Raxivace's 2021 Movies or: (Neo General-Chat V for Vendetta)

[Raxivace]

I have returned.

1. Knights of the Round Table (1953, Dir. Richard Thorpe) - A pretty bland retelling of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. I have not read the whole version of Malory's yet (It's very, very, very long and I decided to read Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian first since they're not only older but all five of them combined are still significantly shorter than Le Morte d'Arthur), but it makes some kind of weird changes. Like removing the entire incest angle of the story with Mordred. And making Lancelot a hero who avenges Camelot.

Beyond that though, its just a bit of a slog to watch, especially compared to something like Kurosawa's samurai films that are being made around this same time. Having seen several of his films now too, Thorpe is kind of a nothing director which is a shame to say about a guy that worked on something as good as The Wizard of Oz.

2. Skyfall (Rewatch, 2012, Dir. Sam Mendes) - Still quite good. Javier Bardem really steals the show here.

3. The Umbrella Man (2011, Dir. Errol Morris) A documentary short about the “Umbrella Man" in the Zapruder film. Its pretty self-explanatory and short at just a few minutes in length, so I'll just link it here.



4. The Dragon Dentist (2014, Dir. Ohtaro Maijo & Kazuya Tsurumaki) - Time to finally start back up with the Animator Expo shorts from Anno and Studio Khara. This one was about soldiers of some kind that get absorbed into dragons through their teeth or something, kind of weird.

5. Hill Climb Girl (2014, Dir. Azuma Tani) - This Animator Expo short is about a girl who races a boy on bicycles. The boy keeps winning these races, but the girl finally comes ahead through effort and determination. Its pretty cute, though some of the CG was a bit wonky at times.

6. Carnage (2014, Dir. Akira Honma) - This Animator Expo short is a stylish little western of all things. Its basic revenge story but it's a pretty fun five or so minutes- really wish there were more animated westerns like this- while Ford and Leone have probably done most of what can done with westerns in live action between the two of them (Not to discount any of the other great western directors of course), I really do feel animation could probably exploit some new things from that genre.

7. 20min Walk From Nishi-Ogikubo Station, 2 Bedrooms, Living Room, Dining Room, Kitchen, 2mos Deposit, No Pets Allowed (2014, Dir. Takeshi Honda & Mahiro Maeda) - This Animator Short was very thoughtful. It poses the question “What if Franz Kafka's Metamorphoses wasn't about a guy waking up as a bug, but instead about a woman shrinking down to the size of a bug?" The answer of course is that if a woman shrunk down to that size, she would be naked because none of her clothes would fit her anymore and then she would have to run around in her apartment because her boyfriend or husband or roommate or whoever would see her as a bug and try to crush her because who wants a bug running around in their apartment? I'm glad anime exists to explore deep, existential themes like this.

8. Tomorrow from There (2015, Dir. Akemi Hayashi) - Weird music video thing where a girl is bored through her humdrum life, until she imagines it as fantastical for a bit, and then is able to get through her life again. I didn't quite get what this one was going for to be honest.

9. Yamadeloid (2015, Dir. Masahiro Emoto & Takashi Horiuchi) - Similar to Tomorrow from There, this Animator Expo Short is essentially a music video, this one about a singing samurai. He travels to villages, falls in love, fights some dudes etc.

10. Power Plant No. 33 (2015, Yasuhiro Yoshiura) - A giant sleeping kaiju is used as a power source for a town. A robot flys in and seems to attack the kaiju (Or maybe the town itself?); this wakes the kaiju up and they fight. The kaiju wins, and then scutters on into the ocean, now leaving the town without its main source of power. Its neat little short- perhaps interesting as some kind of environmental fable.

11. Kanón (2015, Dir. Mahiro Maeda) - Man, I couldn't tell you what happened in this one exactly. Something about Adam from the Bible destroying the world, and then God forcing Adam to repopulate it, and then Adam's creations getting mad at him. It was uh something.

12. Sex & Violence with Machspeed (2015, Dir. Hiroyuki Imaishi) - This is beyond reviewing. No review can capture whatever the hell this short was. It is impossible.

13. Obake-chan (2015, Dir. Shigeto Koyama) - Weird misadventures of a ghost girl who likes to drink milk. It sure references Eva a lot too, to the point they play an instrumental version of Kom Susser Tod over the credits.

14. Tsukikage no Tokio ~Tokio of the Moon's Shadow~ (2015, Dir. Takanobu Mizuno) - Some weird mecha thing about a kid who lives on the moon and fights a monster with his robot in outer space. Didn't leave a huge impression.

15. Three Fallen Witnesses (2015, Dir. Satoru Utsunomiya) - In the future DNA evidence is used to recreate crime scenes, including the moments of a victim's death. A man is accused of murdering his wife.

Its an interesting short and the kind of idea that's been done before, but the ending here was very ambiguous to me.

16. The Diary of Ochibi (2015, Dir. Masashi Kawamura) - Cute little stop motion thing about a little guy who lives in a lunch box, then on fans of some kind, then as a pile of leaves, and then on a mug. Apparently based on a manga by Moyocco Anno.

Let's see, that's about half of the Animator Expo shorts I hadn't seen yet. Next post about them will likely be a long one like this again.

---------------------------------------

The Sopranos (Season 3, 2001) - This season as a whole was kind of strange. It starts out very strong despite having to work around the death of the actress that plays Tony's mother Livia (I particularly like the first episode structured around the FBI trying to wiretap the Soprano home), but that also feels like it kind of undoes a lot of what was going on at the end of season 2. Like even Janice being written back into this season after what a big deal it was to make her leave at the end of season 2 was just odd (And her fight over Livia's CD collection with the one legged Russian woman was kind of weak). Still, Livia's death also leads to some great moments too, like the way clips of The Public Enemy are used to show the kind of mother Tony wished he had in episode 2. Episode 2 in general with the funeral was a riot.

I feel like after the first two episodes though, this season kind of goes into that meandering mode I talked about with the second season again. Its kind of hard to criticize because I still really like most of the individual moments (Like irony of gangster wives praising Hillary Clinton, or return of "talking fish head" motif from season 2), but there are few very distinct episodes as a result. Really the only two that stand out to me are the one where Dr. Melfi gets raped in a parking garage (Which tbh I thought was kind of beneath this series), or the Pine Barrens episode (Which was hilarious and I was pretty surprised to see Steve Buscemi directing).

I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that while the show is clearly focusing on characters more than anything else, the actual character arcs are less defined at this point outside of Tony and his family than I was really expecting that sometimes it can be hard to tell if a scene is all that important or not. Like I'm not sure any of the acting stuff with Christopher in season 2 is even mentioned in season 3- did I watch that stuff in season 2 because it actually matters to understanding Christopher as a character, or will matter in the future, or was it just something to be amusing or interesting only in the moment? I guess I'm just a bit frustrated that I can't always actually read the room super well here yet despite being 39 episodes deep into this show. Could also just a quirk of season 3 really, because even season 2 was still probably a little more plot driven with Big Pussy's betrayal, Janice's nonsense etc. I guess the equivalent here would be everything that goes on with Jackie Jr. but that character didn't carry very much weight at all to me.

Its also worth mentioning this is the last season from before 9/11 (Which adds a bit of a dark irony to the talk in the season finale about whether to send AJ to military school or not and Tony's belief that America doesn't even fight wars anymore). I'll be curious to see how that nonsense affects the show going forward. Also it was kind of cool to see Michael K. Williams in the last episode too.

[Gendo]

I just found out last week that Mendes directed the last couple Bonds. Hopefully this is the year that I watch every Bond movie finally.

[Lord_Lyndon]

2. Skyfall (Rewatch, 2012, Dir. Sam Mendes) - Still quite good. Javier Bardem really steals the show here.

I saw Skyfall in 2018. I watched it right after I rewatched Casino Royale. I really liked both films. I don't know if you knew this, Rax, but currently Skyfall and Casino Royale are two highest rated Bond films on imdb. Which means that those two are most popular Bond films I guess.

As far as Bardem is concerned, it seems he is really good at playing villains. I don't even have to say that he played one of three most iconic villains of the last 20 years and won an Oscar for it (I'm talking about his turn in 'No Country' as Anton Chigurh). The other two being Ledger's Joker in 'The Dark Knight' and Christoph Waltz' Hans Landa in 'Basterds'. He was also quite good as the villain in the fifth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I saw it last year.

[Raxivace]

I didn't know that about Skyfall and Casino Royale, but I'm not too surprised since they've always seemed to be the most popular of the Craig Bonds. And yeah Bardem is great as Anton Chigurh. Come to think of it, he's arguably playing a villain in "mother!" as well.

Honestly I probably need to rewatch both Dark Knight and Inglourious Basterds at some point. I don't think I've seen either one since they came out on DVD.

I just found out last week that Mendes directed the last couple Bonds. Hopefully this is the year that I watch every Bond movie finally.

Yeah Mendes was a pretty surprising choice at the time, though since then he's also done 1917. Maybe he's trying transition into an action director.

[Gendo]

Yeah Bardem as the villain in Pirates 5 is the only thing that I remember liking about the movie.

[Eva Yojimbo]

2. Skyfall (Rewatch, 2012, Dir. Sam Mendes) - Still quite good. Javier Bardem really steals the show here.

We've talked about the Mendez Bond films before and I think you know I'm a big fan.

The Sopranos (Season 3, 2001) -

I wish it hadn't been so long since I'd seen the series as I'd love to talk about it. I do know that it got very meandering at parts but, hell, is there any long-form TV drama that doesn't do this? I can't think of any.

[Raxivace]

I wish it hadn't been so long since I'd seen the series as I'd love to talk about it. I do know that it got very meandering at parts but, hell, is there any long-form TV drama that doesn't do this? I can't think of any.

The only that maybe comes to mind is The Leftovers, but that depends on how you define "long-form". Its only like 30ish episodes long, which is barely longer than just the first season of Lost.

Sopranos also doesn't suffer nearly as bad as some other series do (Like we're not at Dragon Ball Z filler levels here), so I won't be too damning about this aspect.

[Raxivace]

17. Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Rewatch, 1994, Dir. Wes Craven) - Oof, not nearly as good as I remembered. The whole idea of Freddy leaving the world of the movies and invading the “real" world is interesting, but it seems so underdeveloped here. Like honestly the movie connections feels like it comes almost entirely through dialogue and nothing cinematic, beyond Elm Street 1 playing on TVs in a few scenes. The actual kills and scares seem to boil down almost entirely to pretty typical Elm Street shenanigans that honestly it makes me wonder why they even brought this premise in to begin with.

Like I guess its kind of a prototype for Scream in some ways, but man. Its still a decent film in its own right and some of those Elm Street sequels are so nothing that it still holds up favorably to many of them, but its just feels lacking in creativity which is a problem with the main franchise to begin with.

18. Next Three Days (2010, Dir. Paul Haggis) - A fairly decent thriller about Russell Crowe trying to break his wife out of prison and escape with her and their child out of the United States. I've slagged on Haggis for Crash before, but between this and something like Show Me a Hero, he's probably a decent workman director if he's given okay-ish material to work with.

19. Nouvelle Vague (1990, Dir. Jean-Luc Godard) - So the basic plot here starts off kind of noirish with a woman picking up a man off of the street after he had some kind of car accident, but after that its mostly a movie of people just kind of Godarding around in his typical fashion, until eventually some stuff with a boating accident/murder(?) happens and the man is killed, unless he isn't. And then his twin brother appears, unless its just him.

There are few interesting things here. For one, Godard goes heavy on the references again here. We have a character named Richard Lennox who is named after Terry Lennox from The Long Goodbye (Opening line from the novel version of The Long Goodbye is even referenced a few times), we have a character named Della Street after the Perry Mason character, several references to being "stung by a dead bee" from To Have and Have Not, and so on.

Of course heavy usage of allusion is nothing new for Godard, however the references feel kind of weird and different here since stylistically Godard is very much in his mode of heavy emphasis on nature. Shots of greenery and trees, very blue bodies of water etc. The contrast between nerdy film history (Especially some so stylized as noir) and the beauty of nature is interesting, and kind of reminds me of how the dad in Bicycle Thieves has the job of putting up posters for Gilda of all movies. IIRC De Sica himself gets a shout out at some point in this movie too.

The nature focus here also got me wondering if maybe this isn't coming from the influence of Ford on Godard, even if they were depicting very different types of nature for very different purposes.

20. A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010, Dir. Samuel Bayer) - Honestly this isn't terrible, or at least its better than the Friday the 13th remake that came out like a year before this (And I generally like the Elm Streets much less than the Fridays). Jackie Earle Haley kind of works as a menacing Freddy, and I like how his jokes falling so flat actually kind of makes him scarier, like he's trying and failing to imitate a regular person. Probably my biggest problem though is that despite being decently executed this film really doesn't add anything new to the Nightmare on Elm Street mythos- a lot of scares are just repeated from the first movie, and lack of creativity was already problem I had with the main series as I mentioned above with New Nightmare. Still, this is easily better than like Parts 4, 5, or 6.

21. Poltergeist (1982, Dir. Tobe Hooper) - I dunno why this took me so long to see, but its fine. Probably biggest problem I have with the movie is that it feels like it has two climaxes (I.e. all the stuff after the spirit medium feels kind of pointless), and I did often wonder just how much I was supposed to think the parents sucked in this movie.

I guess its also worth mentioning the controversy about who directed this. Hooper is credited, but Spielberg was also a writer and a producer on here and some have said he was the actual director as well. Honestly this does remind me way more of Spielberg's films than like, Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, though who knows what the actual truth is.

22. Ocean's Twelve (2004, Dir. Steven Soderbergh)
23. Ocean's Thirteen (2007, Dir. Steven Soderbergh) - Both of these are pretty decent followups to the 2001 Ocean's Eleven, though I still that was better. Still, I liked the angle in Twelve with the competition with the French thief, and while Thirteen is arguably retreading old ground by just being another casino heist it's at least still a lot of fun.

[Lord_Lyndon]

18. Next Three Days (2010, Dir. Paul Haggis) - A fairly decent thriller about Russell Crowe trying to break his wife out of prison and escape with her and their child out of the United States. I've slagged on Haggis for Crash before, but between this and something like Show Me a Hero, he's probably a decent workman director if he's given okay-ish material to work with.

I liked this one more than you. I thought it was very good. I know I'm boring by mentioning tieman all the time, but I'm going to post his review here because he saw some philosophical themes in this one.

Show me where the bullets go
tieman64 16 January 2014
Warning: Spoilers
"Chaos is what we've lost touch with. It is feared because the Ego's existence is defined in terms of control." - Terence McKenna

A gripping thriller, Paul Haggis' "The Next Three Days" stars Russell Crowe as John Brennan, a college professor whose wife is arrested for murder. Brennan, a mild mannered intellectual, resolves to break his wife out of jail.

"The life of Don Quixote, what's it about?" Brennan asks his students. "That someone's belief in virtue is more important than virtue itself?" a female student replies. Her response seems to allude to Brennan's faith in his wife's innocence, a faith which may be misplaced. But Brennan's subsequent response complicates this. "Yes," Brennan admits, "but could it also be about how rational thought destroys the soul? Could it be about the triumph of irrationality? We spend a lot of time trying to organise the world? We build clocks and calendars and we try to predict the weather, but what part of our life is truly under our control? What if we choose to exist purely in a reality of our making? Does that render us insane? And if it does, isn't such insanity better than a life of despair?"

So Haggis has essentially created a little philosophical parable. In "The Next Three Days", the world is portrays as a noirish, maximum security prison in which the decks are stacked entirely against the individual. Social forces, chance and a wholly indeterministic universe exist solely to derail any and all human presumptions. Man might build structures and impose some semblance of order, but all man made objects, demarcations, boundaries and bodies are destined to crumble. Entropy always wins. All bonds eventually break down.

Given that this is our "reality", is man thus "insane" to impose his own will? Freud, of course, wrote about this decades ago. He believed that human neuroses and certain forms of insanity stem from subjects either irrationally asserting control or refusing to relinquish control. In "The Next Three Days", Brennan himself seems to become increasingly unhinged. The more he asserts control, the crazier he becomes. His narrative is nothing less than a Herculean war against a battalion of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Eventually, of course, Brennan wins; he asserts his will, imposes order, reclaims some sanity and is proved to have been "right all along". Interestingly, Brennan's "order" never lasts long. All the "structures" he builds soon come crashing down. Still, they last long enough; humans clutch at moments.

One cannot speak too much about "The Next Three Days" without spoiling Haggis' plot. Suffice to say that the film is engrossing, dodges clichés, sets up a number off neat red herrings and boasts a touching last act. The film's happy ending has been criticised, but Haggis never presents Brennan's journey as anything less than taxing; mankind needs all the help it can get.

