Movies
Pan's Labyrinth, 2006 - ★★★★½
This is the third or the fourth time I watched this movie. It's the first movie by Guillermo del Toro I've seen, and it's masterpiece.
A fairy tale fit for grownups, you won' find a happy ending here (well, kind of, depending on your angle) - it's full of magic and symbolism. There's not much to say about this movie that won't spoil the magic of watching it for the first time, so I won't attempt to do so. Go watch it.
Civil War, 2024 - ★★★★
Joel (Wagner Moura) is screaming his lungs out, arms at his side, a cigarette he didn't finish stuck in his right fist. Behind him, an American flag with two stars is blowing in the wind. A tank rolls in with a group of soldiers in the background, 2 feet away from him, blocking it from view. They ignore him. His primal screams of pain and suffering are silent. The soldiers don't feel it, and you don't hear it.
I mostly tuned out of anything political because I don't want to know and what I already know is too much. But if you think there's only so much you can take, watch this movie.
On its surface, this is a decent movie with a satisfactory plot: youth and innocence lost, war, and some good scenes. But to me this movie was personal. I tried to figure out why.
It's easier to start with the cinematography. Grainy, gritty, often overly contrasted with colorful graffiti or pink sunglasses. It's good. Very good. I itched for my camera several times, mumbling to the TV "damn, this is a good shot." This is important because the story is told through the eyes of two war photojournalists with a talent for the art.
The pictures they take are far from happy family photos. Lee (Kristen Dunst), a photojournalist veteran, has seen enough horrors for them to flash in her mind whenever she closes her eyes while Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a novice who is just started her photojournalism journey, faces new horrors that suck the innocence out of her until there's nothing left. It takes talent to describe a story through the eyes of two talented photographers, and this movie has it to the point that I want to track down Rob Hardy (the cinematography director) for more of his work.
It's these photos they take that make the war real. A war is never about the war itself, it's about the people who experience it. A series of human moments in a hellscape that defy the reasoning of everyday life. A war is a war only when it's personal: until then it's just politics and heated debates on social media.
There's a plot to this movie, a reason this great American war broke out, but we only get glimpses of it. There's an authoritarian president who took his executive power too far (ordering the usage of military force on US citizens among other things), and two states, California and Texas, called the "Western Forces" are fighting back and surrounding Washington DC. There are other factions and states involved, a hint of a more complex structure in the background, but not much more.
The rest is built from carefully selected moments. There's a scene in the movie where Joel is asking a sniper and his spotter who's shooting at them and who's giving them orders. The spotter replies: "No one's giving us orders, man. Someone's trying to kill us, we're trying to kill them." That's it. It's enough. These moments worked beautifully throughout the movie, each scene freezes and is taken apart by the pictures Lee and Jessie snap away.
I'm not a huge patriot, but it gets to me when Americans dislike the flag because it represents injustice to them. True, the flag has been used by extremists as a symbol. But this is because these extremists hijacked the flag and what it represents. Meanwhile, this kind of hate toward what the flag represents is the same stuff that one day could cause events like in this movie.
Maybe it's because I was not born into what most around me have as a right. It was given to me. I never understood why the president of the United States still has to be born here. It doesn't make sense. If you ask me, it's a nation built by immigrants who seem to understand the American Dream well, probably much better than the extremist militias who use it as an excuse for their propaganda.
I don't think Alex Garland thought about all of this when he wrote the film, but I thank him for making me think about all this stuff.
Heart of Stone, 2023 - ★
I couldn't finish watching this one. This movie has a plot aimed at my horny teenage self at 12.
I loved Rotten Tomatoes' one-liner summary: "Gal Gadot remains an entertaining action star, but she's no match for Heart of Stone's thinly written characters, generic plot, and rote set pieces."
An attempt at a female James Bond was made - and blown. The plot is obvious, but the spoon-feeding is strong with this one anyway, just in case someone misses it.
There's an AI / Minority Report copycat style thrown into the mix to keep things up to date (I didn't finish watching, but I'm sure the AI turns out to be evil, or at least terribly incompetent, because duh) and non-stop action, which works for Gadot as Wonder Woman but fails badly for Rachel.
This would be another case of a good actor suffering from terrible writing... except that Greg Rucka is actually good at what he does (Old Guard, quite a few good comics in DC and Marvel), so I'm not sure what happened here, blaming Netflix is too easy.
Problemista, 2023 - ★★★★½
First of all, this is a well-made movie, meticulously packaged. A fun comedy with visual metaphors on one hand and a harsh view of reality on the other, it balances both well in a way that gets through to you like a refreshing splash of cold seltzer on a hot summer day... No? Just me with my seltzer? Fine then.
This movie is rising to the challenge of the cliche story of an immigrant who follows the American dream in modern times and nails it. To a drywall. In a make-shift gallery for an impossible employer. It works, and it works well. As a person who emigrated to the US at 16, I remember some of the ridiculous chicken-egg mazes, and Torres's (who's both the brain behind the movie and the main actor) artistic talent representing those is spot-on. The pressure to make money while being forbidden to get paid at the same time is one such example. The stereotype of the clueless Columbia student who has his parents pay his problems away ("What's a Visa?") is another element that strikes close to home. And that's just the main layer. There's so much more happening at the same time.
The relationship between Alejandro (Julio Torres) and Tilda Swinton (Elizabeth) is worth another short film in itself. If you have ever worked at an IT helpdesk (or, frankly, any retail situation with that one annoying customer), beware: you will melt into your seat in a series of cringes. At the same time, this is a friendship, borderline romantic but still not, kind of reverse mother-son (more like dad-daughter?) kind of thing. It's weird; you have to experience the chemistry to understand what I mean.
Delivering ordinary daily American phenomenon, like a Bushwick apartment in New York complete with its roommates, is what Torres seems to excel at in a way that only those who experienced themselves can appreciate for all its colorful yet realistic descriptions. Another example is [Larry Owens playing Craiglist](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15078804/), which would make you scratch your head before you see the movie, but after you do, you'd never be able to look at that site the same way again. It makes so much sense to me now I think Owen's face (in that suit) should become its official logo.
At the same time, the movie also portrays the relationship between Alejandro and his mom as a magical story, complete with castles and a Narrator (Isabella Rossellini), which is a brilliant look at nostalgia that loses its charm as we grow old and starts showing cracks and leaks as we grow older, giving way to different kind of fantasies.
And yet, there's more. Sexual darkens. Over-the-top art exhibitions and egos. Even more relationships. Somehow, it all fits, it all works, and it is packed away with a ribbon at the end. I'm not sure how this is possible in one movie, but he did it. This is a keeper.
I know what I’m going to watch this weekend. What about you?
‘The Crow’ soundtrack turns 30: Looking back on the album that defined an era
…But before all these came The Crow: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, featuring original songs from The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, and Stone Temple Pilots. While grunge was mainstream by 1994, a soundtrack this hard-edged — flaunting heavy metal alongside goth rock — was far from common. But this album did more than sing the song of the eponymous anti-hero; it also sang of the lost Brandon Lee.
They Live, 1988 - ★★★½
An unexpectedly fun movie. Roddy Piper plays the role that inspired the likes of Duke Nukem. He finds out the world is in an advanced stage of a take-over by aliens who send subliminal messages through the TV and Radio. They already have the world's elite at their grasp, and they're wiping those who oppose them (the working class and the poor) using the police, also under their control. Nada (Piper) doesn't waste much time - he's all out of bubble gum after all - and with the help of Frank (Keith David) and truth-reviling sunglasses, he shoots his way out to victory.
A Scanner Darkly, 2006 - ★★★★
I watched this film before and couldn't follow it. There's so much going on, both visually and dialogue-wise. As odd as it might sound for a rotroscopic animation, the movie feels authentic, perhaps because PHK spent a couple of years around drugs.
At its heart, this is a sad story about a guy slowly losing his mind and his life to drugs, and Keanu Reeves does an excellent job portraying this, while Robert Downey Jr is amazing at being the paranoid conspiracy supermind.
Perhaps what makes this story even sadder is the fact that at the end, when we learn who the real villains are, we shake our heads with a solemn of-course. Like other good movies, it offers a bleak look into a future that is not too far from us right now, one that hopefully we won't get caught with.
Sunshine, 2007 - ★★★
A friend summarized this movie perfectly: good suspense film with hard Sci-Fi elements that go down the drain with the introduction of the villain. Why Sunshine, Why?
I enjoyed the buildup and the start. Not too hard to follow. The story is a bit of a stretch: if the sun was dying, I think the range of life-supporting temperatures on Earth would drop too fast for us to build a spaceship, let alone two. And I won't go into the sun becoming a red giant when it runs out of fuel, which seems to be the case here. So OK, fine, moving on.
The space ride with the crew was thrilling science-wise, though it was a bit macho for reasons, but in a way, that was a (small) part of the point, so alright, I could live with that.
The sun provided a lot of problems, and these could have been explored more and caused more suspense; instead, the movie yanks a villain seemingly out of nowhere and gives said villain some unexplained godly powers. The sun would have made a better villain if you ask me.
This is a solid 3-star: solid entertainment, but nothing too mind-expanding.
Dark City, 1998 - ★★★½
He can tune!
Dark City has been a favorite of mine when it came out, and after I watched it again, I can see why. It's dark and melancholic with a shred of hope and a lot of revenge kind of style. Beyond that though, it's one of those "what if" movies that gets some of those questions stuck in your head after the credits roll, like, maybe there *is* someone who keeps misplacing my hot sauce in the fridge??
This movie fits well with Donnie Darko and perhaps the original Matrix for a good reality-doubting weekend (more recommendations are welcome). If you're more into questioning-reality-god-complex movies, I also recommend The Truman Show, one of Jim Carry's best performances ever.
More random thoughts: Jennifer Connelly is absolutely stunning here in a very Who Framed Roger Rabbit style. I also think it's about time I get myself a duster coat. And when was the last time I went to the beach here in NYC?
Die Hard, 1988 - ★★½
A solid, fun action movie of the era. It's not going to blow your mind away. You know what to expect, you know how it ends, and it's fun this way if you're in the mood for something simple and familiar. But dude, Alan Rickman...! I wish he were still around.
Prospect, 2018 - ★★½
Prospect is a movie with two elements that should be reviewed separately. Its world-building is rich and intriguing; its story is shallow and lacking.
A lot is going on from the start. The language is rich with alien terms, which made me turn on the subtitles, but I remained just as confused. At some point, I accepted that there was just too much to understand, and the movie wouldn't bother explaining; when I reached that conclusion, I started to enjoy the film more. However, treating the characters the same way doesn't work. I wanted to understand why they ended up where they did and how they got there, and these questions bothered me long after the credits rolled - unanswered.
It felt like I was watching a series, missed the first half of the season, and finished without the finale. There is no clear start and no clear end, just facts. While intriguing, these lay disconnected from each other, uncared for. Too bad. It was a nice visit to a rich, interesting universe.
Prometheus, 2012 - ★★
I had hopes: Ridley. A compelling story. Horror Sci-Fi.
Instead, what we have here is an "If it ain't broken, don't fix it" movie based on a tested and proven formula from Ridley's successful Alien movies. It's too much of the same to be unique. Where Alien was ahead of its time championing Weaver as Ripley (not to be confused with the director... or perhaps that's part of the point?), this movie is running after the trope's wagon, waving its hand desperately, "hey! Wait for me!"
The main problem we have here is lack of character development. There are too many secondary folks mixed with special effects and dark alien horror for this to happen. The movie's too busy telling us a unique story, providing background, and wowing us with special effects, all of this while also introducing the characters all at once, and as a result, it all feels too shallow. So I didn't care. Not when someone died, not about the story, and not about the movie.
It's a shame because if the movie would slow down a bit and take its time (squeals perhaps?), we'd have something much better that would get me invested. Instead, it's a marathon of flashy black oozy horror in a "been there, done that" sort of a feeling. Back to Alien for me.
Baba Yaga, 1973 - ★½
For me, this was high hopes, low delivery. It goes to show that foreign doesn't necessarily mean sophisticated.
The story consists of a bunch of tropes mashed together. The bad: witches, BDSM, lesbians, and orgasms (combined with those). The good: men, vanilla sex, and orgasms (combined with those). Yes, it's from the 1970s, and I should expect the glorious age of knights in shiny armor who push themselves upon competent women who turn them away but somehow lose all ability of self-discipline toward the end and need help to be saved.
This would be boring enough, but see, Carroll Baker works well as Baba Yaga; her piercing eyes bewitched me, and fell under her spell. She has depth, the only one in the cast who seems to be more than a paper-cut character... but no. She's evil, she's a witch, and even though she seems to care about a lot of things (including the well-being of the women under her control, at least at the start), all of this goes to hell when (oh no!) the BDSM scene comes out. The poor lady, all she wanted was another plaything for her and her sub to have some fun with. Instead, she falls into a hole just when things get interesting, to the tune of "Here Comes Your Man" as our knight shows up to make sure all crooked, beautiful things break down to fit nicely into a happy, appropriate ending. Behhh.
Still, I enjoyed some of the cinematography going on. A few nice tricks in a movie lacking a budget for special effects show that you don't need to go far to get a nice spell-like story going.
Anatomy of a Fall, 2023 - ★★★½
I made a mistake. I went in thinking "murder mystery," but the real death in this movie is the fairy tale of a perfect marriage. And it's brutal.
The acting in the film is so authentic and so close to home, this movie feels more like a documentary to me than fiction. Many families go through the same thing, perhaps not to the extreme that is required from a movie to attract an audience, but the drama and intensity are all there. As a matter of fact, I could argue that in a way it's worse since it lasts and continues into your teenage years and adulthood. These things shape you and your opinions of relationships forever.
As someone who grew up with parents fighting constantly to the point of a divorce, this was an odd healing experience. "Someone had the same life I had, but it ended up even worse," I told myself. And I don't even need to feel guilty since this is fiction; yet, it is so real I know the writers of this movie must have gone through the same things I did.
There is a point in this movie where one of the characters explains how deep desperation looks like, the kind that leads to a bottomless depression. I nodded in my seat and thought, I wish I could explain it this well. Thankfully, someone made this movie.
Be warned, if you have a past or familiarity with intense fighting and/or divorce (I want to say, who doesn't these days?), this movie will rip you apart. For me, this proved to be a healing experience, a confirmation of the choices my family made, and later I did, as an adult. The friend who watched it with me was not OK after this movie ended and needed to recover.
No One Will Save You, 2023 - ★★½
You know the taste of a well-done steak left on the grill a bit too long? They add more spices in, some more exotic than others, to make it interesting, but really what it does is to try to compensate for the somewhat burned flavor.
This is not a bad movie. I've seen some horrific movies, and not in the fun Halloween way. It's entertaining and good to watch with a friend - or a few even - with a drink, which is fine. It's fine.
It's just not the kind of movie that fucks with your head. It doesn't have the ability to do so. It starts with familiar tropes, and you can guess what happens quite easily all the way to the end.
To her defense, Dever delivers a good performance. I bet she'd have a couple of good things to say if only the movie would let her (the film is almost 100% speech-free, for "reasons.") the quality of the effects is also alright, but in this day and age when nearly every horny 20 year old can create deepfakes of their most disturbed fantasies, I don't think it's much of an achievement.
The main issue of this film is the plot. It's there, somewhere, a basic and familiar one we've seen before, and it could work well. The film's trying to do this little dance of "maybe it's all in her head?" But it's clumsy, and it gets stepped over by the special effects. Speaking of those - the aliens (it says there are aliens in the description, so I'm not spoiling anything, right?) are a bad joke of monsters you get in horror films. You can't tell if they're messing around or really are that dumb because if they are, how in the world (or Mars, or whatever) can they fly those spaceships?
You want a pizza night with a drink and a couple of friends? This is it. You want good psychological horror to keep you up at night, second-guessing your life? Move on, this ain't it.
Golda, 2023 - ★★★½
I read a review somewhere that Mirren can play many roles, but Israel's Golda Meir is not one of them. Bullshit.
