Posted by crumbsroom  Online!10/04/2024 10:35 pm | #121 |
Jinnistan wrote:
What? Are you binging shows instead now?
I'm mostly just falling asleep in movies. I'm half way through about 40 of them currently.
Posted by Jinnistan  10/04/2024 10:37 pm | #122 |
Well I guess they didn't leave an impression.
Herzog's Nosferatu is definitely worth your rewatch this season.
NINETEEN–WHAT??????
I got it in the book, nikka, I show you!
I like the idea of throwing a Twilight Zone in there because the presentation should have some variety. I'd also add some of them old Halloween themed cartoons. Mix it up. And as much as this might scare the socks off of them Seattle freegans, I'd even go so far as....
|
Posted by Jinnistan 10/04/2024 11:00 pm | #123 |
This piece of shit.
There's an obvious point here, that there's really no sensible reason why this film book/film even needed to be related to the legacy of The Shining. Stephen King could have very well had written a pretty good story about some roaming band of hipster psychic vampires who feed off of gifted children, and this story could have made the basis of a pretty good film. There's some interesting ideas there anyway, and what I could very generously consider the better parts of this film involve entertaining those ideas.
But the cynicism of IP-dryhumping is inescapable, and it goes beyond that into implicating just the entire enterprise of bad taste and judgment that ends up turning the whole thing into insulting swill. The film is so bad and dumb, on so many levels, that it's difficult to lay the blame solely on King (although I haven't read his book to see how many of these dumb ideas are his), because Mike Flanagan is a god damn hack who has very little imagination outside of some kind of CGI literalization of "shining" as a drug metaphor, and his editing is simply a mind-sore. This film is useless as anything other than compulsive fan-service, and those types of fans are utterly useless anyway.
4/10
|
Posted by Rampop II 10/04/2024 11:09 pm | #124 |
I'd also add some of them old Halloween themed cartoons.
Oh shit! [shits brick] Ohh SHIT!!! That is a magnificent idea!!!!!!!!!!
|
Posted by crumbsroom Online! 10/04/2024 11:33 pm | #125 |
50 Ft. Woman
Great!
|
Posted by Rampop II 10/05/2024 3:34 am | #126 |
50 Ft. Woman
Great!
The Penultimate Upskirt Cinema Experience! Coming to a planetarium near you! "Harry! Harry!"
Say that reminds me, It Came from Hollywood and Terror in the Aisles...
|
Posted by Rampop II 10/05/2024 3:46 am | #127 |
Damn, I know I made a curated selection of those old horror cartoons somewhere and now I can't find them. I'll have to do the excavating and sifting all over again. Lots of the YouTube mixes of old horror/halloween cartoons leave much to be desired. But at least the cartooniverse mix of Looney Tunes Halloween Classics looks generous...
|
Posted by Rampop II 10/05/2024 7:02 am | #128 |
Well that Looney Toons mix was full of Chuck Jones classics, all with the middle edited out.
Why.
|
Posted by Jinnistan 10/05/2024 6:46 pm | #129 |
I still can't quite get over this Dr. Sleep bullshit.
Here's some questions for Mr. King and Mr. Flanagan: I grant that King has every right to write a "spiritual" sequel to his own Shining novel, if that's what he wants or feels he needs to do in order to sell more books. Lord knows it's been about 30 years since anyone has been excited about a new Stephen King book. And Mike Flanagan has every right to adapt this new book. But, in light of Mr. King's well-known and oft-repeated derision of the pre-existing Stanley Kubrick adaptation of the source novel, going as far as to claim that Kubrick's film bears no resemblance to his book, I wonder why either of them felt the need to lean in so dependently on Mr. Kubrick's vision in their adaptation of this otherwise unrelated sequel to a book which allegedly has no resemblance to Mr. Kubrick's film? I wonder (somewhat facetiously) why instead didn't Mr. Flanagan choose to lean heavily on Mr. King's own 1997 adaptation of his source novel, which King not only claimed was superior to Kubrick's film but was restorative of King's original source novel? Why didn't Flanagan devote so much of his screen time to lavish and precise recreations of exact shots from Mr. King's superior TV miniseries, or find actors who resemble the iconic Steven Weber or Melvin Van Peebles as stand-ins for their characters? Or even Rebecca De Morney as King's own self-selected choice for Wendy? And all of this could have been shot at the still-standing Stanley Hotel instead of the expense of reconstructing long-neglected sets from Elstree Studios?
