Film Diary June 2024
Jul. 1st, 2024 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amado1June 6: I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
June 7: Street Trash (1987)
June 10: Gaga Chromatica Ball (2024)
June 25: The First Omen (2024)
June 26: Rope (1948)
June 26: Saint Maud (2019)
June 27: There's Something Wrong With Aunt Diane (2011)
June 27: The Deer Hunter (1978)
June 28: Crimes of the Future (2022)
June 29: The Deer Hunter (again)
I Saw the TV Glow: Fantastic. When we first got out of the theater, most of my friends disliked it; they felt it was a 2-star, maybe 3-star movie -- too cynical, too depressing, too hopeless. One friend said it was like watching someone commit an act of self-harm for the entire runtime. I think it's an honest, moving portrayal of the internal struggle of figuring out your gender identity. The entire message is that transition is scary and it DOES kill your old life, but you HAVE to go for it... I found it a devastating but hopeful film.
Street Trash: I usually love campy 80s gore but this one was wearying. It's hard to explain how a movie where people play football with a severed penis and citizens melting goopily into toilets can be boring, but it was! This movie seriously dragged.
Gaga Chromatica Ball: I love herrrr.
The First Omen: Beautifully shot. The gifsets on tumblr convinced me to watch it and visually, I wasn't disappointed. But everything else...? The writing was painfully reminiscent of Marvel movies.
Rope: I had a Hitchcock boxset as a kid and watched every movie obsessively, but I don't think it included any of his famous hits. So I watched Rope for the first time. It was nowhere near as gay as everyone hypes it up to be, but the suspense was masterful (of course!) and Jimmy Stewart's character as the skeptical, maybe-ally maybe-enemy old schoolteacher had me captivated. Excellent, short movie, definitely worth the watch.
Saint Maud: This is an A24 film I've been aching to watch since it first released, knowing it would be up my alley. It's an almost perfect film marred by the ending, imo. It follows a personal caregiver named Maud, a very religious young Welsh lady, who cares for an aging bisexual dancer with lymphona. Maud makes it her life mission to convert the dancer; over the course of the movie her mental health unravels, culminating in an unfortunately cheesy end scene.
There's Something Wrong With Aunt Diane: This documentary explores the 2009 Tacoma Parkway crash. If you weren't around at the time, this was a three-car crash where Diane Schuler drove a van crowded with kids for two miles the wrong way down the Tacoma Parkway. Eight people died, most of them Schuler's kids and nieces. The autopsy concluded Schuler had dangerous levels of alcohol and THC in her system, but her family was shocked and loudly protested, insisting the autopsy must be wrong. The doc follows her family as they hire private investigators and search for an alternate explanation. It's a fantastic exploration of trauma, grief, and denial, and it walks as through their emotions as they slowly come to terms with the fact that Diane was most likely a closet alcoholic, and while a medical event MIGHT have compounded things that day, we'll never know. It's also an excellent exploration of how people who make bad choices aren't bad people, and shouldn't be villainized.
There's a chilling moment toward the end where one of Diane's biggest champions, her sister-in-law Jay, sneaks a cigarette while talking to a producer. She's just learned that the expert she hired concurs with the original autopsy, and she's shaky, close to tears. She smiles self-deprecatingly and waves her cigarette at the camera, confessing that her family has no idea she smokes and will be shocked when they see this footage. It's a gut-sinking revelation; if Jay has been hiding her smoking habit for years, how can she convince herself that Diane WASN'T hiding her alcoholism? But the documentary is marred intensely by its decision to show uncensored crime scene photos of Diane's body. I can't think of ANY reason why that was necessary, and it affected my rating of the documentary a LOT.
The Deer Hunter: Y'all saw my essay! This is one of my new favorite movies. If the essay was too damn long for you (trust me I get it lmfao), it's a 1978 Vietnam War film starring Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken. The film follows three friends from a small steelworking town who voluntarily enlist to fight. Their scenes overseas are very brief, making up only a tiny portion of the film. For the most part, the film explores who they were before the war and what happens to them and their community after.
Crimes of the Future: One of Cronenberg's latest, and a return to body horror. In the future, infectious disease has been eliminated and humankind has gotten a lot dirtier. Most people no longer feel pain. Some people spontaneously grow extraneous organs, so a new art craze has blossomed: public surgery to remove the organs and display them in jars. It's an incredibly trans, very horny movie, definitely recommend.
June 7: Street Trash (1987)
June 10: Gaga Chromatica Ball (2024)
June 25: The First Omen (2024)
June 26: Rope (1948)
June 26: Saint Maud (2019)
June 27: There's Something Wrong With Aunt Diane (2011)
June 27: The Deer Hunter (1978)
June 28: Crimes of the Future (2022)
June 29: The Deer Hunter (again)
I Saw the TV Glow: Fantastic. When we first got out of the theater, most of my friends disliked it; they felt it was a 2-star, maybe 3-star movie -- too cynical, too depressing, too hopeless. One friend said it was like watching someone commit an act of self-harm for the entire runtime. I think it's an honest, moving portrayal of the internal struggle of figuring out your gender identity. The entire message is that transition is scary and it DOES kill your old life, but you HAVE to go for it... I found it a devastating but hopeful film.
Street Trash: I usually love campy 80s gore but this one was wearying. It's hard to explain how a movie where people play football with a severed penis and citizens melting goopily into toilets can be boring, but it was! This movie seriously dragged.
Gaga Chromatica Ball: I love herrrr.
The First Omen: Beautifully shot. The gifsets on tumblr convinced me to watch it and visually, I wasn't disappointed. But everything else...? The writing was painfully reminiscent of Marvel movies.
Rope: I had a Hitchcock boxset as a kid and watched every movie obsessively, but I don't think it included any of his famous hits. So I watched Rope for the first time. It was nowhere near as gay as everyone hypes it up to be, but the suspense was masterful (of course!) and Jimmy Stewart's character as the skeptical, maybe-ally maybe-enemy old schoolteacher had me captivated. Excellent, short movie, definitely worth the watch.
Saint Maud: This is an A24 film I've been aching to watch since it first released, knowing it would be up my alley. It's an almost perfect film marred by the ending, imo. It follows a personal caregiver named Maud, a very religious young Welsh lady, who cares for an aging bisexual dancer with lymphona. Maud makes it her life mission to convert the dancer; over the course of the movie her mental health unravels, culminating in an unfortunately cheesy end scene.
There's Something Wrong With Aunt Diane: This documentary explores the 2009 Tacoma Parkway crash. If you weren't around at the time, this was a three-car crash where Diane Schuler drove a van crowded with kids for two miles the wrong way down the Tacoma Parkway. Eight people died, most of them Schuler's kids and nieces. The autopsy concluded Schuler had dangerous levels of alcohol and THC in her system, but her family was shocked and loudly protested, insisting the autopsy must be wrong. The doc follows her family as they hire private investigators and search for an alternate explanation. It's a fantastic exploration of trauma, grief, and denial, and it walks as through their emotions as they slowly come to terms with the fact that Diane was most likely a closet alcoholic, and while a medical event MIGHT have compounded things that day, we'll never know. It's also an excellent exploration of how people who make bad choices aren't bad people, and shouldn't be villainized.
There's a chilling moment toward the end where one of Diane's biggest champions, her sister-in-law Jay, sneaks a cigarette while talking to a producer. She's just learned that the expert she hired concurs with the original autopsy, and she's shaky, close to tears. She smiles self-deprecatingly and waves her cigarette at the camera, confessing that her family has no idea she smokes and will be shocked when they see this footage. It's a gut-sinking revelation; if Jay has been hiding her smoking habit for years, how can she convince herself that Diane WASN'T hiding her alcoholism? But the documentary is marred intensely by its decision to show uncensored crime scene photos of Diane's body. I can't think of ANY reason why that was necessary, and it affected my rating of the documentary a LOT.
The Deer Hunter: Y'all saw my essay! This is one of my new favorite movies. If the essay was too damn long for you (trust me I get it lmfao), it's a 1978 Vietnam War film starring Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken. The film follows three friends from a small steelworking town who voluntarily enlist to fight. Their scenes overseas are very brief, making up only a tiny portion of the film. For the most part, the film explores who they were before the war and what happens to them and their community after.
Crimes of the Future: One of Cronenberg's latest, and a return to body horror. In the future, infectious disease has been eliminated and humankind has gotten a lot dirtier. Most people no longer feel pain. Some people spontaneously grow extraneous organs, so a new art craze has blossomed: public surgery to remove the organs and display them in jars. It's an incredibly trans, very horny movie, definitely recommend.
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Date: 2024-07-01 09:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-02 02:47 pm (UTC)