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. Blackcoatās Daughter is the only other Oz Perkins joint Iāve 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 āhail satanā though in that case only once. Iām 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 āitās okay to just write a story with a central conflict driving the action that is resolved at the endā or ā666? Really? Are you sure?ā
2 Likes
Heart of Glass is very good. I need time to process it but itās probably my favorite of his movies. I get so excited when I see something that is both refined and like nothing else.
1 Like
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.
5 Likes
thatās good to know. Iām that kind of sucker too. Iāll skip this in theaters and stream it in a few months.
god darn it. Every time!
1 Like
Yeah Iām a real mark for FBI type stuff (I would say Cure is likely my favorite movie ever.) But Perkins just doesnāt know how to close out a screenplay.
Aesthetically, I think frankly it has gotten too easy to make a pretty looking movie and we are so used to garbage television that anything that seems to have a vision looks incredible. The biggest thing was I think Cage brought a lot to this, and not in a good way, and I wonder if a filmmaker of his stature can even say no to somebody like Cage.
3 Likes
Oddity by the Caveat people is out today I bet that ones good at least
2 Likes
I know nothing about this film and bought it anyway. It was on sale for $10 and looked positively righteous.
6 Likes
I forgot about one movie that I meant to add to theā¦
Gaagaagiins Work Watch Movie Review Revue
BlacKkKlansman (2013)
ā¦which perhaps doesnāt necessarily bode well for how high I am going to review it. I should also say, I donāt think Iāve actually seen a Spike Lee film before, unless not really paying attention as my partner watched his godawful Old Boy adaptation on a laptop next to me as I did something way cooler (āhelp! Iām trapped in this hotel room!ā) so that may explain some of my response(s) to this movie.
I donāt want to say that this movie was bad, but, it was pretty corny.
To begin by getting the elephant out of the room, itās in such a weird place copagandistically speaking. It feels very, very āhave your cake and eat it too,ā it wants to critique police brutality with clarity while also doing the whole āa few bad applesā schtick, or at least the inverse schtick of āthis bunch of apples is definitely spoiled but every once in a while a fresh apple does find its way into the pile of rot and maybe sometimes it wonāt also spoil right away.ā This is probably a realistic and true thing to say about cops, and itās a contradiction that is enormously difficult to navigate even in the best of times, I wonāt get into it much further beyond that though.
Perhaps we can forgive the real Ron Stallworth for taking that position about, well, himself and the people he infiltrated and undermined the Klan with, because as much as I would prefer it, itās probably an unrealistic expectation to expect cops to hate cops. And perhaps the real Ron Stallworth would even agree with me on most points about the function of police in North American society. So, perhaps what disappointed and alienated me with this movie is that, well, I wonder why this subject matter was something Spike Lee even wanted to make a movie about at all, considering how, in my opinion, clumsily the script grapples with that very complex contradiction. This clumsy treatment of it is greatly magnified by the completely fabricated events that were used to embellish the story.
Thereās another sticky contradictionā¦ becuase the real story was not sexy enough for a movie, they tarted it up with some Hollywood bullshit. Despite the fact that, well, I would bet that the real story was probably more boring than fictional what-ifs could be partially because of the systemic impotence of police to oppose white supremacy on a fundamental level. I suppose this aspect is snuck in right at the end after the sexy fictional Hollywood stuff has concluded, but in my opinion that really undermines that point considerably. I think āthis unit within the police department is being disbanded before it is even able to accomplish anything too tangible,ā which seems to be the gist of what happened in real life, seems like a far more poignant point than "this unit within the police department is being disbanded even though you just prevented domestic terrorists from committing mass murder."
But, yeah, maybe Iām just being a hater for how, I dunno, self congratulatory it feels, not of cops per se but of the people making the movie for being so brave as to make this movie that (perhaps to them) addresses a complex contradiction in a meaningful manner. Maybe I am just being a hater though and disliking it because it does not 100% align with my politics, but no, I think I am just disappointed it wasnāt better. It was kinda made like it tried to hard to avoid offending the real Ron Stallworth as if it needed to at least somewhat pull certain punches, which is weird, 'cause I would assume that the real guy is probably critical of police and white supremacy in a more meaningful way than most people who have never been cops. Oh well, Iām not gonna read his book to find out, though.
At any rate, itās time for some positive things about the movie:
-
Some of the comedic beats wereā¦ okay (again feels like another thing that undermines other things but whatever). They smack of being movie versions of real anecdotes from Ron Stallworth or his book, in a bad way, like they feel very staged and inauthentic. But yeah I suppose some of those situations were probably funny if you were there.
-
Itās unsettling how much Topher Grace looks like a young David Duke, I kinda thought they cast him specifically because he made 1970s David Duke look a little silly and emasculated but then I was floored when I googled his name and saw a B&W picture of David Duke, because I initially thought it was Topher Grace. Shouts out to Topher Grace, it must not be easy knowing that in the right suit and hair you look exactly like one of the dumbest pieces of shit in history.
-
John David Washington was pretty great. Jasper PƤƤkkƶnen played a pitch perfect psychopathic. At risk of acting like I get a disproportionately high amount of my opinions directly from Tim Rogers, he is absolutely right about how good an actor Adam Driver is.
Iāll give that movie exactly 205,378,932,265 dead cops out of a possible 410,757,864,530 dead cops, no more, no less.
7 Likes
i was also thinking a lot about Cure watching Longlegs and that comparison did it no favors in the same way that @MoH mentioned re: Silence of the Lambs.
it wouldnāt have saved the movie but my gf and i thought it was a real missed opportunity not leaning more into a Mulder and Scully vibe with Maika and her boss. it wouldāve at least given them more personality if there were tension between one character believing in supernatural shit and the other being very skeptical.
Watched several films recently, and some were really good:
Dragon Inn, while flawed at times in execution and had so little money for it, it sure was like a very fast action-paced The Hateful Eight. Not like exactly the same film, though, but having a lot of beautiful exteriors and having a wuxia that works essentially as a western with some nice sound and editing cues is pretty awesome, and I think itās the perfect place to start with the genre to understand it, specially if you love westerns. Sword draws seem like gun draws, with the difference that Huās movie feels kind of goofy at times (in a good way).
Also, Yi Yi is an awesome movie, also in terms of color and narrative. This is also the kind of narrative Iāve been seeking to implement at times (thereās a subplot that is being slowly fed to you until the inevitable conclusion and is connected to another plot, and some stories tied to the subplot of the couple of teens fighting always work using whatās happening at the front versus whatās happening at the back). There are a lot of other great things, like the use of color, but this is what striked me the most.
6 Likes
last night i saw www.rachelormont.com at the sf jewish film festival. itās a vaguely sci-fi, vaguely arthouse, vaguely ryan trecartin knockoff movie starring chloe cherry (of euphoria fame) and dasha nekrasova (of, ugh, red scare fame). it is slightly more sincere than that description might indicate, but not by much.
4 Likes
was your experience anything like this?
3 Likes
this is wild. none of that made it into the movie lol
1 Like
omg i know! thinking too long about that scene and the people in it breaks my brain.
1 Like
I watched Studio Ghibliās Whisper of the Heart tonight ā I canāt believe Iāve gone so long without having seen this. So lovely. Might be a regular revisit for awhile.
11 Likes
Iām not even sure that Perkins really knows how to start or continue a screenplay. I liked Longlegs, but it feels like heās really more of a collage kind of dude - his process seems to be more about āoh, these ideas kind of resonate when you put them togetherā than the actual mechanics of storytelling. āWhat if I put Silence of the Lambs, Twin Peaks, satanic panic, My Twinn dolls, and T-Rex in a blender?ā
I still liked it, but I think selling it as a quasi-procedural is maybe not the right approach, since the mystery itself is kind ofā¦ ehhhhhh.
7 Likes
I agree with you, but thatās kind of an isssue for me, because itās presented as serious for the first hour to the movie and then by the end we are winking into the camera. Feels like he doesnāt have a complete grasp on his material.
3 Likes
Jackie Chan Movie Marathon!
Battle Creek Brawl
City Hunter
Crime Story
Dragon Fist
Shaolin Wooden Men
Snake & Crane Arts Of Shaolin
The Killer Meteors
The Protector
To Kill With Intrigue
Winners And Sinners
5 Likes