Legendsofanus

Before Sunrise is a monumental romantic drama because it feels the least pretentious.

The sequel is even better, taking place nine years later; it makes its characters deal with the reality of that wonderful day they spent in Vienna together.

If I could recommend one romantic drama to everyone it would be this one.

I have a habit of not watching movies chronologically. I watched Star Wars EP. XI just so I could be done with the whole franchise in one movie and to be honest it did suck so I was glad. I haven't read the first Dune book but bought the second one which works well cuz the second one ultimately destroys what the first built!

Anyway, I watched Before Sunset before watching Before Sunrise. That's a lot of befores but somehow the movie didn't make me feel like i couldn't follow it. Jessey and Celine are wonderful protagonists that meet again after nine years and yes, it could have been more meaningful if I had watched those movies nine years apart as they were released but nevertheless both of these characters are so well played by their actors that it feels like you know them just by how they talk and walk around.

Which is a lot of this movie, it's essentially a bubble-movie. A single one hour and 20 minutes capture of these characters lives who haven't seen each other in a long time and it's beautiful. They walk from cafes to streets and parks and the camera leisurely tracks along the entire time occasionally getting a cut to emphasize something.

I think it's a really good sequel too, everything feels much more realistic and mature than the first time (even though I haven't seen it) and the characters have real adult problems now but also things that they kept inside themselves for so long that are dark and sad. It also has a dramatic momentum that kicks up almost as soon as the movie starts which reminded me of Spider-Man 2, movie that pushes us into Peter's conflicts and day-to-day drama just after the first scene.

Anyway, really glad I watched this.

The only sad thing to come out of this is that I couldn't finish the movie in one sitting, that feels important to mention because I have a feeling it was made to be experienced like that

Longest movie of all time but not a single scene wasted. It gets you almost drunk in a certain way, the landscaped stretched as far as it would go feels like it could be any place on earth at any time. I guess that's what gives this movie it's "post-apocalyptic landscape" as it describes itself in Kanopy's description but to me it felt like my hometown: broken up, not too many things working and everyone knows everyone so hardly anything remains a secret but the resentment penetrates everything as well.

To make a film like this and make it seven hours long is the easiest thing to argue in this film. The leisurely plot, the long takes that make themselves as distant as they can be to a character without losing focus, the close-ups or side-views of characters just going about their business all feels like it is part of the plot and therefore justified. Seriously, If you look at the plot beats then it's like any other movie ever except it's fucking huge. The rise in stakes doesn't come until way after 3 hours and before that the film just moves along establishing itself like any first act

Lighting and shot-wise it's fantastic too, much of the attention goes to it's long-takes that have a almost intoxicating drowsiness reality to them but the backdrops all look gorgeous in black-and-white and there's even a scene that goes beautifully from darkness to daylight

It's pacing and plot might not be the most intriguing of all movies but they are nonetheless definitive elements to it and I enjoyed the story for what it's worth. This is clearly a mystery to unravel on further re-watches and I would love to watch it again some time

I have a confession to make first, I had been watching Satantango for most of the day because where I live you get scheduled black outs every two hours and if it wasn't the blackouts stopping me from watching it then it was me falling asleep from that tremendous piece of work and I was finally over 5 hours in when my friend gives me a call to come over...

And we saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World! I suggested it cuz I always wanted to, it was one of the movies that came on tv on an Arabic channel with Arabic subtitles and the scene that played was when Ramona and Scott are in the bus and she tells him about her evil exes and how he has to defeat them, they kiss and Mary Elizabeth Winstead is so fucking cute in the scene

Well, so yeah now that I have seen it I think I'm even more fond of this movie. It's so confident and realized and Edgar Wright has somehow made this silly, goofy comic-book story with it's ridiculous plot come out in all it's colors and beauty which is just fascinating to watch. I was in awe at most of the action sequences at how well choreographed they are.

The movie is also genuinely one of the most fun times I have had watching a comic-book movie ever, it's very funny in a not-annoying way that is beyond Marvel Studio's ability it seems. Which is what I wanted to talk about a bit.

How is it that we have so many comic-book movies and they all look the same thing, the reason I quit superhero movies once was because it was becoming more and more meh and then there is a property like Scott-Pilgrim vs. The World that brings it's own language to the movie genre with it's comic-book animation in 2010.

It's also a really well-made movie in terms of plot and characters, no side character takes up too much space, the plot has a lot of twists and turns that feel organic because they tease you about these things beforehand.

I want more comic-book stuff like this: original, weird and that accepts it's own ridiculousness without trying to fit into another genre because most comic-book movies are trying so hard to be just another action popcorn movie and it's tiring to look at them

Come and See is a 1985 Soviet anti-war film set in the region of Bylorussia in 1943, a boy is recruited in a Soviet army unit and witnesses the first-hand effects of war and the cruelty of it. It manages to do this beautifully, frighteningly almost by destroying everything that comes in it's path in sometimes sudden shocks as the bombs fall on our characters or in an effective extended sequence which fires the systematic extermination of a Bylorussian village and it's inhabitants.

War kills everything, the people just following orders commit crimes against other people that shouldn't ever have happened but it is all too real, it has happened too many times and it is still happening. The lose of innocence caused by the fraction of a young boy's reality as he discovers for the first time just how horrifying and terrible war can be and how easily one person can bring about the death of many.

The movie is set in a forested backdrop, it's gorgeous and doesn't flinch from destroying it's own beautyto showcase the brutal destroying nature of man. Everything that has ever been built, was real and has been the norm for our main character is shattered and he is helpless as people die around him. It makes you feel as helpless as him, as terrified and as useless.

The ending is one of the best ever, a symbolic shooting at the history of this war which ends with a meaningful final confrontation with Hitler himself.

An unflinching almost surreal and cruel war film that everybody must see atleast once. It is more a experience than a narrative but a damn good one

I saw this movie when I was kid and laughed at the final scene for being stupid, now I understand the true implications of the ending and holy fuck it scares me

A micro-budget film of the 60s, Night of the Living is a short one-off movie that doesn't have compelling characters or a bold direction but I think I really like how analog this film feels. Everything is bare and human and ugly as it feels, the zombies feel like an unflinching wave of death and horror in a way as if they're a natural calamity which cannot be reasoned with. The music doesn't have songs but the entire design of it along with the amount of screaming in this movie do make for an effective atmosphere.

It's essentially set in one location and has bunch of characters come together to hide in this one house against the growing threat of zombies outside, most of the dialogue doesn't even come from the characters but rather from the extended television reports which serve as the film's expository venue and where we learn most of what is happening.

There's a lot of gore and eating flesh in this and I felt kinda disgusted eating meat in front of it as if I was similar to them and that crept me out a bit. The characters aren't complex nor are they trying to be, everyone is trying to survive and these few people are just best reacting to the situation but we can see how prototypical these characters are because we have seen many like them in zombie movies and shows that have come after. I really like the naked displays of resentment, anger and desperation that come on the screen.

Nor is it difficult to feel the dread and intensity of being in a situation you cannot get out of, the entire movie shot in black&white effectively narrows our experience to those two colors as well, light feels safer and everything in the darkness feels uncertain because we can't see what might be out there in the dark.

Overall, Night of the Living Dead is an effective horror classic that has half of it's runtime spent showing news reports and footage which does bog down it's pace by not having a lot of action but in turn make the threat and the twist at the end hit that much harder. An average person who watches a lot of horror and zombie movies will probably still find the end shocking but the rest of the film and the situations in it will feel very familiar.

Played for 40 hours and completed the main quest on the base version that's available on PC Game Pass. Didn't try any mods

I was excited to play Fallout 4, it's one of the few games that made me want to upgrade from my Xbox 360 back in the day when I didn't have a PC.

Sadly tho, I ended up being disappointing and mostly annoyed with this game mostly because of two main things: how Bethesda Softworks has curated quests in this game and how the story just ends abruptly.

I like the promise of a journey to find your missing son but as soon as that plot twist in the Institute comes, the game just sort of...dies. Not a lot of story after that point as I did like only two more quests after that in the Minutemen faction. All of that felt very abrupt and anti-climatic and I hate that I saved the robot version of my son only for him to disappear?!

But what really ruined my experience were the quests...the infinite quests. You see, I had finish the Next-Gen update quests at the start of the game without knowing anything and was very over-powered and that coupled with the extremely insulting way those quests just kept sending me to the same locations again again just made the game feel so mechanical and soulless and then you had to do them a bunch more times for the Minutemen to unlock the final quest?! why and not to mention that near the end my quest log was half full of these fake quests

I enjoyed how fluid the shooting is, it's easily the best improvement over the previous games but hate that the dialogue wheel is just now a dialogue flavor wheel. You get four options to choose from and most of the time they just say stuff like "Go on. or "Okay" which is needless and lazy

Overall: 6/10 I did have some fun with it and I liked the premise of the story at first but for someone who doesn't do mods a lot and is interested in experiencing the story and hand-crafted quests.....this game just feels shallow. I'm ready to be over this game and go back to playing something indie and much more compelling

Anthology shows are something that I have always looked forward to after randomly discovering Black Mirror way back when the third season hadn't even arrived. To be clear, I loved the concept of a show that was centered around a theme rather than a story or characters. Black Mirror's theme of technology and we using it in fucked up ways was a very realized theme which was fascinating to me, I was excited for every new episode to see what they would explore next. To be honest, that is still the best anthology series I have seen yet but we're not here to talk about tech because later on I did end up watching a few other anthology series and in this post I just wanna talk about those and maybe get to know a few more from you guys

First one was The Twilight Zone, not the old one but the 2019 reboot by Jordan Peele. I wasn't a fan of it and only watched the first episode but it did have something that I hadn't seen before: somebody coming on screen to explain a bit about the show's story or make a comment on it before it started. As it turned out that's very common but back then I just forgot about this show for some reason.

Then somehow I started watching Tales from the Crypt (70's one) and Cabinet of Curiosities together and man it was a lot of fun comparing the two. Both are clearly very different: Tales from the Crypt is adapting stories from comic books so it has more of that one-off shocking gorey spectacle of an edgy teenage comic book and I was very pleased that it delivered so much of that even though the later half of the first season was mostly boring to me especially that episode where they stay at the old castle and just have sex and then the guy gets killed lmao

Cabinet of Curiosities on the other hand atleast says that these stories have much more purpose to them. The themes are more mature, there's a lot of drama and it frequently dips into the the themes of grief, redemption, madness but it was also very boring. The episodes are so much more longer than they need to be and often times not much happens in them and when something does happen it's often fragmented and very poorly paced that I can't feel attached to any of it. The most realized episodes in the series are "The Autopsy" and "The Viewing" as they bring a sense of real suspense and mystery to it along with a lot of gore. I really liked the visuals and the production element of the show as well, many of the gore and the monsters all look really good.

I do feel like it deserves a second season because I think the first season of any anthology series is about discovering itself, especially since most shows these days don't even have full ten episodes a season. I also recently watched Tales from the Crypt's season 2's first episode Dead Right with Demi Moore in it and that was just the whole show doing everything perfectly right. It was so good that I want CoC to come into it's element properly but sadly that doesn't seem to be happening.

If you haven't seen the show, I highly recommend giving it a try or atleast watching some of these episodes: "The Autopsy", "The Outside", "The Viewing and "The Murmuring" (not a fan but letterboxd really likes it) The show also has a really good cast, some surprising people made it there that wouldn't have thought I would see again haha

Finally, is Star Trek (TOS) an anthology series? I have seen like nine episodes and it's been good so far

Unfortunately one of the worst documentaries I have ever seen, it rarely talks seriously and instead of that, it often just likes to pretend that its audience has no basic clue of how digital systems work which is probably true but what worries me is that in simplifying the language they're using, it's creating hyperbolic expressions in the audience's mind without telling them that there's a more articulate vocabulary for talking about surveillance capitalism, algorithms and data. By that what I mean is that it's fine for people to talk about "social media and tech companies controlling us and manipulating us" but when you tell them just that and some super basic explanations then the audience can likely think "oh so that's what's going on, ok cool" and they can just leave

It doesn't give you any helpful advice, they don't talk about any healthy alternatives or solutions except turning off notifications lol

Perhaps the biggest problem with this documentary is it's uneven directing and not a good sense of purpose or pacing. There's really not a lot of new information, it's just some new information that's dotted between talking around some of the more basic stuff, there's even a animated sequence for some reason and the dramatization that is enacted.

Now, I don't know if every docu-drama does this because this is the first one I have seen but tbh it was kind of like the worst piece of filmmaking that I have ever seen. It has no rhythm, much like the whole documentary, it has also no sense of style or flavor. The only purpose that I can discern for them to show a fictionalized character's life is to get us in the minds of people going through social media addiction and that's fair but like, dude, we are all going through social media addiction all the time. We know the symptoms even if we don't understand the disease and I thought a lot of runtime could have been cut out of the dramatization and used for something more purposeful.

Overral: I think 4/10. What I will say is that this is extremely extremely accessible because it looks high-quality and passes of as serious and of course that it's a Netflix Original which gives it an important air and yes, it does cover some basic principles of invasion of privacy, the selling of our data and their (tech companies) lack of transparency about what happening inside their digital fortresses, so it does make it sort of worth recommending. Just beaware that there's no danger of drowning her because the water's not that deep

This is a classic now, so I expected it to be the prototype of all time-traveling stories that are so much more common to us now. What I didn't expect was how serious Wells was about writing the book. The year 80K AD is a unique living breathing world which is built on the gradual conditioning of the two divisions of society: lower class and upper class. This makes the novel much more grounded and a commentary to the present times as all classic science-fiction does and indeed what is basically H.G. Wells' flavour.

Another surprising thing was the fact that this is also a very imaginative and creative novel. It seems like H.G. Wells is giving voice to the way time-lapse videos work when his protagonist gets on the machine for the first time and he experiences this:

The laboratory got hazy and went dark. Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. Tomorrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still.

I mean, this is before television, cameras, montages and yet HG Wells' proves himself as the classic visionary writer. The novel is always beautiful and imaginative with it's setting and the visual language gives the more serious commentary an adventurous thrill and excitement that makes you intrigued in the story.

