Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Apr 29, 2021 15:16:54 GMT -8
Catching up on some "classics" old and new.
Baby Driver - This is the best movie musical of the past 20 years.
Carrie - What a weird film - the prom scene is obviously a total classic, but it's weird just how much of the film is a totally mundane depiction of teens just hanging out in the late '70s, periodically interrupted by hilariously heavy-handed goth interludes courtesy of Piper Laurie. The main thing saving this film from total tonal whiplash is Sissy Spacek's angelic grotesqueness, which forcibly glues these three disparate moods together into something magical. Special bonus: serious contender for the best jump scare in any horror movie, ever.
Eighth Grade - I think if I was born in 1989 or earlier this film would be a complete blank, and if I was born in 1999 or later this film would be a ninety-minute panic attack. So my main takeaway from this film is... teens do be on their phones, dog? I guess? The main thing this film has going for it is that the horrifically manipulative sexual advances made by teenage boys at teenage girls are made by actual teenage actors, so those scenes feel visceral. And by "visceral" I mean like a snuff film.
Network - Still a favorite - top ten all-time list fodder, even - but for a film usually lauded for just how much it got right about 21st century America, it sort of stood out to me that in one key respect the film is very, very off - it predicts a media environment where corporate consolidation is rampant, but so is demagoguery and hyper-gritty hyper-real rage-rage stuff - whereas in reality corporate consolidation has defanged basically every single aspect of popular culture, particularly the news.
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Post by unkinhead on May 5, 2021 12:08:17 GMT -8
Hi everyone. I still exist Was just reading through this thread and felt compelled to say: Kaguya is amazing - I'm many months late on this but it's my favorite Ghibli and I would definitely recommend it even if there's a disconnect with Grave. The objectively correct PTA ranking is clearly: 1. Magnolia 2. There Will Be Blood 3. Boogie Nights 4. The Master 5. Punch-Drunk Love 6. Phantom Thread 7. Inherent Vice I could swap #1 and #2 depending on my hunch of the day (and honestly #3 and #4). Not sure I've watched anything I really loved recently. I've been watching far less movies as I've just been busy with lots of other things. Think I rewatched "Paris, Texas" pretty recently and it's really grown in my mind since my first viewing. Great film. I watched "Nobody" recently though and thought it was pretty good, with the first two acts being much, much better than the last. Oh I also watched "Warrior" and I thought it was quite good, and benefited from its standard and archetypal nature, leveraging it as a strength rather than a weakness. RE: Stanley Kubrick and his coldness As soon as I read your reply regarding his tonal coldness, 'Paths of Glory' instantly came to mind as a potentially valuable compromise between you and the departed Kubrick. Looks like Flame beat me to it. It's certainly his most emotionally exposed film, although hardly touchy, feely for most of the duration. He wasn't all that sentimental to start, and he only seemed to become more calculated in his filmmaking as he aged.
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Post by Jeremy on May 5, 2021 20:08:55 GMT -8
Hi, Unkin. Been a while. I did indeed check out Paths of Glory, and liked it a lot. It's probably my favorite Kubrick film (of the ones I've seen). I've been meaning to get back to watching more films now, as the last few weeks have kept me busy with other things. (Still need to carve out two hours-plus for Kaguya.)
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Post by guttersnipe on May 9, 2021 16:20:11 GMT -8
Hi everyone. I still exist Hey man, good to see you! Glad to see you're still rockin' the Rosemary's avatar
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Post by Incandescence 112 on May 10, 2021 20:03:42 GMT -8
Hi everyone. I still exist Was just reading through this thread and felt compelled to say: Kaguya is amazing - I'm many months late on this but it's my favorite Ghibli and I would definitely recommend it even if there's a disconnect with Grave. The objectively correct PTA ranking is clearly: 1. Magnolia 2. There Will Be Blood 3. Boogie Nights 4. The Master 5. Punch-Drunk Love 6. Phantom Thread 7. Inherent Vice I could swap #1 and #2 depending on my hunch of the day (and honestly #3 and #4). Not sure I've watched anything I really loved recently. I've been watching far less movies as I've just been busy with lots of other things. Think I rewatched "Paris, Texas" pretty recently and it's really grown in my mind since my first viewing. Great film. I watched "Nobody" recently though and thought it was pretty good, with the first two acts being much, much better than the last. Oh I also watched "Warrior" and I thought it was quite good, and benefited from its standard and archetypal nature, leveraging it as a strength rather than a weakness. RE: Stanley Kubrick and his coldness As soon as I read your reply regarding his tonal coldness, 'Paths of Glory' instantly came to mind as a potentially valuable compromise between you and the departed Kubrick. Looks like Flame beat me to it. It's certainly his most emotionally exposed film, although hardly touchy, feely for most of the duration. He wasn't all that sentimental to start, and he only seemed to become more calculated in his filmmaking as he aged. Hey, good to see you still alive! The penultimate scene of Paths of Glory is the single most moving moment in any of Kubrick's films for me. Spirited Away is the best Ghibli (normie opinion I know), although The Wind Rises, Porco Rosso, Kiki's Delivery Service, Nausicaa, and Kaguya are all worthy contenders for the top spot.
