Yeah, I used to enjoy his work too (Phoenix, I mean), but lately… I don’t know. Not sure what the turning point was, either?
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[ETA]
A spoilery examination of Barbie via the lens of Kubrick…
with Goth Emo Revival barbie!!!
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I was interested, as a fan of the Sharpe books and TV series and having recently seen both BBC and Soviet versions of War and Peace. But the movie looks like it’s in “beige-a-vision”. Modern color timing in movies can be so awful.
Napoleon era uniforms were colorful and garish. Muted colors for them is a waste.
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Is it April Fools already?
[Martin Scorsese to host and produce religious docuseries for Fox News | Martin Scorsese | The Guardian]
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This one sounds amazing!
Excerpt:
Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, the latest film by Romanian writer and director Radu Jude, opens with a phone alarm going off at the ungodly hour of 5:50 a.m. As the overworked, underpaid film production assistant ¶ at the center of the story reaches out to silence the alarm, we see her nightstand, littered with the detritus of a hazy night in: an overturned beer bottle, a mostly empty glass of wine, and Marcel Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Call it greeting the day with a grimace.
Throwing on a sequined dress, Angela Răducanu (Ilinca Manolache) stumbles to her van to start an unending day of driving around Bucharest. As is so often the case in the industry, the hours of driving will go on interminably, stretching well into the night. Jude himself was once a PA, and he has said that the death of a fellow PA in a car crash — a stunningly frequent occurrence in the industry — was part of the film’s inspiration.
Angela’s route is determined by a local production company that has been tasked with making a workplace safety film for an Austrian conglomerate that is seeking to polish its reputation and reduce its liability. The conglomerate wants to have a worker who was injured in its Romanian factory appear in the video, and Angela’s task is to prescreen the many candidates. She goes from one shabby apartment to another, filming the borderline-destitute disabled workers as they audition, hoping for the 500 euros that come with the role. Their desperation is palpable, the anxiety radiating off the thin walls. Some of the workers’ families plead with Angela to put in a good word, but the decision is up to the Austrians; after all, she’s just another worker being exploited by the wage differential between her country and that of the corporate overlords.
In crowded homes, workers recount their misfortunes for the screen. One fell off a platform in the factory, but because she had taken a sip of alcohol handed to her in celebration of a coworker’s birthday, the corporation claims it was her fault. Ditto for a worker with a disturbing facial scar who lost the ability to speak following his accident; Angela breaks the news that the corporation is unlikely to choose someone who is mute. Then there is Ovidiu (Ovidiu Pîrșan), the worker who the Austrians ultimately choose, a family man who was hit in the head with a rusty piece of metal being used as a barricade in the company parking lot: the impact put him in a coma, then paralyzed him from the waist down.
This is not a safety video; it’s pure propaganda. The conglomerate clearly shares some of the blame for the injuries, yet the most important part of the script, as Angela tells one worker, is when they implore employees to wear the company’s protective gear and not take irresponsible risks, as if it were their own mistakes that left them injured.
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This was a… weird film?
I’m pretty sure it’s some commentary on the immediate post-Franco era, but don’t know quite enough about the end of fascism and the emergence on democracy in Spain to know if that’s the case. It seems to be digging into the trauma some suffered in orphanages during the Fascist era, at the very least.
The kids who play Tin and Tina are creepy as hell!
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I don’t know where else to put this, so I’m putting it here. I came across this short bio of Viola Smith, who I had never heard of until today. I recently started taking drum lessons, so the algorithm is starting to recommend stuff like this. Pretty impressive lady. This video is from 11 years ago, and Viola died 4 years ago at 107.
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Snootworld is in crisis. Don’t know what Snootworld is? Neither do we! At this rate, we’ll never know because America’s favorite weatherman, David Lynch, says Netflix passed on the project.
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My brother is very excited. The sequel, Antimatter Blues, is out, and is, IMHO, an even better novel. Seeing the kid I used to beat up hobnobbing with the high and mighty is proper fricken’ weird, man.
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Absolutely shitting delightful!
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You might think a movie about a second American civil war would be a thinly veiled Trump story. It’s not — and it’s better for it.
I remain skeptical. Any movie on that topic – this close to an election with Tromp as one of two plausible options – that isn’t about the threat of fascism sounds to me like it must be irresponsible and opportunistic at best.
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Yeah, me too, for the same reasons.
[ETA] and now there is a thread on the film!
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