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+1 on this.Quote:
Originally Posted by charlesj
I watched it earlier this week.
The ski fashions alone are worth the watch.
Also, if you work in the snowsports industry, especially as an instructor, some of the skiing segments and lesson skits are priceless.
Genius Party Beyond
This animated anthology is actually the second part of a 2-part series (the first was simply titled Genius Party).
I actually enjoyed this collection much more than the first (oh yeah, it's not necessary for you to have seen the previous anthology to get into this one, either).
The animation styles contained in the various short films run the gamut from traditional anime style to gonzo caricature, neo-abstract water colors, and just plain trippy visuals.
RIYL
Love Death + Robots; Allegro non Troppo; Robot Carnival
LISA AND THE DEVIL
I watched this Mario Bava joint the other night.
What a gothic psychedelic trip.
Telly Savalas chewing scenery in the most assured and subdued manner.
Opulent sets, costumes, and colors.
A confusing and creepy, but no less engrossing, narrative.
RIYL: Dead and Buried; Don't Look Now; Carnival of Souls
BELLADONNA OF SADNESS
This psychededelically enhanced erotic anime is teeming with phallic and yonic imagery, rich pastels, and gonzo Yellow Submarine-styled visual freak-outs.
Alternating between still and moving images, it tells the tale of a woman scorned and straddles the line between porn and art-house pretense.
The Giants
This Belgian coming-of-age film turns the genre on its head, embracing yet tweaking rote tropes and never really going where you think it's headed. Poignant and quietly funny it's augmented by fantastic cinematography which fully utilizes the rich landscape of the Ardennes.
RIYL
Stand By Me; I Declare War;
The Mission
This 1999 Johnnie To directed film is a mish-mash of triad drama, male buddy bravado, and HK gun-fu. Considerably more subdued than the films of John Woo and Ringo Lam, it nevertheless is teeming with style and features one of the suavest standoffs ever filmed (a brilliant shootout in a mall).
Exiled
Another Johnnie To joint and perhaps his magnum opus.
Drawing heavily from spaghetti Westerns and gangster films and rife with wonderful visual motifs, this is is a slick, cool, and violent rumination on brotherhood and honor.
RIYL
The Wild Bunch, The Killer, The Mission
HAGAZUSSA
This strange and enigmatic folk horror effort is a slow-burn exercise in visual nuance accompanied by an immersive score and hypnotically detached acting. While slow in pace, it's deliberate in its eeriness and succeed due to a tilted sense of brooding and an abstract air of dread.
Strange and beguiling and downright creepy.
RIYL
The Witch; Antichrist`; Censor; The Duke of Burgundy
PIRANHAS
This is a coming-of-age/teenaged mafia story that under the surface of its macho facade is actually kind of sad and poignant, hi-liting that all too often one can become a product of their environment.
The way the film unfolds, it's hard to tell if it is merely meant as a slice of real life drama or as blunt social commentary. Regardless, it's captivating and brutal.
RIYL
Gomorrah; Bad Boys (the Sean Penn film); Mean Streets; A Prophet
THEY CALL ME JEEG
Reluctant hero? Check.
Creepy, narcissistic villain? Check.
Cool action sequences? Check.
Solid quirk to seriousness ratio? Check.
The folks at Marvel and DC could learn a thing or two about crafting an engaging and intelligent superhero movie by watching this plucky Italian offering.
Sure, it's derivative as hell, but it's streamlined, well acted, has great pacing, and is crisply directed. The FX are pretty seamless, too, especially for a non-Hollywood film.
RIYL
Hancock; Kick-Ass
SWISS ARMY MAN
Quick thoughts:
1. Quite possibly the most elaborate dick & fart joke ever committed to film (or any other medium, for that matter). If Guinness had an entry for such a feat, this film would be the most serious of contenders.
2. If that doesn't work for you, then this is the most searingly absurd endictment of California's mental health care system I've ever seen.
3. Or, if you will, imagine Where the Wild Things Are crossed with a Monty Python skit gone horribly awry.
4. Or perhaps Robinson Crusoe as re-imagined by John Blutarsky.
5. And if none of that makes any sense, then you can always go with the comment I overheard the portly Southern gentleman, who attended the same screening I did, say on the way out of the theater: "That was a helluva movie. It was like Las Vegas on acid."
Whatever the case may be, I laughed my ass off more than once during the duration. Harry Potter deserves some sort of film award nomination for his role, that's for sure.
Yes! Definitely not for everybody, but I loved it. If one insists on imposing reality on that movie, my take (SPOILERS I guess) is that the Paul Dano character was a messed up dude who liked to wander off into the woods from his home in the upscale hilly parts of Redwood City, and make stick figures and spin wild fantasies.Quote:
Originally Posted by dookeyXXX
And furthermore, that (among his other problems) he'd watched too many Harry Potter movies. Yes, I think, in subtext that's just subtle enough to avoid needing permission or IP license, Swiss Army Man has Daniel Radcliffe playing some weirdo's warped desert island fantasy version of the prep school attired, magical Harry Potter.
Also perfect: That the film's final line of dialog is "What the fuck?!" And BTW, check out the movie's website.
I am eagerly anticipating The Daniels' new film Everything Everywhere All At Once...
LES GARCONS SAUVAGE (THE WILD BOYS)
This film definitely isn't for everybody.
Imagine a homoerotic and avant-core porn riff on The Island of Doctor Moreau and Lord of the Flies, teeming with overt phallic and yonic imagery and infused with surreal tweaks on the creation mythos, Pinocchio's Land of Toys/Pleasure Island, and Peter Pan's Lost Boys.
Oh, and a bejeweled god named TREVOR.
RIYL
Blancanieves; Fando and Lis; Jessica Forever
NEVER GONNA SNOW AGAIN
Delivering a beguiling slant on the "mysterious stranger" trope, this film follows the nimble fingered exploits of a Ukrainian masseuse as he tends to the needs of desperate and lonely suburban Polish housewives.
Brimming with cool, neon tinged imagery, it floats along in a strange, hypnotic manner and culminates in an enigmatic ending.
RIYL
Borgman; Kontrol; Jupiter's Moon
UNDER THE SILVER LAKE
Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell (best known for It Follows), this neon noir could easily be considered a blatant nod to Sir Alfred, and while it undoubtedly is, it is also heavily filtered through the skewed eye of Brian De Palma and the demented cerebral cortex of David Lynch.
Mixing twisted conspiracy theories with wacked-out urban legends and hobo linguistics, UTSL is a hypnotic, hallucinatory, and generally absurd romp through Los Angeles' angst ridden millennial underbelly. Fueled by cigarettes, ganja, day old pizza, booze, and an innocent, yet creepy lust for the ladies, our somewhat clueless, yet no less intrepid protagonist finds himself spiraling down a fucked-up rabbit hole, learning that pop music is fixed, rich people can do whatever the fuck they want, and paying rent on time is overrated.
Every time you think you know where the movie is going, it flips a bitch and heads in the opposite direction. Likewise, every time you start to feel that shit is getting lame, BAAAAAM!, shit gets real weird.
This film makes me want to move to L.A.
I also wish I'd seen it on the BIG screen in theaters.
Oh well.
RIYL
Blue Velvet; Body Double; Mulholland Drive; Blow Out; North By Northwest; Rear Window; Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (the BBC teleplay)
MUSEO
This 2018 gem is a wonderfully understated mash-up of both heist and road trip genres, with a wee bit of philosophy, history, and socio-political commentary sprinkled throughout for good measure. Oh and the rediscovery of a forgotten Mexican porn star.
The ending is killer, too.
RIYL
American Animals
DEAD PIGS
Cathy Yan's (Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) debut feature is a quirky ensemble piece taking place in Beijing. It harkens back to the quirky indie films coming out of America circa the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The story, following the intersecting lives of 5 central characters, touches upon class, family, greed, and the concept of both success and reinvention.
