Movies, Movies, Movies!

At long last The Abyss is available in something higher than standard def! Apparently for some reason this problem plagues several of Cameron's movies, but now there's been a 4k release of it. There's also finally a good US DVD and a Blu-ray version.

I went searching several times over the last decade or so and all I've ever been able to find are crappy extra-low-res DVDs, usually from other countries, not even a decent US release. The one I've had in my collection for years now won't even show on my flatscreen except hard-matted, with thick black bars on all sides and the image about the size it would be on a standard old-fashioned TV. To be honest, after a little anger on first starting to watch it, I usually forget the letterboxing after a while, but still it's a damn shame.

When this sucker comes in I'm drinking to it!!

 

I watched It Follows (2015) and Day Shift (2022) yesterday.
Both are horror with the latter being a horror comedy. It Follows was "meh" to me. I get the subject matter the allegory of the entity that follows you around very slowly. But I think the concept was done better in Smile (2022). That movie actually gave me nightmares. If you are unfamiliar with that movie, it is essentially the same movie as It Follows but with mental illness and trauma as the main theme instead of sex and STDs.

Day Shift was just silly. had over the top action sequences, a ton of plot holes, a ton of tropes, random cameos, Michael Bay-esque explosions, etc. But it was just a fun movie. Nothing to gush over or rant about because even the movie didnt take its self seriously. lol, there was one scene where the MC is thrown UP the stairs. I was like "What kind of physics is this?"
and the MC has a very "WTF" look on his face and mutters 'this muthafuka just threw me up the stairs???'
that made me laugh, because i was thinking the same thing

 

Minor Spoiler: Did you see the deleted scene with the dialogue between the Engineer and Weyland? I don't know why they didn't include that in the final film.

 

I hadn't seen that. Just watched it on the ole YouTube. I can see why they cut it - it kinda holds up the scene. Also I found it improbable that David would be able to figure out a way to vocalize their language (though I don't recall if there were any vocalized records introduced. I didn't think there were, though I could be mistaken).

 

The 4K remaster of The Abyss is everything I hoped it would be. I had to pause it some ways in because I suddenly started noticing things I needed to add to my notes toward an analysis (I have some 40 movies in progress, all at different points along the way. Most of them I'll never write up an actual analysis for, but I do want to sharpen my ability to connect ideas up and notice symbolic elements). Over the last couple of days I watched a few videos about ol' Jim—one just appeared in my feed about a new book release of his drawings that was published to accompany a Paris exhibit of his work (I think only drawings and paintings). That led me to watch a couple more, mainly about his visual artwork. I knew he drew and painted, but I didn't realize how much of it he's done, or how good it is. And now I come to realize he also writes his own sceenplays. Or treatments anyway, occasionally he's listed as screenwriter on his IMDB. What a multi-talent! He basically does the things I do, except that he's successful at them (understatement), and he apparently learned how to do each artform to a professional level very quickly. I'm still struggling along to learn each of mine. Watching The Abyss I was struck repeatedly by how good the writing is, especially dialogue. And especially considering he added in the Linsey character very late in the process to depict Gale Anne Hurd, his producer and ex wife. The relationship between Bud Bridgman and Linsey represents Cameron's with Hurd.

• James Cameron | Drawings That Became Movies
• James Cameron on STORYBOARDING
• “It’s Going to Be Epic”: The Oral History of James Cameron

 

Watched Sinister (2012). It was good. Ethan Hawke rarely disappoints. Well, a few things could have been done better:

Spoiler: Major spoilers for the movie

Less would have been much more. The scene where the boogeyman looks at Hawke from the monitor would have been exceptionally more unnerving if it had simply never moved. There's too much payoff here. It boils off the tension so laboriously built up.

It's also the inflection point where the audience becomes entirely certain there's something supernatural at play, which should have been postponed as long as possible.

Also the deputy existing solely for exposition felt like a dangling thread. I wonder if there was supposed to be more to him that got cut.

My favourite with him as the lead is still Predestination, though.

 

This is brilliant. Star Wars was designed to work almost entirely through visuals and sound (and music). So different from most movies, which are almost literally "talking heads," and where everything is done through dialogue. When he shows parts of some of the movies in black and white and without dialogue, it becomes obvious how well-made they are. Especially the first one (for my money each one was about half as good as the one before it, which is true for many franchises).

 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

 

Lol I can't tell if you loved it or you want to beat it up. Or maybe you loved watching her beat people up.

 

LoL
I liked it, it's amazing.

 

I finally saw Barbie and think it was overhyped. The trailers were very misleading. I was expecting a feel-good escapist musical comedy and instead got symbolic psychotherapy for lot of existential adult insecurities. The jokes also fell flat to me.

 

Mad God is a surreal head trip. Being a 30 year labor of love by Phil Tippet, he tells a strange story using only sounds and visuals with stop motion. There is no dialogue, and the story is viewer interpretation. It is dark and moody, as well as gross and grotesque, also some morbid sense of beauty in the drab and disturbing world it takes place in. Probably not for everyone, but its a mind trip of oddity to experience.

