Movies (recently seen)

[Vesnic]

Oh I was just saying sometimes what movie you like and what movies I like are vastly different and I was being whimsical about it. (Or I thought I was)

I didn't think you like Klaus Kinski movies though. Or is that one an exception?

Oh I see, haha! Mm yes, crazy old Klaus, well... I like the stories about him and Werner Herzog trying to kill each other, and certainly I rank Aguirre very highly. I'm ashamed to say I haven't yet seen Fitzcarraldo. As a reader of German literature, I have no excuse not to watch Woyzeck either, although another version was recently made which updated the story and featured a protagonist who was much easier on the eyes. Unfortunately, it all kind of deteriorated into a politically correct morality play about Turkish immigrants.

For me, Kinski is and always will be, the Vampyre. He and Max Schreck were the only ones to get it right. In the folk tales and oral traditions, vampires are ugly as fuck, decomposed and much more monster than human. They're supposed to be abominations for crying out loud, not sparkle-spewing My Little Ponies from Assfuck's Afterschool Special!

[End Master]

For me, Kinski is and always will be, the Vampyre. He and Max Schreck were the only ones to get it right. In the folk tales and oral traditions, vampires are ugly as fuck, decomposed and much more monster than human. They're supposed to be abominations for crying out loud, not sparkle-spewing My Little Ponies from Assfuck's Afterschool Special!

There's also Cobra Verde, the last movie Kinski and Herzog worked on together. He's a bandit/slave trader/daughter defiler (not his own this time) and all around villain protagonist in that one.

He's a bit wilder too, but then he was acting more out of control on the set as well, so it's predictable that it translated into the movie. Doesn't hurt it though.

And yes, I agree they should have more ugly monstrous type vampires in movies, but I've been sort of burned out on vampires for years. (Or the many variations of them)

Anyway, I saw Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. I liked it. Probably heresy saying it, but I like this reboot series better than the original series.

Not sure why they really needed Gary Oldman though, his character isn't in it all that much and they probably could've gotten away with a lesser actor in the role mainly because all the human characters are pretty dull. Or at best they're very average.

Basically you don't get very invested in them and they're sort of just needed to move the story along and provide conflict. To a certain extent I think this is deliberate though since the focus is more on the apes and how they're evolving. They're the ones that are in the position to take over as the next supreme species. Humanity is on the decline, empires rise and fall and all that so the humans aren't all that important.

It also helps that the movie had a cool villain. (He's duel wielding machine guns on horseback while riding headlong into a hail of bullets and a wall of fire for fuck's sake)

As far as the scenery goes, it was a suitably nice looking post apocalyptic landscape. Reminded me a bit of "Last of Us" with everything overgrown and nature regaining its dominance over manmade structures.

Yep, this is currently my favorite movie overloaded with CGI effects. Avatar and its blue furry faggotry can get fucking nuked from orbit. Which actually would make a sequel worth watching, god I couldn't stand those fucking Na'vi.

Fuck the Transformers too. Always hated that cartoon.

[Vesnic]

Avatar and its blue furry faggotry can get fucking nuked from orbit. Which actually would make a sequel worth watching, god I couldn't stand those fucking Na'vi.

Hahaha! Oh God yes, PLEASE, LORD, I would pay good money to see those attenuated eco-smurfs get blasted out of the galaxy! I would be at the premiere of that sequel, jumping up and down with a sign reading "Death to the Na'vi" and probably also just in time to get blown up by ELF or some shit. Not that they patronize big Hollywood movies, but you get the drift.

If Klaus Kinski came back from the grave and wanted to seduce me, I wouldn't say yes. But I wouldn't say no either.

Hey, that gives me an idea. Let's play the "Dead Celebs I Wanna Bone" game. This question is open to all non-virgins (Sorry Drako!) who know what goes where, and who have seen enough films in their lifetime to really have a good idea of who's who.

My top 3 dead dudes of celluloid are:

1. Anthony Perkins - always liked his gently deranged good looks. Loved him in Psycho of course, but also appreciated him in Friendly Persuasion. Extra points for converting a mostly-gay man to the other side!

2. Claude Laydu - only passed away recently, so maybe he's not yet experienced in the art of ghostly seduction, but I'll have plenty of patience for this sweet soul who won my heart as a tormented priest trying to do good amongst the evil cretins of a small French village. Also in the "Father Fuckable" category is of course Jason Miller, AKA Fr. Damian from The Exorcist.

3. Errol Flynn - Well, duh. And if you don't immediately know precisely why, then you're really not up on your Golden Age gossip and all I can do is heartily recommend his autobiography, My Wicked Wicked Ways.

[End Master]

As strange as it might be, I cannot think of three dead actresses that I would want to make sweet necrophiliac love to. Or rather I can't think of three based on personality or even their movie roles, either because they didn't play in anything I liked or I never watched any of their movies to begin with. Hell, I can't even find any suitable B-Movie Scream Queens that are dead yet. (Which is really odd)

Katie jokingly told me I should put down Heather O' Rourke for the lulz, but I had to remind her that as decadent as we all are here at IS, we tend to draw the line at pedo stuff. Besides, Heather was only 12, and even Jerry Lee Lewis waited until his cousin was 13 before marrying her.

Anyway, I suppose if I was going the complete shallow route for looks alone, I could come up with some. So here you go:

1. Aaliyah. More in the musician category than an actress, but she was okay in the two movies she did play in so I'm including her since she technically qualifies. I'm not into her music either, but like I said I brought her back from the dead to fuck her, not to hear her sing.

2. Bettie Page. Again, I'm cheating here since she was more of a pin up girl than an actress, but what the hell.

3. Marilyn Monroe. I don't think I've actually ever seen any of her movies and I don't really have any desire to either, but I'm going with her anyway just to say I fucked Marilyn Monroe, plus she was still alright looking even when she wasn't completely painted up. But obviously when I'm doing her undead ass, she's definitely going to be looking like she did in the pictures because what's the point of going the completely shallow route if I'm not going to be completely shallow?

Yeah, it's probably cliche and not very inventive, but I'm talking about getting my rocks off on a dead woman here.

Now I did think about choosing Jane Mansfield just to be a little different plus she died in a much more METAL way in a gruesome car accident after pissing off Satan, but then I thought why go for a Marilyn wannabe when I can just go for the real one?

So those are the ones I'm having my unholy four-way with.

Let me know when someone like Lucy Lawless, Linnea Quigley and Patricia Arquette dies. I'll have some better answer for you then.

Anyway, I leave you all with this crazy dead bitch:

[Vesnic]

Bettie Page ... Marilyn Monroe ... Jane Mansfield just to be a little different plus she died in a much more METAL way in a gruesome car accident after pissing off Satan, but then I thought why go for a Marilyn wannabe when I can just go for the real one?

Well that's a little weird and unsettling. Just yesterday, immediately before posting here, I was taking one of my many work breaks and out of the blue (or so I believed!) thought I'd pass a few minutes with old Betty Page videos. This led me on one of those extended free-association hopscotch games through Wiki, IMDB and Youtube, where I learned all about the Mansfield/Brody/Lavey love triangle, as well as that "very metal" death-on-the-highway scene, though I already knew about that. Maybe this can all be explained away by the fact that I inputted the suggestion of "Golden Age" of Hollywood, but considering how little any of us here associate with or watch or are inspired by any of these characters, I'm still finding the coincidence rather unsettling. There must be a satanic explanation for it!

So, anybody else? I commend End's choices and I might even make a bid for Jayne myself since you'd rather have the real thing with Marilyn. Tee hee!

[donteatpoop]

A young Audrey Hepburn. mmmmm.... Makes me wish I had a black and white dick.

A young Janet Leigh too.

[End Master]

What about your third choice? Or are you doing Audrey twice?