Prison movies, incidentally, have always tapped into vaguely existential themes. Be it "Cool Hand Luke", "A Man Escaped" or "Papillon", the genre has always presented man as being stripped of everything but sheer willpower. In "The Next Three Days", such "will" exists as a sadistic double helix: the ego which refuses to relinquish control, and a universe which grants no quarter. Think of it as an optimistic version of Kubrick's "The Killing".

More than this, "Days" taps into very primal emotions; the man who rescues the princess from the castle, the mother who sacrifices her life for her family, the husband who risks everything - even his child - for his wife and, ultimately, the loving family who risk everything to be together. Haggis then contrasts the sheer energy Brennan expels in his attempts to reunite his family, with a creepy climactic scene. Here, police detectives once again fail to find a key piece of evidence (a torn button), which seems destined to always remain tantalisingly out of reach. It's a cruel joke; an arbitrary prank played by the very universe Brennan struggles to re-order. Powerfully acted by Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks.

8.5/10 - About as good as the genre gets.

22. Ocean's Twelve (2004, Dir. Steven Soderbergh)
23. Ocean's Thirteen (2007, Dir. Steven Soderbergh) - Both of these are pretty decent followups to the 2001 Ocean's Eleven, though I still that was better. Still, I liked the angle in Twelve with the competition with the French thief, and while Thirteen is arguably retreading old ground by just being another casino heist it's at least still a lot of fun.

I saw those two. I don't remember 'Twelve' at all, and I liked 'Thirteen', but not as much as 'Eleven' of course. And what the hell, since everyone here already knows I'm crazy, I'm going to post tieman's review of these 'Ocean' films.

Soderbergh does Mamet
tieman64 20 February 2012
Warning: Spoilers
The "Ocean's 11" franchise started in 1960 with Lewis Milestone's "Ocean's 11", a glossy heist thriller which saw a gang of thieves pulling a daring operation in which several Las Vegas casinos are simultaneously robbed. Milestone was a bit of an auteur, known for several fairly good war films, but his "Ocean's 11" remains an anonymously directed affair. Instead, crooner and mega-star Frank Sinatra seems to be the one pulling all the strings, playing the titular role of heist-master Danny Ocean within the film, and the star and money-man calling the shots outside the film. The production was reportedly wrapped around Sinatra's lengthy stays in Las Vegas, where he performed various concerts at up-scale casinos, hotels and theatres.

While Milestone's "Ocean's 11" made ridiculous amounts of money back in 1960 - everyone wanted to see its big name cast: Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Angie Dickinson - today it's a hugely dull movie, with large chunks of exposition, unnecessary filler and a heist that's been bettered by countless heist films released both before and after. With notions as to what is and isn't "cool" constantly changing, "Ocean's 11" also looks completely neutered, its "smooth", "relaxed" and "cool" cast now positively lifeless. Half a century later, only Sinatra comes off looking well, though precisely because of him the film plays like one of those bad crime movies by modern African American rappers, designed to show off the star's "riches", "bling", "money", "rule breaking", "flashy accessories" and "bad boy criminality" (Sinatra had close ties with the criminal underworld - both the Italian mafia and US government). It's a white bread version of such mega-celebrity egotism. Milestone's best scenes? A colourful Saul Bass opening and a wordless ending shot, much imitated by Tarantino, in which our suited gang of heroes walk down a pavement. Everything between these scenes can be missed.

Steven Soderbergh would release a remake of "Ocean's 11" in 2001. It's a much better film, featuring a cast of photogenic mega stars (Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Elliot Gould etc), smooth operators, bad boys and likable character actors. "I owe you for the thing with the guy in the place," is the line which gets the plot rolling, a slice of dialogue which epitomises the film's comically nonchalant attitude. If Milestone's film strove to be cool, Soderbergh goes for a kind of meta-cool, our cast both too cool for cool and playing uncool with coolness, mega stars Brad Pitt always chomping down on food, Matt Damon bumbling with style and George Clooney perpetually basking in his own silly magnificence. As the heist movie is intrinsically formulaic - first act: assemble the "samurai", second act: plan the heist, third act: escape or get captured - Soderbergh indulges in a kind of postmodern devil-may-care attitude. Meanwhile, the film's aesthetic is retro cool, with European/French touches, glossy locales, eye popping lights, sparkling surfaces/bulbs, lush cinematography, romantic editing/music, liquidy shapes and a camera that salivates over its suave actors, smooth villains and expensive locales. It's all about the money.

Soderbergh describes his "Ocean's 11" as a "big wind up toy", and while its designed to be "just entertainment", it does fit in with a number of the director's "heavier" films ("King of the Hill", "Che", "Traffic", "Eric Brockovich", "The Girlfriend Experience"), which have focused on economic inequality, economic depressions, Marxist revolutionaries and violent corporate muscle. Indeed, the casinos where Soderbergh's heists take place, the Bellagio and several other mega-casinos on the LA Strip, were built in the 1990s by entrepreneurs and corporate raiders like Steve Wynn (the real life model of Benedict, the film's villain, played sexily by Andy Garcia) with junk bonds and help from organised crime lords. With its art galleries and upscale restaurants, the Bellagio was then part of a diversification strategy in LA to earn profits from non-gaming sources. Yet the appeal of all these amenities, like gambling itself, is fuelled by a drive to offer consumers escape from a reality of diminished opportunities for upward mobility (within an American economy of diminishing wages, outsourcing and continuous lay-offs). Within a postindustrial, globalized economy, gambling, and even crime, increasingly appears to offer the best way, in the words of Jackson Lears, "to get ahead in a world where work no longer seems reliable". Indeed, each of the film's robbers comes with some indication that they embody the disaffection created by the increasing division of American society into "haves" and "have nots", whether it be a criminal past, lack of work, or entrapment in a job they find to be unrewarding. Even the bank-roller behind the heist, a former casino owner named Reuben Tishkoff (smoothly played by Elliout Gould), wants revenge against a new economy in which corporate moguls like Benedict can use their financial muscle to push him out. On the flip side, such readings are contradicted by the film's need to work as a big budget wish-fulfilment fantasy, and the fact that the crime genre has always portrayed the criminal as Soderbergh does here: cinema's lovable criminals may live on the outside, but they're still perfect conformists, chasing money in their own way because of capitalism's failings.

Soderbergh would release a sequel, "Oceans 12", some years later. This one takes the form of a "con movie", its narrative bending giddily in all directions, mercilessly toying with both convention and audience expectations. The film wasn't well received, despite being as good as its predecessor, which led to Soderbergh releasing the dull, and far safer, "Oceans 13" in 2007. The villain's name is literally "Bank" (Al Pacino) in this outing, but the film is mostly dumb.

8.5/10 - Some overlooked modern heist films: Mamet's "Heist" and Neil Jordan's "The Good Thief", a remake of Melville's genre defining "Bob The Gambler".

[Lord_Lyndon]

I've gone completely crazy. Here are reviews of those films by user called tedg. This should be interesting.

The Next Three Days (2010)
Pregnant
tedg 6 February 2011
Warning: Spoilers
I don't like Paul Haggis as a man. His work does nothing for me; I am not altered or improved by experiencing his shapes.

But I have to admit that the man knows how to tell a story. He engages, and those working with him — primarily Crowe — know how to collaborate with his techniques. I first noticed this trait in Crowe in Gladiator. He is profoundly aware of the director's intent, and the filmmaking techniques that support that intent but which are outside the usual scope of an actor's mission.

This is essentially a film about fatherhood, though framed as addressing justice (itself the father of revenge movies). Crowe seems to ingest this intent as if every element of his work is addressed as a child. He is remarkable, with a remarkable ability to understand and communicate that knowledge. It is made explicit in a scene where he sits by the side of the highway with his wife after a near catastrophe, while we are out of breath. He and she are silent but a deep communication is made that recenters the film. I imagine this was the first scene written. Haggis is readable that way.

It is also a film which engages by having every scene tell us less information that we are used to, with just barely enough left out for us after a while to place our narrative listener not in the scene, but in the scene following. I have remarked that this is something Russell and Ridley seem to have invented and Haggis would have noticed. Crowe supports that here. I imagine the script girl being driven crazy.

Haggis takes this "just enough omitted" technique beyond the slowly unfolding parts of the film into the hectic chase at the end. We hardly notice, but this editing of the exciting part is the by now common "Transformers" technique. What makes it seem more masterful is how the technique is integrated into the soul of the thing and not just a device which originated in Michael Bay trying to save money on effects.

If you are a parent or near being one, this will likely engage. It won't matter much. It won't transform you. But it may remind you a bit about yourself.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Eleven Samuri
tedg 10 December 2001
Warning: Spoilers
Spoilers herein.

Ridley Scott's attention is focused on projecting each scene into the future; Soderbergh's is on the present, the zen of forgetting what's next. He pulls this off by immersion in the craft. Alone among major directors, he is a triple threat: he lives through the actor's eye; he works the director's end (as the variety of director that is storypuller); and he literally is the cameraman.

This last is the special skill, because he seems able to accomplish this zen thing by making the camera flow. It is almost always godlike -- never taking a position or focal stance that a human would; but flowing like an invisible human observer might. The trick is that it is not just within a shot, as others would have, but seamlessly across great phrases of shots. This is architecture in the master builder sense.

The story is throwaway except for two elements:

--The method of shooting noted above is pure Kurosawa, and in particular `Seven Samuri.' And the story reflects it, with all the mechanics of collecting the team. Kurosawa himself collected actors from a single acting tradition and had them act as discrete characters. Soderbergh understands actors well enough to select actors from different traditions to act different types of characters. So we get a richer ensemble: Reiner's style is all timing; Clooney's all body; Pitt's heavily eye's; Julia's all mouth; Cheadle is a nervous projector; Garcia resolutely quite. (Pitt is the anchor of this film. He's really growing.)

--As with all purely modern, postironic film, there is a film within, around which all things revolve. This film within the film is a carefully produced set piece where they fool the viewer. As with several other `casino' films -- particularly the self-referential `Snake Eyes' which is quoted here, there is a constant camera eye.

It's very competent, cinematic storytelling. Someday soon, he'll do something important. And with his growing skill, it will alter lives.

Ocean's Twelve (2004)
Shifting Realities
tedg 10 December 2004
Spoilers herein.

I'll go to see any Soderbergh film, but in the past I'd have to be prepared for them to be either one of his 'serious' or 'cash in' projects. Cashing in is okay, but I think his serious experiments say a lot about his intuitions and intents. They aren't the most intelligent experiments, but possibly the cream of the mainstream Hollywood director's establishment.

Here we get both rolled into one. Its not as edgy or visually intelligent as 'Good Thief,' but it has some elements.

First the bad: Soderbergh's notion of structure is the vignette. He'll shape a segment as if it were a skit with all else just backstory. For instance he has here a terrific piece where Pitt and Clooney as veterans and Damon as novice go to visit a Dutch heist coordinator. They converse in a highly abstract and idiosyncratic parablese which amuses us and flummoxes Damon. Damon inadvertently calls the boss's young niece a slut, and we are never sure who is putting on whom.

It is a wonderful orchestration of clever writing, spontaneous acting and intimate camera-work. These last two are a particular concern of Soderbergh's, but with a well-written shape it both confused and clarified in different directions. This one segment is the soul of the whole project: it amuses, it has a lot of collaborative, seemingly ad hoc acting, and it makes no sense.

This was never a heist film, instead it is in the con genre. That genre derives from the detective story where the writer is trying to fool the viewer (and some characters). In the con, some characters try to fool some other characters and the writer selectively covers and uncovers narrative so that the viewer is fooled as well.

Interesting twists happen when the viewer is fooled differently than the sucker character, or when there are multiple and parallel cons. The narrative folding comes in the parallel, warring realities that the viewer must surf. But always there is a resolution of the 'real' narrative, just as in the detective story. You always find out who is the fooler and who the foolee (including ourselves).

And as with the detective story, we are told just _how_ it is done. We expect this and have to be given some special reward if this doesn't happen.

It doesn't happen here. There is no way to go back and put together a story that makes any sense at all. Surely this could have been done, but the plain fact is that Soderbergh doesn't care and he wants us to know he doesn't.

Instead, he wants us to focus on his folding. He folds all his 'serious' films: movies about movies (more than four levels deep in 'Full Frontal') or about imagined reality. 'Limey' overlaid scattered intent with parallel jumpcuts.

In this case, he has Julia acting a character who pretends to be Julia. In an homage to 'The Player' he has Bruce Willis as her companion when Julia com Julia. You can just imagine him cackling with his players over this bit.

But it is all clever bits like this in the small: nothing clever at the scale of a real movie. For that, we'll have to wait until he stumbles away from his enchantment with the miracle of acting and discovers the miracle of long form writing.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Ocean's Thirteen (2007)
Sexual Editing
tedg 17 June 2007
Is this the most valuable franchise in film? Will it last for a decade?

I like Soderbergh. I even like him when he has no goal in the world but making money through simple entertaining.

I like him because he actually thinks about film. About the bullets the towels. The phrases and melodies.

Superficially, this has two overt components. One is the well established con form. The strict version is that we don't fully understand what is going on and "see" it only at the end. Then it all makes sense. This is a weaker version where we see some of the plotting and problems. This is where the jokes are.

The second overt component is simply coolness. Its the sort of coolness that Apple-inspired ad editing has given us, in opposition to the heavy rap-gangster intimidation-coolness of the last great sales cycle. This is referenced within the movie with a bit about an all American black jumper (with a Jewelled flag on his teeth). Its colorful, fast. The pace is translucent with the music. Vegas Cellophane. The actors are cool. Even Matt Damon, who knows cool, plays uncool with coolness.

But its the technique here that impresses. Shots have shape and how those shapes are modulated (as they usually are not) and then assembled with those shapes forming new ones, is a matter of unique style with this filmmaker. Look at how fertile soft ends are punctured by sharp beginnings so that the very passage of time in the eye here is a matter of conceptual copulation.

Look at how many shots end on one of those colored artificial flavors and create a romantic movie at the atomic level as if a John Coltrane was compressing a thousand easy ballads into a few moments. This takes knowledge and the filmmaker has to actually operate the camera to pull this off. It was in his "Limey" and not in the other Ocean's.

And it takes an editor who knows. The best editor was found fresh off "Babel" which among other variations, had the three segments vary on shotshape assembly. This matters. This is a five diamond film, yes?

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

[Raxivace]

I know I'm boring by mentioning tieman all the time, but I'm going to post his review here because he saw some philosophical themes in this one.

I mean I liked Next Three Days well enough, but I really wouldn't say it "avoids cliches" or that its "about as good as the genre gets". It stills seem like much more a plot driven film than one driven by themes or philosophy or whatever. Not really sure what that second review is getting at either.

Like I enjoyed the movie well enough for what it is, but its not the second coming of Hitchcock.

Soderbergh does Mamet

Its been a very very long time since I've seen the original Ocean's 11, but I think I'd agree that Soderbergh does it better. Still I think he's being a bit harsh on 13.

I'm a bit closer to this "Ted" on the Ocean movies I think, but comparing Soderbergh to Kurosawa is a bit hyperbolic IMHO.

[Raxivace]

So I watched a few things, and also finished watching the shorts from Anno's Japan Animator Expo thing. I'll go through the non-Expo stuff first.

28. Rope (Rewatch, 1948, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
29. "Rope"` Unleashed (2001, Dir. Laurent Bouzereau) – Oh boy Rope is better than I remembered it being. Even on a just a surface level it’s a more engaging, quick little movie than I remember it being, and honestly there’s a lot more of that post-World War II “Hey just because we just beat the Nazis, that doesn’t mean fascists aren’t in America too” type stuff going on here than I really remembered. In a way that makes it a far more similar story to something like Gentleman’s Agreement, but executed waaaaaaaaayyyyyyy better.

Robin Wood’s writing on Rope is pretty good. While talking with Jimbo has definitely moved me more toward a more anti-Theory point of view over the years, Wood provides an example of an interesting application of Theory. He argues since the leads are gay but unable to express it (While the the first part of the interpretation is the common reading of the characters, the "unable to express it" aspect was new to me), society is as much at fault for driving them to murder as they are themselves (Represented by Stewart's character Rupert having taught Brandon and Philip the philosophy that ultimately drove them to kill David). I think this leads the film to having two mutually exclusive interpretations: the murderers are fascists and something that needs to be eliminated (Hence the comparisons to Nazis and such) and America is heroic for doing so, but also the murders are the cry of the oppressed while the country is at fault for driving them to a psychologically unstable state. In other words, this can be read as both affirmation of American values, and a condemnation of its most oppressive/repressive aspects. If these two dudes could just fuck without being hated for it, a murder never would have happened.

