Just watched a Russian black comedy thriller called Why Don’t You Just Die! (Papa, sdokhni the original title) from 2018.
I think I read somewhere it’s as if Sam ‘Evil Dead’ Raimi (unusual camera angles) made a Quentin Tarantino film (criminal lowlifes in an interweaving plot) and I would add there is also a dollop of early Peter Jackson (circa Braindead) in the mix as well.
It’s not as good as Raimi or Tarantino at their best but if you can stomach huge amounts of bloody violence with the emphasis on bloody plus cope with subtitles it’s actually pretty good.
Very low budget (at times the walls wobble) but the production design, cinematography, acting, script and special effects are usually very good.
I liked it. Best film I’ve seen in ages - but I do have eclectic tastes!
Okay, I finally finished this thing and had to come back to say WTF? It was very well-acted, especially by Michael Shannon and the bad guys, but it just ended in a weird way. It was like the director decided he really didn’t have any more money in the budget, and just left everything dangling. Any clues?
I saw that today - so beautiful, so slow. I still haven’t decided what I think of it. I actually think it got better as it went along; maybe I just had to find its groove, or maybe I like it when movies get weirder.
I watched Bliss the other night with Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek. I see where they were trying to go with it and it had real promise but it just missed somehow.
A comedy from 2007 from Andy Samberg that I had not heard of. It’s kind of zany, felt like an attempt to make a Happy Gilmore type movie. Not vulgar, but also not consistently funny. It was nice to see a kind-hearted comedy, though. Everyone is basically good and trying to help the main character.
Watched a documentary called Fantastic Fungi the other day on Netflix (?; possibly Amazon Prime). It was pretty interesting. I hate mushrooms as a food, but as an organism they’re quite fascinating. There was quite a bit of hippie woo peppered in there, but it was still entertaining and informative. Extensive use of time-lapse photography, which is always a crowd-pleaser.
Wow, this is a great movie and everyone should see it. Allison Brie gives an Academy Award worthy performance and the fact she did not win one is a shame. She carries the entire movie on her shoulders and gives a great performance showing a character with mental illness. It was hard to watch as she is clearly mentally ill, but Brie made her so sympathetic, I loved it.
I would recommend this movie to everyone. A classic overlooked movie.
It’s not as good as Hereditary, but this is a fine and pretty intense dark “horror film”. I put the genre in quotes because it is hardly a horror film like Friday the 13th or something that is simply a commercial product. This movie is mainly about dementia and how a child and grandchild deal with the dementia advancing in their family member.
It’s kind of like The Father, but with dark horror elements in it as well. It’s intense, scary, captivating, and an excellent movie you should seek out.
It streams on some services I don’t have, but I was able to get a blu-ray through my library network. Seek it out and see it even if you don’t like horror movies. It’s one of those “real movies” that is probably misplaced in the horror genre.
I’m on an older fantastic film kick. Over the past couple of days (I’ve been grounded for medical reasons) I watched
Return of the Jedi
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
Jason and the Argonauts
That last one was NOT the Harryhausen version, which I’ve watched a zillion times, but the Hallmark version. That one stars Dennis Hopper as Pelias and Frank Langella as Aeetes, two really impressive actors playing kings. I don’t think their hearts were completely in it, but Langella would be great just reading a phone book (if they could find him one, these days). And the actor playing Jason looked like a teenager, which is actually probably closer to the original intent. Overall this version is a bit closer to the original poem Argonautica than the other, and it’s a worthwhile take. With starting-to-loo-dated-but-still-good CGI effects.
I’ve been putting off watching Willy’s Wonderland on Hulu until I was in the mood for some Nicholas Cage scenery chewing. Finally worked myself up to it and…Nick’s character doesn’t utter a single word through the whole movie! What an awesome gig! No lines to learn and all he has to do is pretend to play pinball, scrub toilets, and trash a half dozen puppets.
In the 90s and 2000s they remade a lot of classic films as TV movie versions. I guess they were trying to show TV budgets could have CGI VFX that equalled old movies. What their budgets didn’t manage to maintain was hiring talented people.
An excellent, but pretty clearly massively biased, documentary on Val Kilmer. He filmed a lot of hours of his life and they edited it together with new footage from today. He clearly has lived an interesting life, but I am glad that he more or less admits that he never really made too many great movies. He can’t complain, but he never achieved great artistic work on film.
Anyway, if you are interested in Val Kilmer even a little bit, this is well worth a watch.
I’m not surprised at all that Dr. Moreau was a disaster. I don’t even think I blame John Frankenheimer for messing it up. He only took the job to get to be able to do Ronin afterwards. I think tensions were extremely high at the point he came on board and he probably just wanted to “turn on the cameras and shoot”, so to speak.
I think Val Kilmer always believed he was a great actor like Marlon Brando, but was just never able to get the right opportunities to shine. He had The Doors and I guess Tombstone, but he never got his Godfather, Streetcat, or Waterfront type movies.
Note: I only saw Top Secret! recently for the first time. Not only is it hilarious, he is really good in it, especially for a first movie.
I saw Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary yesterday. Really good and really funny (and a bit surreal to see people cosplaying as characters from Galaxy Quest). And, BTW, if you like that, I recommend the Star Trek documentary Trekkies, not that I saw it recently.
Swan Song
Udo Kier stars in a tale about age, gayness, regret, and redemption. Not a profound movie, but one with an interesting lead, lots of small character turns, that holds your interest through out. Definitely a movie for fans of Kier, and if you haven’t heard of him, definitely a movie to get you started.
Annette
How to describe this film? It starts out as La La Land meets A Star Is Born, but then turns into something else (Film noir meets puppet theater? The Voice meets American Horror Story?). Oh, and most of the dialog is in song. I liked it a lot, but it is definitely not for someone with a high threshold for suspension of disbelief However, I’m guessing that when awards season rolls around, this will be one of the titles in the mix.
Idris Elba, Chris Evans, Zoe Saldana, Jeffery Dean Morgan, and more all made a movie around 2010 and it came to theaters and was gone so quickly, not many heard of it. Me included, by the way.
Well, it’s pretty good! Nothing super amazing and it isn’t as funny as it thinks it is, but it is a fun little movie that is pretty well made and a great way to spend 90 minutes or so. I was pleasantly surprised. Fun, funny, decent action. Nothing groundbreaking, but it deserved more attention back in 2010 and now it is up on Netflix, you should check it out.