2f6o50

no odorama cards but still a work of art

Watched on Friday June 13, 2025.

This review may contain spoilers.

The abrupt scene where the guy opens his mail and finds out who his father is and then all his boys come out and hoot and holler oddly reminded me of that heart-rendingly tense scene in "Carandiru" where the queer couple receive the results of their HIV test. It is vaguely similar and yet so completely opposite.

It's your destiny to die insane.

Watched on Wednesday June 11, 2025.

Watched on Sunday June 8, 2025.

Watched on Saturday June 7, 2025.

stroszek bear (not really)

Watched on Saturday June 7, 2025.

Ultimately bleak and uneasy (and unresolved!) but the much longer depiction of the neighborhood at large is what really makes that climax work. You care about all these people, or at least understand where they're coming from. The scene where Sal tells Mookie he'll always have a place at his store, same as his sons, is something that really stuck out to me.

Watched on Thursday June 5, 2025.

Ray Liotta starts so pretty in this movie

By accident I have seen this again. Overstuffed to bursting and yet threadbare and obvious with a vat of heavy duty gold encrusted CGI grease smeared on everything. The color grading and near-constant ricochets of random noise in most scenes make me feel ill. I think I still don't like it.

gorgeous gnarly nonsense. I don't know how much plot I actually ed and understood but nevertheless almost all of the imagery on the island - like the freak in the cage, with a head covered in cotton, being fed timothy hay like a rabbit - has quickly established itself in my brain. I've been reading The Obscene Bird of Night slowly and this is as close to a film adaptation as we'll ever get.

Watched on Monday June 2, 2025.

not as brilliantly and histrionically overstimulating as The Devils, but still the kind of film I'd kidnap a theater's owner for if it meant I could see it on a big screen.

"we laughed as we roused the animal, and now it's devoured us"

Watched on Saturday May 31, 2025.

strange attempts at being cinematically artsy (strangely selected faux-Carpenter/quasi-Oneohtrix Point Never soundtrack, is it ironic?) that occasionally clash with Tim Robinson being very funny in the ways in which we are accustomed. very fun to see in the theater, I laughed at most of the jokes. kinda feels like the skit that never ends but not in the SNL "we have three jokes written down and we need to stretch them for the entire time slot" way. if I stopped to rewatch and really think about it, I might like it less but for now, it whips.

sparkly neon house of 1000 corpses/phantasm quasi-musical mutant. mostly kind of a "girls hang out" movie where null-budget horror things happen sometimes. two leads that are desperately fighting to out-sass each other. this isn't nutso or frenetic enough for what I think it needed to be, particularly when it wants to be more of a horror genre flick.
I wish the Demon not-HRT was funnier and not a sorta-throwaway detransition juice thing - demon cult HRT is a funny pulp premise not done justice by Doctor AGP Monologue. more cult mayhem and gay doctor satan injecting people full of flying ointment and less whatever it was the transphobic transvestite warlock was yelling about.

it would have benefitted from being recorded on film or shittier recording equipment - any kind of thrashed analog noise would benefit. it shows promise, though, and will I keep up with whatever Mackey releases next? yeah I just might.

a conveyance of fight scenes, cool music, and getting to watch Bruce Lee kick many dudes and run around with his shirt off. pretty good. My favorite moment is when Bruce Lee licks his blood off his chest for no reason. Thinking the villain seems to keep prosthetic claw hands around like fire extinguishers: break glass in case of fighter riot

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday May 13, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday May 13, 2025.

god damn I love the movies. Seeing it on the big screen in 35mm was such a good decision. I was transfixed. Love the story of this strappingly picaresque dumbass who's mostly good at fighting and picking the right time to run off. Things mostly happen to him, and he reacts. He's good at that. When he has to make decisions for himself, the life he thought he wanted falls apart. I adore the change in tone at the intermission. I love how agonizingly slow the duel near the end is. I expected neither the stately, tightly controlled pacing or how funny it was when it wanted to be.

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

pure delirium. when I was young I chopped off arms for free. a hard-earned one star

I've been thinking a lot lately about how cold, bitterly cold, this movie feels. Particularly the ending in the hurricane, in that desolate hinterland where there's never any refuge from the wind. Maybe it's nostalgia as the season slowly gets warmer.

Watched on Tuesday May 6, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 3, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 1, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 30, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 28, 2025.

"How bad can it get? The list is endless."

Worth seeking out if you if you like strange, fragmentary portraits of strange, fragmentary men and the far reaches of cartoonishly exaggerated masculinity; masculinity filtered through cultural effluvia and machismo to the breaking point. This is the place where kayfabe and message dissolve. There is no brow lower.
My favorite bit was the footage of the congressional hearing with the guy flatly reciting the Mentors' comically profane gonzo lyrics.

"I think I like you, Tita." [GIGANTIC ROBOT LASER BEAM OBLITERATES SCENIC CAFE] This has a real je ne sais quoi and some of the most impressive attention to detail I've ever seen cast to animated tits.

the audio in this movie is so distracting. almost every scene has the same kind of really loud ambient noise competing with the dialogue and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. this is the horseshoe theory of kino. vaguely Final Flesh-esque

watched with friends who were also hollering at it. I think it would be unsettling to watch alone

this gave me a headache

What caught my attention immediately this time was the disgustingly saccharine vaudeville tune the child-star Baby Jane Hudson sings and the "very beautiful, natural hair" dolls sold as commodities in the atrium. It occurred to me the children, unnoticed by history or by Baby Jane, who must have shaved their hair to make those commodities. The film doesn't waste time. And Jesus is it still harrowing.

this is a movie that's lodged itself in my brain for years, but I'm still never entirely sure what to make of it. I'm fascinated by the way that Walker is always at the eye of the storm, constantly shot at but never expressing any real concern, but we learn so little of what really makes this man tick. Walker is a mask, an effigy, hollow behind it. Worse, he seems to realize this.
But what the hell was it all for, anyway?

it must be so fun being an evil bandit wizard

"you'll have to stick this one out."

Watched on Tuesday April 22, 2025.

way too much setup, but I love the cenobites and the big scary hell mansion. I'd never break into a big scary hell mansion in baggy cargo pants though

Watched on Monday April 21, 2025.

James Gandolfini is a three-star general but I give him five stars out of five

hell yeah

an unorganized list of (at least a swathe of) my favorite films. I didn't go through and click watch on all of these because I've been watching movies longer than I've been on letterboxd

• Pictures of Ghosts
• Sans Soleil
• Escape from New York
• The People's Joker
• Night on Earth
• The Favourite
• Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
• Safe
• Bacurau
• Barry Lyndon

...plus 37 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

per the rules Carandiru can't go on this list (89k views at time of writing) but I'm putting it on anyway

• Stress Positions
• Shinjuku Boys
• Beautiful Thing
• Liquid Sky
• The Vourdalak
• 100 Boyfriends Mixtape (The Demo)
• Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701
• Siege
• Poison
• The Reflecting Skin

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.