 

AI Tarantino makes some real sense of Scorsese's Taxi Driver. The voice is AI, but the writing was actually by Tarantino from his book. I've seen it a few times and always admired the cinematography and the intensity, but wasn't quite sure what was really going on. Of course I'm nowhere near as familiar with movies as Tarantino, and had never seen any of the other ones he mentioned except for Death Wish, and I never made the connection.

 

I think those are from a different movie. I remember he talked about a movie Boyle was in, and it had the character's first name as the title, but I don't remember what it was called. Maybe it was Marty? Or am I thinking that because of Martin Scorsese?

Yeah, same here. I think if anything it was just a realistic look at people in New York in the seventies, when it was like the crime capitol of the world. I also couldn't help but think, when he was talking about the black audience roaring with laughter at the mohawk and Bickle's behavior, if he would have felt the same with a white audience laughing their ass off at some black dude with a weird haircut acting like a fool. He probably would have considered that extremely racist.

It's hard to get a fix on Tarantino. He isn't on board with current Hollywood activism, but at the same time he has some weird takes on what he considers racist. But then he's always been a really weird dude.

 

I think the Peter Boyle movie is called Joe. If you click to see the video on Youtube, you can see a breakdown of each section of it, and the second one is called Joe. If you click it it goes straight to Peter Boyle.

Yep. He was in a movie called Joe, and later another one called Crazy Joe. I don't think they're related.

 

I disagree with him on a few other points. I don't believe Iris (Jodie Foster) forgot about asking him to save her when she jumoped in the back of his cab. That was extremely important to her. She pretended to forget. She waved him off as a possible savior because he didn't drive off, he let the pimp get her. Now she doesn't want to be reminded of it, and she doesn't think he's going to save her. But now he's working out, getting himself ready for it. I think shaving his head is the final stage of making himself into a full warrior. As soon as AI Tarantino mentioned the Samurai thing I understood a lot about the movie. That's why he tried to kill himself after the slaughter—it was ritual seppuku. He had completed the mission, saved the girl, his life now had purpose (like in Logan). But he knew he was done. He would probably be getting life in prison if they didn't death sentence him. And he failed at the self-deletion.

 

I recently watched a horror movie called "Vile" it's free on the Tubi app it is pretty good. Kind of reminds me of Saw

 

This is insane—I had no idea:

 

I know you're supposed to write stories where characters have to overcome the limitations they live with while dealing with events in a story, but when I started watching, A Quiet Place, Day 1, and they set it up with a female lead with the emotional equivalency of a ten-year-old, I just had to roll my eyes. To me, it was too much a contrived plot element. She wanders around and tries to stay quiet, of course, just like in the other films. It lost me about 30 mins in. The cat was cute, but that was the extent of it for me. And the sad thing is, I loved the other ones. The first one, in particular, I thought was very good.

 

FUCKING PISSED. I pre-ordered the blu-ray of Furiosa and it came in today, but there's something wrong with the disc. Whenever there's music playing it makes this constant and horrible ripped-speaker noise that makes it really hard to understand anybody who's talking. Especially Immorten Joe, who's hard enough to understand anyway with his Bane-mask thing, and also Dementus when he talks into the microphone he carries. Which he does a lot. I checked some trailers and previews, and the ripped speaker sound isn't in any of them—the sound is crisp and clear. And it isn't the speaker in my TV, I watched part of another movie and everything works fine. It's the disc.

And on top of that it freezes up on the second-to-last chapter and won't play it or the last one. I tried to redeem the digital version, which required me to sign up to some movie site somewhere that links through Amazon Prime, but after I went through all their rigamorole I still can't watch the movie. They had a few other outlets listed, maybe it just can't be done through Amazon. Maybe later I'll try a different one.

 

I broke down and bought it on Amazon's streaming service, I had some points that covered most of the price. The horrible ripping speaker sound is nowhere to be heard, and the dark scenes show up a lot better than they did on the Blu-Ray (though that might be the setting on my TV—I'm watching on the computer now).

 

(some spoilers, sorry)

Was disappointed by Alien Romulus. In the grand scheme of things, it clocked in behind Alien, Aliens, Prometheus, and Covenant. It probably was behind Alien 3 as well. I found the nostalgia thing distracting, and the characters weak and interchangeable. The plot was a bit far fetched as well. How sad is it that they had to fall back on the old corporate greed trope as the catalyst of the polt? Is there a more beaten down theme in all of movies? And if they're so helplessly greedy, then why wait until 30 hours before space station implosion to finally snap to it? Not likely, sorry.

Sorry, just my 0.02$.

 

I watched The Boy and the Beast yesterday at long last. it had been on my list since it came out but i couldnt find anywhere to rent it (i didnt want to pay for a subscription to Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime couldnt let you stream it without a Crunchyroll account, AND it was unavailable for me to rent it in the US)
I finally found it, watched it, and its my new favorite animated movie right now