The Bookie

I read them a couple summers ago - by far the most disappointing finale to a trilogy that I've ever encountered. Not that the first two were great by any means, it's basically YA fiction that copies other better takes on the concept (The Lottery, The Long Walk, Battle Royale), but very entertaining with some vividly imagined set pieces. That third book though, what an absolute steaming turd. Half is basically just whatever her name is moping around all emo-like, then it's like the author remembered stuff needed to happen so she just started killing off every character for no real reason. And to make it even worse, there's no actual hunger games. At least it warned me to save my time with the movie(s!).

Couple more ep's through Stranger Things. It's getting a bit better. At the very least I'm hooked enough to want to know what happens next. Really like the DIY Wheel of Fortune Ouija Board (Ouija of Fortune?) More of that kind of thing pls. So, in addition to old Stephen King and 80s stuff like The Goonies, I think they're cribbing from internet memes as well. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if that was the initial pitch - take some internet creepy-pasta stuff and cast it back in the golden age of horror. But I don't know, it's fun summer fluff, at least of a different variety. I think if this were coming out in the fall with a bunch of actual good movies competing for my eyeballs it would have lost me, but at least it's better than, idk, Sharknado or whatever sludge usually trickles out at this time of year. edit - oh and I'm convinced now that Winona Ryder is indeed intentionally camping it up. She's shown she can really act in the past, so, top marks. I don't who the actor playing the sheriff is but he's good too, as is Token Black Kid.

yeah I'll keep going as well but more due to lazy summertime / not much else to watch these days. I def don't dislike it - it's near pitch perfect w the 80s style - i just haven't found any substance in it. Hoping for a twist or something to really kick it into gear.

Same. I tried two episodes of it tonight and was completely underwhelmed. There's a nice shiny outer coating of 80s throwback style with nothing noteworthy underneath. Wound up playing around on my phone for most of ep 2. Someone described it as X-Files meets The Goonies but to my eye it just looks like they threw a bunch of old Stephen King stories into a blender. Winona Ryder getting so much praise seems especially puzzling - I honestly couldn't figure out if she was being intentionally campy to fit the piece (although if she was then serious kudos, but I have a feeling that's not what most people are looking for). I was way more impressed with her limited role opposite Oscar Isaac last summer in Show Me A Hero. edit - in terms of retro-style potboiler with much subtler hints of weirdness and an actually interesting/unpredictable story, I'd recommend season 2 of Fargo

I still like the Blair Witch Project (or did when I last re-watched - maybe 3 or 4 yrs ago) but there's no way to recreate what it was like to see it when it first came out. I remember going to see it about a week after it hit theatres, full house, not really knowing much about it other than there was a lot of buzz that it might be a true story, a sort of found-documentary .... people were literally just screaming hysterically and a few had to be escorted out by ushers. We had completely hotboxed a friend's jeep before in the parking lot and I thought I was going to have a heart attack during that final climax. It was awesome.

Finished season 2 of Silicon Valley. Good but not great, much like the first season, which is probably why I managed to completely forget about the show for a couple of years. I'm interested enough to follow into another season, and, hey, look at that, it's already out, so my broken system works. I guess I should qualify - it is great in some aspects. The writing is close to perfect, they don't halfass technical details and such, and the characters definitely grew in this second season to the point where you (or I at least) started to care about them vs. just being plot mechanics. But the story itself moves forward unevenly - sometimes the show gets bogged into a detail that will take up 2 or 3 episodes, and then rushes through other important details. It's also pretty obvious that they tried to introduce more female characters who were then abandoned or pushed to the periphery - way too much annoying douche Russ Hanneman, barely any hilarious engineer-hacker chick whose name I didn't even get. Although it occasionally seems like this part is an ongoing meta-joke on the reality of Silicon Valley. Who knows. See where it goes. Worth watching for Erlich alone though, dude cracks me up in every scene, even if he's just in the background smoking his bong and looking skeptical. I learned just now from IMDB that he was 'Hud' in Cloverfield.

Tentatively excited for this: ( I remember loving the Gaiman novel, but it's been a decade+ )

Ninth Gate is a weird movie. It's the only example I can think of where it was based on the subplot of a book (The Club Dumas - about a rare book hunter looking for a specific Dumas copy - the occult book is just something he's hunting for on the side). I really liked it in a slightly campy way but it does have a strange, unique vibe to it. Mr Robot, yeah, just OK - started out really promising but by the end of S.1 it felt like they were trying to do too much and open up too many plotlines. Undecided if I'm gonna keep going with S.2 I finished the second half of the Night Manager BBC mini-series a few days ago and realized I'm already mentally filing it away as a Bond movie. In retrospect I might have just watched Tom Hiddleston's job application. I would probably rate it a 6 or so in total. House was alright in it.

my fav actor! sold, will check out, hadn't even heard of it

Green Room 8/10 Fun. I guess that's my kind of mindless summer minibuster. Punk rock and a lot of blood. I think if I had a complaint with Saulnier it's sticking the landing. Both this and Blue Ruin, the ending wasn't bad per se, just underwhelming.Will definitely keep my eye on anything he does next though. Oh and crazy cast. Steady stream of "Wait - is that that guy/girl?"

Maggie's Plan 8.5/10 Nice light summer salad of a movie. Greta Gerwig & Ethan Hawke as the dependable main ingredients. Maya Rudolph & Bill Hader (who didn't annoy me for once) as the toppings. Julianne Moore, stealing every scene in a throwback to her role in Big Lebowski, uh, garnish I guess. Some of the best dialogue of the year from Rebecca Miller and a perfectly eclectic soundtrack of old ska and Springsteen covers from Adam Horovitz as dressing. Serve. An ideal antidote to summer blockbuster fare. Yumm.

3/6 through the bbc/amc mini-series The Night Manager. Decent so far - enough to finish. I'm not usually big on espionage/secret agent stuff but this is just far enough of the traditional mark to hook me. Some of it, like the bombastic score, feels forced: oh look they're going for a boat ride on the Mediterranean cue haunting violins but House will just stare at you for a moment and you forget your disease. ah fantastic this is out in the wild! Almost drove an hr each way to catch in the theatre earlier this summer but it was there and gone in less than a week. Loved Blue Ruin I wouldn't call it crap but at the same time, yeah, a director can only show promise for so long before they need to deliver the goods. Refn has been dangling it for awhile but I still wanna give him the benefit of the doubt.

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at least the trailer for Superhero Film #5 Released In 2016™ looks a little different and interesting:

The Lobster 7.5/10 Reminded me of Wristcutters for the quasiabsurd romanticdarkcomedy tint. Uneven. Absolutely brilliant at times; tedious at others. Humans as animals as robots as humans. One on-screen laugh. Disconcerting. /inserts headphones, dances into the woods

Looked up The Wanderers on Rotten Tomatoes and it turns out it was based on a novel by Richard Price. He wrote a reallllly great book called Clockers, that was turned into a so-so movie in the 90s by Spike Lee, and was also one of the main inspirations for HBO's The Wire. So that's cool. Maybe do a combo re-watch & first time read.

oh geez, completely forgot about this - yeah I have seen it, used to have a vhs (!) copy taped off late night citytv when I was in high school; remember liking it although the only clear memory I have is the massive rumble on the football field with the Ducky Boys, who creeped me out with the way they just slowly start appearing, like something out of a horror movie. Should watch it again tho.

Ginger Snaps - 8/10 Somehow despite being a horror fanatic I never got around to watching this. I think when it first came out I was friends with some goths who loved it and I kind of just wrote it off as pandering to that subculture. But it's really good, got its own thing going on. Disgusting and hilarious and hilariously disgusting. Quite a fresh take on the werewolf genre, especially switching to a female perspective. Surprising how perfectly executed the acting and dialogue was for a relatively under the radar Canadian movie.

from the past couple weeks The Warriors 8/10 1978 cult flick I've been meaning to watch forever. Comic book tinged graffiti scrawled urban gangwar carnival - esque with extra cheese. Delicious. The Baseball Furies were my favorite. Bat wielding pantaloon wearing clown faced riffraff. Completely dated in some ways (mostly racial/homophobia) yet also timeless (the photography/cinematography/eye popping colours). Fateful Findings ?/10 Expected crap. Got crap. A lot like The Room - vanity project for the writer/director/star, horribly made, awkward, bad acting, no clear central plot. It's a mess. Just the worst. Check it out. Do The Right Thing 8.5/10 Finally saw this! At least, properly, I've seen bits and pieces over the years. Spike Lee still isn't quite my thing with his in your face, yelling at the camera stuff, but that's a personal taste issue. Still such a powerful experience. Watching Radio Raheem getting choked out, then the retarded guy stumbling around crying in the street, wow. Feed The Beast 3/10 First couple episodes of this amc show. Underwhelming. One of the guys from Friends plays a drunk sommelier, his coke head wunderkind chef buddy gets out of jail owing money to the mob, they're gonna open a restaurant in the Bronx (!). Boooooorrrring. There's a lot of laughably bad "Things are getting tough ... Let's Cook!" slow mo kitchen scenes that made me feel embarrassed. The only character who seemed remotely interesting was mute. Don't check it out.

oh yeah when I was reading up on the director and the making of I came across a NY Public Library curated resource reading list http://www.nypl.org/blog/2016/02/26/witch-reading-list Particularly interested in this one And I guess that kind of gets to the heart of what I liked about The Witch. It didn't have an agenda, it didn't try to dictate a complex story or a message or a moral to me, just put me in a particular time and place and threw some (very real in that time and place...) ideas out into the air and let me decide. Where's the line between reality and the unknown, piety and deviance, nature and woman, right and wrong? (still undecided - it's probably over there - yeah behind that tree)

Mmm see for me it was interesting specifically because I didn't really 'get it', but like I said I took it as an open riff on the various archetypes of the New England witch mythology. It definitely lodged itself in my brain. I was reading up on the writer/director - it's his first feature, but he worked for years as a set and prop designer, which is why all the little details in the film were so finely crafted. He also spent like 6 yrs researching the topic before writing the script. I can see why it disappointed so many people though - the studio basically took a period piece occult arthouse movie and marketed it as the latest Jason Blum jumpscare crapfest. It's totally not for everyone and I can't even say I particularly enjoyed watching it, just glad that it's out there to experience. And it's probably not an ideal daytime watch. I watched it late at night with headphones on for the immersion feeling. Although there weren't any real scares, the general tension got to me enough that I had to take a couple breaks and take deep breaths. I don't know, I found it to be quite the experience, but different strokes and all that.

Southbound 7/10 Indie horror-ish anthology movie. 5 (or 4 I guess) disconnected stories revolving around people passing through a ghost town in the desert. They got progressively better; no real scares and some hammy acting, but put together the pieces did feel pretty fresh and vital. I love the desert/southern horror vibe though - Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw, Dust Devil, The Hitcher - so this might be a skewed vote.

The Witch 8/10 8 is more just a random placeholder; I know I liked this, but it still left me scratching my head. Definitely in the 'how did this get made?' vein. It's got great production values, from the costumes to the music to the framing to the dialogue, yet it's this bizarre little period piece fundamental religion vs. natural world exploration. In the end it just came off as an open ended riff on folklore and records from the witchhunt days. I'm happy the film exists, basically. Seems like it shouldn't, not at this level anyways. Cool stuff.

Diary of a Teenage Girl - 7/10 Slutty San Fran in the Seventies. Nothing earth shattering, just subtle trippy animation sequences, surprisingly affective acting, and a solid soundtrack. Apt breezy watching for a warm breezy spring evening.