@“yeso”#p91088 Saw it last night and I should emphasize it’s a lot more nuanced and ambiguous than a Wikipedia synopsis might make it sound! Lives up to the hype imo, one of the best films I’ve seen this year
the first review I read was Eileen jones making fun of it, but some other critics I think are pretty sound liked it so I’m sure it’s interesting. Really hated Todd fields other films though
I haven’t seen ‘em, but now I want to!
I think there’s a lot of opportunity for glib/dismissive takes on _Tar_ due to its subject matter and audience reception, but the film itself imo is neither uncritical nor overly didactic about anything it’s depicting. The two most popular reads I’ve seen on it - from people with positive _and_ negative assessments! - are that it’s either a zeitgeist-checking film on cancel culture or a myopic character study that merely uses contemporary trends as a backdrop. I think both of these takes are pretty reductive! As a movie-critic friend I was talking to put it, the film poses questions without offering answers and in a post-Twitter world this seems to make people uncomfortable. I recommend the movie!
I also see Eileen Jones liked Wendell & Wild, which is one of the worst pieces of shit movies from a great director I’ve ever seen in my life, so I’m not sure I personally could take her opinion seriously on anything at all (then again a whole lot of otherwise good critics are treating that one with kid gloves imo)
Sorry to say the Weird Al Roku movie is not very funny, although if you wanted reassurance that the made-for-TV movie was still a thing in the age of Big Streaming it is certainly that
eileen jones is a good writer, nbd that she liked a kids movie imo. I'll watch Tar at some point on your recommendation, but fool me thrice todd field……
@“yeso”#p91984 I think my Eileen Jones “burn” post may have come off in writing less tongue in cheek than I imagined it in my head. I’m not actually familiar with her work at all, I just know Tar and Wendell & Wild are two movies I watched in the past week that I respectively really liked and absolutely despised and I noticed her opinion is exactly the opposite lol
Anyway just watched _The Vanishing_ and was very disappointed with that, lurid little nasty pretentiously dressed up as an unthrilling arthouse thriller imo
I just watched The Pez Outlaw, and it was excellent. I highly recommend you try and find it and watch it. I won't spoil it, but the last line that Steve (the main focus of the documentary) says is so uplifting one cannot help but come away thinking he is an absolute legend (and fuck the Pez USA president).
I hope that One Year, one night gets into the US. It‘s a neat Spanish movie about what happened during the Bataclan assaults and specially how a couple handles all the PTSD. I generally shy away from those kind of movies, since they tend to be very paternalistic or very feel-good movies, but I’m glad this one isn‘t. I love how the editing plays into the trauma and how sensitive is to the context of the time, the insensitivity of corporations (I laughed my ass off in this scene) and how, while some people care about you, other only do that on pretense and others don’t care shit about you. It‘s something really obvious, but I love that at least there is more realism in that sense, and there are some good scenes about how gritty is all the process when there are things crumbling around you all the time. In that sense, they nailed it, even if there are things that might be too confusing for the narrative’s sake.
As for the rest, I'd say that I never expected _When Harry met Sally..._ to be that good in stints, and I loved _The Mother and the whore_. The former stands out from the comedies of its time everytime the script tends to be less iconic and more inclined to the humanity of their characters, which, let me tell you, it's pretty good (so much it is akin to the top tier classic comedies), but the stints in which there are iconic scenes and the characters get so neurotic that the actors seem to don't believe it are decent at best. A very good movie, nonetheless. As for the latter, it's amazing and very unique in the nouvelle vague movement: we tend to remember how dynamic and vibrant in editing and filming all those films are, but Eustache reviewed everything that came from the 60s and dissolved several years afterwards by letting actors breathe and exist into the frame and into the scene (specially Léaud), and makes also a review on polygamy, nostalgia from prior times and capitalism trying to dissolve that. The ending is just shattering and powerful, and it's all due to having amazing actors, but yeah, you need to have a great director to know what he does, because Eustache in here is being incredibly minimalistic and this is harder than what it seems.
