omg thank you this has made my evening so much better
also this movie was buckwild. kinda in the normal Lynch ways but also kinda not?
And with that I’ve seen 5/10 of his movies 
. I’ll have to do a marathon to get through a few more soon
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Thanks, @freakscene. I’ll watch this this weekend, as this is a film that I have it pending (I’m having a cycle of films made in the 90s).
As for Lynch, this is another thing I didn’t know (probably because I haven’t played a Zelda yet):
I’m starting to feel that Lynch was a foundational piece in how he have videogames, but at the same time I encourage people to watch weirder movies (sometimes it feels like Lynch was the only “vanguard” filmmaker, and the reality is he was the most popular -but not without a reason).
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I feel late to the Nosferatu party but I saw it today and it was fine and worth seeing. Apart from the original, I’ve only seen the Herzog remake (wasn’t aware of others, funny to discover that this is Willem Dafoe’s second time acting in a Nosferatu remake), and this one ranks lowest for me.
It’s frequently gorgeous and often pulls off the weird Eggers trick of looking like an authentic yet impossibly HD silent film, but this only adds to the overall feeling of—uhh belatedness(?) that I think keeps his work from being anything like great: it’s cool that his Nosferatu teases and fleshes out the erotic subtext of this flavor of Dracula story, stuff that had to have been unfilmable a hundred years ago, but man it’s been a hundred years! And horny vampire-flavored gothic fiction has already long matured on its own, in other pieces of media that speak more to our time.
Maybe this is a limitation of Eggers’ true film-nerd nostalgia, but I felt like he’s been able, at least in The Lighthouse, to sublimate his freak love for outmoded filmmaking tech into some disarmingly weird storytelling (the weight of an ‘original text’ fell too heavily on this one?). Also I haven’t seen The Northman.
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One of the theaters near me is showing Grand Theft Hamlet so I thought I might as well see it. Expectations were fairly low but it turned out to be a pretty fun documentary. It’s an interesting look at amateur theater and the pandemic lockdowns, and also happens to be GTA machinima.
My only real complaint is that the voice audio is pretty poor and it was hard to hear the lines sometimes. I’m pretty sure they were just using the game comms instead of recording people’s mics directly.
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Did your screening have closed captioning throughout the film?
I’ve been pretty fascinated about it since I first heard about it and am keeping an eye out for local showtimes.
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I don’t think any showings at this theater had closed captioning. But it will be streaming online fairly soon and presumably will have subtitles there.
I finally watched alien romulus - if they hadn’t included throwback lines to past films and some other goofy nonsense in there (and kind of deflating the tension like a balloon toward the end) I might have liked it a fair bit instead or just okay. Still decent though!
Which means it’s time to update my alien film rating to confuse and astound everyone:
- alien
- alien resurrection
- alien 3
- aliens
- alien romulus
- alien covenant
- prometheus
It is gonna take a lot to unseat prometheus from last place and I hope they do not try. I would love to see them try to get into the 90s rankings though. Worth a try.
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My local arts centre is doing a one-off screening of Mars Express this weekend that I’m extremely unlikely to be able to attend. Someone please tell me that it’s shit so that I don’t have to wait ages for a home release. Thanks.
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I am confused and astounded! By several features of this list!
Perhaps most astounding is that you thought Covenant was actually better than Prometheus. Wow!
I think I have to put Romulus at dead last, mostly due to the abhorrent digital necromancy. There was no need for it, it looked worse than a regular actor would have, and it sets a precedent I do not care for in the slightest.
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It is 
Two Michael Fassbenders!
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I totally agree on Romulus—it’s such a shame they put in such a huge amount of the references and whatnot. I’m usually pretty relaxed about that kinda thing but repeating The Like felt just completely shameless
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delighted at alien resurrection’s place on your list. that movie is so weird and fun!
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I have a friend who saw a hamlet staging for Shakespeare in the park and a conf;used racoon wandered on stage, took a look around and wandered off. Ain’t nothing going to beat that.
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The further I get from my original viewing of Aliens the more I agree with this. And I’m not just saying that because I will cut almost any Fincher movie an unbelievable amount of slack. Which I will and do.
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it’s a shame that romulus sucks coz it has a handful of really cool bits in it. like exodus said, the dumb fanservicey stuff just cheapens the whole thing too much.
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yeah, the CG Rook in romulus was pretty rough - sometimes I thought/hoped it was a weird animatronic but I guess that was only the body.
Anyway to explain my bottom 3 rankings:
- romulus annoyed me but had some decent moments and sets, and it was annoying in a modern silly way so I gave it more slack because I didn’t expect it to be any good.
- covenant annoyed me but was forgettable, and at least parts of it were unnerving.
- prometheus annoyed me AND made me mad, earning it the bottom slot. It’s also very frequently unintentionally funny but that makes me even madder (the merc bruiser who hates scientists and then halfway through the movie goes “btw I’m the geologist lol”). I think I also was more annoyed because backward rhetoric and awfully thought out characters aside, it presented itself as a decent movie for a portion of it. Watching the director’s cut and deleted scenes made me EVEN MADDER.
to be clear there’s a rather wide gulf between the top 4 and the bottom 3 in my mind.
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blank check boys are doing early spielberg so i’ve been watching the ones i haven’t seen before.
watched close encounters of the third kind this morning. something maybe underdiscussed about spielberg is just how much he took from altman in these early movies, particularly this one, where outside of a few scenes it’s more or less altman esque mumblings all the way through.
that last sequence is of course, really really cool, the colors and miniatures are unreal. also, ummm, shigesato itoi should probably cut spielberg a check for one of the all time hardest game ads (i’m sure many have seen, but i was ignorant as to how much this is just kinda close encounters)
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Even tho it’s still the first month of the new year, 2025 is already shaping up be legit the worst year in our lifetimes, hence why movies about desperate times that necessitate desperate measures are more vital than ever before.
Hopefully fans of the first person sequence that kicked off the last movie will also dig the first film, which has that POV the entire time…
And for those who dug the last game of death, how about another, tho instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s a bunch of Japanese high school kid…
And for those wondering when I was going to feature another movie directed by Park Chan-wook (the last time was in early 2021)…
Last but not least is something that I believe serves as the perfect counterpoint to both the first movie I showed last time as well as the last (which I will pontificate upon when intro-ing it on the mic)…
The stream will again be via the alt account, starting around 8PM-ish EST…
… But because of the abundance of nudity that said films will contain, if the above URL goes dark, head on over to…
… And if that goes dark, replace the “2” with a “3” and keep going until you get a signal
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spoilers for companion
spoilies
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