Archive for 2021
88 posts from 01 January to 22 December 2021.
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A moderately entertaining affair, between the bitter lashing out at Warner Brothers for forcing their hand and making them release a fourth Matrix. To compensate, they reversed everything.
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Poetry that let itself be filmed. A very personal and fine arts take on familial loss. “Every frame is a painting” is rarely such an apt description, it is literally true in this film.
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What the heck is this? The Christian Rock cover of the greatest horror hits. Let us soil ourselves to provide Christians with their vanilla terror.
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A series of shorts, a simple excuse for Wes and friends to make fun of The New Yorker in France at the producers dime. Just like the story itself! The producers indulge him because they know they will have a masterpiece in the end. The pinnacle of artistic indulgence.
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Fucking war. War never changes. In this case, the changes were significant.
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Bit of a nun-binge, after Benedetta. This is the absolute opposite.
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Paul Verhoeven does a simpler version of Elle, with added black plague. Another unnecessary addition is the “based on a real story” bullshit.
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Patrick O’Malley, drunken Irishman, is so Irish, Catholic, and homophobic because he is a blue-collar working class fisherman. Not a Boston yuppie like Ben Affleck, a real human.
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A middle-class middle-of-the-road Bildungsroman.
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Gaspar Noé on the cheap can still pay off. And his trademark craziness is toned down, despite the title, this is only a bit weird.
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VR Porn leads to an old man’s death, since his climax led to clarity about the system of the world. World on a Wireless Headset.
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Slow moving drama that flares up in the last minutes. Bait-and-switch until the very last second.
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Lord of the Sands. One Shai-Hulud to rule them all, one Lisan al-Gaib to bind them.
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An untranslatable avant-garde look at French mainstream society, Virgil-ed by a pop TV presenter. Brilliant, nobody ever done this before, magnificent.
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Boyhood, without the boy. Burn my shadow away…
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Lovecraftian The Thing, with added Nic Cage. The black dude doesn’t even die, eat shit Lovecraft!
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I just wanted a film to turn off my brain, and the cast was amazing, but the credits turned me off from the whole thing. A Guy Ritchie Watchmen wannabe, produced by Steve Mnuchin? It’s like watching a po-faced Austin Powers.
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Ocean’s Seven Eleven. ‘em hicks sure ain’t no fools. It would help if Corrections Corporation of America wasn’t a human soul grinder.
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Come Back Girl, she’s not gone in the end.
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Event Horizon: Western Edition. It’s both a nice western and a reasonable body horror flick, with plenty of humour (you wouldn’t want things to get dreary, would you?).
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Purgatory is a small town celebrating an inane “festival”. What a depressing and miserable existence. No wonder our sophisticated hero commits suicide so many times.
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Random Ziyi Zhang in an American Nordic noir ripoff (directed by the dude from Smack my Bitch Up and produced by Michael Bay, a match made in hell). Too many characters just appear out of nowhere, and die in the next scene.
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Oh, the humanity. It oozes from the screen.
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The long shots never get old. Never.
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50 minutes of classic silent comedy, followed by 20 minutes of terror at the daredevil climbing of 16 floors from the outside, in a three-piece suit.
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NANOMACHINES, SON! Akira for the younger generation.
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Cronenbergian body horror, Aronofsky-ish weirdness, and Halloween twisty serial killers, in a single esoteric package. It packs a noir atmosphere, with the requisite police procedural.
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Eli Roth pseudo-remakes Cannibal Holocaust, without dead animals, including a virgin final girl. The tone flip-flops between abject horror, and “fun” body horror. Why, just why?
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The Commodus of Ridley Scott’s career: the past glories are history, he is already over the hill; doesn’t care about (film) grain, only games; butchers the visual parts pretty badly, mostly outside the arena.
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An entire film dedicated to the common retort “Not even if you were the last man on Earth”. Shaun of the Dead meets The Hangover, with more dicks since this is a German film.
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A bog-standard modern swords-and-sandals epic, could have been released in any year since 1950.
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The American Film Company casts dozens of lobsterbacks for another historical reenactment of Sic Semper Tyranis. It also has greased lenses for the indoor scenes…
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Lovely little Goldman Sachs propaganda piece. All non-SEC traders are grifters, but not the official privateers. No sirree, no funny business at JP Morgan, only at JT Marlin.
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“Ordinary, with a normal face”. I feel much was lost in translation here. This seems part police procedural, part period piece based on the background events that seem historically important, but my knowledge of contemporary Korean history prevents me from appreciating it more.
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Mommy?
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Men in Black, as directed by Wes Craven. A low budget version of The Conjuring. How the fuck was Richard Jenkins cast in this, was he representing Hardbodies?
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Psycho Marple. Just like all criminal Bong Joon-Ho films, the whodunnit appears to be a very complex web of motives and suspects, but turns into a nearly throwaway situation, completely random and unpredictable.
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How to spin nothingness into a far-right nativist rallying cry against foreigners, courtesy of a pliant press on a summer weekend.
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Ah, the good old forties, when two foot-ball teams could all do roman salutes before the match. Heil, Füsball!
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This has got to be the only film about Ireland without the sound of bagpipes on the soundtrack. How did they do it?
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The missing link between the swords and sandals epic, and a modern action film. It’s ridiculously long, 10 minutes of initial credits, it even has an intermission in the middle.
