Zeluge

@sblfilms assuming you've seen Zack Snyder's Seminal Masterpiece The Justice League, how essential is it for viewing The Flash? I refuse to watch it, just want to know how much of a blind spot to expect.

It's from an era where the studio and stars were the main attraction. Welles is an exception, not the rule. Casablanca is of an ilk similar to Gone with the Wind or All About Eve where the reputation of the film as a whole precedes them greatly, but anyone who knows Curtiz would give him his proper due, particularly with the merits of this movie. Guy had a hell of a CV, really strange to see him referred to as a "nobody."

Decision to Leave Ambulance Retour à Séoul Nope Banshees of Inisherin Crimes of the Future Aftersun RRR Tàr Confess, Fletch Honorable Mentions: Pearl, Dual, Happening, Fabelmans, Till Trash: Men, Everything Everywhere All at Once, She Said, Halloween Ends, Blonde, The Whale, Cha Cha Real Smooth, Scream

It's a regional dialect thing, lot of Scots and Irish do it, especially outside of the big cities. Looked into it a while ago, but anecdotally, I met two Irish and two Scots back in June and it naturally came up, and with them all being from more comparatively rural/coastal towns, they all pronounced it with two syllables. I was the odd one with my single-syllable American pronunciation.

Submarine - Fine debut, but kinda sloppy, even for a movie that's so heavy on flat-center-framing. Black Adam - As whatever as a Dwayne Johnson-superhero movie sounds. Collet-Serra clears up some of the CGI choreography. The Double (2013, rewatch) - Still wish this stuck the landing in the back end, but stylistically this is wonderful. Hard shadows for life! Aftersun - I kept waiting for this to get histrionic based on the responses it got, but it never did, so kudos for that alone. Really well-done memory film with a DV-tape framing device. Two needle-drop scenes are great, especially the latter. Definite grower. Armageddon Time - Knew it was fairly autobiographical, but didn't realize it was so About Something, much less white privilege. Still sorting this one out. Gray's got some balls, if that wasn't already evident with his last couple movies. I'll be That Guy and say I don't think the kid playing Paul is particularly good. I can see why he was cast, but there's a lot of moments where someone stronger could've done more. The Banshees of Inisherin - Fan-feckin-tastic Please Baby Please - Andrea Riseborough is everything in this. The movie itself is already on an odd wavelength its own, but she is the MOST. Good time.

I was putting a lot of faith in this regrouping because while I love In Bruges, I strongly dislike McDonagh's two more recent films. Thankfully, this is a homer, and possibly his best to date (certainly his most mature.) I had the pleasure of being in a theater with a bunch of older folks who didn't find the movie very amusing and were subjected to me laughing pretty continuously throughout this, and bellowing at one more classically-structured joke in particular that caught me completely off-guard. Roundabout way of saying it's very funny, while also being brutally emotional at times, especially as it rounds the bend to the end. Delves deep into Pádraic's (Farrell) self-doubts surrounding himself and his friend and Colm's (Gleeson) reason for the sudden cold shoulder and attendant fears, and some not-so-natural escalations that follow. Farrell's the standout I'd say, but I want to shout out Kerry Condon who does brilliant work as the only sane person on the island. She exudes so much heart and warmth here as Pádraic's sister, trying to ease her brother's insecurities and bat away Colm's pointed comparisons between the two of them. And I forgot Keoghan was in this. Love that guy. He's another weirdo here. But a different kind of weirdo than he's done before. He has so many weirdos in him.

Not really, no. There's one scene I can think of that maybe gets the closest, but it's undercut by the darkly humorous tone, and even then, there's a kill in the first movie that's more conceptually unsettling. Either just PR or there's a lot more brittle movie-goers in 2022 than I would have thought.

I figured, though that's never been my bag. So many services that cover many (though not all) bases, it's easy enough to find something worth watching at the drop of a hat that I've never been strongly compelled to go down that road. Also, my friend got flagged for that several years ago, so that's added to my already-existing hesitation about such methods.

JSA, Oldboy and The Handmaiden have all been viewed within the last year or so (a rewatch in the case of Oldboy), recent enough to distinctly recall. Stoker made the cut because I hadn't seen it since its theatrical run 9 years ago. I'm a Cyborg But That's OK isn't available in any streaming capacity (in the US, at least) and the maybe-region-free bluray is 20 bucks, a little too rich for a barren blind buy. I'll catch it sometime down the road, when availability opens up.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance - Desperately wish this had been my introduction to Park Chan-wook instead of Oldboy, because it would have led to me following his career more closely over a decade ago. Large portions of this operate without dialogue, and it's completely engrossing. And then it opens up to Song Kang-ho's character in the back half, and it's on another level. This is an early example of Park's penchant for narrative elision that I don't think has quite been mastered yet (especially with the procedural-esque vibe of it all), but a near-masterpiece otherwise. Lady Vengeance - This seems to be viewed as the weakest of the trilogy, which is a shame. Love the ebb and flow of Geum-ja's self-serving nature, and how the direction that the last act goes is somewhat foreshadowed by the focus put on the other inmates and their backstories and how they fit into the grand plan. Seems to be the start of Park's experimenting with scene transitions, like the English-to-Korean dictionary acting as a physical wipe, or a shot being aligned with the back of a door as it opens in the following scene. Also, there's a moment here that mentions self-imprisonment/isolation as a form of penance that made me think of the ending to Spike Lee's Oldboy. Very interesting. Thirst - A wild ride, it shape-shifts and changes genre and tone so frequently that it's almost exhausting. Sang-hyeon lifting Tae-ju into his shoes is one of the most romantic things I've ever seen. The main sex scene is done so well, and Park lets his freak flag fly a bit with the foreplay leading into it (and some other scenes!) Stoker (rewatch) - A movie that I've slowly come to realize over the years has a special place in my heart, and I was curious how it would fare in the Park run. Glad to say it holds up wonderfully. This is his only feature where he's not credited as a screenwriter, and it's evident in the absence of tight plotting that's been something of a hallmark in all his other works. Instead, there's a clear disregard for the narrative almost to the point of abstraction, and he aims to make this deeply-involving sensory experience (I suspect India's acute hearing was not in the script because it feels more like a carry-over from Thirst.) Such an anomaly, and I love it. Decision to Leave - A flurry of procedural details that resets itself near the halfway mark and a burgeoning, stifled relationship with a constantly-shifting power dynamic. Park goes wild with shooting "impossible" mirror shots as if he just found out about this technological advancement hours into shooting. So good, already aching for a rewatch.

I put this off for the same reason, but I finally dove in last night and was hooked almost instantly. Stayed up late into the night to catch up with the Season 2 premiere. Much as I love all the work Ianucci has put into eviscerating the political sphere, it's nice to see him stretch his legs in a different arena. I feel like the emotional beats and interpersonal relationships are a little more effective here, but that might be a recency effect deal (and of course, only in as much as that's an actual focus, which it never has been.) And obviously, it's hilarious. Think episode 2 dropped tonight, watching it in a bit.

Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings are the pinnacle of his capabilities . Both idiosyncratic and bearing a personal stamp, but at very different budgets and wavelengths. Love them. I remember liking I Heart Huckabees. It's been forever though. Big dropoff. Joy has some moments. A big ol' mess though. American Hustle and Amsterdam fall on the same level of "failures with some moments", but I want to say Hustle works more closely as an actual movie. But it is more irritating than Amsterdam, which is just confusing in its slackness. Real toss up here. Silver Linings Playbook is bad. Awful take on mental illness (the ending is the closest I've ever gotten to screaming in a theater) and all the comedy falls flat. Lawrence is bad here, don't know how she got the Oscar. Haven't seen Spanking the Monkey, The Fighter or Accidental Love (as much as that latter one counts; I gave it five minutes once, turned it off.)

Stars at Noon - Feels like an American adaptation of a Claire Denis movie. Some of her visual lyricism is on display, but there's way too much talking, and too little of it is of value. Qualley's quite good, though I think I like the conception of her character more than her performance. Tindersticks score is wonderful, as always. Trouble Every Day (rewatch) - Unfortunate for the former movie that they screened it with one of her finest. Subtle, mysterious, erotic while also being kind of frightening. Colors really popped on 35mm too. Amsterdam - Rough. Top to bottom, comes off like amateur hour. Littered with joke ideas that aren't actual written, performed, shot, or edited for the benefit of a punchline. Washington is particularly weak. A complete mess. I laughed a few times. A lot of that was Nivola, who's in it far too little. Anya was good too.

Got back from the theater a couple hours ago. Expectations were already low, but this moseyed under that bar. They kept things simple for the first one, and wisely so because it's fairly good and seems to understand the basics of what makes Halloween so effective. It's too bad that the two sequels are so overtly focused on making their thematic concerns known and those concepts are so poorly integrated into the narrative. This one is particularly galling in that

Bros - Funny, heartfelt, smartly frames its commentary through character. Eichner has a lengthy monologue in the middle that floored me. Maybe a bit too long, but wouldn't know what to cut. Pearl - Finally finished it! Killer final shot. Little Sister - Third time’s the charm for Zach Clark. Can't stop thinking about it. Constantly destabilizing, but not in an aggressive, off-putting way. Fire Island - Figured I’d see the other big gay rom-com of the year (to be stupidly reductive) and it’s not bad. Generally pleasant, though the flaws stick with me more than anything (except for a couple of really great visual gags early on.) Support the Girls - Damn, I forget how much I love Bujalski. A very generous film. Breathless (1960, rewatch) - Very dismissive of this when I first saw it ages ago, likely because I was OD'ing on French New Wave, but this second look opened everything up. Still wows. Excited for my Godard dive. T-Rex - Only just found out about Mickey Reece, and found a bunch of his stuff to rent on Drafthouse. Like Slacker, but not constraining itself to the bit so much and cuts away to varying settings. Suedehead - Still very low-budget, but I was digging this more than T-Rex. Consistently amusing, and breaks perspective at such odd times to beneficial results. Tár - I strongly dislike Little Children so I approached this with great skepticism, and I’ll be damned! Yes, I think it wobbles the very very last scene (actually casts a decent amount of the end in a questionable light), and some of the shop talk comes off as … off, even to my untrained-on-matters-of-the-classical ears, and it frequently brought out the side-seat director in me (dude’s a bit too in love with his wides), but all in all, I really liked this. Great concept to indict a character without showing any explicit wrong-doing. Blanchett's amazing. Triangle of Sadness - I missed The Square, but comparing this to Force Majeure, Östlund has gone in such a broad, obvious direction but does it so well that it’s hard to fault him too much. Yacht section is surprisingly great, liked the first one as well. Last third loses steam, and gets less interesting as it goes on. Like Tati if he had an intense disdain for humanity.