When I Googled it to find out how to watch it, the second hit was a Reddit thread on ‘DO NOT BUY THE ALIENS DOCUMENTARY’. The entire reasoning was ‘it’s expensive therefore the CEO of the company is a dick’. The Internet is a weird place.

Apparently the 5 film thing is specific to a US cinema chain but Interstellar is getting a 10th anniversary IMAX reissue in Autumn.

Can’t wait to see it.

Just found out Monkey Man was meant to be a straight to Netflix film but Jordan Peele saw an early cut and decided to use his production company Monkey Paw to buy it off Netflix and release it in cinemas.
Good stuff.

hylian_elf wrote:

davyK wrote:

Heard 5 of Nolan's films are getting reruns in cinema.

I have time for Interstellar, otherwise meh

.....and Dark Knight as a maybe.

I'm glad that we stayed on this timeline.

American Symphony (2023) - This film documents talented but completely uninteresting musician Jon Batiste as he prepares his first symphony.

I just found this boring, to be honest. You probably don’t remember my review of the Oscar-nominated documentary short The Barber of Little Rock but I criticised it for being composed almost entirely of non-real ‘meetings’ and ‘conversations’ staged for the cameras. That was a short. This is a whole movie, much of which is inauthentic. Aside from manufactured scenarios, Batiste’s circle is made up of creatives who can’t help themselves from trying to sound profound at all times.

Batiste’s fiancée is undergoing treatment for cancer throughout the movie. On the one hand, it’s something - the only thing in the movie, to be honest - that is actually interesting. On the other, it doesn’t really feel like this intersects in any meaningful way with the creation of the symphony.

The thing that’s a bit worrying is that without the cancer happening, you wonder if there could have been a movie at all - there is nothing really going on on the music side. I really have my doubts about whether this should have been a full-length movie - it might have been better off as a 40 minute short. Disappointing. ★★☆☆☆

Folk Horror Friday is just, err, Four-Kay Horror Friday this week:

The Amityville Horror (1979) - A family manage to buy a house at a knock-down price after the previous family were mass murdered. But ruh-roh, the house is haunted by sinister supernatural forces!

I can understand how this has been, and is today, divisive. It has a lot of charm and is quite effective at depicting its horrors. On the other, it’s quite uneven, has wonky internal logic and has an anti-climactic ending.

I feel like it would have been better if the filmmakers had a clearer vision for what the house was capable of. It has a weird grab-bag of abilities throughout the film including being able to attack people that aren’t anywhere near the house whenever the writers fancy. Also… just a different ending.

Overall, nowhere near perfect but I quite enjoyed it to be honest. The 4K is nice with, again, tasteful use of HDR given the age of the source material. ★★★★☆

OG is a goodun but it's a film the spawned a thousand sequels, spin offs and dubiously associated filler movies.
Seems there is absolutely nothing the content farms won't attach the word "Amityville" to.

Having pondered upon it and done a Google, it seems Amityville could be considered a folk horror film. It doesn’t really seem less of one than Blood on Satan’s Claw. It’s just that it’s primarily associated with the haunted house sub-genre.

Talk of rental shops set me off on a stroll down memory lane and I ended up Googling the crazy VHS rental place I used to use in Portland. It’s changed a bit, but it still exists! Behold: Movie Madness.

https://moviemadness.org/

I got a little twinge

I like the Ryan Reynolds version

Back when I was teaching media I used to say to kids "if there's a story in your life, tell it, because at least one person wants to hear it."

The Creator (2023) - B&N Bargains knock-off of Blade Runner in which undeveloped characters run around from A to B.

I just never emotionally engaged with this. I don’t really see how I was supposed to. The film never does anything to make you care about the characters.

I don’t think it had any interesting ideas from a sci-fi point of view and just seemed to be warming up Blade Runner’s leftovers. It makes a show of being gritty and realistic yet has an outright magic robot girl in it and engages in some pretty cheap violation of its internal logic for the cause of blatant emotional manipulation.

There are lots of competent special effects. Apparently this was cropped to its extreme widescreen, which seems an odd decision. This was filmed on cheap ‘prosumer’ cameras, which gives it an interesting gritty ‘lived in’ look, although I’m not sure I would have appreciated this had I paid £15 to see it in IMAX. I liked the soundtrack, which at times felt like it was breaking its back trying to hold up the story.

I didn’t think this was very good and considering the only Gareth Edwards film I’ve actually enjoyed since Monsters was taken off him and given a glow up by Andor mastermind Tony Gilroy, I feel about wary about trusting in his future output. ★★☆☆☆