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Films II : The Filminator


Bob

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I've also watched Alien: Romulus. Wasn't really planning to but a friend asked me if I wanted to tag along and it's been a while since I was in the cinema.

 

'Replaying the hits' certainly is an apt description of this, it's eerily similar in structure to the first movie. But at the same time it also expects you to have seen it, so it doesn't dwell on those iconic moments as much but keeps the flow going, for better or worse. I think overall it's competently made, it's certainly one of the most visually interesting big movies I've seen in a while due to the usage of certain practical effects instead of an over-reliance on CGI, but on the other hand I found it a big too talkative and I would have preferred less usage of music, as I think space horror works better in silence.

 

I don't quite see it falling off towards the end like nag says, even though

Spoiler

I wasn't a big fan of the twist with the hybrid and the resulting body horror. I hate looking at stuff like that, Prometheus did it, too.

 

Overall you could probably have a discussion about whether or not this was a necessary movie. I think it doesn't really move the overall Alien chronology forward in a meaningful way but then again doing that was what people hated about Prometheus and Covenant, so it's really a lose-lose situation. In a vacuum though it's a solid movie I think, with a relatively unknown cast to boot, which I like seeing, as some big Hollywood face would absolutely have pulled you out of the illusion.

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That's the entire reason the ending lost it for me...

 

Spoiler

I hate the whole hybrid concept, it was terrible in Resurrection and it's just as bad here. I'm not a fan of the whole Engineer thing either so having the hybrid be almost that was a double strike against it.

 

I do like the fact they're rolling in concepts from the novels now... to the best of my knowledge it's the first time Plagiarus Praepotens are mentioned in the films

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I watched an older movie today, but it was a movie I'd never seen before, so new to me. Deja Vu starring Denzel Washington, which is currently on Disney+. It was an actual pleasant surprise, as I went into it thinking it was another of DW's excellent thrillers. I didn't know it had a sci-fi time-travel twist. I think it's great when I discover a movie like that, and I've got no idea about it, have never seen a trailer, and then have an enjoyable couple of hours.

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Drive My Car (2021) - another Murakami adaptation but compared to Burning this is practically a feel good story (it's not a feel good story)

 

I'm not going to get too much into what it's about beyond it's about a director putting on plays, stuff like Beckett and Checkov, and he's sort of tortured by a lack of closure in his relationship with his wife. That's all I need to say about that really. It's set in Hiroshima, apparently was supposed to be set in South Korea initially but this was when COVID kicked off and they had to change it

 

What I liked about it most though was how the play he was putting on was multilingual. There were actors speaking Japanese, Cantonese and even Korean sign language, and with the latter in particular it's used to great emotional effect in some scenes. It's a 3 hour film and quite slow but for some reason I didn't feel the runtime on this as much as some other, much shorter stuff. Which is saying something, I recommend it if you like Murakami. Interestingly this film is also named after a Beatles song, like Norwegian Wood. It's a much more affirming film than that book tho, which is a total fucking bummer of a novel

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Watched a film off iPlayer yesterday, Horror Express (1972) which was pretty decent, but it's probably the first time I've seen one of the major stars have their name misspelt in the opening credits !

 

Sorry Mr Lee, it's the font size, and your first name is so long.....

 

IMG_20240826_112752750_AE.jpg

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what am I missing?

 

I've watched a couple of films today, first off Longlegs, which I liked a lot, but I wasn't really prepared for it to not make sense. It's kind of a Silence of the Lambs, really good story, great performances... err to a point. It's about a young FBI agent who has a knack for patterns and intuition, she breaks a case while still green and is moved on to the Longlegs serial killer case. A man who seemingly kills entire families without setting foot in their house, and leaves impenetrable notes behind.

The two issues I have with it, because I did really enjoy it aside from this

1.

Spoiler

I didn't expect it to just basically be 'magic'. I was expecting something else, some larger reason why the families were killing themselves, instead it's magic dolls? That's a bit of a let down

 

2. I don't expect everyone to agree with this, but Nic Cage's character is a bit queer-phobic, if that's a word? There's no reason for the character to be portrayed like that, other than to make him creepier and seedier. It seems I'm not the only person that's felt like that about it, but I also have been around long enough to know not everyone is going to see it, care, or think it's even a bad thing

 

 

I also watched an Irish film called Oddity, which is similar in that it's a horror film that at points works very well, but is let down by being a bit too stupid. Shame, because a couple of the scenes are really well done, I just didn't vibe with its more nonsensical aspects

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Both those horror films are on my watchlist for my horror marathon in October. Reading your spoiler of Longlegs, it reminds of me of Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Not a horror as such but sorta adjacent (this isn't a spoiler related to that spoiler either, just the premise describes sounds similar)

 

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Watched Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952) a few days ago, the BFI bluray just came out for it. I really liked the first hour half of this, the premise is about a 60-ish year old civil servant who's basically languished for 30 years as a chief of social works or something like that in Tokyo. He finds out he has stomach cancer and has a sort of existential crisis when he looks back at the interchangeable years of his wasted life, barely able to tell the days apart from each other. So he starts to do something about it. Speaking as someone who feels a bit stagnant in my own life right now it really spoke to me and I was quite ready to call it my favorite Kurosawa film by a long shot. But it sort of lost me a bit in the back section of the film where it lays it on very thick and the message that was so powerful in the first half begins to sound maudlin. But I think it's a great film, probably still my favorite of his even with that issue. There's a 2022 remake called Living (which apparently is a translation of the original title) with Bill Nighy that's supposed to be really good.

 

(reading that back, it makes the film sound quite depressing but it's actually very funny and uplifting but I didn't want to produce a whole summary explaining why)

 

Also watched Spike Lee's BlacKKKlansman (2018), which is about cops infiltrating the KKK. It's set in the 70s with John David Washington and Adam Driver playing the lead roles. It's an interesting period piece combo of comedy and appalling horror. I think it's very messy and it goes off in some weird tangents when it imports references to Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation, making points about the racist legacy of classic film making but it can at times feel like it's getting distracted. But it's really good I thought. I heard some criticism about the way it ends, and I get it, but I think it's the sort of thing which makes it feel more present and maybe completes the thesis it's going for in doing so, which is even tho the film is an (occasionally) fun distraction the subject it's dealing with is just kinda a continuum of American history. Recommend this as well

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I watched the Borderlands movie, and I'm kind of surprised it's been so singled out as being bad. It's certainly not good, and the characters are annoying. Claptrap and Tina don't have a single good moment. The main thing though is that it's just boring. They don't introduce the world of the characters well, it just sort of starts and moves. There's no sense of "peril" or whatever 

 

For context though, I was exercising while watching it and it's relatively short admittedly, but I got through it barely paying attention, whereas Twisters annoyed me so much that I couldn't get through it 

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  • 3 weeks later...

3 Women (1977) - Back when Shelley Duvall died I imported the criterion of this on amazon, but it took 2 months to come and I only got it yesterday. I think a lot of people bought it at once. Anyway it's a movie I'm shocked I didn't see or hear about until she died, it's exactly the kinda shit I like, right in my wheelhouse and potentially a future fave on rewatch.

 

It's very like

Spoiler

Persona (not the game) or Mulholland Dr.

*(references to films it resembles, not really a spoiler but just in case)

 

Duvall and Sissy Spacek play two characters with a similar name, the latter sorta obsessed with the former. The film is about their cohabitation and how they get along (or don't) and then it shifts into being about other stuff. Which is all I'm willing to say really. A recommend if you want to watch a surreal and inscrutable 70s film, you can get it on apple buy/rent or in other ways.

 

Spoiler

My favorite scene is near the end where they depict a character having a nightmare. The impressionistic blending of images and sound design is so creepy, the final 15 minutes of this film are largely a horror. 

 

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Watched a few haunty ones over the weekend, but I'm going to shout out Green Room (2015). Premise is a struggling underground band gets booked to do a show for a bunch of neo nazis, they witness something they shouldn't and find themselves in a pressure cooker type situation where they've become a problem that needs to be dealt with. In a manner of speaking

 

My byline for it would be it's a bit of Deliverance mixed with Texas Chainsaw (more than a bit redundant perhaps, but those are what I thought about). It's interesting to see Patrick Stewart play against type a bit, he's the leader of this neo nazi militia. I didn't always totally buy him in the role but they find a way to justify that. Two Star Trek alumni in this as well, with him and Anton Yelchin (RIP) playing the leads. A good one to throw on if you want to watch an exciting and tense film, where every scene kinda just crashes into the next and you're like how much worse can it get, a fucking lot it turns out 👍

 

Less positive on Longlegs (2024). Dangerman explained what it's about so I won't repeat that. I thought it had some cool framing at times and I liked the aspect ratio gimmickry. During the wide shots you can sometimes notice weird details, so it can become a game to spot the scary bits (tho streaming really rears its ugly head here, with its macroblocking and colour banding in dark scenes)

 

But its reveals play out disappointingly I think, and the glam rock thing with Nicolas Cage's character felt like a misguided and distracting aesthetic choice. I think if I checked this out on Shudder and never heard of it I would be much more positive on it, but I think elevated expectations haven't done the film much favours here. I thought it was going to be like Hereditary but it was less scary than a James Wan film. The opening was the only bit that really got me, like the literal first 2 minutes I mean. Sometimes films overdo it on jump scares, but I think this maybe needed one or two more than it had 👎

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On 27/09/2024 at 10:07, one-armed dwarf said:

Kermode's not as much fun nowadays but he's still gold when he gets into a good old rant

 

 

Will have to check this out at some point

 

edit or maybe not, the cinematic equivalent of toothache? Might need some novocaine first

So funny. He was waiting to let it all out and then, he let it rip 😂

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The discourse around it had me hunt down 4ks of The Conversation and Apocalypse Now, which I've ordered now from Amazon german (as 'Der Dialog'). 

 

Reason being tho is Apocalypse Now was the one that was shaping up to be his other big failure, but it turned into an extremely good film. There's a documentary on it I always wanted to watched called Hearts of Darkness which is BTS on how bad that thing was shaping up and his lack of faith in it turning into something good

 

Which makes Megalopolis interesting by comparison, cause it also had a difficult birth but the difference is he seems so confident that it's actually brilliant when it (apparently) isn't. The clips of it are very surreal, with strange delivery of lines. This is not Adam Driver in his usual form, and he looks like he's trying to hold back from rolling his eyes at 'Emersonian mind'. My cinema recently re-opened after years of being closed but no hope they show this I think

 

 

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Didn't realise this was happening but The Electric State is being adapted into a movie by the Russo brothers: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/story/the-electric-state-first-look

 

Not feeling those screenshots to be honest, completely misses the style and atmosphere of the original (which is an illustrated book I might add for context). Might check it out but I'm rather skeptical. Also not a fan of the casting choices, even I have nothing against Pratt and Brown per se.

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On 01/10/2024 at 10:13, one-armed dwarf said:

I watched Happiness (1998), now that it's October I'm looking forward to some nice, heart warming horror films about violence and murder to cleanse the palette after that one 😬

 

You should watch the Happiness with Philip Seymour Hoffman in. Not that it's a horror, it's just a great film 

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