characters coming off as no flimsier than they might be elsewhere, but having just read the book, it feels like a lot of context was lifted out of it. The end result is that Barlow's grand entrance is much more abrupt, and some character's plot arcs dead-end midway through without cause. They also very nearly nosedive into "Idiot Plot Syndrome" because one of the two lunkheads moving the coffin-as-sideboard in from port desperately wants to open it. Because it's cold? I don't know.
Another bone or fang I would like to pick with the film is that they cast Fred Willard as the corrupt real estate agent who invites the vampires into town in the first place. Points are scored by Tobe Hooper and crew as he is introduced with his ditzy, redheaded secretary and you know instantaneously that the two of them are doing the Monster Mash when no one is looking. A friend and I were corresponding on this development, but I regret to inform everyone that the ultimate execution fell short of my wildest dreams.
M: that seems like a very Fred Willard role. M: that and as the hapless mayor in Roxanne J: He's also killed off about an hour in but has not yet reappeared as a vampire. Will report back if anything changes as I watch the second half this evening. M: i really want him to come back as a cheesy vampire in a cheap suit with that ridiculous head of hair of his J: Oh for sure, all the other vampires are normal but he just has a white streak in his hair and goes "blah! Blah! Blah!" instead of talking J: He's also diddling his secretary and was wearing a very shiny red pair of boxers as he was caught in the act M: he just brought those with him J: Saved the folks in costume design so much money. He just showed up on set like that one day M: "heya, fred? how's it hanging?" "oh ya know. same ol' same ol'" with the fake teeth in
J: Can't turn into a bat or mist, just hides his mouth behind a red lined black cape and speed walks everywhere. Hasn't bothered to change out of the slacks or jeans or cords (hey it's the 70s) he was wearing when alive J: Sometimes he bumps into stuff because vampires have to maintain eye contact with their prey and all I feel sorely deprived, and since 2020 has taken him from us as well, my dream is now dead, and not undead, as it should be.
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Post by Jay on Oct 30, 2020 13:58:18 GMT -8
I watched the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and found myself with surprisingly little (at least by my standards) to say about it. As a film, it's highly competent and it's been a while since I've felt I could say that about something I've been watching. There were a lot of Dutch angles, a lot of long shots that added to the intensity of what was happening, smart use of close-ups and zoom outs, and the soundtrack didn't have that distinctly dated feel that most horror synth has ended up with. Perhaps there were two points of perplexity for me.
One is, holy snacks, this was PG? I had to double-check as it was made a few years before Temple of Doom, and thus PG it was despite a fair amount of blood in one or two parts and the survivors downing speed towards the end to stay awake. There was no foul language and as far they got into scatological stuff was debating whether something was a rat turd or a caper. Like when I saw Salem's Lot, I found myself impressed with how much drama they were bringing to the picture in spite of the rating limitations. I probably wouldn't have a seven-year-old watch it, even if the pods aren't that scary (the immature duplicates look like cast-offs from the Mushroom Kingdom in the Super Mario Bros. movie), since everything else remains quite unsettling.
Second is me trying to figure out what the metaphor was this time around. The first one was fairly straightforward as "COMMUNISM!" The third was about the military-industrial complex. It's harder to figure out what this one is commenting on. There are elements of an emergent surveillance state and government control, but then two of the protagonists work for the health department, so "the state is BAD" seems contradictory. There are a lot of new-agey, pseudo-science, conspiracy bits and what could be read as pokes at incipient yuppie culture, but there too, you have some characters that rep that, some that don't, and they're on both sides. One possible answer is that it's about complacency and reaching something like the end of history, where major conflicts are done with and life is numbingly comfortable. There's a case there with a pod, at one point, talking about the absence of love and hate and their evolution into a new form, but you don't have too many characters staking the obvious "we're flawed but that's what makes us human!" ground and the pods are tidy, efficient, and certainly less volatile or violent than their human counterparts. All in all though, I think that's what probably makes it the most recognizable entry, aside from featuring multiple actors with considerable Hollywood longevity. It doesn't really give answers as much as juxtapose two alternatives that aren't totally pleasant unto themselves.
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Post by Jay on Oct 31, 2020 11:11:34 GMT -8
Continuing the "VHS box gave me nightmares" thematic, I picked up the 1985, Dario Argento-written film Demons or Demoni. Something about the premise always unsettled me: Bunch of strangers invited to a movie theatre for a surprise screening, but the demonic possession that happens on screen then transfers to the audience members, who become infected and claw each other apart while the normal humans in the audience discover that they're sealed in. It's sort of The Evil Dead meets The Last Action Hero, or SOMETHING like that ( [rec] might also be relevant), but this was long before media itself had become spooky and cursed, as in The Ring if you want to be generous and FeardotCom if you do not. The movie starts out pretty quickly, with a figure that looks like Destro from G.I. Joe passing out tickets to the screening. In a twist, he's played by the same actor who becomes the first to be possessed in the movie within a movie. From there, there's a surprising amount of violence and gore (and hair metal) packed into an 88-minute package. There's also, weirdly, quite a bit of filler. A group of punks manages to break into the theatre after everyone assumes it's sealed off, but we spend a rather long stretch of the movie in aggregate watching them cruise around a neon-inflected West Berlin while they do cocaine from a Coca-Cola can. I'm not sure why most of it is there other than to sprinkle in some sex and drugs with the existing violence. There's also a lengthy stretch in the movie where the surviving humans don't appear to be doing much more than ripping up seats to barricade the upper balcony, a measure that doesn't accomplish a whole lot.
