4v291o
This review may contain spoilers.
There are a lot of pieces here that on their own are cool as hell. The transformation! The folk horror intro! Undead Griffin Dunne! The downer ending! The mayhem of the climax! Still, it feels jumbled by accident, as if John Landis is just putting the pieces of better movies together without understanding the whole. At least, if it’s less than the sum of its parts, most of those parts are extremely good.
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I need an hour-long documentary on how they did the rotating underwater set, and another hour-long documentary on how they did the plane chase, and a third hour-long documentary on why the first half of this movie is just exposition
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A real picture! Can only imagine how hard this must hit when you don’t know the central conceit right from the jump. As it stands, a deeply creepy film! Seen in 4D (the group chat was relentlessly gaslighting each other about what we were doing for dinner and changing the name and photo of the group chat to the names photos of other group chats that people are in)
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Regret to report that at least for me, Andor kinda cheapens this one instead of making it better. Scarif battle still goes hard and Gareth Edwards’s approach to establishing scale is still pretty unmatched but it just makes you realize how much better this kind of thing is when it’s not tied to increasingly convoluted lore
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What does it meannnnn
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Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.
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A little too psychologically real and kind of fucked me up for a minute
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“We have Merchant Ivory at home”
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Seen with the rest of the preludes at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, with the back half accompanied by Natural Information Society.
Re: the films? Brakhage… man what can you say? Like watching a stained glass window, or the visions on the back of your eyelids. It feels like the result of a natural process. It pushes montage to its absolute limits without breaking it.
Re: the performance? Not totally sure Natural Information Society was the right pairing here. Brakhage has a very specific palette here but it’s not minimalist! It’s maximalist! Give me something big and lush and colorful as a pairing! And the screen coming up to reveal some college-dorm-room-ass paintings was uhhhhhh certainly a decision
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You’ve seen this thing before countless times and will probably guess every major plot point ten minutes out. Still, you get extra points for fun creature design, and that plus Trent and Atticus doing what they do best makes this basically watchable!
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Very fun, very interesting, not-quite-fully-realized Hitchcock! During the first 30 minutes or so it’s like everyone is doing a standard costume drama at about 1.25 speed, like Hitch is trying to squeeze in all the iconic lines for book readers without taking too long on the exposition. But once we really get into the meat of things, you see “oh yeah this is for sure the same guy who did Psycho.”
Very ironic that Hitch’s first American studio picture is so full of ~old world gothic~ elements, and very fitting that the stuff that works the most is when those elements start curdling into more contemporary psychosexual noir/mystery. Real good movie! This guy is going places!
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The sequences that have impeccable Chicago geography are great but they make it even more noticeable when they turn the corner and suddenly they’re in northwest Indiana
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The movie that got me to take movies seriously
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It’s really rare to watch something and truly never have seen anything quite like it before
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As dire as things are for the world of cinema, it’s hard to be totally cynical when a few Wisconsin dudes can buy some cheap mascot suits, go out into the woods, and come back with this movie. You can just make things! Nobody can stop you!
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First movie of the year! Some good stuff in here but unfortunately too much of this didn’t feel psychologically real. If the Harris Dickinson character was a woman this script would have been laughed out of the room on the first table read. Plus like it’s clear nobody involved in this movie has ever done an emails job before. Still, some pretty fun character work from Nicole, and who am I to begrudge women a nice gentleman’s-three-star erotic thriller?
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In response to America’s profoundly unserious political culture, Richard Kelly made a profoundly unserious political thriller. Southland Tales is a massive, ugly Rorschach blot of a movie that funnels the influence of dozens of better movies through the aesthetics of an army recruiting commercial and an Abercrombie and Fitch ad. It’s “about” a whole laundry list of topics (Krysta Now helpfully reads us the list early on in the movie) but by the time we get to part VI it’s clear there are no plans to actually say anything. Instead, it simply gestures in the direction of highly topical topics and viewers are invited to draw their own conclusions. Movie could have been a lot shorter if We Live In A Society / Bottom Text memes had been invented in 2006.
Can a movie be an effective satire of vacuous political discourse when it’s also a prime example? Maybe a better movie will answer this question someday. Until then, this is a fascinating, proudly full-of-shit mess made even more entertaining by how clearly Richard Kelly thought he was making the greatest movie ever made.
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Had avoided this for like decades of my movie watching career because people are annoying about it but yeah it’s actually pretty good
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In the minority in that I think Lily Rose-Depp is kinda doing too much here but other than that? Hell yes!
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Wish I saw the same movie the rest of Letterboxd seems to have seen here
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Extremely cool matte paintings! Sick puppets! Total nonsense! I probably would have loved this if I saw this when I was a kid!
