Film Journal 2019

uhhh it ain't too good but it also isn't the train wreck you'll probably go in expecting. The choice of CGI implementation is a lot less perplexing after you've actually witnessed the film because they're clearly going for something with the dance choreography and slim feline bodies and even though the CGI lets them down about 90% of the time the 10% is still good enough to not make you think of it as a total atrocity. The feeling isn't helped by them front-loading the story with that Rebel Wilson musical number with those mice and cockroaches because ohhh my what a put-off right away.

All that said, a cast that's totally into doing whatever the hell this is and mediocre music "salvage" it to whatever extent that can be done.

Three things
1) I'd imagine people come to these movies to see Angelina Jolie be that witty witch goth queen and she's that for like 15 minutes here so that'll be a bummer
2) Why is this the only plot a studio movie can have when it revolves around a fantasy royal wedding?
3) Holy shit at this turning into some genocidal BS at the end when the evil super weapon literally turns people to dust and they Idi i Smotri -style lock a group of innocents to a church and start bombing the place with the stuff. It's waaay too much for the tone this is going for when at the end all is forgiven even for the Mengele of the operation, played by Warwick Davis, who is gleefully staring at the royal wedding despite being ostensibly responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands in the fairly intense action scenes we just witnessed not ten minutes ago!

Hey look, a surprisingly functional deserted island movie with a captivating lead, a spooky hole and fun plot developments, in so far as there is one.

But why on earth is this the name of the movie?

You know who had a bigger balloon adventure?

The Oogieloves.

The best parts are easily the points where this just becomes a nonsense animated action movie that makes it very clear Jon Watts is among the millions very impressed by Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse. The rest? Typical Marvel-fare with some good jokes. I guess you could see something in Beck's arch but the initial post-credits scene (that should just be in the movie) invalidates part of it.

There are a lot of things I think of fondly when I think of Breaking Bad. JESSE PINKMAN: PULP VIGILANTE is not one of them.

In creating a film about interpretation the two directors have also made a flim endlessly ripe for interpretation, which bolsters every meticulously detailed shot with supposed meaning or, at the very least, perceived thematic heft.

I suppose there's something to be said about being a very different representative of the genre, but the way Knives Out gets to it, the way it creates it's most subversive element, it, as a side-effect, creates a curiously timid middle portion for itself, which is a shame, because the elements are there for something a lot more exciting, as the climax handily proves.

It's generally very nice to have a film that perfectly depicts a progression of some sort with an acute understanding of the nyances therein. Coupled with terrific performances and an all-timer score, you have yourself a bonafide modern classic. And it is indeed very nice.

Government cheese cracked me the F up. Otherwise an unkind and unfunny film with some good performances.

Spending 2½ hours watching exquisitely staged vignettes often without much particular point, occasionally touching on things they don't have much business touching, that actively avoid making any statements about anything, is not my idea of a good time, even if it has it's moments, such as the fact that Scoot McNairy actually has a role in a Tarantino-movie and Antonio Margheriti gets namedropped.

Also, how perplexing are those western scenes. They must be the weirdest and deepest failure of Tarantino's career.

Easily the best-directed, most ballin', smooth-ass crime film of the 2010s. The consistent social undertones more than make up for the somewhat dry ideological conclusion this ends up at, and the performances are straight up fire as is every single montage Lorene Scafaria presents with the talent of like a 60s Godard when it comes to the quality of the editing. Love it.

How cool would this movie be if it didn't try to be scary? So cool! Well, OK, it'd still be dumb as hell, but still.

I do like the story here about regaining self-confidence and trust in those around you and it has a killer lead performance, but I was left feeling the tiniest bit iffy about the dynamic it paints between obesity and those themes. It feels a bit more self-demeaning about it than I'd have felt comfortable with.

This is still very much The Barbarian Bros show and whenever they aren't on screen you're just thinking "Where are the Barbarian Bros??" unless Michael Berryman is on screen, then you're just a happy camper.

Look, I really, really appreciate that it would appear Deodato's coaching for all his male performers was just "do the dumbest fucking mouth sound you can whenever you need to make any sound outside of talking".

