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Ed's Replies
I’ve seen 3.
1) Mr. hulot’s Holiday - conventional comic skits at the beach. His most relatable film.
2) Playtime - a bit cold / sterile, but fascinating to pick out all the details. Any given sequence can have 2-3 subplots going on simultaneously, and characters overlap / recur a lot. Gotta pay attention when watching this.
3) Mon Oncle - I liked the dogs, Hulot’s quirky house, and the street scenes. The factory and modern house scenes fell kinda flat with the humor, so the film feels dated.
Annihilation didn’t bother with a plot. There was just enough there to lead from one fight scene to the next. The CGI in the final boss fight was pretty bad. The fights look fake in the usual Hollywood way (qucik edits to mask the fact that the actors can’t really fight or aren’t really hurting each other; compare this to a 80’s era Hong Kong martial arts flick, where there is NO doubt about the skills and physical contact).
I saw this at a Dollar second-run theater back in the day, when such things still existed. It was a bad film…and I still enjoyed it!
I found a used VhS tape that someone just gave away. I still have it. Yes, the movie isn’t great, but ithe pacing is good, there isn’t really a slow moment in it, and there are plenty of fights. It’s nice to see practical fights for the most part, instead of CGI pixels spinning and fighting each other.
B-style acting is par for the course on film noir. In fact, if the actors are too good, it doesn’t feel like noir anymore.
Regardless, Kiss Me Deadly is a fantastic film! I see its influence on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Pulp Fiction.
Slight spoiler…..
I also think Mike Hammer is a dead duck. He’s shot, and he probably has radiation poisoning, too. But he makes a great anti-hero.
Synecdoche New york has similar vibes.
Or, there are folks like me who are content to wait until most of the season is out, then get a membership and binge watch.
I prefer it to Prometheus, too. Yes, the astronauts are dumb and / or annoying, but Fassbender was amazing. If the film had featured more Fassbender and less stupid action / CGI / colonizers, I think the film would have been better received. As it is, it’s probably the most thought-provoking of the Alien franchise since Ailen3 (ignore the theater cut, find the assembly cut, it’s much better).
What you think of it?
It is an amazing film - the black and white cinematography, the usage of its sparse music, the mis-en- scene. When you consider that most of the film is just people sitting very still and talking, and yet the film NEVER looks boring, you can understand the mastery of this director’s craft.
I highly recommend this film to anyone who loves old-style filmmaking at its finest.
If this is trash, then I hope Hollywood produces a lot more trashy films just like this and less Fast Furious MCU fare.
I was pleasantly surprised by This is 40, and king of Staten Island. Both were a lot better than I was expecting. Haven’t seen his other efforts, but Hollywood could use more like these and less MCU \ CGI fare.
It will be very very awful. WB will be foolish to sink a lot of money into this. I predict too much CGI, race/gender swapping with the characters, and random action sequences. Just watch the original 1939 version. Or Return to Oz for a well-made film true to the source.
Try Black Summer, on Netflix. It’s based on the start of the apocalypse. Only two seasons but pretty good and better than Walking Dead for years now.
So…. What’s your take on completely alien species in MCU or Star Trek films speaking perfect English? :)
Going back to the silent era, Charlie Chaplin’s The Seagull was fully completed, screened, and never released. chaplin apparently burned the film and negatives a few years later as a tax write-off.
He produced it only, Erich von Stroheim directed it.
So, are we to assume the arriving predators kill the whole village and take the gun as a souvenir, to be returned in Predator 2? That’s my take.
They weren’t evil. They were quite competent hunters and planned well, but they just couldn’t handle the advance tech.
Oh, and they were French or Canadians.
The heroine won in the end because she observed how the Predator reacted to the hunters and she adapted.
Yup, solid film. Direction is good, and you can see how the girl uses tactics and observation throughtout the entire film. She makes many mistakes and learns from them.
I think Disney was stupid to put this just on Hulu. It could have easily claimed $100 million domestic at the box office. The word of mouth would have carried it.
1994’s Fantastic Four was never officially released, but pirated copies remain. I guess you can expect the eventual same fate for Batgirl. So never fear!
I predict Black Cat as one of the characters.
I’m going to recommend this film to Criterion and see what happens! It is great and magical for such a shoestring budget!