FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: films of a certain quality

[semper occultus]

yeah, its total shit but I presume you'd already realised that

The second season of American Gods averaged a 0.10 rating in the 18-49 demographic and 334,000 viewers. Compared to the first season, that’s down by 65% and 53%, respectively.

Just to show you how weird things have gotten compared to the age of Network TV, current word is that a third AG season is in the offing!

potlatch is the new business model.

[DrEvil]

Quick reminder: The Irishman is out today on Netflix. I just re-watched Goodfellas to get in the mood, and the opening scene is brilliant. "Is that a flat tire?" Nope, it's the corpse in the trunk not being quite dead yet.

Edit: watched it last night and it was excellent. I was skeptical of the de-aging but I didn't even notice it. Weird to see Pesci as a level-headed character though.

[DrEvil]

Just finished Ad Astra with Brad Pitt. Holy shit it was bad. Interstellar and Prometheus bad.

SPOILERS AHEAD




It's billed as a science fiction movie, but it really isn't. The story could have taken place in any number of settings as it's essentially just a really boring drama about the relationship between a son and his absentee father (who ran off to find aliens. He didn't). The space setting is just there for eye candy and a couple of random and pointless action scenes that feel like they were shoehorned in by the studio just so something interesting would happen (minor bonus points for crazed, Norwegian space baboons). And don't get me started on the physics. Is it so much to ask that people at least pay lip service to physics and basic logic in a "science fiction" movie?

And the moral of the story is that we should love each other because we're all we've got. Wow, how profound.

[MacCruiskeen]

On the strength of your collective recommendation I went to see Hereditary in a cinema last week, and jesus, I really wish I hadn't, because now I can't stop thinking about it. People of a nervous disposition should be warned that this might well be the most unfrightening horror movie ever made. God knows I am easily scared, especially at the movies, but Hereditary frightened me about as much as Garth Marenghi's Darkplace while amusing me a million times less.

Damn, it was dull, very dull indeed, so dull that its dullness is very hard to put into words, but certainly as dull as a very, very, very, very dull thing. If you removed all the clumsy plagiarisms, sorry, all the "tropes“ "quoted“ from much better films (most blatantly from Synecdoche, New York, from The Shining, and from the great Garth's aforementioned Darkplace), then about twelve minutes of exposed celluloid would remain, none of it watchable without regret.

What's undeniable is that Hereditary is full of unfathomably weird mysteries, starting with the casting. How did Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne, a strikingly pasty-faced couple, manage to produce a Pakistani son who still goes to high school despite being at least 28? ("Greetings, fellow teenagers!“) Why does this hulking elderly youth agree to take his pudgy wheyfaced sociopathic chocaholic kid sister to a high-school senior party where drugs, booze and his hot classroom crush await him? For no discernible reason, except that the script requires him to be driving that car and his sister to be in it. Also because his mother orders him to take the brat along, so naturally he offers not the slightest resistance, even though Mom had only recently SPOILER ALERT tried to set fire to him while he lay in bed.

Why does no member of this ridiculous family ever notice that Salvador Dali has planted a giant hut-on-stilts very prominently in their back garden, despite the fact that its window regularly lights up a demonic red? Presumably because if any of them were to notice this invasive shed prematurely it would "spoil“ the unspeakably schlocky ending, which provides not the first laugh of the evening but certainly the hollowest.

Toni Collette (chewing the furniture) and Gabriel Byrne (a solid oak sideboard) were also Executive Producers of this masterwork, which raises worrying questions about the state of their careers, to say nothing of their sanity. What persuaded these previously-respected actors to sink their money and reputations in such a turkey? It cannot have been the script, which is as full of holes as a Menger sponge. Perhaps they wagered, correctly, that the critics would be dependably awed by the budget. Either that, or else they were being blackmailed.

The film was directed, allegedly, but this too is hard to believe.


Toni Collette in Hemorrhoidy

[Harvey]

My feelings were similar possibly because it had been so hyped. In the end I do hope to watch it again some day when the memories have faded, like you "...because now I can't stop thinking about it..."

[Cordelia]

I watched Hereditary but have no memory of anything or anybody in it. (I do remember I watched it on a rainy Sunday afternoon.)

[JackRiddler]

Toni Collette (chewing the furniture) and Gabriel Byrne (a sideboard)

Fun! I like chewing the furniture, I do.

The good thing about Hereditary is that it produced your review, and this entertained me for a couple of minutes. Thank you, MacC, for saving me no time at all on the kind of movie I'd have never watched.

.

[chump]

Check out this old-time gripping 80’s thriller with an all-star cast including Ricardo Montalban’ - who is absolutely excellente’, Priscilla Presley, Leslie Neilson and OJ Simpson in a story featuring the LA Police, the Ambassador Hotel, romance of course, programmed killers, Middle East intrigue, the Queen of England…

https://youtu.be/0LIHoEJAA4k
-

[DrEvil]

I finally figured out the name of a British horror movie I've been trying to remember for ages: The Devil's Business

It's about two hitmen hired to kill someone, and it involves the occult and things not going as planned. It's an excellent little indie effort. The only problem now is getting my hands on it again. It's on Shudder, which of course isn't available where I live, and I've checked the usual dodgy places with no luck.

I also just finished off season one of For All Mankind, and I absolutely loved it. It's now one of my favorite shows and I can't wait to see where they take it next season (the last episode has an awesome post-credits scene that has the space nerd in me giddy with excitement. Spoiler:Sea Dragon!). If you ever wondered "what if the space race in the 60's and 70's never ended" then you should watch it.

[FourthBase]

I also recently watched von Trier's THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT. Here is my review of that film.

First things first, this film, the latest offering from inveterate controversialist Lars von Trier, is definitely NOT for everybody. As for myself, I have long admired von Trier’s work and consider him one of the great masters of contemporary cinema. I have found much to admire and value in everything that he does. Everything from his early work to his Dogme films, up to and including his more recent, harrowing output. Anti-Christ is one of the most misunderstood and undervalued films of recent decades, and I also firmly believe that Melancholia, one of his more restrained projects, is very much in the running for best film of the 21st century, so far.

Which brings us to The House That Jack Built. Right up front, I’ll say that I think it's one of his best films, period. Yes, it's grisly in parts. There are long scenes that, if you’re a sensitive soul (as I am), you will find excruciating to watch. Moments like the picnic scene, or when Jack's got Simple, one of his more sympathetic victims, bound and gagged, and he telegraphs what he's going to do to her (a shock motif that itself is borrowed from Bet Easton Ellis' shock novel and fellow “success de scandale”, American Psycho).

However, some of these self-same scenes are also moments of pure cinematic genius, building suspense brick by brick in a way that would have made Hitchcock proud. The film also contains moments of sublime beauty and, in the wraparound narrative wherein Jack relates his crimes and theories to a mostly unseen traveling companion named Virgil, some moments of profound, occasionally disturbing insight.

It’s also wickedly funny in parts. I am reminded of the people who thought Clockwork Orange was a horror movie. Like Kubrick's version of Clockwork, von Trier's House that Jack Built is among the blackest of satires. Its bad reviews I mostly put down to sheer cowardice on the part of today's milquetoast critiquing class, who are more interested in scoring Brownie points with a certain portion of their readers by cataloging the film’s myriad violations of basic, common decency. As if they really can't tell (or refuse to acknowledge) the difference between a movie having a misogynistic character and a movie, itself, being misogynistic.

Another frequent line of critical attack that I’ve seen taken against this film is to declare von Trier “arrogant” and “pretentious” for daring to suggest that his films have played a historic role in expanding the acceptable terrain of philosophical exploration in cinematic form. To that I say, you either accept that he’s right about the value and importance of his work, or you don’t. I do, so the scene in question (you’ll know it when you see it) not only didn’t bother me, it actually put a smile on my face. I appreciated von Trier’s willingness to set his hubris free, to allow it to take him where it took him.

As with Martyrs and Anti-Christ, I cannot in good conscience recommend this film to everyone. However, if you’ve got the stomach for a cinematic descent into Hell—in more ways than one—then The House That Jack Built is not to be missed. It’s a film that will be remembered and watched for as long as films are remembered and watched.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hou ... (2018_film)

The story follows Jack, a serial killer with some artistic disposition, over the course of twelve years and depicts the murders that develop Jack as a serial killer through 5 "Incidents" and an epilogue. Throughout the film he has side conversations with Verge in between the depictions of the incidents, most of which revolve around discussion of art, philosophy, ethics or Jack's view of the world.

1st Incident Edit
Jack is driving down a road when he encounters a woman who needs to fix her broken jack for her car. He agrees to take her to a local Blacksmith, Sonny. Sonny fixes the tire jack, but when they both return to try and fix the car once again, the tire jack breaks yet again. The woman asks to be brought back once again. Jack takes the tire jack and kills her with it. He then takes her body to an industrial freezer he had purchased to store it away.

2nd Incident Edit
Jack knocks on the door of another woman and claims that he can help her with her dead husband's pension. The woman invites him in and he stabs her through her heart. His obsessions with trying to clean up every surface in the house nearly leads to his undoing as a suspicious cop comes by. He then ties the woman's body to the back of the car and drags her body all the way to the industrial freezer. Around this time, Jack ends up giving himself the serial killer moniker "Mr. Sophistication."

3rd Incident Edit
Jack takes a woman he is dating and her two sons, Grumpy and George, out for a hunting lesson. Shortly after, he kills both sons using a sniper rifle at a distance and forces the woman to feed pie to George. He eventually ends up killing the woman, then re-arranges Grumpy's face into a grotesque smile.

4th Incident Edit
Jack meets Jacqueline, a woman that he calls "Simple", as he believes her to be stupid. Jack confesses he has killed sixty people at this point and is the serial killer "Mr. Sophistication," but Jacqueline does not believe him. After he proceeds marking red circles around her breasts with a marker, she tries to get away and tell a cop, but he dismisses her as a drunk. Eventually, Jacqueline fails to escape and Jack cuts off her breasts with a knife and murders her. He pins one of the breasts to the police car and fashions the other one into a wallet.

5th Incident Edit
Jack has detained five people and tied them to a makeshift post, lining their heads up in a row with the intention of killing them all with one bullet, but realizes that the bullet is not a full metal jacket bullet. He kills a man known as S.P. and a cop, then grabs the one bullet he needs and steals the police car, which he leaves outside his freezer space with the siren blaring. After arriving, for the first time he manages to open the door behind the freezer and sees Verge. Verge suggests that Jack has unfinished business and has never really built the house that he was intending to build. Using the bodies as material, Jack constructs a house out of them and when he enters the makeshift house, he sees a hole that leads down. At this point, the cops successfully torch through the door, and Jack decides to go through the hole, following Verge.

Epilogue: Katabasis Edit
In an allusion to Dante's Inferno, Verge is actually the poet Virgil and is guiding Jack through Hell. At the very bottom of Hell there is a bridge and a vast dark space below. The door on the other side of the bridge leads out of Hell and presumably to Heaven as Verge tells Jack. The bridge is completely broken, but Jack notices that one could climb around the cliff and over to the other side, although Verge tells him that he recommends against it and that this is not where he is to deliver him. Jack ignores him and tries to climb over but falls down into the fiery abyss.

Forget your stomach: What kind of soul do you have?

[Harvey]

This 2013 Indie masterpiece (with music by Acid Mothers Temple) isn't merely one of those films who's themes are made for RI, it's almost as if a handful of RI's more disreputable members from over the years had decamped for Preston and collaborated to make it themsleves. Excellent.

[Harvey]

Probably worth worth mentioning this again. Based on China Mieville's novel, The City and the City.

[FourthBase]

In the Shadow of the Moon is a good flick on Netflix. I'd embed the trailer but it gives too much away. Has interesting political implications at the end.

[Harvey]

Gotta see this when released on dvd.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyag7lR8CPA

I sometimes decide what things I might want to see on the strength of the worst reviews I can find, this wasn't one of those. A pity though, had I done so I'd have enjoyed it all the more. 10/10 from me.

[Harvey]

Probably the only show tackling all the current RI obsessions in one package but it's from SKY. Britannia Season 2: