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3 years, 9 months ago
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Movies the giraffe watched in 2021: February (25 movies items)
"I love love love that dumb poster of Clifford that is desperately trying to make you think this movie will feature a (perhaps big red) dog named Clifford"
3 years, 9 months ago
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Movies the giraffe watched in 2021: February (25 movies items)
3 years, 9 months ago
VierasTalo added 1 item to Film Journal 2021 list
A very impressive documentary about a valley in Pakistan that got flooded due to a rockslide in 2008, and a family that resides next to what is now a lake, mournful of their previous home and glory, now washed under the water. The family talks of these past days as we're treated to magnificent shots of Pakistani nature and the surrounding area, as well as a narrative framework of a fairy tale about people dealing with the environment of the world they live in. It's a collection of fragments, but they're all quite significant, and the film does an exceptional job at leaving it up to you to decide whether you take inspiration or despair from these people and this land.
3 years, 9 months ago
VierasTalo added 1 item to Film Journal 2021 list
If you ever have to cast a film full of dubious douche bags get in contact with Lindsay Graham and Mary Vernieu because those two got this shit on lockdown! Also bonus points for having Clancy Brown and Jennifer Coolidge just play super chill roles.
Oh, the movie is pretty great. Practically everything I would even begin to brush about it has been said already.
3 years, 9 months ago
VierasTalo added 3 items to their collection
3 years, 9 months ago
3 years, 10 months ago
VierasTalo added 1 item to Film Journal 2021 list
Hah, oh gee, what an ending this one has. After sitting through 75 or so minutes of a passable, though very late-era giallo, you get this splash card about how this movie was made so the police may learn from it.
So yeah, here's some lessons for you, cops:
- Criminology doesn't work
- The killer could be a witch
- Psychics can be effectively used to get up-to-date information on the killings
The largest failing in this movie is how disconnected our heroine is from literally everything else in the movie. The killer (... probably) never comes after her. She never meets the killer. It'd be alright if there was at least some red herring climax, but no, this movie ends with the vaginal mutilation of a dead woman. It's not a climax, it's a gross-out shock shot preceded by her breast getting cut off. In it's extremely visible and vacuous attempt to shock you it's just very... boring as a choice to ostensibly end the movie on.
So look, this thing has some stuff going for it (the "voyeur's bar" has some interesting clientele, our lead is pretty good at acting and when you still think this might be going somewhere the sleaziness is fun enough) but it pays off on absolutely none of it and really just feels like they ran out of money (a thing not helped by the film repeating a shot of a car driving by the camera like four times across it's entire duration) and couldn't film the actual ending.
On the bright side the music stays pretty nice and haunting throughout and there are some cool shots here โ if only you could see them given that this only exists as either a cut TV version or a very ugly VHS copy.
3 years, 10 months ago
VierasTalo added 1 item to Film Journal 2021 list
A complete offensive mess of a movie. Dude gets shot in a parking lot and has a death flashback to the events preceding this shooting. It's mostly about his Moroccan holiday with this far-too-young wife, where he raped her mother and got very angry all the time. This has nothing to do with why he's getting shot though, turns out the shooter was just an obsessed gay lover of a guy whose body our hero disposed of because he thought the mom shot him!
I just can't with most of the decisions made in this film. It isn't helped by the score being a boring trash heap. The only intrigue it presents occurs when you think maybe the movie is going to lean into how crappy the character is, but it never does, and this inability to understand what a toxic piece of garbage he is destroys whatever else they could've done with this (which is honestly not much). This is referred to as a giallo in most circles which is totally true on account of this being based on a book that was probably a giallo book, but it's definitely not the sort of movie you'd think of or hope for when using that term.
3 years, 10 months ago
VierasTalo added 15 items to their collection
3 years, 10 months ago
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Movies the giraffe watched in 2021: January (42 movies items)
3 years, 10 months ago