Between the 1970s to the 1990s there was a very interesting period in Hollywood. Directors like Steven Spielberg came from relative nobodies to super-stars. Which inspired a lot of directors to take upon the formula of sentimental adventure and try doing something else with it. My Girl looks like a movie clearly inspired by Spielberg, but not quite Spielbergian, in a sense that it doesn't deal with extraordinary circumstances, but rather deals with a family and friendship dynamics.
People change. People change! People grow. People adopt. People change their minds about things. People learn new things everyday. People form opinions. People change. And so have I. I notice something rather strange about people that come into contact with me without prior knowledge of what I do and how I think. I remember the other day on mastodon being bombarded with hate for seemingly no reason what so ever. I either said something good about Richard Stallman, or said something slightly too vague about one thing or another. I know I held opinions that I'm not proud of today. I know I probably have opinions right now that I will change in the future. People change.
Therefor I decided that it would be a good idea, both for the sake of my mental health and just as an example of said change, to talk to you about myself. To psycho-sexually analyze what I stand for. What I believe in. And most importantly: how I got to this point. How I changed to be where I am today. Yet, in a strange kind of way I am slightly afraid of strangers when it comes to my psychology. It is my private life, after all. And I don't want to reveal everybody everything about me. The good, the bad and the ugly. And then the ugly, the bad and the good. I don't want to give haters the platform to hate. So I suppose this is the perfect excuse to use the fediverse gimmick I came up with, the other day. Basically you have to be at least somewhat of a fan of me and / or my work, in order for me to feel okay with sharing with you all this private, highly emotional, stuff. Don't worry about it. If you are a fan, this is going to be a piece of cake for you. The website will just check that you are, and everything is going to be okay. For everybody else, perhaps, this article isn't for you.
I remember sitting at the entrance to a local cinema near me, shivering from a new kind of depression. I was waiting to enter the screening of Avatar: The Way Of Water, which was released in cinema just after The Fabelmans. The previous film I have seen in that very cinema, maybe already a week before that, was The Fabelmans and that dreadful feeling I had was caused by that movie. I was committing an act of masochism going back to cinema right after the trauma I experienced, and I was pretty sure Avatar 2 would only make it worse. I didn't care. I went anyway. Thank god that James Cameron decided to limit references to himself to a few nods to Titanic and stuff, and instead made a movie that is pretty much designed as a joyride. I don't know if I was alive today if Avatar 2 was anything like The Fabelmans.
There are quite some differences between the Scott brothers ( Ridley and Tony ) and the Maximus himself Michael Bay. You can read Troler's observations and then my rant in the comments to see why they aren't quite the same. But specifically Tony Scott films sometimes feels almost like Michael Bay movies. Especially early Tony Scott and early Michael Bay, before both of them knew how similar they are and before they started trying to develop each other into opposite directions. Which happened roughly in time with the 21st century. And yet with all this the Ridley Scott epic Gladiator which was shot at 20st century and released at 21st, bluntly steals one of the shots Michael Bay is known for.
This article is published on a website which is powered by BDServer. And I'm trying to make this website support ActivityPub, so you could for example, subscribe to me from your Mastodon account. Yet it is easier said than done.
If you have any experience with ActivityPub, web-development or Python, please consider helping me. We have BDServer Matrix Chatroom.
How daring must be a film studio to make a film applauding the acts of the Japanese Empire not only for the local, but the global market as well. One of the ways to do it, is to make a documentary, use objectivity as a shield for political play. Alternatively it can be about the individuals, who were concerned about the life of brethren than some pity war goals.
A lot of people see the 2021 Adam McKay film Don't Look Up as something that fails to communicate the message of climate change well enough. McKay stated that the movie was written specifically to point people at the absurdity of the "climate crisis". And yet the film's allegorical comet / asteroid doomsday plot seems to fail at giving it justice. For once an asteroid that is about to destroy the planet is nobody's fault. While the climate change is somebody's fault. But if you look at the movie relatively to other disaster flicks of the same type ( like Armageddon and Melancholia ) you see something rather interesting.
As a kid I did not understand the need for movies like Schindler's List. Growing up Jewish I knew about the Holocaust. I knew about the Nazis and heard stories about stuff they did. But movies in my childhood brain were firmly just a form of entertainment. What entertainment is there if you are watching people suffer? Yet as I explain in my other article at about 14 I got to a rather strange point in my life, when everything dark and real became important. That's when I saw Schindler's List for the first time. That's when a film that is not made for entertainment suddenly started making sense.
Alfred Hitchcock is known to be a hell of a filmmaker at the time of the code. When everybody were required to be kosher, Hitch found every loophole in the rule book to get us exciting stuff. He was able to make sexy and violent psycho-sexual thrillers when sex and violence were not allowed. His final film, 1976 Family Plot was already shot during the MPAA rating system. Other filmmakers like Brian De Palma took the thrown the master of the macabre. So what does Hitch do? He does the safest, most PG movie of his career.
Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary at some point in their early film-maker lives came up with a bunch of tiny little stories that they wanted to develop into movies. And one day a stroke of genius struck these two. Those little stories could be told together as one film, with interconnected characters. Quentin took off with the concept and wrote the final script. And then took off with said final script and made the movie itself. A movie that a lot of people consider to be one of the greatest masterpieces ever made. Yet, with that, re-watching it for this review, it struck me how amateurish the movie feels, despite its greatness.
One of things that slightly annoyed me on this re-watch...
What can be said about Godzilla? It is an icon to name icons. Looking at IMDb, it is unfortunate, although expected, to find 2014 release of Godzilla has 10 times as much ratings as the original 1954 version. Even though some scenes do look pretty goofy, a lot of love was undoubtedly put into it. That love is not always felt when viewing with modern sensibilities. I attempt to remedy the poignant feeling by calculated and logical reasoning and arguments... or more so my own acuity of the work.
Taika Waititi comes into an already saturated world of World War 2 exploitation pieces. It is of Nazis in the conventional historical sense. With that not being enough, it has child Nazis. And the protagonist Johannes "Jojo" Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) who loves Hitler so much, the Fiurher is his imaginary friend, played by the director himself.
If today we have a lot of films to choose from when we want to shock ourselves beyond believe: from barely serious, yet distrusting films by Eli Roth through intense hyper-violence by Coralie Fargeat or depressing looks at the world by Lars Von Trier all the way to deranged films like The Serbian Film, in 1970s you had probably only one true contender for such a level of derangeness. And it was the Tobe Hooper's 1974 film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
It could be said war and comedies don't work well together. How can anything humorous be said about the matters. Those who do must have lost their minds from the war! Cracking jokes and grinning while speaking of most horrific events in human history like it were a regular Friday night, is one of the best ways to come with the trauma. The trauma which never heals, always stays where-ever the eyes turn. Telling a story really helps get the pain off the chest. In a way, Westward Desperado is exactly just that.
It is not often that a horror films appears to tickle the right nerves from the high-brow crowd of cinema critics. With 93% Rotten Tomatoes score though, it is safe to assume that Zach Cregger's Weapons from 2025 is one of those rare movies.