There's obviously a very simple answer to all of these questions, and this is the same answer which reveals the cheapness and cynicism of the entire project. Sleep might not be as much of an IP-cannibal orgy as Ready Player One (which also featured a central recreation of Kubrick's Overlook Hotel) , but both films stand as equally appalling examples of 'memberberry-porn for middle-aged man-children. In other words, most mainstream film critics enjoyed them.
|
Posted by Rampop II 10/06/2024 5:49 am | #130 |
I still can't quite get over this Dr. Sleep bullshit.
|
Posted by crumbsroom Online! 10/06/2024 1:38 pm | #131 |
I found Dr. Sleep to be relatively passable entertainment. But, that said, I also feel that it is the perfect example of what happens when a film has absolutely no personality. When making something that is competent is the goal, not making something that matters in anyways beyond something to fill the time before you go get a meal afterwards, to also fill more time, before you go home to sleep, in hopes of just hurrying as silently and irrelevantly through life as possible.
Because I had been in the mood for nothing but a distraction the night I watched it, it didn't raise my ire to any serious degree. But if I had actually gone into it hoping for anything slightly worthwhile, I would have kicked my television set over. Thankfully, I didn't believe a single positive review that it received. It was clear they were wrong before I even watched a trailer of it.
|
Posted by Rampop II 10/06/2024 2:23 pm | #132 |
I'd also add some of them old Halloween themed cartoons.
Well now I'm pissed. Beginning to wonder if YouTube got scrubbed of a lot of those old cartoons. No matter what search terms I enter, or how far down I scroll, it's always the same goddamn dozen or so videos,… nearly all Disney. I mean there are a couple of stragglers here and there, but even they are often the exact same ones every time. I mean it is slim fucking pickings. The majority of them are dreadfully washed–out prints or even wobbly video transfers. And most are in measly 480p... wtf? Oh, there are lots of playlists, all with the same meager handful of authentic pre–war cartoons, but mixed in with modern CGI bullshit. I knew that some of the old selections would be set to big–band swing music. But in these mixes, most of the old "spooky" cartoons are set to big–band swing music, and use a hell of a lot of same drunken honky–tonk visual themes, with boozing skeletons, ghostly upright pianists and dancing... ahem... "spooks." It starts to look a little racist, is what I'm saying. I shouldn't be surprised to see racism in pre–war cinema, but I seem to recall more variety.
The Internet doesn't have everything???
Well YouTube did have more than a dozen or–so of these relics, once upon a time.
|
Posted by crumbsroom Online! 10/06/2024 2:27 pm | #133 |
With its handful of genuinely moody and eerie moments, this sci-fi cheapy looks to the skies to ponder (and answer!) such big questions as "How did these people possibly get from that scene to the next one?"
Answer: Lots of driving
Cars, not spaceships.
WATCH!
As a human man and woman chat and drive and keep their hands on the steering wheel!
WITNESS!
Them move through space and time towards the next destination of some interest!
MARVEL!
At the largeness and strangeness of the American highway!
|
Posted by Jinnistan 10/06/2024 2:33 pm | #134 |
I also feel that it is the perfect example of what happens when a film has absolutely no personality.
The problem I have, what really downright offends me, is how the film tries to define its personality on its dependence on the previous film, with long, meticulous carbon-copy reinactments of that film's sequences, but all under the pretense of being a correction to that film's presumed flaws. It's a double insult. To crib so shamelessly and liberally, and then act like they're doing it to save the original film from itself.
And it's disingenuous, because it's plainly clear that the only reason why they decided to dedicate a good half-hour of the film to these Kubrick reconstructions is entirely due to the more cynical Hollywood strategy of recognition-triggering. Like how Force Awakens can get away with showing off just enough familiar nostalgic toys, and the audience will overlook the fact that they madlibbed the entire script. And Ready Player One - and everything its author, Ernest Cline, represents - is perhaps the mission statement of this kind of 'memeberberry entertainment. I heard how there were some grown men who were in tears from seeing Wolverine in his classic yellow/blue uniform. Hollywood has learned that this is all they need to do. There's enough of an audience out there that is easy to part with their dollars just to see something recognizable.
As I said, Sleep could have been a salvagable film had it had the confidence to rest on its original elements. It could have also sucked, but at least it had a chance. It could have even tried to be a "spiritual sequel" to The Fury - or any random film about psychics - and it wouldn't have made a bit of difference. We all know why they didn't. There's a simultaneous reverence and contempt for the fact that Kubrick's Shining became more iconic than King's book. On the other hand, it's interesting that the Kubrick estate only agreed to this project by having King promise to stop shit-talking Kubrick's film. I guess that's one positive. But the film is still deeply stupid.
|
Posted by Jinnistan 10/06/2024 3:21 pm | #135 |
One of my favorite Daffy Duck cartoons that could be considered somewhat Halloween related (playing "Duck Twacy"} is frustratingly only available on Youtube in segments, "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery".
|
Posted by Rampop II 10/07/2024 12:37 am | #136 |
With its handful of genuinely moody and eerie moments, this sci-fi cheapy looks to the skies to ponder (and answer!) such big questions as "How did these people possibly get from that scene to the next one?"
Answer: Lots of driving
Cars, not spaceships.
WATCH!
As a human man and woman chat and drive and keep their hands on the steering wheel!
WITNESS!
Them move through space and time towards the next destination of some interest!
MARVEL!
At the largeness and strangeness of the American highway!
Despite a lifelong appetite for space drama, scifi/horror, monster movies etc, this is one I still haven't seen, mostly because it's always got a primo rental price tag. I went on a serious deep–dive into as much 50s-60s schlock scifi/horror as I could about a year ago, and there was just so much available without my having to pay top–dollar I still didn't get around to it even then.
Which movie was it where the alien invaders were invisible? That's one way to keep it within the budget.
|
Posted by Rampop II 10/07/2024 6:15 pm | #137 |
I'm pissed. I'm fucking PISSED! It's as if the Internet itself has been scrubbed of scary old cartoons. Or it's just that search engines have gone to dogshit. I know there were more out there than this. Now there's barely anything but Disney shit. Hmmm. And it's mostly just run–of–the–mill cartoon comedy but with some genre element like a ghost, rendered non–threatening through song and gags, like Warner Brothers' Jeepers Creepers. Even the classic danse macabre Skeleton Dance, arguably the best of the bunch, is replete with silly gags, but at least those are tolerable.
I wasn't part of the Rotten Tomatoes gang but I damn well remember an elaborate thread on this subject.
|
Posted by Jinnistan 10/07/2024 6:32 pm | #138 |
I wasn't part of the Rotten Tomatoes gang but I damn well remember an elaborate thread on this subject.
Our Captain Terror's excellent efforts were eradicated on both RT and the Corriorino forums. I'm not sure if ever bothered to recreate it on the new forum.
You might want to check with some non-Youtube video sites like Daily Motion.
|
Posted by Rampop II 10/07/2024 9:00 pm | #139 |
I wasn't part of the Rotten Tomatoes gang but I damn well remember an elaborate thread on this subject.
Our Captain Terror's excellent efforts were eradicated on both RT and the Corriorino forums. I'm not sure if ever bothered to recreate it on the new forum.
You might want to check with some non-Youtube video sites like Daily Motion.
That's a good idea. I had only tried YouTube and Google searches, my dumb ass... my god, I'm institutionalized by the Googazon. I didn't think to cross–search over on Letterboxd, either, all the while screaming for the ability to search by date range. I'm burning the candle at both ends, mateys. Rampop can't sleep. No rest for the wicked.
|
Posted by crumbsroom Online! 10/07/2024 9:03 pm | #140 |
With its handful of genuinely moody and eerie moments, this sci-fi cheapy looks to the skies to ponder (and answer!) such big questions as "How did these people possibly get from that scene to the next one?"
Answer: Lots of driving
Cars, not spaceships.
WATCH!
As a human man and woman chat and drive and keep their hands on the steering wheel!
WITNESS!
Them move through space and time towards the next destination of some interest!
MARVEL!
At the largeness and strangeness of the American highway!
Despite a lifelong appetite for space drama, scifi/horror, monster movies etc, this is one I still haven't seen, mostly because it's always got a primo rental price tag. I went on a serious deep–dive into as much 50s-60s schlock scifi/horror as I could about a year ago, and there was just so much available without my having to pay top–dollar I still didn't get around to it even then.
Which movie was it where the alien invaders were invisible? That's one way to keep it within the budget.
I realized a couple of years ago what a big blind spot these things were for me, having mostly only seen the major ones. So I guess this October I'll rectify that as much as I can.
And the bonus is most of them are really short, which is what I need when my attention span has turned to such dogshit the last few months.
