Last Movie You Saw, Name & Review Movie • Page 217

Love Matilda

 

Watched Gloria after hearing that Gena Rowlands had passed. I know Cassavetes hated it, but I was into it. He may have thought shooting a New York on-the-run thriller was beneath him maybe but he brings such a unique style to it and Rowlands is phenomenal.

 

Alien: Romulus - 7.5/10
Pretty good, occasionally great, and always fun. As others have said, this is (for better or worse) an Alvarez film, something that I tend to love, although I wish his specific twist on the material was splashed more throughout the film as opposed to being concentrated in the final half-hour. In that sense, Romulus almost feels like two separate movies stitched together, but fortunately, they're both done well enough that it's hard to fuss about. In fact, for every gripe I could have about Romulus, there seems to be a counter that benefits the film; sure, some characters could be more fleshed out, but the performances here are very good, and while the CG creature effects are a little distracting in the final act, how could I possibly rag on a film where 90% of the VFX are practical and incredible effective?

Aside from one egregious moment of fan service, the film pays tasteful homage to those that came before it, retaining just enough of Scott's visual flair and the original film's score to bring you back into the Alien universe. Alvarez shows off some impressive camerawork, the set designs are incredible, and the visuals in space (particularly the rings) are breathtaking. Moments like the silent facehugger room and the zero-gravity xenomorph sequence are franchise-firsts that come out as total high-points. So while it's true Alvarez has crafted a very good legacy sequel to Alien, I can't help but be left with one thought: if you find this thrill ride more interesting than the world-building Scott was doing in Prometheus and Covenant, you're out of your fucking mind.

 

Matilda is fantastic

 

Alien: Romulus - 8.5/10
This exceeded my expectations. The final act was wild. Cailee Spaeny did a great job as a final girl. The movie brought the franchise back to its roots.

 

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (Soi Cheang, 2024)

Been anticipating this one for a while, a three way Venn diagram of my interests intersecting; we have Soi Cheang, Sammo Hung and the Kowloon Walled City.

It's not the usual neon filled nightmare of Hong Kong, there's barely any time spent in Central or Tsim Sha Tsui, we're instead in the infamous Walled City for almost all of the run time, a place that is hard to fathom how it existed.

The Walled City is both a location and a character here, the film isn't just set in the Walled City, it's about the Walled City as a whole, an enclave existing as a subset of Hong Kong, itself living between British and Chinese rule and culture, with the city something neither side could comprehend, or fathom how to manage. The film takes advantage of it as an unusually cinematic location, illuminated with beams of light cutting through the city, claustrophobic and seemingly made up entirely of alleys (and a wonderful town centre scene), where you never know if its day or night.

There's a lot of modern slickly made Hong Kong action films, but what Cheang is doing is combining them with the rugged physicality of the 80s heyday. It's not a film grounded in reality, but every broken bone, or smashed glass has a weight and heft here, even while people are taking far more punishment and brutality than could ever be feasible. In comparison with his truly incredible Limbo, the violence here leans closer to the spectacle than the horrifying, but it's far more compelling than his peers. We even have Sammo fighting in this (in some form...), which is always a treat, and even made me slightly emotional, in a very silly way.

 

Monkey Man - 8/10
Brutal and badass film. Good director debut. I hope he makes more films!

 

Thelma 9/10
Not just a wonderful, charming film, but one I would show a film studies class to illustrate how different genre tropes can be used in new, inventive ways. This had all the set pieces of a great action film — chases, computer hacking, heists, explosions etc. — but everything sprung organically from how the main characters experience the world. Such a gem.

 

Rewatched this tonight — it's only 38 minutes — and I think it's one of the best films I've ever seen. The optimism and the beauty stood out more this time, and it glides along on this senselessly attractive combination of the dreamlike and the sober. Incredibly evocative.

 

The Bikeriders - 9/10
Great performances from everyone. Interesting true story.

 

Trying to add anything to a conversation about Pretty Woman in 2024 is a tall order. There is so much to break down about its portrayal of the politics of class, gender, and sex work, and it is a very long and drawn out way of saying the filmmakers did not think through all of that too much. Any enjoyment of a movie like this requires you to not think too deeply of the overarching morals that a story like this gives, but on a basic level it is weird how plain Gere's character is. We are supposed to believe that they fall in love by looking beyond his money and her looks, but he doesn't seem to have a single piece of personality.

Hellraiser is surprising in its lack of Pinhead in the way the absence of Jason in the first Friday the 13th is surprising. Some of the stuff is really off, like when the daughter does not realize her father is a fake while blood is pouring out of his neck and forehead. It is never really scary, although the designs of the demon are more interesting than towering figures like Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger.

 

Late Night With the Devil - 8/10
Really interesting concept. The whole movie is an episode of a late night talk show with a demonic possession and a skeptic. I went into this blind. I really liked the lead actor in this. I’ve only seen him in smaller roles.

 

Perfect Blue - 10/10
Wow…I get why this is so influential. Satoshi Kon is becoming one of my favorite directors. So far my ranking is
Paprika > Perfect Blue > Tokyo Godfathers

 

Oddity - 7.8/10

I think this worked for me a lot more than it did for some of you but I quite liked it. does everything it needs to and nothing it doesn’t.

 

I had always understood that Fast and the Furious owes a lot to Point Break, but Bigelow and the screenwriters should get points from all of those films for how flagrant the similarities are. Beyond the plot, it has a lot of that Generation X ethos of trying to find authenticity in opposition to the corporate world (Fight Club, almost every Linklater film, American Beauty). I knew about the Presidential masks in the robberies, but I was surprised that the characters would take the time to learn about their Presidents a little bit to stay in character. An unintentional hilarious moment.

The Prince of Egypt is fine, but it is more interesting in its depiction of a bygone era: the secular religious kids' product. Even before I had any concept of religion I remember Rugrats doing episodes on the Jewish faith, but it was told in such a stripped-down way as to not really mean anything at all. It is very in-character for Disney or other corporations to take classic stories and strip them of any problematic context, but it is very hard to imagine them to go straight-up Old Testament these days.

 

Strange Darling - …/10

one of the most unsettling movies I’ve ever see. I’m still processing it.
The twist is pretty big, so go into it blind.

 

I’ve seen the trailer but from that it feels way more like a thriller than a horror movie. I’ll probably give it a watch but it’s not exactly exciting imo

 

Yeah, I’d say it’s a thriller.

 

I Was Born, But… (Yasujirō Ozu, 1932)

An early Ozu, and one of his most regarded silent comedies, which he remade into Good Morning (complete with comical farting noises) 25 or so years later. There's no farting here, which admittedly is harder to do in silent cinema. I wonder when the first fart joke in cinema was? I bet someone made it work in silent cinema somehow. Googling it and everywhere seems to say Blazing Saddles, which can't be true, as Good Morning was 15 years earlier!

Two young boys are shook by their father's subservience to his boss, and his willingness to play the fool in a group. The first inkling in childhood that parents are not heroes, is always traumatic in its own way, that realisation that your dad is just a man like all others.

Furthermore, they don't just realise this, they also realise that there are other, invisible to children, economic classes which shape the world and your place in it. Being stronger or smarter than someone is not all that matters in adulthood, which comes as a shock to the two boys.

Watching this as an adult, and probably at about the same age as the dad here, it's easy to watch a lot of it from his viewpoint and empathy. Even though it may be irrational, he still becomes a fool and failure in his son's eyes, which is hard. Though the final realisation that everyone feels that way about their dad, and some of the other kids think he's cool, is pretty sweet.

Watching old films about children makes me think of my grandparents. The boys here are born before any of my grandparents, and it's so hard to imagine my grandad as a little, naughty crying child, and equally crazy to think that in ~50 years, my future grandkids will be unable to imagine me as anything other than an old man.

 

Amarcord had fart jokes a year before Blazing Saddles.

 

Toy Story 3 - 10/10
So good that I almost don't care that it's explicitly anti-Communist propaganda. Where Toy Story 2 felt content to repeat some story beats from the first film, this one manages to explore unique tones (some fascinatingly dark) and emotional arcs through new settings, characters, and some of the best computer-generated animation I've ever seen. (It's seriously the sweet spot between the first two films and the uncanny photorealism of the fourth). Some folks might scoff and call it children's media, but this is beautiful, funny, harrowing, and heartfelt cinema. One of Pixar's absolute best.

Rear Window - 8.5/10
Always happy when a film lives up to the hype. I've seen so many parodies of this that I thought I had it pegged, but where those parodies usually focus on some sort of twist, Rear Window is content with the tension it creates. I get the Hitchcock love now; he seemed to be, by all means, a real asshole, but also a true talent when it came to visionary cinematography and pressure-cooker writing. The way we see exactly (and typically, only) what Stewart sees is such a smart (and really, the only) way to shoot this film, and it works so well. Having him neg Grace Kelly for whatever reason is such a strange and funny decision. A film so well-done that it doesn't require a twist to satisfy audiences, even 70 years later.

Cemetery Man - 8/10
Truly one of the stranger pieces of horror media I've ever seen, and I mean that as a compliment. There's almost no semblance of plot here, but being dropped into a world where it is simply accepted that the dead come back to life and that someone has the job of putting them back down after they rise from the grave is a great bit of world-building. The whole thing feels very surreal and dreamlike, and not just because of the great 90s practical effects and set design. There are some great performances here and some incredibly strange decisions that ultimately make the movie bolder and more likable, even when they don't make total sense. Considering its connection to a certain graphic novel and the fact that Scorsese called this one of his favorite Italian films of the 1990s, it might be the perfect handshake between cinephiles and comic book fans.

The Master - 10/10
I often think of how much easier my life would be if I joined a cult. If someone could convince me that they could take my anxiety and depression away and look after my needs, I would probably be pretty quick to pledge my allegiance to them. The Master is a film that operates in that exact headspace, and while the nods to scientology's origins are undeniably fascinating, this is a film more about the lack of and search for purpose, even when we know it's a lie. Everyone shows up to work here and it's a true who's who of character actors, with Hoffman and Phoenix obviously turning in great performances, but their relationship is the film's obvious center; Hoffman may be the titular Master who is capable of taming dragons and men alike, but it's Phoenix's inability to be tamed that keeps their relationship symbiotic. Visually beautiful and, at times, very darkly funny.

Milk & Serial - 8/10
According to Bloody Disgusting, this hour-long found-footage horror film on Youtube is one of the year's biggest hidden gems, and honestly, I'm inclined to agree. It doesn't exactly try anything new, but there's a twist or two I didn't see coming, and it does Host/Creep via internet vlogger thing very well. Much of it feels improvised in a very natural way, and the lead performance is very unsettling. As a whole, it feels a step above a lot of homegrown horror on Youtube that you might see, and while this isn't this team's first rodeo, it seems to be their best chance at catching a studio break. You likely already know whether this film will be for you or not, and if it is, you're gonna have a blast. Perfect runtime.

 

Alien Romulus: fun

 

fuck yeah, Rear Window

 

Eraserhead - 8/10, lmao wtf

I actually haven't seen any Lynch's work before besides a handful of Twin Peaks episodes (which I've started again), so this was a crazy ass place to start, thanks Blank Check

 

Every Lynch film is worth watching, even the strangeness of his version of Dune. He never really did the same thing twice.