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What did you monkeys watch this week? (09/19-09/25)

posted 3 years ago by StoneKeeper (21666)
44 replies | jump to latest

It was our birthdays Kowalski and I. And maybe a few others. So let’s sing a long:

Monkey see, monkey do, birthday party for me and you! 🎶

Now, this week on the menu:

Buffalo ´66 (1998 TV)I think you have to appreciate a precise type of mood and humour to enjoy this movie. Hard to explain which type though. It’s slightly absurd, very unique, offbeat and filled with great dialogue like:
Girl: « can I get in the bath with you,? Im cold. »
Guy: « No »
Girl: “But why!?”
Guy: « Because I don’t take bath with people. »
Or
Guy: « I didn’t say I would give you a kiss I said I’d get you hot chocolate”
Girl« Can I get a hug then?»
Guy: « Oh man… »
Not much to complain about except that something bugged me a little bit with the « twist » in the end. Another thing that slightly disappointed was the fact that we kind of expect the guy to snap at any moment but he never truly does and I really expected the ending to be dark but it was the total opposite. ( I thought he would find the girl dead in the hotel room. (Suicide)). Oh and the R rating for nudity and violence is PURE horsecrap. Anyways, this here movie is going to stick with me I know it. My rating: 7.5/10

Word trade centre (2006 Netflix): Recently, a lot of people watched this movie to celebrate the 20th anniversary and I did too. Not sure why I watched it on the evening of my birthday though. It was pretty intense and it made me tear up. My rating: 6.5/10

Godzilla: king of the monsters (2019 Netflix): Sometimes there’s nothing better to take your mind off things than a movie like this. The story was fine by me and the monster spectacle was grand. My favourite part was the Firebird VS the three headed dragon. I love dragons. I got two of them tattooed on my arm, one green one blue. This movie has its fair share of unrealistic moments (even considering the fact that it’s Godzilla) but I think it’s one of the coolest monster movie I’ve ever seen. Now a friend of mine made me realize that this movie is a sequel to another Godzilla movie that came out in 2014 and I was unaware of. I’ll have to watch it, probably next week. My rating: 7/10

[–] capuchin (2681) 3 years ago

Hey, hey.

Who Killed Teddy Bear? (Joseph Cates, 1965)

A nightclub worker starts getting obscene phone calls. A noirish police detective with a suspiciously encyclopaedic knowledge of paraphilias that he casually shares with his 9 year old daughter gets on the case. Post-Psycho thriller that’s frank enough to have troubled mid-60s censors. A ‘This stuff is shocking! Let’s have a really close look at just how shocking it is!’ movie. But solid enough. 3/5

Talking About Trees (Suhaib Gasmelbari, 2019)

Sudanese movies were starting to gain some traction at international film festivals in the 1970s and ‘80s. But the 1989 military coup utterly and deliberately destroyed the industry and closed down all the cinemas. Years later, the Sudanese Film Group - a small group of old-boy directors from the beforetimes - attempt a symbolic revival: they want to put a movie on in a theatre. They quickly come up against bureaucratic interference. A lot of the documentary is just hanging out with these guys. They’re fun. They’re passionate about the art, but weary. 3/5

Love Exposure (Sion Sono, 2008)

Sono’s most popular movie, and from what I’ve seen of his, that’s probably fair. It’s the one where all the kinky madness comes together. But - unpopular opinion alert - it also has some significant (although far from crippling) pacing issues. It makes it feel too long, as if the movie is unravelling a bit in the final quarter. Any decent editor will tell you that pacing issues accumulate over the entire runtime of a movie, that it’s about rhythm, scenes balanced against each other, rather than length per se - so I’d put good money on the original six hour cut not having these issues. 4/5

Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010)

Denis Villeneuve has been making really good movies for quite a while now, hasn’t he? 4/5

[–] capuchin (2681) 3 years ago

The Mad Women’s Ball (Melanie Laurent, 2021)

1885. Lou de Laage speaks to the dead, which means she’s bound for the asylum. As any fool knows, it was easy for a woman to end up in an asylum in the nineteenth century. Asylums were at least as much about social control as they were about mental health. As this movie repeatedly alerts us to. Lots of focus on restrictive corsets. At one point de Laage even tells the doctors ‘It’s you! You’re making people mad.’ To which they reply ‘Shut her up!’ and get the chloroform out. The film isn’t subtle in its themes or its subtext. Which is fine by me. I don’t always demand subtlety. It’s well-directed, well-acted, all of that, and the two hours slide by. But I did find it schematic and just wanted a bit more oomph from it, a bit more grit. But it’s good enough, if a bit bland. 3/5

The Fireman’s Ball (Milos Forman, 1967)

Old duffers in a fire department throw a party - including an improvised beauty contest - for their retiring chief. Petty theft, institutional incompetence, best intentions leading to coercion and disaster. A grand old farce. The Communist leadership thought it was about them for some obscure reason or other - cough, cough - and Forman left for America shortly after. 4/5

The Inheritance (Marta Meszaros, 1980)

A simple story of surrogate motherhood and the issues involved set mostly in 1936 against the background of Hungarian fascism and mainstream anti-Semitism. It’s fairly airless and operates at a stately pace that can be frustrating at times, but the sadly inevitable denouement has some impact and it does all ultimately come together. 3/5

[–] capuchin (2681) 3 years ago

The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)

Not only an outstanding film but a gift to the next two generations of English Lit undergrad students, because - despite the liberties taken with the text - no-one’s going to make a superior version of this story any time soon. If I were being churlish, I’d say it could possibly lose ten to fifteen minutes, and as I’ve found myself saying before now ‘Well, Alicia Vikander wouldn’t necessarily have been my choice for the role’. But it’s pretty great. 5/5

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Of yours, I've seen Buffalo '66. In fact, it's on a DVD in here somewhere in the back of a cupboard. I remember liking it a lot, but thinking it was very uneven. And actually, I was only thinking about rewatching it - after 15 years or so - the other day to see how well it stands up. From memory: 4/5.