It’s been months lol

Many people say the ending ruined the whole movie, that Brian didn't deserve this kind of tragedy, but they're wrong. Brian's explosive ending is actually a catharsis for the audience. The Umbrella Corporation is an extremely cruel, utterly inhuman evil megacorporation, and most of its employees are just as cold-hearted, greedy, and cowardly. When Brian finally reaches the lab after enduring countless hardships, none of the scientists inside care about him. To them, he is just a tool for delivering the antidote, a talking delivery robot—nothing more. In their eyes, they are elite biological scientists from prestigious science universities, the cream of the crop, while he is just an unnoticed courier, a nobody, not worth wasting the antidote on. In particular, the scientists' real goal was probably to use the antidote as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the company, so that the company would send someone to rescue them—and maybe even get them promoted and given a raise. So when I saw the protagonist slaughter them all, I felt an immense, deep satisfaction.

And think about it: such a dangerous and important task was handed to a lowly delivery worker. This is precisely a metaphor for the layer-by-layer outsourcing of work under the modern capitalist system. The protagonist is an ordinary person who follows the rules and never questions the system of his job or his life, yet he is completely destroyed by a zombie disaster brought about by a runaway corporation and elites who never cared about him. This is exactly the social commentary the director wanted to express.

With You Can See Everything being released this week and getting rave reviews, what are the best documentary films you’ve ever seen?

Is this just something us plebs can't get? I thought your banner was just based on your favorite movie.

Found this on Twitter.

Ill start : either DIGGER or odyssey

This is how I structure my way of watching movies. It's been adapted and perfected the last few years, thought it would be fun to share and hear if someone does similarly as I do or if it can inspire anybody.

I first and foremost add the movie to my Letterboxd watchlist. This can come from any external factor. Friends, seeing a movie and checking out the directors imdb page, reddit threads or just scrolling through old Oscar winners or Sight & Sound. I have a mental limit of 150 movies, so if the watchlist is around 140 I try to stop actively adding new ones before seeing the ones already there.

Then I either add them to a checklist note on my phone where they are in the order I have put them in. I have a separate one for upcoming movies with the date they will premiere. Checking the box after watching them is probably my best motivator to watch a lot of movies. It's so satisfying to check them and seeing the list progress over time.

I add them in the checklist note first when I have a source to watch it. Usually I google the title and the word "streaming". If it's on a streaming site I have a subcription for I add the movie + the name of the streaming site. Most movies I want to watch are not on any streaming sites however, so I pirate or sometimes rent digitally. 

When the download is active I add a 📄-emoji beside the title which is code for that I haven't checked if the movie file has working subtitles (I’m Swedish but I usually use English subtitles, I want to understand what they’re saying). When the download is complete I check if there’s a subtitle already there, if not I google myself to a subtitle by searching for the video file name + subtitles (that way the top result is in sync with the file version I have). The most common website is subtitlecat for this purpose. If the subtitle is SDH I clean it up on SRT cleaner. When the subtitles seem fine I remove the emoji. I also have other emojis indicating other stuff:

❤️ = Watch with GF
⚡ - 100 minutes or shorter
⚡⚡ - 80 minutes or shorter
⛺ - 140 minutes or longer
🔄 - Rewatch
😱 - Horror
💥 - Action
🤪 - Watch high
🎺 - Concert film
📺 - Miniseries
🎄 - Christmas movie
👗 - Period piece
🫠 - Easy-watching (in Swedish the expression is "easily melted")
🤍 - Black and white
🏀 - Documentary

When deciding to watch movies I usually check the list and go from top to bottom. Some movies sometimes get stuck in the top if it's hard to find the mood to watch it. Right now Doctor Zhivago is at the top for instance. If I can't decide but am open to anything I go to random.org, paste the list there and randomize the order, then I have to choose the one on top.

I watched Il Conformista for the first time a couple of days ago and I was absolutely blown away. What a masterpiece! The visual style and and the screenplay (especially the political and moral themes) were nothing short of spectacular!

Hitchcock has to be one of the cleverest directors ever. This film was made in 1948, yet it's edited to look like one continuous shot. Back then, cameras couldn't even record for more than around 10 minutes, yet he still managed to make it look so smooth.

The entire film takes place in one room over the course of a few hours, with only a handful of characters, yet it manages to build drama and suspense so well. It's definitely not his most suspenseful film, but it still works really well.

Also, this film looks sooo gorgeous in 4K.

Literally what half the movies say on Google

My pick comes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

It's such a batshit insane movie through and through, but the scene where Raoul Duke leads into talking about his time in San Francisco during the mid 60s truly took me by surprise. Maybe it was the fact that I was really stoned at the time I watched this film, or the fact that I lived in San Francisco all my life. Whatever the case may be, this scene right here genuinely moved me to tears.

It's such an unexpectedly calm and introspective scene that arrives at an already chaotic point in the film. It's also just a testament to Hunter S. Thompson’s gift as a writer and how he's able to describe the atmosphere, the collective mood and the cultural climate of mid 60s San Francisco in a way that just immerses you and pulls you under.

The way he's able to channel all these feelings of:

• wild, prevailing youth
• resilience and hope for one's own generation
• being part of something far greater
• being caught in the middle of rapid social/historical change
• remorse and nostalgia over a bygone era
• quiet satisfaction with being at the right place at the right time
• being lost and weary in the present

...all in such a gentle and tangible way through his writing alone makes this scene just so damn powerful. It just completely blindsided me the first time I saw it.

Combine that with the distant, ghostly sound of Get Together by The Youngbloods playing in the background, the use of archival footage showing people protesting and dancing in the streets of San Francisco, and the way Johnny Depp channels so much emotion and conviction as a narrator, and what do you know? The end result is just simply intoxicating, and it made me shed the heaviest single tear I can muster.

I didn’t know much about the film before going into, so I was fully set on it being an insane drug-fueled head trip all the way through to the end. While it was for the most part, this scene right here will always stand out to me for being the one scene that genuinely moved me in an otherwise zany film. Take it as a brief, sobering period of pure bliss and clarity; a short break from sheer madness, if anything.

My only regret is that I wish I got invested in Hunter S. Thompson’s work at an earlier time in my life, so that when I watch this film at a later time and witness Thompson’s writing unfold on screen in the way that it does here, it would probably hit in a much deeper way than it does now.

“There was madness in any direction. At any hour, you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.

We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke…

…and rolled back.”

Happens a lot with me

I can tell the difference between amateur or “porn-acting,” but I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is exactly they’re doing that makes it “poor” acting.

I can also tell the difference between Keanu Reeves acting versus Leonardo DiCaprio; but, again, I can’t give specifics on why.

What I really struggle with is seeing a difference between actors like Zendaya (who people say isn’t that great) and actors like DiCaprio or Gary Oldman (who many people say are great). What is it that you’re seeing in “decent” versus “great” acting on TV/movies besides range? Gary Oldman can obv play anything and everything, but I feel like Zendaya has also played a range of characters and done well. Her portrayal of Rue on Euphoria felt really authentic, but the internet doesn’t seem to agree? Why not, specifically?

Inspired by another post about movies with <50k watches, I got curious about some of my favorites with <25k watches. Feels like a good way to unearth some gems I might not know about!

Surprisingly, one of my top 10 favorites only has 12k watches - The Belly of an Architect (pictured) - I'm a huge Peter Greenaway fan

Some of mine:

Belly of an Architect - 12k

The Music Lovers - 6.5k

What Time is it There - 21k

Fellini's Casanova - 20k

Drowning By Numbers - 23k

Kontroll - 22k

Shoeshine - 21k

Found this on thanks to seeking out stuff I haven't seen for Spooky Season, and it's really fun. It's a French film set in Eastern Europe about an envoy for the King of France who winds up stranded with a family in the countryside who is awaiting the return of their patriarch. It's a fun but still decently spooky vampire tale whose source material pre-dates both Bram Stoker's Dracula and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla.