#movie review blog

[queerism1969]

[askmovieslate]

The doors are shut, there's no way you can escape.

So, ok.

Point number one: You can't take Godzilla down using missiles, in no way, shape or form can he be defeated with just missiles. It's moronic and idiotic.

Point number two: Do you have any idea how idiotic it is to have so many helicopters fly around Manhattan? The buffeting and centrifuge forces alone will cause most of those helicopters to crash onto each other.

Point number three: The characters are deeply annoying and unlikeable. At least give me someone to root for that's not Godzilla.

Point number four:-

Jamesy: No. Nope. Stop that.

Movie: Wait, what? Why!?

Jamesy: This isn't YouTube, Movie. You can't make a three hour long rant disguised an an essay just because you feel like it.

Movie: Did you know Roland Emmerich wants to remake Stargate?

Jamesy:...go on, I'll give you a hand with the editing.

Movie: Thank you. Point number four...

[werewolfaday]

speaking of the subject--would any of y'all be interested if I wanted to start watching/reading and reviewing werewolf media? idk by what avenue but I don't have a camera or mic so it wouldn't be videos, it would prob be written reviews just on a tumblr blog. if i could figure out a way to stream movies or tv pilots weekly though i'd be down to do that too. idk, give me your thoughts!

[bmpmp3]

sorry to be a bit of a hater but i do wish youtubers weren't so scared of making their videos just like, "reviews", whys everything gotta be a "video essay" all the time. every day my recommendations are filled with 40 minute videos titled "_____: An Underrated Masterpiece" where the first like five minutes are reading the wikipedia definition of "masterpiece" in a somber voice with dramatic themed text on screen. please just tell me how good or bad you think something is and use the rest of the runtime to explain why. you dont need to put on all these airs

[belle-keys]

Saltburn: The Reign of British Bourgeois (Meta)

I recently had an interesting conversation with a close friend of mine who said, "I don't think Saltburn is really about class." She said she thought it was mainly about obsession, in the most individualist and interpersonal way possible. I naturally disagreed, and we argued about it for an hour. But I think the reason she didn't think it was really about class was because the film had a categorically anti-Marxist conclusion. That is, a very British conclusion. In many ways, Saltburn is a Thatcherite's wet dream. Let's discuss.

Saltburn isn’t an “Eat The Rich” narrative. It’s an “Absorb The Rich” narrative. I disagree that Saltburn is merely about an individual’s obsession with a particular guy or family. Saltburn is about the bourgeoisie’s obsession with the old English aristocracy.

Let’s establish the establishment: the modern English aristocracy whose family seats litter the shires. Saltburn aims to satirize the English Country House family drama, and then some. This is made evident when Felix informs Ollie that, whoa, the Evelyn Waugh himself based Brideshead Revisited and other works on Saltburn, on Felix’s family. The film, in my opinion, was kinda ballsy to go there and to do it so bluntly. So yeah, Saltburn wants to poke fun at the long-established English tradition of aristocratic family dramas such as Downton Abbey, Brideshead Revisited, Bridgerton, Poldark, Rebecca, etc. It’s no coincidence that the movie begins with an egregiously stereotypical sketch of Ollie struggling to fit in at Oxford, à la Charles Ryder. Felix Catton is Sebastian Flyte, and then some. And Ollie is obsessed with him, because look at him. Except… I believe Ollie’s obsession with Felix is less of an interpersonal homoerotic deranged clusterfuck than it is the bourgeois boy’s perennial fixation with the unreachable closed-door English aristocracy, the national pinnacle of inherited class and status in a nation founded on inherited class and status.

Saltburn, butler and all, is a perfect symbol of English aristocratic privilege (seconded by none other than Oxford, but the film didn’t care to explore the hierarchies present in British education and instead chose to focus on family in lieu of academia). Saltburn is grand, medieval, kitchy, isolated in the middle of whereverthefuckshire. One would think that Ollie was intending to infiltrate Saltburn to possess Felix, but I rather think he was intending to infiltrate Felix in order to possess Saltburn. To possess Saltburn is to possess the rank and place of the Catton’s in the world, to be the world. And Ollie doesn’t want to destroy the Cattons nearly as much as he wants to embody them.

