32nd Hall of Fame

@jiraffejustin @cricket @Siddon @edarsenal @Hey Fredrick

You guys all still good for the Jan 20th deadline?

I'm watching Departures today.

Yep

I've been done since last year

Yes

sure let me get a link for The Girl who Lept Through Time

Yep

Departures

This was a pretty well made movie, although it definitely feels a bit uneven to me in terms of my attention to it. I really enjoyed the first half but I ended up finding the second half a bit of a chore to get through. I thought it was a really well shot film and the acting was pretty on point. However I wish I could have had more attachment to the characters.

Looks like I'll need a link for Missing too

Missing

The movie has a lot of good going for it. This really shows how well rounded of an actor Jack Lemmon was, he was certainly made to play this role here. The story itself is pretty fascinating and I think Costa Gravas did a really good job directing it. Sissy Spacek was pretty good in it too. Cool to see this after not ever hearing about it.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

Following the advice of an early review of this, my mindset was not on the mystery of it since, as described, there is no why to it any of it. The opening line by Miranda, "What we see and what we seem are but a dream, a dream within a dream." sends you cascading into this idyllic dreamscape disrupted by missing students and a teacher.
Having enjoyed a few of Weir's work, it was very nice to add this to the list. Very nice.

A great surprise seeing Rachel Roberts whom I've only known from the Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn comedy Foul Play.

__________________
What I actually said to win MovieGal's heart:
- I might not be a real King of Kinkiness, but I make good pancakes

~Mr Minio

Very good. Thanks!

Blow-Up

Unfortunately, I won't have time to revisit this before I'll need to cast my ballot. For my own appreciation for this film, I think I need to give it another go. At first I was offput and worried the film would be more focused on the mod stuff, which I have never really been that interested in. Thankfully when the film got around to the blowing up it got a lot more focused and interesting. As far as what it means, I can't really tell you since I am not very smart. But there is probably something to that scene being not that interesting to me and the film picking up when the people involved in that scene don't really seem to notice something like a murder and a man involved with it failing to make people notice something important.

Yay I finished a movie! Write up tomorrow

Departures (2008)

Y'know normally I like to complain about wokeness especially how joyouse and annoying modern female characters are. Departures managed to be the inverse of this... The wife in this film seems to have absolutely no personality her character completely lacks agency and seemed to exist merely as a figure to support her husband and make babies.

Departures tells the story of a celloist who's dreams are crushed when his orchestra disbanded due to not being very good. He moves back home (which is in pristine care) and takes a job cleaning bodies for funeral services. For some reason this is a point of conflict...whole thing is completely lost on me. I don't want to trash this film and say it's bad or that it's pointless, obviously whomever selected this film loved Ozu's films of manners.

The thing is if the film didn't have humor in it, it might have been a solid melodrama. But by trying to be funny it failed to really let me as an audience member feel like I'm watching real people. You also have to question what these three people were doing all day because the job doesn't seem like it takes that much time and how Japanese people die in the vicinity of this office. You have elements in this film that were just bizarre. The film looks really good and the performances make up for the unwritten characters...but this one just was not for me.

C

Can I get a link for The Girl Who Lept Through Time?

I sent you a link that someone else hooked me up with.

This one didn't work for me. I watched it a while ago and tried watching it again just to see if my initial read on it was accurate but it's such a slow moving film that I can't get into it. There's nothing for me to latch onto. I don't find the characters or the story very interesting. A girl has an accident in the school lab putting her into a time loop. In this loop she has the hots for another student who *SPOILER* turns out to be a guy from the future where advancements in schooling allows for teenagers to be phd's yet they can't figure out how to grow plants so they have to travel back in time to get plants for medicinal purposes, especially lavender. That all comes out in the final moments of the film and really has nothing to do with the movie. The majority of the film is following around this confused girl in her loop, not doing a whole lot. I can't say it's a bad movie but it's not for me, that I know.

H-8

Probably the film I was happiest to see nominated just based on that I don't know when I would have ever gotten to it if it wasn't in one of these. It would have most likely just gathered dust on my massive watchlist. It is Hitchcockian, it is noirish, but also felt like something of its own. I loved the look of the models when it showed the vehicles speeding down the dark highway. Fictionalized retellings of true events can be nothingburgers, but the characters in this film felt like real people to me, with maybe some romanticization. I don't remember if the film tells us who dies at the beginning, if it did, I missed that because part of the intrigue for me was how the seat shuffling during the film kept me not knowing who would be the ones to go.

Tentative?