Even with those diversions, the characters are mostly problem solvers and don't dither around too much. While it takes a moment for someone to explicitly state it, the folks seem to understand pretty quickly that if one of these things claws you, you're toast. There are also some neat false positives, like you go in consciously distrusting the ticket taker at the theatre, a redhead in a green dress, as if she's in on the game, but it turns out she's no less a pawn in whatever is happening. The climax is also intriguing, in that I like it when some outbreak movies conclude "we thought this was contained and under control but leave the bottled space to discover it's already all over the city."
I was entertained going through it and didn't mind the diversions or the broad characterization, but I came out feeling as if there were probably a better, smarter movie lost in the execution.
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 10, 2020 21:08:12 GMT -8
The King of Staten Island is a long but very compelling story about a young man coping with grief and identity. It has a great sense of humor, genuine heart, and a strong semiautobiographical anchor in Pete Davidson, here showing more range than he's ever allowed on SNL. Marisa Tomei is thoroughly engrossing as his mom, and Bill Burr steals his every scene as her new love interest. The film features a nice tribute to New York firefighters that doesn't feel heavy-handed, and it functions as a love letter to NYC's least-loved borough.
Still not sure why they wasted Steve Buscemi, though...
And I'm not the biggest Guy Ritchie fan (particularly after his thoroughly disposable Aladdin), but The Gentlemen was eminently entertaining. It has a terrific cast and some too-clever-by-half dialogue (which Matthew McConaughey delivers without batting an eye), plus some skillfully directed action. It does run out of steam after a while (and - sigh - the in medias res opening is cheap and pointless), but any film that lets Michelle Dockery exhibit the world's most exaggerated Cockney accent is doing something right.
Been a dry year for big-budget movies, which means I've had to dig beneath the surface. Thankfully, I've still found quite a lot worth watching. As always, I'll have a "Best Films of the Year" piece posted at the end of December, but it will probably be the most unusual example of such a list I've produced so far.
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Post by Jeremy on Nov 24, 2020 9:05:50 GMT -8
Some more cinematic updates:
Class Action Park: Very entertaining documentary that feels like a darkly comic horror story. Will play well for those who remember the many Action Park scandals of the '80s and early '90s, but as someone who grew up after that era, the film is certainly eye-opening. It's punctuated by some entertaining animated interludes that underscore the ridiculous and awful nature of the park's no-holds-barred amusement rides. The main issue is that the film keeps cutting to Chris Gethard interviews, and his profane commentary gets tiresome very quick. Still a highly watchable film with some disturbing undertones about the nature of American consumerism.
An American Pickle: This film has no idea what it wants to be - at different points it's a fish-out-of-water comedy, a religious drama, a cultural satire, and a Trump allegory - and the lack of focus makes for bumpy viewing. Still, individual scenes in the movie are effective, and Seth Rogen's dual performance is laudable. The film is also more favorable to traditional Jewish orthodoxy than I would expect from a PG-13 Hollywood comedy, with a surprisingly poignant climax. I wish the whole equaled the sum of the parts, but the parts were worth the watch.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things: I generally like Charlie Kaufman screenplays a lot, and am continually impressed by his ability to blend deep character psychology with base emotion and humor. But I gotta be honest - this film just didn't click for me. There were individual scenes that were inventive and creative, but I spent half the film unclear of what was happening, and wishing there was more of a hook to make me care. I did appreciate that the film featured four different actors from four different seasons of Fargo (including Oliver Platt, though he's never onscreen), and the last twenty minutes are certainly one of the more unique onscreen experiences I've had this year. But definitely my least favorite of the Kaufman films I've seen.
The Witches: I'm not sure what audience this film is aimed at. It's too scary for young children, and too juvenile for adults. Probably kids ages 10-15 may enjoy it, but even they may be bored by the pedestrian storytelling. As someone who enjoyed the original Roald Dahl book in my youth, I was hoping this film would recapture some of the dark humor of the page, but apart from Anne Hathaway's performance (she's obviously having the time of her life), nothing about this film stands out. And can we please stop the practice of ending movies with cheesy dance sequences set to old pop songs forever? Robert Zemeckis is one of my favorite directors, but between this and Marwen, I fear he may be losing his touch.
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Post by Jeremy on Dec 25, 2020 13:04:46 GMT -8
So every December I watch a few Christmas films that I neglected in my Christmas-free childhood. Here are a few I saw this year:
A Christmas Story: I don't know why it took me so long to watch this film, but it is glorious. Sweet, heartfelt, and hilarious. It has an edge to the humor that is perfectly woven into the holiday charm (particularly through the narration from adult Ralphie) and features plenty of quotable lines and memorable setpieces. The only real downside is that the film has become so mainstream that all its motifs (the leg lamp, the bunny suit) have become clichés in themselves. But that doesn't dim the movie's emotional strength, nor its capacity to make me laugh out loud at several points during its running time.
The Santa Clause: Sweet, if a bit soft. I was hoping for something with a little more bite to it, since the idea of a guy accidentally killing and replacing Santa Clause seems ripe for cynical black comedy. But Tim Allen is very good, and there are enough jokes and heart to keep the film chugging along nicely. Good entertainment overall.
Scrooged: I love Bill Murray, and I love imaginative retelling of A Christmas Carol, but this film struggles to modernize the Dickens tale in a convincing fashion. Part of the problem may be that Murray is just too likable to be a convincing Scrooge, but the larger issue is that the film's tone is frustratingly inconsistent - it's unclear if we're supposed to agree with the sentimental message or laugh at it. The humor is also pretty raucous in spots, which drowns out whatever good intentions the film might otherwise have. The cast and production values are commendable, though, and at 97 minutes, the story doesn't feel too draggy.
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