Well, it didn't come out of Hollywood, but I saw Suspiria recently, which certainly qualifies as trippy. I am referring to the 1977 version directed by Dario Argento, of course. It was so cheesy as to almost read as a farce, but a good campy watch nonetheless. I felt like the crazy sets were the real stars of the movie.

That's because they were. Kinda. Suspiria is awesome. And fun fact: Argento wrote the script for children to play the characters, only the studio felt it'd be too much for the audience that way so they went with adult actresses. But Argento chose not to rewrite the script, which is why what they say often sounds like kids are talking. And he placed doorknobs high to create a similar sense to them being little.

I've been watching the Australian TV series Return to Paradise.
It's a joint thing between the Australian ABC and British BBC, I think it's part of the Death in Paradise franchise of detective series.


It's about a woman returning to her home town to take up a role at the detective inspector.
It's a sleepy, sunny beachside place called Paradise, hence the name of he series. She had to leave London and come back to Australia because she was under investigation there for tampering with evidence, for which she was put on leave. So she decided to come home and stay with her mum… Her mum isn't there when she returned so she got a job with the local police force doing what she does best.

It's a police detective show with a bit of drama and comedy. The characters are pretty fun, the cinematography is beautiful, the footage is gorgeous (may be a bit overdone), but I watch it mainly for how pretty it is.

The main character looks a bit too reptilian though… Her cheek bones are so severe due to her hollow cheeks, her eyes are too piercing and her skin is too clear and flat coloured… The makeup people need to reel back and make her look more human!!! Because she's hard to watch like that.

All in all it's a pleasant show and I LOVE that it's properly episodic and not some movie in 26 parts like most other things these days, but the love sub-plot between her and the pathologist she walked out on 5 years ago is cringe. She's just TOO alien in her looks and actions, all the unrequited love shes' trying to express looks weird on her because she's not human enough XD

Following my plan of speaking of movies that I watched years ago, and since today's quackcast was about cyberpunk, I'll note Nirvana (1997) by Gabriele Salvatores.
This is a movie I liked a lot and actually went to wee it twice at the cinema (and also bought a DVD at some point).
This movie however has very mixed reactions, with some people (like me) saying that it is pure genius and supercool, others saying that it is boring, or stupid and clichéed.

I personally liked it for the philosophical undertones, and it reminds me a lot of Ghost in the Shell, which came out 2 years earlier and that I also liked a lot.

However, Ghost in the Shell also had supercool graphics and action scenes, whereas, Nirvana has pretty good effects for an Italian produced movie but not really on the level of Hollywood productions (it isn't a “Bmovie” as sometimes claimed though, the director and many actors were really famous in Italy at the time). Also while there are a few “action” moment, on the whole the movie is much more about drama/adventure than action, so people who expect cool action scenes in a sci-fi flick will probably be quite disappointed.

But honestly thinking about it it really is the genre I like more, I don't really care for action, but I like adventure plots, and I also like the philosophising movies too (yes movie philosophy is always cheap and simplyfied, but this is part of the medium).

Reading the reviews of people who disliked this I realize that some people have very different tastes from me, and that even if I did the best comic in the world according to my own standards many people would not like it!
In facts, thinking about it, Nirvana has all the cool things that I (try to) put in my comics, and also lacks all the things that I don't care to put in my comics, but many people apparently like.

marcorossi wrote:
Nirvana (1997) by Gabriele Salvatores.

That sounds very cool!

———
I tried watching Picard.
I saw the first two episodes. -It wasn't horrible, it was just completely unlike anything star Trek from the 90s or The Next Generation so I didn't really see the point. It's an extreme action thing with no clever ideas or slow, clever well thought out stuff we loved from that stuff, It's just modern fast action stuff with actors piked because they look ethnically indeterminate XD
Typical modern boring thing.

I finally saw Casablanca
It was a very tight story, very neat and we'll put together for a 1944 film.
The relationships were mature and people's reactions to them were as well.

There was some mild racism and sexisim but it's very retrained and progressive for the time. I only notice because I'm in 2024 and things have changed in 80 years.

Some notable actors from the Maltese Falcon in it, which is nice. Seems like a great cameo for them.

All in all it's a good film and a nice little snapshot of a very specific moment in history - The Germans coming in to try and take over the French Colonies in north Africa and the desperation as expats and refugees try and escape.

Bogart never says “play it again Sam” but he does ask Sam to play that song again and again, which he does, over, and over… And he DOES say “Here's lookin' at you kid.” Many, many times 😅

I watched the Joker sequel. It is in no way a badly made movie. It would be considered quite good if it were not a sequel that hated the original.

