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Spring Season: Weeks 55/56
Weekend over, I'm in the home stretch now! Feeling really guilty about completely wasting my yesterday, it was really nice and quiet for most of the day, and I could have gotten so much done, like starting threads again, and instead I just... did nothing. Podcasts and scribbled random notes to myself, both here and in my planner. Ugh. I don't know, I think it really might be time to dip from RP again for a while because when I'm on, I freaking love it, I just... have so much trouble getting on these days.
Primary movie theme for the fortnight was Korean New Wave, though with a fair bit of Fonda bleeding over from last time.
FILMS
American Dream (1990): Well that was infuriating! :)
Back Street (1932): The things I'll do for Dunne. Ninety straight minutes of 'THIS fucking guy'.
Badlands (1973): So many stunning distant horizons, so little time. Man what a good movie. I still really only have room in my heart for one Malick movie to truly love, but this is definitely the closest one to changing that. Maybe because it's so short?
Beware! The Blob (1972): The improvised dialogue is so nonsensical in places that it somehow loops back around to being Oscar-worthy. So many of the characters are so annoying, but then they get eaten by Jell-O, and it's all just very satisfying.
The Brighton Strangler (1945): I convinced a whole Discord server to watch my favourite terrible old movie and it was the best thing I will do all year. STRANGLE, STRANGLE, STRANGLE. KILL, KILL, KILL.
California Suite (1978): I really like the way this movie is structured? It FEELS like it should be one of those 'intertwining stories in a hotel' type things by the way the characters are all introduced in succession, but then the bulk of their stories end up playing out more in one go, unconnected vignette-style? But not entirely. I just think it's neat!
The Cameraman (1928): HE KILL-A DE MONK!!!
Casa de lava (1994): Not nearly as much of a pretentious bore as some of the descriptions make it seem. Only somewhat of one. I will have no memory of ever seeing this movie next month.
The Chase (1966): Has a lot going for it, but one of those things is 800 characters and Brando's is the only remotely interesting one.
Crying Fist (2005): Kinetic fights and a whole lot of heart. I will always on some level resent a sports movie good enough to make me cry, and this was like... parallel Rockys? So good. God damn that ending, I REALLY needed Tae-shik to win even while being pretty sure he wouldn't.
Daughters of Darkness (1971): I quite like this movie, but this time I watched it not long after watching The Velvet Vampire, so all I could think about was 'what if Elizabeth had a dune buggy tho'
The Foul King (2000): What's this? A twenty-year-old Korean movie about wrestling? What a perfect cross-section of all of my interests at this precise moment in time. Song Kang-ho really impressed me in this, he was really clearly doing a lot of his own flips and shit in this when not wearing the mask, CGI was not good enough to fake it back then.
Fun with Dick and Jane (1977): I think this is better when I'm expecting to fucking hate these people? The lack of comeuppance remains frustrating, though I get that that's part of the point. Well-off white folks get to fail up, forever. All of the 'look how aware we are' moments of racism and classism and homophobia and transphobia still suck a whole bunch.
Hallelujah (1929): An important movie, and not a bad one if you can look past all of the... well.
Humanoids from the Deep (1980): Very stupid rubber suit monster B-movie, full of over-the-top nudity and gore. A fine time, moved at a really nice clip.
Imitation of Life (1934): There's a lot going on here, some of it handled well, some of it not so much, but it all feels so haphazard and thrown together that I would struggle to come up with a summary of what it's actually ABOUT. Is it the story of a single mother buckling down and making good for herself and her daughter over the years? Kinda, but they gloss over all the actual struggles, so not really. Is it about the relationship between a daughter and her mother, a daughter and her race, and those struggles? Kinda, but the others have way more screentime, so... also no. Bea's own struggles with HER daughter as she grows up while Bea tries to find love for herself again? The weird thing where her daughter wants to fuck her boyfriend never actually becomes a conflict and is just set aside (along with the guy) in the end, so... nah. Is it about a white woman stealing her black housekeeper's recipe, name, and likeness and using them to become megarich without ever really asking? Yes, but I don't think that was on purpose. I don't know, it's a very odd movie, I have to assume it all links together better in the novel? I did really like that they actually got a light-skinned black woman to play Peola, though, seeing as 'they can pass as white, so we can just get a white person to play them' is... still a thing today.
