FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES (1969) *****

I wish the whole country would sink underwater.

An astounding piece of work. Obviously the terminology / levels of understanding are very much Of Their Time™ (or are confused by cultural barriers), but everything else still points to a potential future. A dazzling one at that.

The visuals function like how my mind’s eye works – things popping up at odd times, commenting on / inspired by what I’m seeing or feeling. When we finally get to see it, the underground movie within the movie was like a proto-Japanoise experience. Another bit of music in the dance freakout scene might as well be Les Rallizes Dénudés. Maybe it is!

In regards to the screening I attended – the juxtaposition between this and all the trailers and adverts beforehand was quite something. The commercials were nothing but pure late-capitalism desperation, and the pompous trailers were just a guide to things that weren’t as good as this. Digital Cinema Media’s 15-years-past-the-sell-by-date dubstep jingle cannot compete with “O Du Lieber Augustin” played through a rapidly oscillating tremolo pedal.

Frightening! The cursed destiny of man. What a composite of cruelty and laughter! Let’s look forward to the next film. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

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ENO (2024) *****

My god, I needed to see this today. Marvellous, life-affirming.

This has already been referred to, but at my screening I got to see the bit where he tells a Grammarly ad on Youtube to shut up. And I liked where he was listening back to a microcassette of himself saying the same thing over and over again with slight variations, and absolutely pissing himself with laughter at it.

Does that count as spoilers? Because the version you see might not have any of that…

Oh, and I got a kick out of seeing today’s date flash on the screen at the start!

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ROBOCOP (1987) *****

Thank god the branch of Picturehouse I saw this at had the volume up so high I wasn’t able to hear the shrieking laugh of the tit in one of the front rows for most of it. Something set him off just before the opening logos and it was like having the actual “Does it hurt?” character from this film in the audience. His mates all shushed him, and from that point until the end credits the gunfire throughout the movie drowned him out. Although at the end he started being a pest again by yelling out the names of that main cast as they flashed up on screen, but the movie was over then. “NANCY ALLEN! RONNY COX!”

This screening also had the politest “will you shut the fuck up” interaction I’ve ever witnessed. Some guy was talking a bit too loudly at one point early on, and another guy turned around and lightly chided him. First bloke just goes “Ah, sorry” and then stays mostly quiet, apart from some whispering, which again was mostly inaudible due to the gunfire.

…Oh yeah, the movie. It was good to see it up on the big screen all in 4K and everything, although there was an annoying minor glitch when halfway through the film there was a brief pause at what would have been a reel change in the original – I think the projector was switching to a different file or different hard drive before continuing. I know that isn’t the sort of detail you’re meant to share on Letterboxd but fuck it, I’m going to talk about the minutiae of the modern day cinema experience if I want. Maybe this could be “my thing” on this site.

(Note to Digital Cinema Media, who are in charge of the adverts: You are a shit company and you have wasted roughly an hour and a half of my time over the last month or so.)

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MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (1988) *****

I’d sort of seen bits of this before, but today I saw it from start to finish on the big screen (subtitled version). An absolute delight. It’s so different to the usual shit that gets chucked out as “children’s entertainment”! Someone’s already brought this up, but yeah, none of the cliched souless hogwash you get from Disney and Dreamworks nowadays.

One odd thing about this re-release, though – one of the distributing companies or whoever that had their logos at the start was called “ANONYMOUS CONTENT”. It was a really absurdly basic logo done in a standard Windows font with only the faintest bit of animation. It caused a bit of a surprised chuckle from several people at the screening I was at. Apparently they’re a US production company who were formed in 1999, and have made mainly music videos and reality TV shows. What the hell did they have to do with the UK re-release of Totoro? Hmm…

[CATBUS CHANGES ITS DESTINATION TO “ANONYMOUS CONTENT”, BOUNDS OFF OVER THE HORIZON]

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HARDWARE WARS (1978) ***

Possibly the first ever Star Wars parody, made when the first movie (or the fourth one, technically) was still in cinemas. I can see where some of the negative reviews are coming from; it’s not hilarious, sure, but I’ve always found this to be really charming. Some of the special effects are actually pretty decent for a no-budget short made in 1977 / 78.

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EXCALIBUR (1981) *****

Absolutely absurd, and yet I believed in every moment. Even the fact that Hyacinth Bucket’s husband was in a major role didn’t pull me out of the story, nor did recognising all the various well-known faces. And yes, this movie’s version of Merlin is definitive, whatever you may think of this film.

