Motion Pictures (that anuse me)

[vom]

hooray

[dng]

cryptozoo - amazing animated film by dash shaw (who also made my entire high school is sinking into the sea, which is pretty good), about a zoo where they keep all the worlds mythical animals. i thought this was bloody great

and also those other hungarian 70s animations:

hey you! - a man is trapped in his room, for 7 minutes. the room keeps mutating (for 7 minutes). pretty good
gobble gobble - a greedy man keeps eating absolutely everything and growing bigger and bigger until he is big enough to eat the sun. this was quite like a picture book once wrote about an increasingly big pig, if anyone remembers that. but with more explicit anti capitalist views
mind the steps - a short cartoon centred round some stairs in an apartment block. mild eschering of space leads eventually to complete eschering of space. good

[vom]

I really want to see cryptozoo so I added it to my watchlist and have made no effort to go any further than that and possibly never will

[dng]

excellent

[dng]

To catch a thief - for some reason this isn’t in any of my parents Hitchcock box sets, but luckily it was on bbc two over Christmas. Anyway I thought this was a bit boring, but it looked amazing, so I’ll forgive it that.

[richschnauzer]

Dune (1983) is now on Amazon Prime.

[vom]

Is there no end to Amazon's evil?

[richschnauzer]

No.

[blombluss]

"Alexa, what does a mid-life crisis look like?"

[vom]

another film article from me, about some excellent Norwegian stop-motion

https://www.the-solute.com/year-of-the- ... rand-prix/

(not sure why the header image is broken and there's some editing in the first paragraph I'm not too happy with, but c'est la vie)

[vom]

Aha, those things are fixed now anyway, hooray!

[dng]

Hooray. Also I too have never heard of that and now I want to watch it

[vom]

You should. I have seen it three times now I thnk

[blombluss]

I read your piece earlier - lovely stuff, Vom! Your enthusiasm for it shines out, and is most contagious (but in a nice way!).

[vom]

I'm afraid there is no cure

[dng]

I watched the eternals, a new marvel film that is literally the plot of a final fantasy game, but filmed as if it's a really sad sombre meaningful look at some vital aspect of human experience, rather than the load of old nonsense it is.

Then also the standard marvel ending of advertising several more marvel films to come at you just in case you might have thought for a second that there might never again been several more marvel films to come is so inept and abysmal it makes you wonder what the point of anything is or was or will be ever again sonehow

[dng]

I also watched some more films off mubi and they were better but I'm too tired to say anything else about anything else now ever again

[blombluss]

I have seen 2 1/2 Marvel films.

Iron Man - very good.
Iron Man 2 - okay.
1/2 of a Thor film until Match Of The Day came on - decent.

The more they make, the less likely I am to watch any of 'em.

[dng]

Surely the more they make of them the more you'll want to watch 781 of them a year (plus assorted tv show tie ins and spin offs)

[The Robotic Anomaly]

Did I mention I saw

Mortal Kombat: imagine the old Mortal Kombat film, but with the tiny amount of joy it possessed completely drained out of it.

Fast And Furious 9: what is even happening, is there a problem Vin Diesel can't solve by driving a car into another car

[vom]

I still haven't seen a Fast and Furious. I feel like I'm going to have a breakdown and watch them all at some point

[blombluss]

I still haven't seen a Fast and Furious. I feel like I'm going to have a breakdown and watch them all at some point

That way inner peace, tranquillity, and enlightenment, lies.

[dng]

Here's a big list of the other things I've watched recently off mubi:

Infernal Symphony - a short 80s cartoon by Polish animator/film director Walerian Borowczyk (who made lots of interesting stuff and also lots of unwatchablestuff), in which the worlds sexiest angel and the worlds least evil demon have sex and make babies. the babies are man! (this was pretty terrible really)

Venus On The Half Shell - more Walerian Borowczyk. This time snails and humans have sex. Walerian Borowczyk really likes sex, I think.

The Games Of Angels - more Walerian Borowczyk, I'd seen this one before because its on my DVD of his cartoons. Anyway its ten minutes of absolute horror about the holocaust. Very good, utterly horrifying

Cold Meridian - a short film by Peter Strickland, this is a sort of ASMR video but as horror film. Good, I liked it

The Pleasure Of Love In Iran - short Agnes Varda film from the 70s (supposedly an out take from another film). A man and a woman talk about love and poetry while looking at mosques. V. good

Vampir - 70s weirdness, where someone was allowed to film a Christoper Lee Dracula film being filmed (not one of his hammer horror draculas, but another one I haven't seen with Herbert Lom in it), and then edit it all together as another film, with no dialogue, and eerie sound effects, and all in black and white, like a long lost surreallist nosferatu. Good (if you like dracula, nosferatus, etc)

Fay Grim - This was a sequel to a film (Henry Fool) that I last saw 20 years ago, but which I used to like a lot. This isn't quite as good as that, but its quite good fun (if you like Hal Hartley films, if you don't it's probably excruciatinng). Anyway, there's lots of weirdness and whimsy and meclancholy, like all his other films, and also Jeff Goldblum's in it for some reason. And Saffron Burrows. You don't see Saffron Burrows in much nay more do you? But I quite liek Saffron Burrows I don't know why (maybe because she was in Karaoke/Cold Lazarus). Anyway, the plot involves some convoluted, corrupt CIA nonsense eventually bringing death and despair to everyone involved, which reminded me of some of the plot of Cryptozoo, which also features the voice of the man who plays Henry Fool in this. Which is a fact of no use whatsoever to anyone

Piercing - This is an adaptation of a Ryu Murakami novel that I read ten years ago or so and don't remember much of at all except it was about a man who reallyw anted to stab a prostitute, so he hires a prostitute so he can stab her. Anyway, strangely, the film was about exactly the same thing! This had lovely production design, so that everything looks like its set in the 1970s, in Italy, presumably, where all the soundtrack is also from. But the films a bit crap really.

