Yojimbo & Sanjuro - Kurosawa is probably the greatest filmmaker who ever lived. Prove me wrong.
PS, the ending of Sanjuro lifting the veil and slowly eradicating the entire notion of heroism through violence and therefore retroactively deconstructing Kurosawa's career of samurai movies is way ahead of its time but also genius.
-Vader
Homie, ya ain’t wrong. I think High and Low is my favorite of his. It is goddamn perfection.
high and low is my shit and it very well may be the best blocked film of all time
This has the most atrocious sound mixing I've ever experienced on a theater. I'm honestly still baffled by how bad it was. I've missed crucial exposition and a lot of other dialogue even if I'm entirely bilingual
I'm also really mixed on the film in general but need time to think about it. But this is definitely the anti-Dunkirk. It's everything that film wasn't. Maybe except that for a second consecutive film, Nolan doesn't have any characters
Leave No Trace- liked this a lot. Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie are amazing. Foster’s best role to date. Granik is one of the best directors in the business when it comes to getting subtle humanistic performances out of her actors. She’s 3/3 in her filmography.
Watched Godard's Contempt again. Such a beautiful and ambiguous film. By the way so many lines that are very hard to hear because of the music being louder than the dialogue. Nolan didn't invent anything, and so much of the quality of the film is in the details of the dialogue. There is so much to unpack.
In the end, it's about the realization that as much as you may love someone, he always remains someone else. She keeps pushing him to make what will deceives her, hoping against hope he will find what she really means and wants.
Watched Godard's Contempt again. Such a beautiful and ambiguous film. By the way so many lines that are very hard to hear because of the music being louder than the dialogue. Nolan didn't invent anything, and so much of the quality of the film is in the details of the dialogue. There is so much to unpack.
In the end, it's about the realization that as much as you may love someone, he always remains someone else. She keeps pushing him to make what will deceives her, hoping against hope he will find what she really means and wants.
I should revisit this, it's been too long. I'm planning to do the Apu Trilogy + Human Condition trilogy soon.
Also:
Albert Brook's Modern Romance fucking rules, I recommend it.
Queen & Slim (2019) Another Woman (1988) Chloe in the Afternoon (1972) A Touch of Class (1973) Children of Hiroshima (1952) Millennium Actress (2001) The Cremator (1969) Aladdin (2019) Drunken Master (1978) The Wind Rises (2013) The Entertainer (1960) The House of Mirth (2000) A Hidden Life (2019)
A fine enough Jane Austen adaptation from what I've heard (I have not read the source material so I would not know) but it works well enough as a film by itself anyway. I enjoyed it and it essentially is a showcase of how not being honest with others and with oneself stands in the way of one's happiness and maybe also how the institutional aristocratic way to engage with other people prevents people from truly and honestly speaking their minds. While the film is no tragedy by a long shot, it provides enough emotional punch to make you care about the characters. It's not a revolutionary historical costume drama by any stretch but it gave us some decent performances and some skillful cinematography with vibrant colours so I often felt that the setting came alive in a way that other drab and colourless period pieces do not.
8/10
Dark Waters (2019)
How you fight a corporation101 and guess what: you might not even succeed with your own health, sanity and financial situation intact. It is the third time I've seen Mark Ruffalo in this type of role (Zodiac and Spotlight being previous entries). Long story short: the company DuPont has been dumping C-8 everywhere knowing the effects on people's health and a corporate lawyer is asked to defend a farmer from West Virginia and his community against the corporate giant and bring them to justice. Even by the end when you might think that everything might turn out fine after all, the film throws another twist at you that makes sense knowing how corporations behave and how devastating it is for the lives of the people in that community and Mark Ruffalo's character who by that pint has been wrecked and beaten down by the sheer enormity of the challenge that his own physical health is at risk and you get a sense that doing this one thing for over 20 years has not been great for his family life either. The film is much closer to Zodiac instead of Spotlight because, while it is not entirely bleak, it gives the viewer a real sense of what it means to go up against a titan of industry and how the system will protect itself by any means necessary without sensationalising the story. Anne Hathaway is not doing much, which is a shame, as she's stuck playing the frustrated wife character.
8.5/10
Needful Things
A Stephen King adaptation starring Ed Harris and Max von Sydow is exactly what I needed and especially with a story like this where things go from bad to worse very quickly for the small town of Castle Rock. Max von Sydow's Leland Gaunt opens his shop called Needful Things and manages to sell objects to people that they find are meaningful to them and which they associate with important emotions from their past. He sells them said objects in exchange for a small favour but at first you are not sure what this means. The film starts out with a prank and ends with explosions. There is a real sense of the entire town undoing itself but the film is not explicit about the 'why' until the third act but you really see why the people of that town change the way they do over fairly trivial things. What I like is that the big climax of the film features a fair amount of explosions but the way the violence is framed is pretty horrifying and the resolutions comes with a speech and an appeal to people's inner goodness instead of an action climax, which I really appreciate. The mood and the music are on point and convey a real sense of dread.
