Oh right. No, just ignorance. I saw it around the same time as the others and so my brain had filed it in Ghibli. I defer to you lovers and scholars of these films.
Wade
If Fede Alvarez endorsed that poster with the couple, I have a message for him:
You endorsed a bad poster, Fede!
Wade
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Yeah, that’s a really good one! I also like how New Order took part of the melody for the guitar break in “Run”, it sounds triumphant. 
Today I watched Bettie Page Reveals All. It was great. Glad I watched it. When one of the final quotes was “There’s a little Bettie in all of us”, I felt that. XD
Funny thing is, I felt a parallel with another documentary I once saw about Lemmy. They’re both people who basically lived life on their own terms, haha!
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We just watched Crumb Catcher, which was just a charming thriller/horror-esque movie. The weirdest home invasion movie ever. I adored it.
We also recently saw Longlegs with Nicolas Cage, which was confounding. It’s absolutely awful in every regard except for vibe, and the vibe is fantastic. It’s a terrible movie that I enjoyed a lot just because of the vibe. Literally not one thing in this movie makes sense even remotely. But it is grimly and successfully committed to a horror feel that works great.
And we saw Oddity, which has great reviews and which is old-fashioned gothic trope-y fun, but which was a pretty slight and forgettable movie.
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Tonight I saw the new version of The Crow. I only saw the 1994 original once, probably in the late 90s, and had no great love for it and remember little of it. Obviously, otherwise I’d have watched it again by now.
I liked this new one a lot. It’s already an hour fifty, but if anything, I could’ve used more middle act, before his full transformation into The Crow. That it has 4.7 / 10 on IMDB doesn’t really speak to this film. I expect it’s either hate due to loving the original, a cult film, or groupthink, that you’re supposed to hate this film.
What I did take note of about this new one was the soundtrack, and what if anything it says about goth culture today. The 1994 film had an original soundtrack of contemporary industrial, hard rock and goth-satisfying rock. This new one, when it plays goth tracks, uses tracks from thirty years ago or older. Imagine if you heard sixties music in the original Crow; it’d have felt absurd.
Is there no trust in any corpus of today’s music? Is it just a reflection of the total fragmentation of musical taste in this age, and also that rock is no longer mainstream? Is it just commercial consideration in light of point two? The original Crow as a whole seemed to reflect some goth realism that was fully comprehensible. This one seems to posit goth as a kind of one-film aesthetic, choices made by characters in this film about how to dress and act, but fairly individual choices. So I don’t know, I feel a little strange about what world the new film is portraying, whereas the old one felt more coherent on that front. But I think this is some kind of reflection of our times.
-Wade
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Yeah, I agree with your overall point. This has the consistent powerful atmosphere that usually signals a great film. That it didn’t pull together into one was odd. So it was a disappointment, but at least a good one to be watching.
-Wade
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I don’t really have any trust in it myself, haha, I’ve joked before about how film soundtracks have gotten worse lately. I remember watching the first Sonic the Hedgehog film and the credits song was… this generic autotune-heavy trap song, yawn.
Well, here I am, a geezer in my 30s talking about how contemporary pop music sucks. XD
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I actually thought Longlegs was great but the major flaw is that the characters are very two-dimensional with the exception of maybe Blair Underwood’s character. Plus, seeing Nicholas Cage ranting like an even more deranged Tiny Tim was… well, something else.
Now, a really good Cage film with an incredible story that I would recommend above Longlegs would be Renfield. I’ve heard it described as being one of the greatest movies ever made about toxic relationships and gaslighting and I think that’s on point. Plus, it’s got Nicholas Cage as Dracula.
I don’t know how many folks here saw it but my partner and I recently saw I Saw The TV Glow, which is honestly a bit slow at times but also gut wrenching, especially if the allegory of it speaks to you.
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Reminder to my fellow 30-somethings: The music of the 90s is as old today as the music of the 60s was in the 90s… and most of our parents were probably complaining about the music of the 90s back then as much as we complain about the music of today.
Also remember, it’s usually the best of the past that gets remembered fondly while most of the mediocre stuff ends up forgotten while the mediocre of today makes up the majority of the new, so we’re often judging the past by the hits and the present by the meh. Plus, as time goes on and there are more old masters for the new to be compared to, the harder it is to do something that isn’t just emulating what came before.
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I’m approaching 50, and while I have theoretical faith in today’s (pop/rock) music pop/rock) I actually have no practical faith in it 
Politics and music industry and social factors aside, and the studies showing tracks are more verbose than ever in terms of number of words but that word variety has plummeted… two production elements came in that I hoped would be fashions or fads, but they never went away. They just became everything. And they suck. 1. Autotune as a standard effect on all vocals and 2. hypercompression on all vocals, and on most other elements in general.
