Once More, Into the Fray
The Annual War Film Retrospective returns on
@A4EPodcast
. This began as an attempt at an all-encompassing collection of war films from around the world, but for 2023 I honed in on a few standout additions to the pantheon.
Thank You For Your Support
The 2023 War Retrospective is live!!!
@VyceVictus
takes you through the year in war films,
@hibachijustice
pipes up when he can, and we open with a very special Warpath update from
@LiamODin
Started Karate today.
I stood next to a 5yr old little girl on her 1st day. We learned the same steps & the Dojo Kun closing. I am 10x her size, seen horrors in my years I hope she will never even imagine. In that moment we were equal. Never felt such a gracious humility before
Not a spoiler but I dig that the first SPIDERVERSE emphasizes that everyone deserves a mentor who guides & loves them unconditionally, while the second one is like sometimes you also need a straight up instigator in your corner to egg you on into doing fuckery because fuck ‘em
His whole family got killed by skeleton iguanas. The Man locked him up & put him on a slave ship to do a Mandingo fight with an alligator. Now he gotta fight Evil Orangutan John Malkovich and his only help is a dragon w/ anger management issues
Brother Kong can’t catch a break😫
Using this bizarre trending timeline as an excuse to remind everyone that Kevin James was a diesel high school wrestler and was teammates with Mick Foley
A year later and an uprising against space nazis ignited by a large scrap worker hitting a gestapo in the head with a brick made out of the ashes of a covert freedom fighter is still some of the coldest shit I’ve ever seen on tv
Andor is one year old today.
This show is exactly what I'd given up hoping for, from a big IP. I never thought a Star Wars series would be one of my favorites of the year.
What's your favorite scene?
(for me, it's extremely hard to choose 🤣)
If we're still Conan posting, one of my favorite bits was one of his latest, when he had a Hollywood Blockbuster-grade superhero suit made for himself. Reminiscent of Letterman's classic Alka-Seltzer suit bit, he made the silliest thing imaginable the coolest thing in the world
Amber Midthunder was the star of the show, but shoutout to the homie Dakota Beavers for his Supporting Hunk role as her brother Taabe in PREY, mufucka went hard!!
It’s so funny that when you first see him he’s presented like a typical scowling movie cartel prince but then he basically explains “I hit my head so hard I turned crazy gay”
Think I’ll go see KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON again. Haven’t stopped thinking about the scene of Hale watching footage of the Tulsa massacre and you see the light bulb go off in his head about escalating his campaign of terror. A quick moment that feels so substantial
Similarly hilarious is when I see people dismiss Reacher as “conservative white male power fantasy” when the message on this shirt is basically what the character is all about
Somebody was like “Dune is what Cameron wishes Avatar could be” and beyond being brain dead wrong, the statement completely misses the real truth of cinema: every sci-if blockbuster should end with an intimately nasty deadly up-close knife fight
Wife started MR & MRS SMITH
In the first 2min, “traditional” looking movie stars that you would expect in a straightforward remake of the Brad/Angelina movie are brutally murdered, and what follows is a weird, intriguing take on spy fiction. Toss your expectations, this is legit
My friend saw UNCUT GEMS and loved it but because she never saw pictures of them or their other movies before, she assumed these were The Safdie Brothers making a quick cameo in their own movie
I have developed an irrational sense of seething contempt for how movie trailers seem to want me to have some sort of holy reverence for popular hits/genre fare I saw decades ago
Incredible look into the action behind BLUE EYE SAMURAI. Neither motion capture nor live model references like in traditional animation, they instead employ a full-fledged stunt choreography team like for film/tv and incorporate it directly into the storyboard/animation process
Instead of asking people like Scorsese about comic book shit, we need to be asking what they think of the brilliant young people all over the internet making incredible cinema with their phones. And if they dont know what we're talking about we need to show them
A facet I adore about this is how in things like HP Lovecraft stories, the very knowledge of cosmic horrors beyond comprehension drives men insane. Whereas here, stalwart kin stare an unknown existential terror right back in the eye and symbolically declare “knuck if you buck”
The meta narrative in MAVERICK has been noted (Cruise the Last Movie Star showing the kids how its done) but I also felt the Admiral Iceman/Captain Maverick relationship was tacit admission that Kilmer was always the superior actor, and here he's getting his due with nary a word
If the MCU is really gonna jump on this Spider-Man Multiverse wagon it needs to go one of two ways: throw Tom Holland into the animated multiverse COOL WORLD style, or have a 5 years later Miles Morales show up in the MCU played by his voice actor Shameik Moore in live action
Babs Olusanmokun, recently featured in DUNE, is the standout for me in MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE; I think he has one of the most unique screen presences today. He is all at once regal yet unassuming, a quiet dynamism perfect for an espionage role.
Thought of this after the KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON trailer. Would like insight into conversations amongst technicians, artists & critics about what makes good digital cinematography. I get the feeling even masters like Scorsese are still tinkering, but I just don't know
It's crazy how the most disposable movie from the 1980's has cinematography that goes harder than most things being produced today. You'll stumble on a piece of shit starring The Two Coreys and the night scenes will look like a fucking Michael Mann movie.
