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I say this having watched Threads four days ago: this is the bleakest shit I've seen in my life. Wild how you could be forgiven for assuming the events depicted are a Kafkaesque parable for existence under capitalism only to learn NOPE TOTALLY A THING THAT HAPPENED.
Fonda's incredible—heading right from this into Klute is a hell of a streak.
Stunningly lovely animation and music elevate what's already an extremely solid period melodrama/ode to the working class. I wanted to live in every single frame of this movie—the things it does with light and color made me vocally go "This is so fucking pretty" under my breath over and over for a good chunk of the ninety-minute runtime. I don't like much anime, but when I do I like it a lot.
Streaming on Netflix! It's technically a feature-length spinoff of a show, but I watched it sans any context and followed along just fine.
Last edited by Abbie (2020-04-20 03:37:56)
Was not prepared for how viscerally this was going to make me want to murder a kid.
Pushes the Hays envelope as far as it can to depict the destruction homophobia wreaks on the lives of two closeted lesbians when they're outed by a vindictive child's half truths. As an artifact of its time it is by nature imperfect, but the level of sensitivity and nuance a picture made in 1961 could have toward these women is still really surprising. Incredibly difficult to watch but I'm glad I did.
Also, speaking of lesbians . . . my god, that we were blessed by Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn sharing the screen. My god.
Unrateable. An impenetrable spiral of self-absorption which for all its technical ineptitude manages to leave an impression if for no other reason than your certainty that it must be on purpose. Succeeds in being politically prescient in fits and starts, mostly because it throws all Dylan's half-formed thoughts at the wall and ensures some of them stick—at its best this plays like a slapdash prototype of Southland Tales, only superficially skating over societal collapse and balkanization but doing so in a way that rings true when so little has changed. Police squads roaming the streets? Government efforts to benefit the sick that are only feeble PR stunts propped up by gangsters? Threats to trample prisoners with wild elephants in football stadiums? Say it ain't so.
Nearly all the performers are at sea, but Goodman plays his heart out, almost single-handedly holding the piece together through bluster and his correct instinct to deliver his dialogue as if he knows it's horseshit where everyone else tries to take it straight and ends up looking embarrassed. Ed Harris shows up in blackface. Val Kilmer legitimately forgets his lines for like ten seconds while the camera keeps rolling. The third act twist is that Bob Dylan's folk singer is the son of a dictator who looks a good twenty years younger than him. Jeff Bridges gets beaten to death by Blind Lemon Jefferson's guitar.
In short, exactly what you'd expect from a late-period Bob Dylan movie, for all that implies. Not good, not even all that interesting, but your suspicion that the central figure knows this and managed to rook the BBC into doing his bidding keeps you going.
Last edited by Abbie (2020-07-20 06:09:47)
Any moral or ideological point this film attempts to make is negated by its own existence.
The wanton slaughter of live animals is the most visceral of the hypocrisies on display here, but it's far from the only one. Actors were coerced into sex scenes they didn't wish to perform, and by their own account suffered lasting psychological damage. Native extras were held inside a burning hut and then paid nothing. Cannibal Holocaust looks at these acts committed in its name, shakes its head, and says, "Boy, any society that could perpetrate these evils just to make a movie must be monstrous, huh?"
Beyond the scope of the direct harm committed in order for the filmmakers to chide themselves, the film also dehumanizes and brutalizes the people groups it claims to be defending. The indigenous peoples depicted in Cannibal Holocaust are props for degradation—raped, maimed, and discarded in loving detail. Not content to torture them, the film also villainizes them. Its ultimate message is that its white colonizer characters are no better than its indigenous characters—the colonizers' crime is sinking to the level of rape and sadism that the indigenous peoples practice. Not only is this founded on a lie—there is no war between the two tribes used as the film's basis, and they do not practice cannibalism outside of funeral rites—it places the onus of evil back on the so-called "primitives." Colonization's ultimate sin, this school of thought insists, is that it reverts "civilized" Western man back to his savage roots—that it could be its own unique, far more malevolent kind of evil is never considered.
What, then, is the utility of the movie? I doubt there's a single person on earth who prior to watching Cannibal Holocaust did not realize imperialism was bad only to have the film open their eyes. And to convey that message, it practiced by necessity the very same tactics it condemns. Cannibal Holocaust's ultimate thesis is that its own existence is an evil—that films like this should not be permitted to be made, and that any purpose they could serve is outweighed by the evil required to bring them about. I will do it the credit of taking it at its word.
Truth Seekers
What an utterly fantasticly fucking BIZARRE delightful little thing this is.
I don't even know where to begin trying to describe it.... throw Supernatural, Spaced, the newest Dirk Gently, and Ghost Hunters into blender and pour into a glass with the words "THIS WAS MADE IN 2020" stamped across the side in big bold letters. It's a 'light supernatural drama-comedy that occasionally cold shanks you from behind with legitimately horrifying moments'. It's genre smashy, ghosts, and mad science, and soul-horror, and things that will keep you up at night as every inch of your mind and soul screeches in terror at the mere thought of it's possibility, and yet filled with an overabundance of delightful sarcasm, charm and heart.
I. LOVED. THIS. SERIES.
So for the unfamilar, it's Nick Frost's new series on Prime. Simon Pegg plays a supporting character that is just... gosh I can't even describe it, it's just such a thing of exsquite beauty you really must experience it for yourself. And Nick Frost is just absolutely perfect throughout the entire series, just nailing the 'down his luck jolly eccentric guy with a big heart' thing with a subtely and charm that is extraordinary, even for him. And the rest of the cast is equally as amazing, Malcolm Mcdowell plays a crotchedy old fart in that special way where you can tell he was having a /BLAST/ the entire time, honestly that alone would have been enough to sell me on this series.
I really don't want to spoil any more than that because it is such a truly bizarre show you need to experience it unroll before you. They are playing fast and loose with reality, but in a way that still feels consistent to the reality of the show, and it just gives it such a specific vibe to it that is wholly unique, and almost has a bit of that dreamlike quality to it.
So yeah, I really recommend it, it's a ton of fun if you're looking for something light and charming, but also with a few ghost-y spook em ups. The only thing that slightly tamed my love for it, is that it does have that awkward... "we're a small production so we're gonna reference real world technology and how people really use tech today so it feels more like reeeeaaaalllity..." thing about it at a few points. Like they do a livestream at one point, and the show takes tremendous pains to make sure to explain to us, the watcher, what a livestream was. So it just comes off feeling like "We want to use all this real stuff and how people today in 2020 actually use these things so it feels more reeeaaalll, but we also don't trust you to understand what's going on when they do... even though the whole point of this was to appeal to the things you are familiar with to make it more relateable." and it's just a weird paradox and makes my brain go a little wibbly watching it on screen. But if you can manage that, excellent show.
PS. I also just finished binging the entire series in one sitting... so I may be a little biased at the moment.
PSS. Also... this is Big Damn "What do you mean it's 'objectively terrible and the only reason I like it is because it's doing some dumb and weird', I LOVE IT" Artist we're talking about here, so you know, ymmv.
Cage, casually excellent as ever, is what initially makes this compelling—he's tasked with carrying a half-hour's worth of labored emotional exposition and does it effortlessly, before plunging into an increasingly jangly paranoia of the kind he does best. It's the famous plane crash where the overall mood of the film shifts to match him—in the midst of a clunky screenplay and relatively pedestrian filmmaking intrudes a waking nightmare, a penetration of the capital-U Unreal into the hack's unreality. The blatantly absurd escalation of the horror could be silly but, to me at least, is genuinely unnerving, and with its presence the film begins to transcend the imperfect pieces that create it. The third act feels as truly Apocalyptic as anything I've ever seen, as both Cage and the audience realize that the filmmakers have no intent of letting them escape what's coming. All right there in the title, really—knowledge can only take you so far. In the end, all it may allow you to do is choose where you spend your final moments.
The uncanny finale—Cage drives unmolested through streets packed with rioters, arrives home at just the right moment, and sits with his family, at peace, while the world turns to ash—hit me especially hard as 2020 draws to a close. True, there's the coda, in which his child and the few survivors plucked from the planet start life anew across the stars, but in the face of all that's come before, it can't help but ring hollow. "The children" aren't going to save us, nor will we be so lucky as to exchange worlds and escape the real burning when it comes to our doors. No, the most honest image of the film is that last moment of a family together, unable to change what's coming but loving and holding in spite of it. In the face of the apocalypse, community is the ultimate comfort—and more than that, its own form of salvation.
Last edited by Abbie (2020-12-07 02:10:59)
A hugely disappointing step back from the spartan, elliptical rhythms of Dunkirk, and not only that but a complete reversion (or INVERSION) of Nolan's hitherto reliably engaging, straightforward exposition. The man who made the first hour of Inception a consistently FUN sequence of infodumps is nowhere to be seen, replaced by an algorithm spitting out data points for its own self-satisfaction. No characters, just puppets for limp action setpieces whose stakes are willfully obscured; no spectacle, just big things happening in front of a camera. Dire.
Christmas Eve rewatch!
The novel seen through a fisheye darkly—Hooper, a completely inept director, takes material already broadened by its musical adaptation and blunts it to the point of constant clumsiness, always going for the most obvious framing and emotion. Where, when I first saw this seven years ago, I was repeatedly moved to near tears, on this viewing I only misted up once—and that was when I was thinking of the novel's final line for Eponine (You know, Monsieur Marius, I think I was a little bit in love with you) rather than the movie's willfully protracted presentation of her demise.
And yet. The spirit is here, even if channeled by a clumsy medium. Hugo's novel, probably the best ever written, has 1,400 pages to touch on nearly every aspect of its author's worldview and knowledge, to give each of its legion of characters their due. Hooper's film has 150 minutes, and, with the notable exception of the changed-beyond-recognition Thenardier clan, somehow distills the important bits of just about everything. The foolish, impossible bravery of Enjolras and his comrades, who I love dearly; the obscenity that is Fantine's fate (Hathaway manages to pour into fifteen minutes' screentime what takes up hundreds of pages); and above all the sheer goodness of Jean Valjean, an inescapably human man who constantly wrestles with his baser self and nonetheless manages to touch the face of God through his love.
There's no better illustration of the manner in which Hooper and Hugo approach the same material than the contrast between their treatment of Javert's final hours. Hugo has him return to his office, pen a letter in which he lays out decades' worth of his complaints regarding abusive treatment of convicts, and then quietly commit suicide; Hooper, meanwhile, has him stand over Gavroche's corpse and, as the music swells, pin his medal to the boy's chest. Every subtlety is discarded in favor of defining a character's shift in one fell swoop; it's undeniably lesser, and yet it works. There's something moving in the laughable earnestness of the adapted gesture—the movie believes in this, even if its director is unable to fully express that belief.
It's not a competent movie. But through grace of God and Victor Hugo, it's a beautiful one.
Happy holidays, everyone!
Last edited by Abbie (2020-12-25 06:34:21)
Insert Spielberg West Side Story poster whose link is now broken here.
Like watching an entire medium reawaken to its own promise.
Last edited by Abbie (2021-12-14 18:11:20)
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