A+ nineties dad fodder; takes those natural disaster movies of the day, your Volcanos, your Twisters’s, but smacks a crime caper on top for good measure; like if you threw a tornado into Speed. Maybe by this point Hollywood was just exhausted with the formula (nobody was even pretending like this was anything other than a paycheck), but i find it charming today. Too many cut costs to creep into ‘actually good’ territory tho; direction even the most talented editors…
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This Is Me…Now 2024
Woof. It’s bad enough that they excluded Aquarius from the council, but to stuff this like a foie gras goose with mid songs, garbage CGI, and lazy metaphors that straddle the line between cringe and confusing.
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Fried Green Tomatoes 1991
A lot more Klan than I remember. And all the lesbian stuff was way over my head as a kid. It's no surprise to me that this came out in the same decade that Chicken Soup for the Soul was in every parents bathroom.
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Babyteeth 2019
Not revolutionary, just very good at what it does. Steeped in the film language of Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay, it's filled with beautiful scenery, pitch perfect needle drops (that house party scene is worth at least 3 stars), and some of the most tender and real performances I've been in a while. This is what indie filmmaking is all about.
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Close-Up 1990
The amount I enjoy thinking about this movie greatly exceeds the joy I experienced while watching it. Conceptually it expands and refines some of the ideas explored in F For Fake, but Welles presented his manifesto with a desire to keep it approachable to audiences, whereas Kiarostami doesn't seem concerned at all with 'entertainment'. It does help that I feel like Kiarostami's ideas have since been further refined; I think of something like The Act of Killing as taking a…
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A Rage in Harlem 1991
“Fuck Gus. Pop goes the weasel”
Neo noir via 70s style blaxploitation. The first 10 minutes of this are pretty unassailable and the actual gangstering is engrossing, but there’s not quite enough swagger start to finish.
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Crime Wave 1985
Forged out of the same sense of reality as John Waters (although with less transgressiveness) and Pee Wee’s Playhouse (with more transgressivenes). My prediction is that when John Paizs passes away we as a society will be treated to a cavalcade of unrealized outsider art a la Henry Darger.
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Sherlock, Jr. 1924
There’s something about comedy that ages better than other genres, at least when it comes to movies. So many of the gags here are as funny as ever (I was losing my MIND at the billiards scene) to the point where you could lift entire bits and put it in a modern sitcom or movie and it would still land. Whereas a lot of horror or romance would feel so flat.
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