are there bees in it? or is it just an outfit?
there are whole hives of them!
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CHALLENGERS (2024) dir. Luca Guadagnino is a movie for hot people. If you get it you get it, if you donât you donâtâŠ
Everyone in the theater was fully gooning out. I heard moans. Everyone so horny. Together. Everyone so horny together. It was spiritual.
I wore full tennis garb to the theater. This was a movie for me and the four-year-old me who picked up a racket and who had no idea how much suffering and misery he was choosing for himself. âSomeone actually brought rackets to this,â one of the movie theater employees told me, like itâs a competition!!! What are you even going to do with your RACKETS in the theater?
Zendayaâs hair: Best Performance by a BOB in a motion picture
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youâve inspired me to wear tennis gear to this movie
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finally got around to Triangle of sadness - not too good imo.
Watched Late Night with the Devil - hyped independent horror films are now batting 0/157 or so lol. In retrospect The Outwaters has been the best of them imo
Still thinking about Trenque Lauquen upgrading it to cool movie and I anticipate the next one from El Pompero people
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last night i went to see stress positions, theda hammelâs directorial debut.
iâm a big big fan of thedaâs podcast nymphowars, and this felt like her developing that sensibility and criticizing it at the same time. really cool and extremely funny - thereâs a little scene maybe 30 minutes in thatâs just three characters having one of the funniest conversations iâve ever heard. itâs a little bit navel-gazey but it feels like a purposeful choice to me, and eventually gives way to a real earned pathos. great, ridiculous movie.
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oh you mean that film where they clearly had watched a load of recent anthology shows and just mixed a few in a blender
I mean it was fine I guess and good for them for making the film. Iâm just reacting to the whole hype train about these movies, which isnt the fault of the people who work hard on making them
my partner has finally been getting into slow cinema. itâs funny how pumped i can get during, like, A Summer at Grandpaâs or In Our Day. iâm just so appreciative of being allowed to participate. because youâre not being bombarded by events or spectacle you have the space to wander, wonder. thereâs no real grind to tell a constructed story, rather, whatever is there unfolds before you. so many welcome repeat screenings because the experience isnât siloed by overbearing scripts.
anyway. i think itâs a nice, broad pseudo-genre identifier. Perfect Days surpassed my wildest(?) expectations. Days of Being Wild left me a little cold and sweaty. Iâm very excited to share Koreeda and Weerasethakul with my partner and continuing through KaurismĂ€ki. this all means iâll finally get to sit with Jeanne Dielman!
do you have any particular favorites? what have you observed or pondered while watching them?
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I think Rohmer is the most âaccessibleâ of those sorts of filmmakers and I think ideal for watching with the gf or gf-equivalent
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very much a Rohmer House. one of my film school professors was buddies with the feller and so assigned Pauline Ă la Plage to be able to make mention of that relationship. it was one of the nice handfuls of times when i got to discover again what movies could be.
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Late to the party here but we watched There Will Be Blood last night. Now thatâs the kind of movie that you can build a house up on.
One of the standouts in the movie as a whole was the incredible score, that has got to be one of the best movie scores I have heard in a very long time, even if I have to praise a Radiohead guy to say that. Iâm thinking of it particularly right now cause Iâm watching the Fallout show, and while I am liking it a lot overall (Purnell is adorable and Goggins delivers every line in the script like it was a fine individually wrapped cigar which he unwrapped, chomped the top off of, lit, and then blew into your face) the score is just consistently embarrassing and tonally jarring. The show would probably be better without any scoring at all (and, to be clear, soundtracking and scoring are two separate things here, the use of the period music that has already been used in the Bethesda games is a bit corny, but the show is actually at its best when it leans into being corny). But, less on that, and back to the good score. The creative vision to write a modern sounding Pendereckiâs Ballet MĂ©canique ass score but with orchestral instruments was thematically perfect. Threnody references can come off as trite if used with even a drop of unseriousness to it or an overreliance on that sort of thing, so, it was great to see that done well.
I thought the dialogue came off as pretty period appropriate, which is maybe where you want something like thisâintelligible to the modern ear, but certain things sound or feel jarring. I kept flip-flopping back and forth on Day-Lewisâ delivery, which is maybe proof that it was good more than that it was not. It also doesnât hurt that the dialogue/script as a whole was great. There are also no uncomplicated feelings necessary for Danoâs performance, which against all odds manages to steal the show (or, perhaps, theyâre like pork and kimchi, amazing in their own right, but greater than the sum of their parts in combination).
