“Oldboy” and “All About Lily Chou-Chou.” I watched both of those movies with no idea what I was getting into because Netflix comes up with the least informative descriptions possible for foreign films. Disturbing isn’t a strong enough word to describe them.
I will also never be able to watch “Steel Magnolias” again. The ending just breaks my heart.
I took a course on anime when I was in college, and our viewing included “Grave of the Fireflies”, “Barefoot Gen”, and “Perfect Blue.” It was a very emotionally taxing semester, to say the least.
Joe Don Baker eating? Well, let’s just call that Mitchell. Twice was more than enough for me.
Lars von Trier…I can’t remember which I’ve seen, but not doing any more of his “work.”
Any of the Henry James film adaptations (with the exception of The Innocents, based on Turn of Screw, and Truffaut’s The Green Room, which is based on a few of James’s stories, and I could probably stand to watch Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller again). I think I’ve seen most of the adaptations of James’s works…I’m not going to explain myself any further.
No more Marvel comic book movies, ever. In fact, unless rewarded with various prizes, no more comic book movies for me.
Well, for what it’s worth, even the MSTed Creature is a difficult go for me. What it lacks in graphic misogyny and xenophobia it more than makes up for in skeevy implications of same. In fact, movies like that declare you really can’t have one without the other. So all are bleak and off-putting in some way, to me.
Kind of wish COR-Man and the rest could be confronted by a supporting character from the old Pirate Corp$ comic who once lambasted humans for thinking they were good enough to get busy with his fine alien self, much less that we had the physical stamina to survive the experience.
Wow, that’s some kind of nearly criminal malpractice. What’s next?
“Enter the exciting world of xenobiology with the stalwart crew of the Nostromo in Alien!”
“Face challenging questions of spiritual faith with Father Perrin in The Exorcist!”
To me, it’s far enough removed from reality that it doesn’t bother me like, say, an I Spit On Your Grave type thing. Goofy guys in rubber suits? Meh. HftD could probably be a classic if they’d just gone full camp. Heh. (The ending would be all that gals running off with the gill-men because human dudes just suck…)
Not to challenge you, sir, but there are about sixty different “official” versions of “Turn of the Screw”. (By official, I mean those adaptations where James is credited. I have no counted the unofficial adaptations.)
Lifeforce (1985). Tobe Hooper is hit or miss with me. Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) qualifies as one of my favorites while the rest sickens my stomach. Lifeforce is all I dislike in pictures wrapped in a bow and with gusto. I watched it one time and once it was over I swore I wouldn’t see it again. The space zombies, electro spectacle, the by-the-numbers devastation, and the autopiliot of the slaughter sickened me and I avoid it all costs.
It was seriously along those lines, like, “Two old classmates reconnect, and one has a problem with the other.” I suppose that’s an accurate summary, but holy cow they left out a lot of nuance.
I remember the description of “All About Lily Chou-Chou” more clearly: “A high school student becomes obsessed with a pop singer.” So very, very misleading.
Replace the Starhops T&A with violence and it was the same thing with Stephen King’s Christine because the PG13 was a year away from happening.
Speaking of Carpenter, I’m not comfortable watching They Live the same way the aforementioned Idiocracy was. Hits too close to home society wise even outside of politics. cough Kartrashians cough. Parallax View comes to mind as well. Gonna miss watching The Ref every Xmas because of a certain creep in that movie.
I’m still not ready, myself, to vet every performer and every crew member in every movie to decide whether I’ll allow them to entertain me. And I don’t want to punish the people involved who’ve done nothing wrong just because they had the misfortune to work with a creep.
I once heard Patrick Stewart talk about being in LIFEFORCE. He said the only reason he did it was because the script he got was titled “Space Vampire,” and he just wanted to be able to tell people that he was in a movie called “Space Vampire.” So he was disappointed when the title got changed.
I’ll still watch Daisy Miller again, though. Cybil Shepherd? Yessir! You know…she could have been in one of those Turn-Screw pictures! I must investigate!
It’s a big-budget sci-fi horror disaster movie that isn’t a horror movie, that isn’t a sci-fi movie, that isn’t a disaster movie—though it has characteristics of all those genres—that features boggling amounts of nudity but in a way that is far less exploitational than aspirational, while at the same time missing most of its aspirations so wide of the mark that it has many of the characteristics of a great bad movie, and yet it’s not exactly that either.
The score is by Henry Mancini, the writer of the script had done both Blue Thunder and The Philadelphia Experiment, and the cast is mostly seasoned vets. Well-lit, well-shot, good SFX right up until they hit the end of the budget. It was Tobe Hooper’s follow-up project after Poltergeist! And yet it was a massive bomb, and deservedly.
The setup is interesting, Mathilda May really is “perfect”, and there’s some (deliberate) scathing insight into the nature of the masculine and feminine, and it all just ends up in the soup.
What was the imagined market for this? It was a hard “R” (and cut to get a rating at all, in the UK) but it was basically The Space Vampires! It’s no date movie, clearly. I think it was Golan who, when interviewed and asked what he’d do with a $25M budget, he said he’d make 25 movies.
And this was their idea of a breakthrough, mainstream hit?
@moviegique FAIR. It is indicative of Golan-Globus output in its larger-than-life tone deafness and mammoth ambitions simultaneously. Cannon viewed the production as their door to bigger business and their unique stamp of personality went everywhere under Hooper’s signature style. Cannon was take it or leave it often in their results and this batted for the grandstands. Tobe had no interference on his wilder urges and Cannon longed to impress as only they could. You’re right. It is a remarkable contradiction and enigma laudable and incomprehensible frequenty at once. Intellectually it is teamining in uniqueness. As narrative? It is painful as Manos (1966) is painful in not seeing what it is outside itself. For the latter, I can’t endure the sensation absent any remote realism whatsoever whereas I nod to the one of a kind vision even if I’m unable to stand it myself. I concur it passes away from rational understanding and that is its power and Achille’s Heel together as one.
He’s a piece of work. I have a really weird love/hate thing with von Trier that leans heavily toward the “hate” side. His filmography is really hard to swallow.
But he’s crazy talented. Regardless of how I might feel about him as a person (he acts like a child a lot) or the “consumeability” of his body of work (challenging for most audiences; cannot usually bring myself to watch something of his twice), the man has an amazing directorial eye and finds really interesting stories to tell. Even if those stories don’t culminate in a typical American ending where everything gets wrapped up nice with a neat little bow. I actually respect him and his decision to end a story differently.
But man… rough stuff.
I want to like his movies more. I honestly do. There’s something really beautiful and secretly clever in Melancholia but it feels like two stories fused together for convenience and then leaves you feeling either defeated or sadly vindictive.