To me the novel has less merit as a commentary though because it is much more speculative even in it's own narrative, the chains that keep the two classes in constant struggles are visible clearly at first to the time traveler but he soon realizes that even that simple explanation though it may explain how the beings of 80K AD got it, what is happening to them now is different. The novel also talks about evolution and time and all of that has a more compelling story-telling intrigue than anything that is real.

I have watched the movie "Things to Come" which was based on one of his stories and it felt like the writing and message was very heavy-handed and dry in it and that gave me the impression of Wells' as a very "old" writer so it was a pleasant surprise to find thrills, danger, beauty and genuine questions of humanity's future and about the Earth.

8/10 Wonderful read, surprisingly good

"It's... Only a ... flesh wound...Sir." immediately dies

The 90s as much I have experienced it was a violent time for movies, every action movie that was coming to the market was loud, obscenely loud even if it didn't start that way. So I admit I was kind of hesitant about Small Soldiers at first, I feared it would be just another edgy violent movie with children who would get absolutely brutally blown to bits for laughs and it might have been but according to Wikipedia, while Joe Dante was going to make a edgy violent film he was told to make it more kid-friendly after the shoot was complete, which resulted in many severe changes to the tone as well as keeping many of the action scenes intact, creating a film that was sort-of a bit of both....and it works!

If you have not seen it before, simply put: "a toy company makes toys with military chips inside them and intends to sell them to the market, a kid gets a few early models and they come to life and they want to killllll" that's basically all you need to know.

I loved it. One of the best action-comedy movies I have ever seen, it's so well realized that every little thing you see on the screen has a purpose, the characters are at first glance stinking stereotypes of stories we have seen before but before long you actually seem them doing things that you wouldn't have expected the filmmakers to go to the length to do. Kristen Dunst beating Barbie dolls with a stick and actually enjoying it blew my mind because I thought she was gonna be another Mary Jane/damsel in distress character. The performances are all funny but the real stars of the show, the real comedy, comes from the action figures and the mythology that this movie built for them.

On one side we have Commando Elites, toys reflecting military and conquering nature, ruthless, calculated and violent and on the other side we have the Gorgonites, a peaceful race of aliens that are just trying to find their home. As the Gorgonite leader says multiple times, "They are programmed to lose." Seeing these toys acting and believing in their mythologies, the commandoes belting out one cliched military quote after an other as the toys march to the "enemy's stronghold" is just so much fun

The movie also has amazing music, most of it from using classic compositions like Rise of the Valkyries or Zarathustra and it all makes the threat seem more serious even if it is ridiculous, all that and some really great pop culture songs give Small Soldiers a tone of good-natured fun seriousness. It knows it's stupid, the plot is stupid but it completely head over heels commits to that and that's what I find so rare in films these days and so compelling in this one.

The action scenes are well-directed, a new threat coming at every turn causing the characters to improvise does a lot of good in making the film engaging and fun. I loved whenever the toys said something or did something because of how serious they are about it and it made me laugh a lot

To be honest, I wasn't sure at the start if it was gonna be something special or just another "blow everything up" 90's action movie but with really fun direction, set pieces, characters, this movie ends up having a lot of charm, action and heart. By the third act, I was giggling and saying "you're just a dumb toy, why are you doing that?!" Hahah

Overral: 8/10 an amazing surprise and a genuinely good film, while it may not be as serious as a cinematic work by some auteur direction, Small Soldiers does a lot that makes movies worth watching in the first place: it's fun and you leave it feeling awesome

This is not a historical movie, this is a fantasy movie with little to none characterization, some great visuals and a long run time that just kept dragging on.

The Last Legion is about a child emperor named Romulus who somehow survives the fall of the Western Roman empire and flees with his guards for a new place to seek sanctuary in, for reasons I have already forgotten they go to Britannia! oh wait...yes I remember now, they go to find the titular last legion....which has no characterization, no flavour, no feeling that it's even a legion of real warriors and somehow we are supposed to root for them in the final battle when they come to save the day!

That's the whole movie basically, so much of it is comprised of events: betrayals, murder, narrow escapes, romances and revelations that feel completely unearned. It's as if the movie just unoriginally takes plot beats from hundred other medieval movies and tries to make it work in this one without caring if it fits within it's story. From unrequited sexy female warrior to shamefully unearned moments of courage, this movie shouldn't be so proud of itself for being so unoriginal in it's execution.

The story is wild though, especially the ending. During the ending all I could do was yell, "why? how?" while witnessing some...well I can't spoil it.

Thing is, if you look at the poster or read the plot and think you'll like this movie then let me assure you, you probably won't. You have seen a dozen other films like this one that are better than this, or If you haven't you should go and watch them. Also it never feels like there are any real stakes in the film, any real danger and the lack of blood and violence just supports that. A disappointing film 5/10