Discover Top Posts Tagged with #week l

Week L: The Life of Chuck (2024)

I always assume that if Mike Flanagan is involved it’s going to be spectacular and make me cry, and I have never been wrong yet.

Is it good? What really strikes me is the emotional construction of this film. With its chronologically reversed structure, you’re seeing the emotional impact of events before you see why they’re happening, and the emotions are so beautifully and intensely depicted that it enhances the later explanations. Marty and Felicia might turn out to not strictly be real, their entire world a metaphor for the unfathomable vastness of the human experience, but their sorrow and fear as their world ends are intense and poignant enough that Chuck’s death feels like the end of a world. In the end, you find that, just as you’ve known from the end of the first/third segment that Chuck is going to die relatively young of a brain tumour, Chuck himself has also seen his own death coming, but instead of being crushed by grief and fear like his grandfather he’s chosen to find as much joy in his life as he can to make what time he has worth it. And as we find out at the end of the second segment, it was, for him; the pure joy he felt through dance and dancing with others was beautifully expressed. Stellar cast all doing fantastic jobs even when they were only briefly present, gorgeous looking film with vivid colours and a great score, just all around beautifully constructed and legitimately inspirational.

Is it fun? The tone varies between the three segments, but the dancing in the middle and last segments are truly joyous and delightful.

Is it queer? No.

Have you seen The Life Of Chuck? What did you think? If you’re struggling under a giant to-watch list, pick something beginning with L and tell me about it!

#Week L #The Life of Chuck #Good #Fun

Week L: Little Monsters (2019)

Oh to be listening to Lupita Nyong’o as she plays the ukulele during a zombie invasion

Is it good? It takes way too long for the zombies to show up. I get that we need to lay some groundwork of David being a childish asshole so he can character develop later, but imo we spend way too long on that, especially the opening depiction of his trashfire relationship that really doesn’t end up being relevant to much? Also I don’t care about him. At any point in this film. Miss Caroline is significantly more interesting, with her past as a groupie who ended up stuck in a foreign country with a stack of medical and legal fees and found her calling in teaching when she realized just how much the kids trust her, and how much responsibility that lays on her. Placing her in a zombie invasion with the responsibility of protecting twelve children, therefore, is a super interesting premise, and David is kinda just a distraction from it? Yeah he develops by the end after seeing what a colossal douchebag Teddy McGiggle is and realizing that that’s how he comes off to others. I still kept hoping he’d die heroically to demonstrate that he’s learned to put others before himself. SHOW ME MORE OF LUPITA DECAPITATING ZOMBIES WITH A SHOVEL SO SHE CAN GET A KID’S EPIPEN TO HIM DAMMIT

Is it fun? Some parts are really, really fucking funny, especially the fuckin killshots taken at the US military and the shit they get up to at overseas bases. Miss Caroline pretending to hug McGiggles so she can threaten to gut him like a fish if he doesn’t calm down and stop scaring the kids was also fun, and the whole reveal of the zombies being calmed/entranced by music. My favourite zombie was def the puppet actor who kept entering scenes puppet first and grabbing folk with the puppet so it came off like the puppet was a zombie.

Is it queer? No but good god is this another film that would’ve REALLY benefited from being less painfully heterosexual

Have you seen Little Monsters? What did you think? If you’re struggling under a giant to-watch pile, pick something beginning with L and tell me about it!

#Week L #Little Monsters (2019)#Fun

Week L: Loving Vincent (2017)

65,000 frames. 65,000 oil paintings. I want to go to a gallery full of these SO BAD

Is it good? As a tribute to an artist it’s hard to do better than hundreds of artists creating sixty five thousand tribute pieces in his medium and style, but on top of that the story is about the importance of compassion and understanding for the mentally ill and the power of familial love. The very concept of Vincent and Theo van Gogh already makes me cry, but actually hearing their letters read aloud and visually depicting Theo’s grief for his brother, mixed in with a truly beautiful scene of Vincent delightedly meeting his nephew… there’s clearly rotoscoping involved but it looks excellent due to the medium, though as a result many characters look more like the actors portraying them than the people they were based on, and while I’m always delighted to see Helen McRory it was a surprise that threw me out for a moment. I do particularly love that all the “present day”—after Vincent’s death—is colourful and in his style, while the flashbacks to his life—all from other peoples’ perspectives, not his—are colourless and in a more conventional style. None of them can capture the reality because none of them can speak for him, but he undeniably changed the world he left behind.

