Jon Cole’s Watch Log652
This was a blast. My favorite of the series so far. No clue why the response to this was mixed.
Great time. Terrific pacing. Tight 90 runtime. Fun jump scares that rarely felt cheap. A handful of really epic shots. Tough to do a video game adaptation where the whole film is from one character's perspective, but Austin Abrams really carries the whole thing. A couple of first-person shots that felt like silly fan service, but... while it's not afraid to fly its video game freak flag from time to time, it's a fun ride even if you're not showing up for that. Highly recommended.
Yesssssss. Completely here for this insanity. This is like an 80s b-movie given the arthouse treatment. Let's do lots more of this.
It's absolutely insane to me that--even in 2008--something like this cost $20m.
Heard mixed things about this one, but had a great time with it. Much better pacing than I expected. Some artifacts of a young director, but nothing off-putting. Kane Parsons was clearly ready for this opportunity. Duplass really shines, & I hope he's a big part of the sequel.
This is a film I might revisit in a year or two & love. It's a visual feast, for sure, & a spectacle to take in. But it demands a bit of reflection. Lots of ego vs alter ego & reality vs fantasy, as Elle interrogates her relationship with her father & ultimately breaks down.
This one tries to be a few different things at once, & ends up missing the mark on all of them. It's kind of about AI autonomy, but also about programmed devotion. It's kind of about gender roll toxicity, but not enough to make the robot come across as the protagonist. So it never really feels like the movie has a clear perspective, they're just creating conflicts to justify the Terminator sequence at the end.
I had a vague idea of what J-Horror was before watching this, based on the era. But didn't realize how small and connected the scene of filmmakers was.
This would've been a banger at 90m. But even if it's stretched out a bit, the brilliant cinematography makes the ride worthwhile.
Left wondering if the exploitation of an animated character stops with the characters who wronged her in the film, or if it extends to the filmmakers themselves. If there's no one actually suffering the humiliation, is the natural response to project suffering onto the inanimate ink? Or to draw conclusions about how the filmmakers feel about real, live women? These questions wouldn't seem so boring if so much of the film didn't feel gratuitous for gratuity's sake. A little restraint can go a long way, just ask Tobe Hooper.
I was prepared to forgive a lot of this film's flaws because of the cast, but it comes across as a really bad 2012 standup routine about cell phones. In theory, juxtaposing rapidly advancing technology against vampirism to interrogate the female experience of aging is a great premise, but this comes across more like "old lady whines at sky." The jokes, unfortunately, did not age well.
Kind of funny that they reproduce Dr. Grant's velociraptor talon scene from Jurassic Park. This movie is everything you think it would be & not much more.
Lots of Clockwork Orange vibes here, where Anson Boon's character ends up paying for chaos he creates. A very convincing droog in the first act of the film.
