I'd put Last Night (1998) over Stories We Tell on that Canadian list...
I'd put Last Night (1998) over Stories We Tell on that Canadian list...
I still haven't finished Holy Motors. I did however watch and enjoy the cult film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension. Now I know another film that inspired Wes Anderson.
BLOG
And everybody wants to be special here
They call your name out loud and clear
Here comes a regular
Call out your name
Here comes a regular
Am I the only one here today?
Mark me down as one who feels like A Serbian Film is a legitimate artistic endeavor with purpose and vision. I think if we give Romero's Dawn of the Dead credit for having anti-consumer society subtext, then we have to acknowledge this film's desperate, bleak vision of governmental intrusion, manipulation and cruelty. While the film may not reach the artistic heights and political clarity of Pasolini's Salo, it does deserve to be a part of the same conversation. I had worried that the film would be simply a nihilistic catalog of grotesqueries. However, what drives the film is a protagonist engaged in a fight for respectability and the preservation of his family. Milos is forced to commit despicable acts; however, he clearly has a moral center. Sure, his business is sexuality. But, the videos we see of his past films are relatively innocent and playful, no darker than anything that might be found on the Playboy channel. It is the villainous director who sees an opportunity to exploit his gifts with his sickeningly corrupt and depraved vision. The film's horrific final scenes are effective because it is always clear what Milos has been fighting for. The pure, dumb bliss of copulation is twisted into something violent, devastating and ultimately unbearable. Although A Serbian Film effectively maintains a haunting, unsettling atmosphere, it is not a film about mystery and suspense, so much as a nightmarish reveal that we may be powerless to stop some of our worst fears from coming true -- that our finances, our family, our security, even our sexuality are in the hands of powerful people more evil than we can imagine.
Coming to America (Landis, 1988) **
The Beach Bum (Korine, 2019) *1/2
Us (Peele, 2019) ***1/2
Fugue (Smoczynska, 2018) ***1/2
Prisoners (Villeneuve, 2013) ***1/2
Shadow (Zhang, 2018) ***
Oslo, August 31st (J. Trier, 2011) ****
Climax (Noé, 2018) **1/2
Fighting With My Family (Merchant, 2019) **
Upstream Color (Carruth, 2013) ***
Wow, Spinal. Color me surprised. I mean, I'm there with you, I just didn't anticipate any other "favorable" response coming out of this forum.
"We eventually managed to find them near Biskupin, where demonstrations of prehistoric farming are organized. These oxen couldn't be transported to anywhere else, so we had to built the entire studio around them. A scene that lasted twenty-something seconds took us a year and a half to prepare."
Heh. Human Centipede III has a 1 on metacritic right now. Never seen that.
I agree.Quoting Spinal (view post)
I've seen and forgotten a lot of movies in my life.
Even movies I like I've forgotten.
I will probably never forget A Serbian Film. I've seen it one time, and I find myself thinking about it often. It is a tremendously powerful film full of haunting imagery.
So there are two different versions of The Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen, one with a montage of sex scenes expurgated and one with quite handsomely explicit penetration included. Somehow I unknowingly chose the version without the sex scenes when I first watched it back in April. This go-around with Sarah I chose the longer cut on youtube, and hey. That's unexpected. The film itself remains a marvel, testifying to the general uniformity of narrative film (and suggesting an awkward number of films view the "unpossessable" woman as a courtesan) and situating clever inversions of classic imagery (Oldboy's fall, 2001's starchild, among many). Just a delight.
The Boat People - 9
The Power of the Dog - 7.5
The King of Pigs - 7
In case anyone was wondering, Neil Marshall's Doomsday is one hell of a rotten piece of shit.
Welcome to the Axis/annex circa 2009.Quoting Skitch (view post)
Has Marshall ever made anything that was as fun as Dog Soldiers or as freaky as The Descent?
That one episode of Game of Thrones that one time.
Also, in case anyone was wondering, Ishtar is NOT one hell of a rotten piece of shit, but rather a brilliant and not at all unfunny movie.
Hadnt seen it since the theater so thought I'd give it a 2nd chance. Ouch.Quoting Dukefrukem (view post)
Centurion is even worse.
Kind of enjoyed Doomsday even if it's just a Frankenstein pastiche of half a dozen much better genre movies. Centurion was just boring.
I dont remember it being that bad. In fact, I remember it being kinda good.Quoting Ezee E (view post)
It's terrible.Quoting Skitch (view post)
Nope. I'm beginning to think he just got lucky, twice.Quoting Irish (view post)
Well, the talent is there, but he gets carried away with certain parts of his script that lead to exaggerated violence and character emotions. Doomsday is especially guilty of this.Quoting D_Davis (view post)
The Descent is so good because it's pretty minimal.
Gotcha.Quoting Spinal (view post)
[+] closer to next rating / [-] closer to previous rating
- Dark (S3) ✦✦✦½ [-]
- Fall (Mann, 2022) ✦✦✦½ [-]
- Ms. Marvel (S1) ✦½ [+]
- Dark (S2) ✦✦✦✦
- Moon Knight (S1) ✦✦½ [-]
- Get Carter (Hodges, 1971) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- Prey (Trachtenberg, 2022) ✦✦✦ [-]
- Black Bird (S1) ✦✦✦✦
- Better Call Saul (S6) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- Halo (S1) ✦✦✦ [-]
- Slow Horses (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- H4Z4RD (Govaerts, 2022/BE) ✦✦½ [-]
- Gangs of London (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- We Own This City (S1) ✦✦✦½ [+]
- Thor: Love and Thunder (Waititi, 2022) ✦✦ [+]
From here:
Has a director ever gotten so bad you start to wonder whether you were wrong to love their earlier movies?
I haven't really liked any of Almodóvar's films since Talk to Her, and having revisited all of his movies since All About My Mother in the past eighteen months or so, I've found that I still don't. I still find Talk to Her impressive, but everything since then (with the exception of I'm So Excited, as I haven't seen it) strikes me as mechanical and lifeless.Quoting Irish (view post)
I also need to take another look at Amores perros to see if it doesn't suck, because 21 Grams sure did. Oh, and his 9/11 short--almost forgot that one. And while I didn't hate Babel or Biutiful, and Birdman has some real virtues, I suspect I'd rate his debut less highly than I did in the early 2000s.
I was a big fan of Oliver Stone as a teenager, but seeing Natural Born Killers again this year was pretty disillusioning. It's like, "Hey, this shot-reverse shot is getting kinda boring, so why don't we arbitrarily cut away to an extreme close-up of somebody's tit just to keep the audience interested?"
I'm also less enamoured with Todd Solondz these days compared to when I was a teenager (though Dark Horse is quite good), and want to take another look at Welcome to the Dollhouse to see how it holds up. (I remember the part where the sister gets kidnapped seeming incredibly dopey even at the time.)
Just because...
The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) mild
Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) mild
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) mild
The last book I read was...
The Complete Short Stories by Mark Twain
The (New) World
Dario Argento (early stuff still good). Kenneth Branagh (early stuff not good). Sam Raimi (50/50).Quoting Irish (view post)
Almodovar still has it; Bad Education and The Skin I Live In are great. That reminds me, I need to see Volver.
Last 10 Movies Seen
(90+ = canonical, 80-89 = brilliant, 70-79 = strongly recommended, 60-69 = good, 50-59 = mixed, 40-49 = below average with some good points, 30-39 = poor, 20-29 = bad, 10-19 = terrible, 0-9 = soul-crushingly inept in every way)
Run (2020) 64
The Whistlers (2019) 55
Pawn (2020) 62
Matilda (1996) 37
The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) 61
Moby Dick (2011) 50
Soul (2020) 64
Heroic Duo (2003) 55
A Moment of Romance (1990) 61
As Tears Go By (1988) 65
Stuff at Letterboxd
Listening Habits at LastFM
He's still got the technique, but even Volver, which has more substantial characters than either Bad Education or The Skin I Live In (perhaps his two iciest films), eventually devolves into a series of dramatic revelations that feel obligatory rather than spontaneous.Quoting transmogrifier (view post)
Just because...
The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, 2022) mild
Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) mild
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, 2022) mild
The last book I read was...
The Complete Short Stories by Mark Twain
The (New) World