I think the only reason this was made was because there were some psychopaths out there who took the movie as a license to do psychopathic things.

spoilers:

Arthur Fleck is a sad man beaten down by society. He kills someone in self-defense and feels in control for the first time in his life. He realizes that if he starts viewing his life as a comedy and does what his instincts tell him, that he killed those men because “they couldn't carry a tune to save their lives.” he can get some of the things he wants in life.

Joker 2: None of that was true. Life, please continue beating me up.
/spoilers

Also, it was a musical. I like musicals, but most of the songs did not seem to forward the narrative and the movie was 2 and a half hours long. You have Lady Gaga in this movie, but Pheonix does the heavy lifting, and he's not a good singer. They should have had him lip-sync, it actually would have worked better considering the fantasy tone of the musical scenes. It came off as, well Joaquin Phoenix singing in a movie that has Lady Gaga in it.

sleeping_gorilla wrote:
I watched the Joker sequel. It is in no way a badly made movie. It would be considered quite good if it were not a sequel that hated the original.

I think the only reason this was made was because there were some psychopaths out there who took the movie as a license to do psychopathic things.

spoilers:

Arthur Fleck is a sad man beaten down by society. He kills someone in self-defense and feels in control for the first time in his life. He realizes that if he starts viewing his life as a comedy and does what his instincts tell him, that he killed those men because “they couldn't carry a tune to save their lives.” he can get some of the things he wants in life.

Joker 2: None of that was true. Life, please continue beating me up.
/spoilers

Also, it was a musical. I like musicals, but most of the songs did not seem to forward the narrative and the movie was 2 and a half hours long. You have Lady Gaga in this movie, but Pheonix does the heavy lifting, and he's not a good singer. They should have had him lip-sync, it actually would have worked better considering the fantasy tone of the musical scenes. It came off as, well Joaquin Phoenix singing in a movie that has Lady Gaga in it.

Excellent review.
This makes sense unlike all the silly reactions (to both movies), I've read, seen, and heard. Thankyou for being smart, intelligent and a good communicator!

Don't know if that fits here…

I went to see Gnome live in a small club in Hamburg last week. They're from Belgium and have only been around for a couple of years, and to me they're a glimmer of hope that good music hasn't died out completely in todays's media landscape.

Don't let their music videos on Youtube fool you into thinking they're just a gimmicky joke band. You couldn't be more wrong. Rather, imagine a band that could be described as a funky, fun kind of Black Sabbath, but something original on its own. They're just really cool musicians who don't take themselves too seriously and have a sense of humour. When playing live, their musicianship is not just every bit as good as on the recordings, it goes up yet another level - as it does with every great band. These guys played incredibly tight and spot on, and you could tell they have tons of fun doing what they do. The sound was top notch too, punching you in the gut (in a good way), with just the right amount of grittiness.

The band that opened for them wasn't bad either, but quite unlike the main act, their performance suffered from bad mixing, making it ear-splitting yet muffled at the same time, if that makes any sense. It was hard to hear the vocals in all that noise, and it started sounding a bit repetitive after a while. However, I'm left with a feeling that that doesn't quite do them justice. Goes to show how much depends on the guy at the mixing console, I guess.

PaulEberhardt wrote:
I went to see Gnome

That was amazing <3

Two new entries in my “movies that I watched years ago” serie:

Tale of tales (2015) by Matteo Garrone
Vaguely inspired by the draconic argument of the last Quackcast, this movie is based on three different fairy tales, with a parallel construction. In one of the three stories there is a sea dragon (though I see that in english it is called a sea monster).
This movie also has some people who rate it very high and some that rate it very low (I rate it high otherwise I wouldn't be speaking of it).
Basically the director took three fairy tales from a pretty old collection of folktales (Pentamerone, published around 1634).
If you ever have read real traditional folktales you know that this kind of story is generally much less consistent and much more illogical than the generally revised forms we are used to today. The director took this in stride and had stories where, e.g., people turn into giant bats at random, or people randomly meet witches who tell magic secrets and nobody worries why they are there etc.
The movie actually follows this kind of crazy plot literally, so it also has three different but randomic and crazy story thread. I rate it really highly because of historical accuracy and because this creates the sense of living in an unpredictable world (as is the world from the point of view of children); however people who expect a plot without big holes or well developed charachters obviously will hate this kind of story.
Also photography is super-duper good.
Finally the stories are quite dark and scary, in fact this could be described as a low-key horror movie (so good for october).
This also possibli pissed off some wievers who expected a family friendly movie from a fairy tale movie, that this certainly isn't.

