I thought I was going to watch the Oscar nominated animated shorts, but it turns out that theaters don’t honor tickets for a Monday show on a Tuesday. Weird.
So I watched this instead, and it was a heap of fun. I enjoyed playing “Hey, that’s that old guy I know… but young!”
This was the obvious fake poster for a movie about a guy wearing a white suit:
Last year I learned that there are special screenings of all the nominated short film categories. I went again this year, and… these didn’t do much for me, especially compared to last year’s nominees. Shorts should be the place where people make unexpected decisions, and these really don’t do that.
Mastodon has stopped showing the front page featured image, so I’m sticking it here so it shows up:
There is a man in this movie who does not remain silent. The main character watches him and nervously smokes cigarettes. Look, I know short films by design are exercises in eliminating as many details as possible without breaking the story, but this cuts out important details and then gives them back in the synopsis. If your movie requires specific research to make sense, you’ve probably cut too much.
I’m also aware that short films thrive on ambiguous endings, but this one ends like it’s the first episode of a TV series.
This movie also has an ambiguous ending, but it works. My favorite of the five; it won’t win. Note to self: go see Companion.
This felt like the successor to last year’s Red, White and Blue; a serious and important subject told in a forced and melodramatic way. It’s the better of the two shorts, though.
Another important story told generically. You’ll know so much of the story ahead f time you’ll wonder if you’re clairvoyant.
Since this is a collection of five unrelated shorts I didn’t make a parody poster, but I did throw together this:
There’s a thing on the Mastodon decentralized social network called Monsterdon, where people choose a cheesy old monster movie , watch it at the same time, and live comment on it. I don’t participate that often, but after the heaviness of No Other Land , the Hammer Films movie The Gorgon was exactly what I needed.
In a small European city that seems to exist in both the 1750s and the 1960s, a series of mysterious deaths has been occurring over the previous five years, The coroner declares they are all caused by heart failure, even though there’s a subtle clue that it might be something else: the bodies have all turned to stone. Could it be related to the mysterious woman who had a strange affliction around the same time the deaths started? I’ll never tell. Also: I learned that turning to stone starts with gray pimples on your forehead. Maybe it could be prevented with a little benzoyl peroxide.
This movie’s poster is a classic example of “You’ll get it if you see the reference poster.”
Basel Adra records his life protesting as the Israeli army slowly but intently – even gleefully – destroys his village in Palestine. The soldiers destroy schools and homes, drive people to live in caves, and murder and cripple the people of his village, all without any sign of care or remorse. A stunning document of the cruelty humans are capable of inflicting on each other.
See it if you can – it’s struggling to find distribution, despite near-universal praise.
I made a (slightly) alternate version of the poster, but this is not a movie that should be parodied.
SPOILERS FOR A 65 YEAR OLD FILM BELOW.
I’m sure every scene in this played out as Hitchcock intended when it was released in 1958, but every time I’ve watched it the audience howls at the some of the nutty things Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie Ferguson says and does, including trying to solve every problem with brandy and forcing the woman he loves (after dating her for a few days) to completely change her appearance to look like the dead woman he loved before her. It’s a bonkers film, but it’s very watchable.
Also: I’m much more familiar with San Francisco now, so it was fun to be able to recognize locations.
Really dumb fake poster for this one (unlike my previous 100% brilliant creations). Whatever. I was never going to top the original Saul Bass poster.
Now I’m off to rub olive oil on my rubber plant leaves.
I saw three movies in the last four days. The first had a budget of $200. The second cost $100,000. This one has a reported budget of $180 million (but with all the reshoots it’s probably higher). This is proof that there is no correlation between movie cost and movie quality. Is this movie better than Who Killed Captain Alex? From a purely technical standpoint, sure. Is it nine hundred thousand times better? No. And it’s nowhere near as good as Tangerine, let alone being 1800 times better.
This movie seems to exist to tie up dangling threads that most viewers will either have forgotten or never seen. Do you remember the Celestial Island created when the Eternals stopped a cosmic egg at the center of the Earth from fully developing? Or when Hulk blood dripped into a guy’s head? Or even when the Falcon became Captain America after having an adventure with Bucky? I man, I do, but I’m enough of a nerd to have read the original comics. (Side question for nerds: Why do they call it Celestial Island? Did someone tell them that the big creature was called a Celestial?)
Also fun: the movie is built like a mystery, but what should have been a big reveal at the end of the film is spoiled by every single piece of advertising. Good job, marketing team! Harrison Ford applauds your out of the box thinking.
My original plan was to make this into a romance like The Notebook, but then the original of this popped up and it was too simple to resist.
This movie had a budget 500 times the size of the last one I saw: A hundred grand! A fortune!
Sean Baker sure is good at making movies that jump into conflicting emotions without losing track of the story.
I live less than ten miles from where this was shot. I’ve walked those exact blocks many times. I can’t tell you how many times I drove past the doughnut shop at the center of this movie and made a joke about it being Donut Time.
Side note: RIP Donut Time. I believe I might have actually been inside once. I hope your current life as Danny Trejo’s doughnut shop is going well.
Today’s poster parody felt like the obvious choice.
On the one hand, this movie is terrible. On the other, it’s also excellent.
Shot for about 200 bucks by a bunch of people in a village in Uganda, it’s a faithful adaptation of a big budget action blockbuster that also gleefully mocks everything about the genre, including itself. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a movie that came preloaded with its own heckler audio track. My favorite bit of low budget ingenuity/ glorious nonsense is the bad guy with the giant tommy-gun that’s made out of a chunk of wood with a pan attached to the bottom who has a bandolier of bullets made from sharpened twigs.
I don’t know that I need to see it again, but I’m glad I saw it once. If you watch it, heed the words of the narrator: expect the unexpectable!
The fake poster was a bit of a challenge since there is not one single decent quality frame in the film, but I embraced the spirit of the film and made do with what was available. The reference poster is for a fairly recent film that had a famous director and won some big awards, but the poster wasn’t a standout. Reference movie title in the alt text.
It’s hard to talk about this movie without giving away the different take it has on how to capture a ghost story, so I’m not going to try. Spoilers for that below. I won’t spoil any of the actual story, but if you want to be surprised by Soderbergh’s latest way of Soderberghing, now is the time to look away.
All good? Cool.
Soderbergh’s approach is to tell a ghost story from the point of view of the ghost. Every scene is a single shot from the ghost’s perspective. For the most part it works. The movie really only breaks when things happen that are beyond things that would happen in the real world; shaking tables are a lot more believable than floating objects.
As for the actual story: It’s pretty predictable- especially since there are a couple of important plot points that were extremely telegraphed- but the cast is watchable enough to let that slide.
Today’s fake poster is only the slightest of genre shifts. I could easily see a similar poster being actually used. This version, however, wouldn’t stand a ghost of a chance.
Not every movie has to be The Brutalist. Sometimes the right movie is a low stakes comedy where crazy situations happen but you’re not worried because you know it’s going to work out for the right people; a movie where people repeatedly get into bad situations, and when they try to get out of them they fall into something worse until everything falls apart- which somehow is exactly what needs to happen to fix everything.
Does this movie really make sense? No. Is it lighthearted fun with charming leads? Absolutely.
And is it bad that it’s only February and I’m stretching to find reasonable posters to parody? Maybe.
