HOUSELANDER wrote: ↑Sun Dec 27, 2020 1:38 pm
I'm a simple guy, when comes too movie i just want a good action movie,especially movie about martial arts.back when was a kid,my pops use to buy a lot of jackie chan and jet li movies and i rewatched many many times.though as i grew older i starting to apreciated other genre aswell. I mean we live in 2021 where actor don't have to sacrifice themselves for the sake of entertainment anymore because we got good CGI and all. But man i will miss good realistic fight scene without cgi its all actor own stun.
Ooh ok! Let's talk martial arts movies then! What are some of your favorites?
I recently saw an utterly insane movie that mixes martial arts with horror that I recommend called The Boxer's Omen. Really makes me want to check out more stuff made by the legendary martial arts studio, Shaw Brothers.
Amazing artistic achievement, that movie. Are you not into George Miller? Guy's a genius at visual storytelling.
I have seen his mad max movies and I really like them (even beyond thunderdome, I don't mind fury road but it's the one I like the least out of the four of them because I find big guy bane to be a charisma vacuum) but I never went out of my way to watch babe because I just assumed it was going to be a normal kid's movie. I'm gonna take a look at it eventually because you legitimately made me curious
I wade into sleaze and lowbrow stuff as well as the highbrow Criterion shit. My main response to your post would be no need to even be so self-conscious about whether you are a typical "film student" or a "Movie critic" etc. This thread is just about recommending movies you dug. All are on equal playing fields despite different histories and m,ove watching experiences.
I feel the same. I don't understand why people are generally close minded about what they consume though. Some days I am in the mood to watch takeshi kitano, some days I'm in the mood to watch the street fighter movie LOL! That's just normal to me, but I notice there's not much of an intersection between say bergman fans and lucio fulci fans generally. I like to watch anything. I've never seen dollman though.
And as for Sorrentino not making it abroad...what? He made multiple English language films with Sean Penn and Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel etc. and The Great Beauty won the Oscar for Best Foreign FIlm. Youth is my favorite of his but The Family Friend rules as well. The dude is the modern Fellini, no doubt. He and Alex De La Iglesia are my favorite contemporary foreign filmmakers, though the list is long.
I thought his earlier filmography wasn't translated at all but I recently found out that all of his movies were subtitled in english. I recently went through his filmography again and yeah I like them all minus this must be the place. I found that movie to be a bit aimless and the photography wasn't as good (despite having the same exact DP as his previous movies. I guess colors just look different in the USA compared to italy.) and I guess I'm not really into sean penn as an actor. I had missed out on Youth when it first came out (his only movie I haven't seen in theatres because I couldn't find a showing that wasn't dubbed over) and god damn that movie is a masterpiece
A lot of people were disappointed with the new pope but I'm more on the side of enjoying the fact that it's such a weird sequel. The ending might have been influenced by Gnostic beliefs (I don't want to spoil it if you haven't seen it but in gnosticism christ's resurrection is seen more as a manifestation than him actually coming back to life.)
Have you seen Loro? That movie is great but the international cut is a complete hatchet job. The full lenght italian cut (which is actually in two parts) was only released in a limited release exclusive french blu ray which I had to import for some fucking reason. I can send you a copy if you want to watch it, though the subtitles are just machine translated from french so some stuff is a bit iffy (but I was told by my anglophone friends that is overall understandable.)
In a way it is a sequel to Il Divo considering it shows how the shape of italian political corruption changed over the decades (namely how whores are exchanged as currency for political & industrial favours as opposed to the bribe economy portrayed in Il Divo), Berlusconi is also a very iconic rapresentative of Italy's second republic as Andreotti was for the first. Someone released a movie about Craxi recently but it wasn't as good as Sorrentino's movies.
(speaking of acid westerns I'm sure you can name the movie my signature is from. I chose it specifically due to its Suda connection)
Yeah obviously I know el topo. My dad was a big jodorowski fan so he got me into his movies when I was pretty young. He would show me lots of movies from the 80s that had tits and gore in them and didn't give a shit LOL. I remember him showing me robocop when I was 11 or some shit. I recently went over verhoeven's filmography as well but I think I had already mentioned that in my earlier post. Recently I have been watching some Woody Allen movies and I have been going through Kitano's filmography (I was actually introduced to Kitano's movies through the old forums).
Do you like Kitano at all?
Anyway I went on a tangent but yes, I am aware El Topo was one of the inspirations for the original No More Heroes. That's one of the reasons why I am going to cover that game even though I don't much care for the rest of the series. Actually I came across this picture and it made me crack up
I wanted to post some more stuff I've been watching recently but I'm kind of in a hurry right now so I might edit this later
I already mentioned that I was going through kitano and woody allen's filmography recently, I have a lot to say about that but I'll mention this first.
Recently I watched THX1138 again and American Graffiti for the first time
THX1138 is a masterpiece, but I already knew that. It's almost distressing how it predicted modern net driven life 50 years ago, lol!
I liked american graffiti a lot more than I expected to though. I'm a huge george lucas fan, yes I am one of those insufferable fags who enjoys the star wars prequels as well (In my mind, now that I watched american graffiti as well, Lucas never directed a bad movie in his life.)
I was amazed by the extent to which these two movies influenced his visual language through his entire filmography, even just in basic things like the implications behind him shooting a sunset in a fucking star wars movies. Both are good in their own accord though. THX almost reminds me of a Lynch movie in how esoteric, yet relatable it is
AngelheadedHipster wrote: ↑Sat Dec 04, 2021 8:44 pm
Happy that we can agree Blade Runner 2049 sucks. Recently watched the Blade Runner movies back to back and it's baffling how some people think of 49 as a sequel on par or even better than the original. Apart from the massive, Vangelis shaped hole right in the center of it, it's such a dull and lifeless movie, both in terms of writing and presentation.
I understand what the movie is going for. It's basically a retelling of pinocchio, the wooden puppet who wanted to be real, with some religious overtones about old testament vs new testament logic.
My problem with it is that I don't understand why the movie is so dedicated to wasting my fucking time with senseless worldbuilding and why it looks like trash.
The villain of the movie, Jared Leto, a thinly veiled yahweh allegory making men out of clay. He's the richest man in the galaxy, not the world but every known off world colony. So obviously, the solution for each and every one of his problems, is to send his kung-fu dominatrix underling to have fist fights with rian gosling, WTF!?
If you need something from the police morgue and you have limitless money, you bribe someone. That's not just the movie's logic, that's real world logic that is so basic, that even children understand it.
If we're going for fairytale logic, where things don't necessarily have to make literal sense because it's just a morality tale, then there's no reason for all the senseless corporate worldbuilding then. Everyone fills their mouths with meaningless drivel about "Hope" and "change" almost like an Obama speech (LOL!), the original movie opted to ditch the horrid narration from the theatrical cut to make the visuals speak for themselves. 2049 just has a virtual chola miku waifu substituting for the narration.
It's just so fucking bad, and it's a glaring example of a director who thinks himself smart, that is actually retarded. Every shot is held for minutes but there's literally nothing to see.
Directors like Kubrick or Lynch have very long and slow takes because there's a lot of detail to take in, and they give you enough time to consider what's going on in the movie and take it all in.
Villeneuve and many like him, being retarded, assume that long takes are a shorthand for "intelligent" filmmaking. It's almost like a new movement in american cinema, where they will shoot MCU-level scripts but stretch every shot as long as possible to imply some depth.
I felt the same way about Joker which put me to sleep lol. It has the pretension of being a smart movie for human beings, but they go through the trouble of spelling every single minute aspect of its titular character in exposition, going as far as to have a flashback sequence where you are shown AND told that the main character (who is established as being insane since the first scene) was not actually fucking the shit out of his hispanic neighbor, and was having delusions.
It's actually an evolution of Christopher Nolan's style of filmmaking, which I affectionately call "bad", where the script is written out exactly like a book. What would have been narration in the novel is relegated to tertiary characters sitting down and spouting exposition, and there's absolutely zero visual storytelling going on in what is supposedly a visual medium. But nerds loved it because "he finally took batman seriously!" so now you're stuck with it because every piece of media in the USA is made for twitter nerds for some reason lol.
Nolan's style of filmmaking (and by proxy his imitators') is so antithetical to cinema that his actors don't even get to act, unless they improvise, because everything you know about his characters is told to you in exposition by tertiary characters sitting down.
It also makes things so predictable because since everyone lacks any human emotion or personal history, you can predict every single plot point because everything that isn't exposition sticks out like a sore thumb. Like Muh Cocaine's speech in TDKR, which was obviously setting up an ending twist because that character never had another human moment in three movies.
It got to absurd lenghts in Interstellar when even the main character feeling love for his children was just a set up for a final twist where love is a fifth dimensional language that transcends space and time.
Say what you want about the Lynch movie, but at least there was a degree of creativity to how it interpreted the book, sure, Lynch didn't seem to take the worldbuilding very seriously, but at least he brought a certain life to it were Villeneuve's movie is this colourless, textureless brutalist monolith of people expressionlessly reciting dialogue from the book.
Yeah I think the Lynch movie is fine. It would have been better if he actually got to edit it because I think its main problem is that it doesen't flow very well (though I haven't seen it in years.)
Obviously it doesen't hold up to the rest of his filmography but it's fine as some popcorn entertainment. Hell I wish modern popcorn entertainment were as good as Lynch's Dune.
I haven't seen the new one because I don't really go to the theater with people anymore, and without anyone to drag me I had no incentive to see it. I have a friend who keeps begging me to watch the new spider-man movie but I told him I would sooner end my life
Aside from that, it's not like I consider everything short of arthouse stuff to be beneath me. If anything, when it comes to movies I've started appreciating stuff that's mainly just concerned with the spectacle of itself. The kind of thing directed by people like Michael Bay, the Wachowski's or Zack Snyder, action fare that puts iconography and spectacle first.
Yeah I actually like Zack Snyder's capeshit movies even (which is another thing that's considered "right wing trump nazi" now) because they are just action movies that dare to have some pathos and stakes, instead of constantly winking at the audience reminding them that they're "in the joke". I mean looking good should be the first pre-requisite for any watchable movie (since it's a visual medium) and Snyder is really one of the few people who has developed a visual style around CGI.
The funny part of course being that the way they direct action owes a lot to (mainly Japanese) video games and animation. Mainly for how absent actually pleasing visual direction is from shit like the MCU or modern Star Wars, those might as well not have directors at all. Hell, Pain and Gain is one of the best movies from the last decade and it was critically reviled.
I had no idea the movie was critically reviled, WTF?!
"I'M STRONG! I'M BIG! I'M HOT!"
I actually heard Armond White say (I'm paraphrasing) that the movie was one of the best satyres of American exceptionalism and that the wolf of wallstreet paled in comparison, which I agree with.
I still don't understand why Armond White became a meme online when most of his opinions on movies are actually sound. Though I don't much care for his political rethoric. (Not that I disagree. I know most movies pushed by hollywood are just "political", for that is what they call it, propaganda for the mindbroken slugs. I just think at some point it's worthless to just go into it every single time. It's like those youtubers constantly making 4h long "video essays" on how the new star wars movies are god awful. Like yeah I agree but that's not really productive lol.)
His opinions are certainly more well informed than some "classic" movie reviewers like Roger Ebert, who was essentially cinematically illiterate.
Whenever I happen to find out the consensus on a movie that I watched I'm always flabbergasted. I recently found out that 8mm by Joel Schumacher is supposedly "bad". All that tells me is that george lucas was right, and film critics are subnormal.
I grew up on a lot of popular mainstream media. Like most of my generation, Harry Potter was part of what taught me to read. Unlike a lot of my generation, I eventually moved on from it. There is nothing wrong with enjoying popular stuff but that attitude of not only carrying it into adulthood, but constantly insisting on its artistic merit beyond just entertainment and basically treating it as modern mythology has become a fucking pandemic. Not too long ago, that was the attitude of harmless weirdos, now its become normalized.
I actually didn't much care for Harry Potter as a kid. I grew up on the Hobbit and I actually found the story of this gentrified fat ass being forced into an adventure and discovering himself along the way to be way more relatable than this victimhood fantasy presented by Harry Potter. I did read the first four or five books though, probably because it was sort of expected of me by then, and when I was a kid you could just put shit in front of me and I would read whatever.
Potter, like most western literature, is just a reflection of "christian" (no need for me to get into why I don't consider that real christianity all over again) victim morality where your power fantasy is actually to be oppressed & victimized by everyone around you, and eventually "prove your bullies wrong" by virtue of your righteousness. It is reflected in many things, such as how nerds are constantly fantasizing of being oppressed by chad thundercock (all of the bullies in my school growing up were actual nerds. "Jock" types were usually very nice to me lol. Rake told me he had pretty much the same experience.), "feminists" think they're being oppressed by male patriarchy, "egalitarians" think they're being denied pussy by "feminists", blacks think that they're oppressed by white supremacy, whites think they're being bullied by the wokes, so on and so forth.
Harry Potter really inadvertedly (?) captured the zeitgeist of its target generation, even down to the fact that the main story is actually about fucking nothing, absolutely nothing, a worthless husk, a placeholder of nothing.
It's also MI6 propaganda but that's just all english entertainment since day one lol.
I like to assume, maybe a bit optimistically, that the main target audience for shows like Rick and Morty or movies like Sausage Party are Teenagers who haven't had much exposure to to media that actually explores unconventional ideas. Of course none of that is provocative, even by the standards of its own genre. American comedy has been wallowing in that cheap, nothing is sacred, vulgarity for vulgarity's sake nihilism since at least the 90's (And even that was mainly revisiting, and neutering, what underground cartoonists have been doing since since 60s/70s). Never moved on from it and what's worse, never even improved on it.
I don't actually have a problem with vulgarity. I actually wrote several raunchy comedies myself.
This specific book is full of farting, burping, vomiting, nose picking, drug usage, alcohol abuse, magical creatures getting fucked in the ass and all sorts of shit. The spin off book even employs the verbiage “negroid of undiscernible ethnicity” to describe a side character LOL!
What grinds my gear so to speak is that most comedies I see coming out of the USA actually seem to be pushing some thesis against a non-existing strawman, as if they were “dunking” on… who? Sure there really are retards around the world who think of God as a giant space alien, but those people are nowhere near the majority, and are influencing society at the same level of Vikings, which is to say not at all.
When Cobra Kai has jokes on modern SJW verbiage it lands because you actually get to meet people in day to day life which will bother you over inane shit like that.
(Yeah that’s the only clip I could find, sorry)
Granted it might just be a cultural bias on my side. Jack actually did complain about random evangelical Christians stopping him in the street to preach at him, so maybe it’s more prominent than I realize. It still comes off as pretentious though, considering that the ideas posited in stuff like rick and morty have been thoroughly discussed 3000 years ago in much more depth, while the show still has the gall to act as if it’s dumping some universal truths on you.
Italian comedy (outside of what I write which is A-mazing) is also terrible but at least it has no pretension to it. It’s just the same exact cuck jokes being repeated since the latin era. (I’m not exaggerating here btw. Latin, as in ancient roman satire was full of cuck and fag jokes, and those same jokes are still in modern Italian comedies virtually unchanged lol.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyricon
Xed51 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 20, 2021 6:55 pm
I understand what the movie is going for. It's basically a retelling of pinocchio, the wooden puppet who wanted to be real, with some religious overtones about old testament vs new testament logic.
My problem with it is that I don't understand why the movie is so dedicated to wasting my fucking time with senseless worldbuilding and why it looks like trash.
The villain of the movie, Jared Leto, a thinly veiled yahweh allegory making men out of clay. He's the richest man in the galaxy, not the world but every known off world colony. So obviously, the solution for each and every one of his problems, is to send his kung-fu dominatrix underling to have fist fights with rian gosling, WTF!?
If you need something from the police morgue and you have limitless money, you bribe someone. That's not just the movie's logic, that's real world logic that is so basic, that even children understand it.
If we're going for fairytale logic, where things don't necessarily have to make literal sense because it's just a morality tale, then there's no reason for all the senseless corporate worldbuilding then. Everyone fills their mouths with meaningless drivel about "Hope" and "change" almost like an Obama speech (LOL!), the original movie opted to ditch the horrid narration from the theatrical cut to make the visuals speak for themselves. 2049 just has a virtual chola miku waifu substituting for the narration.
It's just so fucking bad, and it's a glaring example of a director who thinks himself smart, that is actually retarded. Every shot is held for minutes but there's literally nothing to see.
Directors like Kubrick or Lynch have very long and slow takes because there's a lot of detail to take in, and they give you enough time to consider what's going on in the movie and take it all in.
Villeneuve and many like him, being retarded, assume that long takes are a shorthand for "intelligent" filmmaking. It's almost like a new movement in american cinema, where they will shoot MCU-level scripts but stretch every shot as long as possible to imply some depth.
I felt the same way about Joker which put me to sleep lol. It has the pretension of being a smart movie for human beings, but they go through the trouble of spelling every single minute aspect of its titular character in exposition, going as far as to have a flashback sequence where you are shown AND told that the main character (who is established as being insane since the first scene) was not actually fucking the shit out of his hispanic neighbor, and was having delusions.
It's actually an evolution of Christopher Nolan's style of filmmaking, which I affectionately call "bad", where the script is written out exactly like a book. What would have been narration in the novel is relegated to tertiary characters sitting down and spouting exposition, and there's absolutely zero visual storytelling going on in what is supposedly a visual medium. But nerds loved it because "he finally took batman seriously!" so now you're stuck with it because every piece of media in the USA is made for twitter nerds for some reason lol.
Nolan's style of filmmaking (and by proxy his imitators') is so antithetical to cinema that his actors don't even get to act, unless they improvise, because everything you know about his characters is told to you in exposition by tertiary characters sitting down.
It also makes things so predictable because since everyone lacks any human emotion or personal history, you can predict every single plot point because everything that isn't exposition sticks out like a sore thumb. Like Muh Cocaine's speech in TDKR, which was obviously setting up an ending twist because that character never had another human moment in three movies.
It got to absurd lenghts in Interstellar when even the main character feeling love for his children was just a set up for a final twist where love is a fifth dimensional language that transcends space and time.
If you think about it, it's exploiting what's effectively a pavlovian reaction where people associate a slow pace with a cerebral mood and complex emotions. If you want to make something contemplative, then give me something to contemplate. People call the original Blade Runner slow but I never really felt it was. Shots lasted long enough to sink in, but they didn't linger beyond that. In 2049 they last so long, they feel less like they're trying to tell a story or even build a world and more like they're trying to show off how good they'd be as desktop wallpapers. And that's despite most of them having little going for them outside of empty rooms with colorful lighting. Best Cinematography my ass.
Nolan makes what for me are practically the definition of hacky action movies. Say what you want about Michael Bay's Transformers movies, at least I get the impression he's having fun, smashing his toy robots together. Everything about Nolan's movies is utterly joyless and creatively stagnant. I saw Tenet last year. It was a movie greatly concerned with calling attention to its own complexity, what with its whole nonlinear time gimmick. And it's also the best evidence that complexity and depth are two completely unrelated concepts. Because behind all of its time travel bullshit, it was still just a movie about two boring secret agents trying to stop an equally boring villain from activating a doomsday device.
Joker was a movie held up by Joaquin Phoenix alone. It was much like the Nolan Batman movies in that it tried to crowbar a comic book character into a realistic world. If your source material embarasses you, don't adapt it. Both excessive realism and excessive self irony are different expressions of the same attitude. You know, I actually really liked Gotham. It was a much more entertaining series about the origins of super villainy than Joker, mainly because it never pretended it wasn't set in a comic book world. A lot of it was absolutely ridicuolous but it was just the world its set in. Someone who doesn't trust the viewer to immerse themselves in a fictional world has no business adapting fantasy.
Yeah I actually like Zack Snyder's capeshit movies even (which is another thing that's considered "right wing trump nazi" now) because they are just action movies that dare to have some pathos and stakes, instead of constantly winking at the audience reminding them that they're "in the joke". I mean looking good should be the first pre-requisite for any watchable movie (since it's a visual medium) and Snyder is really one of the few people who has developed a visual style around CGI.
I'm pretty sure the reputation Snyder has of being a rightist goes back to nothing but him expressing interest in adapting Fountainhead. Everything I know about his movies and him as a person points to him just being your typical basic bitch liberal. If anything, kind of a left leaning one, considering Batman v Superman was was about a megalomaniacal billionaire who hired mercenaries to massacre a village in Africa, maniplates the media and creates an uncontrollable monster, because he wants to kill an immigrant. Or maybe that's another one of those things people don't catch unless they're explicity told.
I think there was a wave of sympathy for him with the whole Justice League thing. I think even those who don't actually like his movies can agree that using his daughters death to get rid of him and shit all over his work was a low blow, even by Hollywood standards.
I had no idea the movie was critically reviled, WTF?!
"I'M STRONG! I'M BIG! I'M HOT!"
I actually heard Armond White say (I'm paraphrasing) that the movie was one of the best satyres of American exceptionalism and that the wolf of wallstreet paled in comparison, which I agree with.
I still don't understand why Armond White became a meme online when most of his opinions on movies are actually sound. Though I don't much care for his political rethoric. (Not that I disagree. I know most movies pushed by hollywood are just "political", for that is what they call it, propaganda for the mindbroken slugs. I just think at some point it's worthless to just go into it every single time. It's like those youtubers constantly making 4h long "video essays" on how the new star wars movies are god awful. Like yeah I agree but that's not really productive lol.)
His opinions are certainly more well informed than some "classic" movie reviewers like Roger Ebert, who was essentially cinematically illiterate.
Whenever I happen to find out the consensus on a movie that I watched I'm always flabbergasted. I recently found out that 8mm by Joel Schumacher is supposedly "bad". All that tells me is that george lucas was right, and film critics are subnormal.
Pain and Gain is great but if RT is anything to go by, both critics and audiences largely rejected it. Maybe it hit too close to home for them. I don't know. Actually, there's an incredibly entertaining review on YouTube from Mark Kermode from the BBC:
It's very entertaining to hear him get all worked up about it. And it has gotten me thinking. Because if I had listened to this review without having seen the movie, it wouldn't have put me off, it would have sold me on it. And that's probably just it, people like Kermode present a certain critical establishment of stiff, old farts that react with apprehension when confronted with satire that's actually transgressive and has actual teeth.
I respect Armond White. I don't share his love for Adam Sandler or Eddie Murphy comedies. I dunno. I guess it's a Black American thing. I also think he sometimes lets his politics get in the way of his criticism, but despite all that, he is a guy who most definitely knows his shit. White has actually very explicitly expressed his resentment for Roger Eber and film criticism as entertainment in general:
He's right about a lot of things. People like Ebert have given rise to a generation of critics that are convinced that just watching a lot of movies qualifies you to be a film critic. Which in turn has given rise to the MovieBob variety of reviewer that expresses nothing but the viewpoint of the lowest common denominator. It's what's, at the end of the day, the difference between actual criticism and just expressing an opinion on a movie. Coming from a place of actual knowledge.
I don't actually have a problem with vulgarity. I actually wrote several raunchy comedies myself.
This specific book is full of farting, burping, vomiting, nose picking, drug usage, alcohol abuse, magical creatures getting fucked in the ass and all sorts of shit. The spin off book even employs the verbiage “negroid of undiscernible ethnicity” to describe a side character LOL!
What grinds my gear so to speak is that most comedies I see coming out of the USA actually seem to be pushing some thesis against a non-existing strawman, as if they were “dunking” on… who? Sure there really are retards around the world who think of God as a giant space alien, but those people are nowhere near the majority, and are influencing society at the same level of Vikings, which is to say not at all.
