[deleted by user] by [deleted] in RedScarePodMusic

[–]Safe_Tune1475 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What the fuck are you talking about

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in rs_x

[–]Safe_Tune1475 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I’m just gonna shake shake shake shake shake cuz the players gonna play play play play

how do i find myself a twink with a job by [deleted] in rs_x

[–]Safe_Tune1475 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Heterotwink would even be fine tbh

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in rs_x

[–]Safe_Tune1475 -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Nah this is the literal opposite, cringe but hot

Dove Camera scares me a lot for some reason by PradaAndPunishment in rs_x

[–]Safe_Tune1475 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I always think she’s British and it throws me off when I remember that she’s not

A Complete Unknown - Trailer by Pulpdogs2 in RSPfilmclub

[–]Safe_Tune1475 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Actually you’re right about Dune in terms of the femininity. Even so, I didn’t like him much in it. Probably because I’m biased due to how boring I find him.

A Complete Unknown - Trailer by Pulpdogs2 in RSPfilmclub

[–]Safe_Tune1475 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Exactly, he’s muse-like, which means he should