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PULP FICTION (1994) **

There’s a lot I could say about the way I thought this was amazing back in the 90s, and the way it mostly just irritated and bored me this time round (to the extent I found myself looking at the locations around the main action more than what I was meant to be focusing on). However, the only thing I can really be bothered putting into words properly is this: Why was that Columbian woman driving a taxi without shoes? Okay, so we all know the real-world reason why, but I started to think of Alan Partridge going all the way to Dundee while stress-eating Toblerones.

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THE ITALIAN JOB (1969) ****

Saw this as part of National Cinema Day here in the UK – the ticket was only £4.

Despite certain elements either being – I guess I have to use that word – dated (to put it mildly), and others being retrospectively ruined a bit by being claimed by arseholes, it’s still an incredible film with one of the finest car chases ever.

Had no idea somehow that Quincy Jones was involved with the soundtrack, and was surprised to see a young pre-Doomwatch Robert Powell as one of the drivers. I also didn’t know that this was written by Troy Kennedy Martin, the guy responsible for Edge Of Darkness! And it’s very surreal to see scenes with Caine acting alongside Benny Hill. (“…Take your flowers and get in the car.”)

But above everything else, I wish I had Lorna’s wardrobe…

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BRIGSBY BEAR (2017) ½

This should have been a psychological horror, or a really really depressing drama that ends very badly for the main character. And it’s almost as if someone actually tried making one of those aforementioned ideas, but a bunch of studio heads demanded “changes”. Except! This is clearly a labour of love, a passion project that everyone involved really believed in… and that’s possibly the most disturbing aspect of it all.

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SILENCE OF THE HAMS (1994) *

A fascinatingly bad imitation of Mel Brooks / ZAZ parody movies, including an awful lot of very well-known faces. A lot of the jokes don’t even make sense, and the ones that do are executed staggeringly badly. 

There are also sight gags that don’t work properly because they’re not quite exaggerated / weird / unexpected enough, plus there’s all sorts of odd line readings and acting choices from otherwise professional actors (and directors!) that I imagine are due to the hopeless script, and its hopeless director.

I was actually quite gripped by this for the first half hour, simply on account of how weird its constant failures were (the scene with Police Academy’s Hightower! What the fuck even was that?) and then it just started to wear me down. I confess that I skimmed through a large chunk of it, but I don’t think I really missed anything.

The plot quickly devolves from a take off of Silence Of The Lambs into a general proto-Scary Movie shitfest, and the ending is just a big heap of whatever. Apparently this film also functioned as some kind of tax loss, which if true makes a lot of sense… a lot more than the average gag in this movie.

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BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE (2024) *

PRE-REVIEW COMMENT MADE A COUPLE OF DAYS AFTER I ORIGINALLY POSTED THIS:

I was in a really, really bad mood over the weekend.

Sat through 10 agonising minutes of adverts which felt like capitalism itself was trying to fend off a panic attack. Then there were another 10 minutes of trailers for things that looked like total bullshit and that were all edited the same. Then some of the extra fucking nonsense at the end of the pre-show was accidentally repeated multiple times, because someone didn’t check the digital projector’s playlist or whatever it is they use now.

Then the film actually started. I liked the opening credits. Felt like the original, and for a moment I thought this might be good. However, the movie had the audacity to continue. I started to feel the same irritation that the adverts and trailers had put me in. As soon as it was revealed that Lydia had some sort of TV show now I felt my heart sink. Can’t explain why, it just felt stupid.

Dickhead producer character who wanted to marry Lydia was a dickhead in a weirdly outdated way. Lots of new age talk that was last topical in… 1998, maybe? Odd lack of imagination in all the dead character designs. Monica thingy looked vaguely spooky and was attractive but didn’t work as a villain. The plague flashback was the only curveball this thing had and for that it gets a whole star rather than half.

They had a fucking shrine to the man who played the dad in the original film! Whenever I see a movie with that pervert in I have to try and not think about the terrible crimes he committed. They had his smiling face on a gravestone in front of a group of young children singing that Day Oh song. Why would you do that, Tim?

Catherine O’Hara put actual effort in and Jenna Ortega was also present.

Sudden inexplicable stop motion part to portray the dad’s death. Alright. Didn’t really work, but alright. Beetlejuice has a full on bio-excorcist company now. Okay. Sure. Micheal Keaton looks much the same as he did in 1988 in the same role, thanks to the way the character is as much as the makeup. That’s not an interesting observation. It was fortunate for you though, Tim. Tim? It was fortunate, wasn’t it?

