…i can’t wait until we all, like making our own music today, for pretty much nobody else left to enjoy but our oh so opinionated selves, we all gonna make our own movies tomorrow, for pretty much nobody else left to enjoy but our oh so opinionated selves…
no agendas left to consume, no dogmas left to consume, nothing left to consume…full circle, press start again…on the day after tomorrow…which is another long forgotten as bad as great movie that was made short before the uberdiversification curse started to strangle all seeds of fandom…
What do you think about this list and (very brief) thesis about the “neo-expressionist” style in studio movies from the early 1980s to the mid 2000s? Could this be something the OP and others feel has changed in more recent films. (Via the lastest episode of the Weird Studies podcast.)
Green screen and CGI are kind of the villains there, which isn’t saying anything new I suppose. But while it’s not a list consisting entirely of what I would consider to be “good” movies, there might be something about what we think of as the film experience, what we expect a MOVIE to be.
I’m really looking forward to the new Alex Garland movie, Civil War. Annihilation and Ex Machina are modern sci-fi classics, so I have high hopes (although the less said about Men, the better)
All Of Us Strangers, Zone Of Interest, Poor Things just recently on the cinema are as good as anything on that list - it is probably a golden age for brilliant films the last few years if I think of everything I have seen at the cinema and on Mubi etc… probably a bit like listening to pop music on the radio and saying modern music is rubbish unless you have watched a lot of films and genuinely are not into watching films anymore.
I agree, show dont tell, super movie, really artsy with the colors and mythology presented. Narrative in picture was well executed. Acting was fine too.
Her was great. It reminded me a lot of Solaris (1972) so I wasn’t amazed by it to be honest. But Ex Machina and Her are much better than 95% of the movies come out since then. In fact, with the AI and all the other hype, they would be much more popular if they came out today. They are also good examples of good writing, acting and FX with limited budget.
“Upgrade” is another really good example similar to these.
hot take: Villeneuve movies (including the new dunes) have an aesthetic of sophistication that appeals to the college educated middle class but are substantively just as empty as any other Hollywood blockbuster. First half of Lynch’s dune is still more interesting than anything Denis ever made.
What he did was to simplify the book(s) as much as possible so that it was easier for the average punter to understand what was happening, and then married that to a lot of very nice cinematic shots. I think he’ll keep it to a trilogy and tie it up in a bow, before we see LETO2 become a sandworm symbiote.
I like the idea of Annihilation more than the execution, the dialog was super clunky in places and the editing was not a “good” kind of disjointed, IMO. I wanted to like it more than i did.
