Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
Statistics
We looked inside some of the posts by prielly-blog and here's what we found interesting.
Average Info
Notes Per Post
0
Likes Per Post
0
Reblog Per Post
0
Reply Per Post
0
Time Between Posts
10 hours ago
Number of Posts By Type
Text
17
Last Seen Tumblr Blogs
Fun Fact
Tumblr.com rank in the US is 25.
Text
Howl’s Moving Castle
(dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 2004)
Ugly-duckling fable moonlighting as an anti-war film that transcends those clichés by virtue of the unbridled humanism of its director, Hayao Miyazaki. In adapting Diana Wynne Jones’s (very different) novel, Miyazaki imagines a world in which a pantheistic communion among humans, nature, and spirits allows for a more expedient realization that War Is Bad (and, lest we forget, Love Conquers All). Whimsy gets a bad rap—and it mostly deserves it—but Howl’s Moving Castle is the exception that proves the rule. This must be what it’s like to look around inside someone else’s dreams.
79/100
0 notes
Text
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
(dir. Rian Johnson, 2017)
As with its immediate predecessor, any hint of plot intrigue or surprise was probably cut a long time ago in a draft far, far away, but despite the occasional cloying narrative predictability, the Star Wars saga continues to prove that cliché only feels cheap when it’s done poorly. Here, we get a cast that would have been impossible to market in 1977 or 1999 or even 2015, and to nobody’s surprise, it hardly matters in a universe in which classism is the only -ism overtly depicted or discussed. Critics will surely duke it out as to its wokeness, hot takes a-blazin’, but movie-wise, this one’s a satisfying in a grandma’s-home-cooking kind of way: just because it’s familiar doesn’t mean it won’t make you feel good.
Covert Observations: It’s hard to say whether Adam Driver’s parricidal Kylo Ren has read too much Freud or not enough. C’mon kid, sometimes a lightsaber is just a lightsaber.
65/100
0 notes
Text
Lady Bird
(dir. Greta Gerwig, 2017)
Or, Pretty in Fucking Pink, Mom! Female coming-of-age films have historically relied on trauma as their major plot device, a stereotype that writer/director Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, a year in the life of an eccentrically realistic high-school senior (Saoirse Ronan), entertains and then eschews by portraying the mundanities that seem so important to our teenaged selves as, indeed, A Big Deal. The trauma-drama tropes are replaced with depictions of the fallout from soured friendships, the anxiety about college, and the first fumblings of love. Too often the emotions surrounding these events are mocked or scorned—often refracted through the loathing adults feel toward their own teenaged selves—by popular media, but Gerwig and Ronan portray them in all of their formative, transient, overwhelming significance. A possible touchstone of representation for millennials-of-a-certain-age(-and-race).
Covert Observations: Still beautiful and funny and poignant even though you know that the titular Lady Bird will probably grow up to star in at least one mumblecore film.
72/100
0 notes
Text
The Big Sick
(dir. Michael Showalter, 2017)
Heartbreaker/-warmer about love in the time of medically-induced comas in which earnest comedian (is there any other kind?) Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani, also co-writer) blows it with his dream girl, Emily (Zoe Kazan), before redeeming himself by winning the love of Emily’s parents while she’s a coma fighting a decidedly non-metaphorical disease. This might be too long a stop in Zeitgeist City for the most cynical among us, but hey, it sure beats a think-piece.
67/100
0 notes
Text
John Wick: Chapter 2
(dir. Chad Stahelski, 2017)
Although lacking the desperate emotional stakes of the first entry (in which the titular über-mercenary kills dozens of featureless baddies to avenge his beagle), this sequel continues the metaphor of the original by externalizing the secret bloodlust all modern Americans harbor against anyone (or anything) that reveals free will to be a cruel charade. In other words, it’s the feel-good movie of the year.
Covert Observations: Theory: the fewer lines, the better Keanu.
