i just caught jaws for the first time fairly recently myself, & thought it was just about a perfect movie. i saw rp1 in the theatre last year & was a little indifferent to at as a whole, but definitely thought it had some great set-pieces in it. i liked ant-man a fair bit - pleasant film, uses the concept pretty nicely.
my week:
blue my mind (2017) 3 a puzzling movie, in that it felt pretty great in some ways if perhaps a bit self-serious, seemed like it was creating a coming of age/self-revulsion story on the level of thelma or even raw, but it worked its way to an ending that seemed completely out of step & really underwhelming to everything it had been building up to.
it's good enough, & certainly well made in most ways, but it seems so odd to me that the creators would do all that work, do such good things in my eyes for something so ultimately silly.
a star is born (1937) 3.5 at this point i only know the new, improved recipe star is born, & was slightly surprised by the light, comedic tone. it's still enjoyable, but it felt pretty slight & lightweight compared to the (i thought) genuinely powerful & moving modern version.
body bags 91993) 3 pretty entertaining anthology that plays very much like the strung-together episodes of a tales from the crypt style tv show that it apparently is. i was a bit underwhelmed by the mark hamill/eye transplant closer, but the stacey keech hair segment made me pretty disgusted, so that's a feather in this film's cap, i suppose.
hellhole (1985) 3 trashy 80s horror. i had fun watching it. edy williams must have been 42 or so when this film was made, & she had the best body among the many, many women we get to see naked.
captain marvel (2019) 2.5 captain marvel might be the most blithely robotic movie i've ever seen in a theatre. there is simply nothing in it to latch onto. it is a cinematic block of wood. you remember how in repo man everyone drank generic beer & ate generic food? if otto took leila to a movie in repo man, it would have been captain marvel, except the poster would have been simply a giant 'generic.' it is two hours of cgi gloss & a gaping void where a personality ought to have been inserted & nothingness.
dark web (2017) 2.5 fairly useless horror anthology, but the second story featuring a man & woman connecting across time through their televisions is fairly inventive & interesting. it's worth strolling over to tubi-tv to check out that segment i'd say, but you're safe giving the rest of it a pass.
camp massacre (2014) 2 would be an amusing no-budget horror/comedy if it had come in at 75 minutes or so. it's over 2 hours long for heaven's sake! there's simply no need for it to be so long. did they run out of money to pay the editor? very cute girls, though.
don't torture a duckling (1972) 4 solidly above average giallo, quite bleak at times & (by the standards of the films from this era) fairly coherent plot-wise.
perfect blue (1997) 4 entertainingly weird animated feature. had some lynchian elements that i enjoyed quite a bit, though it perhaps felt a touch too on the nose in its ending.
killing of a chinese bookie (1976) 2.5 've enjoyed every cassavetes' film i've seen until now - only two films in, mind you, but i've found them charmingly shambolic, even hypnotic. i can't really say why i loved 'a woman...' & 'faces' but not this one, but i did & i didn't. i was bored by the end. checked out. i just didn't care.
perhaps i should try it again on a weekend when i'm well rested & engaged, rather than at the end of a rather long day. perhaps i'm just making excuses for the fact that i was bored by a film i ought to have liked.
eat (2014) 3.5 genuinely gruesome at times & overall shockingly enjoyable. the actress looks like a cookie-cutter blonde you'll tend to see in all manner of trashy movies, but she gives quite a nice, relatable performance. by the standards of no-budget items i've stumbled across on tubitv, this is practically great: weird, funny, relatively imaginative.
the tree of life (2011) 5 the one time malick's glacial beauty didn't bore me, to be frank. that's not the kind of thing one's meant to admit in public i guess, but i've always been bored by his films. all of them. not this one, though. the cosmic weirdness mixed with a grounded personal story made this something i found hypnotic & (for the first time) something genuinely touching.
24 hour party people (2002) shambolic (could it be any other way?) mess. a bit too chaotic for me to give 5 stars, yet i love it as much as any film of the last 20 years. nobody plays self-important silly man like steve coogan.
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5 years ago
embryo (1976) 2.5 fairly dull 70s low concept sci-fi. if you are a typical hetero male, you'll probably enjoy ogling barbara carrera, but otherwise i found myself wishing they had done more with what they'd had to work with. more violence, or more sleaze, or, if they really wanted to try, more ideas. more something.
if it didn't feature a smattering of nudity & a bit of gore & floating fetuses, you would be forgiven for thinking it was a mid-tier tv movie.
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