you're not missing anything with Darko.

I fucking HATED Darko when I first saw it. Hated it even more when I rewatched it. fucking pathetic stupid wanna-be deep movie

Very decent interpretation of the infamous film production of an equally infamous movie. It perfectly portrayed why Greg would stick around, Tommy being a polarizing character and all. The performances were pretty damn good. But I just couldn't help but feel it played a bit loose with how things went down. It completely failed to mention that there had initially been another actress that had played the part of Lisa for instance. And I don't think the initial reaction to the premiere was as pronounced as it was portrayed in the movie. The whole "Oh, he treated us like shit on the set, but oh, it's an unintentionally hilarious piece that will surely one day become a massive cult phenomenon, so all is well, I guess." ending seemed somewhat tacky. Still, a well-made movie.

Too much hatin' on Darko here. That movie's all about the atmosphere. Moves in its own, distinct way - almost like a dream. And the score is goddamn stellar. Like to pop it in every now and then, a classic in my book.

I hate pointless films. Throw in most of David Lynch's BULLSHIT in that mix too.

Movies about atmosphere means that NO story, NO plot, NO characterization, NO entertainment.

there’s this thing called “emotion” you might have heard of.... :D

anyway, saw “no blade of grass” (1970) last night on criterion, part of a 70s sci-fi program they put together



ham-handed, poorly acted, now obsolete in various ways, but both convincing (for me anyway) and schlockily entertaining, yeah. loved the way they dealt with technical limitations via freeze frames, montages, and color effects. sometimes a bit too gory (because pictures of actual starving children are truly disturbing. but they had a point. but it’s still fucked up.)

it’s the walking dead before the walking dead. well, night of the living dead was made before this, but storywise this is more of an aftermath, sort of. more like mad max maybe? but mad max is in the program later.

decent-terrible b movie. good for late night and lols.



https://trailersfromhell.com/no-blade-of-grass/

After the Fox is a great Sellers movie. Victor Manure is superb in it, plus a very funny intro. One of my all time favorites!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viJipACkwBw

emotion comes from characterization, plotting, spacing, and structure. confusion is NOT an emotion. It is a state of mind, and shit movies think this is enough.

that’s not true. you can get emotion from an abstract painting with no characters or plot. you not like rothko?

you can get emotion from nature. zero plot in our great bitch mother.

music has no characters or plot (lyrics do, but music... ok program music migh have it, e.g. peter and the wolf. but still...) and you can feel shit from it.

anyway don’t know what you mean by “spacing”.

admittedly, an atmospheric film is harder to pull off than a narrative one.

a shit narrative (eg see above the stuff i watched last night) can be more appealing than a genius atmosphere (eg see some terrence malick stuff, i fall asleep always).

but just because it’s hard it doesn’t mean it’s not valid.

i prefer my atmospheric films short though. can’t see there for 3 hours.

e.g. there’s this little greek movie called “washingtonia” that’s just a beauty. what is it about? who the fuck knows? gorgeous 24 minutes though. KONSTANTINA KOTZAMANI is the director’s name.

i watched that darko business a million years ago and liked it. i wasn’t like “oooooooo must watch daily” but it was nice. haunted by a demon rabbit alternate dimension or something i fucking forget.

i don’t remember much from it except for a darkened room and eerie music and the demon bunnyhead or whatever. then... a plane falls on him? there was a plot—impending airline disaster and bunny demon haunting. no?

who cares though? i got my money’s worth back then. not asking for it back.

i think the real problem was too many emo kids went “ooooh, that’s just like my life!” and overrated it and ruined its reputation.

this thread is about MOVIES, images displayed quickly to create the illusion of motion.

paintings are another beast.

Music is similar to film in that almost all music has a beginning, middle, end structure, even the most avant-garde. The worst most boring "music" I ever heard is shit like Earth and their ilk which is really just background noise. That shit did not bring up any emotions in me.

