Ayte bet.
My October was, as an excuse for horror films, reasonably positive; slashed a bunch of long stragglers off my list and found plenty to enjoy. As highlights go, Castle Freak renders a struggling post-divorce couple way better than any film called Castle Freak has any right to, and while it is strewn with various technical failings there is enough meat on the bone between that and the fun titular freak scenes to be worth a watch. The Boxer's Omen doesn't quite 'get there' in terms of anchoring itself before letting loose, but it is throwing everything and the kitchen sink at you, truly a joyous little sensory overload if you don't quite mind they never really manage to make any of it mean something. I have no reason to believe that Hocus Pocus isn't a lucky swing from a director for hire, but it is hokey and bad in a way that just hits exactly right, totally makes sense it got to be this cult hit in the world of Disney Channel joints. Dogora was my first non-Godzilla joint from Ishiro Honda and cemented him as a really slick B-movie guy, dude is very adept in crafting a charming little film on a budget. Titane was a long time coming for me and I'm glad I loved it as I did; Ducournau has made tremendous strides in building deep pathos through visuals and minimal dialogue, so much so that I find myself forgiving what is an admittedly not-too tightly wound screenplay. I continue to enjoy students of Claire Denis more than the woman herself, with any luck I will be able to report back with a eureka moment in the next pass of these. May is a film that wins you over in the little things, as the little ticks and affectations Angela Bettis brings to the role really do a lot in selling what is at this point a fairly weathered premise. The perhaps recently dubbed Bloodthirsty trilogy (Vampire Doll + Lake/Evil of Dracula) are some really choice bits of low budget J-horror, victims of compartmentalizing the 'good stuff' but they keep each entry blessedly short and have enough atmosphere to push you through fine. The Haunting (og one, though due to an error on my library's part I also watched the 90's remake and it is probably very fine to pass unless you're an Owen Wilson completist) is really stellar, speaks to the sheer fucking power of Robert Wise at that time that such a potentially bone dry screenplay feels so electric back to front. Dude Bro Party Massacre III is a gimmick executed with tremendous love, care, and attention to detail, if you're willing to concede to what it's setting out to do then it's real good time that miraculously almost justifies its 100 min runtime. 100 Monsters (1968) is a very charming little monster joint whose visuals I am impressed remain evergreen, and Miike's far belated The Great Yokai War is a film that I know for certain would have been my favorite movie as a child if I saw it in 2005; in spite of some pretty stale beats and awful child performances, it manages to really effective navigate from the darker subject material into true, evocative moments of childlike wonder, all while working in elements of Robert Rodriguez-esque CGI that you know is bad, but maintains its charm in spite of that. Toshio Matsumoto's Demons is unreal, I was predisposed to it for having such great reverence for Funeral Parade of Roses but the notion that someone with just four feature length films to his name had the capacity to craft such a claustrophobic monument to the depths with which we as people will sink for the right price is nuts to me. Got to Kurosawa's Pulse on the last day and it was, in fact, very good as well. A couple uses of score that felt overly insistent to me, as well as a real unbecoming use of CG around the midpoint, but his ability to pull fear from the ennui of day-to-day existence, and more specific to this the sense of isolation in an increasingly online existence, is perhaps second to none, lots to love here.
For the past 12 months at large, caught a bunch of stuff. Lots to see and I'm chipping away, so I'm just gonna rattle off however many feels appropriate, mine roughly sorted with those I liked most at the top. Once again I am attempting not to double up on director picks, let me know if I goofed, and fortunately many of the already spare few times it would have came up ended up covered in the Halloween talk. Just know that I saw El Topo and enjoyed quite a bit.