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A rough cut from a better film, in need of some lamination and abrasion.
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This title resembling a YouTube tutorial hides a muddled bunch of nothing with some French music as soundtrack. That imagined osmosis could make up for the lack of everything else.
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A remake of the Bogart version, by putting the Hays code violations back in. Classic and timeless film noir.
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Rashomon is the warmest colour. Surprisingly, this is based on a British novel which had already been adapted by the BBC starring Sally Hawkins and Imelda Staunton.
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This is awful in so many ways, it’s hard to pin down. The attempt on Heydrich’s life was more successful than this pitiful attempt at a biopic. It’s both very long, and too abbreviated.
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High-Rise meets generation ships, turning to ʻOumuamua. Did not know this is an adaptation of a sci-fi poem from the 50s.
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As he listens to the biggest lies used to legally support his actions, the fascist spook nods along everything and signs his name to the farce. He stands up, and “Truth and Justice” is written is big letters just behind him. Powerful images.
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Mohamedou was brought to Gitmo in August 2002, and was only release the week before Trump was elected. He won the case that would set him free just as Obama was being elected. The wheels of justice move slowly, but can be greased by elections.
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Saucy old French Résistance fighter breaks down completely when visiting the concentration camp where her brother was killed. This is the first time she’s there, after 75 years. Accompanying her is a young historian studying the period, which gets a more raw look into her study subject.
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If a film is shot all over green screen greenery and fire, can it be considered an animation film? Does the pope shit in the woods?
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Classic meta film about itself, where the characters fight with the meaning of the it all, with rants about advertising while containing product placement. The Madredeus soundtrack is appropriately eerie.
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Gun-wielding go-go dancers gunning down goons, gleefully. Gurning guys gamble their guts.
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Million Dollar Baby.
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This is a dark and depressing film that only gets more depressing with continued views. Sadface, not very nice to watch this on a low mood. This is evident from the very first frame.
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Hack the Planet! Hack the Planet!
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A bit too routine for my taste. I think they tried to stick to the books and failed, since the characters are constantly running around and still some things are only lightly touched upon.
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Still as good as the first time.
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Doesn’t get old. Smashing!
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Starts of funny and lighthearted, ups the ante several times into ridiculousness, then the ugliness is apparent. It can’t decide if it’s serious or a farce.
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Evil begets evil, or victims become perpetrators.
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On the surface, this is just another Black Swan for Natalie Portman to get typecast in, or Her Smell for pop. But it seems more than that, with deeper thoughts about the world.
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Troma still exists? Wow. This is right up their alley, but spoken in Portuguese. A much better output than Linhas de Sangue, against all odds (budget, ensemble cast).
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Ha, that ironic title. Sounds the opposite, every German is a fucking Nazi, even the Jews married SS.
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Sandra Bullock plays Wolfenstein on her Mac, while in Liberal US, system hacks you!
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A modest proposal to serve man. This is an adaptation of a story by Fernando Pessoa, in his Alexander Search heteronyms.
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That cold opening! Only slightly hagiographic history of the OG Bauhaus movement, brought to life in Weimar republic.
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Yojimbo remake that reuses parts of the other previous remake, A Fistful of Dollars.
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Fuggedaboutit. This is a semi-standard mobster film, but with a funnier script and massively talented cast.
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Bourne to be wild. The ending is kinda crazy, it does sputter around to the end.
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ISO Standard biopic about a subject which seems dead and buried in modern society. But then at the end there as so many dates which are very recent. The future is here, just not evenly distributed.
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A classic British tale: working class hero with dough from his job battles a penniless upper class twit for the “melons” of a girl. Many-a cheese types are consumed.
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Al Pacino hissing to the crown while miming a cat’s paw remains an incredible image.
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Creepy crawlers. Lowlifes dragging themselves through the mud for a bunch of cash. A low-key picture.
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This is the worst episode of The Twilight Zone (the killer plants), upgraded to a watchable infection-based horror film. A nice first outing.
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Moar shootouts (include video of Burly Brawl).
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Underworld: Epilepsy. Nearly all florescent light is broken, and flickers like hell.
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More gore and guns, with nicer hairy werewolves. The plot thickens a bit, but since nearly all characters die (even the main ones, which come back again), everything is self-contained.
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Romeo and Juliet with vampires and werewolves, throwing other variations in the mix. The setting is pushed to the recent past where everyone drives Maserati, dresses up like Neo, and shoots either silver bullets or liquid UV light.
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Eli Roth sneaks into my living room (hidden behind cool uncle Keanu), takes a dump in the rug and throws bile all over the room. Gender swapped Funny Games is equally tasteless.
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Yearly Wipe with actors as talking heads loses some of the edge, but it’s still nice. Lacks Charlie Brooker’s dinghy sofa.
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In 2024 (the hypothetical end of Biden’s first term), the ozone layer is kaput, and Earth is an irradiated hot mess. The Sunrise Movement has gone rogue into ecoterrorism, lead by a future Bene Gesserit.
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I had never seen the extended cut. They cut so much Wombosi stuff out, and there was apparently plenty of cuts and reshoots too. Still manages to blow most thrillers out of the water.
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Ironically an hagiography, considering the title. It’s a condensed part of his life, mostly exposition, a rookie TV movie.
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The Bourne Team.
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Apocalypse No. The lust for knowledge is enough to send fine man to their deaths. No need for gold or political considerations.