Completely off topic and should be in the rant topic but this evening's adventure with MoviePrep has been thoroughly unpleasant.

Is that a laxative? I think it's a laxative. DuckDuckGo tells me it's a laxative. It's a laxative, isn't it.

Little Men (2016) (Hulu)

Little drama about childhood friendship and adult preoccupations, and how they can clash. Naturalistic performances from the two boys (Theo Taplitz as Jake, Michael Barbieri as Tony). A couple standout scenes include an acting class towards the middle (Tony), and an emotional episode towards the end (Jake). Good supporting cast all around. Not exactly uplifting, but that's life.

Added: Hah. Movieclips has the acting class scene on youtube:

arugula2 wrote:Is that a laxative? I think it's a laxative. DuckDuckGo tells me it's a laxative. It's a laxative, isn't it.

Yes, industrial grade: 2 litres goes in, an ocean comes out. My guess is that it's made by some people who have discovered body temperature superfluids! Geez! Still, the medic will have a clear view down their camera later this morning.

I now return you to scheduled posts about films and movies...

and now for something completely different...

...

Coherence (2013) (Hulu)

The other movie I watched when the site was down. A comet passes overhead during a reunion of acquaintances. Naturally, one or more of those gathered have some urban legends to share about what supposedly happens when this, or other comets deign to cross us. Then shit happens. All the goings on are conveyed by the group, trying to figure out what's happening. Almost entirely within the house. If some of the more unnecessary plot conceits were cut out, such as cracking of cell phone screens, rather than just cell phones not working, and others, this could've even worked as a play, or been a better movie. I was ready to buy whatever they were selling, because the cast is pretty strong. But almost as soon as the group starts to lose control of the situation, the script succumbs to perplexing characterization. It thinks it's doing it for a good enough reason - to highlight the possibility that some characters know more than others. But a formerly-intelligent, curious, stubborn, and mildly paranoid character (which would describe any of them, under the circumstances) can't suddenly be drained of all those qualities when it's convenient for the script. Anyway, partly due to this ambiguity in how the characters think and react, you'll likely feel as confused by events as they themselves are, and the slow unraveling of the mystery might intrigue you. Which is a pity, because the mystery should be mysterious on its own terms, and not because a movie insists it is.

Pff, I am unshakeable in my love of Coherence.

yup - the film that keeps giving...takes multiple watches to even start working it all out
there's a map of it somewhere online that attempts to connect everything

it's the writer/director's house...i love a complex indie film on a budget...

I applaud the complexity... I do not accept how passive the “original” members are at the initial weird behavior of the “intruders”. That’s the immersion-breaking moment for me, and sadly it starts almost immediately. It’s like the screenwriters couldn’t or wouldn’t make those reactions more realistic, for fear of breaking the “puzzle” immersion. Oh well. I’m glad it didn’t poke all viewers in the eye at least.

It’s generally an endorsement anyway, just with what I experienced as a flaw. I liked the movie, but I also resented that particular decision.

Added: To be clear, “confused” & “intrigued” were meant as the same, ie a plus. My realization that part of the obfuscation involves making characters react out-of-character is what bugs me.

I just watched 'Upgrade' on Amazon Prime.


https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6499752/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

(I originally linked to the trailer, but upon review, it was a bit spoilerish, so I changed it to the imdb link.
My recommendation is to watch the movie cold, no trailer or anything.)

Wow, what a pleasant surprise.
Apparently, they only had a budget of about 5M USD. But, they did an excellent job all round.
The cast were spot on, and the story intriguing and raised some really interesting questions.
The action scenes were bloody, but not gratuitous and the SFX were very nice and understated.

When I think of the hundreds of millions spent on the endless sequel/prequel/reboot nonsense, resulting in generic, predictable, sub-moronic 'blockbusters' with cartoonish villains, mono-dimensional heroes, sledgehammer thudding political 'messages', black and white moral lessons and so on, and and then compare them to this little gem...

Anyways, a solid recommend and thumbs up.

I was pleased for the same reasons (though I hadn't known about budget). And yes, it's one of those where the trailer is the enemy.

I remember Coherence! Jeez, this is bringing back so many fun memories of films Fal and US put me onto. They really did find all the gems and interesting ones.

Memory: The Origins of Alien (2019) (Crackle)

Delicious. Yes, H. R. Giger's art is synonymous with the visuals of that universe, and Ridley Scott was a stubborn visionary without whom this would probably have been a much trashier product. But the making-of story is many layers deeper than that, and it begins properly (I know this now) in the unconscious mind of Dan O'Bannon, screenwriter - his childhood influences/obsessions, and even his poor health & his poverty as a struggling artist (we may never have gotten the face-hugger or the chest-burster, and hence Alien as we know it, otherwise).

