Films Recently Watched

Sun Choke - 8/10 pretty fucked up.  Very hallucinatory, little exposition, I got an Under the Skin vibe from it.  Boom Bip's music tied it all together very well, excellent cinematography and editing.  The theme and "twist" if you can call it that I took from it was:

Oh right, seemed interesting... Must remember to check it out.

In honor of today being Star Trek's 50th anniversary, I watched:

Star Trek: The Motion Picture Director's Edition - here's my theory on this one, they're tripping balls. It's the 70s, Spock and Bones are burnouts left over from the 60s. Being an MD, he has access to the good shit, and doses the entire bridge crew. They spend most of the movie flying thru space staring at the view screen, at one trippy light sequence after another, time slows down, they all start talking slowly. Then the child molester has a 3 way with a space probe.

Tripping balls.

dude totally

  On 9/6/2016 at 11:59 AM, AJW said:

Holy Hell

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/holy-hell/sundance-documentary-buddhafield-cult-reaction/

 

Excellent docu on the Buddhafield group whos "guru" was a hot pants wearing, ballet dancing ex pornstar/actor, a must see if you're interested in cults!

i've had this on dvdr for a while. been meaning to watch it but something always comes up. maybe tonight?

X-Men Apocalypse - I loved it.  I went in with low expectations, but cheered several times at all of the call backs to the comics and past films.  Definitely the most CG heavy X-Men so far, but if you're gonna do balls out green screen, do it in a Star Wars movie or super hero flick where it belongs.  Several storylines interwoven into a coherent plot, good editing pulled that off.  Liked the jokes about everyone looking the same 20 years later, lol.  My favorite part was:

I think I understand Marvel's deal with Fox regarding the Maximoff siblings; Marvel got to keep Scarlet Witch (who did cameo in Days of Future Past) as an Avenger, and Fox keeps Quicksilver, who stole the show again, and IMO deserves his own spinoff, although that would be expensive to produce I'm sure.  Great call backs to Proteus and Mister Sinister as well, I had a grin on my face the entire movie.  Maybe it was gas.

  On 9/9/2016 at 12:20 AM, Rubin Farr said:

In honor of today being Star Trek's 50th anniversary, I watched:

 

Star Trek: The Motion Picture Director's Edition - here's my theory on this one, they're tripping balls. It's the 70s, Spock and Bones are burnouts left over from the 60s. Being an MD, he has access to the good shit, and doses the entire bridge crew. They spend most of the movie flying thru space staring at the view screen, at one trippy light sequence after another, time slows down, they all start talking slowly. Then the child molester has a 3 way with a space probe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tripping balls.

:^)

next up .. TOS Space Seed + Wrath of Khan double extravaganza. 

as for the ' tripping balls ' thing. i think it's more just .. someone saw 2001 Space Odyssey and they figured '  that but star trek '

I'm trying to watch antibirth. Feels like one of those old John Waters films innit.

  On 9/9/2016 at 5:52 AM, Nebraska said:

 

  On 9/6/2016 at 11:59 AM, AJW said:

Holy Hell

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/holy-hell/sundance-documentary-buddhafield-cult-reaction/

 

Excellent docu on the Buddhafield group whos "guru" was a hot pants wearing, ballet dancing ex pornstar/actor, a must see if you're interested in cults!

 

i've had this on dvdr for a while. been meaning to watch it but something always comes up. maybe tonight?

 

 finally watched this.

i found it a little boring. i didn't fully understand what their "religion" was. at first it seemed like yoga with random ramblings of hindu before slowly morphing into pierre et gilles ballet ymca commune. also, what happened to the guru. towards the end, he seems to walk like his entire back is being held up by a stick- to the point where getting into the passenger side of the car seemed like a chore.

another thing i didn't like about this cult was the no sex policy. if you're going to create a cult and not shagging everyone then i really don't see much point to it all. the whole rape business is unnecessary

  On 9/4/2016 at 10:52 PM, hello spiral said:

 

  On 9/4/2016 at 6:43 PM, Kidrodi said:

Only seen the trailer and the whole thing looked terrible. Idk what you all are talking about but I guess it's just me

 

 

lol

  On 9/6/2016 at 1:46 AM, dr lopez said:

The Martian - "hexadecimals will save this"

 

Also fuck that Asian hard working nerd who magically solves the problems by giving up his life to become a drone. Racist as f

lol

  On 9/6/2016 at 2:09 AM, dr lopez said:

omg its getting even more retarded

lol

the Martian was such a turd. "Gonna science the shit out of this bro." Matt Damon does his good will hunting impression on Mars. Random skinny guy. Matt Damon jumps through space. Academic respect. End.

I don't know. It had some pretty intense potato farming.

