Thursday on Hey, Did You See This One? at NEW TIME 8PM EST on TWITCH
(link in bio) we continue Close Encounters Month with The Fourth Kind (2009)
With your hosts:
Steven Waters (@bobablackfly)
Jason R Phillips (@spiderhero9000)
Special guest: Jared McInnis (@jaredmcinnis)
The mixed response to Emerald Fennell’s 00s-set thriller evinces a movie-going conundrum: how do we assess entertainment that is predominantly indexed on vibes? By now, the buzz around Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s sweaty, lascivious sophomore feature about a middle-class interloper in a vacuously rich family, has begun to...
Yamazaki Takashi’s period blockbuster acts as a companion piece to the 1954 film where Godzilla made his debut, giving space to human stories and national politics while letting its seventy-year-old icon wreak impressive havoc on land and sea.
In many ways, “The Killer” is exactly what you’d expect from a David Fincher movie centered on a hired assassin: a detail-rich procedural about what a hitman is forced to do as his calculated world implodes. And by telling this story of a deadly perfectionist who repeats phrases like "Forbid Empathy" to keep himself...
A sociopathic student takes revenge on a changing society by seducing wealthy women in Mikio Naruse's brooding noir, The Angry Street. https://wp.me/p1x9li-k5n
One of my favorite things about Hell or High Water is that they get away with it. well, Toby does anyway. I’d argue that Tanner gets a very Walter White ending where, obviously if you die from a gunshot wound you didn’t get away with anything, but I’d also be hard pressed to say that he “got caught” or “didn’t succeed in his mission.”
And honestly, if Toby had gotten caught I think that would have ruined it for me. It’s not that “the good guy” always has to win in the end, it’s that Toby gets to actually be the good guy*. The movie spends so much time showing audience the economic precarity of this part of America, so much time showing how predatory the banks really are I have a hard time sympathizing with the cop whose goal** is to take the two young men trying to escape from underneath the banks boot and make sure they stay in their place, with boot planted firmly on their neck.
This is the exact problem I keep running into with Justified, another neo-Western with a cowboy cop vs outlaws. Their “criminals of the week” often get fleshed out enough (in actually realistic ways imo, the villains of the week are rarely evil instead their ppl who made a few bad decisions and are now stuck in whatever predicament forces them to cross Raylen) that when the episode ends with them in cuffs headed to prison it rarely feels like “Justice is served” as much as “Raylan and the marshals trampled on the freedom of a human who deserved better.” While this may be realistic, my issue is with the framing. The shows tries hard to convince you “sure, so-and-so is actually a decent person, and their reason for doing this particular crime is actually pretty understandable, but if you do crime you need to be arrested” which simply… doesn’t fly with me to say the least.
Sorry for turning this post into being about Justified lmao. The point is: Toby getting away with his plot to save the family ranch and rescue his children from a life of poverty is a welcome change to the Neo-Western formula. Also, the gas station scene with the obnoxious metal head in the line green whip fucking GOES.
*yea, he’s of the Jesse Pinkman school of hero-dom, where he’s kinda sketchy but compared to the ppl around him he’s basically a saint. Still the good guy though.
**This is, ofc, not the Texas Ranger’s stated goal; he’s simply doing his job and trying to stop a couple people from breaking the law. But intent doesn’t matter materially, regardless of the Ranger’s values what he is in fact doing is acting as a stormtrooper for finance capital in assisting the economic devastation of the region. This would hold true regardless, but he’s also smart enough to know what effect he’s actually having.
Your perspective of “Aftersun” is likely to be influenced by your personal circumstances. If you’re content and stable, you might initially blame Calum and his ex-wife, much like I did. However, if you’re grappling with emotional lows or battling depression, the film will echo your experiences and may resonate deeply, perhaps even painfully.
Post-war teens take on injustice in the form of a problematic parent at their school in Ryuichi Takamori's cheerful youth movie, Here Because of You. https://wp.me/p1x9li-jSq
Teenage girls plot revenge on their high school bully only to discover she has joined a weird cult in Lim Oh-jeong's intense bullying drama, Hail to Hell. https://wp.me/p1x9li-jQn
Screened as part of this year's New York Asian Film Festival
Started watching this series called Foundation, after the Foundation series from Asimov. In case anyone was wondering, it's not a film version of the story, rather a story set in the same universe with some vignettes from the books. I'm guessing Foundation is out of copyright, so they could use the name. It doesn't have the same sense of a grand sweep of history that you get from the books and is really more of a space action series with some bits of Foundation narrative spliced in.
Employees at a nude modelling agency find themselves in the firing line when a “bloodsucking painter” escapes from a psychiatric institution in Motoyoshi Oda’s B-movie thriller, Ghost Man. https://wp.me/p1x9li-jG9
Watched Bros last night with Michael and we both really enjoyed it! The awkward scenes and moments were really well written (I had to cover my face a couple of times lol.) The romance was super sweet and the writing overall was funny and clever. The cast was fantastic and I would totally watch this movie again, bro. 🤠 4.5/5, if only because Billy Eichner did a little too well at his character. #movies#films#romcom#comedy#romance#gay#gayromance#queer#queerfilms#filmreview#moviereview#review
Barbie is refreshing for a few reasons — there aren’t many films where the titular female character proudly proclaims she hasn’t got a vagina — but one thing that really stood out to me was the variety in the male characters and the way that the film really criticises patriarchy whilst realising the ways in which patriarchy harms men in similar ways that it does women. https://medium.com/prismnpen/barbie-isnt-anti-men-it-s-anti-toxicity-353cfae74d95?sk=4d37ea91d9f157dd071823ba4d45910c
Gerwig's #Barbie successfully baits the masses with pink Mattel iconography and then beats them over the head with rather abstract theses. It's remarkable that she managed to somehow pull off both, lure the bling bling crowd into making the #film into a real, huge blockbuster and also proselytise to these huge masses on #feminism
Go Greta! (I hope you'll return to your own personal stories sooner rather than later, because Lady Bird was something else than these big and well-made adaptations)
#Barbie is like a self-conscious, abstract, intellectual, satirically funny play by Brecht, while #Oppenheimer is a darkly brooding, Wagnerian, mythic, bombastic, operatic Gesamtkunstwerk
If you want to go deeper, and add a #philosophy spin, check out Stephen Mulhall's book 'Film', which focuses on the Mission Impossible series, and serialisation more generally
Lukas hängt im Sommer 2003 in Berlin mit seinen Kumpels in Gropiusstadt ab. Diese Gegend am Rand von Neukölln ist berüchtigt für seine Plattenbauten und soziale Probleme.
(...)
Empfehlenswert für Leute, die damals etwa im selben Alter wie Felix Lobrecht waren, oder in Berlin lebten.
"If the Event Horizon has been to a dimension of chaos and returned, why does this chaos take the predictable form of all the dead wives, neglected children, and unhappily dead ex-colleagues of the crew of the Clark? The claim true hell lies within each of us is laid on thick …"
Is Saltburn the most divisive film of the year? (www.theguardian.com)
The mixed response to Emerald Fennell’s 00s-set thriller evinces a movie-going conundrum: how do we assess entertainment that is predominantly indexed on vibes? By now, the buzz around Saltburn, Emerald Fennell’s sweaty, lascivious sophomore feature about a middle-class interloper in a vacuously rich family, has begun to...
‘Silent Night’ Review: John Woo Lets Guns Do the Talking in Tight Dialogue-Free Revenge Thriller (variety.com)
Just when many audiences had written off the innovative Hong Kong auteur, John Woo returns to North America to orchestrate a high-concept comeback.
Godzilla Minus One review: the titan of terror returns (www.bfi.org.uk)
Yamazaki Takashi’s period blockbuster acts as a companion piece to the 1954 film where Godzilla made his debut, giving space to human stories and national politics while letting its seventy-year-old icon wreak impressive havoc on land and sea.
The Killer movie review & film summary (David Fincher, 2023) | Roger Ebert (www.rogerebert.com)
In many ways, “The Killer” is exactly what you’d expect from a David Fincher movie centered on a hired assassin: a detail-rich procedural about what a hitman is forced to do as his calculated world implodes. And by telling this story of a deadly perfectionist who repeats phrases like "Forbid Empathy" to keep himself...