thebtskink
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Post by thebtskink on Sept 20, 2022 19:07:20 GMT -5
I'll have yours up by tomorrow night, Donny.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Sept 20, 2022 19:08:29 GMT -5
Gonna go with Night of the Kings. Also, for the future, I just went ahead and updated my Blind Spots.
For you:
Don't want to get too ahead of myself with the spooky stuff, so I'll probably do Perks. |
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Sept 21, 2022 15:45:44 GMT -5
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Sept 21, 2022 15:50:05 GMT -5
Sure thing, I'll get you a new one today.
And I might go with Shame because it's on Criterion Channel...but I feel like I have to see Tenet at some point.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Sept 21, 2022 16:01:09 GMT -5
Sure thing, I'll get you a new one today. And I might go with Shame because it's on Criterion Channel...but I feel like I have to see Tenet at some point. Thanks man. Since you're willing to do so I'll give you two bonus picks: Menace II Society25th Hour |
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thebtskink
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Post by thebtskink on Sept 21, 2022 17:31:34 GMT -5
let me know if you need more.
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donny
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Post by donny on Sept 21, 2022 20:17:48 GMT -5
let me know if you need more.
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donny
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Post by donny on Sept 21, 2022 20:45:01 GMT -5
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Sept 21, 2022 23:34:37 GMT -5
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thebtskink
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Post by thebtskink on Sept 22, 2022 8:11:32 GMT -5
These will work. I'm gonna be indecisive which of 5 to watch for a bit |
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Sept 22, 2022 9:06:34 GMT -5
Nice. I think I'll do Fat City. |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Sept 24, 2022 19:11:56 GMT -5
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
So, there’s a plot point in this movie where the characters hear a song on the radio and marvel at the fact that none of them have ever heard this song before and then spend much of the rest of the film trying to figure out what this song is. What is this rare and obscure song? It’s “Heroes” by David Bowie. What the fuck? These characters are otherwise depicted as being these hip and music-savy kids who are steeped in The Smiths and Sonic Youth and they’re even in a damn Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow-cast and this movie expects me to believe they don’t know Bowie? Bullshit, half star deduction on principal. So what else is going on in this movie. Well, it’s a coming of age movie, which is a genre that for me tends to either really click or really flail for me depending largely on how it connects and while I’m not sure this one exactly connected for me there are some strong elements here. For one, this turned out to be something of a training ground for a lot of now prominent actors. Star Logan Lerman didn’t really turn into a big deal, co-star Ezra Miller did (albeit not always for the right reasons) and it was also interesting spotting both Nicholas “Cousin Greg” Braun and Julia “Ozark” Garner in tiny roles. The film is also well shot for the most part and it does choose a decently interesting sub-culture of early 90s cool-kids to follow. That said for most of the film I was pretty annoyed with its protagonist. The film identifies him as a “wallflower” and he’s always whining about his lot in life but from where I sit he seems to be doing pretty good: he falls in with a cool group of friends his first week of school and has a hot girlfriend before the end of his freshman year. Late in the film we find out about some more serious problems he has in his past that makes some of his gloominess make more sense, but this comes way too late and would have been much more useful information earlier in the film. So, I have some mixed thoughts about this, I guess as these things go it’s pretty decent but also definitely falls into clichés. It’s fine.
*** out of Five
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Sept 24, 2022 21:11:53 GMT -5
I think my film club review for Perks of Being A Wallflower was lost to the ages along with the original forums. Another reason to damn Mirko to the lowest levels of hell.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Sept 25, 2022 12:03:29 GMT -5
Open Water (2003)
On the one hand, it's hard not to respect a "little movie that could" story like this. Open Water was made on a low-budget of a few hundred thousand dollars and went on to make $55 million at the box-office, turning a simple but terrifying scenario of being stranded in shark infested waters into a very disturbing piece of psychological horror. On the other hand, the movie was shot on consumer grade digital cameras in the early 2000s and that's a visual aesthetic that causes me genuine physical revulsion. So Open Water had a bit of a barrier to climb to really win me over and thankfully it did. The film's visual style improves tremendously once our central couple actually get stranded and the movie also ratchets up the sense of despair very well in act three as the situation grows increasingly grim. The movie is less of a full on horror film than it is a simple examination of a horrible scenario, but it is effective. That ending also really hits.