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You could make a whole sequel about these two guys attempting to get from the Loop to Wilmette via the CTA
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Will probably wind up being the only great video game movie
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Watched on Sunday November 10, 2024.
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Many things are bad but movies are still good
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Double featuring this with Halloween was an inspired choice
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The thing that distinguishes a really good slasher movie isn’t so much the good slashing as the really tactile, really visceral scrambling away from the slasher
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Watched on Saturday September 21, 2024.
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Watched on Monday October 14, 2024.
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So sincere and full of ideas I couldn’t totally bring myself to laugh at it even when it was really going off the rails
And also so surface level and awkward that if I didn’t know better I’d have to ask if Coppola had ever seen a movie before
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imo what the standard Rich People Crazy Bottom Text movie either doesn’t get or doesn’t convey effectively is the emotional disconnect with humanity (both the large mass of people and the abstract concept) that wealth and power can create, and this movie is that disconnect, distilled, and then poured directly onto your eyeballs
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Nope 🤝 Twisters
Put Brandon Perea in there and let him cook
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Despite some irably gooey creature effects and a couple fun setpieces, Romulus is too worshipful of Ridley Scott’s original and not confident enough in Fede Alvarez’s sicko capabilities to really do anything that fun here, let alone anything new. But ultimately if all this does is get David Jonsson cast in more stuff that’s probably ok?
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When people say “they don’t make em like they used to” this is the kind of movie they’re talking about”
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Almost makes tennis look cool
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Literally how the fuck
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(Beautiful gowns)
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Lot of cool art direction and costumes! Shame about the movie they were in
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I really enjoyed the parts of this movie that were about the mechanics of how to keep a human body swimming for 60 hours straight. Considering how well Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have portrayed impossible physical tasks on screen before, I guess that’s not a huge surprise!
The stuff about Nyad herself also brought my mind back to Free Solo, but in a less charitable way. Like Alex Honnold, Diana Nyad’s echo chamber of her own narrative pushes the people around her away, but the dramatized approach seems to suggest it was all worth it and all was forgiven. Was it? Was it really?
Ultimately the movie doesn’t get enough distance from Nyad’s perspective to avoid becoming another piece of her hype narrative. Which is a shame because there’s a really interesting story in there! You’d just need to make more of the movie from Jodie Foster’s perspective.
As it stands, all of the footage of the real Nyad kinda reads as a “sorry we had to make this movie this way, this is just kinda how she is.” You can almost imagine her sitting in the editing bay reading them the dictionary definition of “Nyad” for the third time that day.
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In a weird middle ground between stylized and gritty, but too technically sloppy to feel comfortable with either of them? Also kinda boring up until the end?
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I relate to Paul Atreides because I too am an introspective white boy burdened with a terrible purpose (my terrible purpose is to work in marketing)
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Not in love with the color grading choices made in the remastered version but what a banger, still
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No the dog is really good though
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Jeffrey Wright and a really solid ensemble keep this from being just a kinda toothless satire of race and art but ten years from now when the satire on the preponderance of kinda toothless satires of art and race comes out the fake movie in that movie will probably look a lot like this movie
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Polyamorous propaganda
Sorry to all of the actors who were called “fearless” for playing Hot And Sad; unfortunately Emma Stone has raised the bar for “fearless” to Uncoordinated Sex Toddler
Shout out my dude Mark Ruffalo as Dick Tremayne
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Given the exact mix of horniness, megalomania, and impotence on display here, it feels at least as much like a sneaky portrait of Trump as a Napoleon biopic… or maybe Ridley feels like every Great Man (tm) is essentially the same stupid person. But isn’t one of the weirdest most interesting things about Great Man (tm)-ness that all the idiosyncrasies of the designated Great Man (tm) somehow seep into the fabric of how we live?
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Watched on Sunday January 14, 2024.
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First time with the extended edition of Fellowship in a minute! Reaffirms for me that the theatricals are the better movies and the extended editions are for when you want to disappear into Middle Earth for a while. Still though—no matter how many times I watch these, the minute Concerning Hobbits hits I am 11 years old seeing these for the first time again. Actual cinematic magic.
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John buddy you’re better than this I know it
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Perfectly fine comedy that purports to be about The Way People Are but reads as more about The Way Successful Creatives Living In New York Who Are Not Really Tied To Any One Way Of Making A Living Are and if they did that it would have probably been a much funnier more incisive movie but the script would have had to have a little less sympathy for the individuals portrayed and Nicole Holofcener seems to feel a lot of sympathy for these people why I don’t know you tell me
]]>Everything I’ve seen at the Music Box, as far as I can recall, in roughly chronological order
- Nosferatu
- The Master
- Long Day's Journey into Night
- Dune: Part Two
- CatVideoFest 2023
- Oppenheimer
- Nope
- Asteroid City
- The Northman
- Broker
...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
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]]>For da bubble
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