#filmwatching

[sugurugetos]

Humans only have one ending. Ideas live forever.

BARBIE (2023) dir. Greta Gerwig

[funeralbeach]

august ✭ it / he

15! twin fantasy enthusiast! monster high fan! scott pilgrim connoisseur! death note enjoyer! boygirlcreature! NOT normal about music! vinyl collector! baja blast #1 fan! filmwatcher! will buy anything with hello kittys face on it! autistic! a little strange! used to be @mybloodyfemboy!

follow me for a MILLION dollars and a everything bagel flavored ricecake

[acompleteunknown2024]

my 2024 resolutions:

read 5-10 books (this is a low number but i have a hard time with reading and struggle to finish books so i'm hoping that keeping my goal small will help!)

watch 12 movies i haven't seen before (similarly to books i have fallen off my movie grind severely so i think a movie a month is a reasonable and achievable goal to help me find my filmwatching groove again)

get a cheap guitar and practice once a week

host gatherings, dinners, parties etc at my house

meet new people and make new friends, get to know my housemates better, expand my social circle, spend lots of time with friends overall

get out of the house every day (i'm taking a remote wfh job so this will have to be a conscious effort)

travel to another state

see more live music

take more pictures (i am so bad at this and it makes me sad that i don't have many photos of friends events places experiences etc)

keep up with journaling

:-)

[thealmightyemprex]

I think the smartest thing one can do when they are called an expert is acknowledge they arent simply cause you can always learn more

People call me a movie expert .I hate that cause I AM NOT .Cause theres so much I DONT know about and one thing I adore is broadening my filmwatching horizions .I just really really really am enthusiastic about cinema

@piterelizabethdevries @themousefromfantasyland @angelixgutz@theancientvaleofsoulmaking @ariel-seagull-wings

@amalthea9 @the-blue-fairie @filmcityworld1 @countesspetofi @princesssarisa

[earthdoves]

i bring a sort of ‘discomforting family dysfunction dramas’ vibe to the watch party that the other filmwatchers don’t really want to have....

[mino2aur]

my filmwatching associates were more freaked out by fucking mother! than skinamarink

oh boo hoo theres people in her house. my boy kevin had no people in his house and shit went so much worse for him

[rencontresinfidelesch]

FilmWatch Weekly: Lea Seydoux shines in 'One Fine Morning ... - Oregon ArtsWatch

FilmWatch Weekly: Lea Seydoux shines in 'One Fine Morning ...  Oregon ArtsWatch http://dlvr.it/SkDHQ1

[picklejuice-666-blog]

Pickle Juice’s Bay Street Video issue cover illustration. 

[thefeministbibliothecary]

I've been trying to watch more films in a variety of languages, and these are some of the things I've watched recently that aren't in English. Clockwise. Godzilla (1954, dir. Ishiro Honda, Japanese) My first time watching any Godzilla movie. The action scenes were cheesy, as was the acting, but it was still a lot of fun. I really liked the anti weapons of mass destruction statements that it had to make, which added a lot of nuance to what is otherwise pretty standard for classic monster movies. Also watched the Americanized version from '56 and it was truly terrible. Kung Fu Hustle (2004, dir. Stephen Chow, Cantonese) The story in this was really enjoyable, even if it was a bit on the wacky side, and the humour was genuinely quite funny. Not a perfect movie but a genuinely good time that was a fun and funny watching experience. Vampyr (1932, dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, German) A rare vampire classic based on Carmilla instead of Dracula, this is an interesting viewing experience. I feel like this movie had an amazing tone and atmospheric, with some fascinating stuff in the story and a change of pace for vampire classics, but I also didn't completely love it. I saw the Passion of Joan or Arc earlier this year as well and in my opinion it is a much stronger example of Dreyer's work. The Platform (2019, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, Spanish) This one is a really interesting critique of prisons, capitalism, and artificial scarcity. It is absolutely brutal but highly enjoyable as a critique and as a bloody thriller, and the acting is top notch. #films #filmwatching #filmposting #classicfilm #movies #moviewatching https://www.instagram.com/p/CT_etaHrrn-/?utm_medium=tumblr

[dandelionjack]

the navidson record btw

[rainonsand]

Anthony Mackie filmwatch

I recently decided to go back and watch some of Anthony Mackie’s filmography that I haven’t seen before.

Guys: I have just noticed Anthony Mackie’s filmpgraphy is nuts.