I suppose Ollie’s need to absorb, to consume, to possess and to incarnate is obvious through his actions—drinking Felix’s semen in the bathtub, the period blood bit, the grave-fucking debacle. He worms his way through every aspect of the family members’ lives with the intent to become them, to suck them dry (see: “I’m a vampire”, how gothic). By the end when the Cattons are all dead, Ollie celebrates the privilege he has grasped, and in turn, the film applauds his feat rather than condemns him. Saltburn is a film that congratulates Ollie’s usurping of wealth and privilege, rooting for him from beginning to end. And the film never tries to interrogate itself and ask why Ollie is our hero. Ollie, who does not want to break the wheel as much as he wants to be in the room where it happens, even if that means destroying everyone else in his path. Ollie’s obsession, generally speaking, arises from the desire for status and rank rather than an inoccuous maniacal insanity. This is symbolized by his possession and control of Saltburn. If Saltburn were a gothic ghost story, then Ollie is our specter. And Saltburn is definitely rooting for the specter, full stop.

Britain is a nation of ranks and hierarchies, naturally averse to watering down pristine intergenerational blue blood with filthy postmodern capitalist dollars. “Stay in your place”, that is the Tory way. Even in a “modern, democratic” nation nonetheless governed by an antiquated Tory hegemony and quite opposed to both radicalism and revolution. Ollie, however, wants to be in the room where it happens in a world where only those who are born in that room ever get to enter it. It is why he faces this overwhelming yearning for Felix’s world and Saltburn’s beauty – it is, by default, off-limits to him no matter how hard he tries to reach it. In my opinion, Ollie’s fascination with Saltburn isn’t due to a homoerotic fixation on Felix. It’s due to an outsider’s bourgeois fixation on the romantic world of inherited English rank, status, and wealth. The romance of Saltburn, our need to romanticize the privileged upper class, is evident in the stunning cinematography and costuming. Farleigh is the first person in the family to notice Ollie’s insecurities and see it for what it is – he’s begging to be let in. Farleigh likewise takes the opportunity to constantly, antagonistically remind Ollie that Saltburn isn’t his world, that he will never fit in and will never be accepted as one of them: the tux will never perfectly fit. It is the tragedy of the almost-theres. So Ollie decides to just get rid of everyone in his way and prance about naked since the tux refuses to bloody fit.

It’s just so English, culturally speaking. To claw your way to the top to sit with the big boys rather than to criticize the system that bred the arduous, back-breaking, fatal climb in the first place. This is Tory meritocracy, founded on decades of policies to reduce taxes on properties such as Saltburn in Britain, to keep old peers in the Lords. Felix Catton is Sebastian Flyte is Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher who, despite brandishing her “common” background as a selling point during her political career, painstakingly perfected the Received Pronunciation of her Eton parliamentary peers and successfully died with the coveted title of Baroness added to her name. Thatcher, an Oxford scholarship kid like Ollie, who wormed her way into a title and country house and was yet forever plagued by her average, middle-class upbringing.

Ollie is obsessed with much more than a mere man. If Saltburn were a Marxist class story, truly dedicated to class critcism or subverting the English Country House drama, Ollie would have burned the whole damn place down. But Saltburn is rather a Tory class story about the insane lengths the British bouregoisie, obsessed with ascending class hierarchies and disillusioned by the lies of meritocracy, will go to possess the near-unpossessable ranks at the peak of English-textured privilege. The film is a performance in English upper-class tomfoolery and a celebration of its infiltration by the almost-theres.

And yet, the cycle perpetuates itself. Saltburn is ruled by a new lord. Nothing, really, has changed.