When Cobra Kai has jokes on modern SJW verbiage it lands because you actually get to meet people in day to day life which will bother you over inane shit like that.
(Yeah that’s the only clip I could find, sorry)
Granted it might just be a cultural bias on my side. Jack actually did complain about random evangelical Christians stopping him in the street to preach at him, so maybe it’s more prominent than I realize. It still comes off as pretentious though, considering that the ideas posited in stuff like rick and morty have been thoroughly discussed 3000 years ago in much more depth, while the show still has the gall to act as if it’s dumping some universal truths on you.
Italian comedy (outside of what I write which is A-mazing) is also terrible but at least it has no pretension to it. It’s just the same exact cuck jokes being repeated since the latin era. (I’m not exaggerating here btw. Latin, as in ancient roman satire was full of cuck and fag jokes, and those same jokes are still in modern Italian comedies virtually unchanged lol.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyricon
I think mainstream comedy hold the notion that an acceptable target is one that's too insignificant to complain loudly. Flat earthers, evolution deniers, scientologists, pedophiles and so on. Groups that are neither big enough nor well liked enough that they would raise a fuss over it or have someone raise a fuss on their behalf. Cobra Kai is an oddity, in that despite its 80's fetishism, it does a good job feeling like it's about actual people and grounded in actual modern culture. Does a good job comparing and contrasting older and newer understanding of masculinity, romance, self defense, raising children etc. without ever treating either unsympathetically. It's why it feels mature, while being as lighthearted and goofy as it is.
Watched SABU's Blessing Bell (2002) with a couple family members who I think didn't enjoy it so much.
Excellent film. Questionable whether every scene is really necessary. I understand that the pace of the final act relies on the pace of the first, but it's a little unrefined.
I think SABU was too aware of the expectations of the audience and so he overdid it in the other direction.
Susumu Terajima as a mute for most of the film was also a bit of a "meta" thing. To typecast him as the same reticent side-character as he played in Kitano films earlier in his career, but then to make him the lead. Not that this detracts from the film. On the contrary.
A short adventure in Tokyo. As you might expect, the theme is death.
"Don't be crazy. I would never go near such a poisonous flower. She is carnivorous. She disgusts me"
When looking at the works of others whether it's a work of art or cinema or literature or architecture or music or a game or anything I am always thinking about how I would improve it by censoring, destroying, cutting or removing parts.
This was a film which contained basically nothing unnecessary.
The final act was especially thrilling.
Having rescued our leading cow Brown Eyes from being sent to the slaughterhouse, our hero then releases the entire rest of the herd into the streets of Los Angeles.
Scenes of urban chaos follow as the steer fill the city. Crowds run in fright and traffic accidents occur. Cows enter buildings.
Neither the police nor the fire department can stop the mayhem.
These 999 other heads of cattle intended for slaughter are brought to stampede and deftly led to the stockyard, saving the business of the ranch-owner and earning his gratitude.
Finally the ranch-owner, the ranch-owner's daughter, Buster, and even Brown Eyes all get into a car and drive off for our happy ending.
"Don't be crazy. I would never go near such a poisonous flower. She is carnivorous. She disgusts me"
I'm Aki Kaurismäki from Finland. I've made eleven lousy films, and it's all your fault.
In London in 1976, my brother forced me to visit the Film Institute, Where I saw Tokyo Story.
After that, I gave up my dreams about literature.
I decided to begin my search for a red kettle.
I grew up under the influence of American movies.
What I respect most is that Ozu never needed to use murder or violence to tell everything that's essential about human life.
So far I've made eleven lousy films, and I've decided to make another thirty because I refuse to go to my grave until I have proven to myself that I'll never reach your level, Mr. Ozu.
I chose this old factory for shooting because I have a tendency to look to the past.
I'm not a person who presses forward with confidence in the future and in technology.
I prefer to look back.
I think Ozu was like that too during his time in Japan.
The epitaph on my grave will be "I Was Born, But..."
アリガトウ.
"Don't be crazy. I would never go near such a poisonous flower. She is carnivorous. She disgusts me"
