Brief reviews of movies you already should've seen, and ones I have. End of year 2018.
TOP FIVE:
1.) Pastoral, to Die in the Country
2.) Nashville
3.) Annihilation
4.) In Bruges
5.) Nightcrawler
Nightcrawler and Get Carter were tied for 5th, then I remembered the music from Nightcrawler.
BOTTOM FIVE :
64.) AVP: Requiem
63.) A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
62.) Popeye
61.) Band of Outsiders
60.) City Hunter
If we were talking pure objective quality, Exorcist II and God's Not Dead would be here, but I'd rather rewatch them than any of these five.
STATISTICS
Total - 64
Writer/director ("auteur") movies - 27
Documentaries - 3 and 3/8 (of Ken Burns' Vietnam)
Most frequent director - Boorman/Altman/Herzog (4)
Most frequent writer - Werner Herzog (4)
Most frequent franchise - A Nightmare on Elm Street (3)
2018: 4
2010s: 10
2000s: 14
1990s: 10
1980s: 16
1970s: 9
1960s: 2
1950s: 3
SUPERMAN RETURNS (2006)
Bryan Singer / Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, Bryan Singer
"Much more even and likable than Man of Steel, with some fantastic saving-people (rather than punching-stuff) superheroics and a real mix of great, terrible, and fan-filmy casting"
CITY HUNTER (1993)
Jing Wong / Tsukasa Hojo, Jing Wong
"Too weird to miss, it goes more than all-in on being a live action manga, even if it ends up wasting Chan. Severely not funny for a comedy (terrible editing for punchlines), but whatever."
TAMMY AND THE T-REX (1994)
Stewart Rafill / Gary Brockette, Stewart Rafill
"Though hard to say whether this is a moronic children's comedy with way too much violence and sex or the dumbest erotic revenge thriller ever made, it's actually funny when it's supposed to be, even if largely by virtue of insanity."
GODZILLA: PLANET OF THE MONSTERS (2018)
Koubun Shizuno, Hiroyuki Seshita / Gen Urobuchi
"Builds a surprisingly robust world without much direct labor, quietly lacing in concepts forged in the '60s series while feeling entirely new, with a great primal setting for what limited monster action we get"
HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
Terence Fisher / Jimmy Sangster
"Very easily the best version of Dracula I know, still just kinda alright. Transfixing performances from Lee and Cushing, but neither man is present frequently enough, leaving everything else to wither under overwrought production design and violence more melodramatic than scary"
THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)
Val Guest / Richard Landau, Val Guest
"Between an unusually outre space invader and a magnificently suspenseful opening scene, this easily coasts past some awful performances to instill genuine terror in rote genre material"
FEAST (2005)
John Gulager / Marcus Dunstan, Patrick Melton
"For direct-to-video horror, it has a nice grungy aesthetic and solid natural passing-of-day lighting, the practical effects are great, and the cast makes a lot out of underwritten dialogue (Henry Rollins). It also has exactly as formulaic an Alien structure as one would expect, something that goes a long way in counteracting any puckishness in the choice of deaths. Not to mention it wasn't direct-to-video."
THE ROOM (2003)
Tommy Wiseau / Tommy Wiseau
"tbh not
that funny, the highlight reels are all you need"
DEADPOOL (2016)
Tim Miller / Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick
"The gore's good, the humor's pleasant if not laugh-out-loud, and the characters are better developed than expected. Solid fanservice too - I'd forgotten all about Blind Al and Weasel and both get plenty of screen-time. The plot doesn't diverge too far (or at all really) from superhero boilerplate, but by god is it refreshing to have a purely personal hero/villain conflict and stakes as low as one human life."
THE DARK CRYSTAL (1984)
Jim Henson, Frank Oz / David Odell
"If the central characters weren't so off-putting and unemotive, maybe the standard fantasy beats would have some identity, but the whole thing feels in such a hurry to get through the formula that there's nothing else to attach to, and it winds up boring. The dialogue is awful too, though we learned on this viewing that's because the film was originally intended to include no intelligible language!"
ANNIHILATION (2018)
Alex Garland / Alex Garland
"If cancer's this fun, sign me up for chemo!"
IN BRUGES (2008)
Martin McDonagh / Martin McDonagh
"A fairy tale of conflicting moral systems, men who can't stop being boys, and calmly precise spiritual metaphor"
ANNIHILATION (2018)
Alex Garland / Alex Garland
"The characters make a lot more sense the second time, and the declamatory dialogue cliches play as charmingly inept rather than hackily terrible"
PONYO (2008)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki
"Inventive action, beautiful animation, lovable characters, and a sleepily comfortable incarnation of childhood nostalgia. At the same time, a simple, nice, and pleasant story with a deeply insufficient final third that makes the experience feel largely without substance or pathos"
BLACK PANTHER (2017)
Ryan Coogler / Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole
"High fantasy moreso than superhero story, just political enough to prove it isn't stupid, and the best cast of characters in any Marvel movie short of Guardians OTG. Definitely bloated with at least an unnecessary aerial battle, but makes the most out of the requisite car chase as penance."
DUNE (1984)
David Lynch / David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
"David Lynch? More like David Crynch, because this story is so violently smashed into a 2-hour filmic suitcase as to completely lack even the slightest hint of momentum; the classic case of the film that is so busy that it can't see farther than one scene ahead, and never really starts the plot as a result."
JURASSIC PARK (1993)
Steve Spielberg / Michael Crichton, David Koepp
"The 'bergian chase scene is effective, but how many of them do we need in a single movie? And the hand-holding endless tension and sentimentality ratcheting is annoying beyond belief - fine stuff for kids' film, but I don't know how adults don't go nuts slogging through. Fun fact: the famed T-Rex Jeep attack scene is about 8 minutes long, starting from where the T-Rex is first heard approaching. The T-Rex doesn't appear for 4 minutes, and then after a minute disappears for another two."
EL MARIACHI (1993)
Robert Rodriguez / Robert Rodriguez
"Sing us a song, you're the mariachi man"
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)
Jonathan Demme / Ted Tally, based on the novel by Thomas Harris
"The best episode of X-Files never recorded, with a dash of Cape Fear here and a dash of Friday the 13th there, laced with some great face-to-face close-ups and stitched together with noticeably great editing."
BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964)
Jean-Luc Godard / Jean-Luc Godard
"This is probably pretentious meta-schlock made for film enthusiasts who can point out all the weird techniques and rule-breaks Goddy uses along the way, and I don't really object to that any more than to horror schlock or romance schlock - the odd thing is, when it's at its most self-congratulatory and confrontational is when it's most entertaining, like a minute of silence imposed on the audience or the awkward layout of the credits that turns out to be setup for a joke where the director is credited as "Jean-Luc Cinema Godard". I audibly chuckled at the student in English class whose only purpose is to ask the camera "How do you say 'a big, one million dollar film'?" But, like, it's also terribly boring, with barely glimpsed superficial characters whose petulant personality shifts play like more schoolyard antics rather than recognizably human intricacies, and drama that isn't given even the faintest air of gravity, with characters playing dead (or actors playing dead????, I'm probably supposed to ask), nighttime scenes shot during the day, and an escape to South America that very obviously terminates 12 inches left of frame. Is it all worth it for those few excitingly surreal moments, like the trashy plot of a Godzilla movie is worth it for the few minutes of monster rampage? Am I missing literally everything? Maybe at 29 I'm just too old for this shit."
DESPERADO (1995)
Robert Rodriguez / Robert Rodriguez
"Like El Mariachi, great for its means, but not particularly high impact. Heavily leaning into the cartoonish / spaghetti western side of things now. Very fun and inventive action scenes, but hurts that the movie starts at its peak and slides down (the bar) from there."
SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)
Billy Wilder / Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshman Jr.
"A pair of titanic, one-of-a-kind character portraits paired with a pair of rote, generic ones, almost more Gothic than noir"
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)
Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson
"Delightfully precise and frothy, yet hang on I'm not using the word 'frothy'. Is this the origin of critic-speak? Artificial brevity? Even 'delightful' is pretty bad. I gotta stop writing things that I would never say in real life. Anyway, GBH is sorta like an imaginary period piece, a salute to the passing of an era that didn't really exist, one glorified but not exactly praised. It's really the perfect use for Anderson's dollhouse aesthetic. Dollhouse aesthetic. Dollhouse aesthetic!"
PORCO ROSSO (1992)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki
"Pigzapoppin'"
NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND (1984)
Hayao Miyazaki / Hayao Miyazaki, based on the manga by Hayao Miyazaki
"As much as I enjoy Miyazaki's typical fairy tales, his fantasy epics seem more like
the point, channeling the flood of dreamlike detail into boundless vessels far exceeding the scale of a motion picture, too visionary to qualify as anything as prosaic as 'world-building'"
ED WOOD (1994)
Tim Burton / Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski
"Good enough to warrant
a review!"
DOCTOR WHO vs. GENESIS OF THE DALEKS (1974)
David Maloney / Terry Nation
"It's definitely a BBC genre show from the 1970s, and exactly as exciting as that sounds, but there are just enough unique ideas and suspenseful situations to keep your attention, with Davros naturally transcending genre expectations and Tom Baker getting enough lines to remember he exists"
ED WOOD (1994)
Same
"Greg said he's not impressed, and after I was so nice to 'Genesis of the Daleks' too"
X2: X-MEN UNITED (2003)
Bryan Singer / Michael Dougherty, Dan Harris, David Hayter
"Pretty clunky in the script department and not focused on any character well enough to feel like more than a TV episode, still does good service to the X-Men notion of gods among men, and even half-decent for riffing on The Once and Future King (if you know the plot of that novel. Just like the Phoenix stuff is decent if you know the plot of that comic arc - if you don't, it's like whaaat?)"
GORILLA INTERRUPTED (2003)
Mike Stoklasa / Mike Stoklasa with additional material by Garrett Gilchrist
"Going into this, I was perfectly aware - based on 1.) the remarks of the filmmakers and 2.) every other RLM film trailer or short - that it would be absolutely terrible. I also knew from those two sources that it came about very similarly to the movies my friends and I would make as teenagers, right around the same early '00s final pre-Youtube era, and that therefore it would make for a very potent injection of nostalgia. And it did. It even had a single, solitary funny joke! Perhaps the best and nostalgiaiest bit was That One Friend who obviously no one likes, no one even pretends to like, but you let them hang around because they have the camera or their parents don't care if you trash their house or whatever it may be in this case."
NIGHTCRAWLER (2014)
Dan Gilroy / Dan Gilroy
"A human experimentation project moreso than a character study, squeezing a weird near-psychopath to see what comes out. Simultaneously a black comedy exploring the evil side of Pursuit of Happyness-type rags-to-riches fables, though often more unpleasant (in a groaning, sickening way) than funny because of its hate-boner for newsmedia."
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL (2014)
Wes Anderson / Wes Anderson
"Lot of rewatches this year. Sharing is daring."
Here begins the oft-interrupted Summer Directrospective, in which we take a decades spanning summary tour of the works of John Boorman, Robert Altman, and Werner Herzog.
DELIVERANCE (1972)
John Boorman / James Dickey
"Like Sorcerer, it's tempting to describe this as just a really great thriller, but it's also working with the same kind of primal self-destructive masculine energy that whatever"
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER (1988)
Renny Harlin / Brian Helgeland, Ken Wheat, Jim Wheat
"Well, things aren't completely terrible yet. A couple of the kills are kinda okay, not yet dragged into the elaborate 80-minute set pieces of the next couple movies, but the Dream Magic is now officially hardcore stupid, and the 'daring' decision to copy Psycho's mid-film twist completely destroys the story's momentum and ability to function"
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD (1989)
Stephen Hopkins / Leslie Bohem
"Just the fucking worst: screechingly loud, purely redundant, moronic in concept and execution, overplotted, and nothing at all like a horror film"
FREDDY'S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE (1991)
Rachel Talalay / Michael DeLuca
"Like The Final Friday, the '90s hurt this series bad, dragging it down to television production levels in script, scope, cast (featuring cameos by Tom Arnold and Roseanne!), and all but a handful of effects shots. Still, it's funny enough here and there to easily surpass part 5."
