"You gave me peace in a lifetime of war."
The recent discussion about Nolan's Odyssey has had quite a few people come back to Troy and I feel like many people, such as myself, have gained a newfound appreciation for Petersen's epic, because we now know how much worse it could have been.
My favorite part of Troy are definetly the colours. The oceans are beautifully blue and the Islands of Greece are colourful, they feel like they could actually…
The Devil is in the Details.
Urban Legends are nothing new. For as long as there have been humans, there have always been tales about the obscure or bizarre. The advent of the internet, however, brought it to an all new level. Now, guarded by the anonymity of the web, everyone, even the most ordinary person, could come up with something and post it on the internet. That's how most modern "Creepypastas" begin; that's how the Backrooms began.
Parsons' film…
"Show me an alternative, and I’ll take it. What I’m doing now is horrible, difficult, frightening, but I have to do it to save my own life. [...]"
-Donald E. Westlake, The Ax 1997
I'm not going to lie, this is a film that completely flew under my radar, until I heard the Oscar Drama around it. When I found out it was going to play in a cinema near me; you could say, I had No Other Choice but…
"In this town, winning is everything."
Between the 1990s and into the early 2000s Japan experience a complete economic crisis, known today as the Lost Decades. Unemployment rates rose to 5,5% in 2002 and corporations slashed hiring, forcing most youth into low paying, part time jobs.
2LDK reflects these Japanese attitudes to the then very serious crisis. Tensions rise between two roommates, as both await a message from their producer for news on the role they both auditioned for. Both…
"It's a filthy world."
The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil is a Korean Crime-Thriller released in 2019, starring Ma-Dong-seok and Kim-Moo-yul as the titular Gangster and Cop, respectively. After both are left ridiculed in their respective Jobs, they must form an uneasy alliance to capture the Devil, a brutal serial-killer on the loose. What results is a wild goose-chase, not only about justice, but also about honor.
The mixture of high-octane action, and gritty crime-drama makes for a suprisingly great…
"Nothing is over."
This might be the film I've logged the most, here on Letterboxd. That's because this is not an easy film to rate for me, but I think I've finally got it; I know what makes First Blood special. And i think I can boil it down to three points.
Real Location - First Blood takes place in Hope, Washington, a fictionial town in the Pacific Northwest but it was actually filmed in British Columbia, over the border…
There is no end to this story.
Fuller's war-drama dares to do what no other war-movie did at the time; be genuine. Ever since the advent of film, the US-Military used the medium for propaganda. In a way, that's still the case. The Steel Helmet subverts this tiring trope; it's down to earth and realistic. It doesn't white-wash anything and questions the very core of the Korean War, just six months into this never-ending conflict.
With a suprisingly diverse cast…
"Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!"
-Karl Marx
Super Mario Bros. is an anti-adaptation. It takes everything established beforehand, and throws it all unceremoniously out of the window. What results is probably the most experimental and unusual videogame movie of all time.
The Mushroom Kingdom is a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk hellhole with President Koopa as it's fascist dictator.…
The Manchurian Candidate
No matter how far you reach for the yellow banner, you can never reach it. That banner, along with the dragon accompaniying it, has become synonymous with the Qing Dynasty, the last Imperial Era of China.
The Last Emperor really managed to impress me. It's sort of a relic. Some may call it Oscar-bait, but I would like to call it historical epic, although there's really not much epic about it. Bertollucci's film is a deeply personal…
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by observing its prisoners"
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
There will never be another Con Air. This is a movie that could only have been made in the time that it was. The late 90s were the perfect time for bold and freshly unique movie ideas and Con Air is no exeption. A big, dumb, yet weirdly engaging action movie that is both entertaining and hilariously funny. No joke, this got to be…
Home Sweet Home
Kiyoshi Kurosawa manages to turn the classic haunted-house trope into a brutally grotesque horror-flick that hasn't quite been replicated since.
Kurosawa takes his sweet time in introducing us to the characters and their relationships, wich helps us sympathise with them. The excellent use of lighting and shadows help build a suffocating atmosphere, that manages to make you feel isolated and on edge. The score is also great and is used effectively. Legendary make-up artist Dick Smith was…