Films you've seen recently and would unreservedly recommend:

Midsommar looks really really good can't wait to watch

Almost never go to the cinema these days but I'm gonna make an exception for that. Looks unmissable

Saw the Matrix the other night and was surprised by how well it stood up. Not sure I've seen it since it came out. Noticed that the number 303 comes up a few times. Also noticed there were a bunch of 303 lines in the soundtrack. Made me wonder if this was all a subtle hint at lsd being one way to see through the Matrix. Makes sense to me. Like he escapes the agents at one point by answering a phone in apartment 303 near the end of the film. Or maybe the Wachowskis are a pair of hardcore ravers?

Watched a few interesting films lately which ranged from just interesting to genuinely good.

Thelma - a Norwegian film about a girl with psychic powers and a dark past which she has forgotten. Very dark atmosphere and intriguing story which maybe doesn't quite deliver on its promise.

Aloys - A Swiss film about a reclusive private investigator who is pretending that his father and the boss of their agency is still alive. He gets into a weird relationship by phone with a woman who steals his stuff and contacts him to claim that there is a neurological technique that there is a way to psychically travel via phone calls.

The Red Spider - Polish film about a weird boy who figures out that the identity of a serial child-murderer (The Red Spider) and, rather than report him to the authorities, becomes involved with him and his crimes. I saw a good point made in a review of this film in that (like all of the above) it's very much a show and not tell film in which you have to figure out the character's reasoning from his actions - nothing is explained - and, perhaps problematically, it's very hard to do this because he is so psychologically different from anyone who will be watching (at least I fucking hope so). Anyway, again not a perfect film but one that is different from almost anything else and asks some questions of the viewer (mostly with the answer "No! God no, no fucking way" but still).

Mom and Dad - genuinely unhinged comedy horror with Nicolas Cage (how many films does he do a year?). Just weirdly shot and with some killer lines. And in general it's interesting to have baddies who are driven mad but remain rational, leading to bizarre scenes as parents discuss how to murder their young children.

Oh and there was Vera Variola (or something) which is Serbian for small pox I believe. Anyway, it's a film from 1981 or something about a small pox outbreak in a hospital. It focuses on the doctors trying to contain it and then being quarantined and it has political elements too... but it also feels like a horror film at times with blood spattered walking corpses staggering up people and coughing infection into horrified victims' faces, blood stained prints being left on windows as the hand of a dying person slides down it etc. Somehow the most sinister person is actually the faceless doctor in one of those kinda haz mat suits who leads the operation. Interesting film to have made just a year or two after small pox was declared extinct I think.

Next up this... in fact we watched the first ten minutes or so today and it looked pretty fucking far out. Though I suppose I can't really totally recommend it yet.

fokse vektaire xeven said:

that's because you're a puny little cretin with no concept of the meaning of personal fantasy.

Fleming is twenty times the writer & man you could ever hope to be.



being a gialli fan has absolutely no relevance here at all. the fact you choose to cite such an irrelevancy speaks volumes. it does not give you "counter cultural" critical credibility.

you have no substanstive knowledge of genre film. at a big stretch, you are a beginner.

where were you in the tape trading days?

try thinking a little about the guff you're typing. do us all a fucking favour before you go off at the trousers.

now drop and give me twenty.

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This person, whoever they were, really hated Craner. Craner stole someone's girlfriend once and I suppose it's actually possible....

fokse vektaire xeven said:

and you can't even spell quantum. weren't you hoping to be an English teacher?

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anyone ever see this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_from_Home

posting this here so i won't forget it. i like to just watch people minding their own business in a time long gone.

Not seen it, but it's on my scattered list of things to see, so thank you for reminding me!

Rocketman was unexpectedly brilliant - sad, beautiful, touching, and genuinely uncompromising and subversive of received societal wisdom in many ways. Pity about the very end, but it really didn't spoil the rest. The whole thing beautifully captured the spirit of mythos and laid bare the tedious lie of 'objective' reality - "It’s obviously not all true, but it’s the truth," in the subject's own words.

I've been asking for some horror film tips and yesterday someone suggested a film called Oculus which we decided to try. Basically a surprisingly effective low-budget (I guess anyway, it had no expensive looking fx or actors I recognised - though one of them looked a lot like Danny Dyer which probably did make it less scary sadly) horror with a fairly original plot and structure. I don't think it's giving away anything that they don't reveal in the first ten minutes to say that the film is about a cursed mirror and that it takes place in two time-lines. In the main one a young man gets out of a psychiatric ward after a long stay and is picked up by his sister who enthusiastically tells him that she has tracked down the mirror and needs his help to kill it. The other timeline shows what happened to them as kids and why the boy was packed off to the rubber room. It keeps moving between the two timelimes - perhaps sometimes a little too much and it can be a bit confusing and this confusion maybe gets in-between the viewer and his/her fear and makes it a bit less creepy than it could otherwise be... or maybe that's just me.
The day before we watched Lake Mungo which is a clever-clever horror type thing that aspires to be more than your standard thing but I think it outsmarted itself and was a bit of a mess in the end. It forgot to be scary, something Oculus never does.

pattycakes_ said:

Saw the Matrix the other night and was surprised by how well it stood up. Not sure I've seen it since it came out. Noticed that the number 303 comes up a few times. Also noticed there were a bunch of 303 lines in the soundtrack. Made me wonder if this was all a subtle hint at lsd being one way to see through the Matrix. Makes sense to me. Like he escapes the agents at one point by answering a phone in apartment 303 near the end of the film. Or maybe the Wachowskis are a pair of hardcore ravers?

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Best film ever made and only gets better with time

101 comes up a bit too. Neo = The One, Cypher = Zero. Neo lives in Apartment 101 (Room 101) and obv. binary is 1s and 0s.

Always assumed the 101 was a 1984 reference.

Yeah, Room 101 but there's the other stuff I mentioned too.

For sure. The binary is a good shout. Never thought of it.

It would make more sense for Smith to be called Cypher given how the story pans out, but maybe they hadn't thought that far ahead.

Why is Cypher zero?