Toronto. Hockey. Always the good stuff.

Throw that last shovelful on my face already.
 

This is like a shrunk down 8 1/2, if it was concerned with a few days in the life of a nobody mobster trying to figure life out after getting released from prison. It's a tiny bit of lightly comic perfection.
 

Last edited by crumbsroom (5/07/2024 8:29 pm)

It's all just so unbelievably weird, that I have to at least consider In Fabric as being Peter Strickland's best movie.

I know in all actuality, it's got to be Berberian. But In Fabric is just so funny and unsettling and unpredictable that it's almost just as hard to shake.
 

I have recently been plagued with feelings of wanting to revisit Amityville 2: The Possession.

I have experienced this a few times in the past and it always ends the same way.

Amityville 2: The Posession is a bad movie.

Let's see how long into this night I can go before I start trying to find a place where it's streaming.
 

Rock wrote:

I thought it was better than the first one by quite a bit.

The third one is super lame though.

The third one is terrible. I've been trying to recall if I saw that one in the theater, in 3D, when I was a kid and for the life of me I can't be sure. But even with the potential nostalgia of that, nah, awful. awful. awful.

I've never been convinced of the recent rechampioning of Amityville 2, similar perhaps to Nightmare on Elm Street 2.  When I finally watched AH2 about a decade ago, I wasn't very impressed, other than to say that, yes, it wasn't quite the complete shitshow as its reputation, and definitely better than 3 and arguably on par with the 'not-great-in-the-first-place' original.  Which is small praise.

But if anyone is curious for a counter argument, I guess you can try this on:




 

Rock wrote:

the first movie, which rarely gets scarier than sweaty James Brolin losing the money for the caterers.

The tighty whiteys was the most enduring trauma.

It's too sunny out right now for me to justify watching the entire 45–minute analysis, but the first 7 minutes made me laugh. Scenes that are supposed to occur in darkness are famously difficult to shoot because some lighting is always necessary (Fahrenheit 9/11 is the only movie I personally know of that tried a scene in complete darkness, and while the effect was tremendous, it didn't work in the theater because it resulted in audiences turning around in their seats to look up at the projection booth). The speaker in the video does pay lip service to this. The various contemporary techniques for shooting dark scenes took decades to develop, and certain cinematographers even made names for themselves as a result of having innovating new ways to depict darkness on film. 
Under such constraints, continuity often gets sacrificed. The hope is that audiences won't notice, and they usually don't. I don't have the wherewithal to create and post YouTube compilations, but if did, I could provide a long string of scenes from throughout film history with such lighting inconsistencies that go largely unnoticed by viewers.
The set of a scene shot in a studio can be cluttered enough, with DOPs yelling at audio techs to get their boom mics and cables out–of frame, blocking that requires actors to hit their marks with pinpoint precision in order to be lit properly, etc etc etc. A studio is typically several times the size of the actual set, providing plenty of room for all the stuff happening out–of frame, all those lights and crew and other equipment... and Amityville II, like its predecessor, was shot on–location in an actual house. That kind of shooting presents immense challenges because, to put it simply, the "fourth wall" really is there. Even if you drill holes and knock out a wall here or there, you're almost inevitably going to be working in tight spaces, so choices for where to place the camera, lights, crew, and everything else, are instantly limited by the structure of the house itself. The hope is that the audience, especially audiences buying tickets for Amityville II, will be too consumed by the action and suspense to register the inconsistencies.

Yet this "analysis" re–casts the lighting inconsistencies as "directorial technique." I wonder if the producers of this low–budget sequel (5 million, about half the average budget for a film in 1982) snicker at this. "Primary subliminal tool," indeed.

"Surrealism of the underlying metaphor!" Humph! Death's too good for them!

Surely, Silence of the Lambs, though heavily imitated since, has to go down as one of the most effective innovations of filming complete darkness.