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Arts & Entertainment / Re: Just Watched
« on: February 02, 2023, 07:54:31 PM »
It's a Cruddy cinema roundup! From least to most recent:
The Happening (dir. M. Night Shyamalan)
I was expecting this to be one of those overhyped "worst movies of all time" that was simply mediocre, but no. This is actually horrifically bad, and enough has been said about it over the years that mercifully I don't have to relive it in detail here.
Fantastic Four (dir. Tim Story)
Casual sexism galore as stupid men get upset about horrible women while also becoming super. Way better than Josh Trank's odious Fant4stic, but still quite horrid.
The Turin Horse (dir. Béla Tarr)
Apocalyptic potato eating and long tracking shots courtesy of the king of slow cinema. Oddly compelling but so slow I had to watch it in instalments.
X-Men (dir. Bryan Singer)
Competent and pretty good fun overall. Certainly makes for a nice change of pace after so many MCU and DCEU movies.
Manifesto (dir. Julian Rosefeldt)
Cate Blanchett dresses up in an array of disguises and reads various manifestos. I'm wary of being too harsh on this since it was originally designed to be seen as part of an installation in which all its vignettes would play simultaneously. Watching them in sequence is pretty tedious, though there are some nice ideas and Blanchett puts a good amount of oratory heft into a rather dry concept.
Ulysse (dir. Agnès Varda)
My first Varda, the French art house legend I've known of for some time but am just now getting around to. This is a short film about a series of photographs she took decades prior and the people who modelled for them. One of the most relaxing films I've ever seen.
Nightmare Alley (dir. Guillermo Del Toro)
Carnival noir! A moody slow burn with a few characteristic Del Toro twists. I had a lot of fun with this one!
Uncut Gems (dir. Joshua and Ben Safdie)
A sacred cow of contemporary cinema, and a much vaunted return to serious cinema for leading man Adam Sandler. I've really enjoyed Sandler in his previous dramatic turns with Punch Drunk Love and The Meyerowitz Stories, so I was disappointed to sit through what amounts to two hours of hateful dullards yelling at each other about nothing. I think you have to be able to sympathise with the Sandler character to care about what happens to him and I just didn't. Another GoodFellas for me.
Antiporno (dir. Sion Sono)
Sono was hired to make a "serious" plot-driven soft porn movie to help revamp Nikkatsu's "Roman Porno" genre in Japan. Sono being Sono, he gave them a postmodern psychodrama about a woman whose life is falling apart as she deals with a terrible grief and the societal double standards for women in Japan. This is an intense film and quite a difficult watch, but a sharp and wildly artsy skewering of misogynistic eroticism. Worth watching if you have the stomach for it.
Event Horizon (dir. Paul W. S. Anderson)
Before the Resident Evil movies, the reason Paul Thomas Anderson has to use his full name was trying to warn us that he by no means should be approached to direct horror movies. A spaceship bends space around itself and teleports to another part of the universe, or does it??? What if I told you it actually went... to hell?!??!?! (prety sppoky huh? lol :3) Cue 90 minutes of swishy tensionless space goings on featuring a crew of morons and a gaping hole where most of the gore was cut out because test audiences just didn't care for it. Most bafflingly, this is essentially a cheesy PG adventure movie that suddenly veers off into spooky town when you least expect it, but you only don't expect it because it doesn't make any sense.
The Other Side of the Wind (dir. Orson Welles)
Yet another legendary lost Orson Welles movie. Welles returned to Hollywood in the 1970s after it had shunned him so many decades before, naturally his first move on being welcomed back was to fashion a cinematic bayonet to stick it with. This is a satire of Hollywood, both Old and New, of auteurism, of art house cinema, of erotic cinema, of critics, of groupies and hangers on, of directors and actors and their debasement and destruction at the hands of a parasitic industry. Perhaps above all it is a self-parody. Gorgeously and chaotically shot in both colour and black and white, and on different kinds of cameras and film stocks, the film records the events of a screening party for an incomplete film by the impish and imperious master Jake Hannaford, played with acerbic aplomb by the great John Huston. Imperfect and still rough, for it was never finished and what we have here is a sort of best guess compiled from over 100 hours of footage and Welles's copious notes, this is nonetheless the kind of film that could only be made by a director who has such complete mastery of their art as to be able to coalesce their love and hate of it into a unified vision.
The Happening (dir. M. Night Shyamalan)
I was expecting this to be one of those overhyped "worst movies of all time" that was simply mediocre, but no. This is actually horrifically bad, and enough has been said about it over the years that mercifully I don't have to relive it in detail here.
Fantastic Four (dir. Tim Story)
Casual sexism galore as stupid men get upset about horrible women while also becoming super. Way better than Josh Trank's odious Fant4stic, but still quite horrid.
The Turin Horse (dir. Béla Tarr)
Apocalyptic potato eating and long tracking shots courtesy of the king of slow cinema. Oddly compelling but so slow I had to watch it in instalments.
X-Men (dir. Bryan Singer)
Competent and pretty good fun overall. Certainly makes for a nice change of pace after so many MCU and DCEU movies.
Manifesto (dir. Julian Rosefeldt)
Cate Blanchett dresses up in an array of disguises and reads various manifestos. I'm wary of being too harsh on this since it was originally designed to be seen as part of an installation in which all its vignettes would play simultaneously. Watching them in sequence is pretty tedious, though there are some nice ideas and Blanchett puts a good amount of oratory heft into a rather dry concept.
Ulysse (dir. Agnès Varda)
My first Varda, the French art house legend I've known of for some time but am just now getting around to. This is a short film about a series of photographs she took decades prior and the people who modelled for them. One of the most relaxing films I've ever seen.
Nightmare Alley (dir. Guillermo Del Toro)
Carnival noir! A moody slow burn with a few characteristic Del Toro twists. I had a lot of fun with this one!
Uncut Gems (dir. Joshua and Ben Safdie)
A sacred cow of contemporary cinema, and a much vaunted return to serious cinema for leading man Adam Sandler. I've really enjoyed Sandler in his previous dramatic turns with Punch Drunk Love and The Meyerowitz Stories, so I was disappointed to sit through what amounts to two hours of hateful dullards yelling at each other about nothing. I think you have to be able to sympathise with the Sandler character to care about what happens to him and I just didn't. Another GoodFellas for me.
Antiporno (dir. Sion Sono)
Sono was hired to make a "serious" plot-driven soft porn movie to help revamp Nikkatsu's "Roman Porno" genre in Japan. Sono being Sono, he gave them a postmodern psychodrama about a woman whose life is falling apart as she deals with a terrible grief and the societal double standards for women in Japan. This is an intense film and quite a difficult watch, but a sharp and wildly artsy skewering of misogynistic eroticism. Worth watching if you have the stomach for it.
Event Horizon (dir. Paul W. S. Anderson)
Before the Resident Evil movies, the reason Paul Thomas Anderson has to use his full name was trying to warn us that he by no means should be approached to direct horror movies. A spaceship bends space around itself and teleports to another part of the universe, or does it??? What if I told you it actually went... to hell?!??!?! (prety sppoky huh? lol :3) Cue 90 minutes of swishy tensionless space goings on featuring a crew of morons and a gaping hole where most of the gore was cut out because test audiences just didn't care for it. Most bafflingly, this is essentially a cheesy PG adventure movie that suddenly veers off into spooky town when you least expect it, but you only don't expect it because it doesn't make any sense.
The Other Side of the Wind (dir. Orson Welles)
Yet another legendary lost Orson Welles movie. Welles returned to Hollywood in the 1970s after it had shunned him so many decades before, naturally his first move on being welcomed back was to fashion a cinematic bayonet to stick it with. This is a satire of Hollywood, both Old and New, of auteurism, of art house cinema, of erotic cinema, of critics, of groupies and hangers on, of directors and actors and their debasement and destruction at the hands of a parasitic industry. Perhaps above all it is a self-parody. Gorgeously and chaotically shot in both colour and black and white, and on different kinds of cameras and film stocks, the film records the events of a screening party for an incomplete film by the impish and imperious master Jake Hannaford, played with acerbic aplomb by the great John Huston. Imperfect and still rough, for it was never finished and what we have here is a sort of best guess compiled from over 100 hours of footage and Welles's copious notes, this is nonetheless the kind of film that could only be made by a director who has such complete mastery of their art as to be able to coalesce their love and hate of it into a unified vision.