He should've been like "do you like potatoes?" Then put up a scientific equation against the window and then said "how do you like them potatoes?"

lol

the neon demon

refn is beginning to feel like the spiritual successor to verhoeven. this movie is not very good, but i've warmed considerably toward drive. only god forgives is a failure, some kind of formal experiment in abstraction that is simply too boring to watch. this fell somewhere between the two. way more earnest than drive, which definitely is made with a smirk and awareness of how little action there is and how insane the main character is. i was kind of bored with this the entire time but i wanted to see it through. i think he's playing with audience expectation in the same way that verhoeven did, he just hasn't found a script to illustrate his strengths yet. this and drive seem like very abstract 80s movies, lots of psychosexual tension and trashiness. if anyone is capable of making a showgirls or dressed to kill for the new millenium, it's this guy.

all the way - it's just another one of those "wikipedia article as a film" biopics in "simple english", ok as an introductory history lesson and character portrayal i guess. i dunno anything about lbj, but bryan crambus' acting felt way over the top, though maybe it's just that the rest of the performances were really bland. despite being over the top and often unrealistic itself, it still feels like house of cards does better in portraying the actual politicking itself, but i guess it's the bane of those biopic films that they have to compress a lot of shit into two hours so no thorough portrayal of anything is really possible.

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World - there's a big chance that i'm missing something major here as i'm not even familiar with pre 00's hertzog, but this one seemed just stupid and shallow. every time hertzog opened his mouth he uttered something inane, banal or just embarrassing. he's just absolutely talentless as an interviewer (same problem that ruined "into the abyss"). i guess he still manages to get people candid because of his biography and charisma (behind the scenes), so there are scatterd bits and pieces of interesting people talking, but as a whole it just doesn't add to much, i didn't get some sense of hertzog's overarching "theory of the modern internet" or any "poetry" out of this that he did well in some of the previous docus, no interesting imagery here as well. so there's nothing here that you can't find on youtube/ted talks  and probably way more in depth.

another gamebreaker is that he wastes a lot time on that louis theroux-ness that i can't stand, meaning purposely looking for the absurd and marginal within a particular subject, turning into a bit of a freak show instead of dealing properly with the subject at hand. like, why the hell would you spent so much screen time by talking to crazy people who think they are physically affected by all the wi-fi radio waves in a docu about internet? why choose specifically a suicide girl-scientist (obviously showing her tats) to talk about astronomy? why inject very small snippets of theoreticians talking about really complex stuff, while knowing very well that those ideas would be impossible to understand for 99% of the viewers? there's an expectation from him to deliver something more than vice/theroux shit, and he fails pretty miserbaly here.

Its crept into his recent work, the over indulgence of narrating or appearing on screen. Maybe its age finally catching up with him a tad. Cave of Forgotten Dreams nearly went that way, the crocodiles for example, but archaeo-bias means that still enchanted

To flip the comparisons, The Wide Blue Yonder shouldnt really work, but it does cos of Brad Dourif's intensity and the floating effect created by undersea ice footage, the slow sway of the sea & the sense of inter-galactic scales in comparison

Bit gutted cos i was looking forward to this due to Herzog's genius in past favourites

  On 9/11/2016 at 4:57 AM, keanu reeves said:

making a showgirls or dressed to kill for the new millenium, it's this guy.

i know rite please please let it be so

only problem with showgirls is casting. the verhoeven cast shit actors approach didn't pay off then, but in starship troopers my god it's perfection

  On 9/11/2016 at 4:57 AM, keanu reeves said:

i think he's playing with audience expectation in the same way that verhoeven did, he just hasn't found a script to illustrate his strengths yet. 

Yeah, but unlike Verhoeven or De Palma, he writes almost all his stuff himself for a reason and he's very likely isn't that good at it as he talks (he likes to discuss the depth of his recent stuff, a lot of evidence on youtube). Even his earlier, more genre films, namely the Pusher trilogy - it had some transient themes, though it was all basically you're a criminal with looser's troubles and you fucked up stupidly, so there's money you bet your life on returning of.

That said, i view Drive as his best effort and a really impressive one, so for me that was the script and conditions he needed. I was almost shocked at the level of Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, the garish cinema background it comes from is in deep conflict with the deep thinker's mentality it showcases and the grand auteur club it strives for. Well, in theory that conflict could be interesting, but i don't sense any perplexing or unpredictable qualities to it, it's embarassingly sterile as in pompous fashion ad. He's like the complete opposite of Verhoeven in Hollywood.

yeah neon demon kind of sucked. only god forgives was terrible, but at least neon demon has a semblance of structure to it, not total abstraction. he's reaching self parody level though, needs to figure out another approach. i still think he's very skilled at trolling an audience and he obviously has a strong visual sense. 

when demon ran out of ketchup, i felt th overwhelming longing to give him ketchup. it was deep in my heart, deep in my loin. the universe had failed him. God had failed him.

instead of siri I have my phone set up so that whenever I ask a question matt damon pops up and does a mini science diary.

I too was bored watching Neon Demon for the first time.

Second viewing, I realized Refn had completely knocked it out of the park. Brilliant film. You know what i'm talking about, men.

Only complaints I have are about the soundtrack which was imo weak. And it wasn't violent enough. They used so much money on lipstick they couldn't get tom savini on set

  On 9/13/2016 at 12:12 AM, Alcofribas said:

instead of siri I have my phone set up so that whenever I ask a question matt damon pops up and does a mini science diary.

this is a permanent feature in ios 10.