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Post by Jay on May 11, 2021 11:18:39 GMT -8
I decided to honor Mother's Day by spending some time with 80s / 90s action moms. First up was watching Aliens in its entirety after having seen the last ten minutes probably a dozen times. I'm not sure what I have to add to the analysis other than the consensus opinion of "it's a different genre from the first but no worse in context." A lot of action movies borrow from it and so it was nice to see the original even though I was surprised-- being more familiar with secondary sources-- that the original cut nixed the bits about Ripley's daughter and Newt's backstory. Sigourney Weaver was right to be pissed. I can't really say I had the same experience watching Alien3 as that one had a number of good ideas (prison planet + monks somehow worked?) and an execution that never had me invested in much of anything. I'm sure everyone bags on the CGI these days (it looks terrible), but I was more miffed at the fact that the earlier films pretty firmly established acid blood as a risk when fighting them, something that failed to come up at all, and that they try to preserve the humans to use as incubators, which the dog xenomorph definitely did not, gleefully mauling everything it came into contact with. Also, neither here nor there, but it didn't get as much mileage from its character actors: Charles Dutton had some moments, but Pete Postelthwaite was just kind of there as one more craggy bald dude. I'd rather watch Resurrection and see Ron Perlman, Winona Ryder, and Dan Hedaya actually do stuff.
Next, I decided to finally get around to watching Terminator: Dark Fate, a jarring experience having gone from "it's an hour until we see a xenomorph and combat" to "we see combat immediately but it's an hour until we see Ahnold." A lot of the reviews on Amazon were complaining about how this is yet one more miscalculation by Woke Hollywood and yet, it's always been about a female protagonist (shout outs to Michael Biehm, the official side man of a tougher lady), and it's always been in California and at least in conversation with some aspects of the border? I don't get where the ire comes from. If they wanted to be all doctrinal about continuity, I could maybe agree except I haven't seen any films since 3, when I snuck into a drive-in theatre partway through. The early fight scenes seem well-choreographed, but in the second half, they're mostly lacking something, even with interesting weaponry and environments. It was intriguing to get an array of snappy one-liners from the cast and I got some good laughs there, but I'm not sure it's much more than a B/B- action movie in a Terminator skinsuit. I was reminded most often in watching it of Live Free or Die Hard, a film I've otherwise had no cause to think of ever although I did see it in theatre with MikeJer?!
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Post by Jay on May 13, 2021 10:21:21 GMT -8
I'd postponed watching Midsommar because I had recently come off a visit to family in Norway and Iceland. Well, little did I know, the whole thing (though filmed in Hungary?) takes place in Sweden and there are few things certain of my relatives more than dogging on the Swedes.
I suppose this qualifies as a horror movie? Surely some horrible things happened to individuals who sometimes had it coming (Will Poulter's face is quite punchable on its own, but his character...). And from the cult's vantage, death ain't no big thing, so whatever. I almost reflexively come down on films with grand reputations so I'll say some things in its favor: I enjoyed the visuals which even when idyllic were slightly off kilter (the angles of all the buildings are quite bizarre), the slow pacing felt like a refreshing change from other more contemporary films I've seen lately, the wallpaper and set designs were incredible, they at least name-checked some relevant runic stuff AND managed to not drag in how the neo-Nazis have appropriated that shit, and I enjoyed the cinematography all throughout for providing something which, while grotesque at moments, made you want to look. I felt compelled to look up the IMDB trivia afterwards to see what I missed and there was some deliberate subversion of certain tropes towards the end that I appreciated. Also you had William Jackson Harper playing an anthropology version of Chidi which was neat.
On the whole? It's Rosemary's Baby (minus the baby, and Satan, I guess) melded with a slasher. I suppose I should qualify that and say that the gore, while dramatic (SOMEONE GETS BLOOD-EAGLED), is irregular and only gets lasting screentime in a few instances. What I mean by "slasher" is that there's a the core conceit of "some young adults are doing things that they shouldn't be doing and thus upsetting certain individuals greatly." A slasher is surely about violence, but it's also about manners and a code of conduct, which the deceased visibly fail at.
It's a nice visual piece of work, yet I regard it as merely an improvement there over its predecessors. Likewise, structurally, it provides an order of its own all ready to go. Yet it never surprised me and even as the character's emotional struggles were foregrounded (those first ten minutes), I was never sure that I connected with them as they seemed, as slasher characters often are, born entirely of their present needs and utter ciphers otherwise.
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Post by guttersnipe on May 13, 2021 13:49:09 GMT -8
I had recently come off a visit to family in Norway and Iceland. Isn't Scandinavia amazing?? Sigh, I miss travelling.
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Post by ThirdMan on May 13, 2021 15:58:25 GMT -8
I'd say Midsommar is a mash-up of Rosemary's Baby and The Wicker Man.
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Post by Jay on May 14, 2021 10:38:52 GMT -8
Isn't Scandinavia amazing?? Sigh, I miss travelling. I was in Iceland for all of a couple of hours and looked around and thought "I could live here easily." Granted, summertime, and the sun only appeared to dip around the horizon and back sometime around 2 am, but it ticked all the boxes for me and I'm not much the heliophile anyway. I know I'd have an easier time adjust to Norway with the family and all, and yet it didn't hit me in quite the same way, much as I enjoyed it. I'd say Midsommar is a mash-up of Rosemary's Baby and The Wicker Man. The Wicker Man is one of many films I should see, but haven't. Also, to add in the obvious point from the earlier thesis, Dani = Final Girl
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Post by guttersnipe on May 14, 2021 13:06:37 GMT -8
The week I visited the land of ice and fire (back in 2014, god) was during the Summer solstice, so Reykjavik was home to a three-day festival across this period of perpetual sunshine. It was a real trip walking back to my hotel after seeing Massive Attack at about 3AM when it genuinely looked like noon.
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Post by ThirdMan on May 14, 2021 15:35:58 GMT -8
I'd say Midsommar is a mash-up of Rosemary's Baby and The Wicker Man. The Wicker Man is one of many films I should see, but haven't. Also, to add in the obvious point from the earlier thesis, Dani = Final Girl Just be sure to watch the 1973 original, and not the Nicolas Cage remake.
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Post by Jay on May 14, 2021 20:24:04 GMT -8
Can I watch the Cage remake anyway? As long as I regard it as noncanonical?
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Post by ThirdMan on May 14, 2021 22:29:09 GMT -8
Can I watch the Cage remake anyway? As long as I regard it as noncanonical? Heh. You're obviously free to do whatever you want, bud. I don't even think I've seen the Cage remake, but I know it got terrible reviews. I'd just watch the original first, is all.
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Post by Jay on May 15, 2021 10:38:15 GMT -8
The week I visited the land of ice and fire (back in 2014, god) was during the Summer solstice, so Reykjavik was home to a three-day festival across this period of perpetual sunshine. It was a real trip walking back to my hotel after seeing Massive Attack at about 3AM when it genuinely looked like noon. That's another thing to appreciate about the country: Weirdly good music scene in addition to strong bookstore scene. Plus you got to see Massive Attack there, I mean, they're not my favorite trip-hop band but I wouldn't pass up an opportunity to see them. I'd just watch the original first, is all. Well, GOOD NEWS, it's on Prime right now so I'll probably get around to it soon, whereas the Cage version is currently unavailable on any service I have. I'll just be proud to have cause to use this with fuller understanding of what's going on:
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