Is it fun? A lot of the tale is tragic, but if you’re a fan of van Gogh’s work, every frame is a delight

Is it queer? No.

#week L #loving vincent #Good

Week L: Léon/The Professional (1994)

Natalie Portman truly is one of the most talented actresses alive and has been since she was a kid but the “Directed by Luc Besson” at the beginning was a warning

Is it good? It’s very much in the genre of “look at how cool and sexy and badass these guys who suck are”, a type of film that makes a gesture at going “look how sad and lonely being cool and badass makes you :(“ but then all of the music and cinematography is focused on jacking off to how cool the guys who suck are. Cinematography is not an art form in a vacuum, and no amount of perfectly balancing light or using interesting camera angles can offset using that gorgeous cinematography to hype up something repellent. I ranted about this before when I watched and hated A Clockwork Orange and I am repeating it now because the way twelve-year-old Natalie Portman was shot is VERY unsettling for large portions of the film. The character herself makes sense; Mathilda has had a very abusive upbringing, her father and stepmother have sex without locking the bathroom door, and apparently her social circle is very openly sexual, so all of this means it makes sense for her to develop a crush on the first person in her life to be nice to her and for her to try to behave as more mature than she actually is and attempt to seduce him. However, a twelve-year-old who does this is not, in fact, sexy, because they’re twelve. Turn off the fucking romantic music and stop panning up her legs right fucking now. Jean Reno does a great job displaying how profoundly awkward and uncomfortable it is to shut down a kid expressing a precociously sexual interest in a full grown adult, but the actual cinematography keeps treating her like an adult. There’s some good dark comedy in them working together as assassins, I love her revenge plot, the action scenes are good, and again Natalie Portman is so PHENOMENALLY talented and has good screen chemistry with Jean Reno (meaning they perform together and carry a scene together very well, NOT sexual chemistry), but I particularly wanted to scrub my skin off after the way too long part of the dress up scene where Mathilda dresses up as Marilyn Monroe and imitates the sexy “Happy birthday mr president” performance. Looking over the cast list I discovered Luc Besson’s 18-year-old wife, with whom he had a two-year-old child, was also in the film in a bit part. There are other films to watch Jean Reno, Gary Oldman and Natalie Portman be incredible in.

Is it fun? The montage of Mathilda and Léon doing murders together gave me a laugh, but by and large the film is very dark.

Is it queer? No although it feels like Stansfield and Malky had something going on, with Malky being the only one who can handle Stansfield and calm him down out of a rage, and how hard Stansfield takes Malky’s death.

#Week L #Leon

Week L: The Lion In Winter (1968)

I think I have a new favourite Christmas film

Is it good? This is an already excellent playscript in the hands of some PHENOMENAL actors. Peter O’Toole is a booming and massive presence as King Henry II, Anthony Hopkins is debuting as Richard the Lionheart, Jane Merrow pulls out some impressive steel for Alais when the situation calls for it, an extremely young Timothy Dalton is an absolutely delightful wrench in everyone’s machinations as King Philip II of France, John Castle is so entertainingly slimy as Geoffrey, and all of them put together are nothing on the dramatic force of nature that is Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine. She HELLA deserved that Oscar. She deserved EVERYBODY’S Oscar. The real Eleanor was an extremely accomplished and politically powerful woman, and Hepburn is giving us a reflexively snarky queen who loves her husband and at least one son very intensely, but her love of the game is stronger than anything else. The scenes can be almost dizzying to keep up with as people shift their allegiances and goals so quickly and backstab each other so relentlessly, an already tense and complicated family dynamic intensified by how all of their relationships are of geopolitical importance (well, europolitical. It’s the 12th century). I can’t speak to the accuracy of the outfits or furnishings, but I like the recurring motif of the time candles burning down—particularly liked the scene where Herny and Eleanor are flirting/threatening each other in her room and, in one shot, both the time candle and an hourglass are between the two of them, splitting the screen in half. Kind of a visualization of how much history is between them. It’s fascinatingly toxic how they can’t seem to stop hurting each other, and just get hornier for each other the worse they get. They end laughing about doing all this shit again at Easter, and historically, Eleanor did make a fair shot at never dying, living to 82 and being a significant force in europolitics the whole time. I’m just obsessed with this portrayal, she’s so relentlessly quotable. “I could peel you like a pear and god himself would call it justice” might be my favourite, or perhaps “Henry's bed is Henry's province. He can people it with sheep for all I care, which on occasion he has done,” which I didn’t clock until later was a snipe at Rosamund being Welsh.

Is it fun? I’m still laughing at how relentless the chapel scene was with Henry, Eleanor and Richard all snapping back and forth at each other over a clearly entertained Geoffrey, a confused and sullen John, and a near-tears Alais, the latter two of which are clearly still catching up when Richard storms off and Henry lounges on the stairs beaming about how great it is to be king. These people can’t go three seconds without snapping something funny and cruel at each other. John is deliberately an unlikeable little shit but sometimes it’s hard not to feel sorry for him when the rest of his family gets going on the verbal war and he clearly can’t keep up. “I'm vilifying you, for God's sake — pay attention!”

Is it queer? Yes, because the then-current speculation about the sexualities of Richard the Lionheart and Philip II of France play into the manipulation and backstabbing here—Philip both flirts with Richard and then almost immediately declares him a sodomite in front of his whole family, also implying he’s a rapist. Not a fan of the relationship between homosexuality and assault/pedophilia every time it comes up—Henry also implies that he has done “boys” and considers it fine and normal for kings and that Richard’s main flaw is catching feelings for Philip, who is lounging around drinking brandywine and doing his best to relentlessly make things worse for every member of the Plantagenet family in an extremely cunty way—honestly the only reason he’s not the cuntiest character in the film is because Katharine Hepburn is serving so hard. He and Geoffrey also have a very intense friendship, which is especially entertaining as modern scholarship suggests that there wasn’t a liaison between Richard and Philip but was a lifelong and very deep relationship between Philip and Geoffrey, ending with Philip nearly flinging himself into Geoffrey’s grave at his funeral. Like they’re toxic queer assholes but everyone in this film is a toxic asshole.

#Week L #The Lion In Winter #Good #Fun #Queer

Week L: Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

The first horror was realizing that, despite having known most of the songs for many years, I’ve never actually sat down and watched this film

Is it good? If you’re not into ham and cheese in a performance, many aspects of the film may put you off—the deliberately stilted and artificial performances, the ridiculous dialogue and song breaks, and so on. But all of that is deliberate, on purpose, and executing precisely what it means to: a delightfully camp time that is an opportunity for some tremendously skilled artisans in singing, costuming, modeling and puppetry to show off their stuff. The songs are bangers, Audrey II is one of the most impressive pieces of art ever built, and everyone sharing the screen with her was acting at half-speed so that when the footage was sped up to make the puppet’s movements smoother, you can’t see the seams. I don’t think I knew before this that Rick Moranis could sing, but damn that man could sing. They really did pack this thing to the seams with extremely talented actors having a ton of fun with even bit parts—Christopher Guest’s bit being one of my favourites. I saw the Director’s Cut and I do fuck with the themes present in the ending—classic “don’t do a deal with the devil” with a thick sauce of “the money men will definitely end the world by accident while they were trying to make a quick buck”—but damn it went on. The miniatures and puppets were excellent, can’t blame the team for being proud of those, but it went on and on. Can you believe this was Howard Ashman’s only screenplay? What a goddamn talent the world lost in that man.

