36. The King of Comedy (1982) - February 5th
This was a creepily fascinating movie in a similar vein to Scorsese's own Taxi Driver, with a hint of After Hours. The way the film devolves in to sheer fantasy and how that contrasts with the reality of the situation is an excellent illustration of the toxicity of fame as success, from both sides of the topic, while drawing out disturbing laughs.
The movie is a window in to insanity, and it effectively creates a most uncomfortable combination of understanding of the delusional and sympathy for the successful. Even though he's clearly dangerous and you'd never want to be around him, it's hard not to see the world as Rupert does; the movie literally tells portions of the story from his perspective, and when we snap back to what's actually going on without any indication that anything has changed, sometimes mid-scene, the headache of dissonance it creates is palpable, at first confusing, and then horrifying. As Rupert's actions spiral out of control, it's easy to become more and more disgusted, but with the setup the film offers and the climactic stand-up routine, you literally see where he's coming from. While you don't receive the same liberties with Jerry's perspective, the film, or rather Rupert, constantly makes him a victim of circumstance. The film's whole goal is to examine the extreme nature with which the culture it exists in treats fame, and regardless of it's relevance at release the film feels positively prescient. I love it when a film has one line that can sum up a lot of what it's trying to suggest: "It's better to be King for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime". The idea that Rupert does everything he does because of some ill-conceived self delusions of grandeur that he believed entitled him to even have a shot at getting famous while also being shot down for his work at every possible turn just all feels so wrong to think about, but the fact that the events of reality in the film don't seem far-fetched is why the challenge the film offers is so troubling in the best of ways. The film is cynical, and deeply personal, and excellently crafted. - 8.5/10
37. Phantom Thread (2017) - February 6th
It's always nice to find something unique in a sea of films that can so easily blur together; it also helps that Phantom Thread is probably the best movie I've seen this year so far. My full review can be found here. With this one watched that leaves me with only one Best Picture nominee to see: Lady Bird, which isn't out until February 15th in Australia.
38. The Cloverfield Paradox (2018) - February 7th
I'm really not sure what they were trying to accomplish with this film. It's too boring to be thriller or horror, too loose with it's detail to be hard sci-fi, played far too straight to be a satire. The whole film is a mess of half-baked sci-fi horror concepts that never really gets anywhere. It's a damn shame. My full review can be found here.
39. Daddy's Home 2 (2017) - February 8th
On a day when I'm feeling lazy and sloppy, it's appropriate that I'm watching a lazy and sloppy comedy. The first Daddy's Home was mediocre at best, largely mean-spirited and riddled with cliches, with only the chemistry of its leads to really keep it going. The second shows some improvements, but runs some other points from the first film ragged.
I remember from the trailers the only thing that drew me in was the inclusion of Mel Gibson, and his character makes up about half of what I actually like about the movie. He's so consistently cynical, and always upfront about it. It's more entertaining than Wahlberg's fast-talking passive-aggressive gaslighting (which Gibson has his fair share of in this), and it's sharp enough to get a laugh when it's well-timed. Lithgow is just as good when on-screen, but under-utilised.
The Ferrell-Wahlberg chemistry is about as good in this as it is in the first. It gets better when Gibson and Lithgow are around, with the best the film managing when it's familiar but relatable and energetic, such as the thermostat scene. The absurdity just doesn't work; on its own it's inoffensive, but it fails to mesh with the family comedy, and reaches extremes that enhance the film's meaner side.
This is just the regular kind of bad comedy; not boring, pretty messy, ultimately sweet, some positives but more negatives. - 4/10
Special. Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) - February 8th Link
This came up on my Reddit feed today. It is believed to be the oldest preserved piece of film in existence. It's only a few seconds long, and contains a couple of people walking around in a garden.
It is absolutely incredible to look upon. This is a progenitor of filmmaking as a concept, proof in its time that moving pictures can be done, and we get to watch it here and now, with 130 years of history to completely re-contextualise our perspective, on devices that have in turn changed the way we absorb movies. It's like seeing the beginning of life itself, total innocence and no idea of everything that is to come, with our understanding shaping how we look at it now. The people who made this had no idea what film would become, and it's incredibly poignant to sit back for a moment and ponder just where and how it all started, and see all that it has led to.