RIYL
Box of Moonlight; Girl Walks Into A Bar
REALITY
If you are unfamiliar with the films of Quentin Dupieux, suffice it to say that they are quirky. For example, his most well-known feature, Rubber, was about a sociopathic tire; his latest, Mandibles, is about a jumbo Tabanus Bovinus.
So, yeah, not your typical Hollywood fare. But his work is funny and thought provoking and often a bit mind-bending.
Reality is often an absurd, at times surreal skewering of the Hollywood film industry, from aspiring directors to megalomaniacal producers, and difficult directors. Or is it?
The excessive use of Philip Glass's "Music With Changing Parts" lends the film an eerie, quasi Giallo vibe, which serves as a wonderful counterpoint to the off-kilter humor.
This is a joyously head-spinning satire which also manages to poke fun at the director's own work.
RIYL
Holy Motors; Everything Everywhere All At Once; Timecrimes
OF HORSES AND MEN (2013)
Taking place in a small, rural Icelandic community, this film examines the relationship between the citizens and the wild horses surrounding them. Poignant, quirky, often funny, yet also darkly introspective and harsh; kind of just like the Icelandic landscape.
MID-AUGUST LUNCH (2008)
A low-key Italian slice-of-life story centered around a middle-aged man who gets saddled with three elderly ladies over a long holiday weekend. Plenty of food, wine, cigarettes, and personality clashes make for a warm-hearted film.
SAVE THE TIGER
This is a strange, yet compelling drama about a man whose American Dream is dissipating and he’ll go to extreme measures to keep it intact.
There is an over-arching theme about baseball, some PTSD trauma, and lots of riffs on morality.
Delivered in a slow, deliberate manner and anchored by Jack Lemmon’s steady performance (he won the Best Actor Oscar for this role), the film is riveting and thought provoking.
It also contains a scene which I am pretty sure Quentin Tarantino jacked and used in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
RIYL
The Swimmer; Electra Glide In Blue; The King of Marvin Gardens
THE FORGIVEN
This would make a good companion watch to Triangle of Sadness; entitled rich people behaving poorly is the running theme here.
Written/directed by John Michael McDonagh, the oft overlooked brother of Martin, this is a biting social commentary about privilege and the remnants of colonial excess.
Playing out like a snide noirish Shakespearean dramedy, it is anchored by some searing thespian turns from all involved and further buoyed by excellent pacing and a predictable, yet no less potent ending.
***Also streaming on Hulu
Quite a number of cool flicks lurking on Kanopy right now:
The Girl With All The Gifts
Nice tweak on the zombie genre. The novel it is based on is worth a read, too.
Cryptozoo
Very cool animated film about a zoo full of mythological beasts. Filled with intrigue and mayhem.
Swan Song
Udo Kier in a tour de force performance as a flamboyantly gay hairdresser in the Midwest.
Only God Forgives
Nicholas Winding Refn’s divisive follow-up to Drive is a twisted Oedipal tale of lust and violence.
Mandibles
Idiosyncratic writer/director Quentin Dupieux’s oddball stoner comedy about two goofs and their pet fly is cult brilliance. Think Dumb and Dumber, but waaaaay weirder.
A Touch of Sin
This film is bleak and violent, but also inescapably tense and unnerving. From the director of Ash Is The Purest White, it feels like a darker, edgier Tarantino film, but with an underlying socio/political message.
THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT
Who knew that God was a misanthrope living in a 3-bedroom apartment in Brussels?
Apparently writer/director Jaco Van Dormeal did, as that’s the basic gist of his film.
To say any more would ruin the delicious absurdity of this dark comedy which owes no small debt to the likes of Brazil, Amelie, and L’Iceberg.
A PURE FORMALITY
Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, best known for Cinema Paradiso, this film is a bravura mash of giallo, gothic horror, and murder mystery.
