Wow, never thought I’d see a movie that scores itself! Here was the last one:
A post was merged into an existing topic: Donbass: Ukriane’s pitch-black 2018 comedy is more relevant than ever
Shoplifters
I’m a sucker for these kinds of movies. One of my favorite directors is Lee Chan Dong, and he always does these very quiet, meticulous character portraits.
I always refer to that style as “literary”. It reminds me of reading a good book.
Shoplifters is like that, but of course it’s Japanese, not South Korean. It still feels kinda similar, but it’s not quite as dark as a Lee Chan Dong movie.
It doesn’t have the most riveting plot, but it’s deceptively well crafted, and it’s so beautifully shot and acted that I was thoroughly enjoying every second of it.
Some of it does get very emotionally taxing with some of the subjects it touches on, specifically poverty and child neglect. For me that’s a lot harder to watch than any horror movie, but Shoplifters never gets really bad.
I was worried it was gonna turn into Capernaum by Nadine Labaki, which had me feeling like crap for a long time after watching it, but thankfully it didn’t go that way.
I think it’s a beautiful movie, and I reckon I should watch a lot more movies by Hirokazu Kore-eda.
If you ever want to combine those things, Tigers Are Not Afraid is excellent.
Interesting! How emotionally damaging would you say it is? I really don’t wanna watch another Capernaum, that stuff messes me up.
Well it centers on child poverty, and like many foreign horror movies, the real villain is the injustice itself. I didn’t find it traumatizing, but it is about trauma.
He’s an amazing film maker. Shoplifters is one of mine and my girlfriend’s favourites alongside I Wish, Still Walking and After The Storm. So… basically all of his that we’ve seen so far.
Yeah that’s a good way of putting it.
That sounds like something I can handle. It’s only when the director or author is deliberately cruel and really wants to twist the knife that it ends up getting to me.
Two good examples of that is Capernaum, which is a movie about the cruel fate of two young boys on their own in poverty-stricken Lebanon, and a book called Swamplandia, which is a cruelly deceptive book that starts off whimsical and then changes very suddenly midway through, and becomes really abusive.
That type of fiction makes me a little angry. I feel like they are using their characters and my affection for them to hurt me as a viewer or reader.
Ooo! Glad to hear it!
I’m definitely gonna be jumping into his filmography :)
Thread die? Everyone stop watching movies?
Caught this last night on Hulu, was pleasantly surprised how good it was.
Fact: @lordkosc has never tried Flamin’ Hot Cheetos
I accidentally did a Fabio Testi double feature the other night. The first was What Have You Done to Solange.
I knew going into it that it had a reputation as one of the sleaziest giallos, but man. This is the IMDB synopsis:
“A teacher who is having an affair with one of his students is reluctant to present an alibi when his lover witnesses the first in a series of murders connected to their school.”
It’s so much about the sexual lives of teenage girls, and the protagonist embodies the hypocrisies of men to that entire subject and the camera always finds its way to the POV of the sleaziest character in play. But the movie is also keenly aware of the damage that gaze is doing. It’s the most I’ve seen a movie having its cake and eating in a long while.
The other picture was Revolver.
Which is just a fucking banger. No notes.
So I’m finally ducking into one of these general purpose threads. Let’s see:
It offends my sensibilities that Donbass gets only a single post when it should have an exhaustive thread of a hundred posts talking about its insights into the war. :( Donbass is one of those movies I can watch over and over. One of the keenest and most relevant pitch-black dark comedies I’ve ever seen, and it’s even more relevant than it was when it was actually made. It is a Dr. Strangelove for our times, if not our corner of the world.
He was just sadly miscast in an American sci-fi movie as a hapless scientist who makes a time machine in his living room. He’s so bad in the movie and I think hearing his voice in English, I know what you’re talking about. Fortunately, I can’t remember the name of the movie and lord knows, I’m not about to look it up to further embarrass the poor man.
Anyway, I’ve been on a title card kick lately, just grabbing screengrabs of interesting title cards as I watch a movie. So rather than tell you what I’ve watched lately, I’ll just show you:
There have been others, of course, but these are the ones where I thought to grab a screengrab because the title cards were so arresting.
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Such a great movie - and one which really was a LOT better in the Theaters. If they could do it, I’d go see an IMAX version.
I watched What Have They Done To Your Daughters. Which is Massimo Dallamano’s thematic followup to What Have You Done to Solange. You have the same moral panic about the sex lives of school girls, but since giallo started to fall out of favor, it’s more of a poliziotteschi. Instead of teachers perving on and/or murdering them, the aperture widens and what appeared to be a suicide turns into an investigation into a teen prostitution ring that implicates the upper echelons of society.
But there’s still a Hotline Miami character running around with a meat cleaver murdering people.
I liked it a lot. On some levels it’s nastier than Solange, but because the really sleazy stuff is just relayed by audio, the aesthetics are more clinical and our protagonists aren’t morally compromised, it’s ultimately an easier watch.
I spent much of this “thriller” astonished at how bad Orlando Bloom is at the acting thing. He grimaces and ducks his head and cuts his eyes and tries in vain to imitate an emotion. But then Andie McDowell shows up as the villain. Hoo boy. You cannot fake what she was doing. It has to come naturally. Being that bad is a gift, not a skill. Now I understand that Tarzan movie where they just taped someone else over her lines.
Imagine the PotC movies with a competent lead.
That’s probably one of the reason’s Depp’s Keith Richards impression ran away with all those movies!
But I never minded Bloom when he was being a badass elf. They gave him a scarred hand in Red Right Hand, but maybe if they’d also given him pointy ears and a bow? Maybe that’s the limits of his range: being a elf.
His gruff persona in that Amazon fairy show, was also pretty one-note.
Yeesh, there are so many things wrong with Batman Begins. The Batmobile is not one of them.
But that David S. Goyer script is such garbage. “I gotta get me one of those!” Gary Oldman has to exclaim when he sees the Batmobile. “Rachel, this man killed my parents,” Bale and his ‘look, now I’m a schoolboy’ haircut say into Katie Holmes’ weird sad face, “I cannot let that pass, and I need you to understand that, please.” Meanwhile, the spectacularly English Tom Wilkinson chews on some weird version of a New York/Gotham mafioso accent before the movie strings him up and literally leaves him hanging. Also, Batman’s ears are so he doesn’t have to extend a radio antenna. Reasons!
I never would have inferred from the rote ponderous comic bookness of Batman Begins that Nolan had Dark Knight in him.
Yeah, same here. Probably one of my biggest surprises at the movies ever I think. My expectations were so low after Batman Begins.