Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Such a bad movie. Watched it and promptly forgot about it. Except for the witch of course.

A lot of time I waited to be able to watch this film. It's available for eight bucks on Amazon or you can watch it on YouTube. It's my favorite poet, it became more known in the recent years, mainly due to, in his words: an artist has to be ahead of his time- something I'm not sure if I agree, but I respect. I don't agree with so many views he had, but the ones I agree, I agree deeply. This films talks about a lot of things, this charming Italian woman interviewing Hank had a way to take it out of him, she could have taken a lot more if Linda, his wife, were not there. The things about writers, and poets specially, is that, they can, with words, express things we think about, but we can't say it. To watch any documentary on Bukowski, like, The Charles Bukowski Tapes, or Born Into This, you have to separate the acting he does from what he means, and that takes a great deal of awareness about how he thinks. My favorite scene from this film is, to me, one of the best words I've heard spoken about love. Anyone who uses the term love, nowadays, it's accentuating a cliché, I've never heard my mother, my grandmother using that word, people didn't express feelings using words. He explained that very beautifully on minute 41:30 of the film:

While I had a mixed reaction to the film, I would say that accusing it of having no plot and just being about someone who wants to sex men into loving her is underselling what is happening in the film.

I actually thought that it was pretty funny and liked that the romantic dynamic (in which she immediately gets totally turned off when the men get emotional and clingy) sort of pokes fun at the whole "you can't have it all" thing that women are so frequently told.

The tragic part of the story is that you have this person who is willing to go to great, horrible lengths for "love", and yet she doesn't seem to know what love means to her. It seems to be some mix of sex, respect, and power, and she just can't seem to get the balance right.

And while I would have to watch it again to be more certain about this, I also thought that it made a point about the dangers in taking on the damaging behaviors of those in power when you take power for yourself. Which is to say: drugging people for sex, discarding someone for being too emotionally/clingy, even calling one of the men a "pussy"---these are all "traditionally" gross male behaviors. In carving a space for herself as being empowered, the lead character has also taken on the more abusive side of powerful people.

And if nothing else, the costume design and makeup along with the intentionally erroneous editing deserves credit. The fact that Biller did all of it herself (along with the music) is pretty incredible.

The Love Witch had a plot. One terribly delivered. It wanted to be more insightful then the script provided, but didn’t really follow up. There were no lessons for her that maybe she could have had some personal revelation where hey, maybe I don’t need to hex these guys and go all Bill Cosby on them.

In the end, it went with cheap shock that one could see a mile away.
Ronson was really the highlight here. As well as some nice direction at times.

I had a more positive reaction to anyone here. I think it could've stuck it's landing a bit longer but I think the aesthetic, sense of camp and amusing gender politics give it a Beyond the Valley of the Dolls meets Technicolor era filmmaking sensibility that I found fairly intoxicating.

The high point of the film is when the film shifted to the internal monologue of the lothario detective and the juxtaposition of her own, in essence becoming two sides of a similarly destructive coin. Inverse sexism.

It is much too long though but I suppose for a film this indulgent in every regard, that's an expected flaw.

I'm not surprised by its reception here though.

Fear Street: 1994 (2021) - 5/10. The starting hour is a bit lame. With a lot of people running in the background, loud music to scare people. Some glaring loopholes. The second half was just a bit better. And the setup to the next part was nicely done. Apart from that barely much to talk about. Just above average acting. There was just one kill that was worth watching. Not great, but the second part should be interesting at least front the teaser that I saw in the end.

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My Favorite Films

The Tomorrow War- a film made by a computer algorithm. It's Live, Die, Repeat, Starship Troopers, The Thing, and Alien smushed together. Cheap parental issues? Check. One-liners? Check. It's simultaneously entertaining and forgettable. A visual spectacle, but what isn't these days? It's not good enough to love, but not bad enough to hate. It's OK. If you like action movies, its worth a watch. But you won't rush to rewatch it.

But that's the point!! When you regard love as being about domination and power, it blinds you to the idea of compassion and gentleness and compromise. A woman thinking about love this way can be just as damaging as when a man thinks this way---it's a perverse presentation of "gender equality".

We as the audience can see how messed up this way of thinking is. And when the main character is confronted with the truth she can either be like "Oh, wow! Thank you for opening my eyes to the flaws in my mentality about love!" or she can fully commit and go off the deep end. If I'm watching an intentionally B-movie, I know which direction I want that character to go.

Exactly.

I think that maybe part of the problem is that when a film is up front about being feminist, the default interpretation is that any actions by the female lead are meant to be positive or aspirational.

This film is portraying an incredibly destructive interpretation of female empowerment, and one that basically revels in all the negative ideas about what that means. She uses sex to get her way. She's dismissive or derisive toward most of the men in the film. Heck, one of her spells centers on using a used tampon.

As if there aren't a thousand horror movies out there where we watch main male characters maim their way through female victims. Like, ain't nobody out here talking about how the main character in Maniac should have had a learning moment about his relationship toward women.

I’m mostly in your camp. Thought it was beautifully shot and refreshing. Yes, there, I said it.

Well, I, for one, have seen this one a bunch of times and I always read it as intentionally anti-feminist, albeit in a tongue in cheek way. But then again, Anna Biller is a known feminist, yet I always thought she has enough irony in her to have a broader outlook on it all. Back to viewing films aesthetically and separately from authorial politics/convictions.

I admit the ideas behind were interesting, but it was handled in a cheap way to fit into a horror/b movie trope. It would have been nice to delve more into her psyche a bit more, rather then she just wanted love. The flashbacks with the cult didn’t provide enough of an insight to highlight that.

Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)

Pretty much what I expected. I swear, these algorithm-based movies are like cinematic LaCroix: they only have a faint hint of anything satisfying paired with a lot of fizzy, unremarkable nothing. It makes you want to game the algorithm by paying thousands of people to stream...I don't know, hippopotamus videos just to see how it will affect our entertainment.

I started this last night and promptly stopped right after they captured the female. Such a boring film.

Enter the Ninja -

This is the first and my favorite of the three Golan-Globus ninja movies. This one's secret weapon - besides caltrops, of course - is its strong character development. I totally bought Cole and Frank's friendship and like how the wartime flashbacks enriched it. Also, your mileage may vary when it comes to sleaze - for me, the third movie, Ninja III: The Domination, has just enough while the second one, Revenge of the Ninja, takes it too far - but this one is refreshingly free of it. Most importantly, though, the fight scenes are so much fun, and with the reliable "they can't take our land" story and character work, there is just enough of this icing on the cake.

Sho Kosugi fans may be disappointed because he probably has the least screentime in this one, but he makes his time count. Besides, he's why the opening credits are so awesome. These movies have no order anyway, but if you haven't seen any of them, I recommend saving this one for last. Oh, and if it's comic relief you want, you'll get it in my favorite character, the posh Mr. Parker.

Just to add something here but Maniac is a poor example, considering it’s just a cynical cash in on the slasher genre when it was hot, but it was all about murder- death - kill and didn’t even do that well.
Love Witch took itself a tad too seriously at times when the film clearly wasn’t suited well enough for it.

It had nothing to do it’s issues of feminism, which some seem to be implying.

Maniac is brilliant and is antithetical to the slasher tropes in a number of ways. It has far more in common with Taxi Driver than Halloween.

It's also a valid example for the specific point she's trying to make about the way we view films about misogyny vs films about feminism.

Something can critique specific feminist concepts without being anti-feminist, which is what the Love Witch does. The protagonist is a negative example, a femme fatale, of what not to do, and specifically victimizes a much more "modern" woman.

I never thought that the movie was taking itself seriously. And if you want a different example, Visiting Hours is a genuinely great horror-thriller, but no one would ever critique it by saying that the main male character needed to learn about his dysfunctional relationship with women.

And her wanting love is the lynchpin of the whole film. What does love look like for a "liberated", independent woman? That's why the whole climax of the film is .

When you break away from a conventional power structure, you have to create your own definitions for what certain things look like (respect, family, love, sex, loyalty, etc). In this film, the main character is trying to construct her own version of love, but the version she has created is inherently flawed and she makes herself crazy (and acquires a body count!) trying to achieve it. In a film that is deliberately evoking a very specific, stilted style, I'm not sure how much more into her psyche we need to get.

I don't think it is anti-feminist, but I do think that it takes aim at a certain type of feminism where the idea is something like "Men hurt women, so women hurt men. Equality!!", where the desire of most feminists would be that no one is hurting anybody. I think that it also critiques structures that purport to free women from patriarchy, but are themselves patriarchal and exploitative in their own way.

Maniac is far from brilliant, but we’ll just have to disagree with that. The comparison to a Taxi Driver is laughable.
We are talking about the original I presume? I haven’t seen the remake.

I take your second point, but that can reversed back as well in my experience.
I don’t support misogyny, to be clear, before that enters anyone’s mind.

Edit: it should be noted that I’m pretty sure it was reviled back in the day for its deprivation of violence towards women as well, as were many slashers, so thinking back, the point doesn’t hold up as no one defended it, as much as you seem to, considering you think it’s a classic.