Lady Vengeance (2005): To me, this movie is perfect.
Lolita (1962): A lot of really excellent moments, but I'm not sure how well they all hang together as a whole. Will need to come back to this one at some point. It won't be a chore.
Magnificent Obsession (1935): A dude's mere existence results in a woman being widowed, then he goes full Dennis Reynolds 'the implication' to try and hook up with her, which results in her being BLINDED, then he stalks her and ingratiates himself into her life again until she leaves the state to get away from him, and it's all treated as a beautiful, sweeping romance. This movie made my skin crawl.
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955): Watched The Manchurian Candidate, had to make it a broody Sinatra double feature, obviously.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962): God, this movie rules so hard. Lansbury rules so hard. That baffling fucking train meet cute... I don't know if it rules so hard, but I'm glad it exists because it's just so fucking weird.
The Morning After (1986): A fun, PEAK '80s thriller with a somewhat disappointing reveal. I really liked their dynamic, damn it.
The Mouse That Roared (1959): Very silly, and... moderately fun. Seberg is just not a good actress, huh?
Nowhere to Hide (1999) I had no earthly idea what was going on at any point in this movie, but I didn't really care that much? An enjoyable bit of style ridiculously far over substance.
Nosferatu (1922): GIVE! ORLOK! A DUNE BUGGY! (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ)
O Fantasma (2000): Goddamn was this a fucking slog. I'm pretty sure there was some weird neat plot shit happening near the end, but I was so checked out after all of the tedious uncomfortable sex scenes that I could not even begin to figure out what was happening by the time we got to the post-apocalyptic gimp suit wanderings. On the plus side, it reminded me that I needed to take the garbage out.
Peeping Tom (1960): "Do you know what the most frightening thing in the world is? It's fear." Fuckin' got me there.
The Quiet Family (1998): Pitch-black wackiness, my absolute favourite kind.
Romance (1999): Once, on a band trip, we all piled into one of the hotel rooms and ate giant pizzas and watched some terrible foreign arthouse porn that was playing on cable, laughing all the while. And after all these years. I fucking found it. It all felt vaguely familiar for a while, but then I got to the line about the basket of penises and everything just came back to me in a flash. Glorious. Anyway, I hate every single person in this movie almost as much as I hate the endless unsimulated sex scenes. Without a bunch of my Grade 9 peers around to experience it with me this time around, it just fucking sucks.
Save the Green Planet! (2003): Wonderfully weird, genuinely horrific at times, poignant when it needed to be, just a total trip from beginning to end.
Shivers (1975): Maybe not the best choice for taco night? I have no regrets, though.
The Student Nurses (1970): Why was the ending to this exploitation movie so wholesome and empowering???
Suburbia (1983): Chicken butt.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002): i love being depressed
The Velvet Vampire (1971): This is the reason I've been obsessed with vampires driving dune buggies all week, particularly sexy ones. It just adds so much to the canon.
SHORTS
The Canaries (1969): A fun, four-minute splash of colour and sound. Made me smile.
Family Business (1984): Pretty cute. Akerman in short doses is apparently much more appealing to me than her features.
Feathers (2018): So far outside anything that resembles any lived experiences I thought existed (at least until the end) that I kinda just spent most of it confused. Which is a shame, because it's quite beautiful.
Jamaica Tapes (2019): It's someone's vacation videos, man, idk. It's boring as shit. I DID then rewatch it in an effort to actually pay attention, but it mostly just made me wildly jealous because it looked like a good time if you were there.
Lance Lizardi (2017): You know what? Lizards ARE cool.
Liberty (2019): Really beautiful, if frustratingly opaque in places. It felt like it SHOULD have been really obvious what exactly was going on, but I spent the entire film just, like... 90% of the way there.
Moving (2019): Deeply relatable and well-done, but not in a particularly interesting way. I did like all of the unanswered questions it very subtly raises.
Rabbit's Moon (1971) Ah fuck why does the new clown have a machete!! Need to find the version with the proper soundtrack.
