Author: Ga2so

Fun fact: I’ve never seen the first Smile, but for some reason this movie called to me. It’s amazing how much this horror movie leans into being a musical. The lead character is a pop singer, and there are several convincing full performances of songs with backup dancers and sets.

It’s also easy to believe that a musician with a history of addiction and bad behavior would have a hard time convincing her family and associates that their crazy behavior was coming from something other than drug abuse.

Also: The whole time I was watching I kept thinking of this:

Bonus Movie Frustration!

There’s a documentary called No Other Land, recorded before the October 7 attacks, that deals with Palestinians in a small village living under Israeli control. It’s been getting amazing reviews, but it doesn’t have a distribution deal so it’s very hard to find and watch. I went to a screening tonight, and I was confused; the subtitles didn’t seem to connect to the actions on screen. About ten minutes into the film, the lights came up and they announced that they were going to try and fix the titles. When they finally restarted the film, there was no sound. At one point you could see the volume control appear and get turned up all the way, and the audience laughed. Not a great thing to happen to a serious film. Eventually they cancelled the showing and issued vouchers. Bummer.

Originally I planned to go to a showing of Hundreds of Beavers tonight. When that fell through, I sorted my Letterboxd watchlist by length to find a shorter film and chose Daisies. Less than a minute into the credits I realized I wasn’t up for a 1960’s surrealist art film, and switched to Attack the Block, the story of lower class London teenagers simultaneously fighting off an alien invasion, the police, and a drug dealer.

I keep saying “these aren’t the kinds of movies I normally like,” then watching them and liking them. I think I may have been lying to myself about what I like.

Also: John Boyega is made of charisma.

I don’t really remember exactly what I thought of this when it came out, but I’m sure my sophisticated fourteen year old brain thought “this lacks the subtlety and nuance of The Empire Strikes Back- it’s leaning too hard into the fantasy action tropes that Star wars so deftly homages.” Except I probably condensed that to “this is dumb.”

I watched it last night, and my main thought was “OH YEAH! THIS IS RAD!” Sure, I could expand on that and talk about the wholehearted embrace of serial archetypes, the intricate costume and set design, and of course the roaring score by Queen, but I’m old enough to know my original response is the most honest.

And every shot of blessed Brian Blessed is pure gold.

If you’ve got an hour and a quarter and want to see an old boxer have a brutal fight while being betrayed by nearly everyone, this is the movie for you! Lots of snappy dialogue, tons of deep sharp shadows, a story that starts at miserable and goes down from there- classic film noir stuff.

This didn’t do much for me.

Maybe it’s because I worked as a sort-of projectionist at Beatlefest in Los Angeles for a few years, showing tenth generation copies of obscure footage that the promoter had loaded onto home-grade Betamax tapes, so I’ve already seen a lot of rare Beatles stuff. Maybe it’s because I just saw a DEVO documentary that was more energetic and more directly connected to my world. Or maybe there’s been so much Beatles content in general that I’m approaching my Beatles saturation point.

Sure, there were some fascinating moments- The Miracles covering “Yesterday,” David Lynch talking about attending their first concert in the United States- but very little of The Beatles themselves felt fresh or surprising.

I found a list on Letterboxd of 100 overlooked films directed by women. I hadn’t seen any of them, and I decided I should. This is the first.

My thoughts while watching:

• “Hey, this looks a lot like Go Fish.”
• “Hey, they just referenced a book about making Go Fish.”
• “Hey, that’s the lead from Go Fish.”

The Watermelon Woman has all of the strengths and weaknesses of Go Fish. It’s about fascinating subjects that are under-represented, and it uses natural settings and performances that sometimes increase the feel of reality. It also struggles to stretch its tiny budget, and the less polished performances can be distracting. It also has the bonus issue of being shot in color. It makes sense to use color to separate current events from the old films and photos, but it’s a lot harder to get color right.

One movie down, 99 to go!

Apparently I’m in Silent Movie Mode. This one came out within two months of The General, but it feels much more dated (well, except for The General’s heavily implied pro-racism stance). The story is whisper-thin. It’s a movie where people meet one day, and by the end of the next day they’re engaged. The main reason it still holds up at all is Clara Bow; she makes even the most nonsensical plot point watchable.

I did not expect to hear Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” in a movie about a lonely gay man in post World War II Mexico, but that’s actually pretty tame for a Luca Guadagnino movie based on a William S. Burroughs novel. There’s a little too little story to sustain a movie this long, and the tonal shift in the third act is jarring, but it mostly works.

Also features significant discussion of telepathy.