I’ve done a filmpgraphy deep dive from time to time with actors like Charlize Theron, Chadwick Boseman, and Karl Urban: maybe I’ve seen them in a bunch of stuff over the years and maybe they only just caught my eye, but something changes and I get the impulse to see more of their work, sometimes exhaustively. I’ll go find and watch as much of their work as I can find available on streamers without an individual paywall. Usually I start with their most popular or critically acclaimed stuff (that I haven’t seen) and then get more obscure until it peters out. Sometimes I can stop myself before I’m watching a random tv episode that they had a 3 minute guest spot on in their early career, sometimes I can pace myself (which is far better for me in many ways) but especially earlier in my life it could become a pretty strong fixation, and I would binge someone’s films/tv across consecutive weekends, 48 hrs at a time, until I ran out of content. These days I’m much better at pacing myself and after an initial binge I try to string out the back half of films over weeks or even months (I’m still rationing out the last of Chadwick Boseman’s films). I’ve done this many, many times before.

All this to say that I’ve seen a lot of IMDB pages with meticulous consideration, gone through my share of deep dives on people’s filmographies, and I have never quite seen something like Anthony Mackie’s.

Usually when someone “makes it big” as a star, if you go back before that you’ll find a few big films they were in, in smaller or non-lead roles, and maybe some smaller or more obscure films that they were the lead of. That’s what I’d expect from someone who *knew* they were lead actor material but who needed the popular name recognition to be given the lead of a popular film.

But either way, once someone starts to make it big they’re in 1, maybe 2 films a year. Before that it’s more hit and miss- maybe no films one year, maybe 3 in another. This might be reflective of gaps in working, which comes with the industry, but it is more likely to be just the variation in how quickly or delayed a film’s release is. Someone could be acting in 2 film a year for 3 years, and have 3 years where first 2 films comes out, then none, then 4 in the third year.  But look at Anthony Mackie’s imdb page. You have him in 3 movies one year, 4 the next, then 3, then 5. It’s insane. I decided to tally the numbers: Mackie was in 60 films between 2002 and 2020, averaging more than 3 a year. Specifically 3 1/3 per year, or 10 films ever 3 years. FOR 18 YEARS. That’s not counting the tv projects he’s done like Altered Carbon, or a tv documentary he was the narrator for, and other miscellany.

This man got famous from the first film he was ever in, was cast as a lead by his third, and was regularly in oscar nominated projects (some say giving the same level of great performance as his white costars who were nominated while he was not) and though he’s been Marvel-famous for more than 8 years he still works like a jobbing actor. He is regularly a film lead, regularly carries movies, and even then still working in 3 to 4 films a year. He could choose to say no to projects unless he’s a lead, a co lead, or a heavily featured part, but he still takes small parts, even bit roles, as recently as 2019.

The only years he hasn’t been in at least 2 films were the ones he was in a long term tv project like Altered Carbon or (so far this year anyway) The Falcon And The Winter Soldier.

So it turns out I have a lot of movies to go through. Even if I only did the ones where he was a lead or colead, I’d have a lot ahead of me. I’ve already started, and I can’t wait.

[sugurugetos]

I would like to say this. Tardiness is not something you can do on your own. Many, many people contributed to my tardiness. I would like to thank my parents for never giving me a ride to school, the LA city bus driver who took a chance on an unknown kid and last but not least, the wonderful crew from McDonalds who spend hours making those egg McMuffins without which I might never be tardy.

CLUELESS (1995) dir. Amy Heckerling

[doodlemeimpressed]

If I was Dean Winchester, I would simply abstain from Thai food one year, every year, after that whole Amazon warriors murdering men thing

[billieliar]

Last Month Tonight in 1992: Rock-a-Doodle! What to say about Rock-a-Doodle? No, really, I’m asking. I put this project on hiatus because trying to write this plus the aftershock from Folks was just too much.  So, I am left with this single, most daunting task: describing a pretty average kids’ movie. That’s right folks, I’ve been to the bottom of the lowest point in film I’ve yet to encounter and it’s this mediocre children’s movie that has destroyed me. Was it the timing that made me so disinterested in this movie? Maybe it was. Regardless, the reality stands: Rock-a-Doodle is a “meh” movie. It’s a musical with no good music, an adventure with no major challenge, and a character-driven plot with utterly forgettable characters. This is the only Bluth film I hadn’t previously seen. I have a massive fondness for his works, but that could be at least partially due to nostalgia. Still, you shouldn’t need nostalgia to enjoy a movie, and I typically find that I like most childrens’ films more as an adult. This one I forgot I watched it within an hour of watching it, and that’s just disappointing. Still, it blemishes nothing. So what? It was mediocre. Every creator has a flop, and that’s okay. Honestly, the folly here was probably pinning all the aesthetic on a Rooster version of Elvis.  You know what? I really wish I’d seen this as a kid. I probably would have at least liked it despite its lack of a decent bop. Plus the villain was SO EXTRA and I loved him. The colors and fluidity of the animation were (as they always are in Bluth films) wonderful. At the end of the day, no crimes were done here, and I now have seen every Bluth film! Isn’t that cool? And missing 1 out of god-only-knows-how-many will forever be more of a success than 98% of other makers have accomplished. So, sorry I didn’t love this one Mr. Bluth, but thanks anyway and I still love you. 3/10 +1 for the sexy pheasant and for Mr. Bluth’s eternal love of oversharing his fetishes. (4/10) Would not recommend Would not watch again #DonBluth #RockaDoodle #Film #FilmWatch #FilmWatch1992 https://www.instagram.com/p/B4L7J6rH-84/?igshid=h2dni497i847

[roombagreyjoy]

Ok, purr 💅

hello >:3c teehee it’s me again

[latenightcinephile]

Film #706: ‘Diva’, dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1981.

In a dream, I imagine being an actor in Diva.

For most of my filmwatching career I've at least been able to determine what I like or dislike about a film. In the case of Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva, I'm at a bit of a loss. The very things that I think are compelling about the film are the same things that absolutely infuriated me while watching it. It's a film of sensations rather than coherence, which is appealing, but that doesn't mean that all of those sensations are pleasurable. It abandons the logical progression of events, which makes for some giddy, edge-of-rationality storytelling, but it also ignores some logical progressions that would make the film more interesting. It is steadfastly unorthodox and doesn't seem to mind that that is a contradiction in terms. It's also a French film from the early 1980s, which means that there are a lot of bare breasts, just for the sake of it.

This complete disavowal of traditional film structure raised a few hackles at the time of the film's release as well. As best I can determine, Diva is on the list because it's a great example of what was termed 'cinéma du look' by Raphael Bassan: a loose collection of films by directors including Beineix and Luc Besson that prioritised style over the realist tradition that preceded it in French cinema. Diva received a mediocre reception in France until the film became particularly popular in the United States, at which point it received stronger praise in its home country. What's particularly interesting about this to me is that it demonstrates the vast gulf that can exist between the audience and the theory. 'Cinéma du look' was originally intended as a pejorative term; an insult against these overly populist films which had abandoned their respect for their realist ancestors.

How does something like this happen? Most of the time, if a collection of films gains a term (especially in French, and especially a French abstract term), it will be considered as a functional movement, even if that term starts life as an insult. Once you label something, you can find connections. The term features in Empire and Contemporary French Cinema without any reference to the term's origins, drawing attention to the malaise that set in under Mitterrand's regime, and proposing that this explains the movement's focus on political disillusionment, fatalism, and an anti-police, anti-familial rhetoric. All of this, though, is tangential to the actual experience of watching one of these films, so let's turn to Diva itself.

Beineix took some time to settle into his feature-film career. Diva was his first full-length picture, and he hopped around various genres before settling into the documentary format, where he stayed for most of the 1990s. At times his films hearken back to Diva, though, returning to the slick crime caper genre. In Diva, a Parisian postal worker (Frédéric Andréi) makes a bootleg recording of an opera singer he adores (Wilhemenia Fernandez), who has been vociferously opposed to having her voice recorded (my partner, half-watching this film with me, said "She's clearly not very good at her job, then, if she's never heard herself sing," and I have to agree with that on a logical level, but the film clearly doesn't mind). The existence of this bootleg recording is noted by two Taiwanese record executives (and possible gangsters), who trick the soprano into believing they have the recording to blackmail her into signing an exclusive recording contract with them. Mistakenly believing that this is the only incriminating recording he possesses, the postal worker, Jules, believes that all the surveillance and threats he is the victim of are coming from the Taiwanese men. However, at the very beginning of the film, a key witness to a criminal prostitution ring drops her taped testimony into the pannier of Jules' moped. This is our secondary crime plot which, as is typical for the caper film, is of much greater importance to everyone except the protagonist. The police officers investigating the witness's murder are trying to locate Jules to retrieve the evidence, as are the hitmen who murdered the witness, but Jules chalks all this behaviour up to the one recording he knows he possesses.

