I don't know how I just found out about this, but Menilmontant is crazy good. It's silent, with no intertitles or anything, but it's less than 40 minutes long, so even if you don't like that sort of thing, maybe give it a shot anyway. There are tons of movies you can tell it inspired, including Persona and Mulholland Drive. It is so good, you guys.
And here it is, or you can just watch it directly on YouTube if you are so inclined.
First, there’s not a single Elton John song in the entire movie. Not one. Also they made him a giant lizard!? I was like “ok, where is this going???”. Then...he fights a moth. I’m going to say that again for emphasis. *Elton John fights a moth.*
Man, this was both great and really weird. Robert Altman directs Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe. It's a mystery that's barely comprehensible, but you're supposed to be as confused as Marlowe.
I haven't read much Raymond Chandler, but I got the impression that the central mystery isn't typically the point. Marlowe is not bad at his job, but he's also hopelessly naive and tied to a code of behavior that doesn't benefit him. He is constantly getting into trouble for reasons he barely understands, and it seems that it's almost pure luck that he figures out what's going on. It's barely explained to us as the reader, partly to keep the mystery, but also to make us feel like there are these forces at work we don't understand, and couldn't affect if we knew. In that sense, the movie gets the idea of the story right, even if the story is told in a radically different way.
Marlowe is played by Gould as both a wise-cracking punk and as a private eye with a strict code. The code is Marlowe from the books, but the attitude is a 1970s reinvention. Gould is not at all how I would picture a Philip Marlowe - he's younger, shabbier, unkempt and not at all a tough guy, but it all kind of works.
That's the thing, it all kind of works, even though it's like nothing you'd expect from the book, except for the crime, murder and betrayal.
Plus, Arnold Schwarzenegger appears as a gangster's muscle man in an uncredited, non-speaking role. It's just a little weird tidbit that is more interesting now than it was at the time.
Anna Kendrick is Stephanie, the model of a tame suburban mom, she's very busy making herself appear as the perfect Mom who has it all together, complete with a Mommy vlog. Through her son, she meets Blake Lively's Emily, the picture of urbane style and success, a PR executive for a fashion firm. Though pretty much opposites, they seem to hit if off.
Stephanie attaches herself to the family, and Emily doesn't seem to mind, mostly because she's getting a free nanny for her son. One afternoon, Emily asks for a simple favor - can Stephanie pick up her son from school? After that, Emily disappears... and only Stephanie seems to care, and starts her own investigation.
The noir roots are strong here, everyone has their secrets, nothing is exactly as it seems, but this is definitely a comedy, too. A lot of the humor rests on Kendrick and her perfect homemaker act, but there's a greek chorus of sorts in the other class parents, including Andrew Rannells, who is given a ton of catty lines.
I think this movie hits just the right balance of humor and intrigue. I was expecting a dazzling performance from Kendrick, but I was really surprised at Blake Lively, who successfully balanced the different aspects of her character. I really enjoyed this.
By now I have a real thing for icelandic movies and i have yet to see one that I didn't love. This one is about Halla, a middle aged choir leader and ... eco-terrorist. Marvelously heart-warming, beautiful and weirdly funny with a strong female lead.
Iceland is a very resonably sized country that manages to produce one strong movie after another. We don't. At all.
To be fair, Luxembourgers can more easily travel to cinemas in neighbouring countries. Quite tough for an Icelander to pop to a Norwegian or Irish cinema for the evening.
And Iceland has a long literary heritage going back to the Eddas.
Rich people do tend to be sort of boring and uninsightful, so I can kind of see that the population is both small and wealthy enough that they aren't producing much in the way of the arts.
I don't mean you, Stormlight. You're my favorite movie guy here. I do kind of mean it about the demographic in general, though. PLEASE DON'T BE MAD AT ME.
Rich people do tend to be sort of boring and uninsightful
While generally true that there needs to be some conflict and/or suffering to inspire art, Luxembourg obviously does have that. I mean, Stormy has a whole thread about disasters that have struck there. Not long ago someone lost a ladder and as far as we know has not been reunited with it.
I quite liked Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Is it a compelling drama, with a deep and inspiring message? Is it a well-acted, carefully crafted masterpiece? No, of course not.
Was it is, is it's a darned enjoyable movie that's far closer to what a "Godzilla" movie should be than was its predecessor. This one is far closer to what you'd expect from a Toho Studios "Godzilla" film, and in fact, had a number of references to Toho productions. (I mean, aside from the obvious, like the inclusion of Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and King Ghidorah.)
For instance, there were clear references to the original Gojira, to Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, and to Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, among others. And we finally got to hear the iconic Godzilla scream/roar in all its glory, at last! (That kind of annoyed me about the previous movie; though the star kind of sounds like Godzilla, it's not the "genuine" Godzilla scream/roar that we hear whenever he vocalizes. Well, though it only happened once, we got to hear the "real" Godzilla scream/roar in this movie. Yay!) They didn't do the "authentic" vocalizations for King Ghidorah or for Rodan, but they did include some authentic Mothra vocalizations.
And when Godzilla strides forward to challenge King Ghidorah, the soundtrack plays ... Akira Ifukube's iconic "Godzilla March"! I nearly burst into applause.
(And during the end credits, they played the "Summoning Mothra" music!)
Unlike the previous movie, which focused almost entirely on the puny humans, and in which Godzilla was barely present, this movie is very much about Godzilla and his fellow kaiju. The humans are present and important, but they don't distract from the real stars of the movie. And Ken Watanabe is excellent as always. It might have been nice to have seen more of Charles Dance's character and to have learned more about his motivations, but I suppose you can't have everything.
Speaking of which, the motivations of the [human] bad guys are interestingly nuanced. They aren't so much evil as misguided, making them much more interesting than they'd be if they had been mustache-twirling villains.
Anyway, this movie is basically what you'd expect Toho Studios to put out if they had the kind of money to throw around that Hollywood does. Yeah, they could have cut out some of the human "drama" and I wouldn't have missed it at all, but the movie itself was quite enjoyable.
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Last edited by The Lone Ranger; 06-11-2019 at 11:47 PM.
A German movie inspired by the life of artist Gerhard Richter and it's basically a 190 minutes epic about the value of art. It's remarkably well made and acted. It's itself a piece of art.
I have one issue with it though: it actually has a bad guy who is so bad that it's distracting. The movie would have been better without him, I think.
Also, while the movie is inspired by the life of Gerhard Richter it never claims to be "based on a true story". Still, Richter himself at age 87 has called the movie "abuse and grossly distorting". Maybe it is, but it's still a hell of a great movie.
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Last edited by Stormlight; 06-21-2019 at 04:29 PM.
So then ... this is the story of Jack (Matt Dillon) a failed architect/engineer who turns serial killer. He narrates some of his most elaborately gruesome crimes (mainly killing women).
I don't really know what to say yet. It's violent, vile, sadistic and some of the scenes are barely watchable. And yet ... while all this would be enough to put it in the bad movie thread, here it works. And it works very well. This is a hell of a movie with an even better ending. Lars von Trier man, bloody hell. He pulled it off again.
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Last edited by Stormlight; 06-21-2019 at 04:31 PM.
OMG and I just finally found a crappy 4-movie DVD that has Carpenter's Prince of Darkness on it! I've been searching for awhile, since it doesn't seem available for streaming (not the services I have, anyway). It's a masterpiece of ridiculous absurdity that somehow still manages to be pretty damned unnerving.
The DVD is called "Zombies," and it's got Romero's Land of the Dead & Dawn of the Dead (original version), as well as Serpent and the Rainbow. Neither Prince nor Serpent have anything to do with flesh-eating zombies, although the latter is about pre-Hollywood zombies of the voodoo variety (and probably belongs in the "aren't bad" thrad; it's a great movie until the last act turns it into every other Wes Craven film ever).
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Prince of Darkness is one of my favorite horror movies. I made the mistake of watching it a couple of times on my own and being completely mind-freaked by it each time. Finally watching it with some friends I was able to break its hold over me. I can't say with any certainty it's "good" but it stays in its lane, so to speak, and does that well enough.
A con artist masquerading as a Count is planning his biggest heist - marrying a woman for her inheritance and then committing her to an asylum. He recruits the daughter of a famous criminal to act as the lady's handmaiden to help convince the woman and help him maneuver around the powerful old man who is her uncle (by marriage) and fiancé.
So, it's basically a neo-noir set in Japanese controlled Korea. It's a twisty movie based off of the novel Fingersmith.
I also liked that one. My main complaint would be that I thought some of the sex scenes were a bit gratuitous.
Probably... I think some of it is supposed to highlight the fact that Lady Hideko may be inexperienced, but she's got a lot of detailed knowledge from reading a bunch of ancient Japanese porn.
Burning (2018) co-starring Steven Yeun of The Walking Dead, streaming on Netflix.
Jong-su is a guy from a modest rural background in the area north of Seoul by the North Korean border. He meets a girl, Hae-mi, originally from his village by chance while working a delivery job in Seoul, and they fall in together. But when she returns from a trip abroad, she's brought Ben (Yeun), a rich cosmopolitan guy who is a rival for her affections and also somewhat creepy/off-putting. Ben, at one point, describes his hobby of burning down abandoned greenhouses for fun.
Later Hae-mi goes missing, and Jong-su suspects Ben had something to do with it. At this point it becomes somewhat of a mystery.
It's a bit slow compared to most movies, but it definitely builds up a sense of unease and mystery about what happened to Hae-mi.
The Silence, the Iranian one from 1998. It's about a 10 year old blind boy who works as an instrument tuner to pay his family's rent, but he keeps getting lost because he follows pretty sounds. (The main character is played by a girl, and she doesn't seem to have been in anything else since, but she's really really good in this.)
It plays out almost like a fable or something, and it's just really really gorgeous.
Directed by French-Argentinian director Gaspard Noé and it tells the story of a bunch of French (urban) dancers who join together for a 3 day rehearsal in a remote empty school in the late 90s. Apparently based on a true story.
They have an all-night party on the last day that goes badly wrong.
This movie is unlike anything I've ever seen: depraved, disgusting, disturbing, unrelenting. And yet you cannot look away. Outstanding.
Together with Suspiria this has got to be the best movie I've seen this year.
I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood this weekend. I almost posted this in the other movie thrad - I enjoyed it but it's a bit too long. It's a good movie, not a great one.
It's beautifully filmed, and Tarantino gets the whole vibe of late 1960s Hollywood just right. Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are fantastic. It's worth it just to see the two of them play off each other.
I really enjoyed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I agree that it's on the long side, but I can't think of anything I'd cut out. (In fact, it's so long that I desperately needed to use the bathroom by the end, but I still couldn't think of anything that should have been cut.) The slow moments contributed a lot to the character development, and both Pitt and DiCaprio provide possible career best performances. (There are some major roles in both actors' filmographies that I still haven't seen, though, including The Revenant - I suspect my stomach is too weak for that one.) Both of them will probably at least get Oscar nominations (my guess is DiCaprio for lead and Pitt for supporting), and this film may end up being mentioned in both of their obituaries.
This is also a pretty light film by Tarantino standards, both in terms of violence (really, only the end is particularly bloody; the first two and a half hours of the film are mostly just people talking, acting on film sets, driving, watching movies, and doing various other everyday tasks; including the ending, I can only think of three cases of violence that weren't staged for the purposes of TV or film shoots, and only the ending is a lengthy or particularly graphic case) and in terms of its overall tone. Neither of its main characters are exactly flawless heroes, but it comes down pretty well on the idealistic side in terms of showing how important their friendship is, and in showing how even morally flawed characters can improve the world.
The ending has of course been a source of severe controversy, but I'm not really sure what people were expecting. Tarantino loves to rewrite history; was anyone really surprised that he choose to do it again here? Sharon Tate's family is OK with the film, so I don't see a problem. Tate herself is treated quite respectfully here - if I have any complaints on that front, it's that she's arguably treated too respectfully. In any case, the film certainly doesn't come across to me as exploiting her memory; it's just another case of Tarantino presenting a vision of what he wishes had happened, albeit one he exaggerates for comedic effect.
Those with weak stomachs may need to avert their eyes at some points in the ending, but the violence is so over-the-top that it becomes comedic, like in Kill Bill. Did I mention this is also a very funny film at times? Though, of course, it becomes chilling whenever the Manson Family members are onscreen, as one would expect.
Also, keep an eye on Julia Butters, who steals every scene she's in as a precocious eight-year-old Method actor (she is very insistent about this terminology, arguing that "actress" is a nonsensical word) Trudi Fraser, who co-stars with DiCaprio's character Rick Dalton in a TV series pilot. Tarantino himself sought Butters out after seeing her roles on television, which should probably suggest what calibre of talent we're talking about here.
Anyway, if you enjoy Tarantino's work, I'd recommend seeing it. It's not as great as Pulp Fiction, but I'd probably rank it as a second-tier Tarantino film, which is still probably better than most other films you're likely to see this year.
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“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith