“Your tendency to dwell on the past could be useful to us.”
Favorites are favorite first-watches of the last month.
As a big fan of the 1988 remake, I was not expecting to enjoy this nearly as much as I did. A lot of tongue-in-cheek remakes of 1950s and 1960s horror movies/creature features have such droll source material (Little Shop of Horrors and The Thing come to mind) that it's tough to get through if you already know what's coming. But this one completely surpassed my expectations!
For one, this first edition of The Blob appears to be a great…
It sucks so bad that Agnes Varda passed away last year. She saw beauty everywhere she went, and let you know!
She was radically open-minded, and, in traveling the world, captured so many different things so beautifully. Her California period is exceptional for that. In this, Uncle Yanco, and Black Panthers, Varda casts mid-century California as a bleeding edge of cultural upheaval and change, as well as a self-contained community of the downtrodden. She’s the GOAT for a reason.
SECRET NAZI HOLY SHIT. A true left turn in the middle of this one. How does Varda discover the most unique subjects, here not even looking for it in the first place?
That she made this french renaissance tourism movie as watchable and visually unpredictable speaks to the pure power Agnes Varda had within her. Truly the greatest to ever do it.
Joaquin Phoenix is good, and there are cameos that crop up that leave a great impact (in particular Bryan Tyree Henry resuming his streak of appearing in one scene and stealing like 20 mins of focus). But the script is bad and the entire movie feels, intended or unintended, like a pale imitation of the better movies it wants to be.
I’m not sure how this ineffectual sad boy movie is meant to inspire an uncle revolution, because for all it’s gritty production trappings, it feels like a studio movie.