Films Recently Watched

Vanilla Sky. Meh.

i was scared to watch this cause it might be cringe or bad, but i thought it was well made and had a concise story, candid, and industry standard production quality.
starring linklater, penn jillette, jerry casale, etc. good plot curve.

also just watched this banger of a movie:
https://archive.org/details/the-day-the-earth-stood-still-1951_202106

this film is like a smorgasbord of influences: kenneth anger, pierre et gilles, and (maybe) james bidgood. there's a strange otherworldlyness about it, despite the minimal scenario. a bunch of people are invited to a party at some womans house. you get the sense she's a leader of some kind- and this house is- another world? at one point they're (i think) moving from one room to another, and they make it "look" like it's the most difficult and scary thing ever. it takes like 20min to get from point a to b.

it's not surprising that salvador dali and andy warhol allegedly loved it

Watched Memento for the first time in 20 years. 

It was actually fine and obviously some ideas within kinda played out again in later Nolan films. 

I just think to make it a better film it could have been more graphic / grittier. It played out very PG most of the time which is not what the film was about (revenge fo r ape and murder of wife)

Saw this in an actual movie theater last night. It has been well over a year since seeing a movie in a theater and it was worth spending a couple hours in the dark wearing a mask.
Very hard to describe. The structure is unlike anything I’ve seen. It’s an immersive experience with kaleidoscopic visuals and it avoids most trappings of standard, biographical documentaries. It’s a bit like swirling in a memory cloud of his life, music and inspiration. Highly recommended, especially for Bowie fans. 
I may try to see it again in imax / 10

Bram Stoker’s Dracula getting a theatrical 4K re-release for Halloween 

  On 9/25/2022 at 11:12 AM, Soloman Tump said:

Watched Memento for the first time in 20 years. 

It was actually fine and obviously some ideas within kinda played out again in later Nolan films. 

I just think to make it a better film it could have been more graphic / grittier. It played out very PG most of the time which is not what the film was about (revenge fo r ape and murder of wife)

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there's an edited version somewhere where they organize the scenes by chronological order..

this.... did not work for me.

  On 9/27/2022 at 9:00 PM, Nebraska said:

this.... did not work for me.

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I just heard about this and was QUITE curious. More details please. 
 

btw, I also just started watching Crimes of the Future but switched it off after the first hour. I love cronenberg but for me the shock factor of this one wasn’t matched by story/character. Maybe I’m just getting old 

  On 9/27/2022 at 2:39 AM, cruising for burgers said:

there's an edited version somewhere where they organize the scenes by chronological order..

 

I remember there was a special edition DVD back in the day that had it put together in chronological order. I opted for the cheaper DVD version, still have it.

and yeah, haven't watched it in like 20 years or so. I remember watching it at the cinema back in 2000 with an ex-girlfriend, and there was like 1 other couple in the audience. they were old and when it was over, the old guy walked by me and said "do you have any idea what that movie was about?" lol

Their first album resides in the highest echelons of my top 30 albums of all time. It still, to me, sounds unique and the way they weave the avant-garde into their art rock is genius. It never seems to age. Most of the avant-garde that surrounded them at the time is just unlistenable imo. Which I guess it was supposed to be. Yet they pulled the rabbit out the hat with their debut album. I thought the film was ok. I’ve watched a lot of V/U documentaries and Warhol documentaries (he’s another genius imo) so a lot of this felt like deja vu. And at 2 hours was a bit of a chore. Cale is the star of the show, and him talking about creating drones was particularly interesting. More so if you are a music maker I would imagine.

Oddly enough I was watching a documentary the same evening  about the bad boys and girls of British art in the 90’s. And most (not  all) these artists and the scene they came from which they seemed quite happily to speak so highly of and how brilliantly unique they were just seemed a bit of a joke. Because Warhol, the V/Uand company we’re doing it all in 1965! 

  On 9/27/2022 at 9:40 PM, J3FF3R00 said:

I just heard about this and was QUITE curious. More details please. 

https://variety.com/2022/film/news/the-munsters-rob-zombie-explains-reboot-1235384634/

  On 9/27/2022 at 9:00 PM, Nebraska said:

this.... did not work for me.

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The first trailer that came out was an intense train wreck.

Recently watched all the Child's Play/Chucky movies just because...

So last night we watched the remake from 2019.

....



. . ... . . . .

I kinda liked it. It was hilarious, but I don't know if that was supposed to be?
Also, the new fucked up looking Buddi doll looks like Skyler Gisondo!

The Witches on Netflix

Visually spectacular, but treads the same ground as Les Misérables (2019) - which did it better by far. Worth seeing.

  On 10/4/2022 at 1:01 AM, Enthusiast said:

Visually spectacular, but treads the same ground as Les Misérables (2019) - which did it better by far. Worth seeing.

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I loved Notre jour viendra but was kind of disappointed by Le monde est à toi... anyway look forward to that one...

woot?!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11128440/

  On 9/21/2022 at 10:25 PM, Nebraska said:

 

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you know, for kids!

  On 9/22/2022 at 2:18 AM, MadameChaos said:

Victoria - Berlin based indie thriller, seemed a bit badly paced and not enough character development.

It took 3 attempts to film the movie. The take used for the final cut was the third take and completed from 4:30 AM to 7:00 AM on 27 April 2014 in the Kreuzberg and Mitte neighborhoods.

Shot in one single continuous shot (134 minutes).

this is almost like a z-grade mexploitation version of zulawski's possession. except if sam neill and isabella adjani were co-workers and not married and the entire world was in jeopardy. 

highly recommended 

Teh Hellraiser (2022)

As a pretty massive fan of the original (and, though some things about it are a bit dated, Hellraiser II I still find to be wildly interesting/entertaining) I was simultaneously stoked and a little trepidatious to check this out. I really enjoyed the Night House (when I found out the director of that was going to do this, it seemed like a perfect match, if he could get it "right"). 

No need to fear - though wandering at times and perhaps not ever quite reaching the ingenuity of the originals, this is an excellent Hellraiser movie, and a very good horror movie to boot. As a fan of Clive Barker's fiction (though lapsed in reading of it), the thing really feels like a Barker sort of thing. Humanity is messy and muddy. The supernatural elements feel genuinely both otherworldly but also like they could really have stepped out of hell. And, not just in the appearance (which nicely updates the S&M fetishism with something more painful yet still on target). 

Speaking of lapses - I'm a lapsed Catholic (and by lapsed I mean I wholly have unsubscribed to monotheism altogether) but at the time of the first Hellraiser "Hell" was all too real in my mind. The things the original conjured forth - not just the demons, but the sins of the human flesh, felt palapable and real and terrifying. I'm pleased to say that, even though I no longer ascribe any sort of actual belief in the idea of hell, this new one is cut from the same cloth, hewn close enough that I felt flashbacks of that same fear. If hell was a place, this, indeed, are the sorts of things that would emerge from it. 

There is a philosophy here that is fairly fascinating, touching on the idea of sensation as being a certain type of end - and the movie conjures some interesting ideas on whether this needs to be pain or pleasure or, if, from a certain perspective, it doesn't matter. There is an very interesting bit about "music" that I won't spoil but I found to be absolutely intriguing. 

In the end, this isn't much more than a horror movie - that's fine. That's what it's supposed to be - and I can forgive a pit of pacing issues and lack of character development for the return to form that I think most fans of the Hellraiser series have hoped for over the intervening decades since the originals dropped. I got a Hulu trial just to watch this, but would have easily forked over the priced of a rental to watch it. 

Horror movie rating 8.5/10

Hellraiser movie rating (taking into account the dilution of the last 17 or whatever entries and what this means for the franchise) 9.3/10

Next up? Going full on avante guard horror with Criterion Collection Lost Highway 4k UHD remaster let's goooooo! (just arrived in the mail today) 

I watched part of raiders of the lost ark tonight. I took me until this night in my life to realize one detail. The nazis only had one side to the head piece to find the ark. The one side was from the burn mark on the Creepy German guys hand from the bar in Nepal. "their dining in the wrong place"! 

  On 10/9/2022 at 2:22 AM, T3551ER said:

Teh Hellraiser (2002)

As a pretty massive fan of the original (and, though some things about it are a bit dated, Hellraiser II I still find to be wildly interesting/entertaining) I was simultaneously stoked and a little trepidatious to check this out. I really enjoyed the Night House (when I found out the director of that was going to do this, it seemed like a perfect match, if he could get it "right"). 

No need to fear - though wandering at times and perhaps not ever quite reaching the ingenuity of the originals, this is an excellent Hellraiser movie, and a very good horror movie to boot. As a fan of Clive Barker's fiction (though lapsed in reading of it), the thing really feels like a Barker sort of thing. Humanity is messy and muddy. The supernatural elements feel genuinely both otherworldly but also like they could really have stepped out of hell. And, not just in the appearance (which nicely updates the S&M fetishism with something more painful yet still on target). 

Speaking of lapses - I'm a lapsed Catholic (and by lapsed I mean I wholly have unsubscribed to monotheism altogether) but at the time of the first Hellraiser "Hell" was all too real in my mind. The things the original conjured forth - not just the demons, but the sins of the human flesh, felt palapable and real and terrifying. I'm pleased to say that, even though I no longer ascribe any sort of actual belief in the idea of hell, this new one is cut from the same cloth, hewn close enough that I felt flashbacks of that same fear. If hell was a place, this, indeed, are the sorts of things that would emerge from it. 

There is a philosophy here that is fairly fascinating, touching on the idea of sensation as being a certain type of end - and the movie conjures some interesting ideas on whether this needs to be pain or pleasure or, if, from a certain perspective, it doesn't matter. There is an very interesting bit about "music" that I won't spoil but I found to be absolutely intriguing. 

In the end, this isn't much more than a horror movie - that's fine. That's what it's supposed to be - and I can forgive a pit of pacing issues and lack of character development for the return to form that I think most fans of the Hellraiser series have hoped for over the intervening decades since the originals dropped. I got a Hulu trial just to watch this, but would have easily forked over the priced of a rental to watch it. 

Horror movie rating 8.5/10

Hellraiser movie rating (taking into account the dilution of the last 17 or whatever entries and what this means for the franchise) 9.3/10

 

Next up? Going full on avante guard horror with Criterion Collection Lost Highway 4k UHD remaster let's goooooo! (just arrived in the mail today) 

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This is the new 2022 Hellraiser?