This film is how you use Rebecca Ferguson. Overall, Dr. Sleep was only ok. However, Rebecca as Rose the Hat…très magnifique. Also, “Rose the Hat” is one of the best character names ever.
As I noted about the weirdo in Les chambres rouges, it’s hard for a beautiful woman to read as creepy. Our girl Rebecca has no problem with this, though. She’s demented and ghoulish and a real scumbag.
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is a repetitive and unsatisfying film. I’d avoid it. It’s not wholly bad but it just feels like a TV show episode with a cliffhanger that got expanded into a film.
Did not care for it, and it gravely misused Rebecca Ferguson.
I love crash zooms.
The 1970s French version is good, but the American version of The Birdcage is such a great film. And I say that as someone who rarely enjoys farces.
That movie is just absolutely fun from end to end and never makes a false move. I was shocked by how much I liked it when I watched it soon after it came out. The casting choices were just perfect, and the chemistry between Nathan Lane and Robin Williams was unbeatable.
Recommended.
What’s the first movie you ever watched in theater?
The Black Hole (1979). Also one of my earliest memories.
And that was at a drive-in theater located approximately right here. That drive-in has been closed since the 1980s; no trace of it remains on the ground or on the internet.
The warm, natural color grading of 80s and 90s movies shot on film.
I’d like to point out that none of these movies have anything resembling “natural” color! The “warm, natural” vibe people remember from a lot of ’80s and ’90s movies isn’t some untouched neutral image. It’s just as crafted a look as any more modern film. Back then, the look and feel was created using the chosen film stock, lenses and filters, lighting, lab timing, and was optimized for the way those movies would’ve been viewed at the time. (In fact, many of those films would have had digital intermediates.)
How those films look is no more “natural” than the films created now. And those films were all produced using wildly different techniques and technologies.
By the way, of course there is NO SUCH THING as a “natural” image. It’s all constructed. It’s similar to philosophy. If you believe it’s pointless and shouldn’t exist, it just means you are then following someone else’s philosophy without even being aware of it.
The destruction that copyright causes.
One of Chantal Akerman’s films (among many others) cannot see the light of day because of music rights. This is true of many works that are unavailable due to copyright insanity.
Copyright should be destroyed.
The first pivotal conversation scene in David Fincher’s The Social Experiment had 99 takes.
Good illustration of the difference between beginners, intermediates and pros/experts. And it is vast.
In the film’s context, I prefer Anne’s and Heath’s version of the scene. It is integral to their already-revealed characters. Out of the context of the film, I think Nina’s and Logan’s (the non-Oscar pros) version is better as a disconnected scene.
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).
Her has really quite a different meaning now that we’ve seen how LLMs actually operate.
Samantha as AI slop and Theodore with AI-induced psychosis makes it an even sadder film than it already was.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.