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| Duane Hanson's "Woman Eating" |
visitor q
necrophilia scene is the best, plus all the followup. and the kid who beats his mom with the carpet beater's good. also the opening scene at the love hotel. what's not to like? the quality of the film online is not good as much as I would want it to be.
caligula
blowjob/marching scene is good, that happens like near the end when caligula is prostituting all of the senator's wives. overall this movie is a boner (the bad kind) and malcolm macdowell's acting which isn't good anyway is destroyed by his makeup. Like there's a lot of sorta porno camerawork where the edit will go to a close up of someone's genitals. But there's also a surprising amount of restriant believe it or not, as much as it's mostly heterosexual it also at times seems like a genuine attempt to bring out some gravitas. the husband/wife newlywed rape by caligula scene is also good at least conceptually.
der samurai
a german queer cinema film, kinda low budget, has some good acting, some really good action choreography, at times, with Pit Kukowski at least. you have to give the queer message credit (the killer is the prophetic lover of the protagonist) but I think there's a more uncomfortable deeper sexuality, animal lust, that the movie doesn't credit or use. I mean yeah in the final scene Pit's dick is out and he's getting a boner but... he's not using it?
Like, emerging queerness is alike a killer with a sword, cool yeah, it's like a wolf, little more cliche... where's the sex.
bullitt
relentlessly pro-police but still a good movie. one of those films with a really complicated plot; but executed with the as-advertised genuine police dialogue. I love scenes of political power struggle set up by dialogue set up by overlapping and conflicting professional social scripts
letterkenny
dialogue, yet again... but also action, and music. there's a
good and complete understanding of albertans and 3-4 different slices of the
social pie: jocks, indians, the more traditional farmers, meth-heads. Each
group, the farmers especially, has a total patter, a complex, constantly funny,
wide social band of emotion. The show often kinda stops there and it's good
enough, it's really fucking good.
there's this constant dreamworld of sex and young adults where all the older people are gone; there's a sense and a hint that the main family, most of the family, are survivors of child abuse... and what happy survivors... what a community, an idyll, could be, even with meth.
the show eventually dissolves into just really good wordplay, which is like saying "my sex life eventually dissolved into just really good nipple play".
westworld 1973
best scene, the loser-turned-hero finds a damsel strapped up
in a cell in Medievalworld. he rescues her and offers her water. she refuses,
he insists, he pours the water into her and she short-circuits. about half the
movie seems interested in drawing out that message but there's a lot of
wish-fufillment too-subtly undercut by it. that being said we all know the
movie's success is due to the concept which is pretty good; I mean they're
running through Pompeii and everyone, robots and guests, are stabbed dead on
the ground, there's some shots of them getting all stabbed to death too.
a clockwork orange
did I already review this? more and more convinced it deserves to be watched on a bigger screen, I have a chunky old huge HD crt. U have to watch from the start and focus on the red and then u can kinda not mind as it zooms out and just take the music in. and yea the rape scene that comes in a little later is well-coordinated fersure. But I really like the music am sort of convinced of Beethoven's power. But yeah other than that the social dynamics wherein these mod beefed-up guys are everywhere, are sort of the child protectors vs. ppl like alex, that's cool... you have to get into rape scenes like I'm getting into and then you enjoy the singing in the rain scene pretty much but I think I like the stuff in jail even more, not any prison-rape but just Alex studying the bible, having these slow, procedural conversations with prison officials... kubrick good at bringing those to a fever pitch
eyes wide shut
in 1080p the blue light used behind nicole kidman in the dream confession scene seems super artificial, and if you watch a documentary you can pick out the parts where tom cruise is on a treadmill and they're using front projection. thought about hyperrealism last time I put this together. specifically duane hanson's "Woman Eating", bc, you know, every scene outside of the orgy scenes are built to be hyperrealistic and that's what you can appreciate, depiction of reality with all the cues. Also Tom Cruise is eternally lovely as Bill, I noticed the moral struggle outlined in the semifinal scene for the first time a couple watches ago, Bill in his social script having to outline the moral compromise he is going to make with his superior Ziegler.
the devils 1971
pretty much perfect, the decline starts with oliver reed's limited range but michael gothard swings in and reinvents the picture. trap me in a convent, baby!!!
the plumber
better than I expected, despite the post-bourgeoise leanings it still goes on a great tear with Ivar Kants and it's quite sexual.
I walked with a zombie
hatian houseman with a guitar sings a ballad and walks up to the female white protagonist, and it's supposed to be menacing. really great scene with the white guy's alcoholism, there's drums in the background slowly getting faster throughout a dinner scene confrontation. there's that sequence where the females go out wearing lowing flowing robes towards the voodoo ritual in the woods and its quite magical, like a genre transposition into fairytale. so many scenes with the surprising good lighting. you watch old movies sometimes and this is one of those which is actually good and holds up, it's trying to make horror out of white people having to deal with black people and in the process manages to showcase some black actors / culture which is like, exceedingly rare in 1943, it's what gives the film life
el topo, the holy mountain
recently some buzz in pittsburgh about how row house cinema disclosed to its customers right before a midnight screening of el topo that alejandro jodrowsky apparently filmed live rape which is in the movie. no credit to alejandro for phrasing it that way for fifty years or whatever, and you can't know the conditions of the actress and so on, so who's to say? I'm fading into "never giving a shit about the ethics of the filmmaker, or maybe even of production", trying to figure out the theoretical props for that statement. anyway el topo is through and through a master's movie, the holy mountain is actually worse. u could say "it reclaims the western" for el topo and it'd be fair. I prefer some other movie to the holy mountain I forget what it is
charlotte rampling
you know what's funny? C.R. is really good in "zardoz". in a movie that is overfull of practical fx and a stupid hippy ensemble cast that's used quite well anyway Charlotte has these sharp three second reaction shots, does the dramatic scenes with the full of her vigor, to bikini'd sean connery. and she gets on a horse and rides the fuck out of it, furious...
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