There is almost no variation in sound pressures now, which is what gives things a nauseating quality. The older the track, the more the level of the vocal was capable of rising and falling under other elements, and dynamically did. Which is what our voices do in life. Now the vocal sits at one level. I find it maddening listening on a hifi when the vocal is like an unmoving brick, people’s breaths are as loud as their screams, and the start of every line is the same volume as the end. Plus autotuned.
I make instrumental electronic music myself, and the whole point of people singing to me is all the real effects of people singing! They’ve all been eliminated.
I think the progression towards choruses like Katy Perry’s ‘EH, EH, EH’ in Fireworks is people naturally playing towards the technology. If the machine makes your vocals sound like a car horn (no pitch change, no volume change), you should make your lyrical hooks sound like a car horn.
-Wade
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Yeah, I really enjoyed Renfield. My favourite scene was when the hero was protecting himself from the vampire by brandishing some self-help book with a title I don’t remember exactly, but something like ‘Protect yourself from narcissists’.
-Wade
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I forget the book but yeah, I remember that scene. I also love the scene where he comes into his apartment and Dracula’s just sitting there waiting for him and was able to come in because of the welcome mat.
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I’m in my 50s, and it’s amusing to me to hear the absolutely TERRIBLE music of my 80s youth being revived. There was a lot of good stuff then, but that’s not what gets attention now.
I can’t believe how much good music there is today-- much more than you could get on the radio in the 80s/90s. Even in the pop/rock sphere, which has been largely overrun with autotune, there’s still a HUGE amount of good stuff. When my nearly 60-year-old husband is singing along with Ethel Cain and Beyonce and Billie Eilish, that’s a pretty positive sign.
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I don’t get synthwave at all - like, if you’re going for an eighties sound, at least pick ZZ Top’s Afterburner or Rush’s Power Windows, LMAO
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Agreed, that sucks. Two other things I find so grody it puts me off a song are minimal 808 beats and triplet flow raps over a 4/4 beat. Urgh. Oh, and pitch effects on vocals applied ham-handedly. I remember looking for some VST I could use to make my vocals sound female, and one of them had a video presentation which included one of those “rap effects” with dropping everything by -12 semitones and I thought “I don’t give a shit”. XD
When I started making music with ImpulseTracker in 1999, I’d see stuff on MTV like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Give It Away” or U2’s “Discothèque” or Madonna’s “Frozen” or Chemical Brothers’ “Setting Sun” that I’d want to sound like, but I was just one dude with a computer. Now I feel like I use my recording equipment and software to try to sound like a band, while pop musicians go into music studios with actual engineers and spend millions of dollars to sound like something shat out of a laptop in 5 minutes. I don’t get it at all. XD
I have that fear with my own mixes, that I don’t know how to use compression correctly and they don’t end up being very dynamic. Or putting a compressor on the vocal channel and then having to fiddle with the volume fader because the compressor evens out the dynamics somewhat.
I’m curious to hear your music, since I make music myself 
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I love seeing a shoutout to Impulse Tracker. I made a lot of tracks using that (and before it, ScreamTracker). I even bought the wav renderer.
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I used to play with UltraTracker (I had a Gravis Ultrasound), but I have no musical skill to speak of.
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I still have my first ever ImpulseTracker file! Dated 30/07/1999, before my 8th birthday 
ImpulseTracker used to be my main program. I loved the interface. I switched to Propellerheads Reason around 2004 or so. Tinkered a bit with Renoise and FruityLoops back in the day but ultimately stuck with Reason. I still have OpenMPT (Modplug Tracker) and SchismTracker (because it imitates IT’s interface) around, as well as XMPlay to just play modules.
Only part of my module folder
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It’s a very well made and engaging movie but it’s almost painfully uncomfortable on purpose. And I’m the person who is always like "Oh, Nic Cage is in the movie, great. 
But he gave the exact performance this movie needed and it was jaw-droppingly phenomenal. The movie feels like a true-crime setup and basically presents more and more disturbing scenarios and information. I wasn’t confused once I realized it was supernatural I finally realized it low-key implies Mr. Downstairs won. It was inevitable the gun would not fire and this will continue. The bad guy wins because of course…it’s the devil the whole point of this is just to wig you out with that vibe. This is not a movie I really want to watch again except to just be like have you seen Nicolas Cage do THIS? Like Skinamarink it’s a movie you appreciate once for the vibe and leave it in the dirt behind you because it will never have that effect again.
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Two best movies i saw this year were “Robot Dreams” and “Four Souls of Coyote”:
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