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Purchased the Criterion 4K BluRay, and it looks deeper, darker, and more gloriously nuanced.

Where actors’ eyes fell into inky shadows and the catchlights gleamed off of them like a ionless shark, here you can see the perfect balance of the chiaroscuro shot by Willis.

All The President’s Men may have won the awards in the 70s, as it told a then-current story with gravitas and heft—The Parallax View warns of a future story. The conspiracies of the JFK Assassination which  bore this film didn’t land the same way in 1974. But this film projects a meaning out into the current era. Our time.

We exist in a political era where lies are told, and then contradicted with new lies, forever devaluing the concept of Truth—the crux of 1984. But in 1974, this movie presents a world where the self-myth of patriotism and reactive, violent alienation leads to a winnowing of candidates until we find the best patsy for the job. The Parallax Corporation asks its applicants to self identify as sociopaths, to pick the wrongest answers to 108 questions.

Today, we have a political movement that doesn’t care if we’re at war with Eastasia—so long as we’re hurting an ideological enemy. It’s are self-selected, by continuing to follow an increasingly bizarre series of self-evident falsehoods. A divining system that winnows out the free thinker or the empathetic, feeding one violent fantasy after another, each more flagrantly antithetical to the moral position it claimed only a few days ago.

Watching people online believe that the FBI planted incriminating evidence in Trump’s safe, asking for violence against the FBI, threatening assassination of Law Enforcement and Law Maker alike… from their back the blue/thin blue line/don’t do the crime edifice.

Today a man was shot who sought to wage war on the FBI, and sent a “call to arms” across social media.

These are the stooges that come out of the woodwork. The vermin whose ears prick at every dogwhistle.

They’re sorted.

Scanned for.

Sought.

Until they step up and do the deed for the corporate sponsor.

Why are you even reading this?!
Go watch it again, ya goof.

The absurdist progenitor of letterboxd.conexionsite.com/film/au-service-de-la-/ which predates 007.

Played by Jean Dujardin (The Artist), Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, alias OSS 117, is a broad sendup of Connery-era Bond and the original Hunebelle movies. From the terrible chopsocky, to the balsa furniture, to the dyed-hairline—everything in this movie reeks of Camembert and sauternes—overly sweet and super cheesy.

The film pokes fun at pretty much everything it comes in with, but makes a whole meal of the insensitivity and proud cultural ignorance of Imperialist . Sexism, racism, the belief that René Coty was anything thing other than an incompetent buffoon of a leader—it all takes a beating here, with no one kicking harder than Bernice Bejo (The Artist).

The first of a trilogy (the following two don’t fare as well), but the start of a new era after 7 of the original run. 88 books. The character is so corny as to beg for a parody, and nobody was more deft at bringing it to the screen than director Hazanavicius (The Artist).

It’s almost like they knew they could make an Oscar winner after working together on this. :eyes:

Saw this on a bootleg VHS in 1992. It is a dark commentary on the documentary, media, and also presages reality shows.

Everyone gets their own camera crew.

Think of Speed Racer.

Now, remove the soul.

This kills the crab.

Every bit the equal of its predecessors. Which, aside from the first… is damning with faint praise.

It was fun, and the low tech versions of both predator and prey are a fun spin on the original formula.

3.66 stars

One of my all-time favorites.
There is no other film that seems more appropriate during the J6 Hearings in America. A film that identifies the characteristics of the alienated, angry, paranoid, conspiracy-thinker, and how they are used for political purposes by the corporate donors who wield them like a weapon.

Pakula and Wheeler have assembled, within the middle of the film, the greatest editing masterpiece since Lev Kuleshov invented his effect. What is America? Who is Mom, Dad, Country, and Me? As it warps from the jingoistic ideal and becomes the dark tortured reality, we see the fuel of the disillusioned. The “I see things around me that other people do not see” mentality of “do your own research” victimhood. “I know who is responsible for my problems” has a thinly veiled implication of “sOrOs aNd tHe JeWs” added to the end of it, for our current patsies.

The Commission’s findings will never follow the money. We’ll never know who funded the rallies, who paid for the busses, who printed the signs. You had to be at the Tea Party marches carrying the sign to see that they were printed by the RNC. And if you were there, you had already drank so much Flavor-Aid that you wouldn’t question the claims of “Grassroots Libertarian Freedom Fighters” printed on Georgia-Pacific cardstock by the Kochs (who created the astroturf in the first). Fox d for free, Reddit and Twitter didn’t clamp down until culpability became the issue. And like the bookends of this film, the profound rot will never be uncovered. The kleptocrats and crony capitalists will be free to take their next shot.

The Parallax View is far deeper than a first viewing. It provides, much as its title, multiple ways of seeing the action. Taken from one point, it is the story of an investigative journalist going undercover to find the truth behind a political hit job. Taken another, it is the story of a man finding out too late that the job of assassin was already farmed out by the corporation. Yet there you stand, watching it unfold.

