Pulse, Bright Future, The Sky Crawlers, Assault Girls, Eureka, My God My God Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me, Dolls, Vibrator, Gozu, Occult, Swing Girls, Vital, The Whispered City, Sex Is No Laughing Matter, Millennium Actress, Keizoku: Beautiful Dreamer
And I'm from Czechia. Hope it'll help!
"How good it must be... being dead."
Lee Marvin in John Boorman's POINT BLANK.
Challenge accepted
It's cool because rewatching Mulholland Drive, it didn't get that much of a bump? But with Blue Velvet it's like the movie got +10 to all stats, it's impossible not to project everything to come onto it.
Watching Blue Velvet: "Sicko shit. Great movie."
Rewatching Blue Velvet after all of Twin Peaks:
Which stings because I'd watched Phil Solomon's experimental GTA shorts earlier this week (which is why I wound up watching this too) and you can do such evocative stuff with even rudimentary video game tools and I'd love to see more filmmakers working in that space on a serious level.
Reading up on Grand Theft Hamlet, surprised they sold that as a documentary - the movie would be better off shedding its transparently faux screencapture format altogether and taking advantage of unique form of machinima instead of scattershot overwrought Youtube RP that somehow got a MUBI release.
Wrote a very spoiler-heavy piece about David Lynch's Lost Highway, and my new way of looking at the film, after seeing it on the big screen for the first time. I now believe this is Renee's story, not Fred's. #filmsky letterboxd.com/mastermaster...
PHYSINT will probably come out around the time he'll be hitting 70 and if that becomes a franchise? Who knows what's going to happen, especially with the game industry in the state that it is, but I wouldn't be surprised if he'll end up emulating Jim Cameron more than anyone else.
Kojima keeps bringing up lately how long he has left, how he'd ideally like to be productive into his 80s like the directors he looks up to, yet the reality of AAA game dev works against him so badly. Ridley Scott can crank out a movie every year, but there's almost 7 year gap between DS1 and 2.
Not-Solid Snake as a horrible spectre of past imperial violence and military culture encroaching upon the new world of Death Stranding a month before Konami delivers reheated leftovers of the MGS3 remake, Kojima does it again
Anno's optimism vs Lynch's pessimism ends up coloring the whole reboot experience in very different ways. Similarly, I went off on Revolutionary Girl Utena parallels after finishing S3 myself, there is so much in common and it's really something how they can plant themselves in your brain like that.
Totally, Cooper literally Can Not Redo lol. Taking control of Laura's narrative becomes his undoing where Shinji can reshape his own world. In general there are so many parallels between both revivals and what Anno and Lynch wrestle with through their projects, but especially at the end point
Looking forward to see where it goes, not too deep into it yet obviously, but I'm having fun and the foundation is strong
This show was pretty sane for 10 whole episodes! Then this dude enters the writers' room and it immediately goes off the rails lol
I'm partway through Jetman and Fourze, started Kabuto and Build, still haven't technically finished Hibiki, I'm bad at tv
Started watching Kamen Rider Kabuto and a character gets introduced by approaching a dying woman in rubble and comforting her by doing her make up, happy International Women's Day from Toshiki Inoue
but you can easily read into the subtext everywhere, even in very broad populist comedies. On the more overt side, in the 80's you have Chytilová's Panelstory, which is basically manic "docu" PlayTime about the failure of public housing projects, or Olmer's Currency and Peace about the black market.
Plenty of that kind of stuff in the Czechoslovak New Wave in particular - Menzel's Larks on a String or Forman's Firemen's Ball are probably the easiest and most notable examples from the era. After '68, during the Normalization, filmmakers had to sneak more pointed critique under the radar,
MyGO's boldness in creative direction is crazy. Their debut performance at ASL and they decide to perform Senzai Hyoumei to introduce the audience who knows nothing about them before to property know who they are. MyGO's PD fought with ASL PD that they will not show any anime footage too lol
Wrote a bit about my very favorite film after seeing it in theaters for the first time thanks to the Cincinnati World Cinema. Such a trip and so happy to finally see it this way: #filmsky #MulhollandDrive #DavidLynch letterboxd.com/mastermaster...
Watched Unforgiven last night in Gene Hackman's honor. Real movie. Clint's commitment to obliterating his screen persona is admirable. The way he slips in that first chug of whiskey without even bringing attention to it in the scene is absolutely diabolical.
Also this was funny, thank you Letterboxd
Caught by the Tides (2024), Jia Zhang-ke
Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Denis Villeneuve
Thinking about Caught by the Tides a week later. Stealth sneak into the underappreciated present day cyberpunk genre. Scraps of digital memories coalescing into strange lonely futures.
(I haven't played Ghost Babel myself, so I can't comment on it)
As for Fukushima, I think his involvement is kind of overblown? I think it's like when people say that Lucas needed Marcia Lucas or Gary Kurtz to shape his "mess". Where Kojima goes over the course of his career is just an evolution of his style and leaning further and further into his quirks imo.
Phoning it in in that MGS4 on the surface goes the fanservicy route of tying everything up in the most convoluted way and giving fans everything they wanted (but not really). There's a way to read the game as a product of Kojima being fed up with MGS, which I don't agree with, but it's popular
There's absolutely nothing wrong with having issues with some of MGS4's formal excesses, tbh.
And yeah, I certainly hope people revisiting the game will push back against the reductive ideas that the story was Kojima phoning it in or some one-dimensional hate-screed over people rejecting MGS2.
The MGS4 remaster can't come soon enough. I think people have already come around on MGS4 being good all along, but the game actually being widely available should trigger a canonization of the game as an essential classic like MGS2 got a decade ago.
