idk, they threw romeo and juliet around in the dialogue a couple of times but i really missed the suicides, hahahah. there were also very on the nose references to the graduate that weren't really developed. this was a disjointed nonsensical story with highly inconsistent characterization, so at times it was impossible to figure out what was going on. a pity really, because the premise allowed for a lot more. but anyway i'll stop the hate now lolol.
i don't think there's such a thing...

hahahahha i can't help myself... sorry. but honest opinion, no trollin.

--

oh, i recently rewatched david cronenberg's "rabid", featuring the immortal porn queen marilyn chambers. i wish she had been in more indie and mainstream films because she had talent.



just so fucking good, both she and the movie. yes that is a carrie poster in the frame hahaha.

The only 2 with Julia as the villain, after that I believe they pivot to Pinhead. ( I need to see more of the rest. only done the first 2 so far).


Yes on the reboot-ish with a female actor playing the role this time around. haven't looked at it that closely though, don't need a pin through the eye ;)

RIP Jean-Luc Godard -

Throughout the years, I've cooled to a lot of JLG films, but his influence on my life and taste cannot be understated. I still remember finding out about JLG through this board (RIP atsonicpark). JLG was my gateway drug into cinema. I'll never forget the first time I saw films like Breathless, Vivre sa vie, and Pierrot le fou.

So rewatched three of his films since his passing. There are still very few films out there that are as alive as Breathless or A Woman is A Woman. But Vivre sa vie is in its own league. Sorry I don't have anything enlightening to say right now about this films, I am just enjoying revisiting some of these old favorites.

my favorite godard is le mépris. because of the literary references and the glory that was brigitte bardot. and the cinematography was also great.




MORE: https://notesonfilm1.com/2019/12/26/...rds-le-mepris/

I have never enjoyed a Godard film.

49 yrs and counting.....

well he's not going to make any more lol. i am not a fan either, although he was "important". massively influential, a bit like one might not like cubism but has to recognize that it changed painting.

but yeah maybe check out "contempt". it's the least "godard" and gimmicky oh his films hahaha. and it really looks amazing. alphaville was also very cool. i really liked alphaville, a tough guy who likes "gold and women" wrecks a computarized society with a revolver hahahah. i love it. cheaply made, stylish and poetic.

the other more didactic shit with people reading from books peddling theory marxism etc makes me impatient. nah, more than that it plain annoys me. buuut it featured some innovations. :/

I have tried and tried.

I have turned off, or stopped, at least 5 of his films.

I much prefer Ingmar Bergman. There is a guy who knew how to tell a story.

I can't stand plotless films. I only watch movies to see an entertaining story.
.

yeah those two i mentioned have stories. contempt is about an american film producer fucking with a movie adaptation of the odissey directed by fritz lang (the real fritz lang plays the director) and with the writer of the film whose girlfriend (bardot) he's trying to poach. and alphaville is a kinda science fiction film noir.



oh it's a actually a pistol not a revolver lol

but anyway, the other shit... eeeeh not my bag. but "important" for the film form. even stuff like 80s mtv owes him ha ha ha. but yeah, there's a lot of boring, plotless, didactic, obnoxious stuff hahaha. like when he has people reading whole chunks of books into the camera. fuck that shit hahhahahaha. i've never liked being read to, not even as a little kid. really pissed me off to sit there watching people read a book like a cuban cigar factory, but instead of classic novels it's a fucking theory book.

oh and



this famous bit of piled up cars that opens "weekend" (loooong traffic jam) was a straight ripoff from cortázar, only la autopista del sur was a better short story than godard's theory "lessons". but eh, it was the 60s or something, in its context maybe this film was better than it appears from here.

nevertheless, tldr: a great formal innovator

yup, this is it. i feel like this convo re: Godard has played out the same through out the years in this thread lol. i also cannot stomach the pedantic & didactic stuff he felt so compelled to make. i saw his last film, the image book, in a theatre and yeah... maybe i'm dense, but unpacking it did not feel fruitful.

but his best films have a certain compelling energy to them that i am still a sucker for. call it nostalgia. it was through Godard that I came to know Bergman, Fellini, BRESSON, countless others. Godard was a gateway drug into that whole world. i remember sitting and watching these films on an old tv/vhs hybrid, back when netflix streaming was new and it had everything on it (like all the Pasolini films). great memories of discovering cinema.

anyway...

the past week or so i worked through this box set

five easy pieces & the last picture show are 2 of my favorites. easy rider is what it is, and head i congratulate for just how weird and off-putting it must have been to the monkees fans who went to see it.

the other films are fun, but ultimately just full of energy with out much coherence. A Safe Place features a hilariously strange Orson Welles as a magician. this must have been around the time he was trying to get The Other Side of the Wind filmed.

The Black Phone. It wasn’t great by any measure.