Serendipity, recurring. For example, O'Bannon’s obsession with Lovecraftian imagery (his widow apparently has his unpublished rewriting of the Necronomicon, in a box somewhere); and while working on Jodorowski's ill-fated Dune, O'Bannon met fellow Lovecraft fanboi Giger, whom he'd later recruit on his own first production of Alien... from which Giger was fired because his art was too gross and scary, and the original director didn't think enough of the project to stick around. Both to our benefit, because when Ridley took over, his insistence on the unadulterated Giger aesthetic (after O’Bannon reintroduced it) is what shut down the studio's protestations. Surface facts... but what I find more fascinating is the unseen primordial, shaping the artistic visions of people who happened to be drawn together on this project, through ancient intermediaries like Egyptian cosmology (can be seen in concept art from both Dune and earlier drafts of Alien), Christianity, and Greek tragedy.

One artist whose work helped Ridley overcome a particular obstacle in design was Francis Bacon, whose painting Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus is about to fetch tens of millions at Sotheby's:

The tortured anatomy, especially in the middle panel, is of interest. Bacon was particularly obsessed with the Oresteia. The ostensibly christian subject of his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (which springs from a festering psychic wound involving his dogmatic father) could be mistaken for three Furies:


These are bubbling cauldrons of angst. Into the pot goes the social context of America in the 70's, which I've always felt subliminally in Alien's crew hierarchies and conflicts. Even the names of the ship (Nostromo) and shuttle (Narcissus) are from Joseph Conrad, who wrote about what happens when we venture into the dark unknown, especially for empire. The tantalizing suggestion here is that, whatever greets us out there, could be as old as our oldest stories, or as old as life itself. An example of these subconscious threads links to the Egyptian goddess Nut, who is alternately the sky or the cosmos (her brother/husband is the Earth). The hieroglyph for Nut also means "womb". It's a weird transgression that the sky should be mother, but this could also be a vestige of an older consensus about such things, which happened to survive in one place. What if it infected the thoughts of some creatives, tapping into yet another suppressed guilt about a ten thousand year arc of history? (O'Bannon's original script, titled Memory, describes a hidden adversary which infects our minds during sleep.)

Anyway, aside from a couple of annoying interviewees (one whose whiny syllables are ridiculously drawn out, another who's clearly in love with his own voice & has over-rehearsed his speeches... both of whom are youngish millennials, go figure) this docu is riveting. Some of the research must've been from Ian Nathan's book Alien Vault: The Definitive Story of the Making of the Film, as he is one of the main contributors.

Speaking of chest-bursters... we're dispelled of the notion that the cast members around John Hurt were completely unaware of what was to come. They had some idea. But two serendipitous events did conspire against them. The first was olfactory: (skip past the quote to avoid... quotes)

Roger Christian (set designer): In the morning, Ridley said “let’s put some bits of gristle and stuff,” so I sent the buyer down to the abattoir to buy a load of offal, which stank terrible. And they put it in formaldehyde for you, but it was worse. We packed it around, and Ridley was doing it himself too. We were sticking it all around underneath.


Veronica Cartwright: We’re all up in our dressing rooms at Shepperton Studios. Harry Dean Stanton is sitting in the hall singing and playing guitar. We’re up there for hours. We kept wondering, what the- what was going on?

Ian Nathan: But at a certain point in time, some assistant is sent to bring them to set. And what greets them isn’t a vision, it’s a smell. Because over these hours, this kind of offal and raspberry juice has just been cooking under the lights.

Veronica Cartwright: Literally, you gagged when you walked onto the set.

The second was technical: the chest-burster had to be reset twice because of malfunctions, so it was only on the third attempt that the monster's face fully protruded from the shirt, the buildup to which, combined with Ridley's instruction for increasing volumes of projectile blood, did trigger chaos and earnest revulsion.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/when_they_see_us

Ava DuVernay pulls no punches in When They See Us, laying out the harrowing events endured by the Central Park Five while adding a necessary layer of humanity to their story that challenges viewers to reconsider what it means to find justice in America.
2019, Netflix, 4 episodes

Really apt for whats happening today, the popular racist Donald Trump and his full page advert advocating the death penalty for these children makes it doubly so

Ah, that was great. Depressing, but great.

Blindspotting

This movie could not be more relevant right now. It came up in my queue and I had actually forgotten what it was about and what made me put it there. Daveed Diggs is OMFG amazing in it. It's about a guy just getting off probation in Oakland CA when he witnesses a police shooting (that's in the trailer) and it causes him to re-think his relationships. It's definitely a must-see.

I like Tim Roth and this works for me.

Ma and Da, you seen this?

It's....I think they finally got Lovecraft into a film properly. Best attempt I've seen so far, anyway. Wasn't going to watch because I'm not a fan of Nicolas Cage, but he kinda works. I recommend.