Movies

Slice Of

Chill Movies

Quentin Tarantino obviously likes and appreciates women in all their complexity and contradictions. In his works, they are always fully-realized characters and not sugar-coated.

This is precisely why feminists despise him so. He does not subscribe to the socially-mandated feminist women are wonderful beliefs.

If he pretended women were always flawless saints, they’d love him. But he refuses and has women as real flawed people operating in a fallen world. That makes him a good writer and director, but a bad feminist (to today’s pseudo-feminists).

K Circ

Chill Movies

I don’t care what anyone says, the line “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K” from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is one of the best from any film.

The movie itself is super fun but doesn’t hold up today, really. You had to be there in the late 1980s to really understand where it was coming from and what it was doing. With modern eyes it seems tone deaf or weirdly stilted, but it did not then as the entire mode of the late 1980s and early 1990s was that way in reality. To us now, though, it all seems affected and overtly, almost suspiciously, sincere.

And to Gen Z, the film would be utterly incomprehensible.

Un rouge plus rouge

Chill Movies, Video, Video (movie)

I love this entire set of scenes; a masterclass in filmmaking. And it’s all so nasty. You feel kind of dirty after watching it. Which is, of course, the point.

But it’s all so perfect. Juliette Gariépy just nails the creepy psycho vibe (very hard to do for an exceptionally beautiful woman, by the way!) and the music intensifies the feeling of dread that is and dread to be. I also like it because the director (et al.) made sonic and blocking choices I never would’ve considered — and these made the scene so much better than my tendencies here would have. (And yes, the entire film is in 4:3 format. It’s not some YouTube upload issue.)

Apologies, this is all in French with no subtitles and I’m too tired to translate, but the visuals, music and non-speech here are what really matter anyway.

Les chambres rouges

Chill Movies, Review
Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne

I watched Les chambres rouges. It was quite good, and sneaky in an audience-respecting way. That’s hard to pull off, being a bit devious but not insulting to your viewers. Warning: spoilers will follow if you read beyond this point.

The film manages this rare feat in two ways. First, it casts an exceptionally beautiful lead, even by Hollywood standards1. Most people equate beauty with goodness, kindness and even intelligence so that is tier one of the film’s strategy to deceive you. It usually bothers me when someone one out of a million attractive is the star, but in this case it works. The second bit of the film’s approach to throwing your judgement off balance is having another person who is obviously delusional for the putative protag, Kelly-Anne, to play against. It unites the viewer with Kelly-Anne against someone who is obviously a bit nuts and who is not composed, not that intelligent, and who is not emotionally stable. Only later do you realize that Clem is little more than Kelly-Anne’s pet that she is toying with for amusement.

Clementine is a perfect contrast to Kelly-Anne, who is more tightly-wound, far more intelligent, but is also the kind of crazy that Clem’s more mundane tendency to believe the best of even clearly-demented people cannot even begin to touch. The movie does an excellent job of seeing the world mostly through Kelly-Anne’s eyes, and any time a film manages that you start to empathize with the viewpoint even if the person whose eyes you’re seeing through is not really worthy of that.

Laurie Babin as Clementine

Kelly-Anne is not violent. Or at least that is not shown. But she is certainly a psychopath of some type. She enjoys watching snuff films and spends over a million dollars to obtain one. That it is used the solve the case is only incidental to her goals. Her real motive in purchasing the killer’s “lost” footage was the thrill of being able to view it and then to use it to inflict psychological torture on the parents of one of the murdered girls.

(And note that this isn’t a horror movie. There is never any violence shown and you only hear some screams and a saw or something at one point in the background, but never see any violent acts. This is a psychological thriller. A very dark one.)

And kudos to the movie to having one of the most intensely fucked up scenes in film history that involved no violence, no gore, no blood, and barely any movement at all. And that’s when (again, spoilers!) Kelly-Anne reveals by removing her overcoat in the courtroom that she has dressed up like one of the murdered girls in an effort to connect with the killer and to further antagonize the family. When she puts in the blue contacts and applies those fake braces…dang.

I recommend the film. It’s one of those that gets better the more you think about it.

  1. Yes, I know this is not a Hollywood film. But Hollywood sets the standard for all film, in a sense.

Pulp Up

Chill Movies

I know it makes me an Evil and Bad Man in the eyes of many women, but the dialogue in Pulp Fiction is just so spotless. It’s an unrelenting stream of the most brilliant patter written for film.

I think I know why there is such deep hatred for Pulp Fiction among so many women1. That’s because it is probably the most masculine movie ever made. And I don’t mean the jock-y frat boy masculinity many men (and women) mistake for masculinity. No, I mean, it’s all about and based on how the masculine psyche actually functions. Exaggerated a little, sure, as all movies are. But basically correct.

Many women say to men, “We want to see how you really are.” Or, even more ludicrously, “I want to be treated just like a man.”

And to this I say:

1. No you don’t.
2. No, you really really, really don’t.

Pulp Fiction demonstrates raw masculinity and its concern for power structures, the casualness of violence in many men’s worlds, and that nearly all men care far more about what you actually do rather than what you say, or claim, or how you look, or seem to be. This is very different than how women relate, which is more often based on social presentation and though it involves just as much (arguably more) competition, their terms of the social contract are much more subsumed in obfuscation and plausible deniability.

So I can understand why women strongly dislike the movie. It must be for many of them like watching a scrambled film in a foreign language where scary people do bad things for unclear reasons. I would not like that either, to be fair.

  1. Though not all women hate the work. A friend of mine was goofing around with the remote in a hotel room and turned the TV on. Pulp Fiction happened to be playing and she sat rapt watching it. “I’d forgotten how damn good this movie is,” she said.

Comp

Chill Movies, Video, Video (other)

I wish it had more actual “behind the scenes,” but Sophie Thatcher has a brain in her head so she’s worth watching in interviews. Incidentally, Companion is my favorite movie of the past couple of years.

One of the outfits Sophie is wearing isn’t in the film so that must’ve been from a deleted bit. And she does such a great job with the German scene.

Animoot

Chill Cool, Movies

Thinking about CGI and all that stuff, here’s a clip of Anchors Aweigh! from 1945 that is another highpoint in visual effects.

[image or embed]

— Emily ✨ (@emilyoram.bsky.social) March 13, 2025 at 6:27 AM

That is amazing, but every one of those frames is hand-painted. That scene is 94 seconds long, so that’d be 2,253 frames. 2,253 frames x 30 mins animation etc. per frame = 67,590 minutes. Which is 1,127 hours or just under 47 days.

In other words, that scene alone would’ve taken just under 47 days of animator time to produce1. There’s no way CGI would take that long. A comparable scene with CGI would take a day or two of animator time. Big, big difference.

  1. Of course, multiple animators worked on it. The actual scene probably took a week or so to make once filming and editing was complete.