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Awards Season: Week 6
It's my birthday! I didn't get particularly retrospective over the new year, but I'm feeling it a bit now, just because I remember my last birthday SO clearly and my current situation is SO different. It's only been a year, and I'm a homeowner now! I've got a big ol' bedroom with my own bathroom and I keep them clean and have space to do things like exercise and I have a little pull out floor couch that I can curl up on to watch movies on my large, conveniently streaming television! I was so miserable for so long and things just kept coming up to make me put off finding my own place and things are finally looking up and just. Happy reverse golden birthday to me!
I have ordered myself a birthday burrito then it's back to my '2 a week' limit.
Goddamn, I hate Dreamwidth cutting out spellcheck.
ANYWAY, my mom got me a slick new 8-in-1 record player (along with some random old records from one of her tenants who used to be a DJ), so I can finally toss my junky old one and also the old Walkman I found in the move, I am VERY excited, even if I'm still trying to figure out where in my room to put it. And then my grandmother got me Artpop on vinyl! And my brother got me some cute winter boots, which are very appreciated as I'm currently hip-deep in our second bad cold snap of the winter.
Just gotta tough it out for the week, then it's supposed to warm up again. C'mon global warming, do your thing.
Until then, I have music. And also movies!
Iron Man 3 (2013): God, this movie makes me sad that it's the last solo Iron Man movie. It's just so good! RDJ is so good! He continues to be so good in the rest of the MCU for another six years, obvs, but in terms of sheer volume of excellent material to work with, this is the tops.
Walden (1969): Ha ha, wow did I hate this! It's heralded as some avant-garde masterpiece, but I found it borderline unwatchable. It's just home videos edited into a frenetic, jerky, headache-inducing mess, backed by loud, horrible, droning noises. Every now and then, the soundtrack would drop out for a few segments, or the camera would hold on something for more than a split second, and it would be a blissful relief from the constant assault on my senses that was this film. Here's a couple of minutes of it! Now imagine that for THREE FUCKING HOURS.
Murder! (1930): Okay, back to oldschool Hitch! This movie... did not deserve that exclamation point in the title, lol. It's real stylish and striking in parts, but there are a lot of long, dry, talking bits to it, too. Love that circus climax, though.
The Skin Game (1931): Not much in the way of fun Hitchcockian flourishes here (that awesome auction scene aside), this was a little dry and took me two tries to get through, but the ending was really depressingly bleak when I made it there (in a good way!). EAT THE RICH. Also, oh my god, they say the words 'skin game' SO MANY TIMES.
Rich and Strange (1931): Middle class asshole comes into money thanks to a convenient rich uncle and remains an asshole, the end. It's almost impressive how completely devoid of redeeming qualities Fred is. Oh, and then it gets real racist for no reason at the end!
So it turns out the early British Hitchcock films... aren't that great? It's kinda inspiring, really. We all gotta start somewhere!
Richard Jewell (2019): Everybody aside from Hauser, Bates, and Rockwell felt like they were phoning this in from miiiiiiiles away (maybe not Olivia Wilde? she was definitely doing A Thing, even if it wasn't good), but those three were compelling enough to carry it for me. I think it helped that I knew absolutely nothing about the events in question, since it seemed like a pretty dry telling of them, but they were all still new to me!
They Live by Night (1948): Sooooo good. Quintessential noir romance. One of those movies where you know exactly where it's going, beat for beat, the entire time, and it just doesn't matter because the getting there is just so stylish and immersive. Why did all the characters have such weird names, though!
Kes (1969): Another slow, incomprehensible Ken Loach job. At least I realized pretty early on that I'd need subtitles to understand anything anyone was saying, so I didn't have to struggle along. Anyway, this was pretty good! Wish the balance between lovely bird time and tedious, Dickensian school abuses had been weighted more towards the former, but still. Pretty good. FUCK that ending, though.
12 Angry Men (1957): It's 12 Angry Men, it's one of my all-time favourites, I can pretty much recite this movie from memory, what do you want from me.
Five Easy Pieces (1970): Ugh, I love this movie. Just something about the vaguely sleazy aura that permeates the whole thing, a pair of really killer performances at the center of it, that Tammy Wynette soundtrack, it all just clicks for me so perfectly. How Much I Want to Bang Jack Nicholson Score (where 1 is The Shining and 10 is Easy Rider): 8. He's such a piece of shit, but 'piano-playing oil rig worker who also bowls well' hits a lot of really specific buttons that I WISH I didn't have, but here we are.
I have ordered myself a birthday burrito then it's back to my '2 a week' limit.
Goddamn, I hate Dreamwidth cutting out spellcheck.
ANYWAY, my mom got me a slick new 8-in-1 record player (along with some random old records from one of her tenants who used to be a DJ), so I can finally toss my junky old one and also the old Walkman I found in the move, I am VERY excited, even if I'm still trying to figure out where in my room to put it. And then my grandmother got me Artpop on vinyl! And my brother got me some cute winter boots, which are very appreciated as I'm currently hip-deep in our second bad cold snap of the winter.
Just gotta tough it out for the week, then it's supposed to warm up again. C'mon global warming, do your thing.
Until then, I have music. And also movies!
Iron Man 3 (2013): God, this movie makes me sad that it's the last solo Iron Man movie. It's just so good! RDJ is so good! He continues to be so good in the rest of the MCU for another six years, obvs, but in terms of sheer volume of excellent material to work with, this is the tops.
Walden (1969): Ha ha, wow did I hate this! It's heralded as some avant-garde masterpiece, but I found it borderline unwatchable. It's just home videos edited into a frenetic, jerky, headache-inducing mess, backed by loud, horrible, droning noises. Every now and then, the soundtrack would drop out for a few segments, or the camera would hold on something for more than a split second, and it would be a blissful relief from the constant assault on my senses that was this film. Here's a couple of minutes of it! Now imagine that for THREE FUCKING HOURS.
Murder! (1930): Okay, back to oldschool Hitch! This movie... did not deserve that exclamation point in the title, lol. It's real stylish and striking in parts, but there are a lot of long, dry, talking bits to it, too. Love that circus climax, though.
The Skin Game (1931): Not much in the way of fun Hitchcockian flourishes here (that awesome auction scene aside), this was a little dry and took me two tries to get through, but the ending was really depressingly bleak when I made it there (in a good way!). EAT THE RICH. Also, oh my god, they say the words 'skin game' SO MANY TIMES.
Rich and Strange (1931): Middle class asshole comes into money thanks to a convenient rich uncle and remains an asshole, the end. It's almost impressive how completely devoid of redeeming qualities Fred is. Oh, and then it gets real racist for no reason at the end!
So it turns out the early British Hitchcock films... aren't that great? It's kinda inspiring, really. We all gotta start somewhere!
Richard Jewell (2019): Everybody aside from Hauser, Bates, and Rockwell felt like they were phoning this in from miiiiiiiles away (maybe not Olivia Wilde? she was definitely doing A Thing, even if it wasn't good), but those three were compelling enough to carry it for me. I think it helped that I knew absolutely nothing about the events in question, since it seemed like a pretty dry telling of them, but they were all still new to me!
They Live by Night (1948): Sooooo good. Quintessential noir romance. One of those movies where you know exactly where it's going, beat for beat, the entire time, and it just doesn't matter because the getting there is just so stylish and immersive. Why did all the characters have such weird names, though!
Kes (1969): Another slow, incomprehensible Ken Loach job. At least I realized pretty early on that I'd need subtitles to understand anything anyone was saying, so I didn't have to struggle along. Anyway, this was pretty good! Wish the balance between lovely bird time and tedious, Dickensian school abuses had been weighted more towards the former, but still. Pretty good. FUCK that ending, though.
12 Angry Men (1957): It's 12 Angry Men, it's one of my all-time favourites, I can pretty much recite this movie from memory, what do you want from me.
Five Easy Pieces (1970): Ugh, I love this movie. Just something about the vaguely sleazy aura that permeates the whole thing, a pair of really killer performances at the center of it, that Tammy Wynette soundtrack, it all just clicks for me so perfectly. How Much I Want to Bang Jack Nicholson Score (where 1 is The Shining and 10 is Easy Rider): 8. He's such a piece of shit, but 'piano-playing oil rig worker who also bowls well' hits a lot of really specific buttons that I WISH I didn't have, but here we are.
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