...Actually, it's all a bit more complicated than this. Jules knows he has the witness testimony tape; he handles it several times. Yet despite being in possession of a mysterious audio cassette, and living surrounded by sound equipment, it takes him a maddeningly long time to even consider playing it. It happens at roughly the right point in the film's plot, but forty minutes too late to be believable.

Anyhow, Jules falls in with a bohemian - and probable pimp - Gorodish (Richard Bohringer, suitably menacing) and his muse Alba (Thuy An Luu, pixieish), and Gorodish pieces everything together, rescues Jules from his plight, and machinates the deaths of the record executives/gangsters, the hitmen, and the leader of the prostitution ring. Despite recording her against her wishes, almost ruining her livelihood, and not acknowledging any of this when he could, Jules and the soprano finally fall in love.

Written out like this, the film sounds kind of stupid. But it's made out of some absolutely pristine parts which are often all the more appealing when they don't make sense. The film is a kind of collage of things that the director and his audience clearly found 'cool', with no apologies made for their inability to gel into a cohesive whole. In fact, doing so would likely make the film much less vibrant. Jules appears to live in a disused Planet Hollywood at the top of a car park building; when his home is ransacked it is left festooned with unraveled audiotape in a way that cannot have occurred naturally. Gorodish and Alba's apartment is a large room with no interior walls, like a contemporary art gallery, where Gorodish completes a large jigsaw puzzle on the floor and everything is blue. Discordant electronic music plays at a high volume everywhere, and it seems like Beineix is more concerned about the sonic textures of Paris rather above all else. Variety in colour is robbed from scenes, creating a gorgeous but artificial uniform scheme, but the sound is frequently jarring, in contrast to the beautiful performances of opera.

Wilhelmenia Fernandez is the film's greatest find as a musician, even though she is clearly not a comfortable actor. Her opening performance, which Jules records, is masterful and time does seem to hang still in the air for the duration. This is the most still the film will get, and much has been made about the most memorable sequence in the middle of the film, a fast-paced chase between Jules on his moped and one of the police detectives trying to catch him. The implausibilities of the sequence add to it: the detective is able to run almost as fast as Jules on the moped, despite shots showing Jules motoring at speed by himself. Either the detective is supernaturally fast, or Jules is appallingly slow on his moped, but rather than doing the obvious thing and ditching the vehicle, Beineix keeps it to make the chase far more interesting than it would be otherwise.

It's the most infuriating thing, really: I should be able to put my desire for narrative cohesiveness on hold for two hours. This film has a plot, certainly, but it doesn't seem to care enough about it to treat it seriously. On the flipside of that, it also doesn't have a strong commitment to being funny. It winds up being somewhere in the middle, enough to earn the slightly hostile bemusement of the French film criticism apparatus.What I think I wanted from this film was a clear reason to stick with it in the face of its failings, and Diva didn't provide me with that. Why doesn't Jules listen to the tape earlier? It would reveal the answer to a major mystery much earlier, certainly, but with the right treatment that could serve to make the plot more interesting and convoluted, rather than less. Why not explain more explicitly Jule's reluctance to tell the opera singer that he has the recording, and that her career is not in any significant danger? It would, again, remove something from the script that currently serves as a major catalyst for 'things happening', but stripping out the weaker elements and replacing them with stronger ones would only be a benefit to the film.

The answer, of course, is that Beineix doesn't really care how weak the plot is. American critics in higher publications admired this break from traditional narratives, having an almost meditative experience in the midst of these slightly alienating soundscapes and colour fields. Despite this, I'd argue that if you're making a film with some fantastic setpieces, stylistic choices and an embrace of the merging of highbrow and lowbrow, that you would want to show these elements to their best advantage. Beineix has assembled some great stuff, but without the care or the resulting satisfaction.

In a dream, I imagine being an actor in Diva. I want to know my motivation. I want to know why things are happening in a language I am not fluent in; why I should respond in a certain way and why I don't respond in ways that seem obvious. Jean-Jacques Beineix looks at me from behind the camera when I ask why my bath is in the middle of my wide-open apartment. "C'est cool," he says, simply. "C'est radical, c'est vulgar."