Monday, October 7
I had my laptop with me all day today, so i wrote the diary bits more or less as they happened. For this post, i'll just jump right into the film reviews. I may repeat some things i said above, just in case anyone's reading the film reviews and skipping the journal.
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BASILEIA
I liked this film a lot, and i think it would 100% be Amanda's jam. I'm pretty happy with having seen this, especially since it was more or less an afterthought. Once i'd picked out my movies for the day, and saw that my first one didn't start until 2:30, i was like, well, what should i do with my morning then? See another movie? Maybe i'll see another movie.
The description of this movie on the web site was incredibly vague, and parts of it, i'm not sure are even true. "In the rugged, mist-shrouded Italian mountains of the Aspromonte in the Calabria region, a ruthless archaeologist and his assistants are searching for an ancient treasure. However, their excavations will unleash some mysterious mythological creatures taht will permanently change the lives of all the inhabitants of this remote rural area. A fascinating and peculiar new twist on the folk horror subgenre."
Sounds pretty generic. If i had not been looking for a movie just to fill time, i would not have picked this.
It opens with a wolf pack doing wolf pack things, looking for food and water, showing us around the forest and the town where the story will take place, teaching us the geography. Good filmmaking.
For the first twenty or so minutes, there's hardly any dialogue at all, but the story is effectively conveyed with the imagery alone. Even after the characters start talking, i think you'd be able to follow along just fine if you didn't have subtitles for whatever reason and couldn't speak the language. I think a bit more than half of it is in Italian, a bit less than half in English, but everything you need is in the visuals.
The monsters are dryads! I don't think i've ever seen dryads explored in film before. As you'd expect from that choice, the movie is largely about nature reclaiming the Earth from human civilization.
And i think that's about all i can really say about the movie without spoiling things. Just bear in mind, the dryad costume design is literally blacked-out eye contacts, and nudity, so don't watch this one with your parents. Or your kids.
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LOVE ME
Love Me starts its story with a timer reading "5,000,000,000 YEARS AGO," slightly before the formation of the Earth. It starts counting down, then fades out as the planet comes together, looking kind of small in the center of the screen, and we watch it spin rapidly as time goes on. Landmasses form, green plantlife covers them, and then a meteor hits the planet, destroying everything; it's not explained, but you understand that you are witnessing the death of the dinosaurs. The planet continues to spin. Suddenly, there are cities and lights and satellites surrounding the world, and we hear a whole lot of radio chatter. Within seconds, we see nuclear explosions all across the globe, and it goes dark and silent. Two people across the theater cheered.
The timer reappears, the years now counting up from about 2040. A million years pass, we see the scars of civilization reclaimed by the spreading plantlife, and then we can zoom into the ocean to begin our story.
This opening scene was probably my favorite part of the movie. From here, i mostly found it frustrating.
It's not the movie's fault. I don't think i can be objective about this one. Taken on its own merits, i think general audiences would find it a unique story told in an unconventional way. When i bought the ticket yesterday, i wrote in my journal that i was getting "17776 vibes" from the description.
You cannot convince me that the filmmakers have not read 17776. Its influence is all over this movie. That and Wall-E; it's like a perfect mashup of those two stories, which are both very near and dear to my heart.
And then, the first half of the movie filters that essence through a Live Laugh Love poster. It does get more interesting toward the end, but by then, it was too late for me. This movie just never reaches the level set by its influences.
I didn't hate it, but i don't think i can watch it again. In fact, i still hope it does well. It's got Kristen Stewart and Steven Yuen as the leads, so i assume this thing will get some form of wide distribution. I just know that if this tanks, there's no hope of ever getting something like 17776 adapted.
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GRAND THEFT HAMLET
"Grand Theft Hamlet" was a live performance done within the game Grand Theft Auto Online, streamed on Twitch, by a bunch of out-of-work actors, during the pandemic.
I know i'd read the words in the description blurb, but i guess i hadn't fully understood that the entire documentary was also filmed within Grand Theft Auto.
It's an interesting conceit. It's recognized as the first time that a theatrical production has been put on live within a video game environment, so at least here's one crown that Fortnite won't be taking, since they've already claimed "first concert performed in a video game" and "first video game to reveal important backstory for a major franchise film ahead of its release, which really should have just been in the god damn film."
Since it's GTA, and the GTA MMO at that, some of the shenanigans are predictable. Like, you'll have a character giving a deep soliloquy, using the range of character emotes to make their avatar act dramatic, and then some rando will pop in and waste them with a rocket launcher. You know it's going to happen, but it's still funny.
I did think some of the dramatic bits, outside of the play, didn't work as well. It's nice that they have all of this footage, that they screen recorded literally everything as they were preparing the play, but when the actual humans behind the game avatars come into conflict with each other, there's very little recorded arguments, so those beats can't really pay off in a satisfying way. I guess they did what they could with what they had, but i'm not sure that including fragments of an argument between friends enhances the narrative much.
Not to spoil the ending, but the team did get recognized at a major London Theatre Guild awards show for their groundbreaking work. There's just a couple clips of the ceremony, right at the very end, and this is the only time that you see the faces of the people whose voices we've been hearing throughout the program.
I really liked it. The actual performance was streamed on Twitch, and i believe it's still up on YouTube somewhere. I'm going to have to go track it down later.
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BODEGÓN CON FANTASMAS
("Still Life and Ghosts")
This one was also not quite what the description sold it as. "A town where ghosts and humans coexist and solve problems together" is not quite apt. It's definitely a town where supernatural occurrences are known to happen, but there are still plenty of people who don't believe in ghosts and are shocked if they see one.
The film consists of five short stories, which do take place in the same town, but barely have anything to do with each other. We see the aftermath of the fourth story in the second story, and the first story has a brief reference to the type of story that the third is, and one character from the first story shows up in the fifth, but i don't think there's much else in terms of continuity. Which is nice, actually.
The film opens with two translucent old men suddenly popping into existence in a church graveyard. They ask each other if they're here to help people, they both say yes, one says his neighbor is quietly stealing from his son, so he intends to warn him. The other says, "I need to ask a favor of my daughter."
Cut to the daughter, a single woman in her 40s, living a quiet, solitary life, with the blinds drawn and only a small peep hole to occasionally view the outside world. She wishes for bad things to happen to her neighbors, and constantly has batshit extreme right-wing conspiracy theories playing on her TV, like chemtrails, and The Great Replacement.
We see her sad daily routine play through a couple of times, and on the third go, her father pops through the door. Her reaction is incredible, honestly, like she's clearly never seen a ghost, may or may not have even believed they were real, but her expression is just, "Ah dammit, now i gotta deal with this shit?"
The ghost of her dead father then comes out to her as transgender, and to her credit, she rolls with it, finding him some dresses in her closet that she might look pretty in, and so on, but the ghost says that what she really wants is for her daughter to change her name on her tombstone to Aurora, so that everyone in town will know who she really was. The daughter refuses, because she's worried what the rest of the town will think, so the ghost leaves to find someone else who will.
Hijinks ensue.
The crowd had laughed in a bunch of spots where the ghost had professed her gender identity, so i was feeling uncomfortable with that, but once the shit hit the fan and the ghost went to get what she wanted, they started cheering. I feel like the crowd was generally on board with and supportive of this spirit's struggle, even if they were willing to go along with a few jokes at first. I'm not sure whether the filmmakers intended those moments to be jokes or not, i feel like it could go either way, but if they didn't, i wonder how they felt, sitting in that theater, with people laughing at those vulnerable moments.
Second story didn't work for me at all, it was one of those scenarios where a lot of the humor is predicated on disliking your spouse. One spouse is terminally ill and expects to die soon, and the way this is handled in the film was very much not something i was going to respond well to. Ever, really, but especially now. It ends somewhat ambiguously, fortunately, because i expected it to go much worse.
The third story is easily the funniest, even if the ending is very predictable. I don't want to spoil it, so i won't say much, but it includes two ghosts who actually manifest as white sheets with eye holes cut out, and an early gag involves them having to prove that they're ghosts. The other two stories are good as well.
Overall, i would say i enjoyed this film, as a whole. I was given the opportunity to vote on this one as well, and i gave it a solid four. The audience seemed very split on this one. I saw maybe a dozen other people dropping their slips in the box, and what i saw broke evenly along generational lines. Older voters, which i guess includes me now, were giving it 4s and 5s; younger, Gen Z-looking people were hitting it with 1s and 2s.
I can understand why they feel that way. That second segment probably rubbed a lot of them the wrong way also, and i feel like the first one will be divisive among the queer community, regarding whether the issue is handled well or not. Also the fourth and fifth segments cover an emotional range that, if they're living healthy lives, young people should not have experienced yet.
That third sketch, though, i feel should play well to the younger crowd.
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KRYPTIC
Okay this is the monsterfucker movie. The director, Kourtney Roy, was on hand to give an introduction. "I don't want to say too much about this film before you see it, i think it's better to go in without knowing much," she started. "But, if we're all here, i'm assuming it's because you like mucus, monsters masturbating, and awkward sex scenes."
Yeah, some of those things, sure.
Within the first five minutes we've got a woman alone in the woods with white goo gushing out of her ears and all over her face, hair, and clothes.
Much like the director, i don't want to give too much away, but i will say this is among the more fucked-up movies i've ever seen. When i wrote my daily log, i said "Top 25 for sure, maybe top 10" but the more i'm thinking about it, it might not even be that high. I have seen. Um. Entirely too many fucked-up movies. But! Still! If you are a fucked-up movie aficionado, i can heartily recommend this to you.
There's not as much monsterfucking as i expected, and when it happens, it's not as i expected it. It's...interesting. Look, you're just gonna have to see this for yourself.
I am a bit confused about the timeline, though, i didn't quite understand the order of events by the time i got to the end. Things are certainly playing out in a nonlinear way, but it might be more than that. I think this disorientation is intentional, though. I will probably watch this again, though, and hopefully i can figure it out on a second viewing.
I slipped my ballot into the 4. Once again, many of the others that i saw were going much lower, though. What, yall don't like monsterfucking? Why are you here?
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