GODZILLA: CITY ON THE EDGE OF BATTLE (2018)
Kobun Shizuno, Hiroyuki Seshita / Gen Urobuchi
"Like Part 1, the ideas at play here are great, passing far beyond what we could ever expect to see in a live-action Godzilla (such as the bizarrely evil city of the title). Unfortunately, once this stuff is all up on screen, it fails to DO anything, feeling simultaneously uninspired and cheap, with Godzilla barely showing up on screen and M. City mostly just a bunch of gun emplacements. The third movie will have a lot to make up on the action front to compensate, and given that we know the always-tedious Mothra will be involved, it's hard to be excited at this point."
FATA MORGANA (1971)
Werner Herzog / Werner Herzog
"It is mostly just a bunch of landscape photography, but carefully selected and edited not to suggest an actual geographic space"
THE ROCKETEER (1991)
Joe Johnston / Danny Bilson, Paul De Meo
"A pretty fun movie, though somewhat ironically the airplane stunt sequences are much more engaging than the unfortunately dated rocket-pack effects. Jennifer Connolly is still the hottest actress ever, so there's that."
MCCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)
Robert Altman / Robert Altman, Brian McKay
"A genre-typical story that's all weird in the details, from cases of anti-farcical mistaken identity to whores with hearts of drug addiction, despondent if not entirely hopeless, all shot with stand-up-and-notice cinematography shifting from smudgy realism to bleary-eyed nostalgia to neon lust. Not really ruined by the presence of Leonard Cohen songs, but harmed in some fairly irrevocable ways."
EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977)
John Boorman / William Goodhart (rewrites by John Boorman & Rospo Pallenberg)
"The weirdest thing here isn't that the movie is patently insane or hilarious, which is plain enough to see just reading the fact-sheet, but that many of the takes, bar bad acting, are genuinely well-done, from the soaring locust cam to the harrowing cliff face exorcism. It's just that there is no such thing as a good version of locust cam or a cliff face exorcism - 'made by a demented mind' indeed."
GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES (1988)
Isao Takahata / Isao Takahata
"It's hard to call a movie like this brilliant or perfect. Sorta feels like it's so effective on an emotional level that it would be counterproductive or disempowering to turn that off to look at how it's creating that effect. Focus too hard on
why things make you sad and you raise the cynicism water level. Idk, I don't feel that way about all emotionally challenging films. Either way, to describe GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES as 'a movie that makes you sad' is violently insufficient. Gonna have to go with consensus that everyone ought to see this, especially kids."
NASHVILLE (1975)
Robert Altman / Joan Tewkesbury
"The documentary-ish, 'cross-section' style of the film lends a great deal of weight to both its darkest moments and its ultimately optimistic outlook - each event is a sort of surprise at the same time as being a lightning strike"
TOKYO DRIFTER (1966)
Seijun Suzuki / Yasanori Kawauchi
"Real light on incident and character, but to my eyes the style is hard to distinguish from a lot of what was going on in the '60s, except maybe the overlapping music and impatient editing. Uh it's kind of like Band of Outsiders, so there's that - though that's an interesting comparison, because Tokyo D. is garishly fake and set-bound (in one particular scene the
stage lights change from white to red to yellow, with no internal motivation), yet carries the same who-gives-a-fuck attitude. Maybe pop art just really sucks?"
PASTORAL, TO DIE IN THE COUNTRY (1974)
Shuji Terayama / Shuji Terayama
"Painfully lonely and personal, a dream-drama that never strays from its simple, infinitely complicated theme of owning one's identity. Not to mention the pretty obvious origin point of David Lynch's entire career."
EXCALIBUR (1981)
John Boorman / John Boorman, Rospo Pallenberg
"A perfect story for Boorman to tell, with his lusty bombast and skepticism of humanity, symbolic characters, and episodic structure"
ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM (2007)
"The Brothers Strause" / Shane Salerno
"A pointlessly terrible film with a moronic setting, cringey human drama, and shit for brains. Good Predator scenes though, makes the character seem cooler and more competent than the previous film. Surprisingly, I'd rewatch Covenant far sooner than this, but it's too insubstantial to stoop to Prometheus levels."
POPEYE (1980)
Robert Altman / Jules Feifer
"Excruciating to sit through, though good evidence in Altman's (over)confidence in his own style, something that can't even casually be fitted to high-energy slapstick comedy. Shelley Duvall deserves an Oscar, though."
GIMME SHELTER (1970)
Albert and David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin / (documentary)
"The 'peace and love' ethos receives a challenge and shatters live on stage"
WERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE (1980)
Les Blank / Werner Herzog (documentary)
"A lot less shoe-eating than could be desired, but Herzog's off-the-cuff musings about capitalist apocalypse, Coke ads, and the utility of garlic would make a lovely podcast"
FITZCARRALDO (1982)
Werner Herzog / Werner Herzog
"Kinda burns an opening hour without much to show but light comedy (and this ain't no Altman), but gets great once it arrives at the centerpiece stunt. Popol Vuh's noodling has never felt more appropriate and more unwelcome than atop the ethereal realism of the ascending steam vessel"
BURDEN OF DREAMS (1982)
Les Blank / (documentary)
"Interesting but incomplete - again, Herzog is a fascinating man to watch, but the glimpses we get of Kinski and others around him hint at parallel stories too tantalizing to ignore. The climax too skips off unobserved, leaving a giant hole in history and Herzog's story"
HOPE AND GLORY (1987)
John Boorman / John Boorman
"Boorman bends well to comedy, even if it's more often cheery than exactly funny. The dark edge of his primal obsession surfaces in teen pregnancies, destruction-happy boys, and despised senile grandfathers, but the whole thing wraps up with way too many bows on top (not unlike Deliverance, really)"
LAND OF THE DEAD (2005)
George A. Romero / George A. Romero
"Well goddamn if Romero doesn't follow his convictions. A much-needed 15-minute edit is the only thing keeping us from a zombie protagonist this time, and the weird, savage world is again something to behold. The bad news is the leads are too many and too shitty, and the crumbly action highlights just how threadbare the plot is."
GOSFORD PARK (2001)
Robert Altman / Julian Fellowes
"Really interestingly structured around a weekend in the country in a way that situates us as part of the events, susceptible to the same longings and boredoms and suspicions and melancholy of each of the characters, without losing how specifically this time lapse affects each of them"
DAWN OF THE DEAD (2004)
Zack Snyder / James Gunn
"A decent action flick with a few really clever ideas (the birth, the billboard friendship), very solid lead performances (and very weak supporting ones), and a lot of unfunny matzoh balls in the dialogue. It's not really less scary than Romero's movies (it's tenser than any but Day), but the horror (after the opening) feels watered down, not least due to the (comparative) absence of (practical) gore. ()"
RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)
Dan O'Bannon / Dan O'Bannon
"Never gets old"
POLICE STORY (1985)
Jackie Chan / Jackie Chan, Edward Tang
"A deathmatch between Chan, half a dozen cars, a mall, a shanty town, and all the plate glass money can buy."
BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (2009)
Werner Herzog / William F. Finkelstein
"Great first half with an oddly Evangelical second half. It is somewhat too effective at selling salvation through the grace of God and ends up at offputting, where the unsettling black humor of e.g. torturing and blackmailing senior citizens was working a lot better"
End Directrospective. And what a weird way to go.
LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1986)
Frank Oz / Howard Ashman, based on a stage show by Howard Ashman
"Feels incredibly rinky-dink and stagebound, like 120% of the budget went into the monster. The dentist song is great and the (DC) ending is highly correct, otherwise there isn't much to grab onto except grating performances and obnoxious humor"
ENTER THE NINJA (1981)
Menahem Golan / Dick Desmond
"Ninja Gaiden '04 starring Luigi"
GODZILLA: TOKYO S.O.S. (2003)
Masaaki Tezuka / Masaaki Tezuka, Masahiro Yokotani
"Pretty good explosions and overall somewhat better than X Mechagodzilla"
GET CARTER (1971)
Mike Hodges / Mike Hodges, based on a novel by Ted Lewis
"Fantastic and brutal, a revenge mystery that sets up the pieces with mathematical precision and then annihilates them point blank with a shotgun"
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (2012)
Christopher Nolan / Christopher Nolan, David S. Goyer
"Even less a superhero movie and even less good than the usual Batman, although Bane is kind of hilariously weird and terrible in a mostly good way"
GOD'S NOT DEAD (2014)
Harold Cronk / Chuck Konzelman, Cary Solomon
"Hercules time travels to the future to prove that God wasn't really there, he was just always listening"
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Movies you already should've seen:
