Bacchanales Sexuelles

Bacchanales Sexuelles (1974)


Writer: Jean Rollin, Natalie Perrey, Lionel Wallmann
Director: Jean Rollin
Starring: some 70's pasty doughy hairy actors and actresses

Synopsis
sex, boobies, bush, some vagina, sex, boobies, sex, maids, boobies, sex times 3boobies times 6, ritual sex, the end?

MOster
Netflix calls this a "cult movie" and I can totally see that.  There's a fair amount of ridiculousness going on; there's jut no real plot.  I expected there to be just a little more character motivation, which I didn't get.

What I didn't expect but did get were a couple of halfway-decent FFM threesome position ideas as well as some real fellatio.



I'm sure this movie was a much bigger deal 30 years ago, but that doesn't excuse the poor story.  Unless you have a specific thing for 70s bush or softcore with hard seeds, there's no real reason to watch it anymore.


The Woman
um. yup. this had potential to be campy and funny, but it was just dumb. i just kept thinking of the big lebowski maude and the dude scene.

"you can imagine where it goes from there."
"he fixes the cable?"

my thoughts of this quote are a way funnier commentary on this movie than the actual movie.

Yellow Brick Road

YellowBrickRoad (2010)


Writer: Andy Mitton, Jesse Holland
Director: Andy Mitton, Jesse Holland
Starring: 8 people. it's an ensemble thing. i'm not clicking back and forth between imdb that many times.

Synopsis
apparently, in 1940 (? doesn't really matter) this whole town in new hampshire just walked away from the town into the woods. some of them were found later murdered and bloodied and what have you on this trail, but most of them were never seen or heard from again. oh, wait no there was, of course one survivor to relay the tale but he was nonsensical...of course. so this dude, in present day, decides to take a bunch of people on this magical mystery trail for book purposes? he brings 2 cartographers, his lady, their friend the psychiatrist, a survivalist (i think that was that dude's deal), the townie liar, and the intern. guess what? things go awry.

The Woman
what? this was pretty bad. it went from boring to what's going on, to seriously, what the fuck is going on!? to what!? to i can't believe i watched that whole thing. there's no pay off. there's barely any violence. the gore was bare minimum required to get it's "horror"card.

there's never any discovery of why the town people walked. halfway through there was a discussion that i couldn't understands because i am not a cartographer or a hiker/camper for that matter. there was some quote towards the end that...let me find it...

eh. that was too much work. it's something about how the trail understands.
it's a good thing something does. because i was completely lost.
terrible. don't bother.

Red State

Red State (2011)


Writer: Kevin Smith
Director: Kevin Smith
Starring: Kyle Gallner, Michael Angarano, Kaylee DeFer, John Goodman

Synopsis
a crazy church guy abducts some teens because they are horny with the intent to kill them as part of his church service.  awry. the ATF get involved. the obvious parallel to waco is made. guns.


MOster
Looking at it through a clear lens, this is another "it is what it is" movie.  It's high 2 / low 3 from a scoring perspective.  Parts are unnecessarily muddied, and the performances don't always belong in the production.  If John Goodman was asked to dial it down then he failed.  Since he was more world-weary about the endeavor than the preacher he should have shown less passion.  It seemed like he was trying to sometimes, but he just came off so...big.  Even the least zealous of the zealots should have had more presence than he.

The story tried just a little too hard to have complexity and layering.  We didn't need Milton or his subplot at all.  The opening of the action (such as it was) would have played much better had the errant shot come from some inexplicable place rather than him.  We also didn't need the background on the three dudes; their personalities didn't come into the story in any way.  That whole scene in the cafeteria could have been cut, replaced with ten lines in the car on the way to the place.  On the other hand, it could have given a little more weight to some of the relationships between the "cult" people.  There were times when I was confused about why a particular person was upset when someone else got shot.  I was also confused as to whether or not I was supposed to care.

Finally, the title didn't match the film.  What was the point?  That those sorts of religious nuts only exist in "red states?"  If it was a bigger metaphor than that it didn't resonate with me at all.

If we look at it through the lens colored by the notion that some of Smith's earlier works really shaped my development (I'm looking at you, Joey Lauren Adams) then it's a mixed bag.  I haven't seen Cop Out yet but it seems to me that his direction is improving while his writing has stagnated at best.  There were some good-enough tracking shots around rooms, and generally we knew what was happening in the gunfights.  But even including the preacher the dialog lacked real characterization.  Most of the characters spoke with one voice, and it was his, as if he was pretending to argue with himself. 


And now I'm going to complain about both the general and the specific.  Smith is some kind of Catholic who engages in sodomy and had premarital sex and he's all about the civil rights.  But he still calls himself a Catholic, which makes him a member of what's arguably the largest hate group in the world.  So many people claim to be members of these big churches and then ridicule as cults the smaller groups who actually follow more of the rules laid out by the same text in the same book.  It's like these people feel that because there are more members in their club, their hypocrisy is more acceptable.  It's not.  If you're a dues-paying (e.g.) Mormon or Catholic or Southern Baptist or top end Jew then you're contributing to the unhappiness of others.

I like to end my stuff with a single sentence dig / praise.  But we're beyond that now.

The Woman
i wanted to like this, but it just didn't happen. the red herrings made it all seem really unfocused. i actually got bored watching it. like the ministers long sermon. i stopped paying attention entirely. that went on for twenty minutes too long.

i'm going to compare this movie to those choose your own adventure books. my experience with those was always a short adventure. i always died no matter which adventure i chose. the book itself had like 100 pages, but it always seemed like i died in 10. so i would loose interest really quickly. in this no matter what character you follow it seemed like just another dead end. no pun intended. it all took place in the present. there was no motivation, no back story, no development, just a bunch of characters that got picked off one by one. this might have been more successful if it had been presented as shorts with the five point church (is that what it was called?) as the common theme. this just seemed like an experiment on a gimmick that was a failure.

my summary: we watched this on saturday. it's now wednesday. i kept thinking we had a blog entry to do, but i kept forgetting what movie we had watched. not good.

I Saw the Devil

Akmareul boatda (I Saw the Devil) (2010)


Writer: Kim Jee-Woon
Director: Park Hoon-Jung

Starring: Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik, Jeon Gook-hwan
Synopsis
Revenge picture.  Special agent dude's wife is killed by a pretty awesomely crazy psycho.  Agent goes on an elaborate revenge kick.  This is Korean, not American.  The Americans may very well wreck this movie one day.  What the fuck else is new?

The Woman
oh, those koreans. they are rocking the tocks off of the movie industry. hardcore. direction: superb acting: awesome. effects: awesome. it's hard to shock me, or skeeve me out, but there were parts of this movie that made my teeth go all chompers. chomp, chomp, chomp. that dude that played oldboy was seriously evil. just when you thought he couldn't get more dispicable, wham! whole new level of horrible. the serial killer is a fascinating phenomenon to me. i think this was a brutal and pretty good portrayal of the sociopath/ serial killer. this lack of any sort of compassion or human-ness is hard to come by in movies. there is usually that ray of redemption even if it is small it's usually there. probably because audiences are more receptive to the redemption theme. this was just a black hole of violence and revenge. with the redemption thing leaning on the shoulders of the boyfriend/ agent. will he? won't he? it's true that the villian won either way, and there is the rub, and the afore mentioned black hole. excellent movie. excellent.

MOster
The best thing about this movie is that there are no easy answers and nobody comes out  unscathed.  It leaves the viewer with a question: Was the collateral damage worth the first order impact?  I thought about the ending while it happened and I thought about the ending afterwards for quite some time.  Korean movies are good for things like that.

Korean movies are good for things like that.  That makes the bar for a Korean movie a bit higher than the bar for a lot of the things we watch.  That's not necessarily a fair position for me to take, but I'm OK with that.  What I'm getting at here is that this movie is quite fine for what it is.  It stands out among the full crop of IMDB, but it doesn't really stand out among the wheat of the bunch.  It's a 4, but it kind of... I don't know.  The only time the direction stood out for me was when it annoyed me.  One shot near the beginning of the movie, repeated incessantly for about two minutes, gave me a headache.  It was FULLY competent everywhere else.

I don't want this to sound like I don't recommend the movie.  While it's not Oldboy and it's certainly not Thirst it's a very good movie.  The acting was excellent; the direction, as I've said, was very nice; the plot was a line but you have to try really hard to keep the pen on the paper.  If you like heavy, dark, extremely gory subtitled movies about revenge and justification then you will definitely like this movie.  If you like Transformers unironically then you probably won't.

Red

RED (2010)
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Writer: Jon & Eric Hoeber (screenplay) Warren Ellis & Cully Hamner (graphic novel)
Director: Robert Schwentke
Starring: Bruce Willis, Mary Louise Parker, John Malcovich, Karl Urban, Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, and a bunch of other people

Synopsis
an assasination attempt is made on an ex- CIA agent marked Retired Extremely Dangerous. he gathers the whole retired gang back together and they wreak some havoc on those whippersnappers in charge. all this plotting and uncovering happens whilst the willis is wooing/ kidnapping/ protecting his pension operator.


MOster
This movie is funnier than I expected it to be.  I have kind of a thing for Mary Louise, and that doesn't hurt.  It isn't particularly special in the technical, though it exceeds some much more arrogant, much more expensive fare. 

As the youngest of the bunch, Ms. Parker was definitely trying the hardest.  Everyone else, playing old friends, eased into their roles nicely.  I was annoyed by meek, old Bruce Willis for the first few minutes; but he eased down a half a notch and everything was fine.  I'm a fan of Malkovich in general and here he wasn't quite as ridiculous as he's been.  That fits perfectly with the theme of the film: He, too, was kind of on a vacation.  They were straightforward, gentle performances.

When they, characters and actors alike, started to come back to work for the third act--when, in fact, the movie started to get back on the rails--it lost its punch.  Before that point it was a fun, semi-farcical exercise.  But when the plot took over and the characters had an endpoint and a plan with maps and things I started to lose interest.  While I wouldn't quite classify this point as a "quibble," it shouldn't stop you from watching the movie.  You'll still have a nice time.

The Woman
let me just say i went into this with really low expectations and i found myself pleasantly surprised. both of us laughed quite frequently throughout this entire production. the minute the action scene where the willis steps out of the stolen police car, while it's spinning out of control to shoot at the oncoming karl urban, this movie had me. it's utter ridiculousness merged quite well with the comedy. i feel the need to compare this as the more successful version of "the expendables" where that was all testosterone, explosions and a penis and ruler contest with some really lame attempt at humor, this was old people action done right. it still had lots of explosions and testosterone, but there was a little estrogen mixed in there to balance it out. and actual humor. here's a tid bit of knowledge for you hollywood: tough chicks are awesome. they appeal to the chicks AND guys. guys just swinging their dicks about gets old pretty fast. i'm not saying that mary louise parker was tough in anyway. she was pretty useless, but she had sarcasm, which is a quality i hold dear. helen mirren was the tough chick, although probably not appealing to the guys on the sexual level, there is still that lure of toughness equals hotness no matter the age. that giant metaphor of a chick handling a howitzer...am i wrong? is that just my deluded chromosomes talking?

anyway. i liked this movie.

The King's Speech

The King's Speech (2010)
Written by David Seidler
Directed by Tom Hooper
Starring Geoffrey Rush, Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter

Synopsis
Dude, it's The King's Speech.  But, OK.  The second son of the King has difficulty with his stutter.  He's tried every doctor on the planet, except the one to whom his wife is referred.  He develops a rapport with that doctor and becomes king because his brother (admirably) follows his dick (heart if you like) rather than his flag.  Will he overcome his stutter and be a good king?


The Woman
good. filmed beautifully. actors acted really well. i liked it, so therefore, i don't have too much to say about it. i think it deserved it's oscars. acting like you have a stutter i imagine is incredibly difficult in not making it sound forced. good job colin firth.

MOster
I find it interesting that neither of us has much to say about this.  It doesn't quite make 4 but it's a fine movie and you could spend your life in far worse ways.  Everything is done the way it should be.  It reads like a play but that doesn't really limit it in the way that it could.  It has every element that should make it a "holy fuck" movie for me but it didn't and I'm not sure why. 

Finally, I must say that I appreciate how the title refers to both an abstract concept and a specific event.

WHIP IT

Whip It (2009)


Writer: Shauna Cross (screenplay and novel...there goes my theory of the book being anally raped into movie form)
Director: Drew Barrymore
Starring: Ellen Page, Kristen Wiig, Alia Shawkat

Synopsis
Um. There's an individual in a Pageantian family.  Her mother is oppressive; her father (I guess) likes to have sex some times and watch football.  She becomes embroiled in the roller derby.  Act like this is a spoiler if you wan to:  Everything is fine in the end.

The Woman
steaming pile. i was a little prejudiced going into this, seeing as my wonderful dear best friend forevers saw this ages ago and hated it so much she couldn't sit through the rot. i have seen this movie made 9 trillion times before. this plot is why i didn't understand the whole hubbub about "bend it like beckham" this is the same movie, but instead of soccer vs. traditional indian heritage and culture, it was alterno outcast finding her place amongst the roller derby lifestyle vs. traditional texas heritage and culture of cheerleading and beauty pageants. i don't want to rag on roller derby because, frankly, i think roller derby is pretty awesome, but this movie weighs the cool factor down. i don't understand the use of for lack of a better term underground subculture such as roller derby and mix it with the most common coming of age nonsense plot.

there were parts of this movie that pained me so to sit through. not because of it's poignancy, but because it made me want to vomit. listen up drew barrymore. i was a teenage outcast, and even at 17 i would have shit all over this pooptastic piece of cinema. moster and i laughed about how the two of us came up with every detail of the plot within the first 10 minutes, but it's not really funny.

p.s. i don't think patrick swayze has passed on. i think he is passing himself off as a middle aged juliette lewis. check it out because it's totally true.

MOster
This movie is Drew Barrymore's take on Command Performance.  The fact that she only has a supporting role is immaterial.

Nothing here is original.  The characters have all been done before, better.  The story has been done before, better.  The shots are quite obviously stolen, fairly evenly, from each prior Drew Barrymore vehicle.  There aren't even any bare breasts.

With all that said, I didn't find it to be particularly offensive; it just is.  It's there, like a boulder in the woods or a dilapidated building on the street right between the McMansions and the old growth homes.

True Grit

True Grit (2010)


Writer: Joel & Ethan Coen, Charles Portis (novel)
Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Starring: Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Maaaatt Daaamon

Synopsis
a 14 year old, stubborn, headstrong, and saavy, little lady hires an old coot drunkard of a marshall to apprehend the man who robbed and killed her father.

MOster
I went into this one with a bit of prejudice, because I haven't seen a bad serous Cohen movie in a long time.  While it's not quite as good as No Country, this film did not disappoint me.

The performances perfectly mirror the disparities between the characters, with Steinfeld's read of  what's-her-name spot-on; and Jeff Bridges elevates scene-chewing to a new standard of excellence.  Rooster is gigantic, and he inflates right into the character.  The background certainly makes the grade, but neither Damon nor Josh Brolin (who still sketches me out for some reason) come close to the central pair.  Their relationship has palpable chemistry; and yes, I cried.  I cried openly.  I should have blown my nose on the shawl on the other side of the couch.



Everything else is right where it should be.  The period stuff appeared to be very good--what the fuck do I know about the late 19th century?--and it was shot like the next, easy evolution of a Cohen film.



The Woman
i have not seen the john wayne "true grit" i have only seen "rooster cogburn" so i cannot comment on comparison. this was phenomenally good. solid 4 stars on the netflix scoring. that is way impressive in the orienter account. i will say in comparing "rooster cogburn" and this the characters in each were fantastic. strong willed woman theme too. go ladies? jeff bridges is crazy good at whatever he does. i'll forgive him for tron legacy and tucker: a man and his boring whatever crummy car nonsense dream. maybe i should revise that statement as it seems that with age he has seemingly gotten more confident in the roles he plays? maybe he just gets more opportunity to plays varying roles? i don't know. this, of course, was written stomach crampingly well. (that's a good thing) i usually enjoy when the vernacular causes the viewer to pay attention more.

despite moster crabbing about netflix not streaming the correct aspect ratio, it was, once again, unsurprisingly, shot magnificently. ahhhhhh. this is what film making should be. shots with purpose. shots to further the emotion.  shots to convey character growth. me likey the good ones.

p.s. my husband is a giant vagina, and i enjoy busting his chops about his weepiness levels.

lack of postings

our lack of postings is due to my current obsession with "Bleach". i am a huge dorkel and spend every second of my free time watching this anime series. i am a dork. i will be sad when i catch up to current episodes and have to actually wait a week to view one new episode and then gulp...months.....i don't want to think about it. anyway. that's mostly why there has been no new posts lately. i'm 287 episodes in with about 90 to go. i will be sad, but you, few and dear readers, will have movie posts again.

ps moster's been a slacker and needs to do like 5 old ones.