Movies
A Man Called Otto, 2022 - ★★★
A tested and proven formula, the other movie that comes to mind immediately for me is Gran Torino. Tom Hanks pulls off a more likable human being than Clint Eastwood, which is part of the point. Hank's Anderson is also less realistic than Eastwood's Kowalski, which is (maybe) also part of the point: grumpy old men don't usually accept people as they are (Anderson), but how they seem (Kowalski) - at least at first.
Still, it's good to see how movies change to adopt our reality as it is, with our neighbors being of every background, gender, and ethnicity. Or maybe it's just the New Yorker in me speaking.
A film full of symbolism, from big hearts to loyalty to principles (and where these principles get you in life), this movie was mostly entertaining, not educating.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964 - ★★★★
I'm sorry I haven't watched this sooner. A masterful Satire, frighteningly still related today almost as it was in the 1960s. This movie should go on the "need to watch" list of those who, unfortunately, will never watch it or will miss the message altogether.
The drumroll of the bomb run is so catchy I've made a phone ring out of it, hopefully to be listened to by other passengers on a subway car one day as a reminder.
Tetris, 2023 - ★★★½
This movie surprised me for the better. I thought this was going to be a flashy movie about a classic video game - which it is - but there's more. Egerton (Henk Rogers) delivers a good act as the only un-crooked businessman around in this sophisticated spy story thriller. The art direction is excellent, with a few cherries on the top at well-orchestrated moments. A typical Hollywood movie with smarty-pants glasses, this delivered entertainment in abundance.
The Thing, 2011 - ★★★
I'm not sure I watched The Thing, or I don't remember if I did, but this movie makes me want to watch the original. The story is not too unique, but the execution kept me guessing and entertained. This is a good movie to watch with friends while eating popcorn. Don't eat meat though; it might come back up.
Knives Out, 2019 - ★★★
An entertaining watch with smart kind of fun. There aren't enough mystery movies, and this one is built with care and skill. Definitely watch if you like detective movies. It goes a bit further and shines on immigrants with a positive light, yet another thing we don't see enough in movies. I will watch this one again.
Liquid Sky, 1982 - ★★★★
I'd like to say this movie is before its time, but it's not. The issues it raises were present in the 80s as well as in the 1800s. We just take more notice now.
Liquid Sky is not easy to watch. It's an explosive, colorful, emotional,l drug-influenced, NYC-punk, alien, in-your-face, weird sort of a thing, and it gives zero fucks about it. Which is exactly how it should be.
I'd stop here and say good job, but the movie went further and made me question my values, past and present. It grabbed me by the throat and forced me to look. I'm glad I did.
Leviathan, 1989 - ★★
Your typical 90s suspense flick with all the clichés. I enjoyed the story, and the effects are nice. It makes you appreciate the stunts department before we had AI integrated into everything.
We have come a long way since the days of women being sexy meat sacks that always need rescuing. It's good to watch one of these movies to remind you why this was a problem. It made me cringe more than once.
Think Aliens underwater without Susan Weaver to kick ass.
The Beast, 1975 - ★★★½
Ok, let's get this out of the way first. Yes, there's horse dick in this movie. Lots and lots of it. So if you have a problem with horse dick, this is not the movie for you.
As a movie, it's OK. It gets a 7 out of 10. The story is not revolutionary, and the effects didn't exactly age well. Still, I found that it was well performed. It tells the familiar story (all men are sexual beasts) but it turns it around, with women beating men in their own game.
This is an erotic movie from the 70s which you won't find on any streaming services today. The question to ask yourself is not if you're OK with the sort of taboo the movie shows, but why you no longer have the option to wonder about this.
Neptune Frost, 2021 - ★★
I gave this movie about half an hour before giving up. A cloud of buzzwords in different languages thrown into trippy song and beautiful costumes. There's no plot here, just floating ideas.
Mousa, 2021 - ★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
Mousa's has a problem. Its main actor, Karim Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, is trapped in a crappy movie. Such a waste.
The settings of the story are not too bad: a gifted but socially-awkward challenged electrical engineer has a tough life at the university. He lives alone with his father and has an interesting relationship going on between them. Yehia (Karim) has a possible love interest(s) (it's not obvious with Yehia's shy approach, which makes things more interesting), and as he tries to maneuver those with the guidance of his sympathetic father, things go bad.
