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Author Topic: Respond to the last movie you watched  (Read 684611 times)

don s.

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #6070 on: August 18, 2021, 09:31:21 PM »


Duck, You Sucker (Sergio Leone; 1971)
When it originally came out, the title piqued my preadolescent interest, so I'm surprised it took me 50 years to see it. What an odd adventure. Rod Steiger as a Mexican bandit, slathered in brown makeup with an accent just as thick, chews scenery like it's a pinche dollar menu at Taco Bell.
SCORE: 77 ("A blast!")



The Hourglass Sanitorium (Wojciech Jerzy Has; 1973)
I counted more than 300 continuity errors. I have set aside most of the coming weekend to document them on imdb. Visually, it's an ecstatic symphony of decay.
SCORE: 92 ("Fantastic!")
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smirnoff

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #6071 on: August 19, 2021, 03:46:11 AM »
I'm a My Blueberry Nights fan. It's never occurred to me to describe a film as sexy before I saw it.

Agreed - it cemented my love of Norah Jones.
I think of it as a hidden little treasure.

This is interesting since it appears to be one of the lesser Wong Kar-wai films, at least to critics. Wouldn't I be better off maybe watching Fallen Angels or Happy Together? I will keep this rec in my back pocket, though. Sometimes it's interesting to watch a director's less (critically) successful films to see if I follow suit on general opinion or not.

There's a wealth of really really good reviews for Happy Together from the Far East Bracket. Not mine, but you can find links to the good ones at the top of mine. Some people seem to enjoy it. I find WKW's characters hard to connect with, or like, in most cases... And that's usually a tough hurdle for me to clear. Also I find his movies weak on story, and the experience is sustained with mood and music. Sustained for some, for me it's strained. I don't like In The Mood For love, Chunking Express or Happy Together. So he's not a director for me, with the one exception.

Antares

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #6072 on: August 19, 2021, 03:49:08 PM »
chews scenery like it's a pinche dollar menu at Taco Bell.

Best description of his performance ever!!!
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Eric/E.T.

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #6073 on: August 19, 2021, 10:14:39 PM »
I'm a My Blueberry Nights fan. It's never occurred to me to describe a film as sexy before I saw it.

Agreed - it cemented my love of Norah Jones.
I think of it as a hidden little treasure.

This is interesting since it appears to be one of the lesser Wong Kar-wai films, at least to critics. Wouldn't I be better off maybe watching Fallen Angels or Happy Together? I will keep this rec in my back pocket, though. Sometimes it's interesting to watch a director's less (critically) successful films to see if I follow suit on general opinion or not.

There's a wealth of really really good reviews for Happy Together from the Far East Bracket. Not mine, but you can find links to the good ones at the top of mine. Some people seem to enjoy it. I find WKW's characters hard to connect with, or like, in most cases... And that's usually a tough hurdle for me to clear. Also I find his movies weak on story, and the experience is sustained with mood and music. Sustained for some, for me it's strained. I don't like In The Mood For love, Chunking Express or Happy Together. So he's not a director for me, with the one exception.

Narrative, in general, is hard for me to swallow, just as a life philosophy, as I think life is mainly empty/meaningless spaces full of respiration and triviality that we try to condense into meaningful arcs. Sooooo...a movie without a strong narrative is very much OK with me (though there are ones with strong narratives that I like, too; tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies). The issue is, after two Wong Karwai films, I don't feel an overwhelming pull to dig in deeper. Good to know people liked Happy Together, though. Maybe some day.
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1SO

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #6074 on: August 21, 2021, 12:50:31 AM »

Custody (2017)

I remember Teproc wrote a fairly negative review of this and completely forgot about it until it came recommended from my new favorite Podcast (Pure Cinema). They described it as a domestic drama with the tension of a thriller, and I was totally getting that vibe. The film stars Denis Ménochet, the farmer from the opening of Inglourious Basterds, as the husband/father in a custody battle. The first third is a fairly static hearing where he is described as potentially dangerous or perhaps this is how the wife (Léa Drucker) paints him to turn the children against their father. Because we don’t know for sure, there’s a constant tension to the remainder of the film, and because Ménochet looks like Russell Crowe, but even beefier, there’s a constant mistrust. If this guy is how they describe him, when he goes off it’s going to be like fighting off a grizzly bear.

It’s not a pleasant viewing experience because who wants to be tense for that long wondering if things are going to turn ugly, worried about how ugly the film will get? Director Xavier Legrand, in his feature debut, carefully measures the situation and never goes for shock. It’s not a film where things go too big and Ménochet is uncomfortably riveting, with moments that feed into how he’s being portrayed and moments that reveal a more troubled soul in need of some help.
★ ★ ★ - Good

Eric/E.T.

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #6075 on: August 23, 2021, 12:25:45 AM »
Summer of Soul
Pretty awesome debut for Questlove. He did come across an absolute goldmine, so also, pretty lucky find for Questlove. This covers a nice breadth of Black music for 1969. The 5th Dimension, Sly, and Nina Simone are more my speed than B.B. King or the gospel acts, but I can surely admit that there's quality across the board here. We should probably have some shot-outs to the people who originally designed and shot the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, because the colorful set, various, mostly eccentric costumes, and the sound are all very much on-point. For his part, Questlove seems to consistently employ a technique by which he allows a number at the festival to start, and then continues playing it under different soundbites and interviews that often cut back and forth from the performance to whoever is talking. I don't think it's bad, because I get a huge sense of being there, while also getting put up on game of what was going on during that period in time and the importance of these individual artists. It's cool, but I'd also like an alternate version where I can just enjoy the performances more without the inevitable history lesson. I gave it a 4/5, though, because I think it plays well as a coherent whole even if this is a documentary of an event that took place over the course of a couple of months, and he got to the people who really mattered for his interviews. That Questlove did a competent job was all that was required here; I will be curiously awaiting where he goes from here.

