Killers of the Flower Moon was a masterpiece. Big ups to Marty on this one. It's crazy to have a movie to star Robert DeNiro, Leo DiCaprio, and a woman whose prior claim to fame was a series of film school youtube videos (and Certain Women, Buster's Mal Heart), where the woman in question acts the pants off of deniro and dicaprio. If you were to somehow, accidentally, only see the scenes of this movie where the camera is set at a closeup of Lily Gladstone's face it would still be the best movie you'd seen in 2023. Five stars. COVID-19 delays in filming and editing led Scorsese to "drastically re-evaluate" the viewpoint from which he tells the film; the book (also very good!) chooses as its main character Tom White, the 'ndn' agent of the newly-formed FBI. Scorsese instead chooses Lily Gladstone's Mollie Burkhart, a woman who spends three hours of the 3.5 hour movie aware that her husband murdered her entire family for money. The effect, to me, was that the movie is more humiliating, more humbling, sadder, more tragic, than the book because of this lens. Great stuff.
Say Yes (2018) - one of the strangest romantic plots in history. This movie is unlike anything else ever made by a human being with a human brain and person emotions. A woman, dying of a sudden and aggressive cancer, insists that she can only be happy in death if her fraternal-twin-brother and her husband fuck. And they do. Weird stuff. two stars
Ogroff the Mad Mutilator - maybe one of the coolest things i have ever seen that was filmed on Super 8 film but i'm not actually convinced that this was a movie. Some weird french guy tries to remake Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the idyllic wooded French countryside. THE MAD WOODSMAN is CONVINCED THE WAR NEVER ENDED and if you stray into his woods HE KILLS YOU. there is almost no dialogue at all in the entire film. at one point Ogroff the Mad Mutilator drives a motorcycle down the highway and throws axes at women. when he returns home to his weird farmer shack he jacks off an axe while staring at a wall calendar pinup. Weird as fuck. Startling. Unaware of any rules or conventions established by any previous movie, horror or not. 3.5 stars.
Chompy & The Girls - awesome!!!!! total pulp. Absolutely loved this. A woman wants to kill herself but instead she reconnects with her biological father, and when they're hanging out in the park, they see a space alien swallow a little girl whole and eat her. the space alien then proceeds to It Follows them around their anonymous city. Made for a TINY budget and with an AUDACIOUS goal, Chompy & The Girls succeeds, imo, on all levels other than 'well-integrated CGI'. 3.5 stars.
Asteroid City - Wasn't sure about this one! But you see Scarlett Johansson naked in the mirror for a like ten second shot. As far as Wes Anderson movies go if you like that stuff you'll like this one; he's back on his bullshit. Personally I was so annoyed we didn't get to actually see video of the new mexico desert; fuck off with your soundstages, asshole. I like the desert and I think the stars are awesome there. I'm a so-so Anderson fan and I think this was most of the stuff he does that I don't like rather than the stuff he does that I do like. Maybe I don't like Wes Anderson at all. IDK. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah wes anderson dialogue. And what I'm trying to say is that I haven't been the same , emotionally, kids, since your mother died. Two stars.
Cypher (2002) - I really liked this! Lucy Liu smoulders, the main guy grows on you, I liked him a lot by the end of the movie too. It's a neo-noir about corporate espionage, and the trick of a spy, especially a corporate spy, is "dissimulation", pretending-to-be-that-which-one-is-not. This movie dissimulates itself really well IMO. When telling a story that spirals out from its centre like this, we as the audience have to be so interested in the first cover story being told, in its characters (and I was!), that we're surprised when the william gibson PKD of it all really comes to the fore. Awesome stuff. Great script from Brian King. Can't wait to show this to people. 4 stars.