Minus the 5:50 in the middle, the movie is a taut yet slow-paced assemblage of scenes. There’s a narrative, but it comes in smash cuts and long shots. The closest you can get to the framing-for-unease seen here is with Mr. Robot (which owes a lot to this Paranoid Thriller).

I work with psychometric testing in my field. We assess a candidate’s ability to perform tasks under incredible mental duress. To evaluate their capacity to execute in panic settings, to increase awareness and improve outcomes. In a way, we check their own belief that “in a risk situation, they'll go right down the line. That's something money can't buy.” We pay close attention to traits associated with right wing authoritarianism, with Machiavellianism and narcissism. We extract a personality profile similar to the Big 5. All of which is to say: I am aware of the fine line between heroism and psychopathy. I track the factors that lead to alienation and self-esteem/self-construct issues. We are aware of the short distance from ‘patriot’ to ‘radicalized nationalist.’

This movie is in the back of my head all the time with my work. But only recently (in the first week of 2020) was it something that summed up an entire political movement. Patsies and pawns, unaware of the powers they’re serving, fed by the belief that what they were doing was noble, required, for “the good of their country.” All while the evil that manipulates them makes money hand-over-fist; and is only ever temporarily derailed.

Those of you who’ve read my other reviews know my abiding love of the humanist achievement The Human Condition. My anti-authoritarian spirit animal Hara-Kiri. The Parallax View is my choice for pure cynicism. The knowledge that we can be manipulated, by our best intentions, to dig the trenches for uncaring, unblinking terrorists.

I’m reminded of a statement from Chomsky, that the bounding function of Journalism is to ask the questions that are acceptable. The charade of a “Left Wing Media” in the US is only to say: this is as far as we’re willing to push. Past this is far too far. The farcical belief that a newspaper owned by General Electric or Amazon would really want to expose the corporate capture of America, or that millionaire of Congress sitting in a hearing want to go after their donors and patrons.

More than Watergate, the paranoid thriller genre tells us what lessons should have been learned from the 70s.

Watch this movie. Really watch it. It is Pakula’s greatest work. It is darker and more knowing than any other movie of its type. You might be bored by its pacing, or think it is predictable in its plot. Aside from a masterclass in tension— it has a deep, malevolent story to tell. One that we should all know and keep in our thoughts.

This review may contain spoilers.

This may be my 5th rewatch of the film. I docked it a half-star this time around. The pacing wasn’t an issue for me—the performances by everyone around Hackman were more wooden than I ed. Excepting John Cazale, of course.

Leaving aside the dirty trick of the two different takes for the inflection in the line-read, the “story” of the film takes a back seat to the character study. The isolation, loneliness, self-torment. Caul is a fascinating sketch of a man that descends into a criminal plot and comes out of it completely divorced from society. The half-joke “it’s not paranoia if they really are following you” leaves Caul with no way forward.
Where will he go? What will he do? Who is listening to the eavesdropper?

The answers aren’t delivered, much less wrapped up with a bow. Which leaves me wanting more. More resolution, more agency on Caul’s part. Some form of comeuppance.

But we don’t get it. It delivers a hollow gnawing instead. Along with Parallax, ATPM, Marathon Man, and 3 Days of the Condor—this movie is a feel. It delivers a post-Nixon sense of unease and disquiet that modern movies don’t even bother trying to generate.

I love it, but I wish it was better.

It was good enuff.

More heart than I expected.

I sat through the third one. This made up for it. Phoebe was an incredible casting find. The intricacies of a son directing a sequel of his father’s movies, about his dad, with the cast playing his proxy grandchildren—and also directing his CGhost—it was loaded with all sorts of emotion.

A number of complaints would go here […], but I can always reflect on the suppressed memories of GB3, and that moves this movie up at least a star.

Probably my 5th or 6th rewatch. Great heist, wonderful script—but there’s one line that absolutely sucks: “You know, you’re letting this cop get too fucking close.”

Ugh.

Classic screwball style mystery-sleuthing by William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Unbeatable pair, with a surprise young Jimmy Stewart.

Healthy doses of 1930s misogyny and racism notwithstanding, this is best of the sequels, for sure

This movie is terrible.

But it’s also stupid.

And unrepentantly goofy.

Robert Urich, Anjelica Huston, and Max Von Sydow can’t save this movie that is part Krull, part Logan’s Run, part Pirates of the Caribbean, and part steampunk Jason and the Argonauts.

That said, I still think it’s a better movie than Waterworld. I’ve seen this probably 10 times, wouldn’t rewatch Waterworld for pay.

A big reveal was cut out of the movie’s ending, but a spoiler about it was left in the trailer… and it doesn’t make a bit of difference.

Stupid 1984 fun written in a post-ZuckerAbrahamsZucker world.

Terangi: “Why, I’m the best sailor in the whole world!”
Marama: “I know.”
T: “I’m the best swimmer, too.”
M: “I know.”
T: “And tonight when we come out of church, oh Marama, I’m the best husband in the whole world.”
M: “I know, I know.”
T: “Shut up, you don’t know anything yet.”

Aside from this hilarious exchange, the writing is not funny. Not subtle. But it is focused. The theme of this blockbusting special effects spectacle is not centered on its smashing natural disaster. It is focused on racism, colonialism, inequality, heartlessness, and the iniquity that imprisonment heaps upon the imprisoned.

In the Jewish tradition, during over, we use the phrase “Dayenu”—it would have been enough—to describe each step of thanks owed for deliverance from imprisonment and slavery.

Had this movie only been about the beautiful scenery and people of the Polynesian islands, dayenu. Had it been about the love story between the chief’s daughter and a man stuck between his native culture and the imperialist force of French government, dayenu. Had the movie only delivered on the promise of its eponymous hurricane, Dayenu. Had it delivered on the promise of a hurricane without a jaw dropping blend of miniatures, rear projection, howling winds, and massive amounts of fan-power to make a real hurricane on screen, dayenu. Had it delivered all of that and not delivered a scathing antiracist message about the treatment of native cultures and human equality, dayenu.

Had it delivered the message and not showed a hero who only asked for the darkly ironic promise of the French motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité” only to be crushed underneath its heel and given nothing in return, dayenu.

Heavy-handed by any standard, with some dialogue revisited two or three or four times, The Hurricane is not ‘modern’. It is definitely from a bygone era, and it creates a sentimental and idealized picture of the Polynesian islands that might never have existed. The “happy browns managed like children by their patron whites” is a lovely fairytale that whites tell other whites. There is no representation here for what the reality might have been for the people of Manakura.

But this is 1937, and the film (or novel) doesn’t concern itself with that narrative too deeply. Which isn’t unexpected. The 1936 US Election brought about the change from black of Republicans to labor driven allegiance to the Democratic Party. Roosevelt would appoint the first black federal judge in ‘37. It will be a while until Civil Rights become a term in the US Justice dept.

This is 21 years after the detestable Birth of a Nation. Two years before Gone with the Wind. It delivers a message that many weren’t willing to hear about their own country, masked by the foreign setting and capital-S Special Effects.

The Hurricane creates an idyllic setting in French Polynesia—while exposing the mistreatment of Polynesia by the French. A landmark movie, where the landmarks are destroyed by nature and returned to the people.

Hey, all that stuff at the end of the last movie—yeah, Harry isn’t going to mention any of it.

To anyone.

The Weasly twins are years older and just sit around doing whatever the little kids do.

Uselessness confirmed.

This is the horniest Potter.

It’s darker.

Are the Weasly twins the least used (and least useful) characters in the whole series? Stay tuned.

When the acting is stiff, or the subtlety is delivered via sledgehammer, you have to blame the director.

Bless the adult cast for sticking through the two films of terrible exposition. Bless the kids for doing their best with what they had.

Girl, that braid around your head for all of the extensions— giving us Dark Helmet.

Is that a weave? Oh, Hermione, you poor thing.

Aliens attack a planet 71% covered by liquid water, with literal tons of water vapor in the air, during a summer at DelVal.
They tromp *real* crop-circles (because M Night doesn’t know what a hoax is), in the middle of farmland equipped with irrigation systems which would be more effective than a Maxim gun against these spindly invaders.
Why?
Because God still loves you, Mel.

GTFOH.

Watched on Saturday July 17, 2021.

Watched on Saturday July 17, 2021.

Watched on Saturday July 17, 2021.

Watched on Saturday July 17, 2021.

Watched on Saturday July 17, 2021.

Watched on Saturday July 17, 2021.

This review may contain spoilers.

To begin: sometimes small stories contain big themes. The other way around: I’d be a fool to crack open War & Peace and then be disappointed upon discovering that, among its 1200 pages, it was more complex than Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Exploding Plumbing.

Sweeping epics take time—to develop, to create drama, and ultimately deliver on their promise. The Human Condition is 9+ hours. The Thanos story spans 22 movies. We expect big concepts and soul-mining drama from something like that.

In Harakiri, our director continues a theme he began before: we are bound by, and complicit in, the systems which corrupt our morality. Kobayashi sets the film at the opening of a centuries-long era of historical significance [more on this later]. Fascism in Japan has mythologized and fetishized the Samurai period of the shogunate, the Edo period. The samurai sword itself has become the badass-horcrux of nationalism and might-makes-right in the East. Decades later it became an ersatz penis for every wannabe-badass juvenile in the West. In 1930s Japan, the “aristocracy” that would ultimately push for war could trace gilded-lineages back to their Samurai roots.

The myths we tell ourselves—about our exceptionalism, our purity of spirit, or heritage, or honor—these are foundational myths. Myths we build upon, and burnish, and distill until we believe we are right, just, and powerful. They are collective lies we don’t start. They come to us down the generations, and we believe them. The aggrandizement and identity are part of our core.

They’ve set many Samurai movies in the Sengoku period—a time of warring punctuated by the spread of firearms. (see: Yojimbo). The Tokugawa period was a time that resolved into peace and prosperity; there was a noble-scholar transformation for the Samurai class. Tellingly, at least a third of modern businessmen and the dynastic-wealth of the upper-class in postwar Japan could trace their glorified Samurai family trees.

For Kobayashi, Kurosawa, and other Japanese directors, the Samurai were an allegorical device to criticize the wealthy and the profiteers who dragged Japan into the Second World War. But for Kobayashi, the message was more profound: we, the Japanese, by dint of strict-traditionalism, by elevating the powerful in our nationalist dialectic, are forever stained by the outcome of our own Imperialistic efforts. The entire society we wax poetic about is responsible for these horrors and war-crimes—not just the prosecuted underlings in thinly-fraudulent postwar trials.

Kobayashi submits that the society in which we exist inexorably degrades our moral sense. To be a willing part of it is to lose your own moral sovereignty. Ultimately, you cede your own culpability as you become an unidentifiable cog in a national war-machine. Those that enjoy their national pride must also accept their own roles in Unit 731 and the Rape of Nanjing. It doesn't matter that you weren't there. You did all you could to help it happen. "Don't blame me…'I was just following orders'… of a system I worked to in every other aspect."

Nationalism isn’t a lie you come up with. It’s built on a pack of lies that you internalize. It is a system of untruth that you jump into, like a double-Dutch game of intersecting Untruth and Myopia that makes you happy while you’re inside the center of their vortex. You do your little part to perpetuate the fallacy, and enjoy the righteousness that comes with it. And by so doing, you are also part of the system. Even if you’re not actively Nationalist, but simply draw a paycheck within that system, you have helped to perpetuate it. That complicity is corrosive to your moral personhood. This is Kobayashi’s message.

The Germans had the Baader-Meinhoff gang in the 70s. An attempt to call out the entrenched Nazi/Nationalist shitstains that had escaped trial and maintained the reins of post-Reich, West German power. The BMG/Red Army held that the previous generation hadn’t done their part to exact a true ing for the horrific actions of Nazis (and the all-too-happy to collude and profit former German aristocracy).

In Japan, the same phenomenon happened 20 years earlier. But instead of murders and bombings to drive some sort of country-wide cleansing/catharsis…
they had movies.

Harakiri is perfectly filmed—sharp angles and staging with flashing blades and iconic beauty throughout. It continues the relationship between Mas Kobayashi and Miyajima, the genius B&W cinematographer of The Human Condition. While the writer self-deprecatingly jokes that he was just telling a simple story, it is a nuanced story of hypocrisy and white-washing.

It is, as we started out, a small story with big themes.

It is a tale of the revisionist history that powerful families pay others to write about themselves. Where they always come out lily-white and smelling of roses. The blood of the fallen (and especially of the trampled) is washed away, and the self-aggrandizing myth of our honor and power are the only things that persist. Lies of our valorous actions in the face of adversity are repeated. The truth that we “cowered under our bedcovers so others don’t see the shame and embarrassment of our emasculation” is conveniently forgotten. The truth does not help us feel powerful as a family, as a people, as a nation—and so we lie by omission.

The flashbacks in the film are a tragic twist on The Gift of the Magi: pure sacrifice from a man attempting to provide for his wife and baby. To survive in adversity, you must toil in a society that will take everything from you, especially your soul. Then, at your most pitiful and pitiable, scoundrels-in-charge will mock your state and heap scorn upon your personal disaster.

The real-time story, featuring Nakadai in a powerful performance, is about the Quixotic effort to <bold>make the bastards pay</bold>.

In this part, Kobayashi and screenwriter Hashimoto have tied an incredibly profound suture with the audience. You want the fuckers to get what’s coming to them for what they did to sweet Motome Chijiiwa. And yet, in the end, we are lost. To gain real justice for the exploitation, derision, and violence against the weak, we would have to topple the whole system. We would have to tear the house down, ruin the family, and destroy the legacy of the Iyi clan in its entirety.

We know, by the close of the film, that such an effort is futile so long as the powerful maintain their stranglehold on our national conscience. Where Nakadai hid behind the armor while struggling to extract justice, the Iyi clan will hide behind it to avoid justice, for the rest of the nation’s history.

By placing this story of cowardice and cruelty at the beginning of the Tokugawa era, Kobayashi shows that there was always a corrupt and corrupting seed. The whole of the national identity is built upon this series of insidious lies. Tsugumo calls the entirety of samurai honor a facade. Here, in the beginning, we witness a grand and storied house making up stories to protect itself and entrench its power. The manure is there, at the seed of the Tokugawa period. Future Japanese aristocrats and zaibatsu-owners will claim their exceptionalism from this fallacy. The Japanese Empire will hold their samurai history as an example of strength and purity and sanctimony. The whole system is complicit in (and built upon) these lies. The claims are hollow, and the bullshit is stacked and re-stacked like so much outdated armor.

Here we are: witnessing the birth of a nation’s history of sweeping failure under the rug, only to tell great falsehoods about ourselves.