About Endlessness
A series of vignettes that spans the most minor of moments to some of the most profound in human history. I was there every step until one very troubling vignette, that of an honor killing, which I think is the only real BIPOC representation, and really bothered me the rest of the way. I appreciate the ambition here, where we go from a server losing his focus for a second and spilling wine all over a table to the final scene of Hitler's life, enough so that I ultimately come down favorably, but I think this is more of a minor work and success than anything else.
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pixote

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #6076 on: August 25, 2021, 04:40:05 AM »
Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992)

Dave the Necrobumper, with support from jdc, gave me a tough assignment for my impromptu movie dictator club: skinhead Ozploitation.

Fun backstory: I've been having trouble watching any movies lately, partly due to depression-fueled anhedonia and partly due to an overwhelming sense of nihilism and misanthropy from which cinema no longer provides any escape. I can't shake the hopelessness that humanity's entropy is always increasing while its collective empathy is always decreasing, and I see movies, beneath their surfaces, just reinforcing those sad inevitabilities.

In that context, Romper Stomper was either the best or the worst movie to watch. Its nihilism certainly fits my current mindset, so yay for that, I guess, but, my god, of all the stories to tell, why tell this one? Why have neo-Nazi 'protagonists' or even tell this story from their perspective — especially if you're not even going to engage with those values, beliefs, etc.? It's really just a MacGuffin that gives the movie a controversial edge. By the third act (or maybe even the midpoint), the skinhead stuff is no longer relevant to the story, which devolves into more standard "guy tries to leave gang for girl and sociopathic gang leader tries to stop him" territory.

I browsed through a couple favorable reviews on Letterboxd that all provided very generous readings of the film's themes, suggesting that it paints the skinheads in a bad light and clearly it's not on their side, et cetera, et cetera; or that the film is more just about disaffected youth, of which racist hatred is just an ugly side effect — and it's really no different from how Larry Clarke captures the unlikable characters in Kids. And, sorry, I just can't accept that right now. Maybe back in 1992, I could have, but not now. Don't make a film about racists if you can't be antiracist about it.

What's annoying is that, if you just take out the skinhead shit, it's a pretty good movie. Like, if instead of skinheads, they're zombies or vampires or whatever, and the rest of the story is exactly the same, it'd deserve to be a cult classic. The (strong) aesthetic of the film already feels like a horror movie, especially the camerawork, and an allegorical approach to the same things would've hit a lot harder. Plus, Russell Crowe, who radiates strong screen presence in this early role, could've easily gone full Nosferatu with it.

Despite all my reservations, I still came very closely to giving this film a passing grade, largely on account of its style and pace, Crowe's performance, and the moments that had me referencing everything in my head from Lord of the Flies to A Clockwork Orange to Romeo and Juliet to Road Warrior. The last straw for me, however, was a moment near the end when, at the height of tragedy (from the perspective of the skinhead characters, at least), a busload of Japanese tourists shows up, and they start giddily taking photos of the tragedy in cartoonish fashion. This caricature of Asians, who were the main targets of the skinheads' hate and violence in the first half of the film, erased any benefit of the doubt I might have given to the film's themes and the intentions of its storyteller.

Up with empathy.

Grade: C+



Note: I still very much appreciate the recommendation and just the push to watch something/anything and then feel something/anything, even if they were very mixed feelings. It also feels good to engage here on the forums. It's been a while.

pixote
« Last Edit: August 25, 2021, 04:42:45 AM by pixote »
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Dave the Necrobumper

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #6077 on: August 25, 2021, 05:06:59 AM »
Oh I need to rewatch this film to provide a better response.

I am not sure I agree with "Don't make a film about racists if you can't be antiracist about it", as I am unsure how antiracist it would have to be. Certainly the film has never made me think it was ok to be a racist and as a bunch of people there were some deplorables among them. However like with any group of people there are a range of types within the group. This group was a bit like the Manson family, a group of misfits who were drawn into a charismatic leader who lead them in a dark direction.

Bad stereotyping of Asians in Australian film is not unique to this film, unfortunately.

Sandy

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #6078 on: August 25, 2021, 11:36:15 AM »
pixote, would you consider a follow up dictation? It's not a big movie, but its quietness allowed me the luxury of diving deep into my own thoughts. It restored me a little.

Land (2021, Robin Wright)

*Don't watch the trailer! Trailers are the worst at taking away a movie's ability to unfold. :P

pixote

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Re: Respond to the last movie you watched
« Reply #6079 on: August 25, 2021, 02:11:23 PM »
This group was a bit like the Manson family, a group of misfits who were drawn into a charismatic leader who lead them in a dark direction.

That's why I think making the film about vampires instead of skinheads would have been so much better, since the writing lacked the nuance and perspective to deal with the issues brought into play by the racism MacGuffin. I can't imagine this film having been directed by anyone other than a white dude, and that's problematic with me in a film focused on white supremacists. If a film is going to subject me to images of swastikas and quotes from the Mein Kampf, it needs to justify those choices for me in a way that's somehow redemptive. It has to be worth it and not just hate for hate's sake. This film failed that test for me, as it also failed the "don't be part of the problem" test with caricatures of Japanese tourists at the end. (A generous reading would say that the film gives Asians the last laugh over the white supremacists, but I wasn't feeling generous at that point.)

pixote, would you consider a follow up dictation? It's not a big movie, but its quietness allowed me the luxury of diving deep into my own thoughts. It restored me a little.

Yes, for sure, as I could certainly use some restoration. Things are such right now that I actually had an anxiety dream last night that I was accidentally clicked play on the trailer and couldn't turn it off.

pixote
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