The first shot of the 2025 thriller directed by Mel Gibson called Flight Risk is an establishing shot of a location you might see on television, which already says a lot about the movie. But that's not all of it. The shot is also very much computer-generated. I wouldn't say it's Ai ( but anything's possible ). It looks more like a 2D composition using various elements. A modern matte-painting of sorts. It's hard to point out specifically what's wrong with it, but it looks obviously fake. And obviously put together on a computer. And then the rest of the film doesn't really shake off this fakeness.
An exploitation film is a film that exploits some talked about fear or trend in culture in order to sell tickets to a movie that is probably not very good. Exploitation films are usually low budget, badly made B-movies, with a certain charm to them, if you like Tommy Wiseau's work. 2010's Robert Rodriguez film Machete is, somewhat of an intentional attempt at recreating the exploitation film phenomenon. Which exploits US politics of 2025, somehow. ( Rodriguez must have a time machine somewhere in his studio ).
I did not expect Spy Kids Armageddon to be any good. It is written and directed by Robert Rodriguez. A guy who doesn't care about quality that much. His view on film-making was shaped by his first filming experience in 1992 when he made El Mariachi. A movie so cheap that it was weird to a lot of people that it was an action film. Rodriguez has this idea that he can cheat his way into making anything at all. Using as he says "creativity instead of money". So most of his movies tend to look like the Star Wars prequels. A lot of pretty noticeable green screen. Tons of CGI where most other people would use practical props. And strange camera work which is probably more dictated by the limitations of his methods, and not by actual directorial decisions.
In my review of Robert Rodriguez's film Machete Kills I speculated that Quentin Tarantino introduced a small reference to Grindhouse movies in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood to fulfill a rather outlandish promise from the fake trailer of Machete 3 in the beginning of Machete Kills. That there would be a Grindhouse movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. I think Paul Thomas Anderson just beat Tarantino in this regard. His 2025 film One Battle After Another ( starring DiCaprio ) is a straight up remake of the first Machete.
Ethan Coen is a brother of Joel Coen with whom they made a lot of cool black-comedies and other cinema throughout the years. From starting a mock-religion with The Big Lebowski in 1998, to winning a best picture Oscar in 2007 with No Country for Old Men and doing other great cinema before, after and in between, those motherfuckers know how to make movies. So then comes a movie just from Ethan ( and his wife Tricia Cooke ) about lesbians, that is intentionally trying to be a bad film ( like the bullshit Robert Rodriguez is doing with Mechete )? Interesting...
Zack Snyder is the main force behind little 2011'th feminist, action, adventure, war / mental-institute, melodrama, about dancing prostitutes, Sucker Punch. He is the one credited with the story. He is the producer, the director and the co-writer. So it is through and through a Zack Snyder film.
As I observed 2 hours ago in my review of Machete, the first film is about US politics of 2025. The second movie Machete Kills is something else entirely. If the first film is a semi-parody of exploitation films. This one is a full on spoof comedy, parodying not just exploitation films, but other things too. By the end of the film, the bullshit is so absurd, that you cannot stop laughing. And then Elon Musk appears out of nowhere to send Machete into space.
In James Cameron's Avatar humans are attacking the forests of Pandora, bulldozing and killing indigenous population of the planet, to get to the natural resources their tribes are sitting at. The military is literally playing a role of guards, for the bulldozers, because the indigenous have become sort of very upset with humans, that terrorize their land. This is sort the plot of Eli Roth's horror film The Green Inferno, just Roth makes it way way more viscerally.
We all know about absolute cinematic masterpieces like The Room by the legendary Tommy Wiseau. Films that were intended to be great works of cinema, but that failed so miserably at achieving their goal, that they spawn all the way around the scale and became great works of cinema, by mistake, anyway. But then there are films like The Grindhouse movies, or Black Dynamite, or Wiseau's sequel to Samurai Cop, who's goal was to be those intentionally terrible pieces of crap, from the get go. Is Idiocracy by Mike Judge from the first type of terrible movies, or from the second, intentional one? Is Idiocracy intentionally stupid?
I love Isabela Merced. Ever since I saw her being this absolutely amazing girl in Michael Bay's Transformers 5 where there isn't enough of her either, I was a fan. I even genuinely tried to like Madame Web because of her part in it. And so it was rather disappointing to see how little screen-time she has in the new 2025 James Gunn film Superman. In case you didn't understand the title, she plays Hawkgirl.
In December of 2025, my neighbor, Quentin Tarantino finally released Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. The film that was originally meant to be, but that was unfortunately cut into two volumes upon its original release, 2 decades ago. Therefore for this review I will be treating Volume 1 and Volume 2 as one film, even though it has a rather substantial intermission in its not-directors-cut version. Re-experiencing the story of the Bride and her revenge, for this review, filled me with some rather profound questions. Questions that I believe I started asking in my review of Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood. Questions as to: what is the meaning of Kill Bill?
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 have not seen the original 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film yet. But I did appreciate the small cameo of Schwarzenegger on the new dollars used for money in the world of the 2025 Edgar Wright's political action-horror-comedy The Running Man.
I gave a look at the movie nobody seen in cinema this summer called Red Sonja, because the main character is played by Matilda Lutz, an Emilia Clarke look-alike that was very good in a Coralie Fargeat 2017 film Revenge. You may know Fargeat from her other film The Substance. Lutz was so perfect in Revenge and Revenge was so good, that I wanted to see more of Lutz. And then the trailer of Red Sonja dropped, advertising it as a yet another revenge flick, this time set in a medieval fantasy world. So of-course I was hooked.
When I reviewed Havoc I wrote about this strange feeling that I dubbed "short orgasmic blackout" when I see a stupidly serious, angry face of a female character that is really cute. And one of the most cutest actors living these days is fucking Ana de Armas. Let me illustrate. We see young Victoria Comte playing Eve ( the main character ) while being 11 ( Comte was born in 2013, do the math ), and then the film says "12 years later" so now she is 23. Yet de Armas playing her is 36 ( at the time of filming ). She plays somebody almost half her age and it works. Why? She is fucking cute! That's why. And because of that I knew I was probably getting the "short orgasmic blackout" the movie.