67/100
0 notes
Text
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
(dir. Christopher McQuarrie, 2015)
Further notes toward a Universal Theory of Tom Cruise (or “Tom Cruise,” as his current wax-figure simulacrum film persona should be designated): at this point, every movie Tom Cruise appears in was tailor-made for him, often with the other personnel hand-picked with his input. And what has Cruise, an A-lister who could get any unproduced screenplay made in under twelve months, chosen to use his shadowy creative control to produce: exclusively action movies in which he plays the hero. One might argue that these one-man-wrecking-crew flix externalize Tom Cruise’s profound belief in rugged individualism as the governing principle for all worthy Americans, but I, for one, am convinced that all this plane-jumping, explosion-hunting, and I-do-all-my-own-stunts showboating boils down to Tom Cruise wanting us to forget that he is, now and forevermore, eligible for AARP. If wearing his hair like a thirty-eight-year-old bartender trying to pass as twenty-nine wasn’t a dead giveaway, then maybe all that skydiving-under-duress should have tipped us off to his fear of growing old. But maybe he’s right: if Tom Cruise is proven to be mortal, what does that make the rest of us?
53/100
0 notes
Text
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
(dir. Edward Zwick, 2016)
Everyone knows that the 1000-yard radius surrounding Tom Cruise is an Irony-Free Zone, so it’s no surprise that the total absurdity of nearly every aspect of this film seems, in its peculiar way, completely reasonable, logical even. Put another way: when you’re watching Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (a subtitle that could just as easily append “Tom Cruise” in every screen credit), you’ll see something fantastical and laughable every few minutes and find yourself thinking, “of course Tom Cruise would say that” or “of course Tom Cruise would run like that” or, especially, “of course they would do that in a Tom Cruise movie.” If it were, say, Matt Damon instead of Tom Cruise, the average American popcorn-gobbler wouldn’t put up with such blatant ego-fluffing sensationalism, but since “Tom Cruise”—like “John Wayne” and “Arnold Schwarzenegger” before him—long ago transcended its human host and became a visible object of our collective unconscious, we, the insatiable, welcome its outrageous posturing and unthoughtful absurdity because, in our heart of hearts, we all want to bear witness to something miraculous with impossible proportions, something that confounds more than it discloses, something mythical. And, as increasing media choice disperses the monoculture, “Tom Cruise” might be our last chance to be in awe together.
55/100
0 notes
Text
Hail, Caesar!
(dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2016)
The abundant in-joke allusions to (and interpolations of) classic Hollywood are more entertaining than the actual storyline, which, as usual when the Coen Brothers’ quirk-vanity overwhelms their control of plotting, turns into a convoluted pseudo-intellectual fable (this time of 1950’s American capitalism run amok). I know two brothers who wouldn’t have made the Hollywood blacklist.
53/100
0 notes
Text
Land of Mine
(dir. Martin Zandvliet, 2015)
There aren’t many films that depict Nazi soldiers as, uh, multi-dimensional, but writer/director Martin Zandvliet’s coastal Danish study of the postwar defusing of Nazi mines by the boy-soldiers thrust forth in the last-ditch defense of the burning Reich treats its subjects with humanity. They’re boys, after all—even if their youth is obscured (or seems negated) by the terrible insignia of their homeland. The electric Roland Møller plays the Danish sergeant assigned to manage a small crew of ex-Nazi mine-defusers, and his evolving attitude toward his erstwhile archenemies is the narrative engine that makes the film go. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that this film is, brace yourself, atmospheric.
66/100
0 notes
Text
The Kid with a Bike
(dirs. Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, 2011)
The Kid with a Bike unfolds like an alternative-universe sequel to The 400 Blows in which 11-year-old Cyril (Thomas Doret), a young delinquent living in a group home in Belgium, unwittingly finds a caring guardian (Cécile de France) while searching for his deadbeat dad. Following Cyril as he careens around town, desperately hoping to run into his father, the Dardenne brothers, who wrote and directed, capture the unfortunate luck often borne from aimlessness. To the Dardennes—as with Truffaut—criminality stems from circumstance, not character, and in The Kid with the Bike, we see what happens before circumstance hardens into experience. Brutally nuanced and superb.
84/100
0 notes
Text
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
(dir. Jalmari Helander, 2010)
Jet-black nightmare-comedy about the exhumation of a horned, demonic Santa Claus and his devilish elf minions in the foothills of Lapland where the local reindeer-butcher and his prepubescent son fight against the dark, possibly peppermint-flavored forces encroaching on their home. With an ending even darker and wilder than the premise, writer/director Jalmari Helander shows us equator-huggers how surreal the nightmares can be during those endless polar nights. Be sure to spike your eggnog before viewing.
60/100
0 notes
Text
Black Sunday
(dir. Mario Bava, 1960)
A sexy update of early Hollywood Creature Features in which a heaving-chest witch (Barbara Steele) sacrificed by her brother is reawakened two hundred years later by a bumbling rationalist doctor (Andrea Checchi) and his dreamy, Romantic assistant (John Richardson) only to wreak havoc on her leisure-class descendants. Director Mario Bava gleefully replicates the wooden creakiness of 1930s monster mashes while imbuing the classic Dracula story with his own blood-curdling perversity, which, among other things, means that every flesh wound looks like, well, the origin of mankind. Twilight freaks, eat your hearts out.
67/100
0 notes
Text
A Face in the Crowd
(dir. Elia Kazan, 1957)
Thought experiment: what percentage of Americans would do something—buy a product, support a candidate, use the word moist unironically–simply because Tom Hanks told them to? We might quibble over what the actual figure would be, but I’m sure it’s not 0%. That very simple equation, charm + platform = influence, is exactly what director Elia Kazan and writer Bud Schulberg warn us against in A Face in the Crowd, in which a menacing Andy Griffith (a phrase that surprises me even as I write it) plays Lonesome Rhodes, a drifter-turned-huckster who sweeps America off its collective saddle shoes via radio and, eventually television. Kazan puts Rhodes, a soapboxing Elvis-figure, before our eyes as the exemplar of unchecked media-enabled populism, and although we’re treated to rightful comeuppance, Kazan foresees our current predicament all too well. And now here we are, asking, “What rough beast slouches toward Washington to be President?” Maybe we should file this under “horror.”
81/100
0 notes
Text
Fat Girl
(dir. Catherine Breillat, 2001)
Unforgettable—in the bad way. Writer/director Catherine Breillat’s tale of two sisters, thirteen-year-old Anaïs (Anaïs Reboux), who pouts and overeats, and fifteen-year-old Elena (Roxane Mesquida), who’s model-beautiful and naively romantic, on holiday at the beach offers a fist-through-glass nightmare vision of adolescent sexual awakening and experience in which trauma becomes the means to salvation. There, but for the grace of God, go we all, but maybe we don’t need it instantiated.
71/100
0 notes
Text
Burden of Dreams
(dir. Les Blank, 1982)
Les Blank’s wide-eyed doc about the making of Werner Herzog’s 1982 ego-trip film Fitzcarraldo offers further proof that there are some dreams that are probably best left knocking around in the cortex. For proof positive, track down The Real McCoy and watch Herzog haul a 320-ton steamship across Amazonian jungle with a raving Klaus Kinski in tow.
59/100
0 notes
Text
My Best Friend
(dir. Werner Herzog, 1999)
Documentary recounting the violent friendship between affectless madman Werner Herzog and raving madman Klaus Kinski that succeeds in conjuring the frenzied phantom of Kinski for Herzog to alternatively eulogize and excoriate. Worth it for the anecdotes alone (e.g. a teenaged Herzog witnessed a manic Kinski lock himself in a boarding-house bathroom for 48 hours and reduce everything—fixtures and all—to dust.)
Covert Observations: According to Herzog, actress Eva Mattes, who co-starred with Kinski in Woyzeck and appears here, “was one of the few women who had anything good to say about Kinski.” Yikes.
58/100
0 notes
Text
Fitzcarraldo
(dir. Werner Herzog, 1982)
An ego-trip so spectacular and grandiose—Herzog et al. managed to hoist a 320-ton steamship over a hill of Peruvian jungle—that no film, however great, could possibly justify the costs of its fulfillment, which included subjecting the crew to extreme privation, exploiting native labor, and forcing everyone to be in close quarters with a restless Klaus Kinski. Still, Herzog, the self-styled “Conquistador of the Useless,” succeeds at something that would make Thomas Pynchon proud: collapsing subject into object. Fitzcarraldo is, finally, just as much about the spectacle of the filmmaking as it is about its ostensible subject, an Irishman (Kinski) trying to finance an opera house in the jungle, and Herzog seems to know it. It’s very rare that we’re treated to 157 minutes of enjoyable floor-to-ceiling folly, so let’s all thank our lucky stars and make a wish that nobody’s transcendently dumb enough to do anything like this ever again.
82/100
0 notes