Think of all the horrible horrible HORRIBLE Andy Warhol "films" with no structure, so you just make up whatever you fucking want, which is the exact opposite of communication through art.

i just read the plot of donnie darko on wikipedia and remembered

there’s a long convoluted fucking plot!

it’s sorta like a negative groundhog day and favors self-annihilation which is probably why you hated it. but it has a plot! and it was a good plot.

but who says that art is/has to be about “communication”?

that’s a very limited theory of art

almost stalinist

The movie's got a lot to offer in terms of characterization. At heart, it's a movie about societal dysfunctions in middle class America at the end of the 80s and about a youth that felt disenfranchised from the mindless exploits of an increasingly neoliberal/conservative system - the strictly religious high-school being an obvious analogy + the phony self-help and televangelist craze that also manifested itself at that time (eg. Patrick Swayze's character and his shallow doctrine).

Then there's the helplessness of Donnie's parents in the face of his possible mental illness (from their point of view), a general air of apathy that is even mentioned by Drew Barrymore's character (paraphrasing here: "We're losing them to apathy...". Granted, the whole time-travel/multidinsional stuff can be a tad confusing and might be a sign of Kelly losing himself a bit too much in his weird mythology, but there's so much more than that to the movie.

And as a mystery it works nonetheless, it's got the perfect look and feel to it, the performances (especially Jake Gyllenhaal's) are intriguing and it moves with a certain uneasy tranquility that I found to be quite unique.

I always enjoyed it as both a character study and a mood piece. And on that it delivered in spades. And I never thought the whole dimensional stuff took center stage, there's just too much other stuff that was quite compelling about it. If I didn't care about the journey of the characters, I would of course not have enjoyed the atmosphere as much as I did. That is quite an accomplishment.

antagon wins by k.o. :D

I'm currently reading Kirk Douglas' autobiography* whilst going through some of his films. I'd seen this one already but totally forgotten about it. Such a great film. Next up is Lust For Life

*So much of the first half is him talking about who he shagged "then I saw the most beautiful woman" "she was a beautiful woman" and so on. Alright, old man lets stick to the movies.

Also, Donnie Darko was a great film. When I saw it aged 15 (welp) it blew my young mind away.

Darko can still go suck a dicko

when you watch near anything at age 15 it should blow your mind away.

Unless you are preternaturally wise beyond your years! which you may have been!!

staying with the "atmospherics"

Lessons of Darkness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPwmsbbcG6Q

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from 1990.

Probably should have known better, but I was curious what the remake was about. Did not like it, found especially the music really annoying. Cheap metal with violins. Typical Hollywood blockbuster rather than the magical world that Guillermo Del Torro made of it. Also prefer Ron Perlman as Hellboy.




Selected this one pretty much randomly on Netflix by title, hoping for something like Buffy that slayers giants. That's not really what it is, but I did like it even though it's probably more like a teen's movie. Now I see the poster and see that it has the same producers as Harry Potter. Makes sense but I prefer this one.

zoe <3 <3 <3

the italian job (1969)



i’ve never seen the remake but i doubt it could improve on the original, which is smart and a little absurd and FUCKING HILARIOUS. plus michael caine + noel coward?

to those who have seen it i gotta ask—was the movie really about football? hahahaha. know what i mean...?

ok maybe i wanna watch the remake after all cuz charlize theron was in it hnnnnnnnnnnnnng

I don't see how it's about football. What makes you think it might be?

diamantino (2018)



portuguese film (how often do you see one?) that begins like a parody of cristiano ronaldo then becomes a massive wtf that’s funny/ridiculous/demented/terrible/fantastic mishmash of wat.

i liked it. i don’t think it’s a great film, but it’s an imaginative pastiche of contemporary news to keep you entertained and mostly laughing for a couple of hours (yes there is some drama but the villains are ridiculous and also funny.)

ABSOLUTE SPOILERS FOLLOW

well there’s the whole cover provided by an actual football game but then the whole caper ends up being a kind of match that between english crime vs the italian mafia (and italian police and etc), but the while nation is represe ted. coward plays a kind of king, his subjects cheer while he feasts alone, his theme music is a medley of military marches and other representative music, and then the team has... does it have 11 criminals? i forget now, i should go back and count, but at the end, see, at the end SPOILER SPOILERS the whole prison is celebrating the victory but then they end with an “england can’t win” comic cliffhanger . although that probably was not the case just 3 years out of winning the world cup, but somehow, i don’t know, maybe i’m reading too much into it, but it seems as if football were the metanarrative here, sort of like, “let’s think of a crime as an international football match.” VERY FUNNY.

The new Shaft movie is cool, not great but cool. Shaft Jr. is a bit of a douche, so I wonder if there will ever be a sequel. But Samuel Jackson was in top form as he is in most of his movies. The story is so-so, but the dialogues are funny, e.g. Samuel comparing himself with Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix and imitating Schwarzenegger

david lynch: the art life


david lynch chainsmokes, makes art with his 2 year old kid, and tells the story of his early days all the way up to the making of eraserhead.

FUCKING. BEAUTIFUL. such incredible images. this was really great.

having said that: i didn’t watch it in one sitting but rather saw it in 4 parts. plan to do is again sometime as long as criterion keeps it.

Hmm, I dunno. if that really was the idea, why the huge emphasis on cars?

well, it’s totally a mini cooper commercial, just like it was in 2003. here they even drive it to the car dealer, lol.

and the english car beats all the italian police cars somehow. but it’s not... i don’t mean it so literally with the footbal thing.

it’s definitely an international competition though. maybe that’s why i see parallels.

-

i guess “it’s heavily informed by the discourse of international sports contests” is as specific as i can get right now

Found this one on Netflix. It's a Spanish parody on Superman. When he flies towards Earth as a baby his spaceship hits a satellite and lands in Spain instead of the USA. Don't watch it with big expectations but it's a fun one. I watched it dubbed in English which adds more bizarreness to it (and also because I don't speak a word of Spanish except for Cerveza Por Favor)

Southern Comfort

A total gem that's slipped off the radar, for some reason.

Scarier than most 'horror' films I've seen.

It apparently had a big influence on Aliens.

The latest edition of our (vaguely maligned) family movie nights. No complaints about this, though - how could you have any?


We then ended up watching this on DVD. Fairly bland, but well acted, and the characters are all fairly well-designed. (I'm also mildly embarrassed to note that Ash the hedgehog has basically the exact style I'm after.)

Ah, Toy Story's such a classic at this point, it's almost more a staple than a movie. It actually was the first movie I'd ever seen in a theater. Watched the latest one a few months ago. I'm kind of surprised they managed to keep the series fresh for such a long time. It's an incredibly rare thing.

Hm, never bothered with any of the Illumination movies. Haven't even seen any of the Despicable Me flicks yet. Yeah, I've heard they are mostly very bland. As in they cater to whatever is popular right now without much of a personality of their own and somehow managing to fail upwards in a way that rakes in some cash so they can pump out more of them. So I guess there's at least an inkling of entertainment in them.

haha!—are you a furry? :D

I haven't seen 4, but from all accounts it's excellent.

Even on this, probably about the twentieth time I watched it, there's stuff you pick up on rewatches - they mention that one kid got Andy Battleship early on, and then Hamm and Mr. Potato Head are playing that later. And it's just all of the extra stuff that they fit in to animate it...god, it's brilliant.

Despicable Me is a pretty good movie, actually - that is, the first one. The problem is that it got bogged down by the Minions, who've derailed it into a second...and a third...and a spinoff...and now a sequel to the spinoff, which at least offers Young Gru.

The Secret Life of Pets is apparently pure fluff - awesome if you're under eight years old, and tolerable if you're not. Admittedly, the less we talk about The Lorax the better.

Not in the slightest. I mean, anthropomorphism is cute, but it doesn't go further than that.

(The most annoying thing about furries is whenever I'm trying to plug in keywords to Twitter to try and find something lewd, I invariably end up with a bunch of furry art mixed in with the humans. I evidently need better sources. :mad:)

^^ hahahaaaa! maybe google knows what you’re *really* thinking about xD xD xD

eh, i jest, dont mind me, i had a couple of drinks and just got home