[Vesnic]

Nothing Personal

4/5 Stars

Urszula Antoniak, the Polish director speaking in English about this Dutch film she shot in Connemara, Ireland, suggested the German word "unheimlich" to describe the desolate yet attractive countryside which functions in this lean story as the third major character. This is a movie about a man, a woman and a place. It is full of silence and an almost physically felt yearning for solitude. A woman abruptly leaves her home in Amsterdam, traveling to Ireland, where she lives as a backpacker and vagabond until she finally finds a place to land. Like Goldilocks inviting herself into the home of the three bears, she insinuates her way into the life of a stranger living in an isolated old home on a lonely island. Between them there is just one important understanding: no personal questions are to be asked, and no personal information offered. Antoniak has likened her film to a haiku, which I think is just right. It is deceptively detailed, drawing most of its power from the spaces between the lines and the silences between two people who, in a certain place and for a certain time, share the most personal of experiences.

[Vesnic]

Blue is the Warmest Color

2.75/5 Stars

Sorry for the double post. No I'm not.

In my corner of reality, there has been quite a bit of hubbub over the last Palme d'Or winner at Cannes, the French film Blue is the Warmest Color, or the Life of Adele, or the One with the Rubber Pussies or LESBIANS, however you know it if you know it at all. Quite surprisingly, it has been uploaded in its entirety to YouTube by multiple users, with subs available in several languages, no commercials and no apparent rush to take them all down. That's how I finally got to see it, since I seem to have a bit of an issue with shelling out actual money to watch queer cinema, which is notoriously self-indulgent and inconsistent in terms of actual artistic merit.

Artistic merit...a strange concept, indeed, but not an entirely subjective one, according to my subjective opinion on the matter. The movie belongs to a long tradition of naturalism, if that's what you call a prosthetic kitten used in the most graphic sex scenes you will see this side of XXX. Is an actress basically just being herself really worthy of such a lofty honor? Is this the natural extension of navel-gazing, where being you as convincingly as you can in a form which is neither documentary nor really truly fiction is the ultimate attainment? How many levels can we fold reflexively back upon ourselves until the entire exercise just becomes unabating masturbation?

Cannes always seems to swing with the times and really I think it's become one of the less legitimate festivals. Of course this film has also received fairly intense critical acclaim across the board, and the reasons offered for why generally focus on the quality of the performances from the two female leads, which are both good, but in radically different ways, or on the close-up and invasive camera work which I think has actually become something of a cliche and in this case was downright Humbert Humbert in its fetishizing of the clueless young filly who doesn't understand her own furry allure. The director has also been named as a real luminary of French film. Okay, great.

It's just that the things which were bad about Blue were truly bad and the things which were good were good, but in a strange, ponderous way. The movie took pains almost immediately to give itself philosophical and psychological underpinnings, literally instructing us through the lessons of Monsieur Whatever in a high school English (well, French) class like none I ever experienced in public school. To see teenagers pontificating on the eternal truths of love is nothing new, but to see them doing it with actual aplomb and something like wisdom was a jarring departure from the general style, striking discordantly where I really think an artful harmony was intended. Maybe people are taking the film far more seriously than they're meant to because this all smacked heavily of irony, tongue-in-cheek knowing humor, the cinematic equivalent of one of the endless bowls of pasta constantly getting slurped up by our unselfconscious horse-toothed heroine, who is nonetheless "one of the most beautiful girls in our class".

None of you are likely to have seen it and I'm hardly endorsing it. Maybe I just have a problem with actresses who can't keep their mouths properly shut in the moments when they're not speaking (Kristen Stewart, anyone?) and I just had to speak out against all those transparently earnest 50-something men vociferously praising this movie for being so very real, just like the lesbian love they knew as youngsters and hey, has anybody seen my tissue box?

[End Master]

I just had to speak out against all those transparently earnest 50-something men vociferously praising this movie for being so very real, just like the lesbian love they knew as youngsters

Lol, sounds like they were all just jackin' it to young girl on girl action.

Anyway I guess I'll stick with Bound as my go to lesbian romance film then.

[End Master]

So after thinking about it, I decided to do what our erudite bonnie lass Ves here did and go watch uploaded movies on Youtube without the need for paying for them.

However unlike Ves, I didn't do it out of a desire to deprive the gay community out of money to fund their decadent lifestyle. No, I'm afraid my reasons were more of a mundane case of the movies I was looking up currently have no proper DVD version for me to purchase let alone a Blu-ray version. The reason for this is because I'm looking up semi-obscure post apocalyptic flicks, grind house horror and other B-movie stuff.

Essentially wallowing in the laziest of writing, the poorest of acting and embracing everything that is wrong with film making, but I digress...

Yes, there are many movies (mostly from the 70s & 80s) that have been deprived of a current tangible media format and the noble endeavor to create one for them has been bafflingly overlooked. I suppose it's a very good thing then that these movies are usually the products of now long dead companies or are so forgotten that nobody even bothers to take them down on Youtube.

Hooray!

I decided to not focus on the poorest of dubbing this time around by avoiding the many many Italian Mad Max rip offs, and stayed true to America because I don't care if she got fat and suffered a brain injury, I still love her and still hit that shit like the fist of an angry god. What can I say? I'm a romantic.

Anyway, I picked a post apocalyptic movie which has long deserved at least a DVD format. It was called A World Gone Wild.

A World Gone Wild stars Bruce Dern playing the old quirky leader of the community of Lost Wells which apparently is one of the only places that still has a natural source of easily accessible water.

The punk/new wave musician Adam Ant plays the soft spoken though still over the top villain who comes to the town with his brainwashed army of religious zealots to spread mayhem and terror because well that's what post apocalyptic cultists do.

Realizing he needs to get help because his town is completely helpless against a bunch of violent cultists, Bruce goes to the closest city to recruit an old friend of his along with any other mercs they can find.

Yes folks, it's essentially Seven Samurai in the nuclear wasteland because who doesn't like seeing alternate versions of that story? I know I liked the scifi version of it called Battle Beyond the Stars, but that's a review for another time!

So back to the movie at hand. Bruce enlists some colorful mercenary types, a tall black dude who runs around in a leotard blowing up shit, a guy dressed like an old fashioned gunsligher, a biker trying his best to look like a Mad Max clone and an off kilter scruffy cannibal. Finally Bruce's friend is played by Michael Pare. Pare is one of those actors that some thought would sky rocket into stardom during the 80s especially after his performance in the underrated Streets of Fire, but for whatever reason, major fame eluded him. It happens like that sometimes, but he seems to have made a decent career from acting, so who's to say he wasn't successful?

Anyway the rest of the movie plays out about how you expect. Villagers get some training, cultists attack, get defeated and retreat, come back for a final battle, some major characters die in the final battle, Adam Ant gets blown up and it rains again after 50 years of not doing so. The end!

As a dead person once said, I don't know art, but I know what I like. And obviously I liked this.

But don't take my word on how good it is (or isn't) you can go watch it on Youtube right now!

[dreamshell]

While we're talking post-apoc sci-fi flicks, have you ever seen America 3000 or Mindwarp, End? I caught the former on a low-budget cable station that seems to specialize in obscure movies and shows from the 60s-90s, while the latter was a late-night find on one of the movie channels.

Not exactly in the same subgenre category, but the Fortress movies are also a guilty pleasure of mine.

[End Master]

I vaguely remember once seeing America 3000, but I don't remember anything specific about it. Until I read the description I figured it involved gathering a supply of water, fuel or the last fertile woman though. (Most PA movies do)

I do remember seeing a movie called "Exterminators in the Year 3000" which did involve the usual water gathering premise.

Mindwarp I seem to have missed completely though. Never even heard of that one before and considering it has Bruce Campbell and Angus "The Tall Man" Scrimm, I'm not sure how the hell I missed it.

I've seen both of the Fortress movies with the Highlander dude and I thought they were okay too. If you want another futuristic prison escape movie, I'd recommend No Escape with Ray Liotta.

Actually that one is more of a set "20 minutes into the future" theme and they dump all the high risk convicts on a remote jungle island (monitored from satellite) where they just have to fend for themselves rather than bothering with keeping them in a high tech prison.

[dreamshell]

Pretty sure Bigfoot is a fairly integral secondary character in America 3000. And "The President" is some sort of mythical figure to the wastelanders.

When I saw you mentioned Liotta, I first assumed you were talking about a different movie, Control, but apparently I haven't seen the one you mentioned. That plot's a pretty common one, too, but I'll keep it in mind, thanks.

[Vesnic]

I have it on good authority: Sean Bean has a small peen.