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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Posts by Abbie
Matt Zoller Seitz shared this on Twitter along with the note, "I’ve gotten to the point where if I see a poster that doesn’t have any actors on it, just a graphic, it makes me want to see the movie, because the filmmaker has to be an absolutely relentless person to get the money people to approve a poster like that."
Just saw Joe Cornish's latest flick, after eight years of silence!
As a followup to Attack the Block, it's kind of meh. As an adventure film intended for kids it's quite a bit of harmless fun, and definitely deserves better than the terrible marketing it was given and the box office wasteland it's currently experiencing. The visual effects are quite impressive for a budget of only $50 million as well—I assumed it was closer to $100 million. The years have done nothing to diminish Cornish's ability to wring every penny out of his budget.
WONDERFUL news. Absolute best wishes for the recovery.
Just checkin' to see if anyone else here uses Letterboxd. For those not in the know, it's essentially Goodreads for movies—allows you to rate, review, and log what you've seen, read and comment on other people's reviews, make custom lists, etc. The list feature functions a lot like Regan's IMDB 250 checklist—you can automatically see what percentage of any given list you've watched.
I don't tend to write substantial reviews on there (any that are longer than a few paragraphs are generally also posted on my blog/on here), but it's a very nifty website/mobile app for cataloging your viewing habits and seeing other people's opinions (which run the gamut from silly joke reviews to genuinely excellent criticism).
Anyway, if you're on there lemme know so I can follow you! My own profile, such as it is, is here. DocSub is on there too, right here.
No matter how sloppy a Tarantino script gets, I'm apt to largely enjoy it (Django the one exception). And indeed, there is fun to be had here--the comic beats largely work, and the famed standoff between Walken and Hopper is, in terms of construction, flawless.
That said, Jeeeeesus Christ, this is like Tarantino's id just vomited all over the page. At first I was willing to believe Oldman's character (nasty white pimp who's convinced he's black) was QT parodying himself, but then the aforementioned Sicilian scene came along and bulldozed that idea. It's always been obvious that the man gets his rocks off at using the n-word wherever possible, but it's never been so gleefully gratuitous as it has here. And while all manner of people get violence wrought upon them here, it's telling and more than a little disturbing how lovingly
Also, it's annoying rather than ethically problematic, but the male protagonist is such a masturbatory self-insert that I rolled my eyes on multiple occasions. Of COURSE the guy who spends his day working in a comics shop, watching kung fu movies, and monologuing about Elvis is also a sexy mastermind.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun along the way, but yeesh.
Canon Is an Abyss, Mike Rugnetta
Film/lit crossover. Uses Shitgate and Rowling's increasing degeneration as a launching point to discuss the nature of canon and authorship. Selected excerpts spoilered below.
We can assemble these perspectives into a kind of cubist portrait of the Abyss of Canon: an endless swirling void of all – even mutually exclusive – possibility; a gap between what is Real and what is Actual presided over by a Creator; a depth of creation and contradiction in which we may search for unknowable answers and lose something of ourselves in the process... or perhaps willingly give it away.
All fictional canon is abyssal. The difference between canons is how deep we are encouraged to look, and by what method that encouragement is delivered. Pottermore tweets are one kind of encouragement to stare into the abyss of Harry Potter; but some works are designed as deeply abyssal. Doctor Who, soap operas, Star Wars, many long running comic series and the Dark Souls games allow their audience to become like Crowley’s magician: to sacrifice themselves to the depths of canon, become lost in the infinite void of often paradoxical possibility. These works do not unknowingly or only occasionally beckon their audience into the abyss of canon but take it as their ongoing structural mandate.
[. . .]
Like a zombie, The Undead Author is likely unaware of (or unconcerned with) their actions. They come-to with an insatiable hunger for engagement, continued relevance, social and economic capital. The Undead Author hungers for the brains of their audience, and their quarry is likewise turned undead. Audiences seemingly hunger ravenously for a thing they cannot describe or anticipate. When shown what was missing all along – when appraised of These Bricks, when gestured at and into the Abyss of Canon – a sense of need spikes. Wizard feces is the brain-chum, and we are the zombie-sharks. Audiences churn the depthless waters of creation in a shitty, social media feeding frenzy.
This is the labor performed for an Undead Author and their media-complex: flailing wildly, and catching bystanders in the spray, demonstrating the diabolic merriment of The Abyss of Canon. To say those who engage in this paroxysm don't truly enjoy what inspires it would be a difficult claim. As Fisher points out, we are inserted “at the level of desire” to the “remorseless meat-grinder of Capitalism.” (Capitalist Realism, 15)
What we want, and what is wanted from us are unrecognizably fused into a horrible, social-emotional-economic cryptid. Though some may bemoan the abyss of canon in sundry tweets, and think piece dourly upon it, others (and often the very same) nonetheless celebrate, cherish and yearn for it.
I am SO FUCKING JEALOUS right now, that's amazing. Still bummed the Minneapolis area didn't get either that option or one of the 70mm prints.
We did get Ready Player One on 70mm, because the universe is mocking me.
Still can't believe the score lost the Oscar to Desplat for Shape of Water. Don't get me wrong, Desplat is great and his wasn't a bad score by any stretch of the imagination, but Greenwood wrote my favorite movie music of at least the last decade.
With the Oscar nominees announced today, thought I'd take the opportunity to share bits of my favorite movie scores from the last year.
Jonny Greenwood, Phantom Thread
Nicholas Britell, If Beale Street Could Talk
Carter Burwell, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, Annihilation
If you want to disguise a Photoshopped floating head, this is a good way to do it. (Spoilered because the sheer size of the image file is obnoxious.)
^ Just call me John Wick (2014).
I agree with both you and Cloe. 
This looks like heavily similar territory to Peter Watts and I am fucking here for it.
The 70s really were just the goddamn best, weren't they?
Also, me when this movie has better, more empathetic representation of
Been getting into some funk-inspired jazz lately—the Hammond organ/electric guitar combo is just ear candy.
A—a contemporary blockbuster reference? From Teague Chrystie, on this forum, from that movie, localized entirely within this subthread?!
FUCK YEAH 20TH CENTURY WOMENNNNNNNNN
Played through GRIS this week. What a gorgeous little game.
An apology isn't enough, I want reparations.
Another year done. We did it! So, here's a thread to talk about the year in movies, or our years in general. Whatever, go nuts!
Movies
2017 was maybe the best year for film this decade. 2018 was . . . weirdly anticlimactic, but there was still some fantastic stuff. MVP for me is obviously Phantom Thread, which I went on about at length in the "Last movie you watched" thread the other day. Most of my other favorites were also indie flicks, but we also got Mission Impossible: Fallout, one of the greatest action movies of this century, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which is easily my favorite superhero movie ever and one that I desperately hope will be a bigger influence on the otherwise stale genre. Netflix also managed to do some great stuff despite itself, including releasing Orson goddamn Welles' final film forty years after photography wrapped.
I did some capsule reviews of my favorite movies, books, TV, music, and video games first encountered this year in a blog post here (also visible to family and such, so it's under my old name), but for this thread I'll just post a ranked list of the 2018-released movies I watched this year. I've listed the streaming platforms where each is available for free where possible.
THE VERY GOOD
12. Hereditary [Amazon Prime]
13. If Beale Street Could Talk
14. Lean on Pete [Amazon Prime]
15. Blackkklansman
16. Widows
17. Unsane [Amazon Prime]
18. Madeline's Madeline [Amazon Prime]
19. Mandy [Shudder]
20. The Commuter
21. Leave No Trace
THE GOOD
22. Roma [Netflix]
23. You Were Never Really Here [Amazon Prime]
24. Disobedience [Amazon Prime]
25. Thoroughbreds
26. The Tale [HBO]
27. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead [Netflix]
28. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
29. Eighth Grade [Amazon Prime]
30. Sorry to Bother You
31. Paddington 2 [HBO]
32. Annihilation
33. Searching
34. Bad Times at the El Royale
35. Overlord
36. A Star Is Born
THE MIXED
37. Vox Lux
38. The Post
39. Mom and Dad [Hulu]
40. Black Panther
41. Dirty Computer [YouTube]
42. The First Purge
43. Halloween
44. Game Night
45. First Man
46. Support the Girls
47. Wildlife
48. Mid90s
49. A Quiet Place
50. At Eternity's Gate
51. Operation Finale
52. The Sisters Brothers
THE POOR
53. Ocean's 8
54. A Wrinkle in Time
55. Tully
56. Isle of Dogs
THE TERRIBLE
57. Pacific Rim: Uprising
58. Solo: A Star Wars Story
59. On Chesil Beach
60. Suspiria
61. The Cloverfield Paradox
62. Bohemian Rhapsody
63. The Seagull
64. Proud Mary
65. Gotti
Life
Of all the years I've lived through, 2018 has certainly been the most recent.
Work has been a consistent nightmare for the last several months—the publisher I work for is in an awkward phase where business is getting better and better but there are only two of us for the entire production team, so I've had to pull stuff like proofreading 160,000 words within 48 hours and figuring out how to get books printed and shipped within four business days. It's basically been a year of trying to keep my head above water. The continued political armageddon that is American politics hasn't exactly helped the feeling.
That said, good things have happened too! There's been art I've loved, and experiences worth remembering. I'm coming to terms with gender identity stuff that's been brewing for a longass time. I got to record a podcast with Teague motherfucking Chrystie. And as always, the awesome people around here have been a pleasure to hang with, whether that means arguing about Christmas music for two hours straight or ranting about movies or listening to The Hyacinth Disaster again.
Here's to a 2019 full of friends in our heads!
Huh, I wonder if the resemblance to Serenity in the front and back views is intentional.
Fifth watch, because if Die Hard is a Christmas movie then this is a New Year’s flick, dammit.
- - - - -
So. This is my favorite movie of all time.
Barry Jenkins put it this way: “PHANTOM THREAD is just exquisite, an unfiltered work; a sublime object. Object in the sense that, when viewed from different angles, in varying moods, it reveals more and more of itself, other emotions and, for a film overrun with aesthetic objects, deepened ideas.” This movie is many things. It’s a horror story, a romantic comedy, a psychological thriller, a Gothic melodrama, a love letter. It’s delightful, chilling, hilarious, unbearably sad. It’s Vertigo by way of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or Punch-Drunk Love by way of Gone Girl.
Jonny Greenwood’s score is on a whole other level from anything he’s done before—sinister, aching, operatic. The film grain’s diffusion of the image renders everything as though it were shot through lace. Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps go for each other’s throats with their acting, the former as excellent as ever and the latter a revelation.
I’ve thought about this film every single day since I first saw it in January this year. I suppose you could say it’s haunted me. But, as Reynolds Woodcock would say, “It's comforting to think the dead are watching over the living. I don't find that spooky at all.”
Related to the "there's no artistic intention behind these framing/editing/etc. choices" portion of this conversation, Lucrecia Martel recently revealed that Marvel approached her to direct the upcoming Black Widow movie—well, to be more precise, half of it.
One unexpected option was Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, whose latest movie, Zama, is an elaborate and slow-moving art film about 18th century Spanish colonialism. Basically, she’s about as far from the Hollywood studio franchise system as you can get, and she’s not particularly impressed by the MCU. Speaking to Daily Pioneer, she describes meeting with Marvel alongside other female filmmakers, where executives told her, “Don’t worry about the action scenes, we will take care of that.” [Source.]
There are, of course, people who are calling her "elitist" for wanting to direct the entirety of her own movie, which, well. Le sigh.
Just picked up Tetris Effect on a whim and I'm in trouble. This thing is enthralling.
The only thing better than tongue-in-cheek 80s lesbian honky-tonk
is the same band doing an utterly ethereal cover of "Sweet Jane."
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