Moving Pictures

Moana is good. Dunno if that's pixar but it is a computer cartoon majigger

Moana is core Disney, but yeah, it's great.

Inside Out is very good, as is Coco.

Inside Out is fine. Onward is really good. I've heard that Coco is incredible but I haven't seen it myself yet.

Incredibles 2 was good, not as good as the first one but it was always going to be a tough act to follow.

I watched a couple of movies recently, at opposite ends of the quality spectrum, although in some ways similarly entertaining.

Parasite is absolutely incredible, and I'm not going to tell you anything about it except to say if you haven't watched it, you owe it to yourself to do so.

Hollywood Cop is written and directed by Amir Shervan, the director of Samurai Cop. It's an absolute classic terrible movie. At one point, a police officer breaks off from a kidnapping investigation to mudwrestle two women for a bet, while the mother of the kidnapped child looks on. The hero of the film has a habit of trying to shoot bad guys who are running away carrying the child. The main villain points at the good guys and shouts "get them!" to a group of his henchmen, who immediately start running and shooting guns in completely random directions. The scene introducing the hero is utterly bizzare. He buys a hot dog, and then inexplicably tries to give it back to the vendor. Then he involves himself in some kind of emergency happening across the road. There are two cops on the scene, who are hanging around waiting for backup before tackling what they describe as a "rape and robbery in progress." In progress! There's then a baffling three-way chase, before the rape victim's husband grabs the rapist from behind. He has a knife to his throat, and goes to slit his throat, but for some reason the guy's whole head comes off and rolls away.

Here's the poster. It has quite the hair-raising tagline.

[Album] imgur.com

Were you… were you actually back in the 80s for a while there, felt?

What? Can you somehow see my clothes and hairstyle?

The fluorescent socks gave you away, tbh.

I watched Samurai Cop last year, knew about a sequel, but didn't know about Hollywood Cop

http://www.barharukiya.co.uk/you-know-the-code-of-the-bushida-samurai-cop/08/

It's on Amazon Prime I think. That or Netflix. But you know, content warning: they think rape is a selling point.

The awfulness of the attitudes tips over from horrifying to hilarious, similarly to the incompetence of the filmmaking and the bizarre logic of the plot. There are some jaw-dropping racist jokes as well. The black sidekick bursts into a sauna, and seeing another black man in there mistakes him for a drug dealer he arrested previously. The man angrily exclaims that he's not a drug dealer, he's an African prince. So we have a "they all look the same" joke, but they put it in the mouth of a black character in a shitty effort to get away with it.

To be clear, I don't find racism or rape funny, and I apologise for mentioning it so many times in these couple of posts! It can sometimes be informative and entertaining to watch terrible and deeply wrong movies like this though. But if a movie that plays the rape scene I mentioned earlier pretty much for laughs sounds like something you will find unpalatably offensive then, really, don't watch it!

On Inside Out: I thought it was bang average, but if you have kid/s then it should bring a tear to the eye or two.

…did you miss some posts, or are you talking about the racist, rapey cop movie?

EDIT: oh, okay. Clarified as I typed.

To be clear, I don't find racism or rape funny, and I apologise for mentioning it so many times in these couple of posts!

I've met felt in person more than once and I can assure he finds neither of these things funny.

He is racist, but he does it in a deadpan way.

…did you miss some posts, or are you talking about the racist, rapey cop movie?

I realised after I posted it was in response to Gar's post and looked a bit odd out of context…. Perhaps I shouldn't have edited it.

To be clear, I don't find racism or rape funny, and I apologise for mentioning it so many times in these couple of posts!

I've met felt in person more than once and I can assure he finds neither of these things funny.

He is racist, but he does it in a deadpan way.

Oh yeah, I'm deadly serious about it.

Greenland is absolute garbage. I think I enjoyed it.

Also enjoyed Spencer Confidential (even though the butchery of the books it was based on is almost alarming) which was also absolute garbage.

I have been asked by the other half if I can stop selecting films for us to watch.

i wathced that justice league snyder thing

fuck me what a tremendous waste of everything

i am poorer for having seen it

It seems to have been pretty divisive. I've seen some people on Twitter raving about it.

4 hours of Snyder seems to be too much Snyder. But I am morbidly curious to watch it all the same.

We watched the first hour so far. It's… dull. We were talking about it as it went, picking bits apart, though, and that was fairly entertaining.

I do like that it gives Steppenwolf a bit of character; a big issue with the Whedon/Theatrical Cut was that his motivation was "Do Thing Because Reasons", and while I don't like that he's a whinging little lapdog, I at least now understand what the fuck he's doing on earth, and why.

I don't like anything else.

The aspect ratio seems like an afterthought - several shots just look really badly-composed, like they were doing their best cropping a wider frame. And the cinematography in general is bad. The composite work is truly dire, but then you have sweeping camera shots of Bruce Wayne, wearing black, leading a black horse over black volcanic soil, and it's nearly impossible to pull him out. Worse, he's walking the only narrow strip of the stuff - the entire rest of the shot is fucking snow.

Everything takes too long. It has the least exciting battle scenes I've seen since… maybe ever, every other shot in slo-mo, with acres of extremely ropey CGI extras battering each other as major characters just stand gawping three feet away, magically unharmed because plot.

A ton of stuff could have still been cut and you'd have lost nothing but run time. The singing villagers. Diana's Tomb Raider moment. A random closeup of a Daily Planet headline about a bank hiring a new architect? Aquaman saving a guy from a sinking boat, having a drink, and then taking his shirt off for no reason we could discern (other than the fact it's Jason Momoa).

A bunch of other bits feel like they're in the wrong order, especially character introductions - Cyborg appears right at the start of the movie in full view, but then the next time we see him, he's being obscured and hidden like his whole deal is a mystery.

"Mother Boxes" is still just the stupidest fucking name.

Spoiler - click to showDarkseidlooks like shit. Just fucking atrocious. AndSpoiler - click to showentirely nonthreatening, too; just turns up to get his ass kicked and run away. Which also undercuts Steppenwolf, who's not even as powerful, and who just called up Darkseid's secretary to beg to be allowed home.

So, in summary, all it really seems to have added so far is pacing issues? It has no fewer problems - just slightly different ones.

Another ~90 minutes or so done last night. It got less dull - the characters actually started interacting with the plot, for one - but exponentially more stupid, asSpoiler - click to showthe villain discovered the existence of a second doomsday device on Earth, left there by his own boss, who apparently then immediately forgot it was there. That's right, the interdimensional god-king conqueror of worlds couldn't remember the location of his only defeat in history.

Spoiler - click to showEven better, this second doomsday device somehow manages to have an even worse name than "mother box" - The Anti-Life Equation - and it's not just a macguffin that Darkseid (sic) dripped while fleeing, but a massive glowing sigil that he himself carved into the surface of the planet. Couldn't he just…do it again?

Anyway, it's D&D tonight, so maybe we'll finish it tomorrow.

And done.

It's not a good movie. But the last hour (bar the epilogue, which can do one) is fairly entertaining. I think that with a vicuous edit of the first two-thirds, you could probably assemble something half decent out of it, but overall the biggest problems are that it's just too self-indulgent and self-important.

I'd cut Spoiler - click to showMartian Manhunterentirely, though, that shit goes nowhere.

I'm unsure about this – it's maybe a little self-aware? – but I'm very glad to see Idris Elba having some fun. He's giving some very big The Losers vibes in this trailer, which in my book is a very good thing.

We're continuing with DC movies for some reason, and watched the first half of Aquaman last night. It's a monumentally stupid film that ridiculously overcomplicates its two-line plot (get trident, stop war) with various factions, vendettas, and betrayals, but it's having such a great time with itself that it's hard not to be entertained. I do wish they were capable of keeping the camera still in action beats, though; or maybe the intent was to simulate seasickness..?

My favourite thing about Aquaman is how it very obviously gets bored with its own dialogue and exposition scenes, and – every time – interrupts them with someone literally exploding though a wall.

I knew that going in, and it's still hilarious.

Another DC movie down (why do I keep doing this to myself?):
Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

It's… fine? It's anarchic and colorful, and has a ton of personality, just… not a personality I particularly gelled with.

Harley isn't a good fit for a lead, and it's not enough of an ensemble piece to paper over those cracks, even as it hops between subplots on its way to the inevitable team-up; Huntress, in particular, has very little to do beyond being the butt of some gags. But those gags - a lot of the gags, in fact - are solid, and although Ewan McGregor's accent is awful, the whole fragile narcissist performance is pretty good.

It's solidly put together, and probably the best of the recent DC movies, it's just not something that got its hooks into me.

It's a bit of a mess. I thought it had a few good things about it but felt it was trying so fucking hard that after a while you just have to exhaustedly let it wash over you. But compared to most of the DC movies it had a certain something to it and was at least in the not-absolute-shit category.

My favorite thing about it, which of course I forgot to mention, is Harley's little bits of psychoanalysis scattered throughout when someone gets up in her face. It's the only time I can ever remember her being a psychologist actually coming up as something other than backstory.

Harley the character is definitely good, otherwise the film is a bit of a mess. There was a lot of zero threat action. The women are all basically indestructible cartoon characters while everyone else is apparently a psychopath.

They could have done something cool with the fact that everyone in Gotham is insane which means that basically makes a psychiatrist like Harley a superhero, only she does her therapy with a baseball bat because she's outnumbered and it's quicker.

Without its effects, King Kong (1933) would be an irredeemable disaster of a movie, an embarrassing relic of misogyny and racism best forgotten. The film doesn't give a tenth of a fuck about any of its characters, but the casual hostility it displays for its female lead – both in subtext and by having men dismiss her to her face – seems like it should be a bigger part of the conversation about this film.

Apologising for any trouble she might have caused on board the ship, her eventual romantic interest co-star reassures her, "women can't help being a bother". She even gets the final blame for the Kong's rampage through New York and his death: the guy who led the expedition, captured Kong and brought him back as a get-rich-quick scheme, then led the calls for bringing in planes to shoot the monkey off the Empire State Building, sombrely intones the movie's closing line: "it was Beauty that killed the Beast".

Charley, the Chinese ship's cook, is an especially horrendous racial charicature; I can't decide if it's more or less offensive that they hired a Chinese actor to deliver these stumbling, grammatically-suspect lines. I think he gets to say three verbs in total, and not one of them is conjugated.

But those effects are genuinely jaw-dropping. It took me more than one sitting to finish the film because of how often I had to pause, rewind and rewatch shots, trying to see the seams and figure out how the living hell they managed to do this stuff on 1933, before the invention of chromakey, let alone CGI. It's easy to see how Willis O'Brien's work inspired so many others, from Ray Harryhausen to Eiji Tsuburaya to Steven Spielberg.

I can't really recommend that anybody watches the full thing, because there is just so much unpleasantness in the characters and dialogue, but if you manage to find just the effects shots on YouTube or something, give them a watch.

I like the more recent Kong that thinks it's an Apocalypse Now sequel.

I know I've seen the 1976 version with Jeff Bridges at some stage, but it was easily 20 years ago or more so I don't remember much of it apart from the Twin Towers being a major plot point. I have a feeling it was probably less outright problematic and nihilistic than the original, but maybe that's just wishful thinking.

Still never watched the 2005 Peter Jackson one, but at this point my movie-watching habits are going to get me there sooner or later.

Kong: Skull Island was pretty great, though. Pretty lightweight in a lot of ways despite its attempts at Vietnam War allegory, but the design of the skull crawlers alone makes it worth seeing. It's also got a much higher number of MCU actors in it than I'd initially registered, though that's as much a function of how many of those there are than any kind of comment on Skull Island.

Still never watched the 2005 Peter Jackson one, but at this point my movie-watching habits are going to get me there sooner or later.

It's really, really long, and really really dull. Jack Black puts in a decent performance, but I struggle to remember much else about it except that I was bored most of the time.

It's really, really long, and really really dull.

A Peter Jackson movie? No way.

Yeah, but this was the first thing he made after Lord of the Rings, so the studio gave him as much money as he wanted and didn't ask questions.

They should have asked some questions.

I seem to recall the CGI wasn't even that convincing in 2005, and they literally gave the fucking thing away with every HD-DVD drive when those launched.

Admittedly it's a long time since I saw it, and it's probably not nearly as bad as any of the Hobbit movies.

Continuing my delve into American giant monster movies from the first half of the 20th century, today I watched The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms from 1953 – Ray Harryhausen's first credit as a technical effects creator.

With a story charitably credited to Ray Bradbury (the producers bought the rights to one of his short stories to avoid comparisons with certain plot elements), the movie is about a giant prehistoric animal – the fictional dinosaur rhedosaurus – awoken by a nuclear bomb test. After wrecking a few ships on the way, it arrives in New York, where it causes some havoc and is ultimately (spoilers) killed by a sniper with a radioactive isotope bullet.

While the effects aren't as immediately impressive as King Kong, with fewer rear-projection and composite shots, the quality of the stop-motion animation is significantly higher, making the rhedosaurus much more lifelike and believable in its movements. It's also much less hostile to its female lead character – she's even the driving force of the plot on a couple of occasions – and not as lazily racist (though it doesn't have any non-white actors at all).

Ray Harryhausen harboured a grudge against Toho for decades, claiming that they'd ripped his movie off when they made Godzilla (an allegation not dispelled by its pre-production title, The Giant Monster from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea), though the similarities are ultimately pretty surface-level and the tone of Toho's horror-adjacent allegory is completely different from the adventure B-movie here.

On the whole, The Beast is a pretty fun movie; the dialogue is smart, and the characters are broadly likeable (even if only one of them gets a character arc). The ending could really use a moment of reflection or decompression – THE END comes up on the screen seconds (at most) after the monster breathes its last – but maybe that's too much to ask for an American disaster movie kicked off by a nuclear bomb this early in the atomic age.

Wait a minute, are you saying that Ray Bradbury created Godzilla!?

Harryhausen certainly thought so.

The monster as described in the Bradbury story – The Fog Horn, if you want to look up the whole thing – sounds more like a plesiosaur than the bipedal design for Godzilla, or even the four-legged design Harryhausen used for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms .

And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-colored, with immense eyes, and then a neck. And then—not a body—but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water on a slender and beautiful dark neck. Only then did the body, like a slender little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.

Sorry Ray, Nessie isn't scary.

Based on the story, it is a little scary when it shows up in the middle of the night looking to fuck your lighthouse and won't take "no" for an answer.

Does it have a nuclear ray breath weapon?

It’s the Lighthouse Fucker From 20,000 Fathoms, what more do you need?!

I guess that is a lot of phallic imagery…

Does it have a nuclear ray breath weapon?

Not that's mentioned in the story. The rhedosaurus from the movie doesn't either; it's just a regular dinosaur.

The rest of the world didn't have quite the same perspective of the bomb and radiation that the Japanese did, so Godzilla (the monster) was much more of an analogue for the unpredictable and unstoppable dangers of nuclear weapons than anything that came before (or, really, since).

Continuing my inexplicable journey through old monster movies, tonight I watched 1922's Nosferatu at (or, more accurately, against) the recommendation of a friend.

It's… hard to critique. The story is nonsense, the characters are boring, the pacing is bad, the performances are stage-play-level overacting and the approach to vampire mythology is slap-dash. There are some great individual shots (particularly some of the on-location landscape stuff, which makes amazing use of contrasting shadows, and one very dynamic moving shot of a ship on the sea), but it's dull for most of its glacial 88-minute runtime.

I'm not overly familiar with other films of the era, though – maybe it's doing more groundbreaking stuff than I'm giving it credit for. I don't think I'd recommend it, though.

We watched that a long time ago, as part of a vampire-movie binge related to one of Sarah's university projects. My memory is that it's fucking awful; I'd recommend avoiding it.

I'd say "fucking awful" is a bit harsh; it's definitely aged badly and doesn't hold up to modern movies – but then again, it's a hundred years old so I wasn't really expecting it to.

We watched a lot of bad vampire movies (not that I'm sure there's ever been a good one), so the general aura of dull might have unfairly coloured my memory; I do remember some good shots, but most of those come up on a Google image search.