Part of the reason that this discrepancy of meaning exists is that, under Wood's argument, that the film is a sort of proto-Psycho in that it starts with one protagonist (Brandon) and getting us into his headspace before switching to a different protagonist (Rupert) in order to undermine the earlier parts of the film. But again, even though Rupert fulfills typical film detective role (He solves the murder (Though based on flawed theorizing, as Bordwell demonstrates in the section "Enough rope"), the criminals are presumably to be arrested) etc.), he's been undermined as a person just as much as his rejection of Brandon and Philip have undermined them.

For a while I thought that Stewart was really playing against type here, and he still sort of is. The "Rope Unleashed" special feature even has one of the writers (IIRC) mention that Rupert was even originally intended to be a gay character himself in the original play this is based on, and uh that really does not come across in Stewart's performance at all. Supposedly, Hitchcock originally wanted Cary Grant for the Rupert role and I feel that would given the character some VERY different connotations.

Speaking of Grant, I totally forgot he's actually mentioned in this movie! One of the characters mentions seeing a film starring Grant and Ingrid Bergman, which almost certainly must be Hitch's own Notorious. This strikes me as unusual, almost fourth wall breaking for Hitchcock (Though perhaps it could be said his famous cameos are a form of this), though one thing reading a lot of Bordwell has taught me is that the general trend was not unusual in Hollywood at this time. I still wonder if Hitchcock had anything greater in mind by referencing Notorious (If that is indeed what he's referencing). The closest I can come up with is perhaps some kind of parallel between how Rope uses the wine bottle as a metaphor (As Wood writes about in his book Hitchcock's Films Revisited) and how Notorious uses the wine bottle (As Jimbo has written about in various places).

Last but not least, the blu-ray featured the trailer for the movie in its special features which I had never seen before.



It's a little surreal to see the David Kentley character actually alive and speaking!

30. Pretty in Pink (1986, Dir. Howard Deutch) – Another John Hughes movie, I liked it well enough for what it was. I also don't think I realized before that both John Cryer AND Charlie Sheen were a part of the Hughes cadre of actors- that puts Two and a Half Men in a slightly different light for me.

31. The Fugitive (1993, Dir. Andrew Davis) - For something I've seen parodied and referenced so often (They even play clips of this in a Sopranos episode! Conveniently though they leave out any footage of Joe Pantoliano's character lol.), I have to this this still is pretty solid little thriller movie and honestly probably one of the better ones in Harrison Ford's run of the genre from late 80's to early 2000's. Tommy Lee Jones is really good here too, and watching this made me wonder if his character here is why he was cast in No Country For Old Men.

32. Gothika (2003, Matthieu Kassovitz) - Yeah this is not a good script (The whole premise that Dr. Halle Berry would be a patient in the same hospital she was a psychiatrist in is just ludicrous), but in terms of actual filmmaking its not the worst I've ever seen. It looks decent for the most part, there a couple of okay suspense sequences etc. Again we have pre-Iron Man Robert Downey Jr. here too, and I'm always surprised how much of his star persona was already in place before he started working with Marvel.

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And the Animator Expo shorts I hadn't yet seen.

24. I Can Friday by day! (2015, Dir. Kazuya Tsurumaki) – Weird music video short thing about a robot girl piloted by little animal critters. Didn’t have much of an opinion on this.

25. Me! Me! Me! Chronic (2015, Dir. Hibiki Yoshizaki) – A not particularly interest remix of the Me! Me! Me! short that infamous on the internet several years back.

26. Making of “Evangelion: Another Impact” (2015, Dir. Masaru Matsumoto) – Another short that shows the “Evangelion: Another Impact” CGI short at various stages of development. Its kind of interesting in a DVD special sort of way, but not much more.

27. Iconic Field (2015, Dir. Ikuto Yamashita) – A short that’s a very heavily condensed version of some kind of mecha story, but the most interesting thing about it is that none of the dialogue is actually spoken- its all presented solely within subtitles. The only thing you actually hear are the general sound effects and a music track.

32. On a Gloomy Night (2015, Dir. Tadashi Hiramatsu) – An interesting little short about a nationalist uprising in Japan. Would have been interesting to this one as a full feature.

33. Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen (2015, Director N/A) – An adaptation of a Moyoco Anno manga about relationships at a brothel in what looks to be the late 19th or early 20th century. This had a pastiche of silent film style that was pretty neat.

34. Rapid Rouge (2015, Dir. Daisuke Onizuka) – A CGI short about some kind of techno-samurai attempting a rescue mission. I think the art direction here helps the CGI- its mostly in black and white, except for the color red. Red armor, red blood, red lights from technology and so forth.

35. Hammerhead (2015, Dir. Otaro Maijo & Mahiro Maeda) – The story of an overly violent superhero named Hammerhead who seeks to finally die in battle, and the daughter that basically watches him continually succumb to violence. A neat little short.

36. Comedy Skit 1989 (2015, Dir. Kazuto Nakazawa) - An odd slapstick short about a guy meeting his twin brother at a bar. Not one of my favorites of these shorts tbh.

37. Bubu & Bubulina (2015, Dir. Takashi Nakamura) - A short with a weird art style about a pair of sisters named Bubu and Bubulina, and one of them gets possessed by a ghost who died before she could get an audience for her dancing. Odd short tbh.

38. Endless Night (2015, Dir. Sayo Yamamoto) - A kid watches a professional figure skater on television and imagines himself as his equal. Its a nice little short set to a song. IIRC this also formed the basis for that anime series "Yuri!!! On Ice" that came out a few years ago- I never saw it myself by I seem to remember it being well received.

39. BUREAU OF PROTO SOCIETY (2015, Dir. Yasuhiro Yoshiura) - This one is clever. In the future, humanity lives underground. A group bureaucrats are trying to determine what caused humanity to screw itself over, and they examine through documentary footage of the past that turns out just to be various science fiction movies, video games (Somebody even unlocks a PlayStation trophy!), and television shows. I've often wondered if our current overabundance of video data, movies etc. won't create a similar problem for historians somewhere down the line centuries from now, and well it seems the guys at Studio Trigger had the same idea. What also makes this feel like one of the better shorts, I think, is that its joke works real well as a short film that doesn't really need to be elaborated on, whereas a lot of the other shorts feel like parts of a TV episode or movie that have been snipped out. This plays real well to the form.


^Also, lol anime Walter White and Jesse Pinkman.

40. The Ultraman (2015, Dir. Akitoshi Yokoyama) - Some space monster kills Ultraman's...family? Friends? I guess? and then fights Ultraman, but then Ultraman beats him up. I've got to be honest, I really don't understand the obsession of Anno's generation with this franchise.

41. Girl (2015, Dir. Hibiki Yoshizaki) - Another strange surreal music video thing. I think this is supposed to be a sequel of sorts to "Me! Me! Me!", but I don't really know what to make of it.

42. "Ragnarok" Hello from the Countries of the World (2015, Dir. Kazuyoshi Katayama) - At an international festival for giant robots, the Japanese giant robot goes berserk and the robots for the other countries have to unit to stop it. Its kind of fun, but I wasn't super into any of the mecha designs.

43 Robot on the Road (2015, Dir. Hiroyuki Okiura) - A hitchhiking robot tries to take naked pictures of a woman he gets picked up on the road by. I liked it.

44. Cassette Girl (2015, Dir. Hiroyasu Kobayashi) - In some kind of post-apocalyptic future, a girl and her mecha track down old video tapes to combat some sort of Fahrenheit 451-esque society. Whole thing felt like a tribute to the Daicon III and IV shorts that Gainax started out with to me.

45. Mobile Police Patlabor: Reboot (2016, Dir. Yasuhiro Yoshiura) - Some kind of extra addition to the main Animator Expo collection, this being a short based on the "Mobile Police Patlabor" franchise, a show about police officers with mecha. I never really could get into it (I just don't think I can get behind a show where the idea is "The cops need giant robots lol"), but this short has some decent animation I think.

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The Sopranos (Season 4, 2002) - The first post-9/11 season of Sopranos and boy can you feel it.

I don't have a whole lot new to add to this- its still just really engaging on an episode to episode basis. I guess one thing I will bring up is that I like how the series handles ambiguity in its plot. In previous seasons there's an almost magical realism element in some episodes (Like with the seance, Pussy's ghost appearing, or even "the Russian" disappearing in the forest) that never quite gets resolved one way or another which I like. We see more instances here- like its never confirmed one way or another whether Ralph Cifaretto killed the racehorse or not to collect the insurance money, and I like that there's not a definitive answer to that.

Another example is the dinner party, where Carmela just gets really touchy about gay interpretations of classic literature of all things.



Now based on context, Carmela is still upset over her crush Furio leaving the United States, but why that anxiety would manifest in this form is not immediately obvious to me (Even if you remember earlier in the episode that AJ is talking about the book while she and Furio are both around). Is she just jealous of her daughter? Is she trying to suppress that she was ever attracted to Furio in the first place, as the discussion of the book subconsciously reminds her of Furio? Would she have just picked a fight with anyone over anything at this point? Are the writers of the show suggesting homophobia is rooted in dissatisfaction with one's own love life?

The episode about Columbus Day is pretty interesting too, since that is not only still a hot button topic today but I also like that the episode shows how messy discussions about ethnic identity, racial pride, racism etc. really are.

[Raxivace]

Speaking of Bordwell, I came across this passage while browsing around on his blog:

Likewise, instead of the sporadic invocations of Ozu’s style provided by Wayne Wang, the early films of Suo Masayuki show more engagement with the Ozu manner—particularly because they are turned to comic ends. Suo’s first feature, My Brother’s Wife: The Crazy Family (Hentai kazoku: Aniki no yomeson, 1984) was a curiosity: a softcore pornographic film shot in a distinctly Ozuian style. Only in Japan can an erotic film spare the energy to borrow so explicitly from a master of the cinema. While the newly married couple has thumping intercourse upstairs, the husband’s father, sister, and brother sit calmly downstairs, sighing or frowning slightly in response to the gymnastics overhead. One evening the father comes home from a drinking bout and the son, like the son in An Autumn Afternoon, warns him to cut back.

The idea of someone doing a porn parody of Ozu, him of all directors, is just hilarious.

[Raxivace]

46. Tokyo Story (1953, Dir. Yasujiro Ozu) - As silly as that porn parody I just mentioned was, it did get me in the mood (Pun intended) to watch an Ozu and man Tokyo Story is a hell of a movie. I was really surprised by how easy of a watch I had with this, though its hard for me to tell if this is just a really good "entry point" to Ozu or if its just because this is my 10th film of his and I'm now pretty used to his style. Either way I was really drawn into this beautiful combination of restrained drama/melodrama and the way Ozu could use little ambiguities to somewhat undercut that same restraint, to suggest possible feelings beneath surface level politeness. Like the level of sincerity you think the grandparents have could very much change how you read the film. Like is the grandmother saying "What a treat, to sleep in my dead son's bed" meant as a sincere comment or as something biting toward Noriko? I feel like your answer could change with age.

This is one that definitely deserves a rewatch from as much as any of salacious Hitchcock's better movie such like Marnie.

EDIT: I didn't realize it before, but now having seen Tokyo Story I've seen the 2012 Sight & Sound Critic's Top 10. It might be kind of pointless when just next year the 2022 Top 10 is coming out, but I kind of want to talk about the whole Top 100 at some point for the 2012 list.

47. Kiki's Delivery Service (1989, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki) - I must be in an uncharacteristically good mood these days because I really enjoyed this movie a lot as well. One of my main points of contention with Miyazaki is the combination of how hollow his characters are and how saccharine his stories can often feel, but I like here how Kiki is still kind of a fuck-up and like, has actual moments of characterization (I.e. being in denial of her feelings toward the kid who looks like he waltzed in straight out of a Where's Waldo book). Similarly while there are plenty of nice people in this vaguely European city the movie takes place in, there are still assholes as well (I.e. the other witch girl, the granddaughter who derides the cake that her grandmother and Kike made etc). Its a nice, far more realistic balance that I feel has been missing from Miyazaki's other movies.

Really the only major problem I had with story is that the drama of the last 25 minutes is built around Kiki arbitrarily losing her magic for a bit. I'm really not sure what the movie was getting at here- I thought at first the movie was trying to contrive a situation where Kiki has to choose being being meek housewife of Where's Waldo or having "magic" that allows her to be independent "witch" (I don't think we any male characters with magic in this film, which is detail worth noting), but that's ultimately not where the story goes as the "magic" of independence is what allows Kiki to finally find Where's Waldo. Which is totally message I can get behind, there's no contradiction between wanting both self-fulfillment and romantic fulfillment, but why introduce the "lol my magic is gone" angle at all then? As a way of generating tension is seems random to me, and thematically I'm not sure it says much.

For comparison's sake the idea of gusts of wind being dangerous is a far better established challenge in the movie for Kiki to overcome, in terms of like suspense or whatever.

[Raxivace]

48. Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll (2019, Dir. Haruka Fujita) – So Violet Evergarden was an anime series that aired a few years ago. The basic premise was that the titular lead character became an “Auto Memory Doll”- primarily an occupation that involved composing letters for other people. For example, you want to write a love letter to someone, you don’t know what to write, you hire a “Doll” to help figure out what exactly it is you want to express and they more or less shadow write it for you. The anime more less had each episode follow a similar formula- somebody hires Violet, we learn their particular story, they get a revelation or whatever about how they feel about their situation and in a therapeutic moment their letter is written and we see it delivered to their recipient who usually has very emotional reaction in their own right (There’s also something of a “main plot” about Violet’s backstory and while it has some extremely strong emotional moments at times, as a whole I think its less interesting than the little episodic stories).

It’s the kind of very sincere tearjerking melodrama that honestly I’m kind of sad we don’t see very much of anymore in film or tv, and with Violet Evergarden I think animation-wise at least its done at a fairly high level. Most episodes had me at least getting teary at the end, and a few bawling.
The actual movie is another such episode you might see in the show (Sort of), but done at feature length. Here we follow a girl, Isabella York, at a boarding school who is training to become a debutante (Somewhat against her will), after having been adopted into a rich family. Violet is hired to teach Isabella how to behave in uh snobby rich high society, though eventually they grow closer over time (To point I think Isabella develops romantic feelings of some kind for Violet). Without spoiling it, eventually we learn about something Isabella’s past that she extremely regrets, and Violet helps her compose a letter to someone. The second half of the movie then is about the fallout of this.

I ultimately thought this was pretty get, and got me teary like a lot of better episodes of the show did. I don’t really have much in the way of analysis to add, though I do think this really solid blog entry I found online that goes into specifics of the director Fujita’s style, the origins of the film, the context of the arsonist attack on KyoAni etc. is worth sharing and has some good analysis of the movie.

49. Justice League (2017, Dir. Zack Snyder & Josh Whedon) – This almost works but feels waaaayy too rushed, which has me optimistic for the upcoming “Snyder cut” (Which is a whopping four hours compared to this versions mere two hour running time!). It just feels like connective tissue has been trimmed here that would cause this to feel like a fuller movie. Like Superman for example only has a handful of scenes in the movie (And some of them have really cool moments too, like like during his fight scene against the the other heroes where he turns his head to see Flash coming at him), but the storyline meant to actually address his character feel incomplete.

Whedon’s humor also feels awkwardly inserted here at times. I suspect the “Snyder cut” will feel like it has a much more consistent tone, though we’ll see once it comes out in a few days.

50. Mank (2020, Dir. An organ grinder's monkey David Fincher) – David Fincher, why would you do this to me?

This movie does the thing a lot of really hacky biopics do where its central figure is transformed from into a modern liberal as if they so they can be smug at how everyone else is less sophisticated than them (Including classic type of obnoxious scene at a dinner party where nobody seems concerned about the rise of that Hitler fellow in Germany except our hero). Seriously, this movie would have you believe Herman J. "Mank" Mankiewicz was Bernie Sanders himself sent back in time with a booze bottle and a typewriter.