The ending in all its bizarre ferocity was in my opinion perfect. To borrow an observation from Art Martinez-Tebbel and Austin Walker made during an episode of Friends at the Table that I always think about, it was like the kind of violence out of a Coen brothers movie, off-kilter, bizzare, sudden, ideally happening in some strange circumstances (I nearly puked up a lung laughing at that one moment in Burn After Reading) or as in this case with a bizarre implement (a la Fargo). It was just the kind of ending I thought was deserved and appropriate for this character and story: Revealing in its ignoble, anticlimactic pointlessness and inelegance.
Anyway, yeah, Iâll be that yokel who says that a movie critics have been saying is epochally important is actually quite good. No wonder it was awarded our Film Pollâs second highest honour!! Also, yo, that thread actually survived the forum move pretty good! Nice.
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Akermanâs documentary-like film from the same time, News From Home, is great. The narrative of the movie is driven by Akerman reading letters from her mother, and the footage is all long takes of the New York City as it was in 1976. The footage relates of course to the story you draw out of the letters but is in and of itself fascinating to watch, and it made me think a lot about how that city and American cities in general were and are and have changed, how people look and behave and dress and live in urban space. Little bit of âanything can make you think about anythingâ perhaps but the specific way it is shot and edited (i.e. as little as possible) make it a uniquely rich object and worth seeking out.
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Youâve seen that movie a good amount of times imo
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And that musical score is great. I like Greenwoodâs movie scores in general but the derrick explosion in TWBB is a standout (even though he wrote that cue for another film).
There will never again be an appropriate time to mention this: recently I got my parentsâ surround sound system all set up again and watched TWBB because I figured it would present an interesting mix, and that scene is tragically confined to only 2(.1) of the speakers, which is who cares but also come on, how could they
I had a good time rewatching it for the first time in a number of years, but the 20-year skip at the end was frustrating to me in a way it hasnât been before. Plainview and HWâs relationship is the movie, and while I recognize that its texture (and perfect pace) would be altered significantly if there were somehow more of the relationship onscreen (much virtue and artistry in elision of detail, etc), it feels at the same time like the movie skirts the edge of that relationship just a little too much.
putting this on full blast
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Oops, please correct the composer to Antheil. I had Penderecki on the brain for reasons obvious
If you havenât seen Koreedaâs âDistanceâ, thatâs a real good one. Itâs about the families of the members of a cult who committed mass suicide gathering on the anniversary of their deaths in the place where it happened to mourn their loved ones. Such a bizarre emotional space, sitting there staring at the lake and the forest, yearning for a sense of meaning or closure.
Weerasethakulâs style seems to be influencing a new generation of filmmakers in South-East Asia. The Vietnamese âInside The Yellow Cocoon Shellâ borrows a lot of his vibes but introduces more thought out strong images and a clearer narrative drive, for better and worse.
I recently enjoyed âGodlandâ. Set in Iceland, itâs more or less a traditional movie but stretched out to portray the physicality of the natural landscape in all its harsh beauty, with really powerful results.
Also, âThe Company of Stangersâ by Cynthia Scott, who seemingly just brought an eclectic group of elderly ladies to a beautiful setting in the countryside and let them freely roam and ramble to themselves and each other.
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sounds like you know precisely how HW feels!
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Watched Hitchcockâs Strangers on a Train yesterday. I enjoyed it overall. There are important differences in the plot that make the movieâs vibe much more different from the book, which I wasnât expecting. Some of the choices made in the adaptation revealed how much the book does right, to the extent that I think overall the movie doesnât hit as hard. That being said, seeing the characters and scenes come to life like this was very cool. I liked the visual style. This is my first Hitchcock movie so I am interested to see others.
Two departures from the book that I enjoyed:
- Bruno is much more of a little freak in the movie than in the book and it made him seem much more ridiculous, which made the movie more entretaining than otherwise.
- That final scenes in the amusement park and carousel was great and made the movieâs departure from the books worth it imo.
Not sure how I feel about the happy ending tho.
I watched the movie Challengers the same day I watched this one, and both have high-stakes tennis matches at the end, thought that was a funny coincidence.
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