B-
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thebtskink
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Post by thebtskink on Sept 25, 2022 12:14:23 GMT -5
Glad you liked it, Coop.
I remember having to be won over by that movie as well. Glad I stuck with it.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Sept 25, 2022 12:19:21 GMT -5
Glad you liked it, Coop. I remember having to be won over by that movie as well. Glad I stuck with it. The early scenes of just the couple are not especially strong. Literally the second they hit the water though it starts getting better. |
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Sept 25, 2022 15:06:39 GMT -5
That said for most of the film I was pretty annoyed with its protagonist. The film identifies him as a “wallflower” and he’s always whining about his lot in life but from where I sit he seems to be doing pretty good: he falls in with a cool group of friends his first week of school and has a hot girlfriend before the end of his freshman year. Lol, I remember having similar complaints. "Dude, your girlfriend just wants to make out and go see old movies with you. Shut the fuck up." |
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Oct 3, 2022 12:55:27 GMT -5
Fat City (1972)
Where so many Old Hollywood directors were defeated by 70s American cinema, John Huston seemed revitalized by it. It isn't just that Huston continued to remain a relevant and highly prolific filmmaker throughout the 1970s (and 80s!), but that the shifting standards of American movies opened new opportunities for the man. Fat City is such a film, an early 70s story of a washed-up boxer in Stockton, California bumming on at life when he takes a chance, both on a young up-and-comer, and on himself as he gets back in the ring. It's not hard to imagine the Rocky-esque version of this movie were the down-on-his-luck hero betters himself, but Fat City is not that movie. Huston's style is more reserved, content to observe his characters and their lives rather than drive the action along. The film isn't strictly plotless, but the plot occurs between scenes of drinking, or half-hearted romance. In it's examination of small-town desolation, Fat City makes a fine companion piece to The Last Picture Show, with Jeff Bridges even making a direct connection between the films. More generally, Fat City's sense of a futile yearning to escape also aligns it quite nicely with the work BBS was doing at this time, remarkable given Huston unequivocally a product of that old establishment.
I'm not sure Fat City amounts to a full-on classic - for all its authenticity, my own emotional investment in the material was never quite full - but it's a skillfully made movie which strikes the right tone and spots a handful of very good performances.
B+
Cool recommendation, Dooms. I'm in for next round.
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Oct 3, 2022 13:11:26 GMT -5
Shame
In my other Doomsday-specific thread I planned to slowly but surely go through the 'Ingmar Bergman's Cinema' box set that the Criterion Collection put out a few years ago. It's a monster with thirty nine of his films and I was aiming at doing maybe one or two a month. I don't know about anyone else but while I have nothing against Ingmar Bergman whatsoever, his movies just don't hit me as the type that you just bomb through in a few weeks. I had seen several already but it would be his much earlier ones that would have been brand new to me. Anyways, I think I got through three of them when life and forgetfulness derailed me. I didn't really think of it until Coop recommended Shame which suddenly made me remember that I owe the guy (Bergman, NOT Coop) a little more of my time and attention.
Shame (not to be confused with the Michael Fassbender dong move) focuses on married couple Jan and Eva, musicians living on a farm in the midst of a nondescript civil war. We open with them eating breakfast in their farmhouse talking about rather mundane day to day things like painful wisdom teeth or their hopes for the future. They travel into town and see how how the war has upended the lives of local people. Before long the war comes to their doorstep and they find themselves accosted, arrested and eventually forced to flee. While we see the civil war progress as both sides go back and forth, the story of Jan and Eva's deteriorating marriage unfolds in tandem. In the first act Eva is the more steadfast, even-keeled figure in the marriage while Jan is more sensitive to it which pushes him to turn inward for protection from his surroundings. In the third act we see how the ravages of war have taken their toll as distrust in each other has grown along with their interactions with those encroaching on their lives. They finally attempt to escape and find themselves adrift in a boat with only each other and the dreams they still hold onto with desperate futility.
Shame is a very personal, direct look into the lives of everyday people while war pushes in around them. There are no battles, few soldiers, very little of anything that could loosely be considered action. Instead we watch as the relationship between two people festers amidst the violence that they're unable to escape. The ending seems just as nihilistic but there are still breaths of hope in their voices as they speak with each other with neither the audience nor themselves knowing what fate they will meet. Shame is a pretty intense movie but not for the reasons you have come to expect, although there are definitely scenes of discomfort. Watching a marriage change shape alongside a war is a unique approach to drama films and war films and also adds to my original comment that Ingmar Bergman films aren't ones you just power through en masse. There are layers that you need to absorb. Heck, it's been a week since I watched Shame and I'm only now getting around to writing about it but I can tell you that it's still settling with me days later.
