@“Funbil”#p70542
_The Good, The Bad, The Weird_
@“Funbil”#p70542
Probably obvious ones, but I can say I liked them a lot when I watched them:
The Wild Bunch
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Shane (Roger Ebert's review of this one is really insightful, too)
The Big Country
If you want a Western that pushes outside the genre a bit:
Dead Man
El Topo
@“Funbil”#p70542 People naming Leone films left and right but not one mention of Once Upon a Time in the West, his masterpiece?? Blasphemy!
Other canonical genre entries that haven’t been mentioned yet:
Also throwing my weight behind _Wild Bunch_, _Man Who Shot Liberty Valence_, and anything Leone.
Westerns are a genre I either love intensely or find unwatchably dull, so I don’t watch too many. Personally I think I get a lot more enjoyment out of 60s-70s “spaghetti” or “acid Western”, the kind that focuses more on operatic extremes of violence and existentialism in a defamiliarized kaleidoscope of history than the classic American foundation myth/morality play kind (though _Searchers_ and _Valence_ are probably the best of this kind). The post-_Blood Meridian_ deconstructive Western can be cool too.
Yeah Once Upon a Time in the West is very good, don‘t skip it (even if you think you’re on Leone Overload)
Is Hud a western? I saw it a long time ago but recall it scratching a singular kind of itch
reading reviews of EO and I can't remember the last time I was this excited for a film
Au Hasard Balthazar is a masterpiece, but it lacks an Air Bud sequence
>
perhaps the film’s longest vignette, when EO shows up at a regional Polish soccer game and winds up playing a hand in the local team’s victory.
@““I thought lethal weapon was safe…yeah.””#p70971 This definitely has the makings of a masterpiece. Not joking.
Where do you recommend to start with Skolimowski?
@“Naaaaaaaathan”#p70983 I'd say Moonlighting is a solid choice. The Shout is great too, but quite different. I like his Polish exile-centered films, but idk how broadly interesting that subject is
There was a 4 months for $4 deal for Mubi last weekend, so I got a subscription. Do we have any Mubi users on here? Do you have any non-obvious/weird recommendations that aren’t anywhere else? I had done a free trial a long time ago, but I ended up being busy and all I watched was Afternoon, a long discussion (mostly monologue) with Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng.
@“saddleblasters”#p71084
looking at the site:
Martin Eden, Wake In Fright, Atlantics, they got a bunch of Zanussi films on there, The Terrorizers, Warsaw Bridge, Night Tides, Turin Horse, Neighboring Sounds
I would all recommend
Watched 007 Goldeneye for the first time last night and was struck by A) how transparent an inspiration it was for Metal Gear Solid and B) how much less it feels like a video game than the most recent one.
@"saddleblasters"#p71084 I keep forgetting whether I have this subscription via Amazon or not…
So my series of vehicular themed screenings crosses the finish line later tonight, starting with one of my all time faves…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaCGMiFRJEA
There's also a pair of black & white flicks, which includes a de-colorized version of everyone's fave installment of Mad Max...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNykS4VlnwE
Along with an excellent intro to Yasuzo Masumura for those who require it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh0nuvyrDyo
Finally there's what many consider to be Quentin Tarantino's worst, and yeah the first part is indeed a slog, but that car chase towards the end is legit AMAZING...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5VmaMY7T70
Stream starts at 8PM EST, over at the usual digs…
https://www.twitch.tv/wondervillenyc
In the last 24 hours I’ve suddenly gotten a small flood of angry 4chan-style comments on a Letterboxd review where I said I think it kinda sucks that Hideaki Anno only does blockbuster franchise reboots now lol
I have a lot to say about the original Top Gun, but my take on Top Gun 2 is baby simple.
Scenes where they’re in airplanes: marvelous.
Scenes where they’re not in airplanes: meh.
Last night I watched a movie called Rockula about a rock & roll vampire (obviously). I have to say, it exceeded my expectations and while it's definitely dumb and cheesy, I thought it was a ton of fun! And the talent involved for this low-budget forgotten film is pretty wild: Toni Basil, Bo Diddley, Thomas Dolby, and Visiting Kids all perform in the movie.
The story is about a 400 year old vampire who messed things up with his true love centuries ago and she was killed by a pirate before he could make her a vampire. Now she's reborn every 22 years and is killed on Halloween but he always messes things up. This time it's the 80s and she's in a rock band, so he forms his own rock band to impress her (he has friends at a bar who know he's a vampire). It's got a lot of 80s cheese, but I was consistently entertained by the movie!
The only part I wasn't wild about was a recurring motif where he has conversations with his independent reflection in mirrors (which I guess is supposed to be like his imaginary friend? or the real him in a parallel dimension?) - it doesn't really make sense and isn't really funny, but I guess it works well enough as a device to deliver exposition.
This was one made by Cannon Films while the studio was falling apart; it never got a wide release and never found much of an audience. But if you're the kind of person who thinks "oh there's a movie called Rockula - I'd watch that" it's worth a go.
Cannon Films was such a cool company. Even their bad movies are usually interesting. I know there was a documentary about them that came out some years back; I should track that down...
read that Luis Buñuel tried to make an Under The Volcano film but it of course didn’t work out. Fuck ! what a bummer. jodorowsky’s dune is nothing compared to this
@““I thought lethal weapon was safe…yeah.””#p72127 Watched the Huston version last year, haven’t read the novel but my god was he ever the wrong director for that material
@"Syzygy"#p72145 I completely gave up on _SW_ after the second part of the Disney trilogy. Was almost nostalgia-baited into watching the Obi-Wan thing due to the casting but thankfully early impressions from people I trust have confirmed it’s exactly what anyone could have predicted and saved me the effort. Feel comfortable saying at this point what I always suspected, which is that _Star Wars_ for me only really holds interest as a maximalist patchwork of George Lucas’s particular aesthetic/thematic interests and not as a “universe” in and of itself, let alone an Entertainment Product. I think the fact that all the myriad stories in this supposedly massive universe just keep coming back to the same Jedi/Sith and Republic/Empire dichotomies at least partially reveals how limited the storytelling possibilities of that pastiche universe really are. The only truly interesting and novel place to go with additional films would have been the crazy New Age metaphysics exploration/_West Wing_-in-space drama Lucas proposed for the sequels and got thrown in the trash by JJ Abrams.
@“2501”#p72163 yeah the huston film is ok but not sufficient. I can't conceive of better conditions than Buñuel in mexico at the height of the mexican cinema golden age - and even he ultimately concluded that the novel isnt filmable.
and about star wars yeah it seems almost pathological the degree to which the new films and shows flinch at any hint of doing new stuff. I admit I was probably naively shocked when I saw they just went and did the death star again in the first of the abrams films lol, I didn't think it would be that pathetic
@“Syzygy”#p72145 I fuck with Tales of the Jedi and the KOTOR comics extremely hard. Has been the case for a while that anything cool/fun/interesting in SW has happened away from the live action filmed stuff. It sucks!
watching jackass 4.5. Looks like johnny has some difficulty speaking, cognitively I mean which isn’t surprising given all the head injuries. And that new guy poopies seems almost too dumb to be able to legally consent to some of that stuff. 4.5 is slower paced which brings out more detail. the tennis pro sniping them all in the balls was very impressive