It’s gorgeous, I’ll give it that.
But it’s the only film I’ve ever seen that I might rate under Kangaroo Jack.
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Anyone seen Deathgasm or Final Girls?
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Well, it was kinda.
It looked pretty, but the plot was a jumbled mess.
And just sticking a tribute to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil in the middle might have been a fun idea, but it didn’t really work.
It needed focus and a few more drafts of the script.
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Lolita, at least watch the opening scene. A great Peter Sellers moment. But yeah the movie (the book doubly so) is full of “Oh man, oh lady, no no no, don’t do that” moments. Which is either fascinating or unwatchable depending on your tastes.
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Well the book is Nabokov’s metaphor for his new love of the the english language.
I liked the film but I think seeing it at Cinerama helped a bit with that. The Nelson Riddle soundtrack is pretty awesome too.
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Anyone else watched Beasts of no Nation yet?
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I forgot last weeks ‘Untamed Women’. WW2 bomber pilots get shot down over the the ocean and manage to land on an island. They get captured by a tribe of women who speak english and are the descendants of the druids who fled england at the time of the Romans or something…I know the english spoken back then was not anything like even 200 years ago but I digress. All of their men have been killed by the hariy headed ones and the leader does not trust any men so they are exiled to find hey there are stock footage dinosaurs trying to eat us. They try to get back are rescued and etc, etc, fight off the hairy headed ones and then a volcano erupts and everyone dies but the pilot who manages to get back to the life raft and is picked up by a Navy ship. Some very cringeworthy sexist bits only add to the fun of how bad this movie is.
This week was ‘The Amazing Mr. X/The Spiritualist’ with Turhan Bey and Lynn Bari. A widow hears her husband calling her from the sea and happens up on a psychic who knows all. More of a noir/thriller than horror. A good story, well paced plot and decent acting make this one worth seeing.
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Okay, so yesterday I watched Hard to be a God.
Based on a book by the same people who wrote Roadside Picnic, which became Stalker - which I quite liked.
Got loads of glowing reviews from all the critics, but I just found it impenetrable - without resorting to the internet I’d have had no idea what was going on. It was unremittingly grim and disgusting, the camerawork seemed to intentionally obscure everything, the dialogue explained nothing. Very long, very odd, I’m not sure what people saw in it.
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I saw Peter Strickland’s (of “Berberian Sound Studio”) latest this weekend - “The Duke of Burgundy”. I am saying that it is under-rated, simply because I had never heard of it before, despite it having shown for more than a year.
It is about two female lepidopterists and the dynamics of their relationship, with free/pinned butterflies functioning as metaphor for the cat-and-mouse nature of their erotic role playing. Not unlike BSS, there is a slightly retro vibe to this as it works partly as homage to the style of European erotic art/exploitation films of the 1970s. It is quite visually rich, detailed, and atmospheric. And like BSS benefits from strong audio - the sound design, foley, and score are amazing and work well together. There is a lot of quirk and symbolism, which seems very well thought out and deliberate. Also solid acting from the all-female cast, especially the two leads.
I was quite tired when I watched this, but it woke me up and kept me interested, despite an often languid, dreamlike atmosphere. It was one of the best movies I have experienced in a while, and I definitely hope to see it again soon.
(ETA: Apologies to those who dislike the word “female”, it’s a proud term in my book)
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Currently watching CBGB out of a sense of morbid curiosity since it showed up on Netflix. You can tell it was filmed in Savannah.
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Sheee-it, I read the wiki article and I still couldn’t tell what the hell was going on!
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Oh god… Is it bad? Should I hate-watch it, as someone who has written on punk history?
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Location can ruin things for some folk. I now have a lot of trouble with the X-Files as I keep going yep been there, bought stuff there, oh that’s this place and it distracts from the story.
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It’s just…bleh.
It was filmed across the road from Paula Deen’s restaurant, which is a bit odd if you know the area. Doesn’t look much like the Bowery.
Rickman was strangely detached from the whole thing - I can’t believe the real Kristal could be quite as incompetent as he is portrayed, the songs are all recording of the original artists, not live performances and it has some weird, annoying conceit where it pretends it’s a comic book. Something to do with Punk magazine, I guess (which the film claims invented the term, although I gather there’s some debate about).
Do you want to see people lip syncing to recordings of Television, Blondie, The Ramones, Iggy Pop, The Dead Boys and Talking Heads?
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I don’t think it is underrated, but I’ve never met another American who has watched OSS 117.
Funny. As. Hell.
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I don’t have a problem with location generally speaking. I do get a weird little thrill with all the stuff filmed here in town when I recognize them. Obviously, there’s The Walking Dead which (until recently) was set in GA. but we watched the first episode of Catch and Halt Fire, which is supposed to be set in Texas, and there is a scene in that episode that’s at a well known movie theater in town. Seeing it out of context was weird, but it didn’t ruin it for me (although I’m not sure I’m into it, so far - maybe it gets better?).
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Have I not mentioned both films in this thread? The best super spy satires out there.
EDIT : Yes I did
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Hudson Hawk was brilliant. One of my all time favorites.
I think it was one of those films where you actually need something of a spoiler to enjoy it- It starts off as a gritty crime drama with a little dark humor and ends up as a Three Stooges / Pink Panther slapstick. If you go in without knowing that, the beginning starts you off with a false expectation and it loses you.
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A couple of things have pissed me off with location.
50/50 pretending to be Seattle really annoyed me (I guess the same is true of Chronicle). Just set the fucking thing in Vancouver if you’re going to film it there, not just stick up a signpost with Pike St written on it, and the geography of London was really, really annoyingly out of whack with reality for 28 Weeks Later - if you’re going to have your characters moving between recognizable real places, at least look at where they are on a map when you write the script.
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That’s wrong. Both Lester Bangs and Greg Shaw used the term prior to the magazine coming out. I think the first person who used it the term as applied to music was some guy writing from a Detroit magazine, but I can’t remember his name now. But I’d argue it’s Bangs and Shaw that really popularized it in relation to music. But yeah, Legs McNeil didn’t invent that at all, much as he wishes he had.
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