I'm going to finally make an effort w Eustache, been meaning to for a while. His cousin Larry has had his ups and downs
oh wow, holy heck. Barbarian. if you‘ve seen it, you know what i mean. if you haven’t, i‘d say it’s easily one of the best horror movies in recent years. go in blind, like i did. get messed the heck up, like i did. if that sounds appealing to you, you will not be disappointed.
spoiler talk for folks who have already seen it:
>!part of me actually wishes i _had_ known a little bit more about the movie going in, because man, it represents my absolute most nerve-touching, stomach-turning horror subgenre, which is incest/hidden family stuff. that's always made me deeply uncomfortable, ever since i watched that one episode of the X-Files as a too-young kid. then again, if i had known about Barbarian being that kind of film, i quite likely would not have watched it! and that would have been a shame. sometimes ignorance really is bliss.!<
>!i'm impressed with how many layers of enjoyability there are in this movie. for one, the storytelling is just excellent - the way it doles out little bits of information to keep you hooked, and the way it all comes together. at the same time, it sort of dances around the "show, don't tell" rule, sometimes showing skillfully, and other times telling, in explicit terms, that yes, the thing you (the viewer) think is happening here definitely is happening here. additionally, i think it's equally successful as two very different kinds of movie. the first half is a tense, creepy thriller (right up until the cut to Justin Long driving along the coast) that slowly lets the suspense build. and then it shifts modes entirely to a disgusting (for many reasons) cartoon of a monster horror flick.!<
EDIT: i'd also love to know how this movie impacted the number of streams of Donovan's "Riki Tiki Tavi" lol.
i watched mimic (1997) last night. that is a very dumb movie. the sets and lighting are gorgeous, though, and the practical effects (when they‘re used) are compellingly gross. i’m curious if the director's cut is any better.
@“connrrr”#p87924 when it came out on vhs i was hanging out with bffs A and B which was always a contentious relationship. a sunday school night, A would not shut the fuck up about wanting to see monkeybone so after an entire day of talking about it we walked a total of about 9 miles to blockbuster to get it when A revealed that he had neither his membership card nor any money to rent it. B had both so he ended up getting it and we made the long trek back with our waning evening inducing that high school anxiety.
B and i hated monkeybone so much we would shout A down anytime he chuckled. it was like asking a ham sandwich to give you food poisoning. two months later B couldn't rent anything because A never returned *monkeybone* and thus incurred a $30 fine that cursed him for at least a year. i've never seen B want to beat the shit out of someone more before or since. A and B no longer speak to each other.
@“Lunarchivist”#p92901 that movie's bad news.
Cuz tonight will be the last FORT90 FILM CLUB broadcasting from Wonderville this year (all next month will be FORT90 TV-focused), am going out with a bang with a survey of films that can be simply referred to as “EPICS”.
And first up is a sprawling odyssey, one of the greatest westerns ever told, yet it's ultimately about just three individuals...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-mXj9RtKjg
Next is again a film that truly lives up to tonight's theme, also widely considered one of the greatest true crime movies ever made...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfnGQetbX-U
And last but not least, one can't do a slate of epics without Sion Sono’s 4 hour long magnum opus...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ4HLwZk-9I
Stream starts at the usual time, 8PM EST, and at the usual destination…
https://www.twitch.tv/wondervillenyc
Sad news to share, and I don‘t know this person’s work at all personally, but knowing how knowledgeable and worldly the folks here tend to be, I thought I'd signal boost this here.
Via [joblo.com: Legendary director Albert Pyun would like to hear from fans in his final days](https://www.joblo.com/albert-pyun-fan-messages/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&s=04)
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Over the last forty years, director Albert Pyun has built an awesome career. He started off with the appropriately titled sword and sorcery classic The Sword and the Sorcerer and since then has directed such films as Cyborg, Captain America (1990), Kickboxer 2, Kickboxer 4, Arcade, Nemesis, Dollman, Mean Gun, Infection, and many more. So many more, he has around fifty feature directing credits to his name. Sadly, Pyun was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis several years ago… and it seems he is now in his final days. His wife Cynthia Curnan took to Facebook to ask fans to send in personal messages so she can read them to him. Curnan’s request for messages was then given a signal boost by a Sam Peckinpah fan page.
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Curnan’s Facebook post can be found HERE. She said, “Albert took another downturn. I could tell he feared going down again. He was working too feverishly. I asked “What’s the rush?” He said “If I stop, that’s it.” … Please write a message to him for me to read. A personal message from you to him will make him really happy. They think he does not have much time left. Update: Albert wept happy and sad tears when listening to your messages for him. He feels terrible to have let you down. by failing to finish his last 2 movies. He wanted them to be a 6 part TV series. He worked and tried like a maniac; it was all that truly mattered to him. To Albert, failure has never been an option.“
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The post from the Sam Peckinpah page is HERE. They said, “It has come to my attention that cult movie director and direct-to-video pioneer Albert Pyun is very ill and does not have much time left. The Hawaiian-born filmmaker began his career under the tutelage of Toshiro Mifune and carved a reputation for himself as a B-level action/sci-fi director who brought memorable visuals and endless imaginations to films that were usually filmed on very limited budgets.
Known primarily for his kickboxer/apocalyptic spectacles, Pyun was clearly a student of greats like Sergio Leone, John Woo, Akira Kurosawa, and Sam Peckinpah in the way that he staged his action scenes and often transformed them into surreal landscapes for his eccentric characters to inhabit. Cult classics like THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER (1982), RADIOACTIVE DREAMS (1985), CYBORG (1989), CAPTAIN AMERICA (1990), NEMESIS (1992), KNIGHTS (1993), and MEAN GUNS (1997) are never going to be mistaken for cinematic masterpieces, and certainly many of Pyun’s films fall cheerfully into the so-bad-it’s-good corner of cinematic legacy — but they were all made on a wing and a prayer by a director with a distinctive artistic vision with a range of impressive cinematic tricks up his sleeve. Additionally, consider some of the legendary actors with whom Albert Pyun has collaborated: Burt Reynolds, Jean Claude Van Damme, Charlie Sheen, Lance Henriksen, Ice T, Christopher Lambert, Ronny Cox, Darren McGavin – and Peckinpah alumni Kris Kristofferson, James Coburn, Rutger Hauer, and Dennis Hopper.
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Albert’s wife Cynthia has been posting updates about his condition for a while now on her private page and has let us know that while he is in his final days, Albert would love to hear from fans. She’s given me permission to post this request here for my readers – and I’m asking you now to rise to the occasion. Albert has been ill for quite some time, but his love for cinema has kept him going; indeed, he has spent these twilight years of his life working tirelessly on new projects that he will never live to see completed. I think it would mean a hell of a lot if those of us here who love cinema could express some words of gratitude to a man who has spent his life in the field, fearlessly working against an often unforgiving industry to bring his artistic vision to the screen.
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If you’d like to leave some words of thanks for Albert, please do so in the comments below. Cynthia will make sure that Albert sees them. And by all means – share this post everywhere. Thanks, team.“
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So if you’re a fan of Pyun’s work, now is the time to reach out and let him know that you appreciate the entertainment he has provided over the decades. Here’s hoping his health will actually turn around for the better, but it will be good for him to hear from fans either way.
sad news but Albert Pyun is obviously going to Heaven
Yesterday I watched Scent of a Woman. I’d never seen it before!
Why do people rate this so highly?
it's not good no. But it does remind us of a time when new, normal movies would get made and then play at a theater and you could go see them
Devastated that still no one else has seen Tar so we can’t all fight about whether it’s good or not.
Anyway for some reason I finally watched _Batman v. Superman_ last weekend and against all odds it was… not _good_ exactly but _unhinged_ in a way that is certainly more memorable and engrossing than your average 2010s studio blockbuster. So I had to check out the legendary Snydercut, which it turns out by contrast is _exactly_ your average 2010s studio blockbuster except 4 hours long, and not a _Once Upon a Time in America_ or _Brighter Summer Day_ kind of 4 hours either. You’re 50/50, Snyder fans!