#Adventures in Film Watching

[cinemaocd]

Movies I watched in March 2024

Under the Cherry Moon (1986)** I'm Not There (2007)*** Jingle All the Way (1996)* Three Graves to Cairo (1943)** Hitchcock (2012) ** Silent Partner (1978)** Possession (2002)** Oppenheimer (2023)** Oscar Wilde (1960)** Turning Point: The Cold War and the Bomb (2024)** Anselm (2023)*** 24 Hour Party People (2002)** Two of Us (1999)*** Remains of the Day (1993)*** Doubt (2008)*** Dune (1984)*** Dune Part II (2024)***

Under the Cherry Moon (1986)** Absolute bobbins of a script is still beautiful to look at, very gay and of course mainly a vehicle for Prince's music. Under the Cherry Moon was the follow up to Purple Rain. It was a box office flop, a critical failure that earned Razzie nominations, but is a worth another look. Prince and Jerome Beton are sex workers with a rich female clientele on the French Riviera, the kind of career that only exists in movies. Kristin Scott Thomas makes her film debut as the debutante who comes between the friends and threatens to part them. Prince's death scene, harkens back to Camille with Prince playing Garbo. Like Garbo, Prince was happy to exploit his own androgyny and like Garbo, he was doomed to only explore that in a way that could be squeezed into heteronormative films.

I'm not There: (2007)*** A fascinating look at Bob Dylan, dividing him into six personae played by six different actors. Haynes uses different film styles, the Cate Blanchett mid Sixties Dylan of Bringing it All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde is matched in style with the black and white cinematography of D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back. It also has elements of the Italian Surrealists like Felinni or Antonioni with a scoch of A Hard Day's Night. The soundtrack is particularly good, avoiding for the most part, the licensing pitfalls that plagued Haynes' Bowie biopic, Velvet Goldmine. Some of the most effective moments of I'm Not There, pair landscape shots with Dylan's music. Given the catalogue and the array of talent, Haynes has gathered, one perhaps expects a bit more , but then that has always been Dylan's nature, he's mysterious and aloof, leaving us wanting more.

Jingle All the Way (1996)* We watched this Christmas movie in March because we recently learned that part of it was filmed at my son's elementary school. It had Jake Lloyd somehow being more annoying than he was in the Phantom Menace as a bonus. Phil Hartman got dragged into this unfunny mess as well.

Three Graves to Cairo (1943)** Tense war time drama about a British officer who gets trapped behind the lines and ends up hiding out in a hotel working as a waiter for Field Marshall Rommel. Billy Wilder ratchets up the tension, his script giving all the best lines to Rommel, played by Erich Von Stroheim who really owns the film though Anne Baxter and Franchot Tone nominally "star."

Hitchcock (2012)** Hichcock's struggle to make Pyscho dramatized with fantasies where he hangs out with Ed Gein, while Alma Hitchcock gets involved in a Hitchcockian romance with a hack writer. Scarlett Johannson plays an almost deliberately obtuse Janet Leigh and James Darcy captures pre-Psycho Tony Perkins. It's a bit silly but I'll never turn down Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins in anything. This has a slight, arch feel to it, like many of Hitchcock's pictures, but lurking underneath are the ordinary hates and passions of a man who fears being left behind, at the height of his career. For his long-suffering wife's part, she too feels she's being replaced by the young actresses that Hitchcock is obsessed with at the moment. The conclusion is sweet enough for the Hayes office: husband and wife rediscover the magic of their working relationship, which was always the rock upon which their relationship was built.

The Silent Partner (1978)** With Elliott Gould, Christopher Plummer and Susannah York in the cast, this should have been better. Decent heist plot that devolves into slasher film . Christopher Plummer takes on the dubious mantels of playing a villain in a piss-poor American action film and a cross-dressing murderer.

Possession (2002)** A rather thin adaptation of a great novel, A.S. Byatt's story of two modern academics who disover a previous hidden romance between two Victorian poets. The film lacks the poetry of the novel, which I think is necessary for the story to have its full impact, but the film is full of plenty of jabs at academia as well as burning passions. Gweneth Paltrow and Aaron Ecklund play the young couple, while Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle play the poet/lovers. Tom Hollander has a small but memorable part as does Toby Stephens.

Oppenheimer (2023)** My least favorite half of Barbenheimer still damn good and the physics nerd in me reveled in seeing my dead physicist boyfriends on screen. There are better films about Oppenheimer's life (BBC did a mini series starring Sam Waterston and it's on youtube) but something about the dreamy quality of Nolan's film captures that quantum mystery kinda vibe and put it in a blockbuster package. Cool.

Oscar Wilde (1960)** Preceded the landmark film Crisis by one year, without the world shaking honesty that film managed, around the topic of homosexuality and the law. Both films hinged on blackmail of a gay man but Oscar Wilde is careful to skirt around explicit mentions of sexuality, using tricks like showing the dictionary definition of "sodomy" briefly on camera. More was needed and more was achieved a year later. Ralph Richardson contributes to the courtroom scenes admirably and Morley is a terrific Wilde, who would rather make point for style than save himself from prison.

Turning Point: The Cold War and the Bomb (2024)** Fascinating background to our current situation, most of which is terrifying and now I'm worrying about the bomb again. I took off a star for the sheer number neo-con/Reaganite talking heads in this...

Anselm (2023)*** Wim Wenders stirring mostly visual documentary about Anselm Kiefer, a German artist who has explored his childhood memories of post war Germany in a frank and intimidatingly in your face way, on a massive scale combining sculpture, painting and physical spaces, many of which he has engineered himself. As a middle aged person who feels estranged and terrified to look more deeply into her own childhood, Anselm was something to sit with for two hours.

24 Hour Party People (2002)** Steve Coogan plays Tony Wilson, the Manchester TV personality and club owner who helped launch the careers of Joy Division, New Order and The Happy Mondays. Coogan has a tendency to make all his characters Alan Partridge and this is no exception, but it kind of works? It did more to get me to listen to Joy Division that numerous goth roommates ever could...

Two of Us (1999)*** I can't stop watching this made for VH-1 fanfiction of a movie starring Jared Harris and Aidan Quinn as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, dramatizing a probably apocryphal tale that John and Paul met up in NYC in the 70s when Paul was playing Madison Square Garden. Pure fluff and nonsense. I need it like air.

Remains of the Day (1993)*** Revisiting this old favorite and finding that it's kind of pacey and funny for a Merchant Ivory pic. The movie that made me love Tony Hopkins as an actor, his Stevens is really such a fascinating, ostensibly tragic character and yet there is a weird kind of triumph to living one's life so completely to a schedule and a code, and yet never being to eliminate desire and feeling.

Doubt (2008)*** This is the second Philip Seymour Hoffman movie I've watched in the last few months that has left me utterly haunted. Like The Master, Hoffman creates a villain who charms the audience at the same time you know that he's probably done unforgivable things and is only at the start of a long career of doing unforgivable things. Meryl Streep gives a heavy handed performance (Streep never met a colloquial accent that she didn't wear like a Groucho Marx nose) that certainly gets the point across that unpleasant people usually aren't the bad guys you want them to be. Amy Adams plays a naive young nun who, like the audience, is left wondering what to believe.

Dune (1984)*** Unapologetic Lynch Dune lover here. I love the cheesy acting, the wild tonal shifts, and the attempts to put this sprawling multibook epic in the Star Wars shaped box that the studio wanted him to use. My favorite scene has become Lynch's cameo, he seems so happy just pretending to be a spice miner, in his little spice mining suit in his little unconvincing space ship. I love him and this whole stupid mess. Sorry Frank Herbert.

Dune Part II (2024)*** My prediction is that Villeneuve's probable trilogy will--like so many franchises--peak in the second film. The first part was a slow-moving visual feast, that only hinted at the potential of this cast. Things actually start moving in the plot and Chalamet's Paul does his best to cope. Unlike MacLachlan's avuncular Atreides, who takes being a Messiah as just being another Tuesday of being the Universe's Most Gifted Child, he actually seems conflicted. Zendaya continues to utterly dominate every time she's on screen. Can Channi be the focus of the movie? Please?

[thearoacemess]

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Furtive Festivity (2019)

[mikimeiko]

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994)

[cyphyree]

I threw together a Show / Movie recommendation template so I can find more stuff to watch!!!

PLEASE feel free to fill this out and reblog from me so I can find more cool shows/films!! (hopefully i'll have time to watch them RIP) Or repost with credit :) Anyone can modify/expand it however they want too! Here are some of my recommendations:

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

The Indian Tomb (Fritz Lang, 1959)

[frogsottersandbees]

the whole nsbu table is filled with people that were specifically selected to make fucked up improv choices that ruin brennan’s life and i’m so here for it

[fxllingout]

does not include the alabasta and drum island ones bc lets be honest i had to cut some movies out to fit it into the poll options and those ones are basically just manga adaptations (also no straw hat chase because. no)

[valcaine]

hi tumblr doodling them made me physically ill

watch the film Right Neow:

[uwudonoodle]

Just thinking about the genuine beauty of this movie.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger (1926, Germany)

[havinganidentitycrisis]

just finished watching Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977), and it just became my new comfort film

this movie is so lovely and charming and the animation is astoundingly beautiful and delightfully strange, watching it genuinely made me so happy and warm inside.

Raggedy Anne's such a delight, but Andy's totally my new transmasc icon ♡♡♡

[bedlamsbard]

I'm trying to figure out how to get from What If's CCverse CATWS knock-off (which I hate and think is not only nonsensical but actively insulting to both CATWS and BW) to an AoU in that 'verse and I think it may be literally impossible because they cut the Hydra infiltration out of that 'verse.

(Bedlam, you hate CC, why are you thinking about it? --I'm considering doing some concept writing for the hypothetical Yonder sequel.)

[sideblogdotjpeg]

i am not immune to launchpad sol and albin thoughts

[seasonallydefective]

After rewatching Ghostbusters: Afterlife and also seeing Frozen Empire, can I just say how much I love the autistic, queer, butch science girl rep??

I ultimately grew into a transmasc NB but as someone who is AFAB I still would have been wow’d by that as a kid. And it still makes me feel seen, now.

Possibly controversial statement but I also love that none of Phoebe’s character traits are Big Plot Points; they’re just there. I do love her weird as fuck jokes though. That’s definitely a mood from my childhood 😂

[dont-hug-me-its-yuri]

more fart end job headcanon!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

More fart end job headcanons!!!

. Coffins love language is acts of service while Briefcases is receiving gifts

. Coffin loves horror movies while Briefcase is terrified of them

. Coffin actually hung out with Briefcase (outside of work) for the first time when he made them watch Hellraiser together

. they had to stop it 20 minutes in because Briefcase could not handle it

. Coffin is way taller than Briefcase, she could literally throw him

. Briefcase is totally ok with helping Coffin bury and carry dead body but will not go through the dissection phase

. Coffin gives Briefcase so many gifts that it doesn’t understand (wilted flowers, jewelry made out of actual bones, etc.)

. Coffin is constantly helping Briefcase out with injuries since the man is the most clumsy man you will ever meet

. Coffin has never showered and Briefcase is totally attracted to that (little freaks)

. Briefcase thinks that holding hands is scandalous and Coffin has no sense of personal space due to having no social interaction for most of her decades long life

pay 20 dabloons to get more!!!

[allweknewisdead]

Poor Things (2023) - Yorgos Lanthimos

I wanted a tart, but then an adventure befell me.

[jay-wasreblogging]

I'm starting to think I understand how Disney's Star Wars trilogy enjoyers feel as a 'The Hobbit' enjoyer.