[pearlpleultraviolence]

I love the cinematography aesthetic of this movie, but the story is so so sad I mean she was just a kid. 16 man it’s so sad. It’s definitely one of my favourite movies for the showing of the parts of girlhood I could relate too, but I cant shake the feeling of how it’s never resolved with the trauma she goes through. But i guess that makes it feel all the more real sadly.

(All pics off Pinterest)

[green--tea-owo]

"why do you even like that movie? it's literally just p0rn."

the movie:

[3liza]

The poster is the worst advertising for what the film actually turns out to be. You think you're getting into another screwball millennial cringefest and it's actually a deep-blue chiaroscuro of neuroses. I really thought I would not be surprised by the depths of male anxiety and weirdness going into a movie about sperm donation, because the topic itself is so trammeled at this point and so obvious that you assume you already know everything such a documentary could teach you, but I got my tits blown clean off.

No one does anything BAD, it's not that kind of film, it's simply a silent and eerie observation of people acting completely independently to either provide or acquire human semen. Necessarily, the receivers in this setup are all buying the same product for the same purpose: they want to conceive a baby and don't have access to the missing gamete for some reason and don't have the extortionate amount of money required to go the official route through a sperm bank. The providers are all doing it for completely different reasons, and all of the reasons besides "making a bit of extra cash" are in fact weird, no matter how stubbornly some of the reviewers here insist the motives of the donors are simply "to help people out :)". Sperm is just the kind of thing you really don't want to get from a stranger unless money is exchanging hands, so by this property the male subjects in the film become perfect documentary protagonists: profoundly damaged, bizarre, or obsessive in ways that stand up to steady, direct observation.

I'm not judging anyone here, by the way. I guess if you have a lot of money to throw around you probably would waste it on genetically profiling strangers in a lookbook in a nice office in order to breed your ubermensch or whatever. I'm being nasty, there are lots of good reasons to want to anonymize, institutionalize and vet sperm donors, it's just that the idea is ludicrous on its face because this is a substance people never ever stop trying to push on you for free, or pay you money to take off their hands. Epigenetics and environmental factors being what they are, I question the utility of "genetic testing" beyond a certain point anyway. No one is being exploited or misled. The people who want babies can conceive and it doesn't really matter in the big picture whether the donors are doing it for "the right reasons" or not.

There are some more esoteric ethical considerations here that aren't addressed at all, which is probably for the best in consideration for the pacing of the film, but I could have used at least one interview with a genetics expert who winced at hearing some of these donors have 100+ sperm babies because of the very real possibility of creating future half-sibling incest crises unawares, a problem that real sperm banks and actual legislation have to grapple with. You get one good-looking Norwegian brain surgeon on the books at a sperm bank and you get a line out the door of people with too much money who know what being 6' tall and blue-eyed and symmetrical is worth down to fractional shares and have already put a down payment on the local private montessouri pre-K prep program. Genetic Sexual Attraction or GSA for short is a documented (and controversial) phenomenon that causes a lot of high-profile scandals when long-lost siblings or birth parents are reunited with a child who was the subject of a closed adoption, fall in love with them, and reenact various historical and mythological tragedies. That thing where you tend to find your blood relatives sexually repulsive or at least uninteresting is a way that social animals avoid getting into failure spirals of incest and birth defects, but humans have a tendency to be attracted to people who resemble themselves physically and personality-wise, so meeting a sibling or parent you didn't grow up with can sometimes short-circuit the incest-avoidance failsafes and create instantaneous, passionate obsession. That's what people who are involved in cases of GSA report, anyway. Half-sibling pairings aren't quite as bad in terms of the mutation issues, but it is definitely not good for the health of the resulting offspring or the mental health of the related parents. These lone gunmen fathering dozens of children in the same school district are potentially creating serious problems down the line. 

The cinematography is breathtaking. It's truly a phenomenal film from any angle.

My mother is a family lawyer by the way, if you ever find yourself in this situation (for example you are someone's friend and they ask you to be a donor) you need to make sure you have an IRON CLAD contract checked by an actual lawyer and probably notarized that you are absolved of all parental rights and obligations irreversibly, or you WILL eventually find yourself in the position one donor did at the end of the film: suddenly being the sole custodian of a little girl named "Italeigh". Family law is not like any other field of law in the USA, the judges in family court care about one thing only and that's Who Is Gonna Pay for This Damn Kid. Which is correct, and I'm not saying family court is always fair or that the judges make the right decisions all the time, but a proper family court judge will walk to Hell to bring the devil in for a wage garnishment and you need to be aware of that. Legally you are someone's dad until another dad legally enters the picture and supplants you (for example a stepfather officially adopting a child) or you have irrefutable paperwork saying you're excused. By the way, legal status pre-empts biological status. The guy who is married to the person who gives birth is legally on the hook for child support and caretaking of any child produced during the union unless there's a paternity suit and a bunch of rigamarole. This may appear unfair to the casual observer but family law is designed to prioritize the survival and wellbeing of the child above the rights of the parents and potential parents. So a freelance sperm donor without REALLY good paperwork is on the hook, absolutely.

[thesirenisles]

10 girly comfort movie ideas🌸

fashion, aesthetic, & a bit of fun

Monte Carlo (2011)

Sex & The City 1 & 2 (2008) (R)

Catwoman (2004)

Twitches 1&2 (2005)

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

John Tucker Must Die (2006)

Perfect Stranger (2007) (R)

Burlesque (2010)

The Sweetest Thing (2002) (R)

Bring It On 1-3 & 5 (2000)

Bonus:

Life Size (2000)🌸

Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)🌸

[wh0-is-lily]

Eileen (2023) Director: William Oldroyd

[heartguardss]

I never let you go, let you go

[ayeeeebri]

I definitely would agree tho😙

[askmovieslate]

Seriously though, do you think Disney knew?

This movie was made at a weird time for the studio, with them phasing out traditional animation in favor of computer animation. They also were trying to cater to their young adult audience, which is why the movie has this very out of place...how to put in a non-crass way? It has a very "F-the-cops" kind of vibe, as Mae Borowski would put it. In hindsight it's very cringe worthy.

Movie looks pretty, though. Pretty, and fun, it moves fast, despite the weird tone the characters are likeable, their designs are wonderful, and the James Newton Howard music is excellent.

It's a bummer it was such a box office catastrophe.

[tobygetsgirlz]

why terrifier 1 was actually a good movie

I think I see a lot of people saying the terrifier movie (specifically the first one) was bad but this is why the movie is actually fucking amazing.

the special effects. this is pretty obvious and honestly not many people know this but the first movie had a budget of $35,000 now when you think of all the amazing gore this is insane. I think people forget this little detail that the gore was done with a very low budget

Lets talk about the plot problem. Yes the plot is messy in the first but lets not forget...Its a slasher. slashers have never been well known for their plot. sometimes its fun to watch a horror movie that's just suspenseful and crazy.

This first movie was a start up that never even reached its goal AND it was used to introduce Damien Leones practical effect work and further Develop the character Art the clown.

finally to keep this short I will say there is so many amazing comedic moments. when you think of this you may think of art on the tricycle that was far to small for him but in general art the clown is almost relatable. his reactions to dumb things characters do and his reactions to the world around him are sometimes so human you forget he got stabbed int he head and sort of just got back up...

theres so many other reasons but I feel I write wayyyy to much about this stuff and honestly I should be doing homework right now so... yeah. (and trust me Ill talk about his movie again.and probably review it)

terrifier series for the win!

[scarabjewels]

Corpse Bride had the PERFECT ending.

SUE ME.

The number of people who wanted Emily to be Victor's endgame, with myself included, have a similar issue or lack of growth with Emily's arc throughout the movie.

Clinging onto the idea of love, to the point of forcing it onto someone. I'm calling us and her delusional.

She also went through a sort of roundabout response of the stages of grief: grieving her life.

Shock and Denial

She knows she's dead, and yet she delusionally believed she was still a young bride waiting for her groom

Emily was murdered and Barkis, her now ex- fiance, took her dreams with her life. My theory is that after she died, she had to grieve his betrayal first. She probably coped by clinging on to her dream, convinced that she had just found the wrong guy, and that the right one would come eventually. While we see she is popular in the underworld, she was not able to find a young enough suitor or one that sparked her interest.

She also exhibited extremely idealistic scenarios of her finding the right guy. Hey, the girl was murdered the last time she took a chance on an impulse. While her pattern of falling hard fast still exists, she probably convinced herself that Victor was better because she had no dowry to present for him to take and leave her, yet he still asked her to mary him (despite being an accident), so it must be "true love". This is the kind of behaviour a loottt of people with reoccuring similar toxic relationships tell themselves, I know because I was one of them.

Emily was our hot dead girl with the delulu issues. She was in denial of the reality of the situation, even when she was aware of this.

Pain and Guilt

Notice how when Emily has a fit about Victor seeing Victoria, she said the words "you should've thought of that before you asked me to marry you" and he responds "don't you see it was a mistake, I would never marry you". The silent blinking and realization of Victor's lack of tact, out of so much frustration, and Emily's small glimpse of what kind of person she had become, was perfection. She obviously knows she was holding him captive, but she was denying the truth until the wedding. It was painful for Emily, but her reality is so twisted that she can only see her pain before Victor.

The essence of guilt came when she was given the option to poison Victor to forever be tethered to his marriage to her. With guilt, there is kindness, and her kind heart shined before guilt. She couldn't bear to kill him for her dreams because she genuinely cared and loved him still. Another time was the wedding scene. She had second thoughts and finally realized that she was taking Victor and Victoria's chance.

Anger and Bargaining

When she caught Victor seeing Victoria, not only was she pained, she was blaming and angry at Victor, as in her eyes he was cheating on her, when all he did was to escape from her, because duh, he is held against his will.

Going back to their argument, while Emily felt jealous and envy, she subtly wished she was alive. In the lamenting musical scene "Tears to Shed," she accepted her death a long time ago but envied Victoria's main asset that she can never compete with: being alive.

Depression to upward turn

Emily's lamentation of being dead and that Victor will eventually leave her, being lonely again, was evident during the Tears to Shed song and just before the infamous chemistry induced piano scene.

While we see her depressed, she had calmed down and was able to be serenaded into a neutral mood again.

Emily was in this stage completely when Victor and her were gathering everyone and getting ready to get married upstairs.

Reconstruction and working through

Emily was in her full delusions of her dreams finally come true, but her reconstruction stage flashed when she was delivering her vow and saw Victoria watching.

My own little headcanon is that she saw herself in Victoria, and she saw herself as Barkis, taking her dreams away.

She stopped Victor drinking the poisoned wine and finally spoke her truth, the raw truth that Emily is seeing the reality she is in and what she has become.

Her dreams were taken, and now she is the one taking from someone else, and she hated it. She loved Victor so much, but he wasn't hers. She brought the Vs (keehee) together, deciding to call off the marriage.

Now, facing her past is probably her final stage of reconstruction. She meets her ex-fiance and is able to protect Victor from him in the midst of the two men's showdown. She was absolutely disgusted and hated his presence, pointing the sword and telling him to get out.

The karma probably hit best when Barkis drank the poisoned wine, his last words showing how full he is of himself. He was dealt with by Emily's underworld friends soon after he died.

Acceptance

While Victor and Victoria were finally in each other's arms, Emily smiled with bittersweetness and began to walk away. Victor stopped her, attempting to keep his promise. Emily reassured he already did. He set her free, and now it is her turn to set him free.

She literally walked the aisle alone. She accepted the truth, the past, and the present. Her only future was to move on.

As a sign of moving on, she tossed the bouquet that eventually landed on Victoria's hands. With her last breath, she bursted into butterflies. Finally free.

My Conclusion

I think a major theme in Emily's arc is letting her delusion get the best of her, almost portrayed humanely. Just an observation, aside from the art style of Tim Burton, Emily looked lowkey deranged? While Victor looked tired and scared, Victoria had wonder and curiosity, and Emily looked low key crazy and held on to what little sanity she had left. I think the reason why I couldn't see that aspect as much is because she also looked so beautiful, sounded sweet, and looked delicate, albeit being a red flag and literally a horrifying, decaying reanimated corpse.

Corpse Bride really was Emily's story, told through Victor's perspective. Let's be honest, if it was from Emily's perspective, it would be similar to 500 days of summer, an unreliable narration from a delusional protagonist. That is the difference between her, Victor, and Victoria. They saw what was actually going on.

Victor was already a developed character, in my opinion. He was just a young man living with anxiety. He liked Victoria at first sight and wanted to get married. He was kind and musically inclined. He was much more of an established person than say a character needing another character for their development like Joel from Eternal Sunshine (that's a read and I meant it). So was Victoria, she was a young woman who wanted to get married, looked forward to getting to know her betrothed more, and was quite outspoken and courageous. They were just bothe caught up in an arc. Emily, albeit the different girl, was probably the one who needed a manic pixie dream man, and she got Victor. She really needed character development.

One more theme the movie has is what a broken heart can do to you. Emily loved and was betrayed. She clung to an impossible dream even after death. Victor saw the opportunity for a rebound the minute he heard Victoria was going to get married to another man. Victoria was in total shock when she was going to be betrothed to someone else and accepted to help her parents, but also stood up for herself from Barrkus the minute he showed his intentions of marrying her.

I really loved Emily realising what was happening, it took her a good minute but she got there. I also loved that Emily and Victoria never got into some kind of argument or showdown, seriously I feel like that would have happened in early to mid 2010 fantasy romances, ehem Twilight (I hate the story and the characters but it was entertaining hot garbage). It was a graceful story of love and let go.

I'm sure we have a collective head canon of Victor's and Victoria's first daughter to be named Emily.

[poppletonink]

FILM REVIEW: Roman Holiday

★★★★★ - 5 stars

"What the world needs is a return to sweetness and decency."

During her grand tour of Europe, an adventurous, young princess escapes into Rome during the middle of the night. While she explores the city, she falls in love with an American journalist.

Roman Holiday is a light-hearted, adorable romance with a bittersweet ending. It takes the viewers by the hand and guides them down the streets of an ancient and tremendously cultural city. Be prepared to consult TripAdvisor, because, after an hour and fifty-eight minutes of watching Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck's dazzling love affair, you will most certainly feel the need to travel. The film encapsulates the beauty of Rome through a classy and glamorous lens - black and white in colour and yet brimming with emotion. It shows the human desire for thrilling escapades and freedom from the constraints imposed upon us - be it through work, school or, as in the film, our living situation. Regardless of whether riding on a motorbike, daring fate at the La Bocca della Verità and eating gelato in Rome is your idea of freedom, these actions incite a hunger for adventure within viewers.

This cult classic film plays with many tropes including, but not limited to, 'the important haircut', 'the bet', and 'the rebellious princess'. While many tropes are used to fuel the drama and plot of the film, others add to its cathartic and fun nature. The most notable use of a trivial trope is when Princess Ann has her hair cut into a pixie cut - though an act of rebellion and freedom, it shows spontaneity and relatability in her character, making Roman Holiday even more entertaining to watch.

Having defined the very nature of the genre over the past seven decades, Roman Holiday is a must-watch romantic comedy and perfect for a vintage film binge.