40 & 41. 2-Headed Shark Attack (2012) & 3-Headed Shark Attack (2015) - February 9th
Somehow, after over a century of innovations in the arts of both filmmaking and storytelling, a beautiful little moment like Roundhay Garden Scene can lead to 2-Headed Shark Attack, a film that also led to not one, but as I found out when reading up on them, but two sequels containing sharks with more heads. These films come from The Asylum, a group renowned for such blockbuster ripoffs as Transmorphers (2007) and Atlantic Rim (2013), as well as several shark-themed b-movie series like Sharknado and the Mega Shark vs. series. This level of self-awareness in purposeful bad exploitation filmmaking doesn't necessarily make the overall experience any better, but it means you can expect about as little as possible and have them deliver on it without much variation in quality or content, which is why I lumped these two together; no point in dwelling on them too much when they offer essentially the same thing.
2-Headed Shark Attack offers all the joys of a bad shark exploitation flick with the added benefit of giving it two heads. This essentially adds up to the shark occasionally biting in to two bikini-clad women at once; what an incredible twist on a classic trope! Seriously though, the film does even less than usual to add characterisation: with a cast of over twenty people to slaughter, the film barely has time for each individual kill, let alone giving those victims basic character traits like personality, speaking lines, or a name. Actors are essentially bodies in this film, and a good thing too, because not a single person in the movie can act. The film just puts a couple dozen people on a boat, then had the shark mess up the boat as they get close to an atoll, then go between the two, picking them off one or two at a time, until the last people find a way to kill it. It does this with pathetic visual effects that have no consistency; the shark loses one head in an initial explosion but then that head switches sides several times in the seconds that follow. Characters may appear to be may of wood, but the effects have them take on the consistency of rubber, which makes them a dead giveaway. Overall, this is exactly what it purported itself to be, and I can't fault it for that; I can however, fault it for everything that being itself means. - 1/10
As a quick aside, I couldn't help but feel that something was missing from the film; a presence common in other bad exploitation that makes the bare minimum for entertainment. Films like Dinocroc vs. Supergator and Piranhaconda are terrible films, but they contain occasional breaths of excitement afforded by their absurd concepts that remind the audience why they watch these films in the first place. I'll never forget the moment in Dinocroc vs. Supergator when a man, standing in ankle-deep water, it eaten from beneath by the Supergator, before the Supergator falls back in to the, again, ankle-deep water. It's such a ridiculous moment that it never fails to humour me on the sheer baffling evasion of expectation through completely ignoring them. Nothing like that really happens in 2-Headed Shark Attack; there's no energy, no attempt to make an already silly movie just that much sillier, in turn making it somewhat memorable, it just meanders lazily through a meat grinder. The closest the film gets to this is making the shark destroy the atoll with brute force, and I'll admit, it almost did it for me with the film reaching its height of purposeful stupidity, but it just couldn't find that sweet spot to make this sort of film somehow watchable.
3-Headed Shark Attack is what happens when a film like 2-Headed Shark Attack gets a modicum of budget, and pretends to be about something. The shark is a "chilling" reminder of the mutative effects of pollution, and surprisingly the film actually delivers on that aspect of the plot. The effects are noticeably improved and there's actual attempts to create tension, even if none of those attempts work in any way. The film is still very campy and exploitative, with the acting getting upgraded from 'barely present' to 'as over the top as you would hope from a movie like this', and the film actually manages to find the niche these sorts of movies offer with an escalation of the silliness that you simply don't expect for how stupid it is. Overall, this is still awful in almost every sense of the word, but for actually trying to do something fun and a little more worthwhile, and managing to succeed at least once, the film is a considerable improvement on the first. It's weird to feel positive about giving a movie a score this low, but when you're working at this end of the scale, your perspective changes considerably. - 2.5/10
42. Lady Bird (2017) - February 10th
My full review for this can be found here. Everyone's seen coming-of-age stories a few dozen times before, but this is one of the best; it remembers youth with cutting realism and sobering perspective constructed in detail that fits how we see memories perfectly. - 10/10
43. Bad Words (2013) - February 10th
This was edgy enough to be entertaining for its duration, but it tries too hard to soften up by the end of the film so that it can finish on a heartwarming moment when the thing that made the movie entertaining in the first place was the fact that it was aggressively offensive. - 6/10
Re-watches
11. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) - February 11th
I'm feeling pretty burned out this week, so rather than force observation when I simply don't have the energy to make any, I'm just going to leave a link to a brief discussion by Dan Olson that covers one of my favourite aspects of Ragnarok that's centred around one of my favourites scenes from the film. Link
Published February 11th, 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment