Movies reviewed this week: Gaslight, Ladies in Retirement, King Creole, Spring, Black Sunday, The Tower, Syndicate Sadists, and The House That Dripped Blood.
Category: Culture
Movies reviewed this week: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Bottoms, Chan Is Missing, Saraband, The Dunwich Horror, Daughters of Darkness, Elvis, Depraved, The Devil Down Under: Satanic Panic in Australia from Rosaleen Norton to Alison’s Birthday, Alison’s Birthday, and Johnny Mnemonic.
Movies reviewed this week: Safe, Together, Mystery Train, Henry Fool, Pool of London, and Return to the 36th Chamber.
Movies reviewed this week: Dog Day Afternoon, Mystery Men, The Small Back Room, Nashville, 3 Women, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, and The Woman in Question.
Movies reviewed this week: Theater Camp, Adam’s Rib, Barbie, Zebraman, The Misfits, Starved, The Foundry, Ariel, and Phoenix.
Movies reviewed this week: A Trip to the Orphanage, Sorrowful Shadow, The Saddest Music in the World, Polite Society, Almost Human, Armour of God, Five Easy Pieces, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), and Odd Man Out.
Movies reviewed this week: Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Desperately Seeking Susan, Mean Streets, El Topo, It Always Rains on Sunday, The Seven Year Itch, Obsession, Wild Style, and Hunger.
34 feature length movies and 12 shorts. Towards the end I was having a little bit of trouble connecting scenes into narratives so it’s probably just as well that my last two movies were a magic realism fable and a sociological essay. That was a very good time and I hope to do it again sooner than a decade from now.
Since I’m that kind of person, I made ranked lists for features and shorts. It was a pretty good year. Hippo is particularly good if you like thinking about conspiracies and cult dynamics and such. Baby Assassins 2 Babies has a martial arts fight scene that’s probably going to wind up in my top ten ever. I’m also particularly pleased that the Southeast Asian films I saw were more mature than some I’ve seen in previous years — it feels like the programmers have a solid handle on how to program the good stuff.
I’m a little bummed that I never found the Arrow Video booth, if in fact they had one. Vinegar Syndrome did but their releases aren’t quite as in sync with my tastes. I wanted to ask Arrow when their next Shaw Brothers set was coming out, too.
Gonna be a long flight back. Still all worth it.
Movies reviewed this week: The Fantastic Golem Affairs, Stay Online, The Primevals, Tiger Stripes, Paragon, Restore Point, In My Mother’s Skin, Good Condition, Lovely, Dark, and Deep, Rascals, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?, The Burning Hell, A Chinese Ghost Story, Insomniacs After School, Femme, Devils, The Perfect Place to Cry, Blackout, Drumming Makes You Happy, The Becomers, Lollygag, Hippo, Baby Assassins 2 Babies, Every House is Haunted, Where the Devil Roams, Aporia, Pett Kata Shaw, River, Saint-Sacrifice, The Sacrifice Game, Ms. Apocalypse, School Girl, The Man Traveling with the Brocade Portrait, Kurayukaba, Home Invasion, Hellmark, With Love and a Major Organ, and Ms. Apocalypse.
We had eight days of movies scheduled; we have completed four days. Halfway mark! I am tired but very happy; our hotel continues to be perfectly positioned and the food’s still quite good. There’s this little counter service Chinese place next to the hotel which is unexpectedly tasty.
Highlights so far: Lovely, Dark, and Deep, which is some of the best cosmic horror I’ve seen in a while. Not Lovecraftian. It lays out the situation in the first fifteen minutes, so that as Georgina Campbell discovers the scope of the horror, we have the same retroactive realizations she does. Smart movie.
Also great: Talk To Me. The Philippou brothers may be YouTube bros but they’re good filmmakers who care about their craft, and their insight into teens being teens is strong. Very kinetic, certainly terrifying.
On the non-horror side of the fence, I greatly enjoyed The First Slam Dunk. I’m not a huge anime fan and I almost didn’t get tickets for this one, but I’m so glad I did. Director Takehiko Inoue really loves basketball, as I discovered afterwards, and it shows. I can’t think of any sports movies structured like this one — the climatic game is the spine of the movie, with flashbacks explaining how the characters got there — and it’s very cool.
We also learned something very important. If you’re doing back to back movies, you can tell the volunteers when you get out of the first one and they’ll shuffle you off into a little holding pen and you get seated first for the next one. I don’t care so much about my exact position in the theater but it’s nice to maximize sitting down time.
The in-room laundry is running. It’s crappy but it’s better than a laundromat.