18th Mofo Hall of Fame

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2022 Mofo Fantasy Football Champ
02-26-19
The Little Stranger



I like the vibe that the film gives off. It certainly has a rather chilling atmosphere and I really enjoy the look of the locations of the film, particularly that eerie house. The film always seemed to keep me glued to what was happening next, even in it's lulls you had a certain feeling that something would come up and surprise you. I was actually rather impressed with the acting, particularly Domhall Gleason but also Ruth Wilson and Charlotte Rampling were very very good. Great chemistry by Gleason and Wilson. Lots of great camera shots too and definitely appreciated the overall look and work put into the sets of the film. I'm really surprised by the fact that this has such a low IMDB rating. It's not a perfect film and I'm not even sure it will be all that memorable in the long run but I think it was still pretty well made. Nice nom by Siddon.




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Anti-Woke
02-26-19
Continued with another one that's been on my watchlist for a long time.

Originally Posted by pahaK
The Florida Project (2017) N

Six-year-old Moonee lives in a cheap motel in Florida with her mother. Money isn't easy to come by and mother doesn't always stay within legal boundaries. Daughter's games with her friends often turn to mischief too.


"Man, oh, man, that's gross."

There's no real story in The Florida Project as it just follows Moonee's summer. She plays with her friends, does all sorts of mischief and generally demonstrates how badly her mother has raised her. She seems like a smart kid but the circumstances aren't on her side. Ending is kinda sad as she doesn't understand that she's potentially given a chance at something better.

I have no idea if in Florida everything is really in pastel colors but it gives the film a funny look. Maybe it's just showing how for kids everything is little more bright and colorful and wonderful while behind the pastel walls things are really broken and dirty. At least I thought it was about that difference between children and adults.

Acting is superb. That little girl playing Moonee is so expressive and animated. Her mother is also great as a total ass white trash who blames everyone else for her problems and loses her temper every time someone doesn't do as she wants. Dafoe is great too but he usually is.

So The Florida Project is really well-made glimpse to these people's lives but outside several individual scenes I'm not too interested in them. There's no way I can call it a bad film and despite of some compatibility issues with this viewer I was never really bored. It's one of those films I consider just OK but can perfectly understand the love it's got.

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Friendo.
02-26-19
18th
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Split
1989

When the movie started, I didn’t want to just split the scene right away… I wanted to split every scene, of almost every second, of this filmic feculence... I wanted to get away, get out, go under the radar, run away, retreat, evacuate, depart, leave, simply anything in the world that would mean I didn’t have to watch anymore of this agonizing endurance test of absolute torture.

Seeing the main character scream about a freaking straw was already the last straw for me... I mean, there was basically no story – at least for the first many, many, many minutes it just felt like random scenes, random characters and random events happening – and happening in a way that makes you question whether what’s happening is actually happening at all – and not in a good way. Actually, mostly in a way of doubting whether anything so otherworldly awful can actually be something you willingly watch as a film-lover?

The only time I felt something that somewhat represented one-part of half of a quarter of a percentage of interest was when he met that one woman. That was the only time I felt the movie somehow managed to raise a level up on the Bristol stool chart. Simply put, the mere exercise of watching this film-diarrhea made me feel sick, wondering if this movie would have the same effect on me as when you watch someone yawn and you do it too? I prayed to God it wouldn’t, because I was on a public bus… Anyways, I guess there was some sort of ongoing theme, just like when an intense infection makes you run to the bathroom multiple times during a day, this movie did have a theme of big brother like surveillance, but it was done in the same sh*tty way every time. The look, the feel, the everything of this movie was just bad.

Sh*t, eh excuse me Split, is endlessly exasperating excrement of experimental sci-fi punk-trash, which might be a number two, but it will be dead last on my list, that’s for damn sure… I will try my best to flush this out of my memory as quickly as possible. “Straaaaw” Fuuuuuuuck!





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02-26-19
Abandon Ship! (1957)



I hadn't heard of Abandon Ship so other than some clues that can be picked up from the title I wasn't all that sure what to expect.

The film's ethical quandary is the aspect that I enjoyed the most. The presentation is paced effectively towards the breaking point and surfaces the internal biases that Holmes has when it reaches that point. Who he does and does not align with feels like a natural inclination related to how his character behaves. Thought provoking for sure.

I didn't like the acting and thought it was poor for the most part. There's too much awkwardness likely down to the filming conditions that I found to be distracting. For the situation they're in, they don't really convey the drama that they're attempting to because of this. It's an unfortunate consequence of the difficulty facing Richard Sale and the crew here and was just something they had to work around. In that sense, it's surprising it came out looking as good as it did.

Abandon Ship is so reliant on the acting and dialogue as well so it's a big knock against the film for me. Without Tyrone Power's performance I would have given this a negative rating but thankfully he comes into his own in the latter stages. Great in the last few scenes especially.

Finished with mixed views on this one. It was fine but not one that I can see myself revisiting.



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Mugen Impersonator
02-26-19
I'm going to hold off on reading your Split review for now @MovieMeditation but the rating certainly caught my eye.



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Women will be your undoing, Pépé
02-26-19



The Square

An artistic film that seems to be anti-art, or rather, anti-people who claim to like art. . . how truly art - esque.

There is such a brutally honest display of art museum denizens and supporters here, and then they crank up the awkwardness and pull away the intellectual facade while using the very "tools" and "devices" of this world of art supporters and curators use to define themselves and their intellectual appreciation of what they are told is art; make for both an interesting and tiresome endeavor. Which, in itself is kind of impressive. Taking an inside joke and hinting at the way art is perceived,dissected and portrayed, without ever completing the debate it appears to suggest, is, in itself the very core of this film. Or so it feels like to me.

With strange cuts and misdirection of camerawork throughout - something I actually enjoyed, where we see the reaction of someone talking as opposed to showing the person speaking, and keeping key elements off screen could easily cause aggravation AND/OR a keener interest of finding out what the hell is going on. And, in the end, have we been motivated to end the debate or do we simply take the path of action that shifts the harsh light away from us to someone or something else?

I've seen a number of films that center around the awkwardness of humanity and the fumbling thereof and I have found more aggravation than interest in a larger number of them. But not here. While it did seem to run a bit longer than I would have cared, which, I do GET the reasoning of such extensions of many scenes: extracting the tension by elongating the scene, I did find myself caught up in it all.

MM stated this was a brave attempt at choosing a nomination, and rightly so. Where it will end up in my final voting, I can't truly say, but I will say I'm pleased to have been introduced to it.
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Noir Time
02-26-19
Eloquently written review, Ed!...You do have a way with words and pack a lot of esoterics in your review...good reading!...You know the more praise The Square gets, the more I seem to like it, in retrospect. Odd I know! but that happens sometimes. And sometimes when I review a movie I have no idea how I feel about it, until my review tells me what to think. Anybody else have that experience?



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Women will be your undoing, Pépé
02-27-19
Originally Posted by Citizen Rules
Eloquently written review, Ed!...You do have a way with words and pack a lot of esoterics in your review...good reading!...You know the more praise The Square gets, the more I seem to like it, in retrospect. Odd I know! but that happens sometimes. And sometimes when I review a movie I have no idea how I feel about it, until my review tells me what to think. Anybody else have that experience?
Much appreciated CR. I always enjoy the love and observations you bring into yours.

And I have noticed that with The Square. At the moment of viewing, there's this kind of capturing of your sea legs as the film (ship allegory placed here) rides over unexpected waves and it's after the "storm" that you come to a conclusion. I do know that, having drifting off to sleep and then going back to it, I think I got a chance to get those sea legs. Of course at that point of the film (somewhere around the two thirds mark) the course went into rougher seas lol

And yes, most reviews seem to bring me new enlightenment into the film I had just watched. Bringing the experience into a literal translation as it were.



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Mantis Toboggan, MD
02-27-19
Watched The Florida Project tonight. Will get something up soon.
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Women will be your undoing, Pépé
02-28-19
Got a large chunk of The Little Stranger the other night, just need to finish it off. Some great acting and while the pace IS slow, I do enjoy what I've seen.



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Mantis Toboggan, MD
02-28-19
The Florida Project (Sean Baker; 2017)



Was looking forward to seeing this for some time so was quite glad when it was nominated here. Overall it did live up to my expectations of it. The acting was very good, particularly from Prince, Vinaite and Dafoe were all very strong and the cinematography also look particularly nice. I did feel that this was a good portrayal of porverty. I also really liked the ending. Overall this did live up to the hype and is definitely one of the best of 2017.



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Friendo.
02-28-19
18th Hall of Fame
Perfect Blue
1997



’Perfect Blue’ is not a perfect film, but it is a frustratingly fascinating piece of art,
which pushed the boundaries of animation and cinema in more than one way…

While the story could have been better structured, it could hardly have been better conceived. The way the film presents a person’s slowly crumbling sanity, combined with the later introduced schizophrenic behavior, is super convincing and very impressive… it is also a little too confusing at times, especially towards the end, and while the wildly elevated and admittedly engrossing animated presentation of shifting personalities and interchanging plotlines is insanely interesting, I too get a little bit insane just watching it, wishing it would have dialed it down just a tiny bit.

Armed with amazingly animated sequences, director Satoshi Kon shoots more informational bullet-points at us than we can keep track of and there is so much going on here that it does get a bit overwhelming. In a sense, it works when everything is overworked, but I can’t help but fault it a bit. There are too many instances of intimidating scenes that turns out to be in her imagination, only to find out they aren’t and finding out they are after all or perhaps not. The film switches a lot between plots, people and points of views, and while I don’t have a need to be fulfilled, I feel more frustration than needed be. There is a sense of ambiguity and artistic value to what Kon creates here and for that I appreciate this film a lot.

This movie was made in 1997 and I have never seen scene-transitions like that in an animated film before or since – at least not in this sense nor scale of which Kon does it here. It is mighty impressive and works surprisingly well. The story is very mature for an animated film and really draws me into the story from the start – keeping me captured in the collapsing mind of our main character. Building this world, both the physical and mental one, while making sure the focus comes from inside and out of our main character, the movie does a fine job at.

So, despite of the film getting a bit too lost in its own little crazy game of crazy, it does maintain my attention well and insistently wind up my mind in intriguing ways that I surprisingly wound up enjoying a lot; whacking away at my brain with its wacky plot-construction kept inside a beautifully realized animated universe. ‘Perfect Blue’ might not pass with flying colors, but focusing on one color and nailing that perfectly usually also works pretty darn well…


-



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Women will be your undoing, Pépé
03-01-19
very good, precise perception into Perfect Blue, @MovieMeditation! It took me a few rewatches to actually "get" what the hell was going on lol
But yeah, the scene-transitions are impressive and the style of it all always kept me involved. Confused, but involved.



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Friendo.
03-01-19
Originally Posted by edarsenal
very good, precise perception into Perfect Blue, @MovieMeditation! It took me a few rewatches to actually "get" what the hell was going on lol
But yeah, the scene-transitions are impressive and the style of it all always kept me involved. Confused, but involved.
Thank you, ed. This was my 2nd watch, but it’s been a very long time. I honestly don’t doubt that I will get every single second of this movie if I persistently pull out this movie every now and then. I do like the ambitious nature of it and the fact that it’s not just made to digest instantly. I would still have liked it turned down just a tiny notch. But I still very much like it, as you can see by my rating (half a star up from last time actually.)

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