CaptainHowdy

I finally sat down and watched this after hearing for years about how what a classic this movie is supposed to be. I don't get the hype. This movie is depressing. I think I might have smiled once or twice at some of the half-hearted attempts at humor, but I didn't laugh a single time. "Hey look! It's Billy Bob Thornton acting like a bitter drunk a-hole! Hilarskis!" Yeah, I won't be watching this a second time.

Writer/director John Boorman (Deliverance) failed in his attempt to adapt The Lord of the Rings to the screen, so he wrote the bizarre fever dream that is Zardoz instead. This film has some admirably high aspirations, but there's no denying that it's a bona fide hot mess. While the artistic design is memorable, the story jumps all over the place, with no clear rhyme or reason to anything. Aggressively opaque pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo abounds in an attempt to make the film seem deeper than it actually is, but it makes so little sense while taking itself so seriously that it's hard to enjoy the film, even on an ironic level. An odd film indeed, but by no means necessary viewing.

At this point, I'm beginning to fear that Jordan Peele is very good at coming up with interesting concepts but very bad at pulling them together. This is because "Nope" is his second movie in a row that starts out intriguing but just falls apart at the end. For the first two-thirds of the film, "Nope" maintains an aura of suspense that makes you wonder where Peele is going with this. The setup is strong, and the imagery riveting. There's a hint of something high-concept that Peele wants to get at, which is partly due to the expectations after "Get Out" but also partly due to the way he delivers information. But then it just...sort of...devolves into a regular-ass horror movie. It's not a terrible movie, but it's not what it wants to be or could have been. What's even more confounding is that he includes flashback sequences to a horrific event that seems to foreshadow what's going on in the present. By the end of the film, however, I can only speculate on why those sequences were included other than to ratchet up the sense of dread and add length to the film. If he had followed any one of the high-concept themes (animals rebelling, the modern phenomenon everyone watching everyone else, etc.) the movie seems to be getting at in different points of the movie, this could have been a really thought-provoking film. In the end, however, Peele is just throwing ideas at the camera while not really making them cohere.

'Crimes of the Future' plays like classic Cronenberg, getting into levels of weird and unsettling that are reminiscent of 'Naked Lunch.' There are also a lot of the elements Cronenberg is known for, most notably the merging of biology and technology. However, the film suffers from an unusual problem for directors: Cronenberg has far too many ideas. While other directors will suffer from too few, he has loads of them. He just seems to have a hard time discerning which ones are good or bad or just unnecessary. They all get thrown into the mix, and they are all given far less screen time than they need to develop. In the end, none of them do. As a result, the audience is also fed a steady stream of characters whose motives are unclear. We meet one, find out a little bit about their background, then move on and don't revisit them until much later on. Characters with no known connection are later shown to have some sort of link, but that link is never made completely clear. In short, it looks and feels like a Cronenberg film in just about every way you could imagine. However, the muddled plot and half-baked ideas left me much more confused at the end of this film than I was at the beginning. I'll leave this one for Cronenberg completists only.

I was very wary when I saw Larry Clark's name on this movie. Clark has a well-earned reputation for being borderline-exploitative with young actors, and this was no exception. There's tons of drugs, nudity, and violence, all things that are relatively par for the course with Clark. For the first half of the film, I found everything to be fairly unrealistic. The way the characters talked and the fact that they told nearly EVERYONE they knew about what they were going to do. In the second half, I found it completely believable that the characters acted and reacted the way they did to the situation. These chatty-kathys couldn't keep their secret for more than a few days, and everything fell apart exactly as you'd expect. After Bully wound to a close, I came to find out that this film is a true story. The major events played out on screen more or less as they did in real life, and the characters' names were not altered for the movie. The movie's strengths lie in the unflinching portrayal of its central event and the sense of inevitable doom afterward. Clark really creates a sense of "Oh, **** This really can't be undone and is going to end badly." That the film stayed as close as it did to the source material is admirable when so many other films tend to mess around with the facts for Hollywood. Bully's weaknesses manifest themselves in the dialogue. Some of the dialogue is just really unbelievable and clunky, even for late teenagers. Perhaps the characters say what they're going to do over and over because they're trying to talk themselves into it, or maybe they do it because the filmmakers wanted everyone to know that this act was premeditated. If it's the former, it's clever but not strongly executed; if it's the latter, it's just hamfisted. Furthermore, the character of Lisa Connelly (played by Rachel Miner) makes some jarring turns. We see her go from what seems like a relatively sweet girl to a complete psychopath then back to a sweet girl without any warning at all. Maybe the girl was like this in real life, but you get no clues early on the film that she's really this disturbed. Then, all of a sudden, POW, she's completely, heartlessly crazy. Another point of contention is the music. This event occurred in the summer of 1993, yet all of the music I recognized came out afterward, sometimes by years. The characters were watching Eminem videos that wouldn't come out for another 8 years. In a particularly bizarre turn, the characters are listening to Cypress Hill's album "Black Sunday" which came out a week AFTER the main event of the film. It's just sloppy if you're going to make a film based off of real events using real people's names but you mess up on getting the little details right. Bully is a good film, slightly above average, but not a great film. It's worth watching once, but I feel no need to watch it again.

One of my favorite works of strange cinema. I would want it as my come-down film during a bad trip. I have passed out to it many times in pure pleasure. But it demands a larger place in the cult film world, as it is confusing, compelling, and deeply beautiful in its analysis of the natural world and how mankind's creation is always at its mercy.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

This film has an interesting premise, but it really doesn't know what to do with it self. It starts off as a complete farce of **** Germany, then switches tone to something more akin to Wes Anderson, then becomes a tale about how **** is wrong (yes, we knew), then becomes a bleak anti-war tale, and vacillates back and forth between all the above. Meanwhile, the central premise that this boy imagines that he is close friends with Adolf **** gets thrown aside after the first fifteen minutes and revisited only sporadically. A few of the jokes land, but probably less than half of them. Enjoyable, but bit of a mess that really doesn't give us anything new.

This film is a fairy tale with the training wheels taken off. It's essentially a story of unrequited love, but it's packed with witches, werewolves, ghosts, plagues, curses, and deals with the devil. The visual imagery and cinematography are stunning, and it will constantly surprise you. Only gripe: It's maybe about 15 minutes longer than it needs to be and drags slightly near the end.

The first 30 minutes of this film had me laughing hard. The remainder kept me interested but didn't really pay off in the end the way I hoped it would. This is the second Potrykus film I've watched (the other is The Alchemist Cookbook, and I'm getting around to Buzzard), and though I think he has interesting ideas, he has a hard time executing those interesting ideas in an interesting way. I'll keep an eye on this filmmaker.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Let's face it: Quentin Tarantino is just about spent. If this film had not been directed by a legend of cinema who has been making dazzling movies for almost three decades, no one would be as forgiving of two and a half hours of scene after scene with nothing happening, conversation after conversation of weak, uninspired dialogue, and characters with no character arc. The plot line does little more than shoehorn the Manson family into a film about being a has-been who can't create the magic that he used to, which aptly parallels Tarantino's career over the last few years. You almost wonder if he meant to write it that way, but it's hard to tell when it's bogged down with a million other little subplots that reveal nothing interesting and go nowhere. People want to keep loving Tarantino, but without his name, this film would not be getting the score it has. Stop reviewing Pulp Fiction and review THIS film for what it is, not for what you imagined it would be before you walked into the movie theater. Had it been made by a first-time director, this bloated snoozefest would have ruined their career. That said, I will add: Margot Robbie did a great job of capturing the ghost of Sharon Tate. And that dog was a really good dog.

This movie makes a lot more sense if you look at it from the perspective of writer/director Ari Aster's own description, which is that it is a breakup film. Yes, there are some gruesome parts. Yes, sometimes the characters' decisions don't make sense. Yes, the "horror" isn't particularly gripping. Yes, the movie is deeply, deeply strange. However, if the entire Sweden trip is taken metaphorically as the emotional journey of a woman (in this case, the protagonist Dani) who has just been dumped from a bad relationship, it comes together beautifully. She's in a strange mental place, and she has to let go of the past in order to enjoy the ample sunshine. The film takes her through the steps of grief, confusion, betrayal, commiseration, and ultimately presents her with a choice that will determine whether she is able to reconvene with the world that always existed outside of the one she built with her ex. From this perspective, it makes sense that ALL of the members of the main group are his friends, not hers. It makes sense that their characters are all drawn a little flat, while she is easily the most complex of the whole group. It makes sense that they make uncanny decisions and choose not to see what is going on. It makes sense that they all stick around instead of hightailing it out of there once things get bad. Definitely looking forward to a second watch for this one.

"Starry Eyes" is a surprisingly good slow-burn about ambition and what for some may be the true price of fame. Taking cues from films like Rosemary's Baby without imitating it too directly, the film exploits the psychological despair of failure well and balances it out with the body horror. I've watched it twice as of this review, and it stands up to repeat viewings. Alexandra Essoe is fantastic in the lead role of Sarah, letting her sweetness and naivete transform into viciousness and aggression gradually. The fact that Essoe cites "Possession" as a main inspiration for her performance is hardly surprising. Most of the supporting cast do well also, with few really weak performances to speak of. On the negative side, "Starry Eyes" could have done a little better in the third act. There is certainly body horror and gore, but in the process the film loses the critique of Hollywood culture it built its foundation on. Why Sarah ends up having to do what she eventually does is sort of understandable, but it's a little klunky in how it plays out. Bottom line: Definitely worth a watch, especially for horror fans and aspiring actresses.

I really enjoyed The Cuckoo more than I thought I would. The film is historic, funny, moving, and features three fantastic performances by the leads. I was fully engaged throughout the entire movie.

Apart from about two very dramatic sequences, Trouble Every Day is a slow slog that goes more or less nowhere before ending suddenly and without warning. It's like Claire Denis came up with the one "big scene" and then decided to write up a bunch of filler to go around it. One redeeming factor: The "big scene" has one of the most realistic performances of a person in agony that I've ever seen. Pain is often poorly acted, but the performer here just nails it and makes the scene believable.

Very little happens in this movie, which is a misleading statement because several rather dramatic things happen. However, none of those events have any bearing on each other, and as soon as an event happens, it is forgotten. Taken as a whole, the film just seems to be writer/director Claire Denis throwing anything even mildly interesting up on the screen with the hope that something will stick and make the film relevant. It ends up being a mishmash, and with so many competing ideas forbidding any of the others to be developed, the greater narrative becomes a non-entity. Add to that an ensemble of wholly unlikeable characters and an ending that just sort of suddenly happens without any warning, and this film just leaves you wondering why it took a whole two hours to let this non-story unfold. One redeeming factor: It contains one of the most realistic depictions or near-light-speed travel I've seen committed to film.

There are good **** movies and there are bad ones. This one was just monumentally stupid. I went in having read some of the bad reviews and was willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of the film...I mean, aren't we all when it comes to action movies? But this demanded way too much suspension of disbelief too early on, and it just got worse from there. I don't want to get into too many details, but this piece of garbage was evidently shot using the first draft of the script without any consideration for "Is what's happening right now at least remotely plausible?" Rewrites and second drafts - totally worth the time you put into them.

Valhalla Rising is, like many of Nicholas Winding-Refn's films, beautifully shot, well-performed with top-notch actors, and occasionally extremely violent, but with an absence of plot that doesn't compel the viewer to rewatch it. I can't think of anything that makes any of the characters memorable, or even any scenes that greatly contribute to the film, though I only finished watching it minutes ago.

Unfortunately marketed as a horror film, this is one of the best and most important films of 2017. A depiction of man's destruction of nature, mother! uses the Bible as its base material and builds from there, creating a rich allegory of how the human race is bringing about its own apocalypse. This film should not be taken at face value, but rather as a deeply symbolic work that stands up to repeat viewings.