Dracula 1931, The Fearless Vampire Killers.

fearless vampire killers is how one knew, early on, that polanski was going to embrace evil, hahahahahaaaa

Did anyone ever see this movie Daddy Longlegs? It stars Lee's two sons and Leah Singer. It was made in 2009, this year it's released on Bluray.

https://www.criterion.com/films/29117-daddy-longlegs

Hocus Pocus 2...it was alright. Not essential viewing even if you love the first one.

Watched Godfather two days ago.

The watched Godfather 2, yesterday.

Both good. 2nd one is sad. I had not seen them since early 20's so it was cool to go in fresh.

on purpose (no joke) i watched REALITY BITES, which i hadn't seen since it came out.

i vaguely remember not liking it the first time, so this was an exercise in perspective, i mean self-torture, which i did just for lols.

i reached 3 conclusions:

1) the 90s were fucking embarrassing
2) i'm fucking old
3) i still don't like this movie but now i realize it was kids who made it so it's ok

also funny that winona was supposed to be the pretty one, but in the scenes they're together my eyes always go towards jeanine garofalo. she was the more interesting character really, and a livelier actor, it's just that the movie wasn't about her.

then while trying to find out why the fuck the movie was set in houston i found out about the woman who wrote it and realized that what happens to the movie is what happens to winona's footage in a way lol. tarted up for mtv. ben stiller directed this at 29 hahahha. he's better at comedies though.

also: everybody smoked a lot back then or what?

Singles has aged better than Reality Bites, I’d wager.
Singles has not aged perfectly, by any means, but it’s aged better.

Also I love Winona — possibly my first on-screen crush sometime around ‘95/‘95 — but Reality Bites has never done it for me.

singles i think went for the whole "grunge" cliché whereas reality bites went for broader genxer themes of alienation and disaffection i guess, but i could not tell you from memory, and wouldn't know where to find singles, in fact both movies were mixed up in my brain. the lemonheads play in ethan hawke's "band" in reality bites. the other one had eddie vedder i think? someone...

the thing is i got a cheap offer to subscribe to "starz" (lol that name, but it was $2 a month) and decided to trawl it for trash movies a bit, and this one was there. and so i did it on a lark. looking for singles on purpose, idk, hahahha, ok maybe to prolong the joke

--

eta: so no singles without paying extra but "starz" (lol that name, can't keep a straight face) includes "empire records" if one wanted to get zellwegered (she's also got 3 seconds on screen in reality bites). and ah the lovely liv tyler front and center on the poster.

hahahha zellweger was playing an alcoholic near death judy garland some 3 or 4 years ago. she's fucking old, i'm fucking old. old! and winona is spock's mom now lmao.

here is winona looking a bit goth right when covid hit

It's an old shitty movie night, first was Slavegirls from Beyond Infinity, followed up with Starcrash

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers.

Dr. Alien.

Empire Records is a terrible film, even by the low standards of its peers.
Singles does fumble the bag a bit with the whole “grunge” thing, but there’s some legitimately funny stuff in that movie.

And yeah, Eddie Vedder and Jeff Ament, I think, played members of Matt Dillon’s band Citizen Dick.

Reality Bites was a bad film, but it was nice to see parts of Houston and recreated parts of houston.

the dive bar they go to was a re-creation of the old Axiom near downtown Houston. I saw so many bands there.

The shots outside of their house are from a street just a few blocks away from where I lived for 15 years.

In the movie, ethan hawke sells newspapers and shit at a kiosk in what is Tranquility Park (created to commemorate the Moon Landing). At the time they filmed this, that park was derelict, and used by the homeless as a campground and toilet. It has since been cleaned up and looks super nice.

I have always been in love with both Winona Ryder and Jeanene Garofalo.

the scene on the rooftop is bullshit. No one goes on rooftops in Houston. It is HOT AF and all that shit is off limits.

is it really bad? i cannot remember, i only remember zellweger's massive pout, lol. she used to get on my nerves for so long until finally i saw that judy garland film, and much respect to her in old age (lol), she can really act now that she gave up the bunny face. as a broken nervous wreck, she was fantastic.

but i think i'll watch empire records in my morning off today, if only to suffer lololol.

so i looked up singles and realized it's a cameron crowe film. i don't like his stuff generally. he's a boomer too, unlike the people who made reality bites, and apparently he had written the thing in the 80s and just refried it for the 90s. can't remember much, honestly, but i'll give it a look if i can find it cheap/free.



hah, nice! thanks for the insider look at the little details. it makes it more "real".

I think that Reality Bites tried hard to ape some of the feeling that went into Douglas Copeland's novel Generation X.

My generation of people had begun to quit the "Career" job path, seeing it as a black hole sucking your soul out your ass and throwing it back up in your throat. The idea in Gen X that people work whatever they can get for 6 months, save $$$, then go do whatever they fucking want the remainder of the year, was a huge thing in late 80's early 90's. Not fully dropping out, but using the system to fund what you truly want to do.

Reality Bites hints at this between Winina's character vacilating between artsy director work, and corpo MTV work, and with Ethan's character being an over-educated bum basically.

yeah it... well yes but i think it was genuine though, the writing. they were authentic generstional concerns--the damage left behind by boomers, the aids epidemic, the (at the time) economic malaise from reaganomics hangover, the "overeducated underpaid" problem, the futility of "progress" etc etc, all of that was very real at the time. so yeah the movie makes heavy use of those issues, it's not very subtle hahaha. starting with winona's opening "i don't know" valedictorian speech, it's all genuine but also very on the nose (because it was kids who made it, and that's okay),

for me the other texas movie that does it better is linklater's "slacker" with his roving camera through various places in austin, showing people doing fuck knows what, hanging out, paranoid 20-monitor rooms, rambling about parallel universes, etc. it's all there but without having to spell it out with sharpies hahaha. ah, i wanna watch it again...

on a related note to all that, i remember people were obsessed with poetry like the ethan hawke character talking about his little moments in the face of absurdity etc. very cliché poetry.

but see poetry was a real deal back then, and i remember going to see the nuyorican poets cafe who were touring in dc, and saw paul beatty read this:

https://powerpoetry.org/content/that...ob-description

that there was exactly what hahahahahaaa. a great read, worth your minutes.

he's famous now and teaches at columbia but anyway i laughed so hard he was exactly talking about all that stuff. i became an office temp not long after that, then took off into the deep end and beyond.

True ^

People were obsessed with poetry, poetry slams, and live poetry readings.

in 1993/94, while at college, I was part of the student program board which set up concerts, movies, and other entertainments on campus for the students. We were one of the stops for MTV's spoken word tour.

I remember some of the street poets, on of which asked me about my homemade hat (which my GF had made for me from the sleeve of a long-sleeve T shirt) He said peeps in NYC would want it.

Maggie Estep was one of them, and so was John S. Hall from spoken word band KING MISSILE.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-...289-story.html

The best part of it all for me was that the host was a very inebriated GIBBY HAYNES from the almighty Butthole Surfers. He was late arriving, MC'd the event and walked out. I followed him to where he was smoking cigarrettes outside the Hotel & restaurant managament college. I shared a smoke with him and kept the butt.

Without the soundtrack of the time, Singles would be a completely forgotten average movie.


Actually soundtracks are probably the best part of it, Reality Bites, and Empire Records, but I have a soft spot for Empire Records the movie as well. I can't slag it even at its weak points.


I haven't seen Reality Bites enough times to really remember it.

Yeah it’s Crowe. I’m not a huge fan either but Singles was foundational for me growing up. Soundtrack isn’t even that good as a whole (good Paul Westerberg songs and some of the better Pearl Jam tunes, but otherwise it’s a bit meh), but the film itself is funny and dumb and dumb fun, in my humble opinion.

I watched Singles the other day, mostly because I'd heard of the soundtrack enough. It was pleasant, but like...not much happened? No great pivotal plot swings or whatever, it kinda just went by. It's nice enough though.

That’s a Gen-X movie for ya. That was the trend.

Have you ever seen Kicking and Screaming? Good enough but holy wow does nothing happen

yeeees. "clerks" being somewhat quintessential in that regard

and another chance in this thread for me to praise "slacker", where linklater did a lot of this before anyone, and more intelligently too.

hah, so much to respond to above this post, but i'm running out of neurons at the moment

Clerks is maybe the gold standard for a bunch of slackers doing fuckall during a movie lol. I’d probably rank it above Kicking and Screaming, but I have a soft spot for Singles, probably because of Seattle (even tho I’m pretty sure the Seattle element was part of the script repurposing you mentioned — it probably took place in LA originally).

But I love that pan-out st the end where I can spot all the apartment complexes (many of which have no doubt been replaced with, I dunno, Amazon offices or gentrified condos with roof gardens now)

But I love that bit in Singles when Matt Dillon’s character leaves the poorly recorded song on Bridget Fonda’s character’s answering machine.

“I’m walking down the avenue-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo … And I am looking at the garbage cans, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo-hoo”

LMAO

You just don’t expect him to rhyme “Avenue” with “Garbage cans” because why would you?

So dumb.

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death


Virgin Territory

1981's Ghost Stories

i read up on it, it was originally set in phoenix. i fucking hate phoenix lol.

anyway i couldn't find the movie cheap or free, the only thing i remember is "we're #2 in belgium!" (or something), but i think your soft spot might be mainly because you miss your hometown, and i sympathize with that immensely


hahahahaaaaaa!

these titles you post are usually terrible, but "avocado" is an original touch for sure hahahahaaaaa.

what was avocado about it? im honestly curious. in mexico, aguacates is avocado but also means nuts, ha.

To quote Wikipedia:

oh! shannon tweed my adolescent crush! hnnnnnnnnngggg



i'm gonna have to watch that...