Truly depressing comments here. Other than the dated terminology, the film is beautiful, perfect, and unquestionably correct. Any music historian will tell you that Black American musicians merged the soul and melody of blues with the compositional approach of classical music to create jazz in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There's no Beatles without BB King and there's no Benny Goodman without Scott Joplin or Jelly Roll Morton. Without the unique experience of being Black in America there would be no jazz and no rock n roll.
Started pretty strong discussing primitive and silent era through the enforcement of the Hayes Code, but as it continues to roll through the decades, it begins to feel like a compilation of 'cinema's greatest hits of nudity' and loses much of its academic steam. The film ultimately stuffers from only briefly touching on power dynamics and how truly exploitative Hollywood was in the latter half of the 20th century at certain points during the runtime, but not thoroughly interrogating it until the end where the focus is primarily on Weinstein. This comes in far too late after listening to actresses share their experiences with being asked to disrobe during auditions, or pressured to do more on camera than they wanted or agreed to throughout the second half of the film. In the meantime, there are plenty of moments where men orate about their favorite nude scenes.
There is some interesting juxtaposition between women talking about their aforementioned negative experiences and others discussing positive, liberatory ones, but eventually the cutting back and forth wanders, causing the film to struggle to maintain its tone. It would have benefitted from having more context provided by film historians interspersed between the traumatic testimonials and the praiseful ones or an entire section in the middle of the film to focus on the industry's exploitative practices. This would have allowed for a consistent, thoughtful tonal shift, wrapped up with the existing ending to show how far we have progressed.
As he does in everything, Malcolm McDowell steals the show and is full of great anecdotes and insights. This was an interesting and challenging concept for a documentary and it does accomplish a fair amount, but the change in tenor from academic to reverential was disappointing. The runtime is also unnecessarily long, considering if watching the scenes is your primary goal, there are plenty of other places on the internet to do that. The film could have been quite good if a hedge clipper had been taken to it before exporting it from Final Cut.
The French Dispatch is an intriguing installment in Anderson's filmography. In many ways, here we see him pushing his visual and storytelling techniques outwards to more experimental limits than ever before. The narratives and dialogue are fast paced (even when they feel slow), and the film really requires multiple viewings to fully appreciate how the many tiny gears fit together. While The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom felt like a fine-tuning and polishing of Anderson's trademark style, The French Dispatch is a departure. Telling stories within stories is a trademark of Anderson's style, but this is his most ambitious use of vignettes and character study to create an overarching narrative to date. I found his approach to difficult subjects depicted here mostly tasteful and always humorous. There are so many beautifully edited moments to be found and the editing is perhaps the most avant garde feature of the film, but there are also a handful of small but noticable continuity errors or harsh cuts that are unfortunate given how successful most of the editing is. The performances and sets are brilliant as always, and the art and occasional animations are fabulous and always fit the story's tone just right. Make sure to watch the credits for all the lovely "covers" made for the Dispatch. This film is perhaps Anderson's most polarizing and like any artistic departure, will turn off some viewers (as the comments below attest) but it will also surely be a favorite for others. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
The Rifftrax episode is funny, but what is much funnier is the video of narrator Anita Bryant getting pied and crying on live tv in 1977 for her anti-gay activism. Do yourself a favor and go watch that as a reward for making it through this schlock
Tremendous performances by Bogarde and Gardner considering the script doesn't always give them a lot to work with. Joseph Cotten is underused considering his casting and his role reminds you of a character from television more than film: a tertiary character with a huge personality, but he is enjoyable nonetheless. The same can be said of De Sica whose lines are quite humorous. The Angel Wore Red has a lot of humor, a number of beautiful shots and wastes no time skewering organized religion, politics, and war. The film's greatest flaw is that it is frustratingly sympathetic to Franco's fascist rebellion forces (although they are not totally spared from critique either). Some of the reviewers on IMDB are rather shocking how much they seem to sympathize with the forces Hemingway and Orwell fought against. But perhaps that's a conversation for another time.
A fun, funny, and at times, shockingly sweet look into the nexus of performance art, fear, morality, humanity, and the evolution of folklore in the digital age.
A lot of Brakhage's films, this one in particular, make you feel like Dr. Bowman looking into the infinity of the cosmos in 2001. Like a Mondrian or Rothko, it's about feeling the imagery, rather than trying to make sense of it.
Only in its wildest dreams is Strangers a Neo Noir, as billed. It's rambling, confusing, vague and pretentious. The film isn't particularly complicated, but it's unintellible characters are devoid of personality; depriving them of any semblance of motivation as they stumble through each scene. Suter confuses the charm of mysterious characters for outright cryptic ones in "Strangers." In Rashomon, we learn about each character through their biases via numerous unreliable narrators. In "Strangers," the audience can't learn about either the characters, nor narrative, because frankly, there's nothing to know.
Since the late 1980's, Danny Way has done everything in his power to drag skateboarding away from its artistic essence, and alchemize it into an "extreme sport" by wicking away creativity and originality and turning it into lucrative, easily consumable, mass-market one-upmanship entertainment. His gimmicky brand of skateboarding involves doing airs over the Great Wall of China and jumping out of helicopters, or off the "guitar" at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel. Director Jacob Rosenberg: an otherwise unshakable talent, has essentially created a documentary of the "straight-to-YouTube" variety because the object of the film is easily summed up: Danny is a savvy businessman that, while talented on a skateboard, is a one-dimensional skateboarder and man.
Unfortunately, the credits is not where Waiting for Lightning ultimately ends. Even if inspiration is to be found in this portrait of Way: his perseverance, dedication, and fearlessness, what the film doesn't say about him is far more telling about the content of his character. Waiting for Lightning completely fails to mention an incident in 1994 when Way and former Think Skateboards pro Josh Swindell got in a fight with Kieth Ogden: a gay man that the LA Times later reported witnesses testifying he had "flashed money" at Danny in an attempt to gain sexual favors outside the bar they were attending a party at. The fight that left Ogden dead. Swindell spent 19 years in prison for the murder, while Way, who escaped any charges, went on to become a millionaire.Details regarding Way's involvement about the fatal fight vary between the original Times article and Swindell's later interviews: both during and after his incarceration, but the theme of a "gay-panic" unpremeditated murder remain consistent throughout. Waiting for Lightning highlights many of Way's accomplishments but does not ask any questions of substance about its subject. There is no inquiry about his version of what happened to Ogden that night. There's never an inkling of how he may have changed as a person in the two decades since. This is something everyone in the industry knows, but no one talks about. This certainly isn’t Errol Morris recording Robert McNamara evaluate his failures as Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War in The Fog of War. But it’s exactly what anyone with any knowledge of the skateboard industry wanted it to be. Instead, the film pretends it never happened, and that uncomfortable silence says it all. As a documentary, it serves not as a preservation or historical account, but as a work of revisionist history; erasing Way's egregious actions to create and profit from a fictional legacy; amounting to nothing more than a massive advertisement for Way and the companies he co-owns: Plan B Skateboards and DC Shoes. Waiting for Lightning is a portrait of a pathetic man: one whose aforementioned one-dimensional personality is more concerned with doing a victory lap regarding his "legend status" than his responsibility for the death of a man.
If you're reading this and have a genuine interest in learning about the history of the skateboarding industry, [i/] The Man Who Souled the World[/i] is a far less revisionist documentary than most of the films about the industry are. The best way to learn the anthropology of skateboarding as a subculture is to watch old videos and read(& watch) blogs like Chrome Ball Incident, Jenkem, and Bobshirt.
Sorry whiny nerds, this film is just as good if not better than the originals. As nearly everyone has mentioned in the comments, Kate McKinnon definitely steals the show. Where do I get a "screw U" necklace?
This movie thinks it's hilarious. The other comments here say it's refreshing and original but it is no such thing. The jokes are hackneyed, it is not well acted (especially the voice acting), the direction, lighting, script , editing and sound are awful. I like dark. I like dark comedies. But this film is essentially a bad Taxi Driver rip off, mixed together with Cats and Dogs (we all know how miserable that movie is) and it wishes every day that it was Tucker and Dale Very Evil. Cabin in the Woods was a clever, refreshing, dark comedy horror film. This on the other hand can only be described as wretched.
