Sunday, October 16, 2016

saved from letterboxd

San Andreas, Brad Peyton, 2015

The ultimative positivist disaster movie: the reconstruction of the family unit not only goes along with, but directly and perfectly correlates with the destruction of everyone and everything else. When the world collapses, we just negate the negation, and afterwards, like the last line says: "rebuild". This has a singlemindedness which is downright frightening and which probably needed the hand of an anti-auteur like Peyton. A cynic like Bay or a hippie like Emmerich could never have made this.

Joy, David O. Russell, 2015

Not an ideal project for Russell I guess - not enough wiggle room, too many bad montage sequences with awkward musical cues - he just isn't anything close to the next Scorsese. If most of the payoff scenes somehow work despite all that, then because of the amazing, unconditional trust Russell once again places in his ensemble - he films Lawrence, Cooper, de Niro (and to a lesser degree everyone else) with a sense of absolute assuredness, as if he has access to a powerful, organic star system no one else knows about (any more). Of course, this one is mostly a Lawrence show, but when Cooper appears for the first time, the film literally stands still for a few minutes, just deavouring his face.

Salt and Fire, Werner Herzog, 2016

there's no crazy like herzog crazy.
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"this is the mother of all diarrhea" [creepy bernal heading for the toilet, never to be seen again]
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if all herzog films are also meta herzog films, this might be the first time the meta herzog film devours everything else completely.

Bad for Each Other, Irving Rapper, 1953

The best thing about this is Heston's weird, energetic performance. He enters the film as a constantly grinning, arrogant schmuck only to find into a more relaxed, ironic vibe after a while - especially his extremities are way too expressive and effusive for this rather narrowminded movie. Because apart from Heston BAD FOR EACH OTHER is a dull, moralist medical drama rather unconvincingly haunted by film noir tropes. Lizabeth Scott is avertised several times by other characters as a femme fatale. Her scenes are extremely bland, though, she's completely wasted on her role and never truly enters the film in any meaningful way. Rapper's solid direction adds a few nice touches here and there (the camera movements during the party scenes), but he never really rises above the very bad script.

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