Das Geheimnis der Marquisin (1922): What a kickass Nivea commercial. I gotta get me some of that.
Los que desean (2018): This film definitely has some interesting things to say about sex and attitudes towards it and all these weird provincial Mexican dudes, but mostly I just wanted more footage of the poor pretty painted pigeons. Their names were Chambi, Tweety, Scissors, Captain, Mojo Sauce, Yellow Tail, Whitey, Red Dot, Orange, Montepinar, Full Stop, Go, Lincoln, Know-It-All, Prince, Bataclan, Red Heart, Mogambo, Lover, Julius Caesar, Son of Evil, Smurf, C5, Couple Seeker, Dracula, Light, I'm Unemployed, Insert Coin, Atlantic, Non-Stop, Fatty, Whimpers, Being Bad, New Line, Toledo, Iberian, White Camocho, Revival, Live, Festival, Clockwork Orange, Fine Hand, CSI, Cheerful, Latino, Ford Fiesta, Our Father, Plastic Sea, Spades, Ferrari, Super Nanny, Therapy, Lincoln (again), Theatre, Cum Laude, Spanish, Coming for You, Limited Edition, Azahara, Dali, Patricio, Griezman, Spirit Plus, Pigtail, I'm Flying, Unique, Nook, Wanted, Red Eagle, Lame, Hades, Angel, Hugo, and Titi.
TELEVISION
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier 1x01/1x02: Fine stuff! Not must see viewing like WandaVision was, at least not so far, but it fills the MCU-shaped hole in my heart nicely. I'm enjoying getting to actually care about Bucky's whole deal for once, since it's not being placed in direct opposition to characters that I like more. All of the bits of social/thematic stuff they're throwing in just seem very... shallow, though? Interesting beats with no larger ties to anything that's happening, so they just fall kinda flat because you can't look at them any deeper than that surface moment of recognition. This goes for everything in the show, tbh, but maybe I'm more forgiving of it with comedy moments and action beats, because like, they accomplish their missions regardless, I laugh and am thrilled, so. WHATEVER, GIVE ME ZEMO.
Riverdale 5x08/5x09: what's this show even about barked vegas, and everyone laughed
BTE is gonna hurt this week, isn't it? I can't wait.
Primary movie theme for the fortnight was Korean New Wave, though with a fair bit of Fonda bleeding over from last time.
FILMS
American Dream (1990): Well that was infuriating! :)
Back Street (1932): The things I'll do for Dunne. Ninety straight minutes of 'THIS fucking guy'.
Badlands (1973): So many stunning distant horizons, so little time. Man what a good movie. I still really only have room in my heart for one Malick movie to truly love, but this is definitely the closest one to changing that. Maybe because it's so short?
Beware! The Blob (1972): The improvised dialogue is so nonsensical in places that it somehow loops back around to being Oscar-worthy. So many of the characters are so annoying, but then they get eaten by Jell-O, and it's all just very satisfying.
The Brighton Strangler (1945): I convinced a whole Discord server to watch my favourite terrible old movie and it was the best thing I will do all year. STRANGLE, STRANGLE, STRANGLE. KILL, KILL, KILL.
California Suite (1978): I really like the way this movie is structured? It FEELS like it should be one of those 'intertwining stories in a hotel' type things by the way the characters are all introduced in succession, but then the bulk of their stories end up playing out more in one go, unconnected vignette-style? But not entirely. I just think it's neat!
The Cameraman (1928): HE KILL-A DE MONK!!!
Casa de lava (1994): Not nearly as much of a pretentious bore as some of the descriptions make it seem. Only somewhat of one. I will have no memory of ever seeing this movie next month.
The Chase (1966): Has a lot going for it, but one of those things is 800 characters and Brando's is the only remotely interesting one.
Crying Fist (2005): Kinetic fights and a whole lot of heart. I will always on some level resent a sports movie good enough to make me cry, and this was like... parallel Rockys? So good. God damn that ending, I REALLY needed Tae-shik to win even while being pretty sure he wouldn't.
Daughters of Darkness (1971): I quite like this movie, but this time I watched it not long after watching The Velvet Vampire, so all I could think about was 'what if Elizabeth had a dune buggy tho'
The Foul King (2000): What's this? A twenty-year-old Korean movie about wrestling? What a perfect cross-section of all of my interests at this precise moment in time. Song Kang-ho really impressed me in this, he was really clearly doing a lot of his own flips and shit in this when not wearing the mask, CGI was not good enough to fake it back then.
Fun with Dick and Jane (1977): I think this is better when I'm expecting to fucking hate these people? The lack of comeuppance remains frustrating, though I get that that's part of the point. Well-off white folks get to fail up, forever. All of the 'look how aware we are' moments of racism and classism and homophobia and transphobia still suck a whole bunch.
Hallelujah (1929): An important movie, and not a bad one if you can look past all of the... well.
Humanoids from the Deep (1980): Very stupid rubber suit monster B-movie, full of over-the-top nudity and gore. A fine time, moved at a really nice clip.
Imitation of Life (1934): There's a lot going on here, some of it handled well, some of it not so much, but it all feels so haphazard and thrown together that I would struggle to come up with a summary of what it's actually ABOUT. Is it the story of a single mother buckling down and making good for herself and her daughter over the years? Kinda, but they gloss over all the actual struggles, so not really. Is it about the relationship between a daughter and her mother, a daughter and her race, and those struggles? Kinda, but the others have way more screentime, so... also no. Bea's own struggles with HER daughter as she grows up while Bea tries to find love for herself again? The weird thing where her daughter wants to fuck her boyfriend never actually becomes a conflict and is just set aside (along with the guy) in the end, so... nah. Is it about a white woman stealing her black housekeeper's recipe, name, and likeness and using them to become megarich without ever really asking? Yes, but I don't think that was on purpose. I don't know, it's a very odd movie, I have to assume it all links together better in the novel? I did really like that they actually got a light-skinned black woman to play Peola, though, seeing as 'they can pass as white, so we can just get a white person to play them' is... still a thing today.
Lady Vengeance (2005): To me, this movie is perfect.
Lolita (1962): A lot of really excellent moments, but I'm not sure how well they all hang together as a whole. Will need to come back to this one at some point. It won't be a chore.
Magnificent Obsession (1935): A dude's mere existence results in a woman being widowed, then he goes full Dennis Reynolds 'the implication' to try and hook up with her, which results in her being BLINDED, then he stalks her and ingratiates himself into her life again until she leaves the state to get away from him, and it's all treated as a beautiful, sweeping romance. This movie made my skin crawl.
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955): Watched The Manchurian Candidate, had to make it a broody Sinatra double feature, obviously.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962): God, this movie rules so hard. Lansbury rules so hard. That baffling fucking train meet cute... I don't know if it rules so hard, but I'm glad it exists because it's just so fucking weird.
The Morning After (1986): A fun, PEAK '80s thriller with a somewhat disappointing reveal. I really liked their dynamic, damn it.
The Mouse That Roared (1959): Very silly, and... moderately fun. Seberg is just not a good actress, huh?
Nowhere to Hide (1999) I had no earthly idea what was going on at any point in this movie, but I didn't really care that much? An enjoyable bit of style ridiculously far over substance.
Nosferatu (1922): GIVE! ORLOK! A DUNE BUGGY! (㇏(•̀ᵥᵥ•́)ノ)
O Fantasma (2000): Goddamn was this a fucking slog. I'm pretty sure there was some weird neat plot shit happening near the end, but I was so checked out after all of the tedious uncomfortable sex scenes that I could not even begin to figure out what was happening by the time we got to the post-apocalyptic gimp suit wanderings. On the plus side, it reminded me that I needed to take the garbage out.
Peeping Tom (1960): "Do you know what the most frightening thing in the world is? It's fear." Fuckin' got me there.
The Quiet Family (1998): Pitch-black wackiness, my absolute favourite kind.
Romance (1999): Once, on a band trip, we all piled into one of the hotel rooms and ate giant pizzas and watched some terrible foreign arthouse porn that was playing on cable, laughing all the while. And after all these years. I fucking found it. It all felt vaguely familiar for a while, but then I got to the line about the basket of penises and everything just came back to me in a flash. Glorious. Anyway, I hate every single person in this movie almost as much as I hate the endless unsimulated sex scenes. Without a bunch of my Grade 9 peers around to experience it with me this time around, it just fucking sucks.
Save the Green Planet! (2003): Wonderfully weird, genuinely horrific at times, poignant when it needed to be, just a total trip from beginning to end.
Shivers (1975): Maybe not the best choice for taco night? I have no regrets, though.
The Student Nurses (1970): Why was the ending to this exploitation movie so wholesome and empowering???
Suburbia (1983): Chicken butt.
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002): i love being depressed
The Velvet Vampire (1971): This is the reason I've been obsessed with vampires driving dune buggies all week, particularly sexy ones. It just adds so much to the canon.
SHORTS
The Canaries (1969): A fun, four-minute splash of colour and sound. Made me smile.
Family Business (1984): Pretty cute. Akerman in short doses is apparently much more appealing to me than her features.
Feathers (2018): So far outside anything that resembles any lived experiences I thought existed (at least until the end) that I kinda just spent most of it confused. Which is a shame, because it's quite beautiful.
Jamaica Tapes (2019): It's someone's vacation videos, man, idk. It's boring as shit. I DID then rewatch it in an effort to actually pay attention, but it mostly just made me wildly jealous because it looked like a good time if you were there.
Lance Lizardi (2017): You know what? Lizards ARE cool.
Liberty (2019): Really beautiful, if frustratingly opaque in places. It felt like it SHOULD have been really obvious what exactly was going on, but I spent the entire film just, like... 90% of the way there.
Moving (2019): Deeply relatable and well-done, but not in a particularly interesting way. I did like all of the unanswered questions it very subtly raises.
Rabbit's Moon (1971) Ah fuck why does the new clown have a machete!! Need to find the version with the proper soundtrack.
Das Geheimnis der Marquisin (1922): What a kickass Nivea commercial. I gotta get me some of that.
Los que desean (2018): This film definitely has some interesting things to say about sex and attitudes towards it and all these weird provincial Mexican dudes, but mostly I just wanted more footage of the poor pretty painted pigeons. Their names were Chambi, Tweety, Scissors, Captain, Mojo Sauce, Yellow Tail, Whitey, Red Dot, Orange, Montepinar, Full Stop, Go, Lincoln, Know-It-All, Prince, Bataclan, Red Heart, Mogambo, Lover, Julius Caesar, Son of Evil, Smurf, C5, Couple Seeker, Dracula, Light, I'm Unemployed, Insert Coin, Atlantic, Non-Stop, Fatty, Whimpers, Being Bad, New Line, Toledo, Iberian, White Camocho, Revival, Live, Festival, Clockwork Orange, Fine Hand, CSI, Cheerful, Latino, Ford Fiesta, Our Father, Plastic Sea, Spades, Ferrari, Super Nanny, Therapy, Lincoln (again), Theatre, Cum Laude, Spanish, Coming for You, Limited Edition, Azahara, Dali, Patricio, Griezman, Spirit Plus, Pigtail, I'm Flying, Unique, Nook, Wanted, Red Eagle, Lame, Hades, Angel, Hugo, and Titi.
TELEVISION
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier 1x01/1x02: Fine stuff! Not must see viewing like WandaVision was, at least not so far, but it fills the MCU-shaped hole in my heart nicely. I'm enjoying getting to actually care about Bucky's whole deal for once, since it's not being placed in direct opposition to characters that I like more. All of the bits of social/thematic stuff they're throwing in just seem very... shallow, though? Interesting beats with no larger ties to anything that's happening, so they just fall kinda flat because you can't look at them any deeper than that surface moment of recognition. This goes for everything in the show, tbh, but maybe I'm more forgiving of it with comedy moments and action beats, because like, they accomplish their missions regardless, I laugh and am thrilled, so. WHATEVER, GIVE ME ZEMO.
Riverdale 5x08/5x09: what's this show even about barked vegas, and everyone laughed
BTE is gonna hurt this week, isn't it? I can't wait.
no subject
THE FUCKING MEET-CUTE. I watched this for the first time last year and it’s just SO WEIRD??? I still don’t really get what was happening!
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no subject