Quite hilarious that Vin Diesel put some approximation of "Weirding Way" combat in his Space Conan movie whereas Villeneuve didn't even fuckin bother with the conceit
I can deadlift 400lbs but I cannot touch my elbows together or reach my shoulder blades. I have never felt more seen by a movie than in this moment:
#BadlandHunters
@AndrewJEisenman
It works the other way too. I have all this “baggage” between my army experience, the strain from years of heavy lifting, and the various health concerns with being overweight. But learning next to this small child felt like…I can just let all that shit go, clean slate.
This Dominic Sessa kid's got the juice for real, 21 years old pulling off the neuroses of a 50 year old screen veteran in this movie. Cant wait to see more of him
There’s a scene where Leo DiCaprio and Lilly Gladstone embrace and as I’m watching, Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” can be heard playing over it from the next theater over
I think what makes the drone camerawork in AMBULANCE so impressive is most films seem to use drones as an easy replacement for helicopter shots or even Steadicam rigs, and the crew here actually looks at what you can do with a drone that you can't otherwise.
This scene highlights CREED's greatest feat: a legacy sequel to a historic franchise that cant escape nostalgia yet makes you care about a new journey on its own strength. You dont need to see any Rocky movie to grasp Apollo is a God among men, his spirit imbues his son's destiny
The shot of Apollo is a great example of how more franchise movies should go the archive footage route then de-aging for flashbacks. It’s more emotionally impactful than deaging, showing that it’s still in the past, and it’s also simpler to achieve on a technical level
Many people are gonna finally see the Indian blockbuster RRR today on Netflix and I cant remember another time where a movie lets you know exactly how wild shit is about to get before you even get to the studio production credits, let alone the first scene:
I left my gummy bears in a hot car. When I returned they melted into a sugary quagmire, their individual essence dissolved into nothingness, reformed by the void into a singular consciousness. No seperate beings nor flavors, just one manifestation of formless eternal gummy.
Trying to take all this news about Warner Bros./Discovery in and the reveal of their "master plan" and...I can't stop thinking about the Coen Bros' absurdist satire of old Hollywood from a few years ago and how it feels so relevant, particularly in this moment:
The fun thing about Ridley Scott is you can never truly know beforehand if you're going to get some nonsense or a masterpiece whenever he makes a movie
Ridley Scott’s ‘NAPOLEON’ is reportedly 2 hours and 27 minutes long.
The film is rated R, reportedly for “strong violence and sexual content, moderate-high amounts of language/drug use/subject matter.”
(via:
@HuatheAlgDemon
)
Always fun to learn the Silly Guys in your favorite comedies are film nerds and real students of the game. Although in hindsight/if you didnt first pick up on it, the signifiers you see looking back at a lot of their work are obvious
✨Charlie Day's Closet Picks✨ With his feature directorial debut FOOL'S PARADISE in theaters this weekend, the writer-director-actor visited our films closet—where he shared the connection between IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA & Truffaut, his love for Hal Ashby, & much more!
Why's everybody being an asshole about Blue Beetle? That charming kid with the softboy face from Cobra Kai is going to do Power Rangers karate on Susan Sarandon, sounds fun whats the problem
Ryan Coogler made a movie featuring Blue people that ACTUALLY respects indigenous cultures and hired indigenous people to play them. Y’all copping all of the pleas for why Avatar’s digital Blackface is okay when another director has already PROVEN it didn’t need to be that way
After sitting through explanations of variants and anomalies and the Arachno-Humanoid Poly-Multiverse and The Everything bagel and timeline diagrams made out of spaghetti, I've now come to appreciate Rian Johnson's stance on space/time mechanics that much more:
Several people chiming in with "MCU will never be this good again" but that fails to comprehend how BLADE was cooler than all the Raimi Spidermans, all the Batmans, basically every superhero movie ever. Of course nothing will ever be this cool again
Scorsese is not long for this world. People seem scared to say it, but he is acutely aware. If KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON ends up his last film, it works as the grand finale of his oeuvre about the brutality that is the lynchpin of American modernity, fueled by greed & hatred
Everybody going “she is my queen” when Jane Campion called Sam Elliot a bitch but now it’s awkward when she say some sideways shit about Venus & Serena. Gotta learn we can’t be stans for these people or anyone. They don’t care about you
Today is the 25th Anniversary of one of the Illest Movies of All Time. On August 21st 1998, cinema was changed forever with the The Undisputed Greatest Comic Book Superhero Character Introduction of All Time.
Today is a Holy Day.
Today, we celebrate BLADE
@neonwhite900
Unlike so many rubbery/unconvincing looking CGI compositions of the past 20+ years, the special effects are virtually seamless in the Transformers movies. That ship and the robot actually look like they are there in that physical space
Judi Dench was on Graham Norton last night to push her new book about her life and work with Shakespeare. After making the point we quote Shakespeare daily without knowing it, this happened: