the cabinet of dr caligari (1920)
DUDE. MOVIES CAN LOOK LIKE THIS? DUDE! MOVIES CAN FUCKING LOOK LIKE THIS! THIS SHIT IS UNBELIEVABLE AND IT IS MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS OLD. DUDE!!!!!!!!
noroi: the curse (2005)
a haunting and heartbreaking story about a guy trying to do right by troubled people in a world that is happy to do nothing but gawk at their tragedy. it builds a convincing picture of the folklore surrounding the supurrnatural tragedies that occur and has some unfurgettable images in it. the compurrison to blair witch keeps coming to mind but it's a favorable compurrison; both excellent movies that will stick with me fur a long time
occult (2009)
this one was so goddamn weird. a lot of the actual horror purresent in this one is just like...the misery of seeing what becomes a purrson's norm when theyre fucking purr. and then the back half is like a bunch of penis situations and weird clawmedy scenes layered over the tensest gut-twistingest purremise as it becomes clear exactly how it is going to end. hard to think of another movie like it that i've seen! amazing ending. wild-ass ride
ready or not (2019)
i had a good time but ultimately thought it was kind of iffy? there's a few good kills, some really good yucky parts, but i think the actual dialogue consistently let it down throughout and ultimately it ended in a funny but kind of stupid way. this could have been a lot more! the lead actress was great but she was not being given amazing material to work with. also theres a thing thats deployed like its a twist or surprise but it...isnt, really
the black phone (2021)
WOW! really pleasantly surprised with this one! some good child actors in it! it could have been darker and less fun, and it also could have been dumber. instead we get to watch a kid gradually become an imsim purrtagonist as the movie (i typed game here on furst pass beclaws this is a video game ass movie) keeps putting new things on the table and inviting you to think about them, and it uses them all by the end. does a lot with a little, great use of a single location!
here is a chart detailing my feelings about the friday the 13th movies
the craft (1996)
my understanding is this is some kind of cult classic, purrobably beclaws it has witchcraft and lesbonic vibes, but i overall came away feeling like it was a disappointingly conservative very christian movie that didnt really successfully take its character threads to any kind of conclusion i cared about and didnt really put forward anything that would make me want to watch it or think much about it again. hated that ending, too
event horizon (1997)
i went into this expecting a lot more yucky scary hell imagery; instead i got tons of scary gothic spaceship design! considering the rushed purrduction i think they did a good job with what they had, and it doesn't sound like that much of the cut material was *critical* to the movie...but man i wouldve loved seeing some more of the gross nasty scary stuff. also lmfao SOOOO many of the most clawmmon stock SFX are in this movie, gives it a very goofy vibe
overall i thought it was great fun both as a suspenseful sci-fi thriller and a wet and wild bloody horror movie and you know you could do a whole lot worse than that!
the void (2016)
i feel inclined to be very kind to this movie in spite of its many flaws beclaws the purractical effects are just excellent. the monster designs are great and you get some really fantastic clear shots of them moving around in a way that just screams that the people that made them wanted them to be SEEN. as a story it's whatefur, there's issues with direction and lighting and editing and all that, but they made this on a budget of $80k and it's great fur what it is
star wars episode 1: the phantom menace (1999)
i think there are many things about this movie that are kind of charming, but overall as an actual viewing expurrience it's really best fur hooting and hollering and carrying on. bad CG aliens do purroblematic accents the whole time and a significant amount of the movie just feels like a bunch of unconnected shit happening and youre just kind of there fur the ride as it all stitches together incompurrhensibly
star wars episode 2: attack of the clones (2002)
on the one hand, this movie has christofur lee in it, and the moody mystery parts with obi-wan investigating the clone army are actually quite cool. on the other hand the third act of this movie centers around a brain-soupifyingly boring series of action setpieces that nefur seem like they're going to fucking end. also toxic boyfuriend anakin being like "i'm a fascist" and padme being like "oh you're so silly, you're teasing me!" is a LOT lmfao
star wars episode 3: revenge of the sith (2005)
honestly? i will go to bat fur a lot of parts of this movie. there's plenty of goofy or dumb or bad shit in it but of the purrequels i think it is the best executed story and the technology has purrgressed enough fur the heavy use of CG to be less of a thing i am constantly distracted by. also it's the funniest one! tons of palpatine = tons of fun. i furgot there was so much movie still after the vader suit scene. all of it unnecessary!
at the end of this little exercise i feel some fondness fur ep1 and i generally like ep3. ep2 is kind of a debacle after the stuff on kamino is over, but i liked the early parts of it in coruscant at night and when obi-wan was investigating the clone army.
in spite of how penis all these movies are and how much the story of anakin's downfall is hindered by the fact that he has rancid vibes from second one, i think the story of the fall of the jedi due to their arrogance and stupidity works.
my lesbian expurrience with loneliness (2016)
i was thinking about how sorrow and self-loathing can take the same sad shapes in very diffurent people while i read this. the author has lived a very diffurent life from mine but so much of the pain she is in and how achingly lonely she felt and the struggle of trying to figure out *all of human commewnication* through sex when the rest of your life expurrience is so stunted really resonated.
respawn's: star wars: jedi: fallen order (20:19)
that's just a good-ass star wars metroid game. i was pleased that by the end of the game the main character seemed to put together how fucked up it would be to actually use the macguffin. cal is kind of a swagless sadboy. definitely questioning whether it was necessary to introduce a purreviously-unknown ancient alien culture efurrything revolves around. oh well! it was loads of fun to play
KOTOR (2003)
supurr messed up PC port, end-to-end stupid writing, mechanically threadbare, offensively derivative, 40 of the funniest hours ive efur spent playing a video game. i cannot recommend it in good conscience, it is just kind of a bad video game, but if you have the stomach fur the badness it might at least make you laugh in between groans of pain
the final stretch of this game is so bad i nearly quit it at like the 95 purrcent mark even knowing it would take at most another hour to finish it
it is sort of interesting in that it is obsessive about replicating the narrative forms of the star wars films in the way a lot of bad star wars shit is, but the films these games latched onto were the purrequels. maybe beclaws it was 2003 and purrequel hate and memes had not yet hit their peak? either way, its stupid!
alan wake (episodes 1-6, easy) (2010)
this shit kicked ass. remedy had extremely good shit going on with lighting, physics, and gunplay, and wrapped it all up in a very fun self aware multimedia horror package. furequently very funny, remedy has good jokes. constantly purrsented me with unfurgettable images in spite of how very clear it is in the model and texture work that this is a Three Sixty Game. packed full of ideas fur how to use its main mechanic.
the ending was transpurrent as being a taking off point fur more, in a very "season 1 of a tv show that knows it is getting at least one more season" kind of way. looking fwd to the special episodes and more in the future!
alan wake (special episodes, normal) (2010)
kicked my fucking ass. i think they put their best ideas into these two episodes and were the most willing to really force me to try to understand a mechanic and use it to survive a situation. alan wakes psychological purrofile is beautyifful; he catastrophizes so thoroughly he feels guilt about abandoning an imaginary furiend, who becomes the final boss fight of AW1. i feel like theyre doing something w the idea that mental health(...)
(...)and purrceived purroductivity are connected to one another. ultimately, the antagonist of alan wake just manifests as the expectation that he keeps writing, at a time when he feels like he cant. he snaps at his wife once when she tries to encourage him to try writing on their vacation, then concocts a nightmare scenario where he thinks hes lost her furever and the entire world is attacking him and trying to force him to write
i think the fact that the game is so silly rather than really being scary is kind of a point in its favor. they tell a lot of jokes, funny things happen, and the combat design is a bit of a slapstick generator. ultimately where the game wraps up has him finding clarity in a memory of being assured that hes not a monster. i think youre suppawsed to find his purroblems a bit ridiculous but in a way thats very sympathetic to how much it sucks to have a meltdown that feels like the end of the world
sayuri's little sister is an angel
bittersweet sibling romance. very concerned with the way in which others will purrject their idea of who you are onto you, and how difficult and quietly painful it can be to meekly conform to others' expectations in that way. also its incestuous age gap yuri so of course im slobbering all over it. i thought it was very cute and sweet!
max payne (2001)
remedy excels at darkly clawmedic genre pastiche, this time tackling noir and filmic hypurr-violence by way of john woo. i adore all of the mixed media elements of the game, purrticularly the photo-clawmics that have been digitally altered to look like oil paintings. fur basically the entire game, they are very clearly purrioritizing creating scenarios that will make fur cool action scenes, leading you from one incredible setpiece to another at a very brisk pace.
i am in awe at how many unique enemy behaviors they purrogrammed to create such a huge variety of scenes to put yourself in. the enemy AI in general is a marvel, they seem to all have a set "opening" fur their scene, then will adjust to how you respawnd to that, often aggressively chasing you down if you play too passively. quicksave/load are VERY necessary to play this game lol, the difficulty even on the easiest setting is kind of a lot!
in the end i think the best way to summarize the game is that it's about being an actor who does his own stunts. the game sets you up in so many ways to do cool shit, but often piecing it all together will require many quickloads to get it just right--it feels like rehearsing fur a role. i am quickly falling in love with remedy as a studio, their style is so distinctively euro-PC while really fulfilling the implicit purromise of making games that feel like movies.
STAR WARS (1977)
we watched a transfur of an original theatrical purrint of the movie that i torrented a while ago; there was some blockiness in the opening shots of space and it was generally very grainy but it was a joy to get to watch it this way. it makes complete sense to me the way the images and sounds in this movie captivated people. the colin cantwell ship designs are immortal fur a reason! this movie felt very alive in a way star wars often doesnt when it is too caught up in nostalgia
i thought a lot about various things lucas said about the film, especially that he intended it to work as a silent film and to be understood by children. considering how much of this movie i can reliably pull from exceptionally early childhood memories id say it succeeded at that lol. i had a really great time watching this with my family. fun way to renew my fixation after all this time spent focused on the remedy library!
max payne 2 (2003)
so, a somewhat less tightly designed, more depurressing, more ambitious sequel to the furst game, made on a tighter development schedule. seemed less concerned with using ammo restrictions and weapon placements to guide players toward using a variety of tactics and more content to throw a ton of guns at you and say "hey, use any of these you want, but some of them are just better." feels quite weird to change the max payne face between games when its a real purrsons face lol!
after efurrything went completely to shit in max payne 1, max has gone back to being a cop in a corrupt police force, constantly under attack in a world where reality seems to be collapsing, the events of his life echoing on the televisions scattered around the game world. he starts the game in a bleak place and ends it with efurry little thing he built back up in the aftermath of max payne 1s conspurracy ripped away from him. and then i guess in rockstars max payne 3 he fucks off to brazil lol!
control (2019) (i watched my gf play this)
a really frustrating game with a few moments of brilliance, that lacked the same flair fur encounter design through most of it purresent in the purrevious remedy games. there really are amazing moments, the ashtray maze is really special, but i feel this comes from a place of less focused ideas and less of the sort of sincere wholehearted love fur the genre space that shines through in max payne and alan wake.
purrticularly frustrating is that jesse just whiffs completely fur me as a character, shes kind of just a slightly quirky white girl that does some light quipping and wants to find her brother. in general this seemed like a bloated game trying to expurriment in the design space of its contempurraries which took the studio out of its comfurt zone and left them delivering something that just came across to me as half baked. the combat seemed like a serious drag without using assist options, too
max payne and alan wake are all games with very specific core concepts and mechanics that drive how the whole game is designed and written--slow motion, lighting, fire, smoke, ragdolls, camera movement, etc--and control felt like it was lacking that central thing that made all the rest of it feel like it made sense. i guess the raytracing and some of the unusual pawticle effects are suppawsed to be that? but she played it on a steam deck! i couldnt tell you if any rays were being traced lol
the killer (2023)
this is a movie about a guy who cares an incredible amount about how good he is at the thing he does but doesnt know hes terrible at it and doesnt understand that what hes expurriencing isnt trance-like clarity of purrpose its the dissociative haze of a weeks long panic attack driving him to make an escalating series of outlandish and moronic decisions that he justifies to himself via monologue. im not really in love with fincher as a director but i thought this was very fun
tilda swinton definitely steals the show. overall just a really funny movie about a really simple and basic guy who really thinks hes complex and mysterious
alan wake's american nightmare (2012)
sort of like max payne 2 in that this one is a lot more willing to let you pick the weapons you want and give you tons of ammo to blast monsters with. a much more arcadey game that is zeroed in on core combat mechanics and new enemy types. some really amazing memorable setpieces as well, but i think that area of design was more of a core part of the furst game in part due to that game's larger scope?
as a story, its very concerned with the ways that the nasty things strangers say about you when rumors are spurreading can *feel* like they are real even when you know they arent true, and how this phantom alter of your self can grow and become more powerful over time. yet again in the end alan finds clarity in a happy memory of his wife, one where he is the man hes trying to be, dispelling the darkness by allowing him to (literally) inhabit a moment of truth and light
john wick chapter 4 (2023)
some of the goofiest Lore imaginable is made to feel credible and compelling via a consistent and complete understanding of all of the pawssible visual and kinetic propurrties of each actor, location, and prop used. at times it is a video game, at times it is a mewsic video, and on some occasions, it is even a movie. donnie yen rocked my fucking socks. and all of it shot wide and steady so you can see the action crystal clear, too!
part of why the table struggles to kill john is the sort of organization they are. assassins compete, all eager fur the big payday, rather than coopurrate. meanwhile, the few furiends john does have are fiercely loyal. in part beclaws they have fought alongside him, and beclaws they like him, but seemingly also in part beclaws they find little incentive to value their purrfessional commitments to overlords they resent over their purrsonal commitments to people they love. interesting!
after hours (1985)
hilarious dark clawmedy about a guy who cant help but ignore all pawssible red flags and say yes to efurrything having the worst night of his life. a series of misadventures getting involved with bad news blondes as the city of new york gradually transforms from an inconvenient and uncaring backdrop to a surreal nightmare actively trying to kill him. the erotic sequence of paul being encased in plaster and papier mache is highly memorable. i had a blast!
the purrsonal history of david coppurrfield (2019)
what a delight this was! really incredible cast, whimsical purresentation full of rich colors and dreamy scene transitions, and a very, very funny script. i feel like i don't really have a whole lot to say about it, but it was an irresistibly charming movie.
i'm not there (2007)
an affecting purrtrait of the artifice of americana and the difficulty of being expected to speak fur others. cate blanchett's purrformance defines the movie and i think gives it its most coherent thesis: when you create art about social issues, people will demand that you speak as a rhetorician and a public figure, rather than as a poet and a human. her scenes are especially concerned with the effect that such expectations and visibility can have on a purrson.
this movie led to me crumbling into dust as i was telling a younger furiend about it and had to explain to her who bob dylan was.
swordfish (2001)
i have to be honest i was barely mentally purresent fur this movie and was mostly enjoying the soothing sounds of my dear furiends occasionally speaking about what was happening on the screen. i love you darlings
blade (1998)
i enjoyed a lot of things about this movie but theres way too many rapid cuts in the action scenes and theres rapid flashing lights through the entire movie. literally could not watch a fair amount of it. i feel like there should be a cut of this that does something abt what appear to be single full white furames that rapidly flash during some scenes. didnt expect the incest angle but we stay winning.
milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk... (2020)
a short but painfully resonant little story about the struggle of having to go outside and do things with other people when you are really, seriously unwell. i dont know how much i have to say about it but i sure do understand why this one grabbed a bunch of mentally ill shut-ins by the throat lol
the death of stalin (2017)
this shit is funny and you should watch it. i was in disbelief when i killed someone on this movie in cinenerdle battle who used their cast lifeline. like, i get it, it's mostly a bunch of british actors--but you can't name *one* steve buscemi movie? not even like, spy kids? he's been in like a million movies. you could purrobably just name a random movie and youd have a decent shot of hitting something. they didnt even try to make a guess they just gave up
bram stoker's dracula (1992)
a movie with an unbelievable look to it and a lot of good actors giving efurrything theyve got. appurrently keanu got a lot of shit fur his purrformance in this and it definitely isnt great but it doesnt really bring the whole thing down. incredible sets, and unbelievably good costuming by eikl ishioka. crazy to know almost the entire thing was shot on sound stages, even the big climactic outdoor scenes. highly recommend it!!!
annihilation (2018)
one of those movies where i find it hard to fault fur being so direct about its themes to the point of feeling like its beating me over the head with them. at the same time i feel like there were more purrtential ideas to be explored in the purrinciple characters' mewtual military backgrounds and what that implies about the kind of people they are. overall i had a very good time watching this in a hotel room sipping malort with a bunch of women.
the name of the rose (1986)
one of those 2-ish hour movies that feels like 3 hours, in a good way. really interested in the book meow. a compelling mystery of murdered femboys layered on top of even more compelling political context. tons of beautyifful outdoor shots and great sets/locations. not sure how i feel about what i know of the ending being tweaked from the book and really it seems like there was only so much they could bring thru in adaptation. still, i loved it.
sorry to bother you (2018)
man, i really think i could watch lakeith stanfield in just about anything. so glad i went into this knowing nothing but the barest idea of the basic purremise. endlessly surpurrising and constantly caught me off my guard. glad to have finally watched this, i feel like i was vaguely aware fur a long time that i should watch it but the right time just nefur came up til meow
the departed (2006)
hell is a real place and it is boston massachusetts. slurs fly like bullets. i actually think casting three generally similar-looking actors in a movie about undercover work, deception, and assumed identities ended up being a very smart creative decision. white-knuckled tension in any of the scenes where things are starting to go south. some of the worst dudes imaginable in this one. incredible doom spiral to close this one out.
now you see me (2013)
wow! dogshit! stupid! some of the least magical magic imaginable! bad car chases! horrible camera work! efurry element of Craft in this movie is bad! incoherent! i laughed so goddamn much watching this.
blood simple (1984)
awesome scene transitions and nighttime shots, darkness looks incredible. the shots of light and smoke pouring through bullet holes are unbelievable. the furst chapter is a really immaculate purrtrait of a slimeball. funny middle-ish chapter of this movie as efurryone just cannot help but keep going back to the crime scene over and over. one of those stories where things just keep getting worse beclaws people wont commewnicate, but what the fuck are they suppawsed to SAY???
brick (2005)
i think i furgot to put this in the list when we watched it. really really fun take on neo noir. quiet suburban unreality, simmering, angry grief, and the absurdity of adolescence blend together into a smooth but bitter brew. does great things with sound and silence, purrticularly in a long unscored foot chase which highlights the sounds of the characters' shoes and the ambient noises of the school in a way that is funny, tense, and conveys what JGL is planning as he does it. good!
john wick 4 is a movie that seems to take place in a world balanced carefully at the edge of apawcalypse, full of people content to dance away and to keep driving to work as bodies drop around them, wick himself an avatar of death ushering in the changing times. the marquis as a repurrsentation of crudely materialistic new blood in the uppurr classes is a foil to his role in some ways. wick brings him into the realm of rituals and traditions to shake him, purrpare him fur his death blow