Unfortunately, things go bad not just as part of the plot, but also for the whole movie, which flatlines to a dumb terminator-turned-a-good-guy superhero flick. (Spoilers alert)
The bad guys show up for some vague reason, steal money and watches (the father was a watchmaker), and run, let the father die in a fire. Yehia, paralyzed in fear, has to watch his father die. He survives the fire and comes back, sells the house, and decides to live in the lab (the "hut"), and build a termin... sorry, a remotely-controlled robot who will avenge his father's death.
It doesn't take long before his engineer-woman friend shows up. She hacked Yehia's computers and knows his secret, but is somehow too dumb to figure out how to fix her car. She convinces Yehiya to go beyond simple revenge for his father into a full vigilante and go after the bad guys. There's a professor at the university who has some jealousy issues with Yehia also. I'm pretty sure he will become the nemesis, but I won't know because I stopped watching after the second skirmish between the term...err, robot, and the bad guys.
The robot animations are bad. Not awful, but seem to be a couple of years behind. I'm sure the producers don't have the budget Hollywood movies do, but I've seen better animations made in Blender by college students in their free time. That, however, I can forgive.
What I'm grumpy about is the waste of talent and story. I'mYou have a good actor who plays the role beautifully. The character is smart and capable. There's also a gifted woman who happens to be a hacker. Why not use that raw brain power on the bad guys? Do some more flashy matrix-rip-off hacking? Why not develop on the complex relationships Yehia has with his peers? Maybe give the father more of a role somehow? Anything is better than the bad guys. They are so flat and boring, evil robots would have more personality.
Director [[https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5394027/][Peter Mimi]] is rushing to get to the juicy action part and leave the "boring" introduction as soon as possible. The problem is that the juice reeks of rip-offs and cheap effects with zero depth. The only good part is the rushed introduction.
Too bad.
Oblivion, 2013 - ★★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
A bit of the Matrix thrown into a cheesy heroic story about freedom. Good for a chill night for easy viewing, don't expect anything special.
The twist in this movie is not really a twist, because by this point we're used to it, like turning around full 360. Bla bla aliens enslave humans, bla bla brain washing humans, bla bla somehow humans' brain can't be brain washed completely, bla bla true love will unlock everything, etc etc.
Left unexplained: why do such advanced aliens need humans to fix their own machines? Why keep any humans alive? What's the point?
Cool tech, cool toys, nice action, awesome drone noises. Tom Cruise with his Top Gun sunglasses is still flying like a bat from hell.
The Mist, 2007 - ★★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
This was an OK movie. I enjoyed it. It was good enough to hold my interest (which is not easy to do).
Stephen King can build believable characters and Frank Darabont does a good job following up on that.
First, a few trigger warnings. If you have issues with gore horror, this might be a problem here, though it's far from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The religious zealots are more of a problem if you have issues with that. Unfortunately, it's also believable: all you need to do is to read the news. People kill in the name of God for much less than being threatened by the supernatural.
The movie builds toward the climax nicely, and you get the chance to get up close and personal with the characters. The feelings of dread and panic are believable. There's a bit of a cross into the cliche with some military experiment gone wrong and creatures crossing from another dimension. This is not a huge spoiler, because the origin of the horrors in the movie is of little importance. Way more important is what the people do to survive and how they cope (or don't cope) with the monstrosities. This is the beef of the movie, and King drives it home well.
I'm a bit angry with the ending (Spoiler alert! stop here!!).
It doesn't end well, and I don't like how fast David (Thomas Jane) gave up on everybody, including his son. He decided that, nope, that's it, time to commit group suicide and give up. It feels pushed. King wanted to show us that real hell is making decisions, but this last one doesn't make sense with the rest of the movie. Oh well, it was still fun.
The Colony, 2021 - ★★★
I started watching yesterday, got bored, started watching again today, got bored again, decided it's enough for now.
The Colony starts OK. Earth is kaput, and the rich humans settled in a different remote place, where they discovered they can't reproduce. Desperate for the survival of the human race, they return to earth to see if they can restart.