If you want to tell a story about Hollywood's history of helping crush social movements, or how they treat artists or leftists shitty, or how that's intertwined or whatever, it's not that there isn't an angle here. Problem is that making Mank not only the central figure but a heroic liberal is just a bizarre choice when the dude seems to have been a conservative in real life. His brother Joseph (Himself a fantastic director!) or hell even Orson Welles himself are much more historically accurate figures to base such a drama around if you were interested in left leaning politics of the time. You only make Herman the main character if you're trying to suggest the psychology behind what drove him to write Citizen Kane...because unfortunately this movie sneakily puts forwards Pauline Kael's 50 year old, long debunked horseshit about how Herman was the sole writer of the screenplay. This doesn't even make sense on the surface because of how much shit in that screenplay is straight out of WELLES' life, and not just some straight 1:1 facsimile of William Randolph Hearst's life. The Bernstein character in Kane for example is based on a figure from Welles' own childhood who was named goddamned Bernstein but Fincher's film puts forth the idea that Bernstein was based on Louis B. Mayer of all people for some reason.

Maybe this is hypocritical of me to care so much about details here when there's plenty of other films where lack of historical accuracy does not at all bother me (Even just in Fincher's filmography you have Zodiac and The Social Network, which are much better films than this meandering piece of shit). Certainly it stings me more because of how important Welles' own work is to me. Then again, this movie makes a big deal about how important it is for good socialists to tell the truth and not lie to the public and blah blah blah when this movie, even as an abridgment, isn't even close to the truth of how Citizen Kane was written. And that itself would bother me less if changes that were made were at least in favor of a good story and not something this sloppy where most of the character relationships are underdeveloped (Like Hearst again and Marion Davies and both of their seeming affection for "Mank"), with even Herman is written as little more than a stereotypical witty drunk cynic and not much else. Like this movie is just Trumbo with a cheap stylitsic gimmick.

Oh and its a gimmick that doesn't make a lot of sense either in how its executed. Like Fincher wants to imitate the look of Welles' films, Toland's cinematography on Kane, and as a goal from the outset it doesn't make much sense. Why imitate the visual style when its one of the writers you claim is solely responsible for the script you're making your movie about? And on top of that the style feels like something of a half-measure. The digital look just feels off to me, and the the cigarette burns and such inserted into the movie feel out of place. Also the aspect ratio is 2.21:1 here- why not just commit all the way and make the damn movie in 4:3 like movies in that damn era were made?

Who is this movie for? Like it assumes a weird amount of knowledge from audiences already (Is average guy that watches the million YouTube videos out there about Fincher's films going to have any idea or care who all of these Hollywood moguls like Irving G. Thalberg were?), but at the same time has strange factual inaccuracies that would annoy a more knowledgeable cinephile audience. Like there's a scene set in the 30's where they mention the movie The Wolfman. Except, The Wolfman came out in 1941; the same fucking year as Citizen Kane for god's sake.

I didn't want to watch this movie despite my enjoyment of other Fincher films sense I suspected it would only send me into NERDRAEG and well it did. I even intended to write some rather vulgar things about what should be done to Fincher's father's grave at one point, but figured it would be in poor taste (Not that what Fincher's hack father did is exactly much different).

Look, at the end of the day I think the real Herman J. Mankiewicz was a great artist and the work he actually did in the movies (Including on Citizen Kane) is wonderful and worth honoring. I just don't think this was the way to do it.

[Raxivace]

Really nicest thing I can say about Mank is that we just need a bad movie about Patty Hearst to come out in the next few years now. That way with Deadwood: The Movie and Mank we can have a mediocre trilogy about the Hearst family and their legacy. Maybe do a fan-edit to turn it into some kind of One Hundred Years of Solitude type of narrative, but bad.

[Raxivace]

One last positive note I should add about Mank is that I think the casting is fine for the most part, with the problem with the characters being entirely with how they're written. I don't think I really buy Gary Oldman as 40 year old Mank but performance itself is fine. Amanda Seyfried is good as Davies. Even Charles Dance, for the few bits of speaking he actually gets to do in this movie, works as William Randolph even though he's basically turning in the same performance he did as Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones or Ehmyr from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The guy they got playing Welles even is pretty solid. Bill Nye the Science Guy is Upton Sinclair. And they're all wasted on this.

God I think this is my angriest review in the entirety of my history here at Pitters. I haven't seen Girl With the Dragon Tattoo yet but I'm pretty comfortable saying this Fincher's worst by a pretty wide margin.

[Faustus5]

One last positive note I should add about Mank is that I think the casting is fine for the most part, with the problem with the characters being entirely with how they're written. I don't think I really buy Gary Oldman as 40 year old Mank but performance itself is fine. Amanda Seyfried is good as Davies. Even Charles Dance, for the few bits of speaking he actually gets to do in this movie, works as William Randolph even though he's basically turning in the same performance he did as Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones or Ehmyr from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The guy they got playing Welles even is pretty solid. Bill Nye the Science Guy is Upton Sinclair. And they're all wasted on this.

God I think this is my angriest review in the entirety of my history here at Pitters. I haven't seen Girl With the Dragon Tattoo yet but I'm pretty comfortable saying this Fincher's worst by a pretty wide margin.

I think you were way, way more interested in historical accuracy than was necessary. I didn't give a flying fuck about that and was able to have a perfectly fun time with it. And I don't think Fincher cared, either. For what it is worth, Ben Mank who is also a film critic had no problems with the portrayal of his grandfather in the movie.

[Raxivace]

Of course Ben Mankiewicz doesn't have a problem with the movie bolstering his grandfather's accomplishments. He's already been doing that himself whenever they play Kane on TCM for years and years now even though the last literal 50 years of scholarship on the matter shows it to be wrong.

It's intellectual equivalent to still claiming Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays and then praising that one Roland Emmerich movie on the matter.

[Faustus5]

Of course Ben Mankiewicz doesn't have a problem with the movie bolstering his grandfather's accomplishments. He's already been doing that himself whenever they play Kane on TCM for years and years now even though the last literal 50 years of scholarship on the matter shows it to be wrong.

It's intellectual equivalent to still claiming Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare's plays and then praising that one Roland Emmerich movie on the matter.

I was thinking more in terms of your critique that the politics of the film are too faux modern. Should have said so.

The fact of the matter is, especially during the sequences in the 1930's, that socialism and even communism were far more mainstream back then than they are today. In the early 20th Century the far left actually threatened to get shit done on a serious level. So having the leftists from that period portrayed like Berni bros is actually doing a disservice to how far left they actually were.

That having been said, I don't know anything about the actual politics of the real folks depicted in the film and don't much care. I saw it as a fun movie, not a documentary.

[Lord_Lyndon]

28. Rope (Rewatch, 1948, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

I saw Rope 10 years ago. I loved it. Definitely one of my favourite Hitch films.

31. The Fugitive (1993, Dir. Andrew Davis) - For something I've seen parodied and referenced so often (They even play clips of this in a Sopranos episode! Conveniently though they leave out any footage of Joe Pantoliano's character lol.), I have to this this still is pretty solid little thriller movie and honestly probably one of the better ones in Harrison Ford's run of the genre from late 80's to early 2000's. Tommy Lee Jones is really good here too, and watching this made me wonder if his character here is why he was cast in No Country For Old Men.

I remember this film because Tommy Lee Jones won an Oscar for it, but most people thought Ralph Fiennes more than deserved it for Schindler's List (1993).

46. Tokyo Story (1953, Dir. Yasujiro Ozu)

I saw it once and I loved it.

I was really surprised by how easy of a watch I had with this, though its hard for me to tell if this is just a really good "entry point" to Ozu or if its just because this is my 10th film of his and I'm now pretty used to his style.

You win, Rax. I've seen only 5 Ozu films.

47. Kiki's Delivery Service (1989, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki) - I must be in an uncharacteristically good mood these days because I really enjoyed this movie a lot as well. One of my main points of contention with Miyazaki is the combination of how hollow his characters are and how saccharine his stories can often feel, but I like here how Kiki is still kind of a fuck-up and like, has actual moments of characterization (I.e. being in denial of her feelings toward the kid who looks like he waltzed in straight out of a Where's Waldo book). Similarly while there are plenty of nice people in this vaguely European city the movie takes place in, there are still assholes as well (I.e. the other witch girl, the granddaughter who derides the cake that her grandmother and Kike made etc). Its a nice, far more realistic balance that I feel has been missing from Miyazaki's other movies.

I loved this one, but I didn't get as much intellectually out of it as you.

49. Justice League (2017, Dir. Zack Snyder & Josh Whedon) – This almost works but feels waaaayy too rushed, which has me optimistic for the upcoming “Snyder cut” (Which is a whopping four hours compared to this versions mere two hour running time!). It just feels like connective tissue has been trimmed here that would cause this to feel like a fuller movie. Like Superman for example only has a handful of scenes in the movie (And some of them have really cool moments too, like like during his fight scene against the the other heroes where he turns his head to see Flash coming at him), but the storyline meant to actually address his character feel incomplete.

While this one wasn't as good as The Avengers films, I thought it was pretty solid. This film is also notable for kpop fans because Blackpink's mv for song 'As If It's Your Last' can be seen on a screen in Ezra Miller's (Flash's) house.

[Raxivace]

That having been said, I don't know anything about the actual politics of the real folks depicted in the film and don't much care. I saw it as a fun movie, not a documentary.

Its fine not to care- like I said earlier I'm coming at this from admittedly hypocritical position since its not like similar inaccuracies in other films have bothered me.

But I can't pretend they don't bother me here, and the legacy of Pauline Kael's Raising Kane has bothered me for years as it is and I can't help but feel movie was written this way to push a particular agenda about writing of Citizen Kane (In fact I'm already seeing uncritical writers, podcasters etc. talk about Mank as if it were accurate history). And on top of that script itself on dramatic level feels very generic "Oscar bait about Hollywood history" to me despite attempt to imitate screwball-y dialogue of 30's/40's films and such (Perhaps this part I didn't emphasize enough in my review).

[Raxivace]

I remember this film because Tommy Lee Jones won an Oscar for it, but most people thought Ralph Fiennes more than deserved it for Schindler's List (1993).

Man it is bizarre to think of those two performances competing against each other.

You win, Rax. I've seen only 5 Ozu films.

What's funny is that I didn't realize I had seen that many until I went to count. Ozu is a great director but his films can kind of blend together.

While this one wasn't as good as The Avengers films, I thought it was pretty solid. This film is also notable for kpop fans because Blackpink's mv for song 'As If It's Your Last' can be seen on a screen in Ezra Miller's (Flash's) house.

I'll talk more about this later but this bit has been removed from the Snyder cut!

[Raxivace]

This took me too long to write. I did end up getting my first vaccination shot several days ago though so that's some good news.

51. Konosuba! God’s Blessing on This Wonderful World – Legend of Crimson (2019, Dir. Takaomi Kanasaki) – So the main KonoSuba anime series was something of a comedic sendup of RPG's, fantasy stories, the "isekai" genre etc., about idiot heroes who only kind of accidentally save the world through their selfishness and general incompetence. I think its generally pretty funny and the movie continues what I liked about the show.

Roger Avary, the co-writer of Pulp Fiction, gave it a 5/5 review which honestly might be a funnier fact than anything in an already funny series.

52. Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021, Dir. Zack Snyder) – Okay first of all the title is a bit lol. Very much reminds me of Lee Daniels’ The Butler.
That silliness aside I really enjoyed the movie. Characters are much stronger for the most part (Really only Ma Kent I kind of question the changes to but well even in theatrical cut she's tertiary character at best), with Cyborg being the biggest and most obvious example. I was a bit skeptical of claims from years ago that he really was the "heart of the movie" in Snyder's original vision but it seems to be true- the stuff between him and his father is pretty affecting stuff in the Snyder cut. I can see why Cyborg's actor Ray Fisher was so pissed about the Whedon cut (Well on top of all of the other things that have since been revealed about the Justice League reshoots).

The other big change is that a lot of the humor is toned down to be less Whedon-y quips (And I'm sad to say to report that the one K-pop gag that Lyndon liked is gone). This might be more of a taste thing but I find that kind of comedy to be kind of overdone these days- not that there aren't jokes or funny bits here but they feel a little less forced to me now.

I dunno, people that already disliked Snyder probably won't like this either but this is the first time since like Spider-Verse that I really enjoyed one of these big superhero movies.

----

Higurashi When They Cry Gou (2020-2021) – Ryukishi07 what the fuck.


^Understatement of the fuckin' year.

I can't imagine any of what I'm about to write is going to make much sense to anyone here, but I need to get this out of my system once and for all. If you guys thought Mank set me off before, oh boy you ain't seen nothing yet.

So part of the reason I started the Higurashi VN a while back is that this anime began airing last October. It billed itself as a remake of the original anime adaptation (Even playing the OP song of the original series during the ending of the first episode), and then the next week episode 2 came out and quickly revealed this is a sequel to Higurashi Kai, making Gou something of a third season in the franchise after who knows how many years (There have been various other spinoffs in-between Kai and Gou like Rei but I think Gou kind of ignores these).

Gou is honestly a mess. Sort of. Like I really don’t understand what the point of the “lol remake” fakeout was. Like the first episode of Gou and the original series are so identical there are YouTube videos directly comparing scenes between them (Btw I think part of the Gou footage on the left here has been cropped out but this is easiest comparison I could quickly find).



^Like its interesting to compare clips from a directorial point of view, comparing differences in art style between 2006 and 2020, but even after having finished Gou I still quite see what the point of hiding the twist (To the point the announced name of the series wasn't even Gou at first, it was something like "Higurashi When They Cry (2020)").

Also the violence on this show gets uh kind of ridiculous.


^I mean that is just a comical amount of blood by the end of this, especially because its fucking ridiculous that Keiichi SURVIVES that many stab wounds while apparently all it takes to kill Rena is a clock! I mean what the hell.


^This has one of the more darkly funny match cuts I've seen in recent years.


^If your stay at a restaurant ends up looking anything like this screenshot, I think you can safely leave a negative Yelp review without feeling too bad about it.

Another episode features a child being disembowled in half for ten agonizing minutes of screentime. I mean jesus christ that's some 80's OVA type shit. I'm not going to post a clip of that but uh that is a thing that happens.

Anyways I'm not actually opposed to any of the extreme violence this show devolves into, and one of the aspects of it I actually like is how it alternates between gore as camp, and gore as actually disturbing. Really biggest problem I have with Higurashi Gou is the writing around all of this. Frankly I have no idea why after how many years Ryukishi07 revived Higurashi for basically what amounts to 1) Half a pointless retread of classic arcs with "LE TWIST" endings in the first half of the show, and then 2)The second half of the show devolving into one of the dumbest villain motivations I have ever seen.

Let's start with the first half of the show. The first half is contained of three arcs: Onidamashi, Watadamashi, and Tataridamashi.

Onidamashi - This is a riff on the Onikakushi and Tsumihoroboshi arcs from the original anime and VN, and pretty much plays out exactly the same as Onikakushi for like 90% of its four episodes. That is, it follows it until its big twist being, which from what I can tell anyways, is Keiichi not actually being an unreliable narrator this time around with Rena really actually trying to kill him. Basically they transpose Tsumihoroboshi Rena into the Onikakashi arc. The actual ending with Keiichi managing to kill her is executed in silly way, though I think the basic premise here is sound as an introduction to a stealth sequel disuguised as a remake type of premise. The problem however comes with the next two arcs.

Watadamashi - This is a riff on the Watanagashi and Meakashi arcs from the original anime and VN. I actually can't figure out WTF is going on in this arc and if you know please let me know. The thing it still appears to follow the original arcs for the most part until the ending, but I have no idea what's going on at the end here.

Tataridamashi - This riffs on the Tatarigoroshi and Minagoroshi arcs from the anime and VN. This one actually starts following Tatarigoroshi super closely, veers hard into following Minagoroshi, and then has a bizarre ending. This one is pretty boring to watch through for the most part, though it gains the most in retrospect. Basically, original Tatarigoroshi and Minagoroshi arcs revolve Satoko being abused by her shithead uncle Teppei. Tatarigoroshi has Keiichi react to this by straightup murdering Teppei and then shit further spirals out of control. Minagoroshi has Keiichi instead successfully rally the town into pressuring Child Protective Services into actually investigating Satoko's case and getting her to admit that she was being abused. Happy ending.

Tataridamashi on the other hand shows us several frankly tedious episodes of Keiichi rallying the town once more, and then when all is said and done being invited to dinner by Saotoko as a thank-you...only to get attacked by fuckin' Teppei out of nowhere and be forced to kill him again (A la Tatarigoroshi in a way, bringing straight into the fate he was trying to avoid this arc) in self-defense. The thing is, if I'm understanding the implication correctly from Satokowashi, in this arc Satoko was completely faking being abused to begin with, and Teppei was an innocent man who actually was trying to form himself and just generally be less of a shithead. That's a bizarre change to begin with and plays really strangely for a post-#MeToo, a post-#BelieveWomen American audience member such as myself, especially when in the original series Satoko was basically the poster child for abuse victims in general.

There's also something to be said that Keiichi valiantly rallying the town up and getting everyone to "forgive" the Hojou family only to perpetuate not only the same general discrimination against them from the past (Dam War nonsense), but also repeat his own "sin" from a past life in killing Teppei as a weird spin on the story. Thing is I don't know what exactly, if anything, these changes with Tataridamashi are trying to say. I've previously wondered if there is some kind of colonial angle here with Keiichi being a city boy that's basically trying to upend the village people's way of life (Honestly a comparison can be made to Jake Sully in Cameron's Avatar. It's not like other Higurashi villains aren't city people either) but man its hard to tell what on Earth this is supposed to beg getting at, if anything.

General Issues With the First Half of Gou - Something all three of these arcs suffer from is Rika. She's so ridiculously passive during these arcs that its honestly kind of obnoxious. This sort of made sense in the original series in that the arcs we actually see are toward the end of one hundred years of solitude looping and she's getting to the point where she's finally ready to give up on averting the Hinamizawa Syndrome murders, the Great Hinamizawa Disaster etc., but in Gou she'll only do like, a slight nudge and then just BTFO. Like you don't do any follow up to make sure everything works out between Rena meeting Keiichi? You just assume the loops are the same? Except she kind of does assume there are differences because there's one episode where she cries to Hanyuu that she's never seen a loop like...Onidamashi, I think, but its still kind of silly.

Other than that, while the "Spot the differences lol" game is fun it does mean you sit through a lot of stuff you've seen before waiting for the most dramatic change at the end to happen. At least ultimate changes in Tataridamashi sort of recontextualizes what happens in that arc, but I can't imagine Onidamashi and Watadamashi well ever be much more interesting than they were the first time through. Hopefully I'm wrong about that.

The second half of the show only focuses on two arcs.

Nekodamashi - This arc is just fuckin' nuts. Its basically just a cavalcade of random violence and gore and frankly it just feels like a mean spirited attack on the "Friendship will overcome all odds" message of the original Higurashi. That's probably also why I liked this arc the most, since it feels the most committed to being something, even if that something is a fairly grim spectacle for several episodes, culminating in a child being bisected.

Satokowashi - This is the final arc of Gou and is some dumb horseshit. The first bunch of episodes tries to explain our villain's motivation but its just stupid. All of the awful murders in Gou happen because idiot Satoko struggled too much in school and thought it was somehow Rika's fault for not bending over backwards to help her? Really? You can spend years in time loops killing your friends but you're also somehow so fucking stupid that you can't pass through math class again through another loop? Really? I mean god damn, Rika even offered to help you several times Satoko what the fuck.

Like are they trying to make Meakashi Shion's rants about how Satoko was just this awful person and burden that only drags people down retroactively correct? That the whole town's bias against the Hojou family was actually justified? Like why would you ever given something of a legitimate point to those characters from the original? Its bizarre to turn Satoko into this bizarre murder fetishist to begin with she already resolved her reliance on others in the original to begin with except here now she relies on Rika to unhealthy extreme, except until she doesn't so she can begin Murder Time Loop 2.0: Yandere Edition. Seriously, why make Satoko a damn obsessive psychopath? Why revive Higurashi to do that?

And speaking of Shion, for all her shit about how she's going to protect Satoko for Satoshi, why the hell would she never mention that St. Lucia was this awful school? She's enrolled there and even staged elaborate escape from it in the past for Christ's sake. Why isn't she present for ANY of this St. Lucia drama nonsense? Hell, shouldn't even Rika know that St. Lucia is pretty fucked?

On top of that this arc also brings in elements from Umineko and Ciconia (The latter of which I have not played) which I really am not fond of. The show seems to imply that Satoko is becoming Lambdadelta from Umineko, except Umineko already it clear that Takano is who Lambda was based on. This was a part of the "lore" of broader When They Cry that really needed no expounding upon, especially because Higurashi Rei already gave us enough of an explanation for Rika and Bernkastel splitting. Its just such a thin reason to revive Higurashi, if that's what they're going for anyways.

After all that we get several kind of random episodes that really feel like disconnected fragments har-har more than anything, and the show ends on to me what feels like an unintentional anti-climax. Why?



Oh I guess its because there's yet another season of this mess coming in July. Still even with that in mind, the climax of Gou really doesn't work as a season finale since it revolves around a character that's pretty tangential to Gou's overall story.

Honestly I just don't understand why this show exists at the end of the day, or who it is for. It doesn't quite work for newcomers since, like with Rebuild of Evangelion, it relies on familiarity with some form of the original for its twists and development to carry any weight (Like Akasaka's appearance in this show is a complete and total non-sequitur if you're not familiar with the original). That itself is fine but why actively lie and say "Lol its remake newcomers can enjoy" and immediately double back on that in episode 2? Except they keep doing that charade into the final episode of the series with somewhat lengthy recap scenes that I guess recap the largest plot points well enough, but carry not of the emotional weight (Its particularly dumb with Takano since she's not even particularly relevant to the actual story of Gou).

And thematically I can't really make sense of what Gou is trying to do either. Like I think they're trying to do some "You have to move on from Higurashi already" type of me message (A la Rebuild of Evangelion, Twin Peaks: The Return etc.)...and the general idea of problematizing the original Higurashi's "miracle" ending I think is fine and honestly its something I think was a flaw of it to begin with, but the original was such a resolved story with no real hooks to build a sequel around or loose threads to build a new story around. There's no natural point of continuation. As far as I'm aware too, no one was really clamoring for MORE Higurashi and more information about the characters and such (Other than maybe shippers?). Maybe there is something different about Higurashi fandom in Japan than on English speaking internet but my understand is that people were generally fine with the original story being done, so why revive Higurashi? And why revive it in a way that feels like it assassinates some key characters? I still don't have an answer to that question after 24 episodes of Gou.

Maybe Sotsu will redeem whatever the fuck what Gou was trying to do, but my hopes aren't high.

Lupin the Third: Part IV (2015) - Its Lupin in Italy. Pretty fun, light-hearted and stylish thievery shenanigans for the most part.

Similar to shows like The X-Files or Cowboy Bebop, here there are two types of episodes: random one-offs and episodes that continue the main story of the season. I liked both types about evenly (And really the main storyline ending with a clone of Leonardo Da Vinci trying to trap everyone in Instrumentality was silly but kind of fun), and it does make me want to go back and watch some more Lupin in the future. I'll probably go to the Part I anime from the early 70's next, since Miyazaki and Takahata both directed episodes of those.

[Raxivace]

I'm just going to assume people are aware of the gist of these because of their general prominence in Awards season stuff.

53. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020, Dir. Aaron Sorkin) - Pretty standard trial movie, though I enjoy those well enough. I think the script is pretty standard Sorkin (I.e. fast-talking clever characters), though Sorkin as a director is unsurprisingly not the strongest of visual storytellers. The beginning is probably the most cinematic of part of the movie to be honest, what with the inter-cutting of everyone discussing their motives for going to Chicago and the Oliver Stone-esque blending of archival historical footage and what I think is recreated bits.

EDIT: Really best way I can put it is that while this isn't a great film, its watchable enough fodder for a middle or high school social studies class. That's the kind of vibe it has.

54. Promising Young Woman (2020, Dir. Emerald Fennell) - I had really mixed feelings on this. The basic premise of going after date rapists is fine, but to only go after them to give them a stern talking to feels kind of like a pulled punch. The other problem is that sometimes the movie is more interested in responding to talking points more than anything else, except it doesn't even commit to that. Like the scene where Carey Mulligan meets her "friend" from school who didn't believe Mulligan's friend was actually raped and was just regretting drunken sex the next day, so Mulligan's character drugs her and tricks her into believing she was raped, and this all clearly meant to address things people say (I.e. the people that say you shouldn't get drunk if you don't want to get raped and such). Except, later in the movie we find out Mulligan did in fact know Mulligan's friend was raped and even has a video of it happening, so its like story itself warps itself around to support whatever Fennell changes her mind to focus on.

This movie also heavily references The Night of the Hunter, and I don't know why. Like are they trying to suggest a parallel between Carey Mulligan hunting rapists and Robert Mitchum's character in that movie hunting those kids? But why make that comparison? Like what would be the point of intentionally undermining Mulligan's righteous fury if you're not actually as mad about date rape as the movie seems to be on the surface?

55. The Father (2020, Dir. Florian Zeller) - This honestly was a very pleasant surprise, its like somebody infused Haneke's Amour with the puzzle film aspects of something like Memento and makes it work very well for the most part. The movie is pretty coy at first about whether we're anchored into Anthony Hopkin's perspective or not, though it quickly becomes obvious we are as the order of events in the movie become tangled and confused (Perhaps most noticeable in the dinner scene that loops back around on itself). Its exactly like the audience as whatever dementia or Alzheimer's that has afflicted Hopkins.

You still end up having to piece together the general events of the story (If I'm understanding correctly, The daughter really did move to Paris and that's what ultimately set Hopkins off, the repeated trauma of losing another child), but its also IMO just successful at being emotionally affective even though its also a puzzle of sorts.

[Derived Absurdity]

I haven't seen The Trial of the Chicago 7, but I heard it basically liberalizes (or Sorkinizes) political radicalism. Abbie Hoffman in real life was a revolutionary, an anarchist "burn it all down" type who liked to make a mockery of traditional American institutions, but it seems the film presents him as basically a standard American patriot who righteously hypocrisy-shame his opponents, in the "have you no shame, sir" type of way liberals love so much. The film apparently shows one of the defendants reading out the names of the American war dead in Vietnam, making the judge cry or something, while in real life they instead listed off America's injustices, showed solidarity to the Vietnamese instead of our soldiers, and insulted the judge. Stuff like that. Sorkin takes out most of that scary subversive stuff. Abbie Hoffman was a theatrical showman who held America's institutions in contempt and tried to mock and degrade them as much as possible. Probably should have been less like a standard trial movie and more like something out of Better Call Saul.

Sorry I don't ever respond to your other posts. I read them but I usually just have literally nothing to say.

[Raxivace]

Yeah I figured being a Sorkin project the movie was watered down from history, though the judge in the film is presented as a pretty awful asshole (Though whether the movie makes him being an asshole an example of just one of a few "bad eggs" or an example of a larger institutional flaw could probably be debated. I'm not sure where I fall on this myself). The movie does actually have Abbie Hoffman do showy stuff to piss off the judge in the movie (I.e. coming to trial wearing judge robes, and when asked to remove them he's wearing a bailiff uniform under it), but as the trial drags on there's less of that.

Supposedly the thing about reading the list of dead American soldiers actually did happen in the trial in real life in some form (I actually just assumed it was something invented myself), though it wasn't during Tom Hayden's closing statement it seems. I do think the movie generally makes it clear these guys thought the killing of the Vietnamese by America was wrong, though the movie probably could have emphasized that more.

[Raxivace]

55. Godzilla vs. Kong (2021, Dir. Adam Wingard) - Uh its Godzilla fighting King Kong. I generally like this movie though I kind of would have preferred more of a straight "versus" movie instead of the third act revolving around both teaming up to fight Mechagodzilla. Probably my least favorite of all of the Legendary monster movies.

56. Nomadland (2020, Dir. Chloe Zhao) - Didn't have particularly strong feelings about this tbh. Nice story about trying to move on after grief I guess but I didn't find too much to be interesting here.

-------------------------

Angel Beats! (2010) - So I had a couple of reasons I wanted to watch this.

1) I watched Haibane Renmei last year and really liked it. I noticed online though there seems to be (Or used to be) some kind of weird rivalry between Haibane fans and Angel Beats! fans, which got me curious.

2) The writer of the show was Jun Maeda, who wrote the last year's The Day I Became God which I generally liked despite a mixed critical reception from others.

3) About a decade ago I got the first episode of Angel Beats! for free from some promotional thing iTunes was doing and never got around to watching it. Still, its been floating around somewhere in the back of my mind for a while now as a result.

4) Kuribo had seen the show before and just generally wanted to get my take on it.

Well I finally got around to watching it and generally speaking I liked it. I think solely comparing it to Haibane is a bit wrong because really it feels like a mix of that, Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and like with several homages and references to Evangelion thrown in (Down to even the main battle theme on the soundtrack being called "Decisive Battle").

The basic premise here is similar to Haibane is that it involves various characters having misadventures in an afterlife setting. Once they settle whatever sad element from their old existence is causing them to cling to their old existence (Usually a tearjerking flashback is involved), they are able to move on and disappear from the purgatory-esque world.

The first big difference with Angel Beats! from something Haibane the core characters here are actively fighting against doing any kind of moving on. They believe one character they call "Angel" is directly working for God and if she successfully gets them to move its actually equivalent to some kind of ego death. So they concoct various schemes of violence and crime to overthrow her and such throughout the first half of the show.

This is where the next and probably biggest difference from Haibane comes in, in that large chunks of this show are action-comedy or just straight up comedy. Its even a textual element that most of these guys are really just dumb as hell people that often make huge assumptions and come to totally wrong conclusions as a result, and this mostly played for laughs.


^Oh look its one of those Evangelion references I mentioned.

This is often played for comedy but I think its an intentional theme of the series as well, as presumptions we make about the way the world works can often distort our view of reality, and therefore cause unhappiness or a lack of satisfaction with life and so on. Like really, Yurippe and her shenanigans with trying to defeat Angel might as well make her the true outright villain of the series, and in a more cynical series she would probably be presented as just straight up evil or something.

I'd say the biggest problems with the show show mainly come down to some of the tragic backstories being a little overdone and that the series starts going into them a bit too early (Episode 3ish is where I think the first one starts). Though if you insert the two OVA's into their chronological order in the main series I think this alleviates some of the latter issue somewhat (Particularly for the character episode 3 revolves around).

The other big issue I had is this late plotline about evil Angels appearing and the whole idea that maybe the good Angel would be corrupted by refusing with them. I understand they need an excuse for Angel to end up in the hospital so Otonashi can hear her hearbeat, but I wish they could have found a slightly less contrived, borderline filler-y way to do it.

Otherwise I generally really enjoyed the show. I think Haibane Renmei is still pretty easily the better series (Certainly the more artful as well), but its to Angel Beats!'s credit that it still felt distinct enough to me from any of its obvious influences and still an enjoyable watch in its own right.

[Raxivace]

Man I have fallen way behind on posting again. Gonna try and play catch up, and hopefully get back to regularly posting/responding to things.

57. Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel I. Presage Flower (Rewatch, 2017, Dir. Tomonori Sudo)
58. Fate/stay Night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly (Rewatch, 2019, Dir. Tomonori Sudo)
59. Fate/stay Night: Heaven's Feel III. Spring Song (2020, Dir. Tomonori Sudo) - With last Heaven's Feel movie coming out on blu-ray, I took the time to rewatch the first two as well. Most of my comments about the first two movies still apply not only to those but to the third movie as well, though I will say I did still really enjoy them this time around and boy are they gorgeous looking. One thing I really noticed this time around is light visual motif of Sakura lightly touching her hair any time Rin becomes a topic of conversation. This is nice, subtle bit of foreshadowing that she has some kind of hangup about Rin beyond her just being most popular girl in school or whatever.

I've come to accept "True Ending" as legitimate ending to the visual novel version's of Heaven's Feel over time, and while VN adapts it I'm not really sure the VN adapts it super well. It's already a bit "huh?" to have Shirou survive the VN, but I'm not even sure the movies make it clear that he's lost ability to use his magic circuits any more and is literally forced into never being able to perform any of his old near-suicidal heroics again even if he wanted to. This is to say nothing of this ending revolving around existence of a Garden of Sinners character that was already a bit out of left field in the VN and is even more random here.

60. Spectre (2015, Dir. Sam Mendes) - Yeah I still don't quite get why people hate on this Bond film so much. I find it pretty fun for the most part still. I could watch Christoph Waltz give villain monologues all day.

I also find "Writing's on the Wall" to be an underrated song tbh.

61. Sound of Metal (2019, Dir. Darius Marder) - Riz Ahmed is good in this, but as a whole I wasn't much a fan of the movie. I've always found capital-d Deaf Culture to be kind of cult-like and the way this film tries to a paint a musician wanting his hearing back instead of going whole hog on joining Deaf Culture as some kind of horrible thing (Movie even fucking compares wanting to hear to a drug addiction!) that they're totally right to ostracize him over is just kind of whatever to me (That ending shot in particular stands out to me as cringe inducing. Contrast between Deaf Culture community as blissful commune and the party with hearing people at the end as hellish was kind of dumb too). Like whole thing plays as bizarre anti-cochlear implant propaganda to me.

