Dildo Heaven
Angel Terminators 2
Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero

Last edited by Rock (9/05/2022 6:28 pm)

Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudovic Reels

A few more reviews from the last week or so

Dark Paradise
Desert Fury
Schoolgirl Hitchhikers
Walker
The Escapees
Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman
Goodbye Emmanuelle

Hold on, I think you can click through to the reviews from here:

https://letterboxd.com/the_rock/list/tiff-2022/detail/

It's just in order of watched. Pacifiction was my favourite, so I'll link to it separately:

https://letterboxd.com/the_rock/film/pacifiction/
 

Straight to Hell
Suburban Dykes

Steller non-linear sorta biography of American sex, showbiz and secrets, fracking the psychic iconography of one of the more purple veins of the sexual revolution and tapping deep into the natal coil of needs and desires.  This is what the advertising media did to Marilyn Monroe in the 50s, commodifying her fantasy into gross domestic product, and Norma Jean complied because her father was absent and her mother was hateful.  Mythical stuff that resembles the envies and resentments of all the great Freudian complexes, the dust with which stars and dreams are made of.  This is a major motion picture that has razor veneers behind the luscious lips and I enjoyed every 166 minutes of it.  Now I understand that the film is based on a novel, rather than a proper biography, and I couldn't help but notice that all of the obvious participants remain unnamed ("Mr. Z", "Ex-Athlete", "The Playwrite", "The President", etc), and this isn't so much a spoiler than a tease but I doubt the Kennedys will be giving any thumbs up here.  Long time coming for director Andrew Dominik, another titanic achievement, and I'm going to go ahead and put a dollar on Armas as this year's best actress winner.  Looks like it's got a 48% on the Tomatometer, which is the sweet spot where all of the critics show why they still have student debt.

9.5/10


 

crumbsroom wrote:

You'd be wise to look up Mad God. I imagine it's a Shudder exclusive at the moment, so maybe not hard to come by, but it's a full length stop-motion animated film that clearly just drives itself deep into the murky and goopy subconscious of its creator. Sure to become an absolute weirdo classic, especially considering it apparently drove its creator, Phil TIppet, into a psychiatric ward. There are a few moments where the budget seemingly ran out and they have to use not so great methods to finish scenes, but overlooking all of this, it's just about perfect for my sensibilities.
 

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I rented it on Amazon last night. My reaction:
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That's more–or–less all I can say. All the blurbs are true. I still have access to it for the next 28 hours or so. 

It was released to the general public in June '22 but premiered in a couple of festivals last year and won accolades at the 2021 "Étrange Festival" in Paris; I had never heard of Étrange Festival but it made me wish I lived in Paris. I'm not exactly sure how it translates; "étrange" means "strange," but I'm pretty sure "Festival of the Strange" would be "Festival d'étrange" and "Strange Festival" would be "Festival étrange," am I right? Maybe it's a bit of word play. Can anyone lend insight into that? Étrange Festival 2022 just wrapped up a couple weeks ago. I wonder what this year's batch will bring. 


Anyway, 

crumbsroom wrote:

You'd be wise to look up Mad God.
 

I second that. And, brace yourself. 

Rock wrote:

I’m seeing really divisive reviews for that one on Letterboxd.

It's odd to see among the reviews complaining about what they see as an insensitive or demeaning portrayal of Monroe, they'll describe her as a "feminist icon" or an "empowered woman".  Now I'm not a Marilyn expert or anything, but I didn't think it was a controversial take that she was a classic "little girl lost" with daddy issues (her penchant for domineering older men) and damaged by her sexual exploitation.  I'm curious if any of these reviewers think that her well-documented drug abuse was due to her confidence as a strong woman?

And the pitfall of a film like this is that it would have been very easy to fall into those contrived and cliche tropes, because there's lots of lesser films about similar wounded women that fall along the same trajectory, but this is where I think Dominik's creativity, the structure and images he chooses, transcends it into something more fundamental, because Monroe is more than a little girl lost but a central American sex myth, and how sex myths are fundamentally tragic.  (Imagine if that new Elvis film had dared to be so visionary as this.)

Rock wrote:

I can’t weigh in too much without having seen the film, but there’s been a weird moralizing quality to a lot of the reactions I’ve skimmed. To the point where it doesn’t register as organic, and I’m getting the sense a lot of people are reacting in that way because they feel they’re supposed to. I imagine that interview where Dominik seems dismissive of the idea that people are actually watching her movies has probably fuelled such fires. (I don’t think he’s wrong for the public at large, but perhaps not so much in certain cinephile circles.)

I think that sheerly on biographical merits, some of these reviews seem off.  A theme in the film is fame and projection, and how Monroe, as an icon, became a receptical to what other people wanted her to be.  And it looks like a lot of people want her to be a stronger woman than she was, and seem intent on criticizing the film for exploring these vulnerabilities.  This is probably an aspect that requires viewing because it's a question of how well it does this, but I found the film quite sympathetic, but some reviewers see Dominik - the man behind the camera - as just another of her creepy abusers, why?, for showing how she was abused.  It becomes a no-win situation at that point.

Justin Chang: "(The film) isn't really about Marilyn Monroe. It's about making her suffer."  Jake Cole: "Blonde…is the worst kind of feminism, one so absorbed in the desire to 'save' a woman that it victimizes her as much as possible to make its redemption of her that much more praiseworthy."  I think these criticisms are null on their face.  If anyone wants to provide any actual biographical inconsistencies that show how Dominik (or author Joyce Carol Oates) were unfair or disingenuous to Monroe, than I'll take a look at those criticisms, but for the most part, the film simply looks like the ugly truth to me, and some critics maybe were hoping that Dominik would rewrite history and have her rise triumphant, maybe with a couple of M-60s, Heidi the Hippo style.  They seem to have wanted a whitewash, and thank god we didn't get one.  Let them eat their Elvis instead (77% Tomatometer).

I just want to say that I don't know if I've ever seen that Scanners gif in that clear a resolution, or if it is slightly slower than normal, or my brain is working at a different speed, but there is a reason that moment is a kind of perfection. In that split second, so many wonderful details. The blood splooge coming out of his eye sockets. His glasses shattering in half and being tossed into the ether. The right side and left side of his balding hair ring slapping together with a big meaty thwack. How his shoulders shudder as if feeling what must be the terrible pain of that fragment in time. His jaw contorting as if telegraphing the same pain felt by his shoulders. And a single eyeball, staring out at us through the mess as the whole bloody scene comes to its conclusion.

I think each of these things, if not seen directly, are felt subliminally when we see that scene in real time. It's why no one shakes the image once seen. It's why gif's were created.