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.
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)
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
This is a delightful guest column. More articles should be like this.
"I noticed social media was full of brutalists giving Mama Gascón the business for her racism and Islamophobia.
Did I need to be even more of a real pain and pile on? Sure, her words felt wicked, but as a man who couldn’t remain silent, I knew the most important part of how I responded would be the substance. "
so during the pandemic i moved back in with my parents and out of sheer boredom I would do little things like go out of my way to say hi to them in the morning and then when I would run into them in the afternoon I’d be like “I haven’t see you all day. Why are you ignoring me?”
I never thought this was gaslighting bc I thought gaslighting was like some big, sophisticated, strategical thing but then I watched GASLIGHT (1944) the other day and he doesn’t really seem to have much of a plan he kinda just lies badly a lot so maybe I’ve been gaslighting my parents for years
went to see bram stoker’s dracula, which i totally loved - even down to keanu’s terrible accent, which i thought added a certain old-timey camp quality to the thing (and helped to make it clear why mina falls in love with dracula). beautiful beautiful movie. seeing it so close on the heels of eggers’ nosferatu really crystalized that i did not care for the latter lol
after that, i watched wild at heart, which is certainly not my favorite lynch but i got some good stuff out of it. the car crash scene… woooooo boy. it feels a lot less controlled than basically every other lynch project i’ve seen, but there’s an exuberance to it that i liked.
after that, i was planning to see inland empire this past sunday but when i got to the theater it had sold out! so i bought a ticket for last night’s showing and went home. i still wanted to watch something, and i’ve been in a noir mood recently, so i watched ida lupino’s the hitch-hiker and had a great time with it. i’d only seen one other movie of hers, outrage, which i watched as part of a college class and don’t remember much. this one really struck me with how lean it is: it’s about 70 minutes and nothing is wasted, but it manages a lot of shading and some impressive verisimilitude. the movie takes place in mexico and there’s a whole scene entirely in spanish, with no subtitles - which i found pleasantly surprising for a movie made in the 50s! especially since its villain espouses a worldview that is essentially american individualism/exceptionalism and refuses to speak spanish. in this it felt… extremely relevant.
then last night i saw inland empire. that movie has the worst fucking vibes i’ve ever seen lol. i liked it!
For whatever reason I’ve been thinking about Holes (2003). I saw it with my parents in theatres when it came out, then about a year later when we were at my grandmother’s house she said she’d gotten a DVD she wanted us to all watch together, and lo and behold it was Holes. I told her we’d already seen it, which made her mildly irate.
“It must not have been very good if you didn’t think to tell me about it!”
Still we watched it anyways, and many times thereafter, simply because it was one of a handful of movies my grandmother owned on DVD. I don’t particularly remember the details of the plot, but I can call to mind visually almost every scene in the movie, which creates a very different relationship with it than movies I’ve seen several times as an adult. I remember there being a time after I hadn’t seen it for several years where I’d mix up elements of it with Secondhand Lions, another movie from the same year that my grandmother also had on DVD, but which we watched less for some reason.
I feel like this was a common experience for a lot of people growing up? Spaceballs was another movie we watched over and over despite me not yet having seen Star Wars at the time. Eventually my grandmother met a guy at work who would sell her stacks and stacks of pirated DVDs, which more or less ended the days of just watching the same handful of movies.
Does anyone else have movies like these that are now lodged in your soul forever due only to some arbitrary decision your parents/grandparents made at the store?
I don’t know why but when I was a kid and would play VHS movies over and over and over and over I was obsessed with A Knight In Camelot(1998) starring Whoopi Goldberg as a scientist that is sent back in time to Camelot where she does science for king arthur and replaces Merlin as the court magician
apparently my brother had an interview for his current job where they asked “what’s your favorite Whoopi Goldberg movie?” and he said this movie and they were shocked at the deep cut and he said it helped boost him in their minds with such an absurd pick
I rewatched it last year and it was ok. kinda weird and it sorta just ends out of nowhere but the sets are really fun and there’s some strange and interesting ideas in there for sure! lukewarm recommend!
I remember loving the Holes movie and book when I was younger I should rewatch it soon! great cast!
John Lithgow seems like he’d be a really cool uncle. Just hang out, hear some great stories about working with De Palma, argue about how The Lady Vanishes is kind of a snob Hitchcock pick and Strangers on a Train is much better (I’m clearly right and extremely accomplished actor of stage and screen John Lithgow is wrong) - you know, the usual.
Yes but in my case it’s movies my sisters watched which otherwise I might not have. All the Disney animated films, especially Aladdin, little mermaid, and beauty and the beast. Also grease! I did not like grease but I’ve probably seen it 20 times. I don’t remember anything about the story.
In our house we didn’t really own any movies unless it was either something the whole family liked or stuff that was rated R for boRing, but I did see a lot of kids movies on TV repeatedly which I didn’t like. These included:
Osmosis Jones (really bad) Cats Don’t Dance The Land Before Time 7 (embarrassing songs) Balto II: Wolf Quest (this one is crazy) Monster House Hoodwinked (hideous)
and the Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but that doesn’t really count because it’s a cultural institution. However we rented Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Movie a lot (1998, co-starring Whoopi Goldberg). It’s atrocious.
Also rented The Brave Little Toaster a number of times even though it was really scary. Included in this category as well is Gumby: The Movie. Emotionally destabilizing cinema
Reminds me I’ve never seen Grease in full but I have seen the same 23 seconds of it probably 50-60 times
Physical releases these days will put every possible thing under “limited edition contents.” I suppose they could mean “these are the contents of the limited edition” but that sounds like it’s opposing a standard edition which in most cases (as here) does not exist. This is the one edition, first of all. Second of all, if there were another edition, the high definition transfer, trailers, probably even the video essay, would not be exclusive to the limited edition.
Likely the only exclusives if this were limited would be the paper sleeve and paper essay included.
It’s semantics but it bugs me! It’s like when DVDs used to put chapter select or interactive menus under special features. Is that not a basic feature? Every movie has that.
Anyway this collection here had A Certain Killer and A Killer’s Key and they are pretty fun if you like soft faced hitmen who kill with needles.
this is how i got into miyazaki movies! if i remember right, my mom was at the store with my sister and they saw a vhs of kiki’s delivery service. my mom bought it without knowing anything about the movie, or miyazaki, or anime in general. i watched the heck out of that tape, to the point of memorizing the commercials for the direct-to-vhs releases before the movie and all the random musical cues they added in for the english dub that were taken out of the later versions.
I see what you’re saying. Listing them as “limited edition contents” invites possible misunderstandings. Just call them “contents!”
Also, the repetition of “for both films” or “of both films” makes it feel odd when they don’t say that. (Are the subtitles for both films?)
And I have a personal pet peeve of bullet points in paragraphs rather than an aligned list. They could make the list more concise and readable. But that’s so common covers that I’ve lost that battle.
Yeah, various Limited Edition nonsense is one of my primary gripes with the boutiques. I largely let it slide because, let’s be honest, those margins probably ain’t great–if engaging in a little FOMO-bait keeps some of the labels above water, I’m willing to tolerate it. It does feel especially offensive with some of the labels that will do limited and standard releases, though, where the only difference is a nicer box and maybe a booklet insert.
… although some of those boxes are very nice. That Vinegar Syndrome LE box for The Prophecy series is at least twice as good as any of the movies themselves.
With all the Lynch talk I was reminded of Amon Tobin and the two collage music he made using some of the soundtrack of Blue Velvet and Eraserhead, among other jazz sources.
They’re severely a product of the late 90’s and I find it hard to listen but they’re still interesting artifacts