Like the whole notion that hospitals wouldn't go waaaaaaay out of their way to make it clear to Ahmed that hearing aids wouldn't be perfect and would take time to adjust to is just laughable. Doctors, if nothing else, try very hard to cover their asses.

62. Minari (2020, Dir. Lee Isaac Chung) - Fine little drama about intergenerational experiences of immigrants in America, but as a movie it didn't really wow me.

63. Judas and the Black Messiah (2021, Dir. Shaka King) - Again, solid historical film but nothing that exactly wowed me. Still probably my third or so favorite of the Best Picture nominees this year though.

64. Army of the Dead (2021, Dir. Zack Snyder) - I really enjoyed this. Combining Ocean's 11-esque heist film with zombies turned out to result in some good campy fun. Bautista needs to be the lead in more movies like this.

--------------

Castlevania (Season 4, 2021) - Oof, this was not particularly good final season. I thought Season 3 was pretty bad to begin with and while this is slightly better its still not good. The story had natural endpoint with season 2, and everything afterwards has just felt like bizarre extraneous material. Like the Hector/Isaac storyline and everything directly connected to them just ends up feeling like strange filler at the end of the day. The actual villains that Trevor and co. end up confronting too were kind of anti-climatic.

I also have to be honest and say that season 3 probably plays in a much more negative light for me, now that revelations about Warren Ellis have come out. The "Alucard is forced to kill apprentices he took on that used sex to manipulate him" plays in a very different way now, since that's probably Ellis views the sexual assault allegations against him.

The Sopranos (Seasons 5-6, 2004-2007) - Feels weird to finally be done with Sopranos. I generally really liked Season 5 and while I was a bit tired of the "Tony has to decide whether to whack somebody he likes or just let them live" plots are kind of tired, this one with Steve Buscemi's Tony Blundetto was probably the best version of that. Part of that is just Buscemi being a fun actor to watch, but it felt a bit more tragic since Tony S. is more or less the one who kept pulling him back into the mafia life and playing on his worst impulses.

I generally liked season 6A as well (Vito storyline dragged a bit though), but 6B was kind of iffy to me. I think the problem starts with the episode where Tony starts losing at gambling- from that point it feels like the show switches from "prestige TV" slow-burn pacing to more compressed movie pacing to cram a lot of plot developments in. It felt very sudden to me and made things feel all over the place. Like AJ goes from proposing to a girl, to getting rejected, to suicidal, to being depressed over the conflict in Middle East (That he wants to join? After not wanting to join military school in prior season?), to getting job as some kind of movie producer. Melfi turns on Tony finally over course of like two episodes. Everything about Christopher's story. etc.

None of these are unreasonable developments on their own, but it really does feel like I'm watching a different show suddenly. Which I guess is the point somewhat- Tony's whole world is collapsing on him, but I guess I liked things better when they were a bit more understated.

Even with nitpicking I do think this is still a very good show that was worth the time it took to watch, but man I'm not sure I can do another one of these long 80+ episode prestige shows any time soon.

[Gendo]

So I never talk about TV shows in my movies list thread, but since finishing X-Files, I've re-watched Breaking Bad, and very recently started on the once every few years journey that is the re-watching of LOST.

[Raxivace]

Honestly I'm kind of surprised we haven't had some kind of Lost reboot or movie yet. Its been well over a decade now since it finished and other than that dopey "New Man in Charge" epilogue there's been basically nothing.

Like X-Files and Breaking Bad both got movies and a spin-off series. Even Sopranos has a prequel movie coming out later this year. Lost? Nothin'.

[Lord_Lyndon]

64. Army of the Dead (2021, Dir. Zack Snyder) - I really enjoyed this. Combining Ocean's 11-esque heist film with zombies turned out to result in some good campy fun. Bautista needs to be the lead in more movies like this.

This sounds awesome. I'll put it on my watchlist. I still haven't seen Snyder's cut of Justice League and Dawn of the Dead (2004). I love Snyder's films.

[Raxivace]

65. Lupin the Third: The Italian Game (2016, Dir. Kazuhide Tomonaga & Yuichiro Yano) – Kind of meh unfortunately. Basically this takes some episodes from the Part IV series and combines them into a feature length film, stitching them together with new material that composes an overarching story about Lupin being challenged to find the treasures of a “Count Calgiostro” (No relation to Miyazaki’s Lupin movie) by a mysterious masked stranger.

The Cagliostro stuff is alright, but really I think it would have been better as a standalone 45 minute OVA or something that combined with these Part IV episodes. Like it seems totally counter-intuitive to the villain’s goals to have him be the one secret behind the train hijacking episode in Part IV, since it would put Lupin in danger for no real reason. Nyx was a great character in Part IV too (As a kind of weird riff on Daniel Craig’s portrayal of James Bond. He even works for MI6!), but his introduction episode is totally superfluous as an addition to this story too.

Still the new stuff is fun, it just should have been standalone instead of a weird hybrid compilation movie.

66. Trouble in Paradise (1932, Dir. Ernst Lubitsch) - Fun little film about a thieving couple trying to con a rich woman out of her money. IIRC in the Criterion DVD introduction, Peter Bogdanovich argues that this the origin of romantic comedy in American film and while I suspect that's probably not correct it may be the first genuinely good one.

67. Friends: The Reunion (2021, Dir. Ben Winston) - Similar to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reuinon last year, this was huge nostalgia bomb for me since I hadn't really watched much Friends since the series finale aired 17 years ago. It was kind of light into like deep insight into the show really (The story about Matt Leblanc dislocating his shoulder would have made Buster Keaton proud though, I think), but it was just a pleasure to see the whole cast again.

For real though what happened to Matthew Perry? Others have mentioned this but his manner of speaking is weird and slurred now.

68. The Merry Jail (1917, Dir. Ernst Lubitsch) - Kind of meh silent comedy about a lady trolling her husband. Emil Jannings is here playing a security guard and that's neat I guess. "Lubitsch Touch" really hadn't been perfected yet I guess, though not only was this early era of feature filmmaking but he was also only around 25 at the time and well this is better than anything I could have done at that age in that era.

-------------------

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (2004-2005) - As the name implies, this was a hell of an adaptation of Dumas' classic novel. Since this shares a lot of the basics with said novel, I'll focus on the significant differences.

1. The story is moved to a retro-futuristic sci-fi setting. This is the most superficial change but aesthetically its kind of neat and allows for weird imagery from time to time. Really it reminds me of a Shakespeare adaptations that move content of plays to different eras and such, like Ian McKellen film version of Richard III.

I do think you lose some of the neat historical context of the novel as a result (Edmond Dantes being implicated in a a plot to kill an unnamed Prince doesn't quite carry the same weight as being accused of trying to help put Napoleon fuckin' Bonaparte back on the Throne). Considering other changes though and what this version chooses to emphasize, this isn't too huge a loss.

2. The biggest change is Albert de Morcerf (That is, the child of one of the men that the Count wants revenge against) becoming the main character instead of the Count of Monte Cristo himself. This means the anime starts where Part II of the novel does, and in the show our POV is more aligned with naive Albert who befriends this mysterious Count fella whose arrival seems to happen to coincide with everything in Albert's life beginning to slowly unravel. Its the show's most radical and interesting change, as it puts the concept of the Count's revenge itself in a fairly different light than Dumas did.

3. The Count's actual backstory has a major change. In the novel of course he befriends a priest in prison. The anime has him make a somewhat vague deal with a Devil-esque figure- the Gankutsuou of the title instead. This might seem like weird change at first but honestly it goes a long toward "explaining" why this version of the Count is honestly darker figure than the one Dumas wrote. Dumas' Count still had potential for goodness and himself becomes disturbed by unintended consequences of his revenge scheme. Anime Count has harming innocents as a means to the ends of revenge itself. Even his dying breaths are spent trying to kill Albert.

While the Christian theming is mostly removed from the anime, this change does also make an interesting counterpoint to novel Dantes believing he's enacting "God's will" and such with his revenge.

4. As a result of 2 and 3, who lives and dies at the end of the story ends up different than in Dumas' novel. The novel at least gives the impression that that Danglars was who Dantes had the greatest hate for (Which makes him living all the more surprising), but here Morcerf seems to be the greatest source of the Count's ire. Again, this makes sense for a story about Albert being torn between two different father figures, so Danglars just being jettisoned off to space and forgotten while there are still entire episodes left is sensible enough. Even Caderrouse seems to be alive at the end of the anime and on the run, whereas the novel has this whole subplot about him trying to betray the Count.

Really though why this show works as despite all the changes, it both keeps the spirit of Dumas' novel in tact while the changes it does make adds commentary to the original book as well. Its not just a lazy cash grab using recognizable IP, its a thoughtful adaptation an perhaps examination of one of the best novels ever written.

Honestly this is just a great series all around and probably one of the best things I've watched since I saw Haibane Renmei last year. The director of the show was Mahiro Maeda who you all may remember as one of the co-directors on Evangelion 3.0 (!!!!!), an animator on many famous works (Including the animated segment in Kill Bill of all things), and even did some design work on Mad Max: Fury Road (I really wonder how that happened). Dude might honestly be the George Harrison of the all the people to pass through Gainax.

[Raxivace]

64. Army of the Dead (2021, Dir. Zack Snyder) - I really enjoyed this. Combining Ocean's 11-esque heist film with zombies turned out to result in some good campy fun. Bautista needs to be the lead in more movies like this.

This sounds awesome. I'll put it on my watchlist. I still haven't seen Snyder's cut of Justice League and Dawn of the Dead (2004). I love Snyder's films.

He's had hell of a year honestly between ZSJL and Army of the Dead.

[Raxivace]

69. What Time Is It There? (2001, Dir. Tsai Ming-liang) – The “slow cinema” movement is still something fairly new to me, so while I’m not entirely sure how to process these kinds of movies (Especially when they don’t have overt genre elements in play like in Tarkovsky’s Stalker), I still quite enjoyed this. Ebert's review does a pretty good summarizing the plot (And really his review helps me make some sense of the movie), but I still wonder about the guy that steals the clock in the theater.

One comparison I want to add that Ebert doesn’t bring up is that it seems like this movie is the anti-Lost in Translation. Of course that movie is about Americans (Westerners) who who have romantic hookup in Japan (East). Here we have a Taiwanese woman and a Chinese woman (Easterners) hook up in Paris (The West) and uh…it doesn’t seem to really bring any happiness or life revelations or anything. In general this is just a pretty lonely movie, and like Ebert's review alludes to it seems everyone here is desperately trying to address that one way or another.

Also wtf is that ending? Is the father a spirit after all What does it mean? I'm still not quite sure what to make of all the references to 400 Blows either, despite apparently being Tsai's favorite film of all time.

70. Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011, Makoto Shinkai) - A girl and her teacher both have lost people dear to them in their life, so they journey to the underground world of "Agartha" in order to hopefully bring them back to life.

It's a fun little adventure movie with Shinkai's strong visual style, though I have to say I may have misread Shinkai as a director. I was under the impression that more of his work was in the vein of 5cm Per Second, but really his work seems to be way more plot oriented in general than I thought. Like really movies with fantastical element a plot revolves around like this or Voices of a Distant Star or even the wacky parallel universe shenanigans in Place Promised in Our Early Days seem far closer to the norm for him than something like 5cm does. I'm going to try and finish off Shinkai's filmography this year (Main things I have left to see are Garden of Words, Your Name, and Weathering With You) and I wonder if those will shape my perception.

---------
Charlotte (2015-2016) – This is another melodrama/comedy show from Jun Maeda (Day I Became God, Angel Beats) and this was uh a trainwreck. I think.

The basic premise here is really similar to X-Men. In this setting some people are randomly born with powers, including protagonist Yuu Otosaka. Unlike X-Men however, the powers people can be born with seem to fucking suck. Yuu for example has the power the possess people by looking at them...but only for several seconds. And that's it. And while he's possessing people his own body is left defenseless. A girl named Nao Tomori who leads a gang of people seemingly against superpowered individuals finds out Yuu has powers, and basically blackmails him into joining her gang. They work together to either bully others into not using powers ever again or into joining up with their little gang. The first half of or so of the show follows a "monster of the week" format where some new random child with powers pops up (Usually someone trying to finanically benefit in some way) and is basically harassed over it.

Already this is where I start having problems with the series because for something with such obvious parallels to X-Men it feels more aligned with the fucking villain from X-Men that wanted to "cure" mutants and such. And really this show uses similar language too- the powers are apparently literally a disease (There's no real indication that its even a fatal disease though. Really it doesn't seem disease-like at all!), and eventually they'll go away so don't use them in public (Apparently the powers naturally vanish into adulthood). We're also told that evil "scientists" will kidnap people with powers to "experiment" on them. We're shown a character that there are claims of experimentation on too... The thing is, we never actually see such evil scientist characters. In the main timeline we follow anyways, but they're still talked about as if they exist but like where. Where are they? While previous timeline shows evil scientists, in the future at least one of them works for Yuu's secret brother who is presented as unambiguous good guy so like what the fuck. The supposed stakes are not at all clear and really makes protagonist kind of come off hypocritical bullies because they're allowed to use their powers whenever they want and don't seem to suffer any consequences for it.

The thing is that I'm not entirely sure whether we're meant to view main characters as hypocrites or not. The conflict between what they say, and their actions and what is actually depicted in the series is blatant though that it would almost be more shocking for this not to be the case- this random MAL user for example lists out a lot of blatant examples. The one thing that gives me pause is that such a disconnect doesn't really seem to match the vibe of the show, but if that's the point I could at least respect it. OTOH Maeda's other two series I recently watched didn't even remotely employ Godardian disconnect as narrative device if interpreted sympathetically, or even from critical POV they didn't have anything approach such blatant contradiction.

This gets more blatant as the show develops even. Like Yuu thinks his sister has died and he spends an episode taking his anger out on random gangsters, this is bad thing because hey its self-destructive, I guess gangsters don't deserve to get fucked with either etc. However at the end of the series (Literally final episode even) when Yuu goes on similar power trip again to steal every single power in the world, this is somehow good thing? Even though he's literally destroying himself in the process, and frankly robbing innocent people. Sure there are some assholes here, but the girl who has power to heal injuries was hardly some damnable person.

Like thematically, what does it mean then if one of Yuu's final acts in the show is to rob some random child trying to defend HIM of her super power of "courage"? This is kind of story development that makes sense if Yuu and his friends are meant to read as despicable hypocrite ultimately, but taken face value then man this show espouses some kind of disturbing views, especially if you transplant X-Men's "Mutants = oppressed minorities" thing onto the characters with powers.

Hell even without that, its just weird to make a show about good conformity is in general... But there's enough tension in Charlotte that makes me wonder if its what the show is really doing.

[Raxivace]

71. Fahrenheit 451 (1966, Dir. Francois Truffaut) – I always thought Truffaut adapting F451 at all to begin with was kind of weird (Not really material that I think suits his sensibilities), and in English at that is kind of odd too. He sets the story in the U.K. and I’m not sure I buy the premise happening there as much America like in the novel. I’m especially unsure of the casting of Oskar Werner as Montag- he just plays it in a strange, semi-robotic way.

Biggest thing that’s weird to me though is that Truffaut goes for a languid Antonioni-esque pacing here that I just really don’t think fits this material. Bradbudy’s book is pretty quick and tightly-paced even with lengthy monologue section from Captain Beatty (Which is really heart of the novel IMO that Truffaut makes a half-hearted effort to capture here). Part of the reason even that monologue works though is that the book makes it a suspense sequence- Beatty breaks into Montag’s house and starts going on his rant to a bedridden Montag…who is hiding a book under his pillow. It’s a very Hitchcockian setup (And it turns out Bradbury even wrote on one of Hitchcock’s television shows) and its really bizarre to me that Truffaut didn’t go for it in that way.

There’s also kind of irony I realized in that making a movie denouncing book burning, you have to actually burn books yourself. In making a book denouncing that you…make a new book. I think that gives a tension to film adaptations that I’m not really sure anyone figured out how to deal with.

72. Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964, Dir. Ishiro Honda) – I guess King Kong beating his ass wasn’t enough, because now Mothra is on the action here. I was actually kind of surprised she died, but then her Mothra babies beating the absolute shit out of Godzilla was honestly hilarious.

This always continues the themes from the original Mothra about free press, political corruption etc. (Human villains want to turn site of Mothra's egg into some kind of a theme park), which is kind of interesting.

73. Halloween (Rewatch, 1978, Dir. John Carpenter) – This worked a little better for me this time around. I do think its still kind of a lesser version of Psycho, but this time around I was able to appreciate a little more as what paved the way for stuff like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street. Some of the cinematography is better too than I think I gave credit for back in the IMDb days, though I still say the opening sequence of the film doesn’t work super well.

