Archive for 2024
151 posts from 01 January to 30 September 2024.
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As unabashedly leftist as Triangle of Sadness, but more hilarious. I see that all these stem from Parasite, that critique of high class using all the Voss water bottles and shit. This is more allegorical, there’s at least one kind of bad people burning in end.
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Cassandra Webb, crikey. She even goes blind in the end, can it be even more on the nose?
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That’s some esoteric shit. If this is an autobiography of the Coen brothers, were they the perma-high kid who goes through the motions at the bar mitzvah?
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Geddit, Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy? “Sandra Panza” is also a Don Quixote reference, like most images on the screen.
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I’m Batman! This is particularly lighthearted and funny, compared to the rest of the series, it retains just a little bit of the camp nature of previous adaptations.
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Fucking J Edgar, he’s always there in the background somewhere, scheming, always on the wrong side of history. Fred Hampton was a party leader at 21 years old, fucking hell.
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The opening shot is a perfect trailer, a deluge of words, a wall of voice, a barrage of dribble. This is like a centrist Robert Redford film, but instead of focusing on a little guy, it’s some rich and privileged white chick fighting the IRS to keep some blood money.
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AI is absolute dogshit. Eat your heart out, Spielberg and Kubrick, fucking amateurs.
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Truly a live action cartoon, not like the modern Disney lice action adaptations. And some of those old school cartoons, Richard Fleischer and the Tex Avery, adult animations.
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Such talented and vast cast filming a middle of the road script. It’s a higher brow version of Charlie Countryman, the cast prevents it from reaching such lows.
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Imagine that, a 9 billion dollar company pulling extremely dirty tricks to get the mineral rights off some poor farmer dudes. They send some useful idiot dude, just promoted to VP to make him feel self-important too.
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The frenchiest of French films, it’s almost a cliché. Putain, soft cocks, you name it.
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Os Maias meets Rashomon, with an heavy dose of Lolita. The ingénue was the mastermind all along!
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I can’t believe a CGI dog is really the main character in a 90 minute feature film. The killer dog that murders a greedy rich prospector in the big climax, just chucks him into a burning log cabin. That’s wild all right.
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Christ, common Crichton crap. It’s like Andromeda Strain meets Prometheus, mixed with Solaris. The finale is utterly pointless, there is literally a reset and all arcs are undone.
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I mean, it’s a Charlie Chaplin biopic, with a lot of the actual films. That’s cheating, if you can use the final speech from The Great Dictator. I really preferred Eddie Izzard in The Cat’s Meow.
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This is so bad. They basically remake the first film until middle of the runtime, then run out of plot, and have to make up something to reach the bare minimum 90 minute mark. So the final girl teams up with Leatherface, because FAMILY.
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My god, it’s worse than it seems. The girl is the least idiotic character, and she gets the short end of the stick: harassment, gaslighting, the main character literally feels her tits and jumps in her bath to kiss her. You know, for laughs!
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I’m just a poor, country lawyer, defending a murderer. Yeah, said murderer is a wife-beater, hyper-jealous, overall 50’s husband, but he was only defending her after she was brutally raped by some dude. Oof, his own incognito daughter came on the stand to charge the dead man.
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My god, the first part has some hilarious shit. It gets really serious in the last 30 minutes, for the conventional reconstruction, but it could have just been the funny parts, structured as a fall from grace into an abyss. It’s self-referential, but broad enough to make sense to most people.
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A more modern retelling of the modern Prometheus tale (the Hollywood version, not the book, you think Max Landis reads?), where the doctor is kinda the hero.
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American comedies, how cute. This is their middle-brow offerings, not just pure slapstick, puke, and fart jokes, but nothing subversive and actually funny either. A big talented cast in service of crap.
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A great thriller with so much class subtext, where the focus is all on the technical trickery and old-school CGI. Working Class people are fucked over badly, while aristos can withstand ugly home invasions and come out of it relaxed and looking for more places to gentrify.
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That was not what I expected. Meta-Jokes, in my existential philosophy? An atheist snarky lower class worker, while the aristo wasted 10 years of his life in a pointless crusade, instigated by an idiot?
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Those damn Buoston accents, I luove it. “Anointed Pederast” when referring to men of the cloth, they should have used that tagline on Spotlight (or at least a punk band name). I really want to rewatch Infernal Affairs now.
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Ahh, what seems like The Truman Show turns into Wreck It Ralph for teenagers (with a Cyrano love story). Shame, it reached for the stars, but faltered towards the end.
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The stupid quotes remain. “He slid into my DMs” used unironically, how the mighty have fallen.
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My god, this is too realistic. A billionaire CEO transitioning to lobbyist organisation green washing, another billionaire bankrolling stuff while congress gridlocks.
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What can I say, this is another ZAZ flick, with only some of those letters. Mostly parodying Top Gun, but also very obscure deep cuts I didn’t catch. It’s fine.
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Ha, a Rambo parody with Richard Crenna. With the classic episode of George Bush Sr puking all over the Japanese Prime Minister.
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I guess Scorsese is the real monster. What’s he doing, dipping his toes into stuff he knows nothing about? Or does he direct every script that comes up to him with violence against woman?
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Crosses the line into bad taste, but then it keeps running and running, until it rolls over into awesomeness again. The anti-Lebowski.
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The only film where David Dastmalchian does not play the most tortured soul.
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One of those direct to streaming faux-sequels. The original was nothing to write home about, and this doesn’t have Rooster Cogburn. That dude from Sicario is not cut out for outright comedic roles.
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Only a German would bother about a big budget Illiad adaptation. He’s no Schliemann, this is a proper adaptation with nice touches, even though it’s a 3000 years old story.
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A nice mishmash of all Alien films, a little bit of horror, a little bit of action, a little bit of body horror and baby human-Alien hybrids. Utterly ruined by the stupid decision of putting a fucking deepfake Ash in it, Ian Holm must be rolling on his grave (even though is estate is credited).
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It’s Home Alone if directed by Spielberg: all about the daddy issues for boys, girls are just a sideshow. Speaking of sideshows, black people are that too, even if they come up with some Air Jordan.
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The big boy version of Little Miss Sunshine: pretentious, hypocritical as fuck, vacuous and lightweight. Charlie Day is not Charlie Chaplin, I’m sorry, they just share a first name.
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Hulk Hogan is not Batista, much less The Rock. He’s just a washed out wrestler trying and failing to make the leap into acting, but he just don’t have what it takes.
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A less focused, 1930’s Heat. There’s not just one cop and one robber, it’s a lot of robbers with distinct allegiances and a boatload of cops (and even some bureaucrats like Hoover). It’s still better than The Untouchables, but doesn’t hold a candle to any of the Scarface films.
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Good grief, those upper class twits are complete maniacs. Alas, this is no Dangerous Liaisons, truly evil is vanquished but there’s an happy ending anyway.
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One of those cheating thrillers, where there’s no way to guess what will happen based on foreshadowing. But it’s absolutely predictable anyway, because all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.
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Count Dracula ships himself from Transylvania with a farm girl as travel snack, but gets the munchies and feeds on the rest of the crew.
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Esoteric AF. I didn’t get it, needs a second view.
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Christ, that’s intense. Like a not so good version of Solomon Kane, same vibes but less production values.
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The story of Yasra Mardini and her sister, told in the most soap opera style possible. It’s no Capharnaüm.
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First world problems elevated to life-threatening conditions, as any teenager believes.
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This story doesn’t need to be directly interpreted as the last stand of Europe against the Asiatic hordes, since Attila and Genghis Khan are well into the future. It can be bloody Asterix, some monarchist anarchists fight an invasion by an evil empire.
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Mary Mother of (twin) Christs. It’s an “adaptation” of the escape from Egypt, where Mary is played by Michelle Yeoh and Joseph by Vin Diesel. But Baby Jesus is actually Mary, it’s confusing.
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Eli Roth mixes the worse parts of random high school slashers and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s very mainstream, not hideous like Hostel.
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Borderline experimental action film. A bunch of vignettes on teenage radical stuff, very juvenile, 90’s nu-metal, very fast cameras with fisheye lenses.
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Just another Stranger Things ripoff: kids in violent situations (including swearing), nostalgia for the 70’s, there’s no third element. Ethan Hawke might have lost a bet with Jason Blum and was forced into this.
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Tim Burton’s Back to the Future version, with his trademark horror themes. A solid children’s film, where the hero hooks up with his own grandfather’s ex.
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Sexually frustrated Sydney Sweeney stars in horny Rear Window, with two twists in the last minutes.
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Well, an actual Ron Howard film that is not utter crap? Imagine that. Wiped clean of deviant sexuality and dick jokes, just Apollo 13 in the Pacific Ocean.
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Good grief, the Michael Lewis rot was there from the start. This was even co-written by Aaron Sorkin, for the radical centrist bingo. It was just hidden under the mass of talented actors squeezing blood from a stone.
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Planet of the Apes meets After Earth. This follows all modern trends to a T, but it works. The kid is actually great, and Adam Driver is a good at being befuddled the whole film.
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James Bond meets Starship Troopers. It’s a more political Austin Powers, ultra-reactionary.
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What a great gem. Thematically extreme, but touches so many facets of human nature, it’s almost blissful. He who fights monsters…
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What a bizarre horror film. It has elements of zombie films but so much is left unsaid, feel like a truncated release. The main plot is an hardcore family psychodrama, which gets abandoned half way on account of the freaking birds. And that ending, what the fuck was that?
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A mediocre remake of a mediocre remake of Seven Samurai. With such a large budget and a good cast, not a great film comes out of it. Nothing magnificent about this.
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What a rollercoaster ride of emotions. It starts of a bit too on the nose, and goes completely farcical on the Captain’s Dinner, but the island section is great. The ending freaking sucks, they can shove those damned open ended finales. High-Rise is better at this.
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An opera in two acts, ain’t nobody got time for more, what are we, 18th century aristocrats? Pure Kubrickian technical flex, a visual marvel, but the plot itself is pretty alien for modern audiences: not only the Irish are not reviled as philandering devils, pretty much all situations are preposterous by modern standards.
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Gone in 60 Seconds (the old one, the stunt showreel) meets self-insert fic about some Bulgarian billionaire. It’s the only way to explain this.
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With all due respect, what the fuck? What the fuck is this? What the fuuuck… I know who you are, fucker. Fucking lunatics. Fucking morons.
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A stillborn franchise attempt, how sad. Even more for kids than the last one, mashing up book concepts like there’s no tomorrow.
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Some porn with flimsy plot, not very French. This has aged horribly, there are cancellable offences left and right. It’s tamer than daytime reality shows.
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More softcore banging with yet another excuse plot, but with better cameras, more girls, and less rape. There’s even less plot, “let’s fuck” is uttered unironically.
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What the hell is this, why is Robert Zemeckis directing a soap opera for the Chinese? Sure, they laundered their money through Paramount, but there’s the Huahua company logo at the start, probably some Chinese billionaire front.
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It’s not that bleak, actually. They find “plenty” of food (and eventually lose it), there are several bands of marauding cannibals, but also regular people too. Just like the real world, with much less people.
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They mean Mohawk, some kind of sub-tribe? I do not fully understand the Native American ways.
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Regular middle-class second generation immigrant cannot make it on the police force, no matter how many trappings of upper class signifiers he picks up. He takes the harder way and gets shot for his troubles.
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Whaddya know, it’s a Mel Brooks film. A kind of high brow Airplane!. It’s a bit intense, a lot of “niggers” and “chinks” thrown around, and enormous amounts of gay jokes.
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The emotional arc of Vader’s story, intercut with childish teddy bears and a bunch of action scenes of no consequence.
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More of this sort of childish space opera. Jar Jar Binks is like a C-3PO on steroids, it’s grating on the ears. Even on more serious scenes, that tinny voice is there, hammering away at your ears.
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Yeah, it’s all right. Just another campy space opera, with action driven plot (lifted straight from The Hidden Fortress), young whippersnappers, and older British actors collecting their paycheck.
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This really tricked me into being another fascist interpretation of Saving Private Ryan, bit it’s a much more humane and hopeful film. Doesn’t reach the technical heights of the D-Day landings, but the again, what does?
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A completely unnecessary retreat over well worn desert roads of Fury Road, but still provides crazy visuals that make pretty much all Marvel crap looks like toddler-level drawings, when compared to this J.M.W. Turner painting.
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An important subject matter butchered beyond belief. An abject failure as a film, a lot of money wasted by Blumhouse.
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I knew it, Kill the Messenger needed some kind of softer human alternative. One with literal cartoon Eagles and Bears battling over the American lebensraum.
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King Kong meets Apocalypse Now. A group of city dwellers go on a trip to the Amazonian Jungle to film uncontacted tribes.
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No, Lucas, noooo! The retcons, oh the humanity.
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Now that’s pod racing!
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It that Rose Byrne? It’s like Harry Potter over here, a massive amount of English people!
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That’s a joke with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Fitting, for a middle-of-the-road spy flick.
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The film equivalent of the diss track, mocking Tom Cruise mercilessly. There are so many Tom Cruise direct mentions, it’s clearly not an accident. The funniest thing is he can’t complain, is he gonna admit he doesn’t do his own stunts?
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Less a film, more like a series of music videos. The writing grates on the ears, nothing smooth about the quipping, the pattern is quip-reply-repetition-quip-pop song. Cinematic celery, lacks proteins.
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Some kind of crappy horror film. It’s not just technically bad, the rest is so bad, you start noticing the technical fails.
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The Fincher version. This is a great thriller, but feels like cultural appropriation to pretend everything is Sweden but speak English with accents. If you want to adapt a story, do it, don’t do this half way.
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So this is another reboot, for the money. They got that right, there’s a Jill Sandwich joke in the first minutes.
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Low rent pastiche of other, better sci-fi films, with a way bigger budget it deserved. So much combat, it never ends, relentless bottomless magazines.
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Prude 50 Shades of Tokyo, with Alexandra Daddario. Suck it, Dakota Johnson, instead of nepo babies there are pillow boobies.
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Yeah, a muddled mess, you can’t see the point clearly (maybe there isn’t any). Clearly written during the Trump years, it’s stale before it even plays in theatres. Amazing military visuals and sound, the sonic punch, the tactics, so engrossing.
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Now, that’s another Sicario. What happened Taylor Sheridan, why go from this to dross like Those Who Wish Me Dead? Is it the higher budget? The ego inflation from Sicario itself? I don’t get it.
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A political John Wick, that’s new. Of course it’s not filmed in India, Dev Patel would be murdered by RSS goons.
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Nope, there’s so much product placement, it feels like a very long commercial. It’s just too much, this is not Transformers. Self-Awareness notwithstanding, there’s no subversion that cannot be integrated into the system, all Hollywood people will eventually degenerate into telling stories about themselves.
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James Bond meets Scooby Doo. Is this a Heidi prequel? Are all Miyazaki films on the same universe? That scene inside the clock is like Modern Times on steroids.
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Some kind of direct-to-DVD sci-fi romp, very light on plot, with silly effects. Lee Pace and a Bond girl hit it up, until she drops out of the film (probably dead by the end, it’s ambiguous). Not bad enough to hate.
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An R-rated Predator film written by Shane Black? With this cast? Sign me up, this is amazing.
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A very intense thriller, keeps delivering the goods until the end. Kristen rules, as always!
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A very funny romp through the interwar period, my personal minette. Seems a bit conventional for Ozon, but it’s so hilarious, it gets a pass. This was apparently adapted to Hollywood comedies twice in the 30’s.
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This seems like Lost in Translation from the male perspective? That’s what I took from that middle section. The epilogue seems tacked on, something that does not belong.
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King Amleth Moses Pendragon, more like it. It’s IP now, a meaningless label to slap on unsellable dross to make it pop.
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I thought I detected the Soderbergh touch, not only on the very extensive cast, most the cut away gags, the stylish editing-based jokes. The underlying seediness, the depression, the mental instability, that’s something else, something Being John Malkovich-shaped.
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A medieval story to the bone, in the form of the standard silly fantasy film of the 80’s. Sort of a Dune in tights.
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This is not the final chapter, feels like yet another chapter told badly for devilish reasons. It retroactively makes the last film worse, the whole President Wesker subplot is abandoned offscreen.
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This is a bombastic improvement over the rest of the series, the explosions and overall action sequences are better. Paper-thin characters, just as the doctor ordered for brain shutdown entertainment.
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More derivative Resident Evil films. Yes Paul, I have seen The Matrix, Children of Men, and The Island. It’s called afterlife because the cast comes back even though they died.
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Even though it’s not a great Dirty Harry film, it’s still an hyper competent cop film, with memorable scenes, like the RC car chase. Beats Deadpool by a mile.
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This kind of thing works better as sketch show, like Who is America. Just like most Borat stuff, not all of it lands, but the Giuliani stuff is incredible, it’s beyond manipulative editing. America’s Mayor.
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Dirty Harry fights the forces of feminism, that’s about the only civil right he hasn’t violated. But not even him can resist jiggling boobs.
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Ahh, the fun starts at the credits. Since there was a backlash with fascist undertones of the last film, this one is written by John “Red Dawn” Milius, actual fascist, Saving Private Ryan script doctor, and Walter Sobchak inspiration.
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This is another origin story, but different from Spider-Man 3. Who can keep track anyway.
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Another red Venom, yay. Haven’t seen the dozen of necessary Marvel shit to properly appreciate the references. Boring as fuck normal Marvel crap..
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This is one of those Z-list direct to streaming releases, probably unearthed because Sydney freaking Sweeney stars in it. It’s not bad enough to become blackmail material, it’s just beige and anodyne. It’s not even the good kind of Z-list, just Hallmark shit.
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Ahh, a proper horror film about truly horrible things: sexual frustration, church crimes, British collaboration with the Nazi regime. I just can’t understand the title.
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A story where the ‘Ndrangheta are not the worse villains, at least its an ethos. Worshipping Mammon is the root of all evil.
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More Ivan Reitman bullshit, another low rent Ghostbusters. Effects driven, the “hero” is introduced flirting with an underage student (again!), explicit anti-state spiel. It was bad the first time already.
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A bona fide old school noir in Hollywood, with all the necessary twists. Turns out to be filmed in Spain and Ireland, Tinseltown is no what it used to be.
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Ahh, vintage Will Smith slaps … I mean, kicks ass. A bona fide Arnie-alike. The plot is great too.
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This is a shitty thriller, it cheats so much there is a mid-credits montage of how things actually happened. What’s the point, then?
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The action-packed sequel that Dune: Part 1 required. The diptych really covers all bases. The changes from the book are mostly for the best (except the (understandable) Jihad references).
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Technically impressive biopic with incredible makeup and acting, in service of a crappy hagiography and bland story. The political equivalent of the effects driven extravaganza.
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This feels like Die Welle, with more meaning lost in translation. But the coup de grâce is avoided, the ending is weak, there is barely resolutions to the plot points.
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Celebrating fascist pigs have never been so stylish. A cinematic marvel wrapped around repulsive ideology, more explicit that Triumph of the Will.
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Probably the best film with a calypso cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” on the soundtrack.
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It’s really too subtle, a very small peak into banal lives spent murdering people at an industrial scale. This is better than Oppenheimer in almost every way.
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An anthology of smaller stories. Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax logo means immediate shudders at the amount of nudity. God, it retroactively ruins so many films.
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Mon dieu, c’est magnifique. A higher budget silly B-movie, a much more comedic anthology of Troma-like schlock.
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The Twilight Zone (Nightmare at 20 Thousand Feet) meets Ice Age meets Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.
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More JG Ballard weirdness, but this is much more “political” than Crash. It’s almost too on the nose. I’m sure the book doesn’t end like that, or maybe it does…
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A Dario Argento film, but not stylised and giallo like Suspiria, more raw and undercooked.
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Yet another bloated two and half hours snorefest, with a truly preposterous 30 min long silly fight scene in a parking lot. God, it’s so long and painful.
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Biohazard: The Road Warrior. A particularly crummy Mad Max ripoff, with final boss fight setting up the next film.
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You got to hand it to Spielberg, he can tug at heartstrings. Under absolutely no circumstances you have got to “hand it” to the nazis.
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The second one, a direct sequel. Mostly a retread with smaller and smaller mean scene length. There are just too damn many cuts, it’s all chopped up like confetti.
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Fuck yeah, a proper horror film made in Portugal. Just a bit on the nose, as our boy is called Edward Ipus. Ed Ipus, geddit?
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It’s no Event Horizon, but it’s a competent mainstream horror film. Derivative, but a good effort.
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That’s no time to die, all right. Several decades too late. The complete anachronism of the whole thing is getting more and more preposterous. NANOMACHINES, SON!
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Who the fuck wrote this? Why? Blade is not an exasperated oldie, Whistler is a curmudgeon elder who dies (again), so Blade needs to run with Whistler’s Daughter (not the famous painting from Bean).
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A higher budget cannot hide the outdated CGI, but is great despite that. The characters are just awesome!
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Erin Brokovich with more English actors. I’m afraid of reading more about the case and discover they were all mistreated even more, or that the lawyers hoovered up all the money. I’ll be pissed if they made up the whole thing.
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A nice little close circle thriller. Simple, slow burner, twisty. Overdeveloped in terms of world building, the characters take a back seat.
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Now that’s a Marvel film I can get behind. Beats Black Panther in every single metric. It’s not even an origin story!
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Of all the suspension of disbelief, nothing beats Tom Cruise as the blue collar worker that kill the prepper. He would be the first Trump supporter.
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This is almost a real film. An actual plot with good actors, drama, cool visuals. It nearly outgrows its dark origins as childish dross, but there’s some specks of horse manure attached to a somewhat polished gemstone.
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Wait, another bloated superhero film with Harley Quinn and other people? Am I having Deja Vu? I’m just here for Ratcatcher, the weaksauce hero that saves the day.