But it's too narrow, and too much "been there, done that" to care. It feels like a Children of Men mixed with Mad Max, and it fails at both. Blake, played by Nora Arnezeder, crash-lands on earth with her co-pilot Tucker. It seems like Earth is hostile, with badass mutants and radiation, and the pair worries about that - at start - but we soon learn Earth is actually fine, the humans survived, and decided to capture them both, because you know, humans.
We learn that Tucker is Blake's 80-percent fertile match, which probably means that if everything is OK the two can bone and have kids. hoary! Blake is captured, and she learns that she's fertile because she has a period again out of nowhere, and it's time to contact back home to let them know she's ready to pop out kids, so please come and join her, start bone and making babies.
The story around that doesn't fully pick up. Instead of checking out what happened with Earth, the creatures, the sea, the rain, the movie starts focusing on the petty war between the locals and those who crash-landed before, in some sort of a fight about mother earth against evil technology and rich people. I can smell and see this miles away and with every second movie beating the same drums, I yawned away and went to watch something else.
Good start, but this movie is too scared to pick up on what could be more interesting: what's wrong with earth and how to save it. Instead, it's the old good guys against bad guys.
Belladonna of Sadness, 1973 - ★★★ (contains spoilers)
This review may contain spoilers.
This movie is not fully animated. At least not in the traditional sense. Most of the motion in the movie consists of the camera panning over long strips of paper showing the progression of the story from right to left. This is not to say there is a complete lack of animation. There's enough of that, and though basic, it fits in its elementary - and at times primal - methodology. You'll need to watch this one with an open mind and a healthy dose of patience.
This mechanism is important to how the movie delivers the story. It allows a gradual change in the tone and mood of what's going on. In a certain scene, for example, a crowd of people seems content, but as the scene goes on, the faces shift, the colors darken, and an angry mob emerges. This kind of transition is often reinforced with sounds and colors, another important element of storytelling. The red of passion and violence (of which there is a lot), the pink of beauty, the green-yellow of evil and sickness, and even the black of nothingness for a pause.
I mentioned passion and violence. This movie swims in those. Nudity is not hidden nor implied. drawings of breasts, vulvas, and penes dance on the screen while orgies of all genders and even a couple of animals blend into violent rivers or red. The cliche elements are here: sex is evil (the devil is shaped like a large penis); pleasure is sin; women corrupt. It's all there and might rub certain folks the wrong way. This is also a good point to mention that rape is a part of this movie. If this is a hard line for you in movie watching, I'd sit this one out.
But this movie doesn't dwell on cliches, and just as I was about to roll my eyes, the movie ask something I didn't see coming.
"Who says anger and hatred are ugly," the devil asks Jeanne after she sold her soul to him. The scene is painted with colorful butterflies, while soft bells chime in the background. Jeane lays naked after, having an orgasm of a lifetime. Can such a thing be fundamentally evil? And if not, are we evil for teaching it is? It's an uncomfortable question to ask, and I was happy to see that not only the film didn't shy away from it, but chose it as a focal point. There is no peace without war, and there's no haven without hell.
The movie draws a direct connection to women in the French Revolution, not too long after they were considered to be witches. The fear of men of women is everywhere in this film. There's a woman who wants to have sex with her husband more often but knows contraception is against god. they are too poor to afford to have more kids. She decides to use contraceptives anyway (a gift from Jeanne, who is called a witch at this point) and finds happiness not just for her husband but for herself.
It's not a coincidence that at the end, when the "witch" Jeanne is burned at the stake, it's not a stake at all: it's a cross. She suffered continuously by the hand of the people she worked hard to serve and help with the aid of the devil. These were the same folks who stood silent while she was burned alive.
An interesting question is not "was this woman evil," but the underlying one: is the devil, who helped the woman and through the abilities, he gave her helped the people, evil, or is it god, who's teachings caused such an artifact of beauty good will be destroyed? Are we born into sin, or are the teachings of the priests the ones who turn us into monsters?
There was nothing evil about Jeanne: not at the beginning of the movie and not at the end. Even when she thirsts for revenge and goes after the people, perhaps blamed for the Black Death in the film, one has to recall the nightmare she spent her waking life living. Why wouldn't she want revenge? Wouldn't we? Don't we?