I’ve seen a ton of 'em, and I thought Nosferatu was great!
Part of me wants to rebut the negativity in this comment and explain why I loved the movie, but I’m also pretty blue at the moment and can’t summon the strength to write much. I’ll just settle for saying that, for probably the first time in my adult life, it made me feel like a vampire was truly dangerous.
That’s easy for me to appreciate that response. Scary or dangerous vampires have been incredibly thin on the ground. Scariness is in the Dracula model. It’s the social vampires / Twilight, or zombie-ish models of vampires, that have made them feel undangerous to me for a long time.
-Wade
I hope his character is named Milch just so we can hear characters saluting him with “Heil Milch!” 
Don’t know if it’s been mentioned before, but I found the Netflix mini-series Dracula (2020) to be very well done and very interesting to watch play out. I don’t know how it rates among vampire aficionados though.
I should add that though I’m not a huge vampire buff, I really enjoyed James Woods in Vampires (1998). Super fun! Super gory!
My exposure to modern Vampire media is mostly limited to manga series like Vampire Knight or Rosario Vampire and the Castlevania series(and even then, Symphony of the Night is the only Castlevania I’ve actuallyplayed to completion or close too), but yeah, Vampires haven’t really scared me since I was a kid… and honestly, even reading Stoker’s novel for the first time did little to scare me(Though to be honest, I also didn’t find Frankenstein or what I’ve read of Lovecraft all that scary either).
Stoker’s novel is… not great, in my opinion. Dry prose. Dull characters. Awkward plot structure. One of the things that I appreciated about this new Nosferatu movie is that it harnessed those elements, funnily enough. The plot remains awkward, most of the characters aren’t what I’d call gripping, but there’s a rightness to this wrongness. A sort of respect for the source material – couched, ironically, in disrespect, since the movie is willing to change whatever it wants. It’s Nosferatu, not Dracula; in other words, it’s already semi-bastardized. But it takes its own bastardization seriously.
Anyway. Yeah. This movie got to me much more than the book.
Based on my own experience, simply choosing the see the film on the basis of a curious whim is the best possible pathway.
I walked in with no expectations, and left in tears. Good tears.
Just watched Late Night with the Devil. Actually scared the heck out of me. Despite the purpposeful '80s style horror (looks like from a b-movie) it’s done really well and is cleverly put together. Not actually sure what happened and what was in his head only at the end of the film, but I loved the eerieness nonetheless and it was pretty cleverly done.
Also, for those who may not like some bits of horror, you may be glad to know that although to me it was creepy and there’s definitely gore (cw: body horror) and a scene where hundreds of worms start falling out of tearing skin, all very b-movie so you can tell it’s a mannequin but still squeamish, one thing it does pretty well is that there are no real jumpscares. All the scary things are designed so you actually have a good idea of what’s gonna happen next, even if it still scared me a lot. Just a note.
I saw that a few months ago and thought it was interesting. It sure had the longest bit of exposition at the start of any movie I can think of.
Oh yeah, the intro was long but personally it worked well. Like it felt … not annoying and worth it, despite the voice which may or nay not have sounded like those over-the-top film trailer voices.
I enjoyed this so much! It’s like someone wrote this movie for me: slight minor spoiler for the first twist of many - robotlovepartymurder.
This is an intense, violent, occasionally gory, hilarious and serious relationship thriller with great characters and dialogue. There are twists and turns, don’t watch any trailers for best first impression.
CW: Attempted SA; consent issues which are thematic and intrinsic to the plot.
I did like Companion a lot (gave it 7/10). I think thematically it ended up weaker than it could have been.
Spoiler discussion:
The money-stealing plot potentially was getting in the way a bit (of the sexbot manipulation and sexuality in general ideas) but its implications properly got in the way at the end when it’s revealed the protagonist had pretty much always been an out and out psycho crim. This diminished questions about ‘Who would do this to their sexbot / a woman, or in which circumstances, or in what manner of compartmentalisation?’ Because we’d expect this behaviour from any psycho, that pretty much threw out those questions.
This is why I couldn’t go to the 8/10 zone. I still think overall a really good thriller with many surprises.
-Wade
A while ago I watched the 1916 silent film Shoes.
A young woman lives in poverty and works for her family, and they take every penny she earns. And her shoes are falling apart badly. She later sleeps with a man (who at first seems to be courting her) for money to get the shoes that she desperately wants and needs.
The film doesn’t condemn her choosing to sleep with the man for money — it portrays it as something she didn’t want to do on a personal level and as representation of her broken dreams. The movie doesn’t really put a moral spin on it beyond that.
It does condemn poverty. In fact, in one scene, there’s literally a giant hand labelled ‘poverty’. This criticism kind of falls flat in context – the problem isn’t precisely poverty. The problem is that her family is frittering away money on things like her unemployed father’s magazine addiction and the younger sisters’ totally unearned allowances. If her family was rich, they could still take all her money for themselves and spend it on costlier luxuries.
Also … this story has to be a deliberate subversion of Cinderella, right? A woman serves her ungrateful family and is courted by a man socially and economically above her.
And the plot resolution hinges on her obtaining shoes that are literally perfect for her (the intertitles make a point of this). Except this time, there’s no one to recognize it … the shoes are just an object even though she needed them more than anyone. A sad ending.
Apparently it’s based on various things, though, so who knows?
I watched Roman Holiday. The movie was fine and certainly fun, but I think the ending was vital to holding it together. Especially since it was released in the 1950s, so I have a feeling it may have been an unusual ending to audiences at the time - I could be wrong though! Either way, it had some clever touches in the ending and I enjoyed the film overall.
Sounds good. I think my favourite Audrey Hepburn film is Charade. That movie wouldn’t be half as good without Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant’s sarcastic bantering, lol.
And thanks to a goof in the opening titles, it’s in the public domain. XD
One of my absolute favourites is The Odd Couple (1968). This one has aged well. Still very watchable by today’s standards.
It’s free here → https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8oa227
I finally, in life, sat down to watch Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). It made me think a zillion things. Primarily, that surely one of the least likely candidates for a sequel was the film First Blood (1982). And that this was the sequel? Life is strange.
To the cultural baggage. This film came out when I was about ten. It was a blockbuster. I didn’t see it, but the Commodore 64 game was also a blockbuster, and I played that and memorised its score.
The term ‘Rambo’ quickly entered the culture as an adjective for a one-man-army, a American-attributed militarist fantasy about going in and blowing everything up and being a hero. It was already hilarious to me in the day when the videogame put this message on the screen at the start of the mission saying (paraphrase), ‘Under no circumstances are to you engage the enemy’. This is immediately followed by you shooting and knifing a zillion people, arcade-game style. The film has this warning given to Rambo early on.
The first time I tried to watch Rambo I was in my teens. It was on TV. And after a really straightforward setup where they pull imprisoned Vietnam vet John Rambo off heavy labor (he was put there after his rebellious/criminal actions in the film First Blood) to go on a special mission to try to document the existence of American POWs in Vietnam through photography… they take him to Vietnam and he jumps from a helicopter. But his parachute gets stuck on the copter. And he’s dangling and they’re having problems and the orchestra’s blaring and the scene’s going on. I remember how stupid and annoying I found this, and lost interest in the film.
I still experienced that scene as stifling today, but I wasn’t going to give up. Rambo cuts himself off and then, in what struck me as a bizarre directorial choice, they don’t show him landing.
Stallone is deeply unengaging as Rambo the character. He looks dumb and sad. Other people are acting, he looks the same. What does this guy think or feel? There’s little evidence in any direction as he’s led to the supposed POW camp by a Vietnamese operative.
What’s the situation in Vietnam at the time? I didn’t know off the top of my head and the film doesn’t spend any time clarifying. In its story, the communists have been spending effort keeping these POWs alive for decades and moving them from camp to camp.
Once Rambo has rescued one guy, he tries to get him out at the extraction point. This is where we learn that one of the higher ups (Murdock) never wanted Rambo to find anyone. Murdock tells the chopper pilot to abort the pickup. The politics of the background to the decision aren’t transparent to me. When Rambo’s friend and handler argues with Murdock, he cites the failure of the USA to pay war reparations to Vietnam for past actions and a desire not to spend more money now. My reading was that Murdock wanted Rambo to bring back evidence of there being no POWs, and then just keep that knowledge in military circles to justify a lack of either taking action or spending money regarding Vietnam, but he didn’t know about the Vietnamese’s habit of moving the POWs around, and Rambo accidentally found some.
So the USA isn’t painted well by any of that. And all characters refer to the USA’s war in Vietnam as a failure. However in a reflection of a sort of parallel universe in Rambo’s brain, he says early on something like ‘This time we’ll win.’
From roughly the forty minute mark, the film shifts into massively budgeted, expertly directed high action gear. I doubt there’d been any contemporary action film of this scale before. Shot on location, real vehicles, real helicopter chases, the scenery exploding all the time, entire armies chasing one man. Novel weaponry, a longbow with exploding arrowheads. This feels like the blueprint of Schwarzenegger’s late 80s career, though Commando, which has a lot of similarities to Rambo (especially muscles’n’weapons montages) was also made this year.
I thought, watching Stallone, that Schwarzenegger did never, and would never, play a character this sad, but both he and Stallone have this supernatural physicality needed for the fighting.
Jerry Goldsmith’s half orchestral, half-FM-synth score has travelled terrifically. It’s also amazing how much of the score was ported into the Commodore 64 game.
There’s a vengeful ludicrousness to the last third of the film. Having escaped both the Russians and Vietnamese, Rambo commandeers a helicopter, screams, and flies it back to the POW camp to machine gun everyone who looks at him funny before rescuing all POWs. This felt less comfortable to me than most 80s action fodder fantasy. Perhaps because of the (sort of!) grounding in real situations and settings, I had more of the feeling I was watching a mass murderer.
At the end, Rambo pretty much says he did it for the POWs, suggesting it’s about soldierly loyalty. Then he adds his famous lines about ‘I wish our country would love us as much as we love our country.’
So I don’t think the film is as completely ungrey as it’s always assumed to be. It is of course massively gung-ho and definitely a huge power fantasy. And maybe racist. It’s not very grey. But it doesn’t just leave out all the edges, even if it doesn’t dwell on them. Vietnam’s always admitted as a failure throughout the film. And when Rambo’s in the most trouble, it’s a woman who saves him.
Stallone’s verbally vacant performance is the biggest meaning hole, especially in the first half. Once he gets fighting, he’s convincing and that is the meaning. And apart from its no-frills opening (most films try to make the setup interesting. The start of Rambo is really workmanlike. Then it’s about to get going, then his parachute catches…) it is well made from start to finish. Definitely some kind of touchpoint of the trajectory of action films, blockbusters and politics in the mid 1980s.
Stallone shares script credit with James Cameron, from a script treatment not credited in the film. Cameron says Stallone added the politics and way more violence. Stallone disagreed with some of that.
Also, in another bizarre choice, Angelsoft made a text adventure of it.
-Wade
