Movies

Storied

Chill Movies, TV Shows

One of the reasons I love movies and TV shows and thinking about how they’re made — the immense care and craft that goes into them — is I spent so much of my life with others telling me how my story would go. What my limitations were and how I deserved nothing because I was weak and terrible. That’s the tale they had me signed up for against my wishes.

I like seeing how you can take control of the narrative, seize the diegesis and shape it to your own will. All the world’s a stage and all that. It’s a cliché but it’s also true.

Movies and TV shows taught me how I could direct my own story. And I did just that.

Tine

Chill Movies, Video, Video (movie)

I loved Constantine and might watch it again one day (I rarely re-watch anything). It’s such a beautifully-shot film. And not surprisingly, at least part of the reason it looks so gorgeous is because it was shot on those unmatched Panavision Panaflex Platinum cameras with Panavision Primo lenses.

The video hints at it, but I think the reason the movie flopped is it does not hold your hand. It kicks you into the world and lets you sink or swim. Most sink because they want their thinking done for them. And Constantine is just not that kind of film.

Cast

Chill Movies, Video, Video (movie)

Great analysis of that scene. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is such an excellent film and that scene is perfect. One of my favorites of any film made in the last decade. I missed on first watch that it is James Dean in the mural in the background when the girls are dumpster diving.

The thing about a Tarantino film (and really most films to a somewhat lesser extent) is that nothing is accidental.

Drown In You

Chill Movies, Video, Video (movie)

One film where I disagreed with Roger Ebert pretty strongly is the bathtub drowning scene in Constantine. He disliked it (and the film) for the same reasons that I love it: the scene is horrible and beautiful. It’s nasty, and not in the sense of any gore or even anything sexual. It’s horrifying what Constantine does to Angela — both his direct actions of bringing her to the edge of death by drowning and what you find out she’s witnessing immediately after. Weisz’s acting when Angela realizes Constantine does not intend to let her up is perfect.

It’s all just so wrong. And that’s what makes it a great scene.

Ebert was not a fan of horror. And it shows in his misassessment of the scene and film.

Presence

Chill Movies, Video, Video (other)

Presence is such a good film. It’s not horror, really, for all you horror haters. It’s more of a psychological thriller with some few horror elements. It’s mostly about misogyny and family dynamics. And it’s shot so beautifully. Probably my favorite film I’ve seen in the last couple of years.

Good analysis of how it was shot. (And wow, Callina is so different than her character Chloe in the film!)

Twin Cut

Chill Movies

Ah what the fuck.

I had no idea. I need to check that commentary out. I knew Linda had an identical twin, but I didn’t know that’s how that shot was created.

Bergh

Chill Movies, Review

I watched the Soderbergh film Presence in the theater earlier today.

It was a good film, but it will be polarizing. If you do not like Soderbergh’s quieter, more introspective works, you probably also will not like this one as it is indeed very Soderberghian.

The performances make the film. The plot is thin, but then that is intentional. The viewpoint is the point in a sense. It is not a horror film, really, but an examination of pointless misogynistic evil and how it reverberates through time.

It also had one of the most uncomfortable scenes I’ve experienced in a movie in a long while. I know this will sound bad, but there’s a part that you’re thinking will be “only” sexual assault — then it moves to something else altogether and you wish it’d go back to the other thing.

Callina Liang both grounds and elevates the film with unexpected depth. The rest of the cast is really good as well.

Recommended.

Ferris of Them All

Chill Movies

Guardian writers on their ultimate feelgood movies: ‘For when humanity lets me down.’

I don’t watch movies this way so I don’t really have a “feelgood” movie as such, but if I had to choose one it’d be Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

It’s just such a fun movie with a perfect tone that blends so much about humanity together incredibly well. The film feels like a pastiche because it is, and works all the better for it.