i don't know any of yours except bttf, of course, which i love like anyone ought to & which i've been meaning to revisit. i've never seen the sequels, & one weekend i'm going to put aside an afternoon to watch all of them.
my week:
texas chainsaw 3d (2013) 2 at 33:45, the annoying friend says 'wow, he played that smooth...'
referring to the random hitchhiker who ransacked the house.
he didn't play anything smooth. they left a sketchy stranger alone in their house.
this strikes me as perhaps the single lamest line of dialogue i've ever heard in a widely distributed movie.
the first half or so of this doesn't play badly, i'd say. it's ok by modern mainstream horror standards, moves at a reasonable pace.
the back half is dull & boring & lacking in anything that might provoke even the slightest amount of interest, at least from me.
wonder woman (2017) 3.5 the ending of this movie really is a tremendous let-down, isn't it? it had gotten things so right up to that point. it worked the fish out of water comedy stuff perfectly, was funny & exciting & stirring in the appropriate spots. as good as almost anything else you could name in the comic book world so far. a shame to see it end in such a numbing, dull fashion.
12 angry men (1957) 5 periodically re-watch to remind myself just how great movies can be.
tokyo idols (2017) 3 doc on the japanese teen idol industry & the open fascination middle aged men have with it.
made me feel sad, even miserable in a way i really don't feel like talking about, so i won't.
i will say it's needlessly long. it didn't need to be a full 90 minutes. it could have told the story it needed to tell in a tidy 30 minutes easily.
senator ben sasse recently said that he'd read too many long books, too many books that should have been magazine articles & too many magazine articles that were needlessly long.
i'd say the same thing about most docs & movies in general.
keep it short.
edit yourself harshly.
concision is a great quality.
unhinged (2017) 2 apparently a remake of an (unheard of by me) 80s slasher. i can't help but wonder what qualities the original had that made the new team think it warranted a revisit, because the setup and the story are as by the books, punch the clock, paint by numbers as you'll get.
the actors don't embarrass themselves & the film looks good, but it's a very dull, uninspired affair. it does feature a (sadly brief but very steamy) lesbian sex scene, but otherwise it is competent but not memorable.
climax (2018) 4.5 a stomping, raw, thrilling return to form from gaspar noe after what i thought was a rather dull, boring affair in 2015's love.
noe's films are all ridiculous & preposterous, but, love aside, i can't get enough of them. i did think there were a few moments in the back half that just didn't work, but there were plenty that did, & i thought the long dance scenes that made up a good bit of the first half were as hypnotic & energetic & exciting as anything i've seen in a movie in years
in fact, i enjoyed this so much that i watched it again the following day. there was nothing i wanted more than to spend more time with this world. it actually makes me feel good that i can still get excited about stuff like this.
she rises (2017) 2.5 there were moments here where i really felt embarrassed for the actors.
i'm guessing the inspiration behind this was that someone watched inland empire & thought 'that doesn't look too hard.'
plays basically like david lynch fan fiction. i've enjoyed some things over the years that could be categorized the same way, & i have to confess i more or less enjoyed this too, while also believing that this is pretty terrible & most sensible people will probably hate it.
metropolitan (1990) 4 if i was as scholarly & erudite as the people in this film (or no doubt whit stillman himself) i'd say something like 'whit stillman is our (insert clever comparison here - something better than jane austen).
metropolitan, like every one of his films (only 5 of them, sadly), is a delight, & a nice reminder that the greatest pleasures in film can come from watching people talk.
amazon hot box (2018) 2 in the classic tradition of women in prison films, this didn't quite deliver on all the exploitation it seemed to promise. not enough nudity, not enough sex. but i still had fun watching it.
the man who killed hitler and then bigfoot (2018) 3 at first i thought this was a dreary, self-serious mess, then i came around to thinking it had found it's footing near the end and actually found it was a fairly inspired piece of work that had managed to pull off something fairly unique.
then it slipped on a banana peel at the end, & i found it self-serious again.
can't help but admire it nonetheless. it's streaming for free on hoopla, and i think it's worth a shot. you might like it more than i did.
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[deleted]
5 years ago
fat girl (2001) 4.5 my third viewing, i believe.
funnily enough, even though i think it's a great movie, it's also one that rather firmly refused to stay stuck in my head. i only held the vaguest impression of it, and definitely did not remember its ending, though i did know it had a ... bold ending.
some people will take this as a feminist manifesto, & perhaps it was meant that way. it doesn't feel like that to me. i'm a 50 year old white male, & i see myself in the fat girl as much as any movie character i've ever come across.
necropolis (1987) 3.5 this is great trash. i had no idea what was going on, yet there wasn't one moment where i was not entertained.
conan the barbarian (1982) 3.5 a bit too long and i'd argue a bit too light on action and tension in its middle section, but it has some great sets, some truly great set-pieces, and i think that ending scene, with the temple at night and hundreds of torches lighting up the dark, captures the epic feel the rest of the film lacked. it disappoints me a bit every time i watch it, because i feel like there's a better film just under the surface waiting to burst out, but it's still pretty good, miles better than almost any other sword & sorcery film you could name i bet.
night of horror (1981) 0/5 it's not just that this is boring & doesn't seem to have any story or any characters or anything.
it's ugly, and not in a salo way. it's grating. murky. dreary. and cheap sounding. the sound quality & the score grated on my nerves like few things ever had.
there's a copy of it on youtube. try watching two minutes of it. any part. doesn't matter where.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSxtUZy_ifg
i deserve some kind of reward for being such a brave soldier and watching this through to the end.
entertainment (2015) 3.5 david yow from jesus lizard pops up here, & i just saw him in under the silver lake. it's always a little exciting to me every time i see him randomly burst into my life in some way.
neil hamburger is my spirit animal, and this film makes proper use of his persona, taking his weirdly uncomfortable & unsettling yet hilarious comedy & putting it into a plausible drama.
the florida project (2017) 5 the first time i've revisited it since my theatre viewing.
it's not a film you just re-watch casually, is it. but it's perfect, perhaps except for that final 30 seconds, which still feel not quite right to me, perhaps. it doesn't harm the film in any serious way. it's still painful & feels all too real, but it really could have stopped 30 seconds earlier and not lost a thing, & perhaps gained a bit.
the master (2012) 4 of all the pta films, this is the one that confounds me the most, i suppose. i'm always left feeling like i don't quite get inside any of the people, that there's a lock on the film i can't quite pick, but perhaps that's all by design, since there's simply nothing to lancaster dodd other than riddles & chicanery.
regardless, i always love spending time in its world. like all pta, it's great to look at, filled with indelible moments & images & dialogue. it might be his best, might be his worst. i don't believe in subjectivity in film to any great extent, but all takes on this one feel valid to me.
wildlife (2018) 3 for most of its running time, wildlife plays like the kind of proper, very worthy family drama that i generally take pains to avoid. it's better than most, i guess, & it certainly has quality performers, but this just doesn't excite me or interest me or incite anything that makes me want to spend time in this story. it has an interesting conclusion, and my interest definitely perked up during those segments, but all told it was 100 or so minutes of people i wasn't interested in doing things i didn't really care about.
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StoneKeeper (21049)
5 years ago
What did you not like about wonder woman's ending? The fact that she believes in love or the final battle? Personally the ending did not bother me. 8/10
The master coufounds me too but I did not have a lot of fun watching it. 6/10
I bought a used copy of 12 angry men (1957) a while ago but still need to watch it.
I really really want to see climax (2018). Where did you find it? It's like 30$ on amazon and it looks like it's only region 2 copies.
night of horror (1981): what did you expect it has a rating of 1.4!! Anyways, props for staying till the end.
the florida project (2017) looks highly interesting.
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[deleted]
5 years ago
re: wonder woman - i just found the entire ending battle underwhelming. i thought the earlier action scene in no man's land had been so exciting & stirring, but this one just felt like weightless pixels battling for no good purpose. that's a problem i have with a lot of comic book films of course, but i guess i found this one particularly bad because i thought everything that had come before to be mostly great.
i kept hoping that climax would show up in the theatres here, but it never came. i shamefully watched a stream of it on a site of dubious legitimacy, something i generally try not to do - but i really did want to see that film, and i'm glad i did. i will definitely buy a copy if/when it gets a proper north american physical media release.
as for night of horror - well, one of our fellow mc users recommended it on a thread here, so i felt obligated to watch it all the way through. maybe he was playing a practical joke.
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StoneKeeper (21049)
5 years ago
I called the videoclub today and they told me the European released came out but not America’s yet. They said it looked like a limited released but I cross my fingers that they’ll get a copy or two.
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Catbookss (13664)
5 years ago
I've been wanting to see The Master for a while now. It wasn't on Netflix when I had it, and isn't on Prime, so I'm still waiting.
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[deleted]
5 years ago
do you have kanopy in your region? it's streaming on there, at least in the canadian version.
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Catbookss (13664)
5 years ago
I just checked, and no Kanopy. Searched our library system to see if it was available some other way, but no. Thanks though!
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StoneKeeper (21049)
5 years ago
I just realised you said "neil hamburger is my spirit animal"
That'll be my quote of the week right there.
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