Legendsofanus

Babylon is one of the most mediocre moments I have ever felt watching a movie. And yet I would have loved to experience it in the cinemas. I would have liked to know how so many people reacted to the sheer chaos on the screen. I would have liked to see how many got teary eyed like me in the finale. I would have loved to talk to people afterwards to see if they were willing to share more about what they thought about the early days of cinema.

I didn't think Damien Chazzelle could create an informative and telling tale about the early cinema that was R rated and ran for 3 hours long and had a stupendously roaring loud screenplay to go with it but that's exactly what he did with Babylon.

Margot Robbie plays a triumphant Harley Quinn-like character who never stops ****ING up things in her life, Diego Calva in the first movie I have ever seen him in, stands out as a capable leading man who's entertaining to watch and Brad Pitt plays a established Hollywood star who's ready to be replaced much like DiCaprio's character in Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood.

8.5/10 an often times cartoonish attempt to capture the wild roaring essence of the well, roaring '20s that falls flat in trying to be scary and nuanced at so many turns but when it works, it's magic.

Similar movies: I saw a bit of "Moulin Rouge" in the movie's first party scene and the narrative setup feels carried on or atleast inspired from Once Upon a Time in.... Hollywood.

Leaving question: What is your fav Damien Chazzelle ending?

"Desert power."

Dune review

Fair warning, this is a rewatch. When I first watched the movie with a friend, I thought of it as a beautiful, visually immersive experience that I felt would be much better experienced If i knew more about the book. And that was sadly, all I thought about it at that moment.

Whenever a movie starts with a Part One in it's title, I get a hesitation. And Dune's only covering one half of the FIRST book. This was going to be slow, this was going to have a lot of filler, this was going to have information and scenes that are not at any point integral to the main story and it won't be very pretty because they would save most of the budget for the second film. These were my initial thoughts when I set down to watch it again, having long forgotten most of the plot of the movie from before.

Dune was nothing like that. Dune is probably the best science-fiction movie I have seen this year. It is beautiful first of all, the movie somehow manages to balance shots of nature and shots of sci-fi tech and really mixes them well together to create a very immersive setting. I was in awe when Paul walks away from the beach with a ship in the background rising from the water.

It's also a really fucking compelling movie. Even though this is all serious hard science fiction stuff, there is no point in the movie where you feel lost or confused. It just works and you immediately know what each character thinks and feels. The transition from the novel to film feels very smooth in that regard though I have never read the book haha

Dune sounds really cool too, the soundtrack has this rhythmic thumping to it that just sounds so good and the soundtrack is appropiately quite, kicking in only at intense moments. The ships sound cool as hell

This is a pretty long movie, probably the longest I have seen in a while at 2h 35m but I wasn't bored for a single second because it has a very engaging pace and you get treated to a piece of lore or a beautiful shot of landscape in-between some really exciting fight and action sequences.

Overall, I would give this movie a highly recommended even if you have never seen a science movie 9/10

P/S: What's with the fight scenes? They were the only distracting bits to me and why I don't give it a perfect score. They just feel....forcefully quiet.

"The world of love had no place for monsters in it."

Bones & All review

This is the second Luca Guadagnino movie I have seen and I watched it right after Challengers. I enjoyed Bones & All more.

spoiler

---

Probably because the director manages to create this post-apocalyptic feeling based around the fact that these cannibals just avoid people as much as they can, their time is spent isolated, most of that isolation is spent in running away from connection, from society and Luca Guadaningo builds the movie's theme around this loneliness. He creates beauty among the empty abandoned houses that eaters use, he creates style in them by clothing them with vibrant or more grounded colors, he makes us listen to them by giving them specific musical connections. Maren the main protagonist has this single guitar string that plays really loud in the silence whenever she gets closer to where she's going.

spoiler

---

It feels romantic to me because it also captures the scenic rurality of America so well. There are a lot of shots of just the skies as the two main characters drive across states, from Ohio to Kentucky to Missouri and Minnesota. The beautiful green fields, the forests, a small town here and there, s carnival it's all there. I have never seen a more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing America as it is.

Bones & All is a moving coming-of-age tale about the innocence of age and shows the struggle with accepting who we are when nobody else does. Everything looks like a memory of an innocent age, in a contrast to "Challengers", Bones & All has a softer aesthetic to it. There are no lavishly executed shots of one character in the frame to make them look like super models as in "Challengers", everything just feels more natural.

The thesis of this movie as I see it is, do you deserve love and other good things even if you are so unwanted by society?

7/10

"Court violation, audible obscenity"

Challengers Review

It's beautiful, bold, colorful, it makes you hate it's characters and understand them at the same time and it has some really hard soundtrack that plays whenever things get heated between characters. Challengers for me, feels a little too long, a bit too over indulgent, and sometimes out of place and time but somehow the movie manages to make you feel like it's 2h 15m runtime is justified. It starts at present and then jumps back to the past and then present, sort of going back-and-forth but everytime the distance becomes reduced until it reaches the final scene.

By that point, you know every motivation, every glance, every movement of the camera and it all speaks so much about the characters and how they feel in that moment.

This is also a lot more about tennis then i imagined. Just amazes me to see these actors being so comfortable and awesome with a racket in their hands, serving and playing tennis often in one-shot sequences where everything could have gone wrong.

Rating: N/A (might rewatch)

"Chaos is order yet undeciphered."

Enemy was exhilarating, I was so tensed during the whole movie about what was going on and couldn't look away. Even if you set aside the doppelganger plot of the movie, the world and details in it that Denis Villeneuve created are beautifully exhausting and suffocating. I was taking screenshots and zooming in to a scene of a character turning off lights because I wanted to see if the design of the switches mean the setting is a dystopian one, that's what this movie was doing to me lol

It has this dystopain kafka-esque feeling to it that you can't stop what's happening and you don't know what's happening. The city in Enemy has this perpetual yellow haze over it that seems to wash over on everything and affect the characters as well as what's going on in their minds. The two characters often have vivid dreams of the city scape with a giant deformed spider walking above it and it seems to represent to me, this influence of ugliness and stagnant-ness. It's like a cloud of yellow exhausting cancer over everything which detoriates itself into people's subconciousness and makes them do ugly things.

Regardless of whether or not you understand it or not or whether there is something to understand about it, Enemy is a suffocating, beautifully acted and well-directed movie that evokes feelings in me that movies rarely do.

It's a very focused and well constructed movie, like details I mentioned feel intentional, like they mean something or maybe they don't and it's just a stylistic choice.

I loved it, 7.5/10