The actual kill in that bit is just terrible looking, and in general I think the whole first long take feels kind of artificial with how quickly Michael’s sister and her boyfriend go from making up the couch, to running upstairs as if they were going to have sex, to then the boyfriend seemingly immediately coming downstairs and saying goodbye etc. I like that Carpenter is trying to be ambitious, especially on his budget level for this, but I just don’t find it nearly as effective as the more conventional sequences in the rest of the film.

74. The Skywalk is Gone (2002, Dir. Tsai Ming-liang) – A short film that acts as a follow-up to What Time Is It There?. Shiang-chyi has returned to Taipei to find Hsiao-Kang, but the skywalk where he was selling watches is now gone, and she is unable to locate him. At the end of the short, we see Hsiao-Kang auditioning for some kind of pornography filmmaker, presumably the set-up the final film of the “trilogy” in The Wayward Cloud.

Don’t have strong opinion one way or another, but Tsai only working with 20 or minutes doesn’t leave quite as strong an impression.

[Faustus5]

72. Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964, Dir. Ishiro Honda) – I guess King Kong beating his ass wasn’t enough, because now Mothra is on the action here. I was actually kind of surprised she died, but then her Mothra babies beating the absolute shit out of Godzilla was honestly hilarious.

This always continues the themes from the original Mothra about free press, political corruption etc. (Human villains want to turn site of Mothra's egg into some kind of a theme park), which is kind of interesting.

Coincidentally, I just watched this for the first time last weekend as part of my binge of Showa era Godzilla films inspired by the recent release of Godzilla vs Kong. Hell, I would have kept watching the more recent ones but HBO isn't carrying them.

Did you notice how clumsy this incarnation of Godzilla was? He was literally tripping over buildings and accidentally knocking shit over. I loved it.

[Raxivace]

Coincidentally, I just watched this for the first time last weekend as part of my binge of Showa era Godzilla films inspired by the recent release of Godzilla vs Kong. Hell, I would have kept watching the more recent ones but HBO isn't carrying them.

Did you notice how clumsy this incarnation of Godzilla was? He was literally tripping over buildings and accidentally knocking shit over. I loved it.

I did notice that and yeah its great. I think its most obvious during fight scenes but its there when he's at the hotel and such too. Honestly its like he became a slapstick character or something.

One other thing that's kind of interesting is how long they take to actually bring in Godzilla into the movie. I didn't track the time but its gotta be at least 45 minutes before the big G even appears in the film.

[Raxivace]

75. Halloween II (1981, Dir. Rick Rosenthal) – It’s kind of weird to me how this one seems to have generally lower reputation than Halloween 1 because I really don’t think there’s any kind of huge gulf in quality between them. If anything I have slight preference for this movie just because of how great the black comedy of the police just fucking running down some random innocent kid in a mask wandering the streets is.

It also makes me wonder how many sequels there are set on the same night of their previous films like this. I couldn't come up with another off of the top of my head anyways.

76: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982, Dir. Tommy Lee Wallace) – Honestly I didn’t hate this despite having little direct connection with the previous fils. Sure the whole thing about an Irish-American conspiracy about Halloween is kind of bizarre, but I dunno. Somehow it all kind of works for me despite/because how goofy it all is.

77. The Wayward Cloud (2005, Dir. Tsai Ming-liang) - The end of the trilogy starting with What Time Is It There? and The Skywalk is Gone. Shiang-chyi has finally reunited with Hsiao-Kang, who has become a porn actor. While film is clearly exploring themes of loneliness and sexuality that started in the previous films, what exactly Tsai is getting at about those subjects is mysterious to me (And well interviews I watched with him about this didn't help and phrased things kind of weirdly), and that's before you even get to the fairly shocking climax of the trilogy.

This film also adds musical numbers (wat) and they are a thing.

[Raxivace]

78. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988, Dir. Dwight H. Little)
79. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989, Dir. Dominique Othein-Girard) – These both go together. 4 follows Michael Myers coming back once again to find his niece and kill her. She escapes, but maybe is becoming the next Michael herself so she ends up in an institution of some sort for in 5. And of course 5 has Michael start coming after her yet again, and the little girl is trying to warn everyone despite being institutionalized.

The kid is a perfectly fine character for movies like this, but one thing I’ve started to appreciate about these later movies is how much Loomis really adds to them. I recall hearing him described as a Van Helsing figure of sorts, and while that’s accurate comparison it really does give the movies a different feel than Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th, especially because Loomis is just getting fucked up himself as these movies go on. He’s older, starts needing a cane, his face is all burned up after Part II etc., but most of all he’s just becoming increasingly unhinged as the films go on (And he was a bit of a nut in the original film to begin with). Donald Pleasance of course played the villain Blofeld in one of the Bond movies, but its interesting to see some of that campy menace translated onto an ostenbily heroic character.

80. Garden of Words (2013, Dir. Makoto Shinkai) – A high school student begins to fall for a young woman he hangs out with in a park on rainy days. Naturally it doesn’t work out not just because of the age different, but the woman is literally a teacher at his high school. Kind of salacious for Shinkai, which frankly makes Tomino’s comments about his work even more ridiculous.

Also I don’t know that I’ve ever seen just rain look so good in an animated film before. Really makes me interested in Shinkai's newest film which apparently about a girl who controls rain or something.

81. Someone’s Gaze (2013, Dir. Makoto Shinkai) – A girl who is now living on her on own reflects on how her relationship with her father has changed. At like 7 minutes in length, its short and bittersweet.

82. Cross Road (2014, Dir. Makoto Shinkai) – Two students meet after their college entrance exams. Looks great on technical level of sorts but I don’t think Shinkai’s style really works in a compressed two minute format like this, even compared to something like Someone’s Gaze. Apparently its meant to be a commercial for some cram school or something in Japan too, but that wasn’t even immediately obvious to me watching this.

[Raxivace]

83. Halloween (Director’s Cut, 2007, Dir. Rob Zombie)
84. Halloween II (Director’s, Cut, 2009, Dir. Rob Zombie) – I had never seen any of Rob Zombie’s movies before these two and didn’t really know what to expect from them, but I skipped ahead to these ahead of the main Halloween series on a bit of a whim and honestly they're pretty good. Maybe even my two favorites of the franchise. I kind of like their take on Michael with the whole abused child angle, and the stuff in the second movie about the characters that survived the first film dealing with PTSD I think was pretty effective.

These also have the doctor from Deadwood playing a sheriff which is just fun.

85. Firewall (2006, Dir. Richard Loncraine) – Kind of meh thriller about Harrison Ford playing a digital security expert being blackmailed into stealing money from a bank. There’s a pre-Game of Thrones Nikolaj Coster-Waldau here at least which is kind of interesting to see.

86. Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (Producer’s Cut, 1995, Dir. Joe Chappelle) – Returning to the main series, this is honestly the worst Halloween movie I’ve seen so far and straight up one of the worst slashers and horror films I’ve ever seen period. Sure I could mention the plot holes and bizarre premise (They fight Michael Myers by casting fucking runes at him???????????) or that this is apparently Paul Rudd’s first major film role, but the whole thing is just so lacking in energy which is really the biggest offense.

I do think there’s an interesting comparison to be made to GoldenEye though (Beyond Donald Pleasance being a part of both franchises), which came out the same year as this. Both films were sequels to 1989 films (Halloween 5/License to Kill) that try to reimagine their franchises and even comment on them. Halloween 6 tries to do that by weirdly over-complicating the plot with its druid nonsense and deep cuts that just…don’t matter and are pretty far off from why anybody ever liked these movies to begin with (Does anybody really care that the mysterious cowboy guy from Part V is revealed in this movie to be Loomis' boss from the original Halloween?), but I think GoldenEye works because it doesn’t really stray from actual Bond formula very far. Sure there’s comments about Bond being a sexist or alcoholic or whatever and the world Brosnan inhabits isn’t exactly the same as say the Roger Moore era, but he’s still doing fundamentally Bond shit. Halloween 6 leaves with something that resembles Season of the Witch more than anything, and even like Season of the Witch you have a male protagonist unlike the rest of the franchise which has various female ones.

87. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998, Dir. Steve Miner) - This is huge step up from Halloween 6 at least, and it mostly works because its a real back to basics approach. It was nice to see Jamie Lee Curtis again (And she is a much better actress here than she was as a kid in the 70's), and similar to Rob Zombie's Halloween II, I like the emphasis on her overcoming past trauma.

If I had a major complaint about the movie though, it's the performance of the guy playing Michael was just bad here despite the role only requiring one to move about in a menacing fashion. His walking and general movements are just so goofy compared to any of these other films that it just doesn't work super well. The mask he has in this is probably the worst in the series as well.

Also while they didn't bother me I could have lived without the blatant references to other horror movies here. I'm guessing they're trying to follow in the footsteps of Scream or something but it was a bit unnecessary without being any kind of deal breaker.

88. The Case of the Velvet Claws (1936, Dir. William Clemens) - I was down with the idea for a 30's Perry Mason movie, but this whole thing is just really lacking in propulsive energy compared to the later Raymond Burr movies or honestly even the HBO series from a year or two ago. Not one I really got into.

89. Mobile Suit Gundam: Twilight Axis - Red Trace (2017, Dir. Se Jun Kim) - A compilation film for the Gundam: Twilight Axis series that uh...pretty much just squeezes what little footage that series had to begin with together and still is only about half an hour long. It's probably possible to make a Gundam story (And one focused on like three characters too) work in short film format but man Sunrise was not up to the task. Even in this format this is still choppy and meandering as hell.

[Raxivace]

Gonna speed through some of these, Lyndon-style.

90. Halloween: Resurrection (2002, Dir. Rick Rosenthal) – This feels like two films really. The first 20 minutes are a short film predicated on the most blatant, bullshit retcon I have ever seen in a film just so we can have Michael vs. Laurie again: Apparently in H20, Laurie did not actually behead Michael Myers, she beheaded some poor EMT or something who Michael disguised as himself and I’m sorry but that’s just bullshit. H20 was totally written as an ENDING to the story of these films and this is just an absurd retconning. On top of that they just bring him back to kill Laurie off. Why? Why do this? And honestly even giving the movie the subtitle of “Resurrection” is a bit of a misnomer since its not like Michael is brought back to life through Celtic magic or something.

The rest of the movie (Which is almost entirely disconnected from the first part) is about random kids participating in an internet show in the old Myers house so they can ostensibly find clues about why Michael went crazy as a kid. It’s all pretty goofy, to the point in this movie we have Busta Rhymes fighting Michael with karate, but I kind of dig it.

While the internet show angle of the movie is clearly not only trying to apply a spin on the Blair Witch Project’s found footage angle to Michael Myers and be, uh, some kind of comment on reality television (There’s a joke at one point about Survivor, which is one of my favorite TV shows period), I think what this movie is actually ahead of the curve on is modern livestreaming, and kind of predicts the awful ways that kind of technology can be used. Like watching this I couldn’t help but be reminded of the asshole behind of the Christchurch shooting making sure the internet could see everything he was doing.

91. The Whole Truth (2016, Dir. Courtney Hunt) – Pretty decent courtroom drama where Keanu Reeves plays a lawyer defending a kid who is accused of murdering his father. Probably the most interesting about it was Keanu was the guy who fuckin’ murdered the father!

92. Halloween (2018, Dir. David Gordon Green) – Pretty straightforward soft reboot of Halloween that, from what I can tell, ignores everything except the original Carpenter film. Laurie Strode as crazed survivalist whose obsession harmed her relationship with her daughter was fun.

93. Lupin III: Pilot Film (1969, Dir. Osamu Kobayashi & Masaaki Osumi) - Quite literally a test pilot for the Lupin III anime. This was kind of weird too since it had Goemon as a villain and Zenigata was working with an elderly Kogoro Akechi.

94. Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (2021, Dir. Shuko Murase) - I love robot anime where the action is too fucking dark to see anything. Seriously the nighttime battles in this were ridiculously hard to see.

I wasn't really into the movie in general. The premise of lol Hathaway is a terrorist now, we can pretend to be Battle of Algiers from Tomino's novels never really interested me much and wasn't especially fun to watch here, and in practice this first film of a planned trilogy feels like a glorified TV pilot that merely sets up the rest of a season. It just doesn't really feel like a full movie to me really.

95. No Sudden Move (2021, Dir. Steven Soderbergh) - Fun little heist/mystery film thing even if fisheye lens is abused throughout this movie. I'm all for the return of Brendan Frasier to mainstream film.

96. Harum Scarum (1965, Dir. Gene Nelson) - Elvis plays a guy that gets kidnapped and forced to commit an assassination. Yeah.

97. Lupin the Third vs. Detective Conan: The Movie (2013, Dir. Hajime Kamegaki) - Sequel to a 2009 TV special that was also a Lupin/Detective Conan crossover. It was kind of fun I guess, but I don't really have same attachment to Detective Conan characters as I do Lupin and his gang.

98. Bel-Air (2019, Dir. Morgan Cooper) - Interesting little short that poses as hypothetical trailer for a dramatic remake of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Will Smith apparently saw the video, really liked it, and now an actual miniseries based on a dramatic version of Fresh Prince is being made. Pretty cool story at any rate.

99. Knife in the Water (1962, Dir. Roman Polanski) - Polanski's debut film about a couple that picks up a weird hitchhiker and takes him on a boatride. Visually looks great, and the tension on the boat is pretty top notch.

100. Risky Business (1983, Dir. Paul Brickman) - I knew this was the movie with the famous clip where Tom Cruise sings in his underwear, but man that is not representative film at all. Really its like if typical teen sex comedy character from a John Hughes movie or something (Or maybe instead The Graduate if you want something with a little more prestige) fell into fucking neo-noir plot like Killing of Chinese Bookie or something (There's a gangster blackmailer, tons of prostitutes etc.) and honestly tries to be both at the same time. That it has a weirdly ambiguous ending in regards to whether Cruise was being played the whole time or not makes it hard to believe that there was a time when mainstream movies, even in a decade like the 80's in a genre that wasn't exactly highbrow either, were like this.

101. The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Dir. Brian De Palma) - This wasn't particularly good movie or anything (People say Tom Hanks was miscast here, but I had much larger problem with Bruce Willis' casting as a drunken reporter type), but I dunno. For such a legendarily "bad" film I didn't think it was unwatchable or anything. I honestly would say De Palma has several worse movies than this, like his recent Domino.

102. Pale Flower (1964, Dir. Masahiro Shinoda) - The story of a gangster who upon finishing a prison sentence, falls for a young woman who has been visiting some of the same seedy gambling joints as him. Fell pretty flat for me tbh like a lot of Japanese New Wave stuff seems to for me.

103. A Quiet Place: Part II (2020, Dir. John Krasinski) - I remember quite liking the first film, and this does kind of feel like more of the same (Which isn't bad thing really). It even begins like immediately after the first one too which surprised me a bit.

104. Johnny Guitar (1954, Dir. Nicholas Ray) - Just a really awesome western about Joan Crawford being mad at the world. Maz's thoughts mirror my own, though I'll also add the theme song to the movie is probably one my favorites from a pre-Sergio Leone western.

105. Where Danger Lives (1950, Dir. John Farrow) - A decent little noir where Robert Mitchum plays a doctor that gets conned into murdering his lover's husband. Not too much to say about it but it was fun.

106. Evangelion 3.0+1.01: Thrice Upon a Time (2021, Dir. Hideaki Anno, Mahiro Maeda, Katsuichi Nakayama, & Kazuya Tsurumaki) - I really really enjoyed this on first watch, but man it is going to take at least a second watch before I can really grapple with it.



107. Professional: Hideaki Anno (2021) - This has been floating around online for a while but I only just got to it now. Its a making of documentary for Thrice Upon a Time that really focuses on Anno's management of his team more than anything (Main point of interest being that while he tries to let them do their own thing he can't help but go back to micromanaging them on weird motion-capture process they used). Hilariously he often doesn't come into work some days, and at one point even sits the crew of the documentary team itself to explain to them how they could be doing a better job lmao.

It also goes into some loose biographical details (I.e. story of Anno's father losing his leg in an accident), has interviews with people like his wife in manga artist Moyoco Anno, various voice actors (Curiously Maaya Sakamoto was absent, and that has me wondering what she would have said about him as someone that hasn't been a part of the Evangelion team nearly as long as other voice actors or crew members). Miyazaki gets interviewed too and tells some nice stories about Anno.

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The Rose of Versailles (1979-1980) - Yeah this is probably the best 70's TV anime, and other than the lack of giant robots covers the kind of ground I wish stuff like Gundam was better at doing.