Pinocchio (2019) by Matteo Garrone
Same director of the previous one, this is also a pretty dark rendition of Pinocchio's story (though not as bad as the previous one: you can show this to kids, whereas I wouldn't show Tale of Tales to kids).
Pinocchio is a novel for kids written in the 19th century (it is not a fairy tale or a folktale, even though it has a strong fairy tale taste) that has been adapted for the screen a ton of times, however this is IMHO the best rendition.
Photography and special effects are awesome.
The story keeps the vaguely authoritarian undertones of the original story (that was a way to scare kids into studying after all) but also keeps the somehow rascal spirit of the protagonist, and a sort of implicit distrust of authority. This lead to a very weird tension in the story (that also was present in the original).
The original story is very episodic in nature, and the movie more or less folows this episodic structure (though they cut some episodes for lenght); from my point of view this is good because I value ht respect to the original but some people might find it clunky.
The blue fairy is the ghost of a dead girl (as implied in the original) who grows up in age without any explanation like in the original, which is cool IMHO.

And now, youtube excerpts:
Nirvana (from my previous comment, this is the soundtrack + scenes from the movie)
Tale of tales (the sea dragon scene)
Pinocchio (the giant dogfish/shark scene)

what am I watching? currently im watching FROM…the crazy show starring Harold Perrineau. I am also watching Abbot elementary that is back for the season.

I watched “Woman of the Hour”. About the victims of Rodney Alcala, a serial killer who appeared on “The Dating Game” during his killing spree. I am not an Anna Kendrick fan, but she directed this and did an excellent job! It focuses on more than these women's experiences with Alcala; it shows who they were beyond what happened to them, such as Kendrick's character being told to act dumb on camera, and then rewriting her gameshow questions in defiance. All while keeping an intense sense of dread.

I am indifferent to Anna Kendrick as an actress, but she has a real future as a filmmaker. This was MUCH better than Longlegs, a movie made by a director with four horror/crime movies that have had national theatrical releases.

I also watched “The Bye-Bye Man” from a few years ago. This reminds me of Nightmare on Elm Street in the best way. The entity can not affect the real world but instead messes with people's perception of reality. It uses people's insecurities to make them paranoid and get them to do what they want. Even better, it gains strength the more you think about it. The characters can't tell anybody about the weird things they are seeing because it would put that person in danger. The concept is better than the execution, but it is one of those films where the script carries the weak actors. Good if you are interested in movies like Final Destination.

After being entertained by the first Winnie the Pooh slasher, I watched Blood and Honey II. Overall, it is a better-looking movie, the monsters look much better. And this proves that bigger is not better. This is a slog with way too much exposition. The first movie did not take itself seriously, it was simple and delivered exactly what it promised with scenes like Piglet using Eeyore's tale as a weapon.

I did not need to be more complicated than: “The creatures Christopher Robin grew up with were real, and they lost their minds when he stopped believing in them. Go!”

The Wild Robot - 8/10. Is it up to standards when it comes to animation? I suppose so, yeah. When it comes to an animated feature film? Sure. It's touching, slightly humorous, very entertaining… all the kids can love it, easily. It just doesn't really care about doing anything new. (besides maybe the weightless portrayal of some animals eating each other or giving the main protagonist a mother-like personality). It's a sci-fi story, but it's not meant to really make you think about any of the questions it touches on. Not really, hence the plot you can predict from beginning to end just by a brief description or looking at the trailer. In a way it touches on similar things than Silent Running (except there Bruce Dern is the one who's malfunctioning, is kind of an eco-terrorist, proceeding to kill his own crewmates and the film attempts to make some sort of a hero or martyr out of his character) but a film doesn't have to be depressing or profound just to raise questions. No, this is more like the Avatar franchise when it comes to the relationship between nature and technology. Super easy to love, super easy to enjoy, but nothing that digs beneath the surface. And if we don't count how Dreamworks just gutted Megamind or how mediocre Kung Fu Panda 4 was… I'd say they can do even better than this. But yeah, I don't think anyone here will have complaints about it.

Dagon (2001)

is a very nice Lovecraft based movie, although it really is more “the shadow over Innsmouth” than the “Dagon” story.
It is a spanish movie and, at least in the italian version, the city is called “Inboca” instead than “Innsmouth”, although “boca” just means “mouth” in spanish, so funny citation.
I never saw a movie adapting Lovecraft, and I think this makes a very good job of it!

The trailer.

Just found something of which I'd say, it's something like art, created with AI. Still a lot of clichés, but there's something about it:
OscuroSeptember

Othosmops wrote:
Just found something of which I'd say, it's something like art, created with AI. Still a lot of clichés, but there's something about it:
OscuroSeptember

Ewwwwww, made with stolen art :(

———–

I watched the first 3 episodes of 21 Jump Street. The old Johnny Dep series. First time I watched it since the 80s!
The pilot episode is a two parter and it's a really good actioned focussed thing. It was well done and acted. Just story about car theft by school kids who look like 25 year olds… But well done.

The third episode sucked though. It had two stories- a car theft one again and one about a Polish exchange student who started off talking about how great communism was an then quickly because addicted to cappitalisim and “frrrrrreeedom” uuuuugh! The 80s were FULL of crap propaganda like that in popular TV shows, it was always pretty sickening.
They didn't even give the Polish people real accents.
It was a boring episode that wasn't compelling at all, not real point to it.

Othosmops wrote:
Just found something of which I'd say, it's something like art, created with AI. Still a lot of clichés, but there's something about it:
OscuroSeptember

Cutie pie witch and a jaunty little tune, what's not to like? Dammit! Friggin AI, man, that's how it gets you.

dpat57 wrote:

Othosmops wrote:
Just found something of which I'd say, it's something like art, created with AI. Still a lot of clichés, but there's something about it:
OscuroSeptember

Cutie pie witch and a jaunty little tune, what's not to like? Dammit! Friggin AI, man, that's how it gets you.

Really? The stolen art style is so evil to me, it's like lemon juice in a cut. X(

I finally rewatched the episode “Gramma” from the 1980's Twilight Zone show.

It terrified me so much as a kid and once I remembered it, I was afraid to rewatch it. But also compelled to rewatch it, haha.

My take now - I can see why it scared me. I identified with that kid. I was about his age when I saw the show, and I even resembled that kid. Visually, as a production and everything, it still looks great (image degradation aside).

But my Lord, I didn't remember how the acting, including the voiceover flashbacks were done. The style of acting, with the kid shouting every line, and the voiceover flashbacks with his parents were the same - just actors shouting at each other. It was like being punched in the face repeatedly.

The Stephen King story was good - it's a good, scary story. And there was obvious skill put into the TV episode - I found myself wishing it could just be redone with new ADR dialogue.

But a reedit of an old show that nobody remembers or cares about would probably be a waste of time, haha.

The whole show is on YouTube, anyway - plenty of the other 80's Twilight Zone episodes are really good and hold up quite well.

“I want to hug you, Georgie!” - still a scary moment, though not the traumatizing experience it was when I was a youngster! xD

I think Joker 2 sucked, for various reasons, but I kinda love how it made it its statement that “yeah, well it's about a broken man slowly coming to terms with the harsh reality, if you want murder mayhem and explosions, you're no different than its cast of characters, this is pathetic and you're not supposed to enjoy it, assholes”. :D I think it's pretty obvious that it was underwhelming on purpose. With musical numbers that aren't memorable, with a badly paced and uneventful plot, with it just building and building the anticipation… to an ending many find terribly disappointing (I think it was pretty great). Yeah, the fact that it wasn't trying to live up to the first one, that's something of a surprise from a decent Hollywood project loosely based on comic books.

Two things that are notable that I watched:

The modern reboot of Van Der Valk
It's a British made police detective show about Dutch police in Holland. The original is from the 1970s and I loved that. The new version is well made but too dramatic and dark :(
Like most stuff these days.

Get Back
It's an anime movie on Amazon Prime about two girls who connect over a love for creating manga. It's touching and bitter-sweet. The pacing is a bit uneven but I loved the passion and dedication of the two girls. Their relationship was interesting. I recommend it, especially to this community where we all have a passion for creating comics!

Maboroshi: this is an anime movie I watched a few months ago. Our protagonists are living in a small village where, since some time, everything is locked in a sort of time loop (even the inhabitants can't tell how much time passed since the days all look the same). This little world is weird and claustrophobic, and there is a weird cult that worships the lokal steel mill as a god (a machine god) and says that the machine god is the one that is keeping the time-loop-world alive. This is a very weird anime, with a very eerie athmosphere, so if you like this kind ov dark and vaguely scary/eerie fantasy is very cool.
I watched it subtitled as it was not disponible in italian.

Here the trailer.

Bob's Burgers but if cartoons don't count, Modern Family.

Going back to older shows in this day and age is so strange. Alex, one of the children is quite frankly a huge bitch and essentially an antagonist. I'm really surprised they written her to be like this when everyone else is a decent human being with their own quirks.

Also Bob's Burgers is pretty good too.

@Marco- I'm always looking out for new aime!

Impurepyxia wrote:
Also Bob's Burgers is pretty good too.

I love Bob's Burgers!

——–

I am rewatching Photon. an old anime from the same date as Cowboy Beebop, which is MUCH better and I am also rewatching.
I still really appreciate the old retro style of Photon and I only just realised yesterday that it's by the same people who did Tenchi Myuo and that the stories are actually related!

It's a weird story about a super powered by and his powered up female friend (or sister, I'm not sure), who live a subsistence world on a crappy old desert planet. Things are shaken up when a woman who is the daughter of a convicted “terrorist” lands there on the run from an evil suitor to the galactic princess. He wants to capture her to get on good terms with the princess.
The boy, Photon, ends up betrothed to the woman, through something dumb he does and that means he's committed to protecting her.
It's silly and fun.

Strange But True is a slow-burn thriller. A grieving family faces a bizarre claim when the late son’s girlfriend arrives years later, insisting she’s pregnant with his child. Starring Margaret Qualley and Amy Ryan.

This movie commits the storytelling sin of having an “Unwitting Key”. The mystery is interesting, and the characters are engaging. However, the mystery is solved by introducing some random information that would have made the resolution obvious. At least it's a GOOD mystery.

Freud's Last Session: Last sunday I went to see it to the cinema, so for once it's something that I actually watched recently.

The plot is based on an imagined encounter between Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis and arch-atheist, and C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books and Christian apologist (that is, he actually wrote some books defending christianity).

The movie is based on a dialogue about religion between these two dudes, shortly before Freud's death, but during the dialogue there are many flashbacks on the past lives of these two, in ways that explain why one thinks/acts in a certain way and the other in another (so it is in fact a very Freudian movie).
The movie is written in a way that it tries to not endorse the one or the other, but to show the shortcomings of both (also spilling some embarassing personal events for both, if the two were alive today they would be very very pissed).

Given the premise, the filmmakers make a very very good job and the movie actually mantains the attention of the spectator for two whole hours without being boring (not an easy task but they manage).
But on the other hand, the two characters are used a bit like two symbols of two points of view, so the movie is more like a platonic dialogue than a real biopic.
The actors are very good, though there is some problem of this “stereotypizing” of the characters.

There is a short cameo of J.R.R. Tolkien, who is a starry eyed christian.

This movie actually got quite bad reviews in the sites, but in my opinion is good if you are interested in movies about an “argument” (instead than movies about “stories”, although the spicy details about the lives of the two partially give us also some story), so I recommend it.
I would not watch it twice though, as the good part is all about the “argument” and not the “scenes”, a little like a detective movie that is not interesting once you already knows who is the culprit.

The trailer

marcorossi wrote:
The trailer

Hmm, I like that it's set during the 30s and before haha! I like period pieces.
-Though at that stage in his life his Grandson Clement said his granddad was in constant pain from his jaw cancer and was not very happy because of that, so Hopkins being a smiley Freud is a bit silly. But it's not a biopic, they're just characters doing a dialogue like Lewis's Screwtape letters haha!

———-

I've been watching the Pam and Tommy biopic on Amazon Prime.
Normally I wouldn't touch a show like that but a friend wanted to watch it with me so I gave it a go.

It's very good and stars big name actors like Seth Rogan and Nick Offerman among others and everyone is very good in their roles.
It provides an interesting insight into what happened on the other side of that pop-culture related event when Rand Gauthier stole and sold Pam and Tommy's sex video.

I thought it was be a tawdry, scandalous, tell-all sort of terrible semi-reality thing, but it's actually a very well done dramatic story.

Arcane, season 2 The story is pretty good, even if it sometimes becomes a little predictable. I watch it primarily for the costumes, props, and backgrounds. I think the production design is amazing.

LOLA (2022) - It's a very interesting way to present a found footage film: two sisters find a way to receive broadcasts from the future and start altering the course of the ongoing WWII, which of course presents its own catastrophic consequences. The film takes some time to get really interesting, the style (that reminds me of Guy Maddin's) could be off-putting to some, and it's nothing groundbreaking really. But it seems like most of the budget went to securing rights to play David Bowie songs, which means this movie is as underground as it gets and like Ink (2009) the kind of passion project you find yourself enjoying and celebrating instead of being too harsh on. 7/10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmwJYVrcmVM

Zero Dark Thirty(2012) I never paid much attention when the film came out, because the advertisements made it out to be some kind of testosterone-soaked war-bro film. But then I noticed that it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, whose work I like. So I gave it a shot, and it was worth it. It's a highly disturbing film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, and the morally bankrupt methods that the CIA used to find him. Worth a watch, but it's not for the faint of heart.