Owing debts to Hitchcock, Argento, and Leone, it is teeming with all the cool camera tricks from Dutch tilts to claustrophobic close-ups and dizzying overhead shots. It’s moody, creepy, disorienting, and contains some solid thespian turns from Gerard Depardieu and Roman Polanski.
The ending is a bit old hat, but it is handled well and the preceding elements of the film are fantastic, so the let down of an oft used twist is an easy one to forgive.
Re: A PURE FORMALITY:
While I enjoy both Depardieu and Polanski’s acting, I find both men to be morally reprehensible in real life and fully understand anybody who wishes to boycott their work.
NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE
Hands down this is one of the greatest B-movie experiences of the last 40 years, barring Hell Comes To Frogtown.
This is pure gonzo grandeur.
I am too lazy to re -write a new review, but I wrote about it here 3 years ago: https://spencesez.blogspot.com/2020/...nd-risque.html
If you’re not into reading, peep the trailer:
NINA WU
I watched this slow-burn Chinese psychological drama the other night.
It’s part of the mini-wave of MeToo inspired thrillers that have popped up over the past few years. But unlike the pandering neo-exploitive Promising Young Woman, which gussied up a standard B-movie plot and pawned it off on the arthouse intelligentsia (who blindly ate it up as high art and pointed social commentary), NINA WU is a disorienting bit of subdued visceral melodrama that has a sucker punch ending that will stick with you long after viewing.
A BITTERSWEET LIFE
This is a fairly fantastic hitman-with-a-heart-of-gold-revenge thriller with nice doses of philosophical introspection thrown into the mix of melodrama and high violence.
The action scenes—predominantly fisticuffs and gun-fu—are bristling and taut. The whole story angle about loyalty and retribution is a little old-hat and familiar, but the ending is a blissful kick in the nuts.
BEASTS CLAWING AT STRAWS
This is a twisty and nasty little neon noir teeming with saps, thugs, and femme fatales. Told in non-linear fashion in a style similar to that which Quentin Tarantino made famous, it’s an engaging little dark comedy/mystery thriller.
RIYL
A Touch of Sin; Shanghai Triad; The Wild Goose Lake
SNOWFLAKE
This German action thriller with a metaphysical slant comes off like a collaboration between the Quentins Tarantino and Dupieux; it’s hyper violent and absurdist.
Borrowing more than a few pages from the 2006 films Ober (aka Waiter) and Stranger Than Fiction, it provides enough twists and turns to make the story about fate and destiny interesting and entertaining.
Thanks for the breakdown and recommendationQuote:
Originally Posted by dookeyXXX
Very enjoyable
The pop music explanation scene was excellent (best part of the movie for me)
Reminded me of the Teddy Perkins episode in Atlanta
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7629358/?ref_=ttep_ep6
There's something about Garfield I can't warm to though
I saw Under The Silver Lake a while ago. It's worthwhile as a style-over-substance spin on Mullholland Drive. But damn, when a film invites comparison to Mullholland, it's kind of condemned to underwhelm. Among other aspects of Mullholland Dr's greatness is that once you cut through its near-incomprehensibility, the movie actually makes sense. Whereas, after a certain point, I thought it was clear that UTSL's rabbit hole led nowhere rational. Despite being a pretty good ride.
(And thanks for the Too Young To Die rec; yeah, that was fun!)
I may have to re-visit MULLHOLLAND DRIVE one of these days.Quote:
Originally Posted by bobz
I absolutely loathed that film when it was first released in theaters.
:eek::D
As for TOO YOUNG TO DIE? I dunno how I missed that when it was originally released. It may very well just be the second greatest schlocky B- Movie ever after HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN…
I was scanning the Newly Added Movies list on Kanopy, and saw, wait really???, DANGEROUS MEN. Wow, if you like bad movies you're in for a treat. Here's my review, recycled from years ago:
I had the pleasure of watching DANGEROUS MEN last night. It's sort of THE ROOM meets I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, though with more action than the former, and more entertaining (and less stomach-turning) than the latter. DANGEROUS MEN joins THE ROOM, TROLL 2, and BIRDEMIC in the canon of earnest, ineptly executed passion project films by inexperienced and clueless foreign-turned-American auteurs.
