Movies

Last Night in Soho – Opening Scene

Chill Movies, Video, Video (movie)

Such a great opening scene and Thomasin Mackenzie is just excellent here (as she is throughout the film). It does three things that most movies struggle with:

1) It immediately establishes Ellie’s character. Who she is. What she values. What she wants. How she is.

2) It provides a context for her life and circumstances, allowing the viewer to avoid minutes of boring exposition. And it’s all so effortless.

3) It also sets up that Ellie is maybe a little more attuned to the invisible world — maybe a little bit presentient — because she knows before her caretaker yells her name that it is going to happen, and that the news is probably good. This establishes the context for the entire rest of the movie.

And because I’ve seen the “behind the scenes” of this bit, I also know that what you see there is all a set. That’s not a real house, and not a real place. It’s all in some massive warehouse-like studio lot. It makes the scene better, so this is not a criticism, but notice that the hallway is quite a lot wider than a normal hallway would be in a house like that, and the doors a bit shorter, the furniture a bit smaller. This is to give Thomasin (and the cameras) room to maneuver, room to dance, while making her seem larger than life in the scene. It makes Ellie the focus while still giving you the clues needed to understand her. And the newspaper dress is great.

Every moment in every film scene is chosen, and this one chose everything just right. Such a brilliant setup. This is exactly how you show without telling.

Stake

Chill Movies

All the people who didn’t like the movie Presence — jeez, put the crack pipe down. That was a great film. Get off your high horse and realize that not every movie has to be a cookie cutter “the whole world is at stake” action extravaganza. There’s nothing wrong with a little introspection and calm.

Cages

Chill Movies, Video, Video (other)

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.

Grade A

Chill Movies

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.

And Scene

Chill Movies, Video

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.

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.