It has Mia Wasikowski in it, who was also in the sort of similar Stoker, which also had lovely production design, a sort of stupid story, and a scene where she masturbates. I don't know why film makers want her to masturbate on camera so much but evidently they do. Also the start of this has Wendell Pierce from the wire crddited in big letters, and then his entire appaerance in this film is 5 seconds in the background of another scene, in which he doesn't even speak. I assume they cut all his scenes (insert "should have called this film Pierce Out" joke here).

Ars - a short film about the french town of Ars, and the priest who used to live there. Directed by Agnes Vardas Husband (Jacques Demy). Quite good.

Le Bel Indifferent - Another Jacques Demy film, this one is a 30 minute monologue by a woman about love and jealousy and despair and obsession. I loved it (I like a good monologue)

Longing For The Rain - chinese film about a woman who starts having erotic dreams, so her husband leaves her and her life falls apart. This was pretty good, especially the first hour or so.

About Endlessness - another 90 minutes or so of short deadpan sketches of utter despair by the man that made You The Living and A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Contemplating Existence. There's nothing quite as utterly existentially depressing as the end of the pigeon one, but some of its pretty close. Good

Noise - a concert film, showing bits from some french music festival in the mid 2000s. good

[dng]

that was a big long post. i am sorry

[vom]

The Pleasure Of Love In Iran is an outtake from One Sings, The Other Doesn't I think, which was the first Agnes Varda film I saw and one of the very best films I've ever seen

also I've seen Piercing and thought it was OK, a bit pointless

but none of the rest of that. and my MUBI account is being horribly neglected

[blombluss]

Vampir - 70s weirdness, where someone was allowed to film a Christoper Lee Dracula film being filmed (not one of his hammer horror draculas, but another one I haven't seen with Herbert Lom in it), and then edit it all together as another film, with no dialogue, and eerie sound effects, and all in black and white, like a long lost surreallist nosferatu. Good (if you like dracula, nosferatus, etc)

I've just watched a few clips on YouTube - rather interestin' concept/execution, is that!

[richschnauzer]

Yes. It's brilliant. You should also watch the abominable dr phibes if its on there, as its exactly the same as theatre of blood, but this time vincent price has a band of robons who play music for him in his lair all the time

https://twitter.com/LukeThorne94/status ... 79720?s=20

[dng]

hooray

[Gravid]

Fast And Furious 9: what is even happening, is there a problem Vin Diesel can't solve by driving a car into another car

I saw part of this being filmed because they were in Edinburgh for some reason about 3 years ago. I saw a van being driven quite fast down a street, it was very exciting. I have not seen any other Fast and Furious films.

[Gravid]

Anyway I watched that Maggie Gyllenhaal-directed film on Netflix with Olivia Coleman in it. It's all about how shit being a mother is. It was good.

[blombluss]

Enid Blyton went too far when she penned The Fast And Furious Nine.

Famous Five - sure
Secret Seven - uh... okay
Fast And Furious Nine - what's happened to you Enid?

[vom]

I really want to see cryptozoo so I added it to my watchlist and have made no effort to go any further than that and possibly never will

hooray I actually watched it

very good. extremely odd

[vom]

also today I went to see the Benedict Cumberbatch cat artist film and it was beautiful, sad, full of cats

[Chortle Hound]

The new Matrix film is so bad. I can't remember the last time I felt so restless and unimpressed in the cinema. I just wanted it to be over. But more bad ideas, poor dialogue and unexciting fight scenes kept coming.

I think it may be deliberately bad.

There was a long, long trailer for a new Jackass film in my screening. About an hour into the Matrix, I got the impression that I was being pranked. So that is a mildy fun thing to experience, I suppose.

[blombluss]

I do like the idea that the film is deliberately bad.

[dng]

thats my excuse for everything i've ever made

[richschnauzer]

hooray

[dng]

i recorded it

[dng]

but did not watch it

[dng]

i was watching the final series of the expanse

[dng]

it was largely rubbish, unfinished, pointless

[dng]

"best series finale ever!" - the internet

[dng]

weirdly it had the exact same ending as the first yakuza game (which i played last week) for some reason

[dng]

but in space

[Gravid]

I had never heard of that show, despite it now being on series 6.

[Gravid]

Why is there so much TV.

[dng]

its okay its all rubbish

[dng]

every last episode of everything ever

[Chortle Hound]

I watched about two and a half series of the Expanse and at no point could I decide whether I actually liked it.

[dng]

yes