Mirren is the gem of the movie. If you disconnect yourself from the history lesson angle and embrace the movie as a portrait of one of the strongest world leaders (say what you will, but she was the leader of a country during one of its worst wars), I think you'd appreciate how both women - the actress and the woman - mesh well together. It's the cast around Mirren (Heuberger specifically, as well as a couple of others) that don't rise to the occasion as I felt they should.
As an Israeli with an uncle who is a Yom Kippur war veteran and his big sister as my mother who lived through this war, I can tell you the movie doesn't stray much from facts. The yellings of the troops, the news blurbs, and even the curtain at Golda's apartment (my grandma had these) are real. Lots of details and effort were put into the movie to make sure it's as close to reality as possible.
I came out of the movie asking myself, who's this movie for? It's too real and too Israeli for the majority of the American public to relate to. It's too American and "Holywood" for Israelis to take it seriously. Perhaps the Jewish-American audience, who's looking for heroism from a passing era. Sad, but true. Golda is a p
Blade Runner, 1982 - ★★★★
I watched Blade Runner more than once, but this time, I did so after reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. To me, there's no question about it: the movie is much better. No, let me rephrase this. The film is on a different plane.
There's a moment early in the movie where Ford (Decker) walks into the police station to talk to his old boss, who sits in a booth in an otherwise large hall. The camera pans slowly from the heights of the ceiling, showing us a dissolute police station that looks more like a train terminal with rows of empty seats. At one point, it crosses through the ceiling of the smaller booth inside the hall; this is where I paused the film for a moment to admire the details. On the booth roof, among the debrief, there were pieces of facade from the walls next to something that looked like an old rake and a few more pieces of trash. A shot of perhaps 2 seconds showing us junk, nothing significant - and yet, so much attention to detail. Someone thought about this trash, and someone was creative about this trash. This movie goes above and beyond to give you details.
A rich world with future society lights and music aside for a moment (I could go on for an hour about these alone), we have to talk about the actors. There is, of course, Rutger Hauer as Roy Battey and the famous tears in the rain. But Harrison Ford and Sean Young come close second, even when they recite lines from the book that seem a bit out of place. The supporting cast provides additional gravity to the world (Edward James Olmos as Gaff is one of my favorites). And then there's the music, a rich soundtrack I could listen to on a long commute, humming along.
But what makes this movie a masterpiece is not all that there is there, lying in front of us. It's what it implies. Especially today, it brings up the topic of what it means to be a minority group and how, under a certain light, one group can be morally exterminated. It asks us what makes us human and has us watch tests trying to prove just that and (in light of the end of the film) fail spectacularly. It also gives us a vision toward a future, in my opinion, better than the one in the book (which seems to focus more on religion and its role in human life). A future where everyone's different, but everyone's the same. A depressing shadow of a world that was destroyed (was it the war mentioned in the book? An environmental catastrophe? Doesn't really matter) due to the apathy of its inhabitants.
I'm going to watch this one again.
Grumpy Old Men, 1993 - ★★★
I felt like I wanted to watch something lighter, and this was definitely it. It's the 90s through and through, with humor and the budding start of giving women a role that's going a bit beyond (but not enough) the constant cringy 80s roles. Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon are of different time periods, but that doesn't mean they can't deliver good comical relief today.
Joyland, 2022 - ★★★★
When this movie starts throwing punches, it doesn’t let go. Joyland has many layers that are both beautiful and terrible. It’s culturally refreshing, emotionally draining, romantically charming, gender and traditions devastating. It’s a milestone when you consider its Pakistani origins.
What I immediately liked the most about it was its slice-of-life manner of delivery. Nothing is fantastical. The actors are authentic and candid (especially Alina Khan and Rasti Farooq). You get a front-row sit into the intimate life of a family who could easily be your neighbors, sans the language and the country. The assumed culture is, surprisingly, too uncomfortably close to home.
Go in emotionally prepared and with a box of tissues nearby. This one’s gonna hurt.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, 2018 - ★★★
A collection of shorts by the Cohen brothers that takes place in their favorite time period. Some are golden nuggets, and some are just, well, ain't that good. All in all, it was fun to watch them. I don't think I can go wrong with the Cohen bros. Solid and fun acting, good storytelling, and symbolism you may or may not miss.