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Ricky Gervais: SuperNature 2022
"I'm a white heterosexual millionaire, there's less than one percent of us. Do I whine? No. I just get on with it".
Growing up, I LOVED Ricky Gervais. His work on The Office, Extras, and The Ricky Gervais Show with Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington were cornerstones in my comedy upbringing. I still revisit the XFM podcast from the early 2000s now and then, and it is still a biblical quote book between my brother and me.
Gervais has always…
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The Time to Live and the Time to Die 1985
Some of the greatest films will make you feel right at home even though their settings are not exactly like your own. Culture specific as they may be, they have the sort of universality that can endear them to any person in any part of the world. They will make you feel nostalgic about times you have never lived through. The way they show life in all its pain and glory, through all the heartache and hopefulness, is downright magical.…
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The Hunters 1977
Angelopoulos closes his Trilogy of History with the most inventive, layered, stylistically refined and thematically pointed allegory in his entire filmography, with Days of ‘36 being a relatively straightforward piece of political filmmaking, then following it up with The Travelling Players, which reinvented the idea of structuralism as we know it. The Hunters manages (somehow) to go even further in terms of expanding the possibilities of narrative storytelling and innovative formal experimentation. Here, Angelopoulos not only uses structure as a canvas to illustrate both…
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Top Gun 1986
A story of focus and determination. Believing in yourself, and recognising the value of the people who believe in you as well. This film might also have one of my favourite soundtracks ever. Every single song slaps. This movie slaps in general. I really don't have much to say about it honestly. It rocks. So I'll just rant for a bit.
Some of y'all have definitely gotta lighten the fuck up when it comes to this movie tbh. Like, it's…
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When They See Us 2019
*watched the rest*
Police misconduct, abuse of power, lies, corruption, racial bias, the attitudes and stereotypes of the public/media/authorities, inhumane prisoner living conditions, and failure of social restoration for inmates who've gotten out.
A very emotional series indeed, and I try not to use that word lightly. I hadn't heard of this particular story before the series was made but I don't think it'll leave me since, and of course everyone else should watch it too. Obviously since I haven't…
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Rise and Fall of Chivalry 1970
Kazama (Koji Tsuruta) has officially disbanded his Yakuza family under mounting pressure from the police and rival group, The Ryuseikai and now lives quietly running a nightclub with his wife (the stunning Akiko Kudo). Six years pass and he learns that one of his former men, Shimizu (Makoto Sato) has been released from prison and is trying to collect a promissory note worth a lot of money, which is causing problems with his old enemies of the Ryuseikai family, so…
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Killer of Sheep 1978
Packed and herded down roads with splintered pavement, through the compressed alleyways of cracked concrete and an overgrowth of ivy; breathing insalubrious air around ramshackle homes and crumbling buildings whose old and outdated foundations have wasted away from neglect. Moving onward, steadily, day after day, unknowingly towards an inevitable destruction of essence—just waiting to be demolished like those derelict structures, the ceilings and walls of which can no longer shield its inhabitants from the heavy rains that pour so frequently upon them.
America is a slaughterhouse.
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Mission: Impossible 1996
love that poster
It's been so long since I last saw this (or any of these films) and holy shit did I forget how great this one is.
This is what you get when you actually let a real director make a blockbuster; De Palma firing on all cylinders, keeping you impressed and engaged from start to finish. The setpieces are all brilliant, the mole hunt in Prague was the perfect opening, and the vault room sequence is still an…
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The Good Dinosaur 2015
Realized that I had never seen this from beginning to end in its entirety before, so I decided on giving it a watch. Is it weird that I actually kinda loved this? There’s a very nice contrast set with the visual design that carries through to the film’s tone and structure, somewhat mimicking a tranquil roadtrip film while also pushing through with some cartoony elements. I dunno, it was super charming for me. Also, the backgrounds are pure eye candy.
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Bastards 2013
The tempestuousness of desire and the fantasy of revenge, a film that obeys a dream logic so violently perturbed that it avoids lapsing into the sordid, interrupting its phantasmal fluxes at the very moment a character is about to take action. An intellectually interesting film, though I can't help but feel detached from it, even if it's stylistically bare for a reason.
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Top Gun 1986
A cheesy fever dream(nightmare) that commits to the histrionic culture of the 80s which blasts through the atmosphere with pure Tony Scott storytelling, but Top Gun is not Cruise's Jerry Maguire nor Mission Impossible—movies that stay within their own genre's flaws but still manages to be good. Oh, the 80s. A time when Hollywood would give directors money to pay for Jets just to create a romatic affair between two of its most chiseled and beautiful actors and actresses. The…
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The Cage 1962
Here we are, my final review for all of Terayama's filmography (that is on letterboxd). I unknowingly saved The Cage for last, his first short film, which may even be his best. Filled with an entrancing repetitive score and ethereal whooshing, the journey of our unknown characters in an unknown, completely green place feels like they're trapped in the underworld, left to wander endlessly for all of time. An emptiness filled with dread can put fear into…
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