Is it fun? RIOTOUSLY. Everyone is a camp satire of a type of guy, overplaying it to the max, and they’re all doing bits at each other. The soundtrack is once again blazed into my brain for the next month or so. Letting Bill Murray loose on a scene where he’s to play a masochist who’s getting off to dental torture so clearly that it’s terrifying the torture-loving dentist? INSPIRED. The darker the comedy gets, the funnier it is; the chorus fading ominously out of the shadows in gorgeous sequined dresses in Suppertime, singing about how Seymour should totally do a murder, had me cackling, as did one of the junior Audreys resting their head on a train track for trains to drive right into. The bloopers are a special delight; I like knowing that people were having fun making the film they were on, that people were making mistakes and then laughing at each other about them, and the whole cast of this film are so fucking funny. Shout out to Dusty, whoever you were; I don’t know why the slate guys kept fucking with you, but it was cracking me up. Shoutout also to Frank Oz for doing Kermit and Fozzie voices while directing. I mean, if you had that on tap, why wouldn’t you?

Is it queer? Bill Murray’s masochist is explicitly queer, but the entire text is also extremely queer in its extremely camp satire of toxic heterosexuality and the version of happiness being sold to Americans—Audrey’s dream of a happy life is full of products purchased from the magazines she reads, and none of them sell her a version of happiness that don’t revolve around a husband and children, so she sticks with an abusive monster because she thinks she has to have someone. The deconstruction of that and how all that hollow, image-obsessed, heterosexuality-fronted capitalism is going to destroy us all, is pretty damn queer.

#Week L #Good #Fun #Queer #little shop of horrors

Week L: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

[ID: The film poster for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, with the tagline "a disgrace to criminals everywhere". It shows a few of the main characters of the film in heavily silhouetted black-and-white, Big Chris front and centre carrying the two vintage guns that keep changing hands over the course of the film. There is also text from two film reviews on the poster. The first is from the Evening Standard and says, "The year's best British movie... mixes the authenticity of the Long Good Friday with the jet-black humour of Reservoir Dogs and the intricately plotted wit of The Italian Job... one of the funniest films I have seen in years." The second review is from British newspaper The Sun and says, "The number one film of 1998, one of the most entertaining films ever made." End ID.]

You know, I don't think it's really that often that you look at an early creative work and see how very clearly it's the rough draft of the masterpieces the creator has gone on to make, but Guy Ritchie is very much a guy who loves a very specific kind of film and just keeps making it again and again. There is a CRITICAL MASS of geezers in this thing

Is it good? I am personally going with no, for two reasons. One, I have absolutely nothing against shoestring budget filmmaking and consider some to be real artistic achievements, but I feel like some of the special effects attempted were simply too ambitious for what Ritchie put into them and it can make the film seem like a much older, cheesier action flick at times. The other is the sepia filter over the entire film; it isn't balanced well so there's very little contrast for most of the film, and as a result it felt like my brain was being gently soaked in soup for two hours. I'd genuinely like to watch this again if there's a colour-corrected version going around; as well as the visual sludge, I think it contributed to how hard I found it to tell most of these geezers apart from each other. But you can clearly see the later groundwork of other Ritchie films I love, particularly The Gentleman, which is a very similar plot but FAR more polished.

Is it fun? Oh it's SO much fun! Even when I cannot keep track of what the fuck is going on or who these people are, the shit they're saying to each other is generally pretty fucking funny.

Is it queer? No--there's discussion of a scam involving gay sex toys, but none of the characters themselves seem to be queer, though seeing as it's a film with barely one female character and a shitton of dudes going on about their guns, it feels like there should be more homosexual tension between some of these dudes

#lock stock and two smoking barrels #Fun #Week l