A- so says Doomsday
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Oct 3, 2022 13:12:02 GMT -5
Heh, we must have been typing right past each other.
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Oct 3, 2022 13:26:47 GMT -5
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012)
So, there’s a plot point in this movie where the characters hear a song on the radio and marvel at the fact that none of them have ever heard this song before and then spend much of the rest of the film trying to figure out what this song is. What is this rare and obscure song? It’s “Heroes” by David Bowie. What the fuck? These characters are otherwise depicted as being these hip and music-savy kids who are steeped in The Smiths and Sonic Youth and they’re even in a damn Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow-cast and this movie expects me to believe they don’t know Bowie? Bullshit, half star deduction on principal. So what else is going on in this movie. Well, it’s a coming of age movie, which is a genre that for me tends to either really click or really flail for me depending largely on how it connects and while I’m not sure this one exactly connected for me there are some strong elements here. For one, this turned out to be something of a training ground for a lot of now prominent actors. Star Logan Lerman didn’t really turn into a big deal, co-star Ezra Miller did (albeit not always for the right reasons) and it was also interesting spotting both Nicholas “Cousin Greg” Braun and Julia “Ozark” Garner in tiny roles. The film is also well shot for the most part and it does choose a decently interesting sub-culture of early 90s cool-kids to follow. That said for most of the film I was pretty annoyed with its protagonist. The film identifies him as a “wallflower” and he’s always whining about his lot in life but from where I sit he seems to be doing pretty good: he falls in with a cool group of friends his first week of school and has a hot girlfriend before the end of his freshman year. Late in the film we find out about some more serious problems he has in his past that makes some of his gloominess make more sense, but this comes way too late and would have been much more useful information earlier in the film. So, I have some mixed thoughts about this, I guess as these things go it’s pretty decent but also definitely falls into clichés. It’s fine. *** out of Five Glad you at least somewhat enjoyed it, but clearly it struck more of a chord with me for whatever reason. |
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Oct 3, 2022 13:38:39 GMT -5
Heh, we must have been typing right past each other. Ha! Glad you liked it, and good review. Shame would rank quite highly in my Bergman pantheon. Probably not in the top 5, but top 10 for sure. |
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Oct 10, 2022 14:17:45 GMT -5
One week left.
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Oct 17, 2022 21:22:46 GMT -5
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Oct 17, 2022 21:57:40 GMT -5
Night of the Kings (2020)
I, like nearly everybody else (I would imagine) had never even heard of Night of the Kings until it was brought up by those who HAD seen it (in this case, Dracula) and were singing its praises. This is a foreign indie film set in the infamous MACA prison and follows a fresh new inmate (Kone Bakary) as he has to integrate into the inmate-run system in there by way telling a story to all of the prisoners there until dawn, after a red moon has passed. This order comes by way of the prison's boss, and the prisoner has no choice but to comply. That is a very basic summary of the plot, that doesn't even touch upon the fact that the film has a sort of heightened reality to it, in that it bases a lot of its internal logic around behaviors and ideas that aren't exactly grounded in any sort of realism. It's not a fantasy or genre story, but the way the film portrays the various prison rituals on display require you just surrendering yourself to its brand of reality. I'd gone in knowing this and was sort of prepared for it, and yeah, that's certainly the case. I can't say I really "got" what it was doing on a thematic/presentation level (I assume it's drawing inspiration from certain old African rituals?), but I DO know that the presentation was always unique and always fairly engaging. From the way Phillippe Lacote presents the internal logic of the prison (for instance, some of the prisoners playact parts of Roman's story as he tells it, and they act like it's natural) to the way he presents the actual story sequences themselves, this movie always has a unique spin to it that makes it hard to look away from. I like how the movie just plops you into the middle of everything and expects you to keep up, and I think it earns the right to do that because the craft is so strong. The only downside to that, though, is that not a whole lot of context is provided to give you a sense for the wavelength Lacote is operating on here, but it's hard to deny that Night of the Kings is a confident and pretty commanding piece of work that I am glad I saw.
***1/2 /****
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