The director (and editor, musician, casting guy, etc etc), John Rad (like the other above-mentioned films other than BIRDEMIC, he used a pseudonym), a former propaganda videographer for the Shah of Iran (and now deceased), spent a couple of decades filming and editing this amazing piece of dreck.
I'll now lay out the plot for you (this isn't what I would call a SPOILER, because no one should come to DANGEROUS MEN for its storytelling): Loving couple is introduced; they're newly engaged, and they go to the beach to be extra special romantic. A couple of biker gang types decide to do some rape, but boyfriend kills one of them, remaining biker kills him, and then she kills other biker. Hitchhiking away from the scene, another guy tries to rape her, but she's too badass for him as well. She then decides to go missing and be a ruthless killer of assorted scumball men. Meanwhile, her brother, a cop, wants to find her and pursue the evil biker gang who it seems had something to do with her disappearance. Brother, in tracking them down, comes upon another attempted rape, and uses captured rapist to lead them to the ultimate bad biker guy for the film's final showdown.
Even though the original rapists are long since dead, and dearest sis has become an infamous serial killer.
In the final scene (right after an amazing chase sequence which manages to repeat about 90 seconds of itself, bad dialog included, oops), ultimate bad guy biker, while being chased by cop, (you know what, this one may qualify as a SPOILER, because it's really that stupid, so maybe skip to the next paragraph or whatever), takes a time-out to try to rape somebody.
So yeah, anyway, it's a pretty great terrible movie. Not as essential as THE ROOM (what is?), but so-bad-it's-good fans won't be disappointed.
:eek::DQuote:
Originally Posted by bobz
I still haven’t gotten up the nerve/courage/motivation/excitement to see The Room.
I kinda wanna see it with a large audience rather than in the quiet and comfort of my home, as the former is usually the best way to experience bad movies (I am also a bit leery of all the hype Tje Room has accumulated over the years and fear it might not live up to it…
You haven't seen THE ROOM? You're tearing me apart, Dookey!
Indeed, it might not. The Room is more a slow-burn WTF than a dynamically bad movie; its genre, after all, is Soap Opera. It's a classic, though.Quote:
Originally Posted by dookeyXXX
:cool:Quote:
Originally Posted by bobz
THE WANDERERS
Wow.
Not sure why it’s taken me so long to see this classic.
It’s a fantastic film mashing up a wide variety of genres (coming-of-age, inner city melodrama, high school comedy, and more) in a variety of visual styles; while it’s pretty standard looking, there are these weird moments of almost nightmarish surrealism throughout.
The cast is stellar, and it’s kind of sad and confusing that most of them are either dead or retired or just kind of disappeared altogether.
Highly recommended!
RIYL
The Outsiders, The Warriors, Streets of Fire, Animal House
THE NAVIGATOR: A MEDIEVAL ODYSSEY
While It’s been quite some time since I’ve watched this film, I remember it being really cool and kinda blowing my mind.
I am pretty sure I saw it in the theater back in the late 1980s/early 1990s either with my folks at a long gone arthouse in Berkeley (The Rialto on Gilman Street) or at another now defunct arthouse when I was in college in San Luis Obispo (The Rainbow).
Wherever and whenever it was that I saw it, it blew my mind and left a lasting impression on me, not to mention further forming my taste in movies.
Not sure how it holds up today, but my memory of it is that it was really cool.
For some reason I always lump it in with Luc Besson’s early classics Le Dernier Combat and Subway, as well as Stephen Norrington’s The Last Minute, and Alan Parker’s Birdy and The Wall (David Lowery’s The Green Knight feels like it’s a descendant, too) in that it has this kind of strange neo-surrealism to it.
At any rate, I feel that it’s definitely worth a watch.