Return of the RECENT VIEWING

[hippopotamus]

I find his relentless vertical and horizontal camera tracking visually tiresome - as though I'm trapped inside a video game or something.

Even so, I do find his some his movies engaging and I really did enjoy Isle of Dogs (and Grand Budapest Hotel).

DId you think it was relentless in these last two? See... I think he's getting better.

Meanwhile,



The new one from the guy who did The Lobster and Dogtooth. Plenty of disturbing weirdness, and it's since it's based on an ancient play by Euripides, it's okay that it doesn't really make sense. I liked it quite a bit.

Also, I, Tonya (a lot of fun, particularly the mother's performance), Three Billboards... (Sam Rockwell is great in it) and Lady Bird (good, but I already can't even remember it very well).

Is it just weird for no reason like The Lobster?
I want to watch it, and no doubt people will keep suggesting it to me like the other two because apparently everyone thinks of me when they think of surreal, weird films.

[Geezee]

^^^ I have that in my Netflix queue, although I understand it received what are euphemistically called "mixed reviews." I'm encouraged to hear a dissenting opinion!

Actually the reviews were rather positive all in all:

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gimme_danger

[CRITICS' SCORE]

95%
Average Rating: 7/10
Reviews Counted: 100
Fresh: 95
Rotten: 5
Critics Consensus: Its infectious enthusiasm for its subjects - and Iggy Pop's ingratiating presence - more than make up for the effortlessly entertaining Gimme Danger's relative lack of context or depth.

AUDIENCE SCORE

68%
liked it
Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 2,142

(my alteration and emphasis)

Hmm, okay. I suspect it's been graded on a curve by the critics, but I'm up for it!

On here it was pretty mixed.

viewtopic.php?t=132780

[Snarfyguy]

I find his relentless vertical and horizontal camera tracking visually tiresome - as though I'm trapped inside a video game or something.

Even so, I do find his some his movies engaging and I really did enjoy Isle of Dogs (and Grand Budapest Hotel).

DId you think it was relentless in these last two? See... I think he's getting better.

It didn't bother me so much, let's put it that way.

Is it just weird for no reason like The Lobster?

The Lobster was social satire and the weirdness was baked into the premise, where the new one is a more traditional revenge story, and the weirdness is in service to the conveyance of mood and atmosphere, so: eerie music, oddly stilted dialogue, unusual camerawork and so forth. It's certainly more straightforward in narrative terms, but also quite unsettling.

Putting all this stuff under the heading "weird" is likely a disservice because there's a lot going on in these movies.

[joels344]

I rewatched this for date night yesterday. I’ve always found it underrated in Christopher Nolan’s filmography and still do to this very day. What a brilliant piece of cinema.

[Darkness_Fish]

I rewatched this for date night yesterday. I’ve always found it underrated in Christopher Nolan’s filmography and still do to this very day. What a brilliant piece of cinema.

Yeah, I like that film an awful lot, too. I also think the book it's based on, by Christopher Priest, was rather magnificent.

[pcqgod]

A Quiet Place (2018)

The premise of this movie doesn't stand too much scrutiny and I wasn't crazy about the resolution, but otherwise it is a wonderfully scary flick that keeps up the tension from the opening frame to the end credits.

[KeithPratt]

Just making my way through this. Astonishing stuff.

[Matt Wilson]

The Awful Truth

One of those classic '30s screwball comedies which seemed to be much more well-known at one time than at the present day. It's said this is the first time Cary Grant was Cary Grant onscreen, whatever that means. Topper preceded this by a few months and he certainly seems like Cary Grant in that one. Irene Dunne is perfection, the script sizzles and the print is what it is (the original negative was lost year ago). I wonder how people in the depression liked seeing rich folks onscreen frolicking away and never seeming to be working. I guess it took them away from their humdrum lives, much like the Marvel universe films do for the masses today. Only these were much better.

[Jimbo]

Darkest Hour (2017)

This is the second new movie I've watched in the past year in which Dunkirk is a major plot-driving element...

Because it's propaganda. It is saying get ready. War is coming. Our parents and grandparents did their part it will soon be time to do yours.

Not that it wasn't a good movie. The political ins and outs were interestingly shown and the actor did a job humanizing Churchill whom I always imagined as Churchillian, always tough and crusty. But of course, he was just a guy who had a tough job to do and this is how he probably behaved when he was off stage. I wonder, however, if his ride on the underground actually happened. I actually started bawling when they said, "Never!"

[Darkness_Fish]

Still one of my favourite horror films. Never got around to watching any of the crappy sequels yet, despite being something of a connoisseur of shitty horror franchises.

[Darkness_Fish]

Absolutely ages since I last saw this. A nice, slow moving romance between a middle-aged business man who lost his wife young, and a lonely twenty-something from a troubled background. Delightful.

[Snarfyguy]

Wake In Fright

Doc Tydon: All the little devils are proud of hell
John Grant: You mean you don’t think The Yabba is the greatest little place on earth?
Doc Tydon: Could be worse
John Grant: How?
Doc Tydon: Supply of beer could run out


That’s the thing about fictional outback town The Yabba. It is hell, the locals are proud of it and like hell, you can never leave. John Grant is a primary teacher working in the middle of nowhere, which in Australia really does mean the middle of nowhere, as part of some government programme whereby teachers have to work a fixed amount of time at the behest of the government. Grant is resentful, bored of his job and dreams of escaping to Sydney and beyond but his only hope of escape is to buy himself out of his contract which would cost $1000 so he’s stuck here. Setting off for a holiday to visit his girlfriend in Sydney he travels to The Yabba, a small mining in order to get a flight. The locals are hospitable in that typically Australian way (take a drink!) but there’s an immediate undercurrent of tension not helped by Grants obvious dislike of the place rooted in his own intellectual snobbery and class unease.

There’s nothing to do in the Yabba except drink (and drink) and gamble and sensing an opportunity to escape his job he ends up losing all his money in some simple gambling game and so he’s stuck here for the foreseeable future until he can figure a way to get the money together for a flight. Things start to get worse rapidly as he stumbles upon a group of friends who take him under their wing. One of the friends is the enigmatic Doc Tydon (played with typical brilliance by Donald Pleasence) a disgraced alcoholic doctor who has embraced his base instincts and self-destructive nature of the Yabba and sees it as an opportunity to express his true nature. Grant obviously doesn’t fit in with these men and there’s a threat of violence but he decides to embrace the Yabba and full off drink they go hunting kangaroos. At this point the movie becomes increasingly delirious and strange and this scene in particular, which uses footage of an actual kangaroo hunt, is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen a movie. There’s a level of cruelty, debasement and horror here which is really taps into something deeply uncomfortable as Grants shadow self and primal nature emerges under pressure from his new friends culminating in a bizarre (almost) initiation ceremony where he ends up stabbing a wounded kangaroo to death. In the aftermath Grant resolves to finally leave Yabba but of course leaving hell isn’t quite that easy.

Like a lot of Aussie horror it deals with the tension between city and rural, something which it shares with contemporary films like Deliverance and Straw Dogs and it also shares with the latter the clash between “intellectual” and “working men”. But it goes deeper than this too, delving into Australian masculinity and its relationship with the natural world (the director was horrified when he witnessed the kangaroo hunt and used the footage to highlight its barbarism after consulting wildlife organisations). It’s hardly a flattering portrait of rural Australia but it’s not patronising either. There is community in Yabba, friendliness, generosity but at its heart is something dark and troubling and Grants confrontation with this leaves him irrevocably changed.

Amazingly this wasn't restored until 2009 but it's a great (Australian) film and well worth watching if you want something a bit challenging and disturbing.

Thanks for the recommendation. I really enjoyed it (if that's the right word - its realism is brutal), although the DVD I watched was damaged and the last 20 minutes or so weren't playable. I suppose it was inevitable where Grant would wind up, but I don't know how he got from the "big debauch" back to where he started. Anyway, it kind of put me mind of Heart of Darkness.

The gambling scene alone was worth the price of admission and the hunting scene is, well, yeah, pretty singular.

EDIT: per Wikipedia, quite a lot happens in those 20 minutes.

Also recently,



Season 1 episode 1

[Jimbly]

saw the new Avengers movie last night with the boys, great fun if you like that sort of thing, which I do.

[Goat Boy]

Absolutely ages since I last saw this. A nice, slow moving romance between a middle-aged business man who lost his wife young, and a lonely twenty-something from a troubled background. Delightful.

Sooo good

[pcqgod]

Paterno (2018, HBO)

Clearly not really a movie about the disgraced college football legend so much as the scandal that brought him down, which explains why Paterno himself seems such a minor character in the overall story. Al Pacino plays him as a somewhat doddering, short-sighted man whose focus on winning football games has clearly left him unable to see important things happening around him. Near the end of the movie, someone being interviewed about the fall of Paterno tersely asks (paraphrasing from memory), "Why is anyone even talking about Paterno? You hear about someone doing something inappropriate with boys, you tell someone right away. Of course he gets fired."

[sloopjohnc]

[sloopjohnc]

saw the new Avengers movie last night with the boys, great fun if you like that sort of thing, which I do.

The movie reviewer in my paper said there was just too much there there. Too many plots and too many characters.

[sloopjohnc]

Where the Damned film bummed me out, this one makes me bounce around.

Yeah, I liked it a lot. I've seen it a couple times.

[Matt Wilson]

A Pistol for Ringo & The Return of Ringo

I'd always wanted to see The Return of Ringo since it routinely pops up on lists of great Italian westerns, but honestly, A Pistol for Ringo is practically as good. Both were released in 1965, a bit early in the Spaghetti western era, though A Fistful of Dollars was in '64, and both have almost the exact same casts though all playing different characters. Arrow's new double feature has remastered prints, extras, and commentaries.

[Darkness_Fish]

Avengers: Shark Jump. To be fair, it's better than the last Thor or Guardians film, it doesn't quite suffer from the same level of smug indifference to narrative. However, it does essentially takes us right back (cue Annie Wilkes rant in Misery) to the old Flash Gordon/Rocket Man serials, as no doubt everything that happened in this one will be rolled back by some macguffin or other. If they had the guts to stick with the ending(s), retrospectively you could claim it as a brave film. But they won't.