This is the story of Oscar Francois de Jarjayas, the last daughter of a French aristrocrat. Her dad was so tired of not having any sons so he just said "Fuck it" and decided to raise Oscar "as a man". In context I'm a little uncertain what exactly this means about like, Oscar's gender identity but she certainly gets taught "masculine" tasks like swordfighting and horseback riding, and I would say the amount of both men and women that swoon over a "masculine woman" like Oscar over the course the series makes this something of a proto-LGBT narrative for anime. She has general kind of no-nonsense "I'm here to do my duty while stonefaced" attitude too that seems unusual in female characters of the time to me, even if there are cracks in this that emerge as the show goes on (Particularly with romance plotlines. This is shoujo anime still after all).

Anyways Oscar gets so good at martial practices that she gets asked to join the Royal Guard...and ends up serving a young Marie Antoinette. That's really what makes the series so good, since everything is played against the backdrop of the rise and eventual bloody conclusion of the French Revolution (Which itself is portrayed in somewhat morally ambiguous light, as the chaos of the Revolution leads to some innocents, some children etc. getting executed alongside people that really did have it coming tbh), all in the form of a swashbuckling tale that would have made Alexandre Dumas and Rafael Sabatini proud.

If I had a complaint about the show, its that maybe the opening arc about Antoinette refusing to acknowledge Madame Du Barry's existence in court (Since she's a prostitute trying to sleep her way to the top) and the ensuing drama that erupts runs a bit long at like 10ish of this anime's 40 episodes, but when the Revolution starts erupting in the later half of the series it does make this early stuff seem more important in retrospect. Like, as her own people were starting the starve THIS is the kind of bullshit Antoinette was worried about?

Still, the way Antoinette is written as a kind of eternal child does make it seem like perhaps (In fictional world of Rose of Versailles at least) that a lot of bloodshed could have been avoided had someone like Oscar taken more stern parental role in her life, but of course being royalty nobody really tries to do this with her.

Anyways this is an awesome, morally ambiguous little series.

Succession (Seasons 1 & 2, 2018-2019) - I said most of what I had to say about this in this thread, but this really was quite a good show. I do have to wonder if it maybe doesn't stray a bit too much from its King Lear-esque premise by having Logan eventually recover, but well when it does what it decides to do so well that doesn't really matter too much.

Come to think of it, Succession's themes also pair bizarrely well with Rose of Versailles' French Revolution narrative.

Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness (2021) - lol

Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapters (2014-2015) - I really doubt anyone else here is into Dragon Ball, but I did take the time to marathon the last bit of Kai, which itself is the last major Dragon Ball thing I hadn't watched yet. It's basically an edited down version of the Majin Buu arc from the original DBZ anime, though I have to say some of the cuts they make are weird.

Or rather how many cuts they don't make, even before you factor in the fact that they add in eight entire episodes for the American broadcast. Entire filler scenes and characters that directly contradict stuff WITHIN THIS ARC ITSELF appear (Anything to do with Hell really), which really goes against the entire spirit of creating Kai to begin with. The original Kai arcs were much more liberal in their paring down of DBZ (Covering Saiyan, Namek/Frieza, and Android/Cell arcs and being 98 episodes vs. Final Chapter's 61 (69 (lol) for American broadcast) episodes), ending up with something much more in line with the pacing of the original manga. Now we end up with an awkward midpoint between the spirit of what Kai was supposed to be and just having a shorter version of the original DBZ anime.

On top of that, The Final Chapters is cropped for 16:9, when the original footage was in 4:3. You end up with a lot of awkward shots of heads touching the top of the frame and such in medium shots when in the original DBZ things weren't nearly so cramped. The original Kai wasn't cropped either, which makes The Final Chapter's cropping all the more obnoxious.

Still, I really like Sumitomo's new score for this (Even if it reuses some of his work from the Battle of Gods movie), and the English dub is a remarkable improvement over the Funimation one from like nearly 20 years ago. It did hit a lot of nostalgia buttons for me in general too, so I had a ton of fun watching this still despite some legitimate gripes.

Bakemonogatari (2009-2010) - This is weird little anime series. Each little story arc is about some or other girl getting haunted by some weird animal-themed ghost, which is manifestation of some personal problem the girl is facing in their lives. The protagonist boy helps them overcome whatever their issue is, which exorcises the ghost.

For what is essentially a harem series its pretty decently well written, since its smart enough to have characters often not say what they really mean directly or contradict their own words at times. Probably the weirdest thing to me about the show though is its use of title cards. There are A LOT of them in this series, and they're often super rapid a la Godard and Anno, but content-wise they kind of remind me of silent film title cards more than anything like you would see in Griffith film and the like, since they're often quoting light novels and such this series was adapted from. Its strange technique to begin with, especially for series like this.

[Raxivace]

108. Evangelion 3.0+1.01: Thrice Upon a Time (Rewatch, 2021, Dir. Hideaki Anno, Mahiro Maeda, Katsuichi Nakayama, & Kazuya Tsurumaki) - Honestly even after a second watch I can't figure out how to review this. I really loved the film and keep thinking back to it, about how Rebuild as a whole must look in context now etc., but for first time in long time I'm stumped with how to talk about a new movie.

Like on broadest thematic level, its clearly a "Evangelion is over for real this time, it's time to move on but memories made are precious and such" type of message, but there's so many little details and such on a microlevel that I'm still trying to figure out. And I can't for sure how those would effect an interpretation or not.

I guess that's the biggest thing to me. Despite having arguably the happiest, even if a bit bittersweet still ending that Evangelion has ever had, its still got that Eva-esque mysteriousness to me that makes it hard to pinpoint what exactly it is I'm looking at even after a few glances.

[Gendo]

I just found out that all 4 parts are available on Prime so I’ll finally be seeing them hopefully very soon!

[Raxivace]

I just found out that all 4 parts are available on Prime so I’ll finally be seeing them hopefully very soon!

The Anno documentary things on Prime are worth a watch too. "Hideaki Anno: The Final Challenge of Evangelion" is a longer version of that Professional thing I mentioned a few posts ago, and they've since added some extended interview with some Japanese TV comedian of all things that talks to Anno for over an hour.

[Raxivace]

109. Reminiscence (2021, Dir. Lisa Joy) - If you've ever seen Strange Days this is like a mix of that and something like Chinatown.

Unfortunately its not very good, and that's a huge bummer because I was down for the idea of sci-fi noir with Hugh Jackman, but it not only feels derivative, Joy has seemingly inherited a cold filmmaking style from the Nolan brothers that just doesn't work here. This is a movie ostenibly about feelings and emotions and memory, but she puts the emphasis on the fucking noir plot. The plot almost never actually matters in noir. Combined with weak visual style and a kind of clunky script and there's just not a lot to love here.

It's a shame because I remember the Westworld episode Joy directed being pretty good, but the style used for that show just isn't very effective here.

110. On the Way to a Smile -Episode: Denzel- Final Fantasy VII (2009, Dir. Shinji Ishihara) - An OVA that bridges the gap between the original PS1 version of Final Fantasy VII and the Advent Children movie. I actually kind of like this- Denzel may be a kind of whatever character in Advent Children but he works for a normal perspective on the basic events of FF7 and the aftermath of the game.

[Raxivace]

111. Your Name. (2016, Dir. Makoto Shinkai) – This was interesting to watch right after Reminiscence because despite ostensibly different genres (Sci-fi noir vs. uh, magical realism I guess), the approaches to what are both ostensibly love stories across time couldn’t be more different. Joy’s more cynical film cares so much about plotting while Shinkai doesn’t give a fuck about WHY body swapping across time happens (Really the basic premise that neither party doesn’t realize they're three years apart from each other arguably doesn’t even make much sense but at the same time who cares.), and I like that he keeps focus more on emotional logic.

Anyways I think this is one of Shinkai's best, just a really effective take on his common themes (Probably his best take on a fantastical premise too since Voices From a Distant Star, especially compared to how weird something like Place Promised in Our Early Days turned out). 5 CM Per Second might be better overall and I'd have to give it a rewatch, but I found myself really engaged by this too.

112. The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf (2021, Dir. Han Kwang Il) - Yeah this didn't really land super well for me. Ostensibly this is the Vesemir backstory movie, done loosely in a style that loosely tries to imitate seinen action horror anime like Berserk, though similar to Netflix's Castlevania series I feel the mix of that kind of visual with naturalistic voice acting is a fairly awkward mix.

The love story between Vesemir and a woman he's aging much more slowly then I think is the most interesting thing here, but the movie puts as much emphasis on gore-y action and battle set pieces (With fall of Kaer Mohren being big climax) and I just don't find any of the latter stuff to be particularly effective. The whole lol the Witchers are creating the monsters they're getting hired to slay plot is intriguing angle too, but dramatically I don't think a lot was effectively mined from it.

[Lord_Lyndon]

I saw some of the films you mentioned in this thread. I'm sorry I didn't respond before.

69. What Time Is It There? (2001, Dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
I saw this one 2 years ago. It is a good film, but it didn't do much for me. However, it is one of Eva Yojimbo's favourite movies.

70. Children Who Chase Lost Voices (2011, Makoto Shinkai)
Shinkai is one of my favourite directors. He makes such beautiful and poetic films, and this one is not an exception. I remember I even cried at the end.

71. Fahrenheit 451 (1966, Dir. Francois Truffaut)
I saw this one long time ago, but sadly I only remember it was solid.

73. Halloween (1978, Dir. John Carpenter)
This is a horror film, so it is not surprising it didn't do much for me.

77. The Wayward Cloud (2005, Dir. Tsai Ming-liang)
I liked this one. Eva is a fan of this one too, and I remember he once said that this film highlights how musicals and porn films work on the same principle. What he exactly meant by that, unfortunately, I really don't know.

85. Firewall (2006, Dir. Richard Loncraine)
I saw this one because I was a Virginia Madsen fan. It's pretty forgettable.

99. Knife in the Water (1962, Dir. Roman Polanski)
I saw this film twice. This is pretty impressive for a debut film. I'm a big Polanski fan. He made several great films.

104. Johnny Guitar (1954, Dir. Nicholas Ray)
This is a great film. Ray made some really great films, but In a Lonely Place (1950) is probably his masterpiece.

[Raxivace]

113. The Green Knight (2021, Dir. David Lowery) - This is probably one of the better of these A24 movies, but I still find it kind of weird. I really liked Sir Gawain and the Green Knight when I read it, but I feel like this adaptation tries to revert it into a schlockier tale in some ways. Like Gawain's actual adventures are elided over in the original poem, but here they're the main focus. Not really sure that the Inception-style ending here is very appropriate either- like it almost makes the Green Knight a fairly authoritative figure (In the poem he and Bertilak are the same guy, but I'm not sure that's even the case in the movie) whereas I think the poem implies more strongly that he's kind of full of shit.

Still its a beautiful looking movie and I like Dev Patel as Gawain a lot. Making this adaptation more dramatic kind of works too I think, though I'm not sure there's as much substance here tbh.

114. Kizumonogatari I: Tekketsu (2016, Dir. Tatsuya Oishi & Akiyuki Shinbo)
115. Kizumonogatari II: Nekketsu (2016, Dir. Tatsuya Oishi & Akiyuki Shinbo)
116. Kizumonogatari III: Reiketsu (2017, Dir. Tatsuya Oishi & Akiyuki Shinbo) - This whole film trilogy is a prequel to Bakemonogatari. Basically it involves the protagonist Araragi stumbling upon a dying vampire, and then agreeing to be turned into a vampire to help revive her. After reviving her, he also agrees to help collect her stolen body parts to help restore her to her former strength. Really whole thing seemed like a mix of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and Arcueid's route in Tsukhihime to me.

These movies are pretty fun for what they are (Battle scenes in Nekketsu and Reiketsu in particularly amusing to me. I like Araragi's victories coming more from his rather mundane aggressive tactics (I.e. throwing baseballs, or just tanking hits or whatever) being pushed to absurd limits from his vampirism and general ability to regenerate limbs. Reminds me of Majin Buu, really), and Shaft's whacky visuals make it interesting to watch. For a trilogy too its not actually too long- like the third film is easily the longest and only clocks in around 80 minutes.

117. The Lusty Men (1952, Dir. Nicholas Ray & Robert Parrish) - Drama about Robert Mitchum being a former rodeo champion who tries mentor another guy in the ways of rodeo (And this guy gets a little too into it really) while Mitchum also falls in love with his wife. Its a decent film but not transcendent in the way that something like Ray's In a Lonely Place is.

118. Air Force One (1997, Dir. Wolfgang Petersen) - Die Hard on an airplane. Fun enough for what it is, though this movie really needed Harrison Ford to carry it.

119. The Great McGinty (1940, Dir. Preston Sturges) - While this is pretty standard rise and fall of crooked politician story in some ways, it's executed quite competently and especially so for a directorial debut. I think later Sturges films I've seen are better but there was less of a gap in quality than I expected. Also Akim Tamiroff is in this, he rocks.

120. A Good Child's History Anime: The Giant Turnip (Inc.) (2016, Dir. Hiroyasu Kobayashi) - A weird animated short about the production of Rebuild of Evangelion being imagined as taking place on a turnip farm. I guess before the documentaries and such came out with 3.0+1.0's release, this was sort of the official word on why Shin Godzilla happened in between the last two Rebuilds.

121. Cry Macho (2021, Dir. Clint Eastwood) - Another one of these weird late period Eastwoods that I seem to be more fond of than most. The plot of this one has Eastwood going to Mexico to deliver his friend's son back to America- people have derided implausibility of a 91 year old being asked to do this, but who cares, its a movie. And Eastwood himself playing the character thematically loads it too- like he shoots a lot of this like his old westerns (In fact it reminds me of arguments of No Country for Old Men also being western. Both films are set in "the past" too, even if that past is like 1980), but at same time this Eastwood is much gentler than most of his classic cowboy characters and decries machismo and such too.

Politically Eastwood continues to be ambiguous too. Like has much as he still gets tarnished with the RNC chair nonsense (And I don't think wrongfully so either), at the same time this movie also has a scene where he says cops are stupid for like several straight minutes. This whole film even portrays illegal immigration in fairly positive light and from what I can tell also ends with Clint illegally immigrating into Mexico to hook up with a Mexican grandma. As always he's hard to nail down.

Also this movie has a scene where a chicken fights a gunman. The chicken wins.

122. The Dead Zone (1983, Dir. David Cronenberg) - I remember liking the Dead Zone tv series from the mid 2000's, but I had never gotten around to the movie before. I didn't even know Cronenberg was the director when I went to watch it, but its nice to have seen another one of his.

I like the basic premise of Christopher Walken being a goober who gets psychic visions of the future and such after an accident, but I think after his origin story in the first part of the film this kind of meanders until Martin Sheen comes. Sheen kills it as the corrupt politician and between this and Judas and the Black Messiah I think he should have played more villains in his career, but the middle portion kind of drags it down and makes the movie feel kind of like TV episodes edited together. In a way it reminds me of structure of Evangelion 2.22 but not done quite as well.

-------------

Lupin III: Part 1 (1971-1972) - The very first Lupin series. Unlike the modern series like Part IV and Part V this is almost entirely episodic (With really the only continuity being the explanation for how Goemon went from enemy to joining Lupin's gang, and the final episode having Zenigata frustratingly explaining to someone that he had caught Lupin twice before), every episode being mostly self contained heists and thievery.

The first half of the series actually seems a little darker than the classic Lupin stuff I remember. Lupin shoots to kill, tricks a guy in prison, into going to the electric chair, Fujiko is written more as femme fatale, Goemon actually is slicing people etc. Partway through this changes though- the old series director is dropped and pre-Ghibli Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata are brought on board as co-directors.

Miyazaki and Takahata's episodes are muuuch less explicit, even by 70's standards. I'm not sure if that's because of the network or just their personal tastes, any sense of sexuality goes right out the window and their violence becomes more a source of gags than anything. Goemon goes from murdering dudes to comically cutting their shirts and pants off, Lupin is much more gentleman thief in general and not a wanton murderer etc. Its a huge shift in tone.

I do generally prefer the tone of that first half, but I have to admit the Miyazaki/Takahata episodes generally have a much better sense of pacing and structure. Even the very first episode being set on a racetrack with Lupin posing as a racecar driver honestly does a poor job of setting up the rest of the franchise's style, and the second half episodes don't quite contain digressions that huge.

[Derived Absurdity]

Poor conservatives. Even the most high-profile and respected "conservative" Hollywood guy they can point to and claim as their own is, at best, only ambiguously conservative. It must be tiring to keep losing the culture war so hard.