To belie the notion of Questlove's Summer of Soul as the "Black Woodstock", we can see with this film, restored and re-released after 50 years, as well as films such as WattsStax and Soul II Soul, there are several worthy candidates of concert films of the era that might better qualify for that title.  And, not insignificantly, it helps when these vintage concert films respect the artists enough not to constantly interrupt their musical performances with banal nostalgia.  And of course it also helps when you have a massive amount of talent - Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Jackson 5, Staple Singers, Temptations, Roberta Flack, Isaac Hayes, Bill Withers, Nancy Wilson, The O'Jays, Cannonball Adderley and even Sammy Davis Jr, among several others.  This film, a product of Jesse Jackson's PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) campaign, also includes fascinating documentary footage of black culture (especially the children) of 1972 Chicago interspersed with the nearly non-stop and priceless music, creating a truly socially immersive testament to black life and spirit.

9/10
 

While I await the opportunity to see the new Pee Wee doc, I figured I would also use the time to catch up on this, the last Pee Wee movie, some 30 years removed from his other movies, and dropped on Netflix with little fanfare.  The film appears to be largely well-received however, I would suppose out of mostly nostalgic sentiment, and I'm sure it will only be more fondly seen in light of Reuben's death.

While the film can't possibly live up to the manic inventiveness of his Big Adventure, or the zany brilliance of his initial HBO live show, this film, after a slow start (virtually an imitation of Big Adventure's Rube Goldberg opening), has enough sufficiently weird and silly moments to keep it amusing, and only gets better the weirder and sillier it gets.

But the problem is with Pee Wee himself.  The fact is that the persona simply doesn't age very well, and 65-year-old Reubens, despite all of the digital de-aging and yet still very obvious cake make-up, doesn't have the same slaphappy smart-ass spunk as in his giddy youth, and his more muted performance comes off as kind of sad instead.  Pee Wee was always an outsider ("a loner...a rebel") but not with so much pathos, uncomfortable in the role.  Maybe this was all Reubens' intention after all.  But I happen to agree with Reubens when he says that the character "doesn't work, to me, with age mixed into it".  I don't think the older character works for me either, and there's no amount of CGI that can fix that.

7/10
 

I was more than happy with Becoming Led Zeppelin focusing on the musical elements of the band. Don't get me wrong, I also would like one that shows all the other good stuff outside of that, but I'm more than happy having it streamline on the band talking about how they came together and made records and detail all of their creative decisions. Sounds good to me. And that live footage, which really was most of the movie, is all great.

But I just didn't like it as a movie. I found myself annoyed by how little the filmmakers were actually doing. And, maybe in their defence, you don't need to do that much when you've got a lot of worthwhile footage of Zeppelin music and interviews.

But the fact that I felt I would have been just as happy stumbling upon each of those clips seperately on YouTube, and didn't find the way the filmmakers put them together to add much beyond linearity to the experience, I just couldn't get behind the thing.
 

crumbsroom wrote:

Hard recommend to the movie Invention. 

Plus I'm in love with the lead actress.

Duly noted.

I need an illegal MUBI password....

Rampop II wrote:

And that actor who plays Dalí, oh my fucking god, he is so perfect for the role. I mean he fucking kills it. He is this movie. You'd think Dalí himself had come back from the grave.

There's five actors playing Dali, lol.

Rampop II wrote:

His entrance is one of my favorite moments in the film.

That was Edouard Baer, probably the best Dali among them.  Definitely a bit of 'Lancelot' in Holy Grail vibe here.




Quentin Dupieux is definitely under the influence of the cult Salvador Dali documentary, A Soft Self Portrait, a project undertaken by Orson Welles only to be taken over by Dali himself, much to Welles' amusement.  Dupieux's Dali (all five of the actors portraying him) inhabits a similar incorrigible tyranny, the irresistable compulsion to define himself in only the most precise sense, however senselessly, complete with faithful renderings of Dali's own personally invented vernacular and dialect.  Salvador Dali is a fundamentally absurdist construct, a carefully self-aware projection of the violently creative id, and Dupieux is wise to avoid any of the biographical conventions, much as Dali himself dispensed with the conventions of documentary filmmaking, and simply embraced Dali in all of his wild, vibrantly conflicted idiosyncrasies, with a non-linear, impulsively restless narrative style, lots of self-serious silliness and unreliable whimsy.  There's even some dashes of poignancy, and a totally sincere commitment to the beauty of it all.

9/10


 

Jinnistan wrote:

There's five actors playing Dali, lol.
...
That was Edouard Baer, probably the best Dali among them. 
 

See, I knew you would know which one I was talking about. 😉

I don't know how great a movie this is, but it's volatile and that's always good.
 

Rampop II wrote:

See, I knew you would know which one I was talking about. 😉

And Anais Demoustier is such a darling.  Or daaaaaaaalING.

Very intriguing meta-horror, somewhat in the vein of Berberian Sound Studio, a period piece set in the periphery of the filmmaking industry - here involving a film censor in the '80s Britain "video nasty" era, and first-time director Prano Bailey-Bond manages a similar hyper-real neo-giallo tone as Peter Strickland, which plays with character/audience perceptions of fantasy/reality.  This censor, Enid (Niamh Algar), seems deceptively prudish and ascetic, an uncomfortable fit for the garish gore she's assigned to watch and edit, but we learn early on that she is motivated by her own guilt complex surrounding her missing sister, so her tireless viewing takes on a self-flaggelating quality.  She soon begins to see what she perceives as similarities in some of these banned horror films and her sister's case, and decides to investigate into whether these filmmakers might have been responsible or whether her sister is still alive.

If that synopsis sounds a bit spoilery, don't worry.  You don't know the half of it.  And even if what follows veers very closely into going completely off the rails, to the point of not satisfactorily sticking its landing, I still have to applaud the effort.

8/10




I know I probably should have learned my lesson about watching these recent unknown movies with legendary actors collecting retirement checks, but this 2019 film, Into the Labyrinth, with a seemingly unashamed Dustin Hoffman, starts off promising enough.  Its gambit of psychological gamemanship is contrived, but writer-director Donato Carrisi is competent enough to again give the film a type of neo-giallo vibe.  The story is split between a private investigator (Toni Servillo, an accomplished actor I'm familiar with from his Paolo Sorrentino films) trying to track down a kidnapper, and Dustin Hoffman as a psychologist attempting to rehabilitate a recently recovered victim of the same kidnapper.  As the conclusion becomes increasingly predictable, it's like Carrisi lost confidence, and the film ends up far too much of a total farce (doubt that was completely intentional) to recommend it.  Has some good scenes, but ultimately deflates into nonsense.

6/10




A film about a severed hand that communicates with dead spirits and causes demonic possession which, for some dumbass reason, teenagers use as a party favor like some kind of Ouija board.

This is a very popular A24 film with a ton of good reviews, all of which I find baffling.  The above set-up, etablished within about 15 minutes, is enough for me to loose any good faith respect for a film which is clearly expecting us to take very seriously.  Outside of the contrivances of its plot, the filmmaking is stale, that kind of "trendy" which has already immediately dated it.  Same old jump scares and moldy corpses, only now with more Gen Z signifiers.  And I'm not really impressed with reviews (most of which have been quite kind) that finds exceptional resonance in the film's pillar themes of grief and trauma.  That is not exactly fresh ground anymore - in fact every film in this post involves grief and trauma to some extent.  That's not going to be enough when the film is this silly.

5/10




Turns out rich people are still horrible human beings.  Another film which is more concerned with its generational marketing than being a successful thriller.  Although I wouldn't say that first-time director Zoe Kravitz is completely unskilled, there is nonetheless a vanity aspect to the production.  However hard it tries, it should be noted that this is not an A24 film, an understandable mistake.  And the actual A24 companion to this film would likely be Bodies Bodies Bodies, which also involved a rich-guy drug party turned into a horror film, only that film was more self-conscious of how silly the whole scenario is.  If this film, Blink Twice, truly wanted to veer fully into Jeffery Epstein territory (notably, the film blinks on that bluff), then maybe we'd have something truly provocative on our hands.  Instead, this film is just exploitating the glamour and envy of the predatory rich.

4/10
 

crumbsroom wrote:

Censor is a movie that generally gets lukewarm to negative reviews (frequently, from what I remember, for being derivative of other, better films), and Talk to Me was generally approved of. 

As usual, unsurprising when it turns out the consensus is wrong about both.

Censor seems to be well reviewed (89% on Rotten Tomatoes) although the average is minimal (7.30/10).  Talk To Me is overall better (94% - 7.7/10).  I didn't take any of this into account, but I'd heard positive things about both.

I didn't go into Talk To Me with any desire to ridicule it.  It was a sincere disappointment.