All That Breathes was up on Kanopy so I watched it this afternoon. Highly recommend.
You don’t care for things because they share the same country, religion or politics.
Life itself is kinship.
We’re all a community of air.
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I watched Heart & Souls (1993) tonight, a movie I only remembered bits and pieces of from when it must have first come to TV. It felt good to indulge in a really sappy, earnest, hollywood fantasy.
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I watched this tonight on your recommendation. It is beautiful. I love how it presents time though out - utilizing these long slow pans and focus. For me it was demonstrative of the main themes of the film. I second your recommendation!
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I watched the first 4 Scream films for the first time.
In fans of anything being insufferable, the ending of the first movie was, unfortunately, spoiled for me after I had expressed an interest in it. There were still surprises, but it has only bolstered my opinion that talking about media is often to the detriment of the media itself.
I liked them!
I’ll watch the next films and show soon.
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I made it a goal to watch 50 movies this year - not a lot, but I’d fallen off so hard on my viewing that I felt I needed to shove myself a bit.
Anyway, my 41st of the year was Longlegs and I would echo everything that @MoH said about it, right down to thinking it was a breakout from a young upstart who turned out to be a random ass nepo baby. I am not a big horror person but I keep trying and I keep getting burned! I obviously need to stop trying these hyped ones because I don’t like any of them.
I’m not going to dig into the other 40 movies I’ve watched this year, but the last few before that were pretty good.
Whiplash (2014)
Bottoms (2023)
Chocolate (2008)
The Bikeriders (2024) - this is a 2024 movie I would actively recommend to anyone who likes this sort of thing. Very much a Guy Movie
Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
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My tribute to the Great White North’s contribution continues, with some especially deep(er) cuts this time, kicking things off with a movie starring a Kid in the Hall…
Next, if there’s only a single movie that one can see tonight for whatever reason, then let it be this legit ultra obscure gem that at best is confused with another obscure Sam Raimi flick (with a very similiar title, was released in the same year)…
Third up is yet is another spotlight on the most famous Canadian director no one has heard of, Zale Dalen, this time via his curious one-part Videodrome/two-parts SCTV hybrid…
Fourth up is someone who requires no real introduction, cuz he’s maybe most people reading this’s favorite director to hail from Canada (it’s also to celebrate 5 years of showing movies on the behalf of Wonderville; the first was eXistenZ for anyone curious)…
… Oh, and I also have the racer trash re-edit of The Kids in the Hall’s Brain Candy; stream will again be via the alt account, starting around 8PM-ish EST…
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Actually by the end of it I became such a hater for this movie. That’s how you are gonna end it?
Now, it’s been a while since I’ve had anything even resembling a poster up in my bedroom, so, I’m well past my Tarantino phase. But, I will willingly admit that I quite liked Inglorious Basterds, and, though I have no plans to test this theory, I expect if I were to watch it again, I would still have at least a fondness for it, even if, if Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood is any indication, I probably have less of a tolerance for Tarantino’s meandering storytelling style. With Reservoir Dogs we get the sense that the lack of clear temporality is a part of the point, even if it’s a bit of a cheap trick that elevates what would probably be a pretty straightforward bank heist movie to at least a Pyrite kind of art house flick. With Pulp Fiction the vignette style adds a lot too, it’s more chronologically logical but it heightens the feeling that when these tangentially related stories converge it feels unlikely, even if, you know, a whole lot of movies are about tangentially related characters and plot threads converging in interesting ways. Pulp Fiction just makes it feel more… I dunno, cool?
Inglorious Basterds is kind of noncommittal in the sense that it seems to tell a story that would be better told with more narrative focus and readability in terms of what is happening and why, but at the same time it also has that unavoidable feeling that it’s a bunch of cool or tense or dramatic scenes that have been conceived of independently of each other, and then crammed into the same movie. But, still, I can recall most of them by memory, which probably speaks to how it still somehow works, or, at the very least, the scenes are cool enough that you can forgive it feeling a bit disjointed.
Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood seemed to me to have been in a similar vein, where it was caught between wanting to tell a story that would make the most sense with a more readable narrative through line and interconnectivity between scenes, and then going on these diversionary tangents. Except, in contrast to Inglorious Basterds, Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood’s diversionary vignettes are just not as fun or as interesting. I will admit that the sequence where DiCaprio is acting someone acting, and the way it flits between the two different layers of diegesis, was pretty good. But, I don’t really know if I cared about much else. How much of the film was devoted to depicting Sharon Tate going to see her own movie? It felt like a lot of the movie was that (although to be fair Margot Robbie was adorable doing so). How much screen time was really needed for that…? EDIT: Just reading now that, as I thought, the real Sharon Tate didn’t do such a thing, but what I didn’t know was that this is something Tarantino did, which makes this overly long sequence feel even more weird and kinda pathetic lol.
Especially considering that the movie’s ending in a way kind of retroactively makes Sharon Tate’s role in the story kind of inconsequential. Here’s another point of comparison where Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood compares unfavourably even to a movie I won’t even defend as good, Inglorious Basterds, but was at least in my opinion a better movie by the same director. The historical revisionism in Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood is kind of puerile. Well, so is the historical revisionism in Inglorious Basterds, and the historical revisionism in Django Unchained, but, at least with those it’s almost kind of leaning in to the revisionism being petty and ineffectual, in order to make it consciously gratuitous, inviting the audience in to a cheap thrill of simulated, orgiastic vengeance. Wouldn’t the ending of Inglorious Basterds have been better than real life? I mean, unequivocally, right? It’s not even uncouth to say such a thing.
I’m left scratching my head and wondering why I should really care about the historical revisionism that Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood worked up towards. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to be that fucking weirdo who, upon even remotely feeling backed into an ideological corner, feels that have to say that Sharon Tate had it coming because she was a rich white person in Hollywood or whatever, we do not need to hand it to the Manson Family. However, the historical revisionism here feels petty without the broader point having much substance. I mean, even just saying them in the same sentence reveals there’s not much comparison between “what if in 1944 Hitler and tons of top Nazi leadership were all assassinated simultaneously by the very people who he oppressed, and so maybe what if the war and thus the Holocaust had ended a year early” vs. “what if a few actors, a couple of their friends, a supermarket executive, and their wife hadn’t been murdered.” And, come on, can’t even throw in killing Polanski before he would become a sex pest while you’re revising this particular history? What a missed opportunity…
It all kind of stumbles into an accidentally virulently reactionary kind of overall point, I get that on some level it was just kind of honestly portraying the kinds of reactionary sentiment that were mainstream in the time period, but the sequence where the Manson family killers are depicted shouting insane, petulantly pie-in-the-sky faux-revolutionary stuff in the car before the showdown, and then the gratuitous brutality of their deaths, just comes off as more or less pointless. Let’s not even get into the idea that, again we’re not handing it to the Manson Family but hear me out here, when poor people kill rich people because they’re rich, that’s still on some level a response to oppression they have experienced, even if with stochastic terrorists like the Manson Family there is no actual political utility or purpose to this violence. I dunno, just, you know what I am trying to get at here, right? I am not moved by imagining an alternate past where less than 10 wealthy people weren’t killed by some crazy hippies.
Overall it’s a movie that seems to be pining for the innocence of an era that was really obviously not innocent. Also that sequence with Bruce Lee was just pathetic, I’m with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in saying it was “sloppy and somewhat racist.”
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My understanding is that for people growing up when this happened, the Manson murders were heavily mythologized and came to represent something culturally far beyond just the people who were murdered. I mean, I personally can’t say precisely what, since I was born nearly three decades after the event – but when I talked to someone Tarantino’s age, whose earliest memories consisted of hearing about the murders and the trial on television and radio, surrounded by adults expressing their own opinions about what happened, the ending seemed to hit a lot harder for them.
I personally liked the movie specifically because the meandering plot and all the different settings – though in general I don’t tend to like tight plots anyways. More than Sharon Tate, the movie was simply about two bros being bros in various situations and locales. I don’t think it was a very impactful movie though, in the sense that I don’t think about it very much, despite having seen it twice. Everytime someone brings it up it’s like being reminded of a dream.
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Don’t get me wrong, like I said in my earlier post about it, something did compel me to keep watching, and yeah, the bromance was cute, as they often are. The ending, perhaps, really casts a pall over it all, at least for me.
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maxxxine, longlengs and in a violent nature
big couple of weeks for horror film marketing here in britain. two films with great vibes and great lead performances with limp, predictable endings. maxxxine’s stupid cop shootout ending is very true to the giallo spirit but i done seen them argentos and this isn’t as cool as that.
longlegs has such a cool feel to it but the script needs a punch up - you’re allowed one “hail satan” for free and you should really earn the second one and longlengs doesn’t - and they could have done more to tie the period in to the feel of the thing.
on the other hand IN A VIOLENT NATURE has had nearly no marketing and it’s fantastic. it rewards your slasher literacy and provides an absolute masterclass of gory slapstick kills but delivered completely deadpan. wonderfully slow, there’s probably not a hundred cuts in the whole thing. i love it.
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I finally got somebody to watch herzog’s heart of glass with me later today. It’s a first watch for both of us. I’m excited.
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yeah it’s as skillfully done as I was led to believe so it didn’t disappoint in that respect, but I found that this sort of highlighted how limited and I don’t mean to be unkind but I have to call it banal it was. Like once it had registered how the filmmakers had smartly tightened everything up, it was all motions-going-through to an extent. Not a diss on the people who made it, it just got me all existential about why do any of this in the first place
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I have watched the remaining Scream films.
They are fun.
I’m a fan.
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is David Arquette in the latter ones?
I am quite keen, for several reasons, to see In A Violent Nature when it finally starts showing here next month
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i felt this way too, but for some reason the ending of the movie from the time she starts running away into the forest and including the story the older woman told her really effected me. it recontextualized the movie and succeeded in making it feel “mythic.”
The real menace of murder in Ontario is both far more sinister yet even more banal of course, even the centre left newspaper says so
Just saw Longlegs tonight. Blackcoat’s Daughter is the only other Oz Perkins joint I’ve seen and hilariously that one is also about someone ritualistically sacrificing people to the devil (depicted as a shadowy horned figure) and straight up saying “hail satan” though in that case only once. I’m almost wondering if Longlegs was meant to be a stealth prequel and this is his Unbreakable/Split situation
I came away from Longlegs feeling like Perkins needs a writing partner real bad. Or at least, like, one person to tell him things like “it’s okay to just write a story with a central conflict driving the action that is resolved at the end” or “666? Really? Are you sure?”
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Heart of Glass is very good. I need time to process it but it’s probably my favorite of his movies. I get so excited when I see something that is both refined and like nothing else.
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saw longlegs last night and thought it was phenomenally stupid made-for-tiktok stuff. and i enjoyed skinamarink and various youtube creepypastas, so i am usually a mark for this kind of thing! and i love maika monroe and thought she was very good! but i felt like i could literally see the moodboard assembling itself before my eyes. boring.
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