CS Film Club II

I'll either do Bad Times at the El Royale or One Hour Photo. Probably the latter as that'll be a much easier sell to my girlfriend.

I'm thinking ahead for when we do the next couple decades.

Reversal of Fortune just came to Criterion Channel, actually.

Probably leaning towards Clemency

<3

One Cut of the Dead

A film about a film crew filming a live film about a film crew filming a zombie film that are attacked by zombies while filming.

What a treat this film was, and even a bigger treat to have been going into it pretty much blind. I can only imagine that the cast and crew had as much fun filming it as I did watching. I can't really say much more without spoiling it for those that might choose this film in future rounds, or watch on their own, but it's definitely a fitting tribute to the men and women, both in front of the camera and behind the scenes, who make the magic happen that we see on screen, especially in live events.

10/10

Clemency (2019)
Clemency is primarily known for its dark horse campaign to get star Alfre Woodard an Oscar nomination, which didn’t really end up panning out, but she did get a lot of nominations from places like the Gothams and the Independent Spirit Awards and the movie itself kind of feels like the sort of thing that would be well liked by those two award shows. The film is about the warden at a maximum security prison in an unnamed state where executions are carried out. It opens with a botched lethal injection and then focuses on the psychological toll this line of work takes on the Woodard character going forward as she prepares for the next one. It is probably bad form to just dismiss something because it covers the same subject matter of another famous movie but… Dead Man Walking already exists. This really doesn’t bring much to the conversation about this topic that that 1995 film didn’t. Of course that was twenty five years ago and in many ways it’s a little depressing that the discourse on this issue has not moved forward much since then, but that’s kind of by design. Anti-Death Penalty activists have rather intentionally moved to doing work behind the scenes rather than engaging in polarizing activism and because of that the institution is dying a slow death. So in a lot of ways this movie feels like a bit of a relic of a previous era as far as its politics and messaging go, but does it work better as a personal story? Kind of. At the very least Alfre Woodard mostly lives up to the hype as she definitely portrays the stress of all of this on her character, but the fact that this kind of thing would mess with someone’s head isn’t exactly revelatory as an insight to me. In some ways I actually liked the movie better just as a sort of procedural of what running a prison would be like and I might have liked if we saw more of that beyond the arranging of executions. Ultimately I’m just not sure that this film is ambitious enough or inventive enough to really stand out as something memorable to me, but I do think it mostly succeeds at what it’s going for.
*** out of Five

I've watched mine. I just haven't posted because I've been sick.

Just been busy.  The second half of October got cluttered.

I watched my movie Tuesday night, so I'll get the review up shortly.