At least the first one had a number of clever spots circumventing the "origin story" formula with clever fourth-wall breaking and going beyond, from budget references to mocking every possible regurgitation of overused villainous motivations, superhero stunts and convenient plot machinations. It even had arguably Stan Lee's second best cameo. You don't escape your genre and result as game-changer if you mock by doing, at the end of the day, the same thing. In the best of the cases, you're…
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Sorcerer 1977
*Twitch Redeem by Jaime Rebanal.*
Friedkin at the top of his controversial cinematic game remaking something "untouchable", and yet the result is electrifying. The first chapter is glorious in its globetrotting concoction of multiple perspectives of low lives that will be ultimately reduced to a deadly task; I just wished Mexico wasn't reduced to a 3-minute-long snippet of a man being shot; it almost seems like a stereotype. Why is the emphasis so disproportionate and biased in favor of France?…
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The Heroic Trio 1993
***The ElCochran90 Discord Server's Watch Party Redeem #40***
**Recommended by 🍟McMaggie Cheung.**
*Find full updated list here*.Holy orange flying, propane-fueled, motorcycle-spinning and head-ripping wuxia cow!!! This ain't no Big Trouble in Little China (1986); this is "Huge Problem for All of Hong Kong"! Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh and Maggie Cheung, the three eternal contemporary queens of Hong Kong cinema, reunite in what is indisputably the best female heroic trio of all times to battle an incomprehensible, baby-stealing menace with…
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Mad Max: Fury Road 2015
During the first major action sequence, a hyperkinetic chase scene in an open post-apocalyptic wasteland that later evolves into a thunderstorm, there is this big vehicle with big speakers on it and Australian guitarist Sean Hape playing an electric guitar with max volume that shoots freaking flames out of it. Reportedly, this guitar weighed around 60 Kg. and bursted actual gas-powered flames that he could control using the whammy bar. In the meantime, there's a lot of spiked cars around…
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Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair 2011
The 20th anniversary of the release of Vol. 1 was more than the perfect excuse for me to revisit a groundbreaking cinema sensation that shook my 13-year-old non-cinephile eyes back in 2003, a film I had to watch hidden from my parents as they had explicitly prohibited me from watching it.
However, this long due revisit had to be in the intended way: a revenge epic that surpasses the 4-hour mark with no censorship, full continuity, added story to the…
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Joker 2019
*Twitch Redeem by advokaiser.*
Todd recovers from a four-year-long hangover which was getting concerningly worse and accepts the bold task of taking a DC character that has been subject to numerous portrayals, from darkly comedic to anarchically sociopath, and construct a compelling, brutal psychological drama. We’ve come a long way since the horrifying story of the German Expressionist melodrama The Man Who Laughs (1928) made us reflect on the psychological impact of unfair tragedy, and we have evolved into an…
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Nope 2022
For the love of God, the last thing I was expecting in a film like this was the most forced inclusion of the sliding-motorcycle shot from Akira (1988) and it just happened with no warning, out of the blue, and as cringe as it was, I loved every frame of it!!
People are calling the director’s current trajectory as the “Shyamalan effect” and with reasons of concern: “The films are starting to become ambiguous: What’s the point?”. This understandable, yet…
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Us 2019
Peele’s “Unfunny Games”, tackling domestic disturbance, doppelgangers, Carpenter-like suburban terror and twists for good measure, where the concept of identity is strongly addressed as dependent on social constructs. Cinematography shows an improvement over the artist’s debut, but the collective hysteria is maximized as a family must confront themselves... or do they?
Great construction of tension that goes all the way to the Spielberg and Kubrick days and arrives to the more recent Shyamalan / Alfredson days, and I can perceive…
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Get Out 2017
*Twitch Redeem by Jaime Rebanal.*
For starters, after watching all current Peele films, I have come to the conclusion that his ideas are so appealing and marketable, that if he had made films during the 80s or 90s, there would be a huge amount of sequels for Get Out, Us and Nope. They all leave room for direct-to-video sequel construction like many franchises suffered, and taking only this film as an example, it would have probably gone something like:
-Get…
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Excision 2012
*Twitch Redeem by FlaviaEstCalida.*
Carnivorous teen angst dissection, like the Canadian modern cult classic Ginger Snaps (2000) all the way until Ducornau’s vomited theater seats. The introspection is intriguing, and AnnaLynne McCord gives a shockingly expressive performance of self-destruction. Beneath the layers of hatred, angst, frustration and (not real) animal violence, we have a deeper psychological insight into orgiastic visions of suffering, surreal and intangible, which become the peak of the film’s symbolic horror. They either function as graphic, gory…
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Time Bandits 1981
*As a constituent part of the Latin American Facebook / WhatsApp Letterboxd Group film exchange*.
Genius, genius, genius Gilliam!! A dwarf-sized adventure of the most gigantic proportions, unarguably among the best of the 80s, surpassing even the likes and talent of the commercially fan-loved Back to the Future (1989) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980). A strongly auteuristic stamp is applied in every single frame, making historical settings collapse in a collision of time stability and an adventure more epic…
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