Been meaning to give this a rewatch since finishing The World is Yours, Glenn Kenny’s excellent book on the film, last month. A few stray thoughts on a movie near and dear to my heart that I’ve seen way too many times:
The book notes Pacino’s insistence on doing multiple takes, including some to warm up, something which exasperated his collaborators but is interesting to note in light of his performance here. Particularly during his outbursts, you can see how…
On the last day before my Disney+ subscription expired, I decided to revisit what is likely my favourite live action film that Disney proper ever produced. The genius of this movie is that it understands that realism was never in reach for its state of the art for 1982 special effects, so instead it embraces their limitations wholeheartedly. The set pieces have a purified linear sense of movement. The cyberscapes in which most of this movie is set are abstracted…
It's sort of interesting how little this tries to excuse Michael Douglas' decision to have an affair in the first place. I could see another version of this where Douglas is struggling professionally and growing bored or frustrated with his family, economic anxieties conflated with romantic and sexual ones as would often happen in yuppie thrillers, so that the possibility of cheating on his wife seems appealing in a moment of weakness. But no, this guy's job seems to be…
Mini-Collab with theironcupcake
Mild spoilers below.
This movie begins with Lina Romay walking through the fog in nothing but a cape and a belt. So even before the credits have finished rolling, this is already a good movie. Romay is obviously a beautiful woman and Jess Franco, like in many of his movies, guides his camera to explore that beauty, every single of inch of it. Under Franco's camera, her body is a landscape, and her bush is dense and…
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
"Bullshit. He's miserable."
"He doesn't have to be. He accepts his fate."
"You're telling me if you name is Syphilis and you spend your life lugging a fucking rock up a hill you wouldn't be miserable?"
"I think I'm an existentialist, I really do."
The MO of the killer in this movie is that he copies famous serial killers, like Albert DeSalvo, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and Harry Connick Jr. Anyway, you see him mucking about with vintage computer graphics and then begin his crimes, but then the movie cuts away before he does anything. So there’s no need to worry. Anyway I’m being facetious but having watched Manhunter recently, it does occur to me that one of the things that one does well,…