My October was, as an excuse for horror films, reasonably positive; slashed a bunch of long stragglers off my list and found plenty to enjoy. As highlights go, Castle Freak renders a struggling post-divorce couple way better than any film called Castle Freak has any right to, and while it is strewn with various technical failings there is enough meat on the bone between that and the fun titular freak scenes to be worth a watch. The Boxer's Omen doesn't quite 'get there' in terms of anchoring itself before letting loose, but it is throwing everything and the kitchen sink at you, truly a joyous little sensory overload if you don't quite mind they never really manage to make any of it mean something. I have no reason to believe that Hocus Pocus isn't a lucky swing from a director for hire, but it is hokey and bad in a way that just hits exactly right, totally makes sense it got to be this cult hit in the world of Disney Channel joints. Dogora was my first non-Godzilla joint from Ishiro Honda and cemented him as a really slick B-movie guy, dude is very adept in crafting a charming little film on a budget. Titane was a long time coming for me and I'm glad I loved it as I did; Ducournau has made tremendous strides in building deep pathos through visuals and minimal dialogue, so much so that I find myself forgiving what is an admittedly not-too tightly wound screenplay. I continue to enjoy students of Claire Denis more than the woman herself, with any luck I will be able to report back with a eureka moment in the next pass of these. May is a film that wins you over in the little things, as the little ticks and affectations Angela Bettis brings to the role really do a lot in selling what is at this point a fairly weathered premise. The perhaps recently dubbed Bloodthirsty trilogy (Vampire Doll + Lake/Evil of Dracula) are some really choice bits of low budget J-horror, victims of compartmentalizing the 'good stuff' but they keep each entry blessedly short and have enough atmosphere to push you through fine. The Haunting (og one, though due to an error on my library's part I also watched the 90's remake and it is probably very fine to pass unless you're an Owen Wilson completist) is really stellar, speaks to the sheer fucking power of Robert Wise at that time that such a potentially bone dry screenplay feels so electric back to front. Dude Bro Party Massacre III is a gimmick executed with tremendous love, care, and attention to detail, if you're willing to concede to what it's setting out to do then it's real good time that miraculously almost justifies its 100 min runtime. 100 Monsters (1968) is a very charming little monster joint whose visuals I am impressed remain evergreen, and Miike's far belated The Great Yokai War is a film that I know for certain would have been my favorite movie as a child if I saw it in 2005; in spite of some pretty stale beats and awful child performances, it manages to really effective navigate from the darker subject material into true, evocative moments of childlike wonder, all while working in elements of Robert Rodriguez-esque CGI that you know is bad, but maintains its charm in spite of that. Toshio Matsumoto's Demons is unreal, I was predisposed to it for having such great reverence for Funeral Parade of Roses but the notion that someone with just four feature length films to his name had the capacity to craft such a claustrophobic monument to the depths with which we as people will sink for the right price is nuts to me. Got to Kurosawa's Pulse on the last day and it was, in fact, very good as well. A couple uses of score that felt overly insistent to me, as well as a real unbecoming use of CG around the midpoint, but his ability to pull fear from the ennui of day-to-day existence, and more specific to this the sense of isolation in an increasingly online existence, is perhaps second to none, lots to love here.
For the past 12 months at large, caught a bunch of stuff. Lots to see and I'm chipping away, so I'm just gonna rattle off however many feels appropriate, mine roughly sorted with those I liked most at the top. Once again I am attempting not to double up on director picks, let me know if I goofed, and fortunately many of the already spare few times it would have came up ended up covered in the Halloween talk. Just know that I saw El Topo and enjoyed quite a bit.
- The Holy Mountain (1973, Alejandro Jodorowsky)
- Solaris (1972, Andrei Tarkovsky)
- War and Peace (1965, Sergey Bondarchuk)
- Memories of Murder (2003, Bong Joon-ho)
- Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022, Daniels)
- Demons (1971, Toshio Matsumoto)
- The Player (1992, Robert Altman)
- Annette (2021, Leos Carax)
- Labyrinth of Cinema (2019, Nobuhiko Obayashi)
- The Red Shoes (1948, Emeric Pressburger / Michael Powell)
- Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
- Europa (1991, Lars Von Trier
- Vagabond (1985, Agnes Varda)
- Rosetta (1999, Luc / Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
- A Page of Madness (1926, Teinosuke Kinugasa)
- Pixote (1980, Héctor Babenco)
- The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987, Kazuo Hara)
- Blow Out (1981, Brian De Palma)
- West Side Story (1961, Robert Wise / Jerome Robbins)
- Pale flower (1964, Masahiro Shinoda)
- Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa)
- Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)
- Unbreakable (2000, M.Night Shyamalan)
- Pájaros De Verano (2018, Ciro Guerra / Christina Gallego)
- Pulse (2001, Kiyoshi Kurasawa)
- Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin)
- The Thin Blue Line (1988, Errol Morris)
- The Devils (1971, Ken Russell)
- Memorias del Subdesarrollo (1968, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea)
- Taming the Garden (2021, Salomé Jashi)
- Betty Blue (1986, Jean-Jacques Beineix)
- The Cloud in Her Room (2020, Zheng Lu Xinyuan)
- The Parallax View (1974, Alan J. Pakula)
- Mother Joan of the Angels (1961, Jerzy Kawalerowicz)
- Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang)
- There is No Evil (2020, Mohammad Rasoulof)
- Seconds (1966, John Frankenheimer)
- Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968, William Greaves)
- Titane (2021, Julia Ducournau)
- Nightcrawler (2014, Dan Gilroy)
- The French Dispatch (2021, Wes Anderson)
- The Matrix (1999, Lilly / Lana Wachowski)
- All that Jazz (1979, Bob Fosse)
- A Touch of Zen (1970, King Hu)
- Farewell My Concubine (1993, Chen Kaige)
- Kids (1995, Larry Clark)
- Death of a Cyclist (1955, Juan Antonio Bardem)
- Mad God (2021, Phil Tippett)
- Hard Eight (1996, Paul Thomas Anderson)
- La Telenovela Errante (2017, Raúl Ruiz / Valeria Sarmiento)
- On the Waterfront (1954, Elia Kazan)
- Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973, Shunya Ito)
- Red Desert (1964, Michaelangelo Antonioni)
- The Funeral (1984, Juzo Itami)
- The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)
- The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967, Jacques Demy)
- Heli (2013, Amat Escalante)
- The Gold Diggers (1983, Sally Potter)
- Jigoku (1960, Nobuo Nakagawa)
- The Chaser (2008, Na Hong-jin)
- Another Round (2020, Thomas Vinterberg)
- Youth of the Beast (1963, Seijun Suzuki)
- That Most Important Thing: Love (1975, Andrzej Żuławski)
- The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020, Jim Cummings)
- Laurence Anyways (2012, Xavier Dolan)
- A Woman is a Woman (1961, Jean-Luc Godard)
- The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979, Kazuhiko Hasegawa)
- The Seventh Continent (1989, Michael Haneke)
- Drive My Car (2021, Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
- Best in Show (2000, Christopher Guest)
- Hail Satan? (2019, Penny Lane)
- Nightmare Alley (1947, Edmund Goulding)
- Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020, Eliza Hittman)
- The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005, Jeff Feuerzeig)
- Ash is Purest White (2018, Jia Zhangke)
- First Love (2019, Takashi Miike)
- Poison (1991, Todd Haynes)
- This is not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection (2019, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese)
- Dude Bro Party Massacre III (2015, Tomm Jacobsen / Michael Rousselet)
- Departures (2008, Yojiro Takita)
- Beginning (2020, Dea Kulumbegashvili)
- Seven Brides for Seven Husbands (1954, Stanley Donen)
- Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (2019, Frank Beauvais)
- Cairo Station (1958, Youssef Chahine)
- Que Viva Mexico! (1979, Sergei Eisenstein)
- A Bittersweet Life (2005, Kim Jee-woon)
- The Knack…and how to get it (1965, Richard Lester)
- The Cranes are Flying (1957, Mikhail Kalatozov)
- Le Havre (2011, Aki Kaurismäki)
- Comrades, an Almost Love Story (1996, Peter Chan)
- The Sword of Doom (1066, Kichachi Okamoto)
- Hud (1963, Martin Ritt)
- May (2002, Lucky McKee)
- Vive L’Amour (1994, Tsai Ming-liang)
- Truck Turner (1974, Jonathan Kaplan)
- Lake Michigan Monster (2018, Ryland Brickson Cole Tews)
- A New Leaf (1971, Elaine May)
- Sleep has her House (2017, Scott Barley)
- Calvaire (2004, Fabrice Du Welz)
- Dos Monjes (1934, Juan Bustillo Oro)
- Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014, Diao Yi'nan)
- What Happened Was… (1994, Tom Noonan)
- Supermen of Malegaon (2009, Faiza Ahmed Khan)
- We’re all Going to the World’s Fair (2021, Jane Schoenbrun)
- The Great Buddha+ (2017, Huang Hsin-Yao)
- The Seventh Curse (1986, Lam Nai-Choi)
- The African Desperate (2022, Martine Syms)
- The Vampire Doll (1970, Michio Yamamoto)
- Coonskin (1975, Ralph Bakshi)
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