Amph What was the last movie you saw?

You son of a bitch! I want that RAD vhs tape!

 

To paraquote Cru Jones "It's gonna take a radical miracle to get that tape."

That was a Goodwill find. I nearly yelped when I saw it.

 

Someone sent you an angel.

 

Yeah, they're very crappy analog formats. Not comparable to vinyl at all.

 

As Above So Below

 

Demon Strike Holy Guacamole...probably the strangest Kung Fu film I've seen and definitely boasting the most wonky villain this side of Lo Pan. I will definitely watch this again for the great martial arts moments including the opening scene, but the evil taoist priest gives Lo Pan a serious run for his black magic renminbi.

 

Ex Machina. This is the first 2015 movie I've gone to see. Very interesting A.I. movie that in a summary could easily look like other movies, but there's more to it than that. I wonder what Stanley Kubrick would think of this. I liked the Willy Wonka-esque angle, with a privacy-exploiting internet mogul, and I applaud any filmmaker who aims to put in an awesome dance scene. Another pivotal moment was just perfect, like key parts of a couple of movies I won't name, because like in those movies, it accurately shows what They do. Vague, yes I know.
Sidenote: why do people go to the movies? A few minutes after the movie started, a guy got up and got something to drink. In the middle of the movie, a guy walked in like he needed a place to eat popcorn, ate the popcorn while sitting there, and then left to never return. Why? When I'm sitting there, aside from the movie itself, my primary concern is not making noise and disturbing people. I don't much my popcorn, I don't let my seat flop around, and I certainly don't make ice noisily go up and down the cup (I don't drink stuff anyway.) Most people have no awareness of their surroundings at all.

These "hipsters" in Rewind This! weren't really speaking of videotape as having better quality in the same way people harp about vinyl records. There was more to their fandom of videotape than just nostalgia. All seemed to agree that the modern video age is more convenient and the quality is superior. These people just haven't thrown their stuff away just because of a new format and maintain a connection to it. One guy even remarked how he thought the unnatural scan camera movement (of pan-and-scan) was kind of neat and something that is embedded in his memories of watching certain movies because he saw them on videotape. That's understandable. I still have a VCR that I bought in 2005, disconnected, because I see no reason not to have one. I still have a Betamax and stuff I recorded on Beta tapes.

 

I bet he'd think "You know I directed 15 other works, right? I was more into lighting work than robots. Nobody appreciates Barry Lyndon even though I've been dead for nearly two decades, that's a damn shame."

 

I was thinking in regards to his plans to make A.I., and actually he was into robots because early on he wanted to actually have a working robot in the movie. There are many A.I. stories. Would the story of David and Teddy and mommy and Blue Fairy in A.I. have been shelved to make something more like this? That's what I was getting at.

 

AI was not his only unfinished project at the time of his death, it's just the one that was furthest along. But fair enough, I understand your point now.

 

And that means he wouldn't even think about one of those unfinished projects? How was I even implying that he wouldn't have thought about anything else by Kubrick coming to mind when watching a particular movie of slightly similar subject matter?

 

I guess I just naturally assumed that you weren't wondering how Ex Machina would influence his planned biopic about Napoleon.

 

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

 

I have a frigging blu-ray of Barry Lyndon on my shelf and it's been there for months now and I just still haven't watched it.

 

I loooove the soundtrack to Barry Lyndon so frigging much.

 

Double

 

Re VHS discussion

Don't get me wrong I don't have any pretenses of arguing about the quality of the VHS format. They look and sound like garbage a lot of the time. If I truly love a movie I have to own it on Blu-Ray before anything else. VHS collecting is merely a fun and fairly inexpensive hobby.

But what can I say I'm a sucker for nostalgia. I'm still a video store hold out. I go to the only game left in town. It may not be rational but VHS and the video store cemented me as a lover of movies.

Rogue1-and-a-half. Let me know how that Lyndon blu-ray is. It's one I've been very tempted to pick up.

 

Chernobyl Diaries

 

I Come In Peace [aka Dark Angel] (1990) - Hollywood briefly tried to turn Dolph Lundgren into the next Arnold or Sly after his breakout role in Rocky IV, but sadly it just never happened and he was soon relegated to straight-to-video land. It's a shame really, because though he lacks Arnold's natural charisma, he's certainly got more range than Steven Segal, a contemporary whose career did take off.

I come In Peace (known everywhere outside of North America as Dark Angel for some odd reason) is easily Dolph's best feature film (as the lead). It's a sci-fi buddy cop movie with a premise that falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny, but Lundgren and co-star Brian Benben have good chemistry and the script is occasionally witty.

And because it's the 80s (well, 1990), what are the odds that it ends with a joke/freeze frame/feel good rock song?



'bout a %100

 

The Warriors

 

Yeah, it was really funny. God, when Johnny laughed at that story about Mark's friend being beaten so badly she was put in the hospital. Just wow.


Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) – Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu



I’d been looking forward to this movie for a year or so when I finally got around to seeing it and it didn’t disappoint. Its tale of an aging, world-weary actor searching for personal redemption, battling creative short-comings and losing his grip on reality is a real masterpiece. The script is smart, witty and sincere in all the right ways; it manages to be both a philosophical treatise on art and a gripping story drenched in real human emotions. And Inarritu’s direction is breathtaking, almost the entire film being edited into one long continuous take. Inarritu’s eye takes us through the bowels of the theater where most of the action takes place until we feel that we know it as well as the characters. And speaking of those characters, what a load of performances. Keaton’s performance is his best, a desperate, vulnerable performance that anchors the film. Emma Stone transcends “likable, charismatic presence” at last to give a genuinely great performance, her first by my lights, and I hope this signals a new phase of her career. Edward Norton is better than he’s been in a decade or more I’d say as brilliant, but difficult actor Mike Shiner. The film is full of moments that have remained fixed in my memory ever since I saw the film, moments both fantastic and real. This is a wonderful, brilliant masterpiece. A worthy Best Picture winner. A real must see. 4 stars.

tl;dr – boasting a host of brilliant performances, a smart and evocative script and eye-poppingly beautiful direction, Birdman is nothing short of a genuine classic. 4 stars.

More Movie Reviews!

 

Ex Machina. Brilliant piece of sci-fi, I was absolutely enthralled from start to finish. Oscar Isaac is one of the best in the business, and keep an eye on Alicia Vikander. She steals it.

 

Netflix! Why you so slow??

 

If you want to feel old, watch a documentary on Netflix called Beyond Clueless. Throughout the early '90s, with nostalgia for '80s films I wondered why there weren't anymore teen movies and then there was the mid-'90s explosion leading to saturation that included new music and MTV's generational shift. I quickly grew to loathe and avoid those movies with their new crop of ubiquitous faces and watching them in a sort of documentary about the movies with their actors now twenty to ten years old feels like I'm in a weird future watching a time that seemed to have just happened. I stopped watching this Fairuza Balk-narrated movie less than twenty minutes in.

 

the avengers age of ultron. i don't know why it is that i roll my eyes so hard at what seems like every single moment of these films. at every overly earnest interaction between these characters, at every formulaic motivational speech, at every flippant one-liner injected at just the right moment to remind you that no one is really taking this that seriously, at every impressive cartoon that represents masterful digital artistry yet fails to maintain a grounding connection to the world of the film. i want to like these films. like many, marvel comics were one of my favorite things as a kid. i'm not fighting liking them, i'm trying to let it happen. but i just find myself laughing at the absurdity of the whole affair. new characters are introduced but none are even developed, they are just thrust into the swirling, exploding, rapidly disintegrating constant action sequence. the juxtaposition between that and a quiet moment between hawkeye and his wife is just too strong and i can't ever ground myself in this universe that they are trying to create. it's like i'm constantly looking at the wizard behind the curtain.

i think maybe what it boils down to is a) i'm (unfortunately) a lot more critical than i was when i was a kid and b) turning these comic books into good movies is just really difficult. i think it's easier with origin films and i tend to favor those. the first iron man and captain america films were both really fun, and i didn't feel like they could have been written by a moderately advanced computer or a raccoon with a stack of flash cards that had like twenty ideas written on them. for me i could always enjoy a comic book if the art was good and the writing was okay. great writing was a bonus, but not necessary. i feel like the films are sort of trying to get by with that same formula but the writing is much more important in this medium. making the same movie again and again and throwing some extra stuff on top of it isn't enough for me, sadly.