Patrick R

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Posts posted by Patrick R

  3. Posted

    I love Un Chien Andalou but the only other Bunuel I've seen is Simon of the Desert, which I found to be kind of a bore. A director I keep meaning to check out more.

     

    I watched the Aubrey Plaza/Dave Franco/Alison Brie historical comedy The Little Hours last weekend, and while the trailer only emphasizes the "lol, olden times nuns saying fuck" aspect (and kind of spoils too many later plot points) I actually found it to be a hysterically funny and smart movie that basically transposes a college sex comedy to the 14th century and consistently makes great choices with it's tone and fluid anachronistic dialogue.

     

    That said, an aspect that I haven't really seen anyone mention and one that makes it hard to recommend is that Aubrey Plaza's character in this is an actual rapist, who commits two sexual assaults (one on a woman and one on a man) that are both played for laughs. In both scenes the initiation of the act couldn't be more violent or coercive but, in a choice that makes it way worse and insidious for me, both parties ultimately end up being into it. Hearing an audience crack up at Dave Franco being sexuallly assaulted at knifepoint was an awful experience, one made even worse because I think there's a lot about this movie that's good but maaaaaaan. That aspect fucking sucks.

     

    It claims it's based on The Decameron, but I'll leave it to someone like Gorm to suss out what that even means and how relevant it actually is.

  4. Posted

    Thanks! 

     

    It's called Number 12 Looks Just Like You and it's about lesbians talking about the Twilight Zone at 4 AM and coming to important life decisions. I don't know when it will be done as I don't have access to editing software (or rather, a computer capable of editing video) and will have to do all that at my friends' (the same friend who supplied all the equipment and technical expertise and the $15,000 camera and walked me through the whole process) so the editing schedule is up in the air.

     

    But the plan is to submit it to some festivals when it's done and because a lot of festivals still don't like programming stuff that's publicly available it probably won't be around for the general public for a while yet. That said, as soon as it's done I will post about it on the Plug My Shit thread and give a private Vimeo link to anyone who messages me.

  5. Posted

    I just wrapped on a short film I wrote and directed! It was exhausting, probably moreso for my partner who was the lead actor and was given way too much dialogue to remember. I don't know when it will be edited and finished but making it was a real learning experience.

  6. Posted

    On all matters, the Idle Thumbs Hive Mind advocates for ambivalence.

     

    It can be hard for me to track Dan's growth because I listen to a lot of back episodes of Giant Bombcast as a sort of non-offensive white noise when I don't want to emotionally engage with the world (the one show I know will almost never get political!), so I'll hear a modern Beastcast where he seems not so bad and contextualizes his dumb questions (questions that I, by the way, am also dumb enough to have) in a way that is fun and self-deprecating and even, goddammit, charming. But then I'll listen to an old Bombcast where he gets mad at anyone asserting any food could ever be better than Taco Bell. 

     

    So part of my ambivalence towards Dan comes from that achronological approach of mine. But the college thing proved to me how easily he can still slip into Old Dan, starting a story with "I know now why this makes people mad, I don't want to get into it" but ending up cracking up and all the ways everything falls into his lap. And just knowing that potential to regress is there makes me want to not listen to the Beastcast.

     

    Anyway, it makes me super mad that Ben has been at GB West for months and they haven't managed to pull together one new Ranking of Fighters, which is one of my favorite series they do. 

  7. Posted

    If it's available in your region (it's not really in the states) I'd say Martin would be the one to check out. It's a low-budget regional art-house horror film about a young man who thinks he's (and may or may not be) a vampire but also it's very Cassavetes inspired movie about generation gaps and youthful bewilderment. 

     

    Dawn of the Dead is of course a classic slice of comic book horror, not actually scary in any way but packed with great gore effects and satire on commercialism and greed. And Creepshow is an absolutely stylish and loving tribute to 50's horror comics, with great effects and wild garish pop-art design. The Crazies is like a low-budget warm-up for Dawn of the Dead (and proof that Romero didn't just master slow zombies but running ones as well) that's rougher around the edges but also a little nastier and a great commentary on the structural nightmare of Vietnam.

  9. Posted

    Every time I think I'm getting used to Dan he once again asserts himself as the smirking shitty face of privilege. Literally every story he has is about how he never worked hard for anything and things just fell into his lap. I bet his whole life hasn't actually been this way but the gleeful way he brags about his lack of hardship is fucking obnoxious and awful, even if it's not as bad as it once was. Sure, he now admits he understands why people get mad about his college story it doesn't stop him from breathlessly describing every way people went out of their way to make sure he'd never have to endure any effort, down to a total lack of student loans. He loves getting a rise out of people too much to care why the stories upset them in the first place.

     

    The fact that he won't eat vegetables seems very secondary to this for me.

  10. Posted

    I saw Stop Making Sense on the big screen again. It's my 3rd or 4th time and it is my favorite movie of all time because of the big screen experience, which involves (in Chicago at least) everyone getting out of their seats during Life During Wartime (about the midway point) and dancing in front of the screen and the aisles. It's the best concert film ever and feels like a concert experience and it's so much fun. I hurt myself dancing so much but it was way worth it.

     

    If Stop Making Sense ever comes to a rep theater near you (and with the recent death of it's director Jonathon Demme that's more likely now than ever) you should run, not walk, to go see it.

     

     

  11. Posted

    A lot of people swear by Brian De Palma's stuff but I found that documentary was the ideal way to consume his work. All the tasty baroque cinematography without all the rock-dumb plots and characters. If you can look past the problematic nonsense (which runs rampant), movies like Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double, Phantom of the Paradise and Sisters are all worth watching. But I think Carrie is the only film of his where the material actually connects perfectly with his overblown style. Well, Phantom of the Paradise too, but I just feel nothing for any of the characters in that movie, it's just a dazzling rock opera. With Carrie I think the mythic structure and high school emotions dovetail perfectly with his approach in a way none of the other films do.

     

    But that doc was really good, with a calm and clean approach to it's subject without a lot of the bad stock footage and trashy dumb animated segments that litter a lot of talking head documentaries.

  13. Posted

    There's so much potential in 10 Cloverfield Lane and a lot of really good moments and choices, but I think it telegraphs all it's story beats way too hard to work at all as a thriller.

     

    It'd have impact if there were any moments where John Goodman didn't come across like a completely unstable creep. Every time he's onscreen the eeeeeriieeeee music revs up just to let the audience know "Hey, don't trust this guy!" Instead of building dread over ambiguity of his mental state, I spent the entire film just waiting for the final moments to happen. And what should be a great mid-film twist (the insane guy who kidnapped you isn't actually lying about the world ending) is spoiled by the mere fact that they named it Cloverfield. 



     

    Love the acting, really hate the last ten minutes that feel bolted on from another movie. It's not just that she fights aliens (something I don't think is at all necessary for the exploration of abuse) but she fights aliens in a really poorly staged (and poorly lit) sequence full of the kind of bad special effects and shaky cam nonsense the entire rest of the film felt like a rebuttal of. It feels way more like studio interference than a natural conclusion of her arc.

     

    Didn't see the first film because while I love the concept of found footage, basically no films that utilize it take the premise seriously.

  14. Posted

    Life Is Sweet is a Mike Leigh movie that is utterly wonderful, sweet, hilarious, sad and touching. It starts off with the broad set-up of a quirky indie comedy and then, instead of furthering that plot, just contentedly fills in the details on all it's characters until it has created a rich and moving portrait of a family. Jim Broadbent and Alison Steadman are brilliant together as maybe my favorite movie parents of all time.

     

    I've seen a few other Leigh films but none of them balance pathos and humor like this. Strongest possible recommendation.

  16. Posted

    John Wick: Chapter Two is great. Everything you want from a sequel, it emphasizes what made the first film good (the world, the action, the art design) and it eliminates all the weaker stuff (generic revenge plot, generic Russian baddies). Best house of mirrors sequence in any movie ever. Still a bit too austere for my taste, but the idea of going into an action movie and being consistently surprised is basically unheard of these days and I ADORE the way the world of assassins slowly opens up, little by little, detail by detail, until the very end of the movie. Action is better this time around too.

     

    I think I was the only person here who liked the first one, which sounds crazy but if you hated the first movie I don't know if this one will change your mind. But if you thought the first film was promising but flawed, like I did, this is a great correction.

  19. Posted

    8 hours ago, Patrick R said:

    I will try deleting and re-subscribing to the feed tonight and see if that does anything. But if you haven't heard it from anyone else, I'm gonna guess it's something on my end.

     

    So I deleted and re-subscribed to the feed and it didn't help. I can stream the podcasts from the app, but not download them. Commercial-ed version downloads fine for me, so I guess I'll stick with that feed for the time being until whatever it is resolves itself.

  21. Posted

    I don't know if anyone else is having this problem, but the last two episodes of IiT haven't been downloading properly for me. I use the ad-free feed on my iPhone's Podcasts app and every time I try to download them it goes through the whole progress circle before informing me there was an error and I couldn't download the file. Idle Thumbs still downloads fine, and I haven't tried the public feed with ads but I thought I'd throw this out there and see if anyone else has had this issue.

  23. Posted

    Okja, Bong Joon-ho's new film streaming on Netflix, is a complete mess but a often fascinating one with some very high highs. Jake Gyllenhaal gives a performance that consistently skates the line between hilarious and horrible. You might think it's a gentle live-action Ghibli movie from the first 10 minutes but there are so many tonal shifts and it's willing to go super dark.

  24. Posted

    It's always been a bonus rather than the key reason why I like Wright films, but I felt a little disappointed there weren't more in-jokes and little Easter Eggs and wondered if that background lyric thing carried through the whole film. But also you can never notice everything in an Edgar Wright film the first time so I guess that will just have to wait for the home video release.

     

    Edgar Wright is my favorite contemporary director and I worry that the thing I've always loved was actually his collaboration with Simon Pegg (I am not a big Scott Pilgrim fan) but part of why he's my favorite contemporary director is that he is so monumentally talented and has such vision, so even if he never reaches the heights of Hot Fuzz again I'm always gonna tune into what he's up to. Baby Driver is definitely a unique film, even if it isn't the full package. I hope it does well? I worry he'll never be able to get big studio budgets again but also I worry that he will and he'll be stuck doing some X-Men movie or something.