Ah, that’s fair. I’m lucky in that aside from rising ticket prices, the vast majority of my theatrical experiences have been neutral to positive. The only downright negative one I’ve had in the last few years was in a theatre that I normally don’t go to, where some dumbasses yelled through the whole movie despite being shushed by half the theatre, and some other dumbass thought it would be a great idea to flash their phone light on the screen. Apparently that one theatre is notorious for bad crowds, so I’ve learned to stay away since (I only went that one time because it was near a Mexican restaurant my friends and I wanted to try out).

To clarify, the person  in my screening wasn’t just looking at their phone, they turned on the flashlight and flashed it at the screen while sitting in the front row. My friends speculated that they were trying to record the movie.

Sofia Coppola's new film about Priscilla Presley is bound to be better than last year's Baz Lurhman's film about her husband, but it's also been a hot minute since Sofia Coppola has delivered a really good film.



 

Oh dear, David Gordon Green is doing an Exorcist sequel and it looks terrible, but he also is bringing back Ellen Burstyn, so now I’m tempted to actually watch it.

Oh, here we go.  There is a list of some of TIFF's films this year.

The Boy and the Heron (Miyazaki)
Next Goal Wins (Waititi)
Hit Man (Linklater)
The Holdovers (Payne)
Monster (Kore-eda) - read about this one from Cannes
The Zone of Interest (Glazer) - same

also a number of films from actors, but most interestingly Michael Keaton's Knox Goes Away (neo-noir thriller) and Chris Pine's Poolman (mystery-comedy spoof of Chinatown)

also docs from Alex Gibney (In Restless Dreams: Music of Paul Simon) and Errol Morris (The Pigeon Tunnel)
 

So I came across this trailer while researching whether anybody ever got around to making a decent cinematic adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. There have been a few short films in the past decade or so and there was a 50–minute Hungarian TV movie in 1975, and although this trailer hardly suggests a Cecil B. DeMille production or anything, I could see it working: 




If some of that “camera” movement looks a little too much like a video game it should come as no surprise; much of the press buzz about this movie centers around its being funded by Epic games as the first fully–animated feature made entirely with their Unreal Engine, the highly–successful 3–D graphics tool behind three decades of popular computer games which has made recent in–roads into cinema, most notably in the Mandalorian series. The movie is not finished yet so maybe they still have time to touch it up. 
But that’s also part of the bad news because production is apparently delayed, reportedly from a lack of funding. The film’s Argentinian production company Duermevela has apparently even taken to soliciting for investors in the YouTube trailer’s description. So whether this sees the light of day remains an open question. 
I just pray to Enlil and Shamash that Disney take no interest in the project. Maybe fear of fundamentalists and culture warriors will keep the old rat safely at bay.
 

Last edited by Rampop II (9/05/2023 3:02 am)

Napoleon looks promising. I've yearned for a cinematic treatment of La Terreur that could possibly serve as a modern warning given the worsening sociopolitical extremism of recent years. I had envisioned A Tale of Two Cities (preferably directed by Martin Scorsese), but Napoleon appears poised to serve that purpose just as well. 
Too bad about the awful music, though. Reminiscent of Gangs of New York.

Curious that only the Spanish–dubbed trailer for The Palace seems to be available on YouTube, despite several clips being available in English: 


 

If anyone is wondering, I'm waiting untll Saturday when all four of the new Wes Anderson Roald Dahl short films are available before watching them.

Rampop II wrote:

True. I forgot about that. I wonder if there's an official count somewhere of trailers that recycled the score from the nuke scene in Aliens. 

I think they've had an express lane for that one.

When Eddie Murphy heard that audiences were nostaligic for his return to his roots, he for some reason thought his roots were in 1994?