Two people in the audience were the people who laughed at the jokes in the film, and then only at some of them. The terrible AI-redolent script couldn’t even at least consistently entertain them. Not many people in the theatre for something on its opening weekend! Tim, did you hear about this? Not many people in the fucking theatre on the opening fucking weekend.

Jenna Ortega rode her bike into a tree and I assumed she was now dead but she was okay and got up and found herself a boyfriend and Dostoevsky was mentioned and I decided to leave.

There were four walkouts, and I was one of them. The only thing I got out of it was a regular Pepsi. If I were to just leave a standard one line review then I think it would be “I felt nothing”. The rating would be the same.

I don’t even feel angry or anything, really. I know this has sounded really angry but I actually just feel a big load of Okay Well Whatever I Guess I Saw A Film And It Was Like That. Well, I guess I was angry at the adverts, but who isn’t these days?

Yeah, so “I felt nothing” really does sum it all up. I liked typing that out, so I’ll type it out a couple more times. I felt nothing. I felt nothing. I felt nothing. Didn’t copy and paste that, did it all manually. That was three times instead of a couple of times. I felt nothing, Tim.

P.S., ALSO ADDED A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER:

I told you I was in a bad mood.

The twist halfway through or so is actually a pretty decent one, I’ll give it that. Still a lot of problems with it though, and to be honest I don’t think I’d change the rating. I can see how I might – might – bump it up to two stars, but other things keep occuring to me about this guff and drag it back down. Nah, I’ll keep it at one.

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NO SMOKING IN THIS THEATER (1982) **

Note: This is a very short film – a pre-show trailer of sorts, in fact – whose subject is explained in the title. It was made for the famous NuArt Theatre, who have a history of making bespoke stuff like this, and this one is hosted by none other than John Waters.

I was expecting something funnier than an early draft of that one Bill Hicks routine: youtu.be/t_wVZXLW7vo

But, two stars for the way he breathes in the smoke at the end and holds it. Also there’s a HD scan of this on Youtube now! The uploader put his logo in the corner of it like a massive twat, but still, it’s there in HD! On Youtube!

Some further additional info: basically this is a no-smoking ad made during a time when it was still seen as cool or somehow being against “The Man” to keep smoking, despite that “The Man” would have been quite happy having people continue to smoke like chimneys but were being forced out of business by doctors pointing out how slow-motion lethal all of it was.

Doesn’t matter now, because those same companies are now pushing vapes, which are thought of as somehow safer or something, despite some rather worrying evidence that any supposed benefits are also nonsense.

Say, did you know that Malcolm Gladwell was a one-time tobacco industry plant who was paid handsomely during the 90s to write all sorts of horseshit that plays into the same attitude as this film? Now you know… and knowing, is of course, half the battle.

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FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S DRACULA’S FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S MEGALOPOLIS (2024) ½

First review, pre-watching it:

I don’t think I’m ever going to actually see this – if I wanted to watch a load of regressive confused neoliberal faff, I’d just pick a random Adam Curtis doc – but the trailer for this thing has the early 70s American Zoetrope logo at the start of it, looking all grainy and resolutely un-upscaled, just conventionally resized. I liked that, at least.

Second review, having actually seen it:

I was the only person in the audience, which they moved from one of the bigger screens to a much dinkier one. I’m not sure what point someone was meant to walk up and lipsync some lines from an actor, because again I was the only person in there. [The following added after checking…] Apparently that’s IMAX only. Fuck IMAX because a cinema screen doesn’t need to be that fucking big. Anyway…

This is bad and terrible and confused and all over the place, but fuck me if one of the death scenes in this isn’t one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a movie released this year. It’s just a shame that it was meant to be serious. Horrible, horrible, horrible. A disaster for the ages – a really stupid, easily preventable disaster, like that Soviet satellite that everyone just forgets about.

Also the American Zoetrope logo was still nice and fuzzy and non-upscaled at the start.

More additional thoughts: My lord, this was a mess! The amount of film critics who are bending over backwards to paint this as some kind of noble failure is embarassing. It’s just plain shit, and as implied in the above review, often unintentionally funny. At least that’s when it’s not also being staggeringly boring, and in those moments I entertained myself by tapping out an Amen break on a water bottle.

It’s also not a massively entertaining failure like The Room – that is a movie that is consistently enjoyable in its badness, wheras this is a convoluted mess that’s more interesting to talk about than to actually watch. In a weird way I don’t regret having seen it, as I felt I needed to as someone who is really into movies… but it’s also something which I cannot actually recommend to anyone but the most hardcore of bad-movie-watchers. And even then, you’d be better off with, I dunno… Low Blow or something.