Due to Aretha Franklin nostalgia: The Blues Brothers! I’ve watched it about a dozen times, but it was Juliane’s first watch. She had literally no idea what genre of movie it was going in, despite knowing various songs from the soundtrack. Turns out: comedy and car crashes.
Wow, this movie is long and slow. A lot of fun, but some sequences last minutes and minutes, for what in a modern movie would take two shots at the most, and be over with in 10 seconds. Almost excruciatingly slow at the start. This could do with a fan edit just to get it going more briskly.
Too many to list here. It doesn’t hold up at all. It’s a looooong feeling movie, but even then it is edited down from a first cut twice as long, and there are so many holes.
未来のミライ (Mirai no Mirai) was really interesting to watch. As an only child, I never got to have the “sibling experience”, and I think it did a really good job of communicating how an older sibling can feel when the new baby comes along. The great grandfather is far and away the best character. Visually, it’s beautiful, like all of Mamoru Hosoda’s movies are. The theme song I’d really catchy, too. It was also nice to see him on TV doing interviews and variety shows; apparently he hates fried squid rings.
It’s a great movie to see with your family or partner, but going with a bunch of lads felt a bit weird afterwards (watching Incredible 2 after fixed that, though). These were the first two movies I’ve watched in Japanese without subtitles, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much I understood (I probably shouldn’t have been that surprised since I’ve communicating exclusively in Japanese for the past month without any trouble). Other than two parts in each movie, I understood perfectly, which felt great!
Don’t know about y’all, but while we’re catching up: I don’t watch film or television anymore. I dunno what happened precisely. It started with a Bowie film called “The Man Who Fell To Earth.” Maybe it was something I ate. Might’ve been why Bowie made that film. It started with movies about 2hrs and then it dwindled to even 15 minute short films. I actually can’t even look at still photographs of people at weddings or out and about in cities without feeling virulently ill, like the native of some island where the camera is thought to have evil magical powers. I even tried a Ghibli film recently. No dice!
Personally, I felt that “Dallas Buyers Club” was pornographic garbage which defamed and exploited the Queer & HIV-Positive communities, and also the medical community and its US regulators, in the context of the emergent HIV crisis, for a chance at a statue made of the world’s oldest and second-most notorious conflict resource (the first being, of course, the human body).
Personally, I also felt that “Spotlight” exploited me, my friends & family, and every member of my Catholic Church, including those who have never touched or spoken to another human (even an adult human; I have celibate family) in lust or anger, for precisely the same reasons, for the same chance at that sickening, maddening thing. I think “Spotlight” was the same sort of exploitative pornography as “Dallas Buyers Club,” but for the human soul, in which I believe. I know not everyone believes in that. That’s your right in most of the world. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to live where it wasn’t a right. And, I know that purchasing these works is a choice people make. I don’t subscribe to Netflix anymore, either.
I love Fellini’s “8 1/2,” though. Everything Scorsese’s oeuvre and “Spotlight” did wrong about the Church (and presumably Italy, though I wouldn’t know), Fellini remarked perfectly upon that, perfectly, and then moved on. I can’t rewatch it, though. It’s that tough.
Went to the local AMC to watch their one-time screening of Perfect Blue, as I’ve had it on my list for, oh, literally since it came out; and it’s just slipped and slipped. And when I got there 20 min ahead of time to get some snacks and settle in, and 7:00 rolls on by, the showtime just slipped and slipped, and they announced 15 min after that it would be 30 min but here’s some passes and feel free to go and eat and come back, and then 30 mins pass and here’s more passes and oh BTW the screening is scrubbed for today.
So I hung around as they let you pick a different movie to stay for. Ended up seeing Searching and I am glad I stuck around as it was quite good!
But also I would actually say this is a movie that should absolutely be seen on the small screen. I would even say a laptop or mobile device is almost a superior viewing context. Because if you aren’t already aware (I had no idea this movie even existed until 15 min before show time) the freaking of the movie is thru computer or occasionally mobile screens. And so I would love to see what it’s like to be watching it on a MacBook Pro in a bedroom.
Good thriller about a Korean American family, where I cried in the intro and by the end again, and yet could laugh at the spot on nature of comments sections and sidebar ads on popular “unrated” video sites.
The plot wasn’t world class mind blow, but the ride was awesome and the real reviews of it do mirror most of my take away. Other than a few things which dipped into the uncanny valley about their mock news media coverage, and one textbook example of “enhance enhance” to mock, nothing was really pulling me out of the concept they built.
I recently re-watched both Clash of the Titans and Excalibur. I hadn’t seen either one in a very very long time, and my memory of both was extremely limited. Also they were both on Filmstruck, but were leaving soon, so I had to watch them soon to avoid the hassle of pirating or whatev.
Clash of the Titans is still way good. That Harryhousen stop motion is so great. Only some of the effects in the beginning where everyone was drowning don’t hold up. The thing is, my view of the story is completely different. When I was younger I viewed it as a pretty normal adventure with Perseus the hero. Now I see that the humans basically just do things at the whim of the gods. The gods are all fucking assholes. Zeus just gets his way because he’s in charge.
Excalibur is a lot shorter than I remember. It’s a little over 2 hours. The early parts of the movie where Merlin is hanging out and Arthur is still young are way cornier and hammier than I remember. Very dated and doesn’t hold up well. Once it gets past that to the Lancelot times and the grail quest that’s where it gets more serious, surreal, and good. It would be cool if the whole movie was like that.
Event Horizon scared the shit out of me when I first saw it. But half the special effects don’t hold up, and neither do the scares. It’s all a bit obvious now.
“Event Horizon” is a terrible name for a ship. It basically means “Where things go to die at a black hole.” I suppose that’s the point, since it’s a horror movie. Stil, it’s like watching a horror movie that takes place at Murdercruel Manor.
The purpose of the ship was crossing that boundary. Or, to be more specific, using a black hole to create a wormhole and travel through it. Event Horizon is a totally non-insidious name for a space ship powered by a black hole.
That’s not to say, in the context of the movie, it doesn’t have spooky connotations. But those aren’t to how deadly a black hole is. It’s more a play on the edge of human experience, and how close you can get to inhuman horror before you can’t come back.
But in the context of naming a ship, it’s no more meaningful than Titanic. Of course now that name has connotations, but at the time it was just one of a whole line of White Star ships that ended in “ic” like Olympic and Atlantic and such.
Black Holes as a way of FTL-travel, punching holes in space and then folding it. Instead they found they found The Warp from 40K. You could have named the ship a lot of things. Since this is a horror movie, they’re using the name to foreshadow “Where things go to die.”
I was working as an Usher in a movie theater when this came out, so I saw the movie in brief 5-minute segments. I’m not a fan of most horror movies, so I didn’t have an overwhelming urge to see it.
I never got the connotation of “where things go to die” from the word Event Horizon, because I already had the understanding of an event horizon as “the boundary beyond which nothing can emerge” which has since evolved into the more correct understanding of “the boundary beyond which all possible futures converge at a singularity” But it’s like they may as well call it the HMS Black Hole or the USS Photon Sphere, because the singularity is the actual doomy scary bit. And if it is a worm hole, then that central singularity bit is hopefully something you’ll avoid hitting along your travels.
Tho I have to imagine that any real wormhole is pointless as if you can’t escape the local event horizon I don’t recall how they expect to get you out the event horizon just on the other side. If they have the tech to escape at all, they should in theory be able to just go into any black hole, scope it out, then pop back out. Thus making black holes and specifically the event horizon of them rather trivial and not-scary. Singularities would still be scary as it just nulls out anything that reached it. (And somehow retains the mass of all it has folded into its null value) but people with proper ships should be able to just cruise right into the sphere and see what’s up and return so at that point you really would just be calling the ship the RMS Aurora Borealis.
I recently watched What We Do in the Shadows (2017) and laughed a lot. It’s a Christopher Guest style movie documenting the exploits of four vampire room mates.
Both films offer a nice alternative to the standard films in rotation as Halloween approaches. Before seeing these films Evil Dead II and Young Frankenstein were my go to Halloween comedies.
