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What DVD / Video did you watch last night? (pt3)

Knives Out by Ryan Johnson, which is good fun. It’s a modern take on an Agatha Christie-style drawing room mystery, was a big hit critically and financially last year and it is exactly the type of film "they don't make them like" anymore. It's also a big "fuck you" to Trump's America and a take-down of the 1%, not dissimilar to Parasite in the way it frames social satire as a genre film.

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Knives Out by Ryan Johnson, which is good fun. It’s a modern take on an Agatha Christie-style drawing room mystery, was a big hit critically and financially last year and it is exactly the type of film "they don't make them like" anymore. It's also a big "fuck you" to Trump's America and a take-down of the 1%, not dissimilar to Parasite in the way it frames social satire as a genre film.

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It's wonderful. They're all so grotesque.
 
Watched the black comedy/thriller Come to Daddy. Urban hipster gets letter from his father who abandoned the family long ago and visits him in the middle of nowhere. It turns into the worst father/son reunion imaginable, there are plot twists along the way and people end up dying gruesomely. Loved it.

 
Knives Out by Ryan Johnson, which is good fun. It’s a modern take on an Agatha Christie-style drawing room mystery, was a big hit critically and financially last year and it is exactly the type of film "they don't make them like" anymore. It's also a big "fuck you" to Trump's America and a take-down of the 1%, not dissimilar to Parasite in the way it frames social satire as a genre film.

View attachment 197888
When you put it like that, it sounds like what last year's Murder Mystery tried to be :D
 
Finally got around to watching Booksmart over the last couple of days. Really liked it, even if it was just a female-driven rehash of Superbad. Some of the subplots were a bit hit-and-miss, but all of the leads were really good, the dialogue was smart, and it didn't rely at all on gross-out humour to get laughs. (It's on Amazon Prime for free now!)
 
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Upstream Color.

Which is... different. The life cycle of a larva with psychic abilities. And pigs. And a love story (between humans). Engrossing and bewildering, a magnificent soundtrack.
I’ve never seen a film which benefits as much from a rewatch as this one does. It gets a lot less bewildering. :)
 
Color Out of Space, based on the Lovecraft story and which is Richard Stanley’s return to feature filmmaking after several decades. After two genre films in the early 90s, which showed promise (but weren’t all that great IMO) Stanley probably became most famous for the disastrous The Island of Dr. Moreau movie, starring a barely alive Marlon Brando. Stanley, who originated the project, got bootet off it early into the shoot, which led to a trainwreck of a movie and a hilarious documentary of everything which can go wrong on a film, going wrong:


His new film has been met with praise. There is a lot of goodwill towards Stanley, whose career is considered to have been unfairly derailed. Unfortunately this isn’t very good. It‘s got a reasonably large budget (nice cinematography and score) and a movie star in Nicolas Cage. After the first half of the movie showing promise, it goes down the drain when it should be getting off the ground. Several characters introduced early on, get lost in the shuffle. Once various, extraterrestrial mishaps start plaguing the family at the centre of this, we have nobody to root for. There is a character who should be the lead, who we are introduced to in the beginning and who then only pops up again in the end.

This is about an otherworldly event which rapidly mutates all life, but what we get are a few sub-The Thing effects, a CGI bug and Cage doing his crazy-shtick. The lighting effects which cause the mutations look like some 80s pop video effect.

The recent Annihilation by Alex Garland dealt with the same premise, far more imaginatively and thoughtfully.

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Judy, which I watched despite my general dislike of biopics. It is a run-of-the-mill biopic, but Zellweger really knocks it out of the park. Her performance drew me in despite the cliches. She goes beyond impersonation and mannerisms and really captures Judy Garland, I was doubtful but she deserved her Oscar win. The only times when this doesn’t quite work is when she has to sing. She does an OK approximation of Garland’s singing style, she just doesn’t have the pipes. Still better than expected and quite touching.
 
Color Out of Space, based on the Lovecraft story and which is Richard Stanley’s return to feature filmmaking after several decades. After two genre films in the early 90s, which showed promise (but weren’t all that great IMO) Stanley probably became most famous for the disastrous The Island of Dr. Moreau movie, starring a barely alive Marlon Brando. Stanley, who originated the project, got bootet off it early into the shoot, which led to a trainwreck of a movie and a hilarious documentary of everything which can go wrong on a film, going wrong:


His new film has been met with praise. There is a lot of goodwill towards Stanley, whose career is considered to have been unfairly derailed. Unfortunately this isn’t very good. It‘s got a reasonably large budget (nice cinematography and score) and a movie star in Nicolas Cage. After the first half of the movie showing promise, it goes down the drain when it should be getting off the ground. Several characters introduced early on, get lost in the shuffle. Once various, extraterrestrial mishaps start plaguing the family at the centre of this, we have nobody to root for. There is a character who should be the lead, who we are introduced to in the beginning and who then only pops up again in the end.