Our fascism and inhumanity papered over.
Floors cleaned and mythologies restored.

Fun movie from the writer of Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

A great coming of age story (based on mostly real life) that pulls a cute trick: it is about a young writer, struggling in the face of fame and notoriety, to write about a band struggling in the face of fame and notoriety. It wraps up nicely (maybe a little-too) with great performances by Billy Crudup and Patrick Fugit. The women in the film were portrayed as Almost Helpless, and the surfeit of dialogue about them ing the band and having some power really pointed up the manipulation and creeper-vibes from all of the males in the movie. If the goal is to make them seem like star-struck naïfs, the knowing conversations seem misattributed. If the goal is to make Penny Lane et al appear to be worldly-vagabonds that are complicit in their own statutory rape, there’s a lot of damsel-in-distress going on. It was a dynamic that took me out of the film and made me wish there was a little clearer story for Kate Hudson and Fairuza. That every guy except Fugit-as-Crowe was a shithead made it hard to want them to have a happy ending.

The shots of San Diego neighborhoods and the Sports Arena made me nostalgic for San Diego in the 70s.

All told, a lot of fun. Would watch again.

Have you ever seen a character in a sequel, and you just know the writers haven’t watched the other parts that you have?

Episode 1: solid concept, great mystery, solidly delivered exposition without too much “mystery box” horseshit that JJ and Cuse love to throw around. Let’s give it 4. Enjoying the premise and thinking “Is this the greatest concept in the Marvel Universe?”

Episode 2: Loki fought superheroes, fire giants, and even took a beating from The Hulk. He’s at least hardy, even if we’re to pretend he’s not great at fighting. But when it’s convenient for the writers, Bubba the WalMartyr is going to toss Loki around and beat him down. You know, for stakes. GTFOH with that nonsense. 2 stars. Have the writers lost the plot after one episode?

Episode 3: “We don’t have anymore ideas. Moon fragments will plague us until we find a new conflict to wait! No, now there’s a shack and a country wife (complete with chickenfried southern accent, for the thematically-challenged) shooting them off their property until she sends them to the wait! Board the train, it’s our only escape for us to get thrown off the wait! No, board a shuttle to get off the wait! It’s all collapsing kn us while we have to fight Space Cops that are pursuing us to beat us in collapsing sets and WAIT! Boom goes the shuttle… is anyone writing this down?! It’s pure genius!”
There’s better MacGuffins and meaningless chases in The Last Airbender. Fuck you, I’m out.

What looked like a 4-5 star miniseries has me out at 2 stars, *averaged*.

Spellbinding dance performances create a hypnotic, believable link between the art and magic.

This film is a powerful ode to the feminine with the leads taking the mythic archetypes of the mother, the whore, the virgin by the reigns.

Aside from the mild lesbian/eroticism presented in the middle of the film, there is some incredible editing in the dream sequences, with the Scarlet Letter A, and even “HESTER!” screamed in a moment, outright summoning the strong female protagonist of that work. Suspiria is a work of female power, and the power of females, set within itself. There is no struggle between the males and females of the film. There’s hardly any males to speak of in the story. It’s a story of power wielded by a character untouched by men. It’s also a beautiful inversion of the Bechdel. It takes every narrative of fiction for women: the stern matron, the evil witch, the damsel in distress, the Shakespearean nothing—and it weaves them all together, winds them up, without the need for an Y chromosome to make the story go.

It is so female to its core it has a vagina in its heart. Literally.

A far more coherent, overt film than the original, this movie uses its predecessor to hint at things in a way that would be lost on viewers who hadn’t seen it before. The shocks of red, the inspired casting, the changes to the story all lean heavily on the viewer knowing the film that came before.

It was nice to be free from the issues that marred the 77 film. The stilted acting, the rictus-grin of the academy marm, the objectively terrible dancing, For a film about the witchcraft of dancing, the remake actually decided there should maybe be some dancing. Crazy, I know.

While the film has some issues as it veers deep into the metaphysical (as most horror films do), the writing hangs together, and the acting carries it aloft until the end. No terror, or even deep fear, as something like The Exorcist aims to create. But the sound design and editing work beautifully to create real unease and shocking imagery (especially in the dream sequences) that make the inevitable blood bath feel like a catharsis.

Honorable mention: the vision of the Mother of Sighs as a spinning dance of light was well executed.

“You’ve never seen any of them? No Star Wars, no Indiana Jones?!”
- I’m not much of a movie guy, I just ride bikes.
“That’s it, tonight we’re watching ‘Raiders of The Lost Ark’. I think it’s probably my best.”

*switches off TV while the final credits roll*

“Well… that was a piece of shit.”

Gotta disagree with Harrison—I think it’s a very fun movie. 4 stars from me.

Went into this expecting the reasons for all of the previous reviews and full-throated praise to be self-evident.

The 3-strip color, the *blasted* soundtrack, the stilted acting, the abandoned narrative, the goofy dialogue, the set design—all of it just kind of left me flat.

Had Argento had his wish, to make the girls in this no older than 12, it would have been the creepiest goddamned piece of Italian cinema. Fortunately, we were all spared that. But in making the change, from children to grown women, the characters (dialogue, acting direction, performances) were never updated. So we end up with a movie where… not much really happens.

Aside from color choices and a bananas apartment building, we have a pretty flaccid movie. I wasn’t creeped out—because there’s a whodunnit that Encyclopedia Brown would have figured out in the first 2-pages. (Hint: it’s literally the only words in the theme song that is played near-continuously, and the word appears in the subtitles)

Speaking of encyclopedia— we get stilted exposition from 20yo Psychiatrist who calls it the Tam Academy and can’t pronounce occult correctly, but had a near-perfect knowledge of Madame Markus history. 🤷‍♂️

I see how this is celebrated for its strengths: there are some great shots, some crazed editing choices (automatic door workings, whut?). The color is undeniably strong.

The Exorcist and Don’t Look Now were in 1973. The Omen and Carrie were in 76. This didn’t shock, scare, or surprise me. It was a little boring. The murders/deaths happened at a pace that Hitchcock roared past, back in 1960.

Had to stop my finger from reflexively pressing the FF button a couple of times. Which means I can’t give it 3 stars.

It was worse than expected, but still very inventive.

Solid black comedy about mental health and coping with loss.

Features Mads and a lot of gunshot wounds. Recommended.

He had that on hold while he wrote a 4 part comedy series? There is no longer walk setup than that.

Acaster is brilliant—confessional, insightful, honest, emotional—all the things we would expect after watching Repertoire. His slow build, long winding call backs, and self-evisceration for the audience are all on display, heightened by the addition of some of the coarsest language he’s ever displayed. Honestly, if you’re easily offended, this might be too much for you.

I highly recommend this to anyone that is a human being.

I cannot write a more fitting review for this movie than this by Charlie Jane Anders:
“There are plenty of bad movies that know they're bad — but TLA is the first bad movie that knows that you are bad. You deserve your full share of the blame for this movie's existence. Airbender doesn't just poke fun at its entire genre, with its hyperactive mix of randomness and blandness - it actually MST3Ks its audience. Noah Ringer and that Civil War vampire from Twilight may seem at first to be sleepwalking through a rote adventure, but you realize at last that they're actually delivering a commentary track on your callowness as an audience. It's deadpan, but unmistakable nonetheless. Aang and Sokka become Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot, staring out of the screen and bemusedly riffing on our feeble attempts to invest in this saga.”
io9.gizmodo.com/m-night-shyamalan-finally-made-a-comedy-5576076

I just realized that I can rate a movie zero stars, and this movie deserves all of them. Walked out of theaters opening weekend, and whenever I see it listed, I am sickened/triggered.

Ernest Borgnine and Sharon Stone in a movie that  haunts my memories: a Wes Craven 80s movie.

This film is pretty much notable for the spider falling from the rafters scene (real) and Borgnine scenery chewing (unreal). If you never thought you’d see the man who would be Dominic Santini as an Amish-adjacent doomsayer screamin lines like “You are a stench in the nostrils of god!” this movie will help you mark that on your bingo card.

Convoluted he’s killed she killed, but she was also a he(!) “plot”. Craven is capable. Some Drag Me To Hell energy here, but it doesn’t hold up to the scare I . Really corny, but not quite children of the corny.

I watched this in preparation for reviewing Harakiri.

This is Kurosawa’s first film, and it is a template for many martial arts movies since—a sort of grandfather to Karate Kid.

The battle is between jujitsu and the school of “Yano”. Yano is a stand in for Jigoro Kano, the first “mixed martial artist”.

The Protagonist Sanshiro begins by looking for a jujitsu teacher, and follows the back alley sensei on an ambush, only to discover that their target is a true master.

Sanshiro commits his first act of both subservience and selflessness:  he discards his shoes, so that he can ferry his new master in a rickshaw. Kurosawa shows the age of time by showing a montage of the abandoned shoes as they through the seasons.

Cut to Sanshiro, and he’s just chucking foos left and right, fighting anyone who wants to catch his hands. He’s become a brawler and a bully.

Sanshiro’s rehabilitation comes when he reflects on a lotus during punishment. He realized that he must sublimate his ego to attain a Buddha nature. The image of the lotus returns frequently: as a symbol of purity-of-purpose; as an icon for selflessness; as a symbol of rampant ego and malicious intent when it is shown as a withering ashtray for the antagonist.

And what an antagonist! This guy is giving us hard core Snidely Whiplash energy. He is the Villain-in-western-dress of every Hong Kong movie.

Ultimately, there is a midnight-cum-high-noon showdown. A duel to the death that demonstrates the moral: the limit of ones capacity isn’t training or skill, but humanity and selfless. Sanshiro taps into his pure purpose and finds the energy to overcome the enemy: ego.

Good film. It seems older than it is, and also thematically modern. This is pretty much the Man vs Self using proxy Man vs Man battle story. Kurosawa tells it well, with excellent pacing and editing. I don’t know the state of Japanese filmmaking in the middle of WW2, but this seems like a call to more peaceful times, especially in the promotion of Judo over Jujitsu.

The Blue UmPareidolia.

The slow motion blur and dramatic holds make this feel like a feature romcom.

The ion of The Criminal.

I’ve never seen a movie where you dislike the “protagonist” so much early on, and by the end you’re just hoping he finally catches a break—if for no other reason, so that you can finally breathe again.

This is the movie the dancer-in-me has wanted to see for a long time. Baltimore beats and stepping, barbershop and club repping.

Baltimore music, lyricists and dancers. Beautiful film showing a city I haven’t seen on the screen since The Wire.

I’ve put my money on “Double feature with Tucker & Dale.”  Maybe not as good as “Merman,” but still a great spectacle.

<No Review Needed - Watch This>

Alden Ehrenreich was in a good movie called Hail Caesar!. His first film, actually. In it, he plays Hobie Doyle, the earnest, guileless cowpoke who’s the moral heart of the entire film. His crowning achievement is the Tim Holt-esque work he does with director Laurence Laurentz, played by an adroit Ralph Fiennes. Let’s just say... it’s complicated.

Here, young Alden is saddled with doing a turn as Harrison Ford. And not Harrison in Clear and Present Danger. We’re talking Harrison at his smoldering, virile peak. Alden is game, and does his best.

Ultimately, we must weigh his performance against an uncomfortable truth: this is a 2 star movie that wasn’t so much written as retconned entirely from lines and story-bits scraped out of the husks of 5 star characters and better movies (from whence the billion dollar toy and fan service behemoth was built).

It’s not a good film. If you know nothing of Star Wars—or worse find them to be mostly clunky retreads of saccharine space fantasy— you won’t like this movie. And why should you? It is barely able to stand on its own merit, and the film was reshot by Ron Howard to deliver a completely inoffensive film. They sacked the former directors of The Lego Movie, because the producers didn’t like the amount of fun they were having with the material. Doesn’t that pretty much say it all?

Writer Lawrence Kasdan claims he built this script from the style of Thief, Heat, Charley Varrick, The Wages of Fear, Sorcerer, Out of the Past, The Getaway, The Wild Bunch, Only Angels Have Wings, The Magnificent Seven, The Godfather: Part II, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
How?!
These are all great movies. This is very much not. I don’t see how you take those and then make this. 

I have a hard time believing it didn’t make the absolute s-tonnes of money that were estimated by the committee of soulless ants that green-lit the film. If it didn’t break even... maybe all of their focus-groping and precalculated fun quotients are for naught. They delivered this rather bland fare amongst the bloated, flavorless dross they’ve been churning out—and all of that stuff did gangbusters. Why was this a flop, compared to the others, and how long did it take to convince the IRS?

1 star for Glover. 1 for Alden. 1 star for the hard, thankless work of all the animators and stuntmen and crew. .5 stars required. Subtract a bit for delivering prechewed bubblegum that has been in better mouths than this.

At the start, I had trouble believing that a man-child—apparently made of cartilage; who is more stunted than stuntman; inept at friendship, leadership or partnership; pretty much just the goofy, Spongebob fuck that he is—had what it takes to win the respect and love of his hard-as-nails step-father.

But I gotta tell you... I nearly shit myself by the end of this movie.

At first the character of Rod just goes downhill. Then he begins to rise. His arc is glorious, his destination and destiny predetermined. He straight up sucks as a stuntman, but he becomes... a man. Will he jump the busses? Won’t he? All that really matters in this movie (in this world?) is that you beat the snot out of your shitty step-dad.

Saw this as the second half of a double feature with Flash Gordon in 1981.

It haunted my nightmares as a putrid worm-thing.

Ugh.

Where Cameron got his start; +.5 star.

I rewatched this to see if it was as bad as 8yo-me ed.

It was many times worse.

I got dropped off at the theater with my older brother because we both thought this was Time Walker—https://boxd.it/1m4K

We wouldn’t know until later that this was the wrong, albeit slightly better, movie. When it turned into Motocross-time travel to the Old West, we were mad bummed. It never improved beyond that last sentence.

“There’s no rule that says being a bigger pervert automatically makes you stronger!”
Truer words, Hentai Kamen, truer words.

There is no more man-ass movie than this.

Watched on Saturday April 10, 2021.

“I’m still the man I’ve always been, even more so.”

Heaven and Hell. This movie is two films in one, a split not unlike The Great Train Robbery (2013). It is, in its first half, a story of corporate greed, of humanism as an unconscionable flaw. In its second half, the entire movie is flipped—reflected in murky water to show the Hell where humans holds no value, and the walking dead are the collective, unburnable detritus of society.

Both halves carry the moral: the pursuit of money over human life is a characteristic of the worst people, regardless of their station.

The film is an adaptation of a novel, but it is purely Kurosawa here— in the same way Kubrick’s The Shining does not pay fealty to its source material.

Most striking in the first half is the camera work. The balletic movement Kurosawa has choreographed between two cameras and 10 actors on a small set. The staging owes so much to Tohoscope that I can’t imagine it in an older aspect. The 2.55:1 ratio is part of the narrative.

Broad eye lines connect actors from across the deep diagonal—almost entirely set in the apartment, like a stage play.

This is a suspenseful, taut story of a kidnapping-for-ransom, and it is as claustrophobic as Rope, albeit no effort has been made to fake a long single. Heaven and Hell was done in the same year as Hitchcock’s The Birds— and for all of the suspense that Hitch is famous for, Kurosawa matches him at his best.

The majority of the first act is spent watching police officers and Mifune’s household move about the room. Six people sweating, stressed, and all avoiding eye at the most difficult times.

We see the immorality of the corporate bastards as Gondo loses his right hand man to the Judas-lure of 30 silver pieces. He is plenty vocal about Gondo’s moral/financial choices—but  is his moralizing simply a way to hide his designs on a secure future without Gondo? Is it craven PR? He’s a director either way... quick to turn on his mentor so he can get an executive office and stay dipped in dupioni suits. The tension of this drama is short-lived, but he sets the stakes higher for Gondo: pay or don’t pay. Either way you’ve already flinched, and as far as the shareholders care, you’re a bitch if you do pay and a monster if you don’t.

Little does he know that what plays in the boardroom is reviled in the community.

Mifune furiously scrubs himself in the shower—leave my browser history out of this—only to be interrupted by the real-time surveillance phone call from the kidnapper, as the cops slither across the floor to avoid detection. Will he pay, or won’t he?

At the 1:00:00 mark, Schubert’s Die Forelle plays, and we see the murky water, with Gondo’s house inverted, reflected, twisted by the muck in the pond. We see a walking figure reflected, and the camera rises up to see The Kidnapper. Die Forelle is the story of a fisherman, unable to catch the trout because his lure is easily seen by the fish in the clear stream. His only chance is to muddy the water, to obscure the field, and thereby trick the trout into biting—a trick that abolishes “fair play” and turns it into predation. Schubert’s music was made for  a poem by Schubart, a moralistic warning for women to beware of single young men. They are predators.

Here, the murky water takes on a funhouse warping of the sublime shining house on the hill, a twisting of the upper Heaven —and into this filth, the movie dives. Into the upside-down of poverty and squalor.

Despite the intriguing police-procedural, Heaven and Hell is most notable for its portrayal of drug addicts and inhuman greed. A shock of color in the black and white film is beautifully used, but what stays in the mind are the scenes of walking dead. The addicts and prostitutes, denizens of Dope Alley.

We see our villain (with catchlights reflected in his glasses like glowing demon-eyes) selecting a barely-living woman to use for his own foul purpose.

Kurosawa closes the film with dialogue between the two main characters, told through talking reflections. The obverse character shown in the glass which separates the human from the animalistic.

A stunning film, told with incredible cinematography, excellent acting, and a deep social-consciousness.

Leave everything you’ve got in the title.

• Bob le Flambeur
• Touchez Pas au Grisbi
• The Human Condition I: No Greater Love
• The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity
• The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
• Harakiri
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Metropolis
• Yojimbo

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Black Dynamite didn’t just happen. It is a pitch-perfect recreation and send up of the 1970s black/blaxploitation/chitlin-circuit movies that set the bar so damn high. Shout out to Blast-Off Video in L5P Atlanta, for schooling a younger me on so many weird and wonderful movies.

• Dolemite
• The Human Tornado
• Super Fly
• Soul Brothers of Kung Fu
• The Dynamite Brothers

  This may also be the first film score to have scratching in it.

• Black Belt Jones
• Willie Dynamite
• The Mack
• Coffy
• Disco Godfather

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A (mostly) chronological list of some of the great/landmark Samurai movies.

1. Harakiri
2. Rashomon
3. Seven Samurai
4. Samurai Rebellion
5. The Hidden Fortress
6. Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto
7. Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple
8. Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island
9. Throne of Blood
10. Yojimbo

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Are they incredible?
Do they get better as the story unfolds?
Are there three of em?

I’m in.

1. The Human Condition I: No Greater Love
2. The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity
3. The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer
4. Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto
5. Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple
6. Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island
7. A Fistful of Dollars
8. For a Few Dollars More
9. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
10. The Godfather

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The next level movies that elevated the heist, hitman, or crime film. Starting with the original (suck it, Boyer) anti-heroes, Pépé le Moko played by Jean Gabin, and bringing it full cercle with the last great film of Jean Pierre Melville. 🤷‍♂️

1. Pépé le Moko
2. Touchez Pas au Grisbi
3. Rififi
4. Bob le Flambeur
5. The Killing
6. Elevator to the Gallows
7. Big Deal on Madonna Street
8. Pickpocket
9. The 400 Blows
10. Le Trou

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.