Comments 1 - 20 of 20
Movie comment on Dashcam
anthemforadoomed
The rare horror film where you wait with baited breath for the main character to dieMovie comment on The Cry of Jazz
anthemforadoomed
Truly depressing comments here. Other than the dated terminology, the film is beautiful, perfect, and unquestionably correct. Any music historian will tell you that Black American musicians merged the soul and melody of blues with the compositional approach of classical music to create jazz in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There's no Beatles without BB King and there's no Benny Goodman without Scott Joplin or Jelly Roll Morton. Without the unique experience of being Black in America there would be no jazz and no rock n roll.Movie comment on Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies
anthemforadoomed
Started pretty strong discussing primitive and silent era through the enforcement of the Hayes Code, but as it continues to roll through the decades, it begins to feel like a compilation of 'cinema's greatest hits of nudity' and loses much of its academic steam. The film ultimately stuffers from only briefly touching on power dynamics and how truly exploitative Hollywood was in the latter half of the 20th century at certain points during the runtime, but not thoroughly interrogating it until the end where the focus is primarily on Weinstein. This comes in far too late after listening to actresses share their experiences with being asked to disrobe during auditions, or pressured to do more on camera than they wanted or agreed to throughout the second half of the film. In the meantime, there are plenty of moments where men orate about their favorite nude scenes.There is some interesting juxtaposition between women talking about their aforementioned negative experiences and others discussing positive, liberatory ones, but eventually the cutting back and forth wanders, causing the film to struggle to maintain its tone. It would have benefitted from having more context provided by film historians interspersed between the traumatic testimonials and the praiseful ones or an entire section in the middle of the film to focus on the industry's exploitative practices. This would have allowed for a consistent, thoughtful tonal shift, wrapped up with the existing ending to show how far we have progressed.
As he does in everything, Malcolm McDowell steals the show and is full of great anecdotes and insights. This was an interesting and challenging concept for a documentary and it does accomplish a fair amount, but the change in tenor from academic to reverential was disappointing. The runtime is also unnecessarily long, considering if watching the scenes is your primary goal, there are plenty of other places on the internet to do that. The film could have been quite good if a hedge clipper had been taken to it before exporting it from Final Cut.
Movie comment on The French Dispatch
anthemforadoomed
The French Dispatch is an intriguing installment in Anderson's filmography. In many ways, here we see him pushing his visual and storytelling techniques outwards to more experimental limits than ever before. The narratives and dialogue are fast paced (even when they feel slow), and the film really requires multiple viewings to fully appreciate how the many tiny gears fit together. While The Grand Budapest Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom felt like a fine-tuning and polishing of Anderson's trademark style, The French Dispatch is a departure. Telling stories within stories is a trademark of Anderson's style, but this is his most ambitious use of vignettes and character study to create an overarching narrative to date. I found his approach to difficult subjects depicted here mostly tasteful and always humorous. There are so many beautifully edited moments to be found and the editing is perhaps the most avant garde feature of the film, but there are also a handful of small but noticable continuity errors or harsh cuts that are unfortunate given how successful most of the editing is. The performances and sets are brilliant as always, and the art and occasional animations are fabulous and always fit the story's tone just right. Make sure to watch the credits for all the lovely "covers" made for the Dispatch. This film is perhaps Anderson's most polarizing and like any artistic departure, will turn off some viewers (as the comments below attest) but it will also surely be a favorite for others. I thoroughly enjoyed it.Movie comment on Drugs Are Like That
anthemforadoomed
The Rifftrax episode is funny, but what is much funnier is the video of narrator Anita Bryant getting pied and crying on live tv in 1977 for her anti-gay activism. Do yourself a favor and go watch that as a reward for making it through this schlockMovie comment on The Angel Wore Red
anthemforadoomed
Tremendous performances by Bogarde and Gardner considering the script doesn't always give them a lot to work with. Joseph Cotten is underused considering his casting and his role reminds you of a character from television more than film: a tertiary character with a huge personality, but he is enjoyable nonetheless. The same can be said of De Sica whose lines are quite humorous. The Angel Wore Red has a lot of humor, a number of beautiful shots and wastes no time skewering organized religion, politics, and war. The film's greatest flaw is that it is frustratingly sympathetic to Franco's fascist rebellion forces (although they are not totally spared from critique either). Some of the reviewers on IMDB are rather shocking how much they seem to sympathize with the forces Hemingway and Orwell fought against. But perhaps that's a conversation for another time.Movie comment on Wrinkles the Clown
anthemforadoomed
A fun, funny, and at times, shockingly sweet look into the nexus of performance art, fear, morality, humanity, and the evolution of folklore in the digital age.Movie comment on Stellar
anthemforadoomed
A lot of Brakhage's films, this one in particular, make you feel like Dr. Bowman looking into the infinity of the cosmos in 2001. Like a Mondrian or Rothko, it's about feeling the imagery, rather than trying to make sense of it.Movie comment on The Wonder Ring
anthemforadoomed
Stunning. Could even be an influence on Josh Stewart's 'Static' video series. A brief, new wave version of Berlin: Symphony of a CityMovie comment on The Touch of Satan
anthemforadoomed
This is where the fish live.Movie comment on Strangers
anthemforadoomed
Only in its wildest dreams is Strangers a Neo Noir, as billed. It's rambling, confusing, vague and pretentious. The film isn't particularly complicated, but it's unintellible characters are devoid of personality; depriving them of any semblance of motivation as they stumble through each scene. Suter confuses the charm of mysterious characters for outright cryptic ones in "Strangers." In Rashomon, we learn about each character through their biases via numerous unreliable narrators. In "Strangers," the audience can't learn about either the characters, nor narrative, because frankly, there's nothing to know.Movie comment on Waiting for Lightning
anthemforadoomed
Since the late 1980's, Danny Way has done everything in his power to drag skateboarding away from its artistic essence, and alchemize it into an "extreme sport" by wicking away creativity and originality and turning it into lucrative, easily consumable, mass-market one-upmanship entertainment. His gimmicky brand of skateboarding involves doing airs over the Great Wall of China and jumping out of helicopters, or off the "guitar" at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel. Director Jacob Rosenberg: an otherwise unshakable talent, has essentially created a documentary of the "straight-to-YouTube" variety because the object of the film is easily summed up: Danny is a savvy businessman that, while talented on a skateboard, is a one-dimensional skateboarder and man.Unfortunately, the credits is not where Waiting for Lightning ultimately ends. Even if inspiration is to be found in this portrait of Way: his perseverance, dedication, and fearlessness, what the film doesn't say about him is far more telling about the content of his character. Waiting for Lightning completely fails to mention an incident in 1994 when Way and former Think Skateboards pro Josh Swindell got in a fight with Kieth Ogden: a gay man that the LA Times later reported witnesses testifying he had "flashed money" at Danny in an attempt to gain sexual favors outside the bar they were attending a party at. The fight that left Ogden dead. Swindell spent 19 years in prison for the murder, while Way, who escaped any charges, went on to become a millionaire.Details regarding Way's involvement about the fatal fight vary between the original Times article and Swindell's later interviews: both during and after his incarceration, but the theme of a "gay-panic" unpremeditated murder remain consistent throughout. Waiting for Lightning highlights many of Way's accomplishments but does not ask any questions of substance about its subject. There is no inquiry about his version of what happened to Ogden that night. There's never an inkling of how he may have changed as a person in the two decades since. This is something everyone in the industry knows, but no one talks about. This certainly isn’t Errol Morris recording Robert McNamara evaluate his failures as Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War in The Fog of War. But it’s exactly what anyone with any knowledge of the skateboard industry wanted it to be. Instead, the film pretends it never happened, and that uncomfortable silence says it all. As a documentary, it serves not as a preservation or historical account, but as a work of revisionist history; erasing Way's egregious actions to create and profit from a fictional legacy; amounting to nothing more than a massive advertisement for Way and the companies he co-owns: Plan B Skateboards and DC Shoes. Waiting for Lightning is a portrait of a pathetic man: one whose aforementioned one-dimensional personality is more concerned with doing a victory lap regarding his "legend status" than his responsibility for the death of a man.
If you're reading this and have a genuine interest in learning about the history of the skateboarding industry, [i/] The Man Who Souled the World[/i] is a far less revisionist documentary than most of the films about the industry are. The best way to learn the anthropology of skateboarding as a subculture is to watch old videos and read(& watch) blogs like Chrome Ball Incident, Jenkem, and Bobshirt.
Movie comment on The Disaster Artist
anthemforadoomed
Don't talk to robo-crab, he's shy.Movie comment on Ghostbusters
anthemforadoomed
Sorry whiny nerds, this film is just as good if not better than the originals. As nearly everyone has mentioned in the comments, Kate McKinnon definitely steals the show. Where do I get a "screw U" necklace?Movie comment on Children of the Corn
anthemforadoomed
Folks are crazy, this movie is amazing.Movie comment on The Voices
anthemforadoomed
This movie thinks it's hilarious. The other comments here say it's refreshing and original but it is no such thing. The jokes are hackneyed, it is not well acted (especially the voice acting), the direction, lighting, script , editing and sound are awful. I like dark. I like dark comedies. But this film is essentially a bad Taxi Driver rip off, mixed together with Cats and Dogs (we all know how miserable that movie is) and it wishes every day that it was Tucker and Dale Very Evil. Cabin in the Woods was a clever, refreshing, dark comedy horror film. This on the other hand can only be described as wretched.Movie comment on Bridegroom
anthemforadoomed
Anyone that dislikes this film is utterly evil and heartless. This documentary is incredible.Movie comment on Three Days of the Condor
anthemforadoomed
Fuck this movie and it's attempt at blurring the lines of what rape is. Fuck it and fuck the patriarchy.Movie comment on My Best Friend's Girl
anthemforadoomed
Yo fuck this movie.Movie comment on Sharktopus
anthemforadoomed
Obviously this movie was going to be bad. But it was so much worse than expected.