This is about an otherworldly event which rapidly mutates all life, but what we get are a few sub-The Thing effects, a CGI bug and Cage doing his crazy-shtick. The lighting effects which cause the mutations look like some 80s pop video effect.

The recent Annihilation by Alex Garland dealt with the same premise, far more imaginatively and thoughtfully.

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I was looking forward to this, in fact narrowly missed a preview double bill of this last night with Little Joe (which also looks promising). Nicolas Cage, Richard Stanley and HP Lovecraft and a poster like this:
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made it look like a recipe for entertaining derangement.
 
You dodged a bullet, I thought Little Joe was even worse. The publicity makes Color Out of Space look like another Mandy. It’s watchable enough and starts out promisingly but then it never really delivers and I’d rather watch Annihilation again.
 
Brassic - This comedy series set in some Lancashire type small town about the adventures of a bi-polar likely lad and his mates is seriously worth watching . Its consistently funny , well scripted , fast paced and probably enhanced if you've ever set foot in one of these places. Too easy to be pigeonholed as just another shameless type comedy ,even though the writer worked on the third series apparantly , this is set exactly in one of those northern towns where after Blair the lack of meaningful jobs created extended adolescence . Think Early Doors for the post DReam generation.Reccomended.
 
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Maborosi by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Sometimes a great filmmaker just passes you by, despite reading about how good their films are for decades. I finally caught up with Hirokazu Kore-eda with his film Shoplifters and even that a year after it came out. After it instantly became one of my favourite films of the last few years, I ended up getting a BFI blu-ray box set of his early films. Last night I watched his debut feature from 1995. With some early films you have to accept that a filmmaker is finding their voice or learning their craft, but not here. This is a masterpiece out of the gate.

Yumiko and Ikuo met as kids, married and just had a baby. They are a young working class couple living in Osaka but they appear happy and it's clear that Yumiko is deeply in love with her husband. Then one day she receives the news that her husband has died. He got hit by a train, an apparent suicide. The film moves on a few years. Yumiko has agreed to an arranged marriage to a widower who has a young daughter and she moves to a small seaside town with her son to join her new husband. She appears content, the new husband is kind and the two children get along well. After a brief visit to Osaka to visit friends and relatives, memories of Ikuo come flooding back and with it, her never really having come to terms with why he committed suicide. After she returns to her family, Yumiko becomes withdrawn. The film avoids melodrama or big moments, it's all in the details and in the expressions of the lead actress. Then the end packs an emotional wallop, I still get teary just thinking about it.

I've got three more films to go with the box set and then I'm going to get my hands on everything Hirokazu Kore-eda has directed.

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Gemini man. Rubbish. Really weird cinematography which is probably down to being filmed with 3D cameras. It felt like I was watching a bunch of cut scenes from a video game. In fact it would probably have been more suited as a video game story. 5/10
 
Gemini man. Rubbish. Really weird cinematography which is probably down to being filmed with 3D cameras. It felt like I was watching a bunch of cut scenes from a video game. In fact it would probably have been more suited as a video game story. 5/10
Ang Lee seems to have become preoccupied with pushing new technology over the last few years, rather than making good films. This was supposed to showcase HFR (high frame rate) in combination with 3D, a technology most cinemas are not equipped to display and therefore only a few people have seen the film in the way it was supposed to be shown. HFR is supposed to feature an unprecedented level of detail and realism. Gemini Man is a film which has been in various stages of development since the mid-90s and was long considered to be one of the best unproduced screenplay due to its central hook. So it's odd that the thing most critics have complained about is its plot. Over the years other films have come along with a similar premise (Ryan Johnson's Looper) , so that's one reason it's not that novel anymore.
 
Brassic - This comedy series set in some Lancashire type small town about the adventures of a bi-polar likely lad and his mates is seriously worth watching . Its consistently funny , well scripted , fast paced and probably enhanced if you've ever set foot in one of these places. Too easy to be pigeonholed as just another shameless type comedy ,even though the writer worked on the third series apparantly , this is set exactly in one of those northern towns where after Blair the lack of meaningful jobs created extended adolescence . Think Early Doors for the post DReam generation.Reccomended.
That looks good. Is it on telly or on DVD/streaming?
 
Late night - a movie about a talk show host (Emma Thompson) who is facing the end of her career unless she can make her act relevant. In steps Mindy Kailing to save the show with some woke humour. A terrible movie.

Joker - I liked it. The background of austerity in 1970's Gothem, the sense of alienation, being left behind while Wall Street and Thomas Wayne own the place was well done. A tale about how having no hope, no life other than day to day struggle, of being seen as vermin, can turn people to prejudice and nihilism.

Heimat - Life in Germany from the end of the War to the 1980's. Just got through the first disc. Loved it.
 
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