What Films Have You Been Watching? December 2021

Finally got round to House of Gucci. Enjoyed it a lot, pretty wild story I knew nothing about.

Jared Leto, though. Just wow. Like a Dolmio puppet on ketamine. Possibly one of the worst performances I’ve seen from an adult on a major film like this.

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Watched The Lure from 2015. Polish one about two mermaids who become singers in a cabaret act which is threatened when one falls in love with a musician.

Be an interesting companion piece with Annette as they are both slightly bizarre musicals. Unlike Annette though, this isn’t completely pompous and irritating, and it’s a nice twist on the Ondine/Little Mermaid story. Quite horror inflicted as well. It’s on Netflix

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Portrait of a Lady on Fire (iPlayer) blew me away again.
Didn’t think films were supposed to do that on a small screen, second viewing.
What a film.

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I watched The Lure on a bus travelling from Warsaw to Gdansk on Christmas Eve a few years ago. One of the less appropriate movies I’ve watched on a bus, but because it was Christmas Eve, there wasn’t anybody potentially looking over my shoulder who either would recognise it (It’s not a widely-loved film here in Poland, it has a rating of 5.2 on the Polish equivalent of IMDB, but only 20,000 or so people have logged that they have seen it. In Polish, it’s called 'Dancing Daughters or ‘Daughters of Dance’ depending on how you want to translate it.

Bonus Round: Films you’ve watched on a bus or train! For the first time or whatever

All of mine were the first time I saw these films:

Bus!:

The Lure
A Clockwork Orange
Barton Fink
Thief
The Hours
Assault on Precinct 13
The Great Gatsby (The Robert Redford one)
Nonstop
Drop Zone (The Wesley Snipes parachuting movie)
Starlet
(The first half of) The Grand Budapest Hotel. The Wi-fi cut out. I still haven’t seen the second half.

Train!:

2001: A Space Odyssey
Three Days of the Condor
Rashomon
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Do the Right Thing
Kill Your Friends
The King of Comedy
Best of Enemies (The documentary about Gore Vidal and William F Buckley, not the Taraji P Henson/ Sam Rockwell racism thing that I haven’t seen

any bites? I don’t care if this is just a ‘list some films’ thing, I am actually curious.

The Forgotten Battle was really good.

We watched Azor tonight (Mubi). It might be my favourite film of the year. A terrific political thriller set in Argentina during the years of the junta about a Swiss banker trying to pick up the pieces after his colleague has disappeared.

If you like Pakula’s 70’s paranoid thrillers or films like Missing, this is for you.

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Ferry - Superbad, American Gangster both on an iPod video

The 8yo was ill at home all last week

We ended up watching Pixar’s Inside Out. Great film to watch with an 8yo

She loved it so much that she wanted to watch it again the next day… so we did… the bit where they go into the abstraction tunnel - 100% genius

Other than that we watched all of Get Back & I’ve made good use of the Disney+ subscription so far by watching;

Alien
Summer of Soul
The Ladykillers (Coen Brothers remake)

and lots of other shite

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I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film on either to be honest!

Really underwhelmed by Swallow, possibly due to my expectations. Was thinking it would be quite an enjoyable absurdist drama, turned out to be a film primarily about dealing with grief and trauma - however, still thought this was done in quite a heavy handed way. Reminded me in tone a bit of She Dies Tomorrow, which I also didn’t like at all

Recently watched:

Soul - The Pixar film. I knew it was jazz based but not about the whole spiritual and heavenly type of stuff. Enjoyed it but not as much as I hoped for. 6.5/10

Click and Collect - A short BBC film I stumbled on on Netflix. Just a Planes, Trains and Automobiles film with Stephen Merchant and Asim Chaudhry as his uncouth neighbour who go on a road trip to pick up a Christmas present for Merchant’s daughter. Started off shit but enjoyed it as it went along. 7/10.

Souad - Unfortunately it just didn’t click with me but it’s a very well made Egyptian film about a teenager and her relationship between friends, social media and religion. A tragic film and worth a watch as the reviews are very good and I’m probably the outlier here. 6/10.

Sound Of Violence - Odd horror where Jasmin Savoy Brown is musician-sound technician gets pleasure from the screams of those in pain. Starts off average and acceptably slow and then gets pretty dull and pointless. 4.5/10.

Night Teeth - Tedious film about vampires vs humans in Los Angeles. Got bored about half way in and was just browsing on my phone with the film in the background. 1.5/10.

Just watched Seven Samurai (1954) at the BFI IMAX.
First saw it when I was about 15/16.

Well shot film imo. IMAX does it a bit more justice than the knackered Toshiba portable TV I had perched on my bedroom windowsill.
Loved it.

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Started watching the Anderson fantastic Mr. Fox sort of knowing I was going to hate it but fucking hell I’m despising it. I will watch the last 75 minutes because I also hate myself

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I cannot express in words how much I despise what he did with this

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Just got to the Jarvis Cocker bit. Fucking hell. Might hate it more than Isle of dogs

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I love Wes but that’s my least fav by quite a way. Really didn’t get the praise, just found the whistling and clicking quite smug and irritating

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I thought it was his best (perhaps only good) film since Rushmore.

(Fantastic Mr Fox was a Dahl book that I never had much affection for as a kid, so I wasn’t too upset at the treatment of it)

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I don’t remember the book vividly. I dislike this purely on its own merits

Good: rushmore, tenenbaums
Fine: Budapest, moonrise kingdom
Bad: darjeeling, fox, dogs
Not seen: bottle rocket, life aquatic, the new one

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Only seen Tenenbaums, Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest and I hated them all

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