A Noob's Journey through Cinema

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A continuation of my prior review thread from the tragically demised Corrierino forum. I started that one when I was 16 years old, which explains why I refer to myself as "noob" in the title. I recently turned 20, but I'm pretty sure I'm still one of, if not THE youngest member on this forum, and certainly the least knowledgable one, so I'm gonna stick with the epithet for a little while longer.


People who read my thread back in the days knows what this entails: mostly rather short reviews, some occasional long ones, either way, you won't have to expect much valuable insight from me.



Manchester by the Sea (2016, Kenneth Lonergan)

Rewatch

One of the few movies that really understands how heavy emotions are often linked to utter awkwardness. Lonergan is able to pull both comedy and tension out of these situations, knowing full well that no one is ever prepared for something like this. There is no guideline or manual to assist you in handling this horror, no one to tell you the right words to say, or the ones you need to hear yourself.

Lonergan also understands how living in a small town can sometimes feel like imprisonment. When everyone around you knows who you are and what your family’s history is, you are defined by your tragedy. There is no option to escape your pain, or at the very least ignore it, which is why the anonymity of the big city is so alluring to Affleck’s character, even when that means to live a life of loneliness. Sometimes not being connected to anyone means you also can’t be hurt.



Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020, Bill Ross IV & Turner Ross)

You can call Rio Bravo a hangout movie all you want but it still has an easily defined plot, character arcs and a shoot-out in its final. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, however, is literally JUST characters hanging out, getting drunk, arguing and walking home afterwards when they can barely stand on their feet. Rarely have I seen a movie that feels so intimate from frame one, where every single moment is distinctive, engrossing yet holds a weight of truth, despite it still being a piece of fiction, no matter how many times the directors might call it a documentary.

My favorite movie from last year, as it stands now.



Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993, Woody Allen)

My feelings about Woody Allen and his work have evolved over the years, not even taking into account everything he is accused of doing. I used to love his work but he, and especially his persona, has started to grate on me. As a writer and humorist, I still think he is amazing but I often end up wishing he wasn't part of his own movies, or at least not as prominent as he often is. I also just don't like him that much as an actor, he performs dialogue like he is a stand-up comedian delivering a punchline on stage. When surrounded by actors like Diane Keaton or Alan Alda, who are able to be funny, warm and natural all at the same time, it becomes especially apparent how Allen as a performer can only hit this one rapid, high-pitched note. It becomes tiresome after a while.

Thankfully, in Manhattan Murder Mystery, Allen almost plays a supporting character, allowing Diane Keaton to be the more dynamic and undertaking one. For the most part at least, his nebbish and whiny character can't help but take front center at times. But by 1993, the man's writing wasn't as sharp as it once was, and this movie, while charming, is never as zany as it pretends to be. The laughs are few and far between, and the central mystery only becomes less gripping the longer it lasts. Maybe me and his work aren't that great a match as I once thought it was.



A continuation of my prior review thread from the tragically demised Corrierino forum. I started that one when I was 16 years old, which explains why I refer to myself as "noob" in the title. I recently turned 20, but I'm pretty sure I'm still one of, if not THE youngest member on this forum, and certainly the least knowledgable one, so I'm gonna stick with the epithet for a little while longer.
WELCOME to MOFO There's always room for one more here! This is a cool board, with lots of neat activity and the owner/administrator keeps a friendly tone here. Hope you stick around and enjoy



WELCOME to MOFO There's always room for one more here! This is a cool board, with lots of neat activity and the owner/administrator keeps a friendly tone here. Hope you stick around and enjoy
Thank you! I've enjoyed what I've seen of the forum so far!



I was on a Woody Allen movie kick and seen Manhattan Murder Mystery. I liked it pretty well it was an 'easy watch' just something I could kick back and look at. Maybe one of these days I'll see more of his films.



Rebecca (2020, Ben Wheatley)

There goes Wheatley again, trying to test every last bit of goodwill he has build up with me thanks to Kill List (2011) as he has been doing with nearly every new movie he has released since.
I have never read Du Maurier's original novel*, to my great shame, but Hitchcock's 1940 Best Picture-winning adaptation is my favorite movie directed by the Master of Suspense. So you could say this remake/re-adaptation already had to fight an uphill battle.

The movie is a debacle of terrible casting decisions, where a too young and soft-looking Armie Hammer is never able to sell the darkness brooding within Maxim De Winter and for some unknown reason Wheatly deemed Sam Riley of all people worthy enough to follow in the footsteps of the great George Sanders. The only person who doesn't seem out of place here is Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs. Danvers, but even she has to struggle through some unfavourably written pieces of dialogue.

Wheatley was never a very stylish filmmaker, and he is at his best when maintaining a very loose, almost point-and-shoot style of filmmaking, which compliments his talent for creating anxiety-inducing scenarios. But for his latest movies, he has been favoring a more conventional stylistic approach, and I can't help but find it inept, artificial looking even. With Rebecca, he is aiming for something resembling a traditional gothic romance feel, but it looks more like an over-saturated perfume commercial, making an adaptation of an iconic piece of modern literature look more like that of some junk-y airport novel that would normally star someone like current-day Julia Stiles and a guy you've once seen on a network television show.

Maybe I'm being too harsh on this movie, maybe I would've been able to forgive it its blandness if I wasn't reminded with every scene that this material could be handled with more class, more ambiguity and more atmosphere and, oh yeah, it actually already has, 80 years ago.


* I wrote this review back in late October 2020, but at the moment of typing this I'm halfway through the novel and if anything, reading the original source text only makes me like this adaptation less.

Obviously, this means that this review was also written before the current scandal surrounding Armie Hammer had become public, though that wouldn't have changed my opinion on this movie in any way.



Messiah of Evil (1973, Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz)

AKA Vibes - The Movie

This is my kind of horror flick, with barely any plot, but full of atmosphere and dread. Set almost entirely in a shady echo to the (sub)urban dream - roadside gas stations, dirty motels, pretentious art galleries (with a blind art dealer, because of course), supermarkets, movie theaters, not to mention that crazy house that looks more like an art installation. Trades on that creepy feeling of being somewhere you're not supposed to be after it's closed and abandoned better than any other horror movie I've ever seen. In a lot of ways this feels like a 70s update of the 1962 oddbal indie Carnival of Souls.

Also, I'm a 100% certain Ari Aster loves the **** out of this.



A system of cells interlinked
I recently turned 20, but I'm pretty sure I'm still one of, if not THE youngest member on this forum, and certainly the least knowledgable one, so I'm gonna stick with the epithet for a little while longer.
After finishing up the latest episode of Movie Loot, I highly doubt this statement!
__________________
“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell



After finishing up the latest episode of Movie Loot, I highly doubt this statement!
Thanks. I can be quite knowledgeable on certain subjects, but my many blindspots are really egregious.



Rebecca (2020, Ben Wheatley)

I have never read Du Maurier's original novel*, to my great shame, but Hitchcock's 1940 Best Picture-winning adaptation is my favorite movie directed by the Master of Suspense. So you could say this remake/re-adaptation already had to fight an uphill battle.

The movie is a debacle of terrible casting decisions, where a too young and soft-looking Armie Hammer is never able to sell the darkness brooding within Maxim De Winter and for some unknown reason Wheatly deemed Sam Riley of all people worthy enough to follow in the footsteps of the great George Sanders. The only person who doesn't seem out of place here is Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs. Danvers, but even she has to struggle through some unfavourably written pieces of dialogue.
It’s a great book btw.

The New York Times critiqued the remake exactly the same way as you. I can just imagine KST as Mrs Danvers. Having said this, there was no need for a remake so it’s their own fault the movie sank. The original is perfect in almost every way.
__________________
I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.



Crimes of the Future (2022, David Cronenberg)



In a sense, a fairly typical late-stage career movie for a canonical director. Cronenberg reminisces (more so than he really explores) on the same themes that have always fascinated him. He is playing the hits, as they say, both the good and the bad. Nothing about this is either new or old.


At the end of the day, this lacks the intensity and the explosive nature of his greatest works, amounting to little more than a compilation of leftover ideas. Does that make this bad? Not really, at least if you are on the same wavelength as Cronenberg. Expecting the man to make another masterpiece at this point seems a tad unfair anyway.


This movie is like listening to a Beatles album consisting out of alternative recordings of familiar songs. Sure, it is not as satisfying as listen to Revolver, but I'm still glad it exists.



The Worst Person in the World (2021, Joachim Trier)



Not "bad" in any orthodox way, but so indistinguishable from hundreds of other movies and tv shows like it, I'm surprised this made such an international splash. Though I guess it kinda confirms my pet theory that any Sundance-esque quirky dramedy can be considered a legitimate arthouse movie as long as it is not spoken in English.


A probably far more cynical judgement than this movie warrants, but I guess this belongs to a specific subgenre (pretty, privileged people unable to make up their mind) that I've grown tired of in recent years, though I'm sure it rings true to many people.



Eternals (2021, Chloé Zhao)

A lot of recent Marvel output seems to just be a collection of rushed, shapeless scenes, and this takes the cake with spending its first act on rapid exposition and its second on even more exposition retconning the initial dump of information.
I can't wait for people praising this arrangement of long, tedious scenes containing good looking people talking intensely in circles while reminding each other of who they are as some sort of "cerebral scifi" and not just "big budget The Bold & The Beautiful".



Saw Lamberto Bava's DEMONS (1985)* at the Cinematek last night. It was playing in their current "so bad it's good!" series, which, initially, knowing how beloved this movie is by many of my horror adoring friends, made me frown a bit. Having now seen the movie, I can understand how, in a very narrow and maybe even boring way of looking at it, someone could qualify this as "bad". Sure, the acting is dreadful, the writing is clumsy (to the point where when the movie inside the movie has purposely bad cliché horror movie dialogue, it doesn't really differ all that much from what is being said in the main feature, making the joke a lot less poignant), the characters' actions don't resemble anything that we might identify as rational thinking and on top of it all the movie might feature the most shameless use of a deus ex machina I've ever seen. Yet I wouldn't qualify it as bad myself, because its qualities lie elsewhere.


Someone once said to me that the best kind of bad movies are bad good movies. Most sincerely bad movies are really just boring as hell, at best you get like two crazy moments of 1 minute each spread throughout a meandering, uninteresting slog. If you want to actually have fun on a Friday night with your buddies and a couple of beers it would be much more effective to watch a movie that is inherently silly (and is aware of this fact) yet is still well made. Their example at the time was Brian De Palma's Body Double, but I think Demons might qualify even more. It's well paced, consistenly unhinged, oozes with style, festers with gore and a great soundtrack keeps your adrenaline going. For some people these ingredients might not be enough to fill 90 minutes with. It does for me, however.


*Please note that this specific review was written on the 28th of June, 2021.



I guess this belongs to a specific subgenre (pretty, privileged people unable to make up their mind) that I've grown tired of in recent years, though I'm sure it rings true to many people.

I think this is key. There's a pressure on Western people of a certain age to conform - to society's standard, to their parents expectations, to get married, have a child, a career etc etc. Yes there are other films that explore this, but I think this film did it very well. It certainly resonated with me in that respect. The central performance was engrossing.



Saw Lamberto Bava's DEMONS (1985)* at the Cinematek last night. It was playing in their current "so bad it's good!" series, which, initially, knowing how beloved this movie is by many of my horror adoring friends, made me frown a bit. Having now seen the movie, I can understand how, in a very narrow and maybe even boring way of looking at it, someone could qualify this as "bad". Sure, the acting is dreadful, the writing is clumsy (to the point where when the movie inside the movie has purposely bad cliché horror movie dialogue, it doesn't really differ all that much from what is being said in the main feature, making the joke a lot less poignant), the characters' actions don't resemble anything that we might identify as rational thinking and on top of it all the movie might feature the most shameless use of a deus ex machina I've ever seen. Yet I wouldn't qualify it as bad myself, because its qualities lie elsewhere.


Someone once said to me that the best kind of bad movies are bad good movies. Most sincerely bad movies are really just boring as hell, at best you get like two crazy moments of 1 minute each spread throughout a meandering, uninteresting slog. If you want to actually have fun on a Friday night with your buddies and a couple of beers it would be much more effective to watch a movie that is inherently silly (and is aware of this fact) yet is still well made. Their example at the time was Brian De Palma's Body Double, but I think Demons might qualify even more. It's well paced, consistenly unhinged, oozes with style, festers with gore and a great soundtrack keeps your adrenaline going. For some people these ingredients might not be enough to fill 90 minutes with. It does for me, however.


*Please note that this specific review was written on the 28th of June, 2021.

Is their series literally titled, "So Bad It's Good," or is it, like, a midnight movie series that people often associate with the "It's So Bad It's Good" category, but in reality is actually much more broad than that.


For a non-comedy like Demons, I think I might use the phrase, "dumb-fun," but even that might be off and somewhat condescending. But I think it taps into a type of enjoyment like a movie like (my vague memory of) Terminator 2 does for a lot of other people (but I suspect people wouldn't be too thrilled to hear people describe that as, "so bad it's good.")