Random Thoughts

Nooo

Heh heh. Is this a comedy?

This really seems like a comedy. A parody? But it’s David Fincher? I didn’t know that he had a sense of humour.

Product placement!

The first 15 minutes of this has possibly been the most tedious 15 minutes I can recall from a movie. Well, except The Smiths bit. Yes, yes, we realise that he’s a moron! And pretentious about it. Did we need 15 minutes for that?

Heh heh. Well, it picked up now.

Did Fincher really need to colour grade Paris this colour? Eww.

But… it’s not a parody? This is a serious thriller?

O my god. I can’t believe it.

I still can’t believe this isn’t a parody. Like, “did you notice anything odd today?” “No, office, just that van with a caterwauling guy playing on the stereo.” (He blasts The Smiths all the time.)

It not just the sheer stupidity of just about every scene. That’s fine. But we’ve been given no reason to care about anything that’s happening, really. OK, they semi-fridged his girlfriend, so I guess that’s supposed to be sufficient?

It also just looks bad. Everything is super colour graded — mostly into greys and teals, like in this scene, and it’s just ick.

Yeah, I guess.

Oh, that’s interesting — virtually all the critics love the movie, but the audience is pretty lukewarm.

I guess people think this is deeply mid. So it’s… Oh yeah! This is Netflix! So this is a movie designed to appeal to people who this kind of movie appeals to: Extruded Film Product.

I’d forgotten. So the scenes are intensely stupid — not because it’s a comment on anything, but just because they haven’t bothered to write anything better. Using The Smiths soundtrack isn’t a comment on anything, but because they thought it would appeal to a certain age group (and besides, they have so many lyrics to choose from that you can always find something to go with the scene in question).

Phew! The dog survived! I was so worried!

Another sequence that made absolutely no sense — if he wanted to kill the guy in Florida, why go into the house? Why not just shoot him from the yard?

*sigh*

And at any point in this movie, would anybody feel anything if the protagonist got killed instead of not getting killed? I don’t think so. “Oh well, it’s over, I guess. Time to put on the next movie in Netflix’ algorithm.” There are no stakes; there’s no tension.

O god, the lines Swinton had to deliver here… I’m embarrassed for Fincher.

Fincher is still trying to redo his Ikea scene from Fight Club?

The Sub Pop t-shirt on the billionaire is a nice touch.

Giving this movie the lowest die rating seems hyperbolic, doesn’t it? Surely it can’t be that bad? Very few professionally made movies are that bad? But c’mon. I’ve never been this bored watching a movie. Everything about it is just so lazy. Even the fight scenes are lazy — they mostly take place in darkness so that you don’t have to get the choreography right.

This is the most “you wanted product, here’s product” film I’ve seen in quite a while, and I would have stopped watching halfway through, but I assumed that it must surely pick up a bit at some point.

But nope.

The Killer. David Fincher. 2023.

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.

Well, what’s this then? I found it here, and from the fishy look, I’m guessing this was shot to be shown in a planetarium? Yes, indeed. Lots of planetariums.

Tilda Swinton reads the narration.

So this is about dark matter, and also about the Large Hardon Collider at CERN. (I was at CERN as a summer student while they were in the planning stages… it was fun.)

Hey, this is good. It’s probably totes awesome in a planetarium, but it’s very edumacational.

So how does one rate this space oddity, then? It’s good stuff, and it’s very, very sure of itself, so I guess you could see it more as a propaganda and give-more-money-to-CERN tool — which I’m all for, anyway.

But it’s strangely moving, and I bet you it’s totally awesome if you watch it in a planetarium.

Phantom of the Universe: The Hunt for Dark Matter. Joao Pequenao. 2016.

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.

I found a French-titled DVD of this movie I’ve been looking for.

I found this short finally.

Ten years ago, there was a general enthusiasm about the brave new world of streaming, and some people were saying that from now on, everything would always be available for everybody. I was sceptical because money is still a thing that exists, and licensing is a complicated revenue stream. On the other hand, pirating is a thing that also exists, so perhaps it’s true?

So to find out, I thought it might be fun to pick an actor and see whether it was indeed possible to watch everything that actor had ever played in. I picked Tilda Swinton sorta at random — I’d only seen her in a handful of films (Last of England, Orlando), but looking at her career, she seemed to have kinda good taste, and she did both blockbusters and small art films, so it’d be varied, at least. And she’s not obscure — she’s somebody that’s popular, which should help in finding the movies she’s in.

Reader, I failed. That is, as I suspected, the future envisioned never happened, but I guess I hit what might have been the point of peak availability: This was before streaming services decided that indeed, nobody (as in “not enough people”) wants to watch obscure movies, so they were gone, but not only that: These days things show up on streaming, and then they’re totally gone. Because that’s somehow cheaper (don’t have to pay royalties, tax write offs, etc). And finally, pirating has declined, too — in 2015, you could find pretty obscure things on torrent. These days, not so much.

Anyway, what’s this post, then? Every other year, I go through Swinton’s list of movies and check whether any of the old things I couldn’t find before has popped up somewhere (Youtube, Amazon, Torrents, streaming, DVD, whatever), and while I’m at it, I also watch her new movies, because why not? I was right in my initial assessment: She has really good taste in movies. Even if they’re not always actually what you’d call “good”, they’re at least interesting.

So here I go: I mixed myself up a batch of batida de mango, because it’s 32C here now, and I’ve got all the windows open, and a Dyson “air mover” pointing at myself, and now I’m going to spend all of today watching various Tilda Swinton things! Wish me luck!

I found this on Rarefilmm, which is a site I haven’t encountered before.

Well, that this hasn’t gotten distribution before isn’t very surprising: First of all, it’s a 1 hour movie, and short films always get lost (until they show up as an extra on a bluray, or somebody does a box set for the director). And one hour movies are even worse — too long to be shown on a short film programme, and too short to get a release on its own.

And of course, this is *shiver* “experimental”, so that’s just impossible.

This kinda reminds me of Derek Jarman — but edited on video instead of on film. But then transferred to 16mm? And then shown on TV? Or filmed on 16mm and then edited on video? I mean, it’s got a very video look, but it’s also very sharp… Hm! The look rather reminds me of Prospero’s Books, which was filmed on 35mm film, but then edited together on hi-def video using Quantel Paintbox. And that was from 1991, so perhaps a similar process… But cheaper, obvs.

And then the movie ends with a song by ©, aka Leslie Winer!

Ah, Channel Four. Gotta love channel four.

I really enjoyed this. And the transfer is excellent — must come from a first generation source, which is unusual for something like this.

Remembrance of Things Fast: True Stories Visual Lies. John Maybury. 1994.

This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.