I come before you with a heavy heart on this, the 24th of November, 2019, as I have seen the film 2019: After the Fall of New York not after but during beautiful autumn weather taking place in New York, therefore not living up to the title, the single promise I made myself that I would perform this year.

The movie is fun enough, gotta love Michael Sopkiw in anything as well as George Eastman getting the title he has always deserved in his role as "Big Ape".

Oh hey, a Larry Fessenden movie where the coolest parts are the self-insert monologues about history that you'd really wish had any bearing on the movie itself, who could've thought

This is occasionally very funny during the first half. Two big buts though. And not with two ts. That would be inappropriate despite how much I want to make that joke here.

First off, the women in this film. Every single woman is either a tool or naked body. They consistently show off an incredible amount of skin in comparison to the men from whom we see two dicks in blurry or quick shots. Contrast that to the genitals from women and it's an uncomfortable ratio. Then throw in how the film literally uses an abused woman as the crux of it's emotional climax in the form of a tool, a proxy for abuse intended for our male lead. You could say that making a film about the porn industry where all the women are tools and skin is commentary on the role of women in the porn industry, which I bet is the reasoning you'd get out of the all-male writing/directing department, but it really, really doesn't excuse the fact that this still remains ostensibly a film that uses those women in the same fashion.

Second, the film is based on actual events. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett does a very good job portraying the lead, but the portrayal becomes problematic the darker the events turn, as the film never really wants to do any groundwork on creating a comprehensive perspective of what the character's mental illness is, instead opting for a Joker-esque mishmash of occasionally cartoonish symptoms with characters telling our lead "you're mentally ill!". As such the film becomes a story not of say, tragedy regarding our lead's inability to receive the help he desperately needs, but rather a chronicling of loony stuff taking place. Coupled with attempts to sentimentalize these horrible real-life events quite a bit, the whole is very, very problematic.

Takashi Miike can really knock it out of the park when he's given an actual production to work with. Though a lot of the philosophical and thematic faffing about is more or less a miss, the story works and the constant subversion of what you expect to something you didn't even know you wanted makes this exciting. That music also slaps!

I'm not so sure how I feel about the way this writes off the inexcusable amount of pain and exploitation the 1% inflict upon the rest of the world by saying they're kooky satanists but it's also a movie where those kooky satanists get some very fun come-uppance so it's fun I guess.

When Hellraiser Judgment doesn't spend it's time being a very, very boring detective story with a predictable finish, it sometimes manages to be quite interesting. The idea of puzzle boxes being a very flaccid form of satisfying primal urges in the age of the internet is a fun one, though the movie doesn't explore it much. Where it's much more successful is in showcasing what the alternative is to the old-school method of inviting victims to Leviathan's Hell, as a clerk writes friendly letters to evil people and makes them undergo a process of confession, judgment and punishment while Pinhead sits in a chair and... stares... at a wall?

Look, I'm not saying this is the best thing you could do with Hellraiser, but the process and attempts at showcasing the bureaucracy between heaven and hell are much more interesting than anything Clive Barker himself came up in his edgelordy magnum opus Scarlet Gospels when he tried to think about similar themes. The interrogation scenes between the clerk and the would-be victims are the highlight of the film, even if they are sprinkled with very unneeded blood-soaked T&A.

That kind of works for the film though, as it really does have a weird feeling of this being what a (relatively tame) exploitation film might be in 2018. It delivers on that front with depictions of nasty gore and even more explicit descriptive dialogue of such, and the storyline is all around very pulpy and gross.

All that being said, nothing can save how boring the cop procedural in it is, as whenever director Tunnicliffe has to do something that doesn't feature cenobites the movie becomes a series of close-up dialogue shots with absolutely zero flow to them with dialogue you've heard a hundred times before. The Pinhead is also no Doug Bradley, and though I think the actor has decent enough presence, his voice is more akin to Dr. Frank-N-Furter than Pinhead, and he doesn't really emote worth a damn save for that stupid ending that I guess makes this an out-of-canon film? Which I guess makes sense since that makes three in a row that exist in their own weird reality outside the first seven. How the hell Deader managed to still work somewhat in canon and nothing since is beyond me.

Anyhow, with the ups of this you can definitely see attempt at innovation of these films, and because of that, I wouldn't mind them making more before they remake the first one. But if they do, please, someone give them the money to make new costumes. The cenobite masks have been laying in a warehouse since they shot Deader and Hellworld in Romania in 2002 and they sure look like it. Chatterer still makes his good ol' chattering sound but boy-ooo do those teeth not move an inch.

A rather melodramatic exploration of death, family and health care in China. Bears a fair amount of similarities with other films on the topic of not telling a loved one of their fatal condition, but quite the number of those movies are Japanese, and this being Chinese is more than enough to cause a significant separation as the angle is very, very family-centric. As a result it's much warmer and emotional, some of which is good enough to forgive some of the melodramatic tendencies. Terrific performances to boot.

It's a Disney-remake with one particularly unfinished CGI dog and F. Murray Abraham cast as the guy trying to get the dogs to bone.

I wish the whole movie took place during night because half of it is set during the day when the lighting makes everything, including the CGI things, look terrible.

I wish this spent the second hour being the 90s paranormally tinted urban thriller it is for the first instead of becoming a tepid decade-spanning drama without the budget to make Boyd Holbrook look a day over 40.

Cements my view of cats as something I am not the biggest fan of.

A powerful study on colonialism, self-image and ownership thereof told with a deliciously detailed mise-en-scene and powerful performances.

A surprisingly gross love triangle takes center stage in Lili,as the titular 16-year old ends up in a circus because her crush, the 43-year old Jean-Pierre Aumont, reluctantly gets her a job. The man could give less shits about this lady, as in he isn't interested in even the slightest fling. She's dreaming of surrealist dance numbers with her future hubby as she gets into a puppeteering act spearheaded by the 36-year old Mel Ferrer, who repeatedly makes it clear that he sees Lili as the 8-year old Leslie Caron plays her, which makes a lot of the film uncomfortable as it feels like Ferrer telling himself it's OK to fall in love with a child. The feeling of him being kind of terrible isn't alleviated by watching him be an angry drunk who beats women. Did I mention he's the hero of the movie? Saying he used to be a dancer before the war and making that the crux of his anger isn't much of an excuse. Which is how the film wants to present it.

Lili's innocence is tainted by her unwavering loyalty to her fantasies of Aumont, and by the time she begins growing as a character we're five minutes from the ten minute dance number that ends the film and it's way too late to make the feeling of having to scrub yourself clean of the feeling of watching this movie go away.

The first hour of Good Boys is downright brilliant, as it has excellent pacing. The structure is repetitive but highly efficient, and the jokes mostly work. The more plot it actually gets the worse it becomes, building up to something quite saccharine.

At it's best when Jessie Buckley & co. get to be the adorable Scots they are or when it's somewhat crushing Buckley's dreams as a Nashville country star, be it via very faintly said statements about wishes being stolen in birthday parties or striking shots of her realizing the futility of that dream while staring at the hundreds of photos of her idols, thinking of the tens of thousands who didn't get to that wall.

Don Coscarelli's second feature, prior to Phantasm, is a mostly plotless depiction of childhood where Kenny and his friends pull off some classic japes like building a life-sized doll of straw and dumping it on a road to make people feel horrified when they run it over. This is probably caused by his upbringing as his dad's best advice tends to be "beat people up if they aren't nice to you" and his best friend's dad (who is in the secret service and probably shot JFK) makes him hold up a pair of wine glasses while pointing his Magnum firearm at them and telling Kenny to not flinch during the target practice.

Like yeah, this stuff is kind of fun, but structurally this film feels so close to the works of Finnish film director Ere Kokkonen that, despite it being much prettier and sounding way better than any of his work, I felt physically ill from watching the film as it threw me back to watching some completely nondescript 1970s Finnish plotless comedy. The mean tone, while catching occasionally the spirit of childhood, does feel like a bit much some times, making it hard to laugh at it the way you probably should due to the silly or outrageous nature of things being depicted.

Do you like Bruno Mattei's Zombies: The Beginning? What if I told you someone remade it as a completely toothless Doom-adaptation 13 years later?

Hello?

The direction this takes are wild to an extent I was wholly unprepared for. I love it. An extremely confident step-up from the somewhat uneven Faults.

Here's an odd film. It's shot like a TV-movie with flat lighting and the camera only does anything worthwhile when you're in the middle of a horror setpiece, but even there we get way too many close-ups of creepy crawlies mugging at the camera, coupled with a period piece setting that feels like padding at best, like watching water go down a drain at worst, and yet, it's occasionally mildly effective and you can sometimes see what they were desperately trying to do and because there's clearly some money and passion behind the project you sort of go into a pattern of rooting for the filmmakers to get that next bit right because by god do they want to get that bit right and oh my do they ever fuck it up.

Oh hey it's a Babak Anvari movie so you just know you're in for a spooky ride with a lackluster third act. Well, save for that last shot, which is pretty fun.

I appreciate the dedication of making this Junji Ito -esque full on nightmare fuel all-encompassing horror movie where there isn't even the slightest chance of understanding the horror because you're too busy being creeped out by it, but the thematical ties it tries to bind between that horror and alcoholism don't fully click for me.

Still, the first hour of this is real spooky in a great way.

Todd Phillips & Scott Silver: We want to make a movie about how The Joker is born!

proceed to make a movie about a guy who suddenly is The Joker

There is A V I B E to the special effects in this movie and I love it

You know what, I can totally appreciate the incredible and absolute commitment this film has for it's bit.

It's silly, ludicrous bit.

Two things, one split in two in proper zombie movie fashion:

1) Lupita Nyong'o is on another level
2) When you set out to make a high concept zombie movie about a kindergarten teacher getting caught up in a zombie apocalypse with the kids she's teaching, it strikes me as baffling that
A) You feel the need to center this movie around a somewhat-too-despicable-to-redeem hack guitarist who ends up in these events in an effort to hit on said teacher
B) You think the audience needs to be reminded that they are, indeed, watching a high concept zombie film by having your military personnel spouting dialogue about all the other zombie attacks using that term and discussing their speed this time, which while fun in some other movie perhaps, really just strikes against the tone in this movie where you're trying to present a redemptive character arc

It's all a bit too much in constant conflict to love even though the execution of most parts on their own (save for the set-up of our lead) is quite good.

Yo this movie might be the dumbest thing these eyes have ever witnessed and that's one high bar

So you've got this fairly offensive take on mental illness being used as a framing device for an anthology film where the psychiatrists make very unfriendly-to-patients bets leading to our chiseled lead having to interview four c-c-c-crazy loonies so we can hear their spooooky stories. They're all cackling maniacs, of course, though the film tries towards the end to make their inflections to be somewhat enforced by their horrible treatment as witnessed during the film. This attempt is slightly appreciated but lets the whole off in exactly zero ways.

Anyhow, those stories, OH MY GOD those stories.

So the first one you're kinda going "alright I can see why this would be kinda spooookyyy" as a chopped up body comes to life to take revenge on those who wronged her in life, but even there the set-up is really bizarre as a voodoo-loving wife wants to own her husband, refusing a divorce with vague threats about how bad wanting one would be, while the husband plans her demise with his lover. The climax with body parts trying to reach a person still in possession of their faculties is very silly but has strong imagery.

The second one is the one where you kind of start going "??" as Peter Cushing wants a tailor to make him a suit out of a very reflective rainbow table cloth to resurrect his dead son. The tailor kills him in a conflict and the tailor's wife puts the suit on their mannequin who comes to life. There's barely a climax as the story cuts back to the asylum the moment the mannequin has come back to life, and the whole mythology of this thing is really, really odd. The suit sucks the blood dropped on it, which doesn't seem like a good way of making anything come to life, and the book that contains the designs is basically the Necronomicon down to making the resurrected look like a friggin' deadite.

OK so then we go to the third one which is a very typically awful portrayal of schizophrenia as a dialogue between two people, one of which is a terrible killer and the other a meek pill-popper. The addition of drugs is ostensibly the only original twist to the formula, and it goes absolutely nowhere. This is easily the most skippable of the stories, and the most awkward in execution as the family nurse totally no-sells a horrific murder only to walk into one herself.

Then we get to the primary reason for me naming this some real dumb shit™ which is the framing story's climax as the fourth interview gets cut short. It's Herbert Lom, and he's made tiny blocky robot puppets with human faces and he's convinced he can transfer his consciousness into them! Our lead has enough and heads downstairs to argue ethics with the head psychiatrist, who gets murdered with a scalpel by Lom's puppet that has come to life as the film spends approximately five minutes showing this hilariously moving puppet walk very fucking slowly across the halls of the asylum until it finally gets to murdering, only to be trampled by our hero afterwards, also crushing Lom's body. Then it turns out an orderly was the craziest of everyone all the time, he kills the lead, and ends the film saying a fun catchphrase straight to the camera. Horror movies!

?

I don't quite understand what writer Robert Bloch was going for with any of these stories, especially when we get to the robot puppet men, but it's certainly quite something to see that even when he was trying to discuss the poor state of mental health care he still managed to do more damage to those ill than good to their care, implying a poor understanding on the subject matter.

I'm giving this three stars but it might as well could be one star, but I had quite a bit of fun rolling my eyes three hundred and sixty degrees around in their sockets every time this movie pulled off a dumb twist or turn.

How I wish there would be ten new episodes of Between Two Ferns instead of an 80-minute movie with a minute or two of footage from each potential episode.

Whenever this discusses the relationship between Rogers and his characters or his views on pedagogy I was absolutely enamored and would heartily recommend seeing this for those parts alone.

Finnish review here: www.laajakuva.com/rakkautta-anarkiaa-2019-osa-2/

This is a very good name for this short.

I need to see so many more pre-code movies that have characters who are super into the teachings of Nietzsche thanks to old German dudes pestering them until they read Thus Spoke Zarathustra or some shit and then the reader as in Barbara Stanwyck realizes how crap men are and decides they all deserve to be crushed under her heel until they just murder one another.

I super wish Luz built up to a more shocking or titillating conclusion but honestly the trip to get there is so intense, crazy and lovely that I am totally fine with this forming a wimwendersian loop.

EDIT: Rewatched a week later. It's good.

When your trashy early 90s HK actioner consists 75% of scenes of characters engaging in various hobbies and activities such as dressing up as naughty maids and talking about breastfeeding in sexy talk can you really call it a trashy early 90s HK actioner anymore? Honestly, I don't care, this movie is the dumbest fun I've had in a while and I just rewatched The god damn Granny.

Rumors only grow, especially in 1945 Japan just before the end of the war. This is a movie with a hell of a drive, and even though the Soviet-esque chanting doesn't always strike the chord with me it probably is intended to, I can't help but appreciate the hell out of the supremely condemning nature of this film in the face of human suffering. It successfully verbalizes a lot of questions that people ask themselves and others in real life upon seeing or experiencing acts of violence in a way films rarely do. When it also looks like one of the most beautiful films shot in the 60s, which is saying a lot, it becomes a terrific package.

Still the primo of the primo 90s trash movies. I wish Christopher Nolan movies had this many dutch angles. Because his DP is the DP in this movie. The fucking Granny. Wally Pfister, you sure went the distance.

The Terrorizers is living proof that I shouldn't assume a thing about a movie upon hearing the name because the only thing I was terrorized by here was the pencil-thin moustache of one character.

Mind you, that doesn't mean the film's bad, but Yang appears to definitely be in the camp of a filmmaker with a hypnotic style that I can't exactly be hypnotized by, and even though the slightly too coincidental nature of the story in this film occasionally touches on some very interesting topics ranging from a myriad depictions of frustration with a life standing still to missing a sense of longing despite doing all you'd expect to have one, I couldn't walk away from this film feeling anything but slightly bummed out and not exactly in the way the bleak ending would have me go out.

Elem Klimov's work pre-Idi i Smotri is certainly recognizable as such, as his trademark front-and-center blocking of shots and dynamic camera movements within the constraints of that are very present. In tone this feels less like a Soviet film and more like a Milos Forman-esque satire, as a kid is kicked out of his absurd pioneer camp, only to have outrageous fantasies about killing his grandma with the shock of that happening driving him to hide in the camp. A lot of good gags, a handful of poor ones and a good pace keep this thing going admirably. The ending is a bit of a wash when the film goes for childlike wonder over satire.

There's a good 15 minutes in The Haunted Strangler during which I honestly thought it was a movie about an "Amityville: It's About Time -clock" -esque haunted scalpel making people commit horrific murders and for those 15 minutes I was in heaven.