Nope. Just watched Escape from L.A.
It was as awesome as I had remembered. 
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You know, this whole time, I thought the new Nosferatu was releasing this Christmas… but it’s actually next Christmas. That was a disappointment to realize the other day. I’m going to have to wait so much longer!
In the meantime, I guess I’ll keep using this thread as a movie diary.
I watched The Fabelmans over the weekend. Pretty good movie, and especially fascinating as a sort of meta-commentary on Spielberg’s career. Something about the monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark always stuck in my memory. The overhead shot, from above the fan, is such a strong image. I didn’t expect Fabelmans to provide additional context for that monkey, but it did!
Then I went and watched The Searchers, since Fabelmans emphasized John Ford as an influence on Spielberg. But I was… not impressed by The Searchers. Seemed pretty racist, to be blunt. Which, yeah, it’s a “classic” Western starring John Wayne. No surprise. But even within that framework, it wasn’t great.
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Saw Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth at the Sphere in Las Vegas the other night. As a demo of the capabilities of the Sphere projection system, it’s pretty good. As a film… not so much. I was particularly galled by its Elon Musk take on environmentalism — there are too many poor people, so we ought to leave Earth and keep it as a playground for the extremely wealthy.
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Wow! That’s… ugly.
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It’s important for influencing a ton of films. Especially in 70s and New Hollywood. Even Star Wars.
I never loved it in its own right, but being a film school person in the 90s I had to spend a lot of time with it.
It never felt particularly John Wayney to me, re: what we probably think of when we think of a John Wayne film.
-Wade
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I’m up to the Australian section of my folk horror box set and just watched an '88 film called Kadaicha. In the USA, it was retitled Stones of Death. The American voiceover guy in the trailer can’t even pronounce ‘Kadaicha’ the way the characters say it in the film, so renaming it was probably a good idea.
In the 80s, Australia started making some horror films where our sins on the Aborigines start to come back on us. So here, building shiny homes on the burial sites of Aboriginal teens leads to modern Sydney teens in the area being killed.
Kadaicha progresses simply and has some character dumbness, but also has quite good atmosphere and soundtrack, and the odd directorial flourish. The most original death involves a funnel-web spider bite to the eye(!)
The print was pretty crappy. Apparently the film got a theatrical release in the USA, but most everywhere else, was on video only. So here I am watching a crummy NTSC video dupe of a local film, the best copy anyone can find now. Such are the fates of film preservation.
-Wade
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Oh, is that the All the Haunts Be Ours set? A blogger I follow worked his way through that recently, it sounded cool – though I think Kadaicha was one of his less-favorite ones in the set.
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Yeah, it is! I think I got it as my xmas present last (2022) xmas.
Kadaicha is certainly not looking like one of the best in the box, but hey, I enjoyed it 
-Wade
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Yeah, I’m accustomed to watching movies through a historical lens, but I didn’t expect to have to mentally file this one next to stuff like Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will. Even those movies, with their repugnant morals and horrific legacies, were more striking on purely technical terms (which should not be taken as an endorsement for these steaming piles of evil). The Searchers, in contrast, is something I’m already forgetting because it was so bleh.
I got around to watching Saltburn. Seemed kinda messy writing-wise. Also not very shocking, which wouldn’t matter except that it was trying to be shocking. Still entertaining to watch, but it could’ve been more.
But enough negativity! I also saw something amazing recently: Scavengers Reign. Technically it’s not a movie, so I shouldn’t mention it in this thread, but it was so good that I want to shout about it from the rooftops! Highly recommended for cartoon and/or sci-fi fans.
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Holy cow, Saltburn. (On Amazon Prime.)
It’s a gorgeous, quotable, darkly humorous and shocking British erotic thriller. I’d say it’s almost a horror movie that substitutes shocking scenes for gore and scares.
Go in unspoiled if you’re up for it, knowing you will sit there multiple times with your jaw on the floor.
ADVISORY: Do not watch with parents. Also this is not a date movie because it’s so weird unless you’re sure your companion is up for this sort of thing.
TW (potential spoilers):
- Frontal male nudity/homoeroticism; Director Emerald Fennell exploits her hawt British men with lovingly-lit extended camera-work; female nudity is avoided, obscured, or implied.
- Suicide: aftermath of a bathtub wrist-slitting
- Death/Mourning: funerals shown… Oh god the funeral.
- BODILY FLUIDS: Extended scenes involving residual semen, menstrual blood, and mouths… (genitals are not shown in these scenes)
- Emotional Manipulation: Narcissism, Sociopathy. Imagine The Talented Mr. Ripley but with more dong.
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In the last couple of weeks, we saw:
Poor Things was gorgeous, surreal and and colorful. Funny with good performances and a great Frankenstein base story, but something about it didn’t sit right with me: it’s a movie about female sexual empowerment that is so naive and unrealistic and exploitative itself that it has a weird undercurrent to its surface charm. Worth seeing, for sure.
The Power of the Dog is a slow burn of a movie with a crackling performance from Benedict Cumberbatch and a surprise ending that caught me unaware. I genuinely disliked the main female character played by Kirsten Dunst, though, even though I think I was supposed to like her. I wonder if I’m alone in that.
Also I watched a ton of TV while Tom was gone:
The Bear, seasons 1 & 2: Everything I heard about this series was true. This is some of the most stressful TV I’ve ever watched, culminating in a season 2 episode with Jamie Lee Curtis and Bob Odenkirk that nearly gave me a stroke, it was so difficult to watch. Yet the show has enormous heart and boundless pathos and extremely real and engaging characters. Highly, highly recommend, if you can stand the relentless stress.
American Nightmare: A three part documentary about an extremely weird case from 2015 that I don’t remember ever hearing about at the time. I found it riveting. Very graphic content of sexual violence, so be warned. An absolutely crushingly depressing sketch of law enforcement failure.
Black Bird: A Dennis Lehane production, a fictionalization of a true story about a serial killer, with a fantastic performance by Paul Walter Hauser. It has a great deal to say about toxic sexual attitudes toward women. Very satisfying for anyone who likes true crime and can tolerate some really nasty stuff.
Edit: It occurs to me looking over this list that nearly everything on it is directly connected to sexual attitudes about women. Which is an amazing coincidence, because I didn’t know much about any of them before watching-- I picked them because they were highly rated or had cast/crew I like.
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A few days ago, I watched The Holdovers. What a lovely film! The first half seems like it would be so dull or overly depressing, but it turns and twists in great ways that leave it light. A coming-of-age and a coming-of-youth, all in one. A highly recommended story.
Oh, on that note, halfway through Society of the Snow (Netflix). Now this one has the complete opposite mood to the previous film. My god this is dark (we stopped on the scene where they realise nobody’s looking for them, which is immediately followed by jolly adverts across the radio with a disturbing contrast).
Now without getting into it in any more detail, even being vegetarian if faced with a situation like that one I would not refuse to eat dead bodies. They have no parasites, being covered in snow for days, and what difference is it to eating an animal? Even people you love, at some point you would begin to look past that and actually think about your survival rather than dignity.
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Yeah, I loved the Holdovers too. Most involving drama I’ve seen for ages. And given cinemas show fewer and fewer of them, I see fewer and fewer. Even though it’s technically a pastiche (pretending to be shot in 1971) it doesn’t feel like one, but does feel like a New Hollywood film, as was intended. That it was shot on film and looks it also had a stronger effect because that’s rare now.
Re: Society of the Snow, I hadn’t heard of this as I don’t watch TV series these days, only films, but I’m well acquainted with the case, and the book Alive! I remember digging the film Alive (1993) as well. I also have the Mexican film Survive! (1976). It’s low budget and more exploitational to get people in the cinema, but I still think it’s pretty effective.
Survive! trailer:
-Wade
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Well, it’s a film but it’s definitely worth it. I agree with all your points on the Holdovers. I still don’t get WHY exactly it’s called that. There isn’t much being “held”. I guess it’s the initial idea that counts.
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Aren’t they staying at the school during the vacation after most folks have gone home? I went to a northeastern boarding high school in the 90s, and while I don’t remember “holdovers” being used as a single word, I dimly recall saying “held/hold over” for stuff that continued from one semester to the next.
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I went back to investigate where I got the wrong idea about it being a TV series.
Googling it real fast, I glanced a result saying it ‘launched’ on Netflix on such and such a date. Grammatically, I expect movies to open, not launch. Combine that with performing this verb on Netflix and not in a cinema, and that’s why I figured it was a series. But yes, it’s a movie-movie!
-Wade
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Okay, Infinity Pool review: I thought it was beautiful and well acted, but not very good overall. I wouldn’t normally compare an artist to their famous parent, but Brandon Cronenberg is so clearly invested in many of the same topics & metaphors as his father, and I feel like this movie actually had very little to say (and what it did say was obvious or incoherent). I spent the whole time waiting for it to step outside this very narrow view that it had established, and there were numerous opportunities for it to do so, but it just never happened, and at the end I felt like I’d just spent a couple hours watching beautiful people be mean to each other. Possessor is peak Brandon for me because I found the plot really engaging in addition to the visuals (those now predictable but lovely practical effects).
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I agree. I was really disappointed in IP, and liked Possessor much better, although I didn’t love that, either. Picking up the work of your forebears is a time-honored tradition, but I’m afraid that Brandon isn’t yet living up to the standard set by his father. If he wasn’t, as you say, clearly doing the same kind of work in the same kinds of ways, it would be unfair to make comparisons, but he is.
Did you see the limited series remake of Dead Ringers with Rachel Weisz? I hoped it would do more, but still enjoyed it and thought she did as well as Jeremy Irons in the dual role of the twins.
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I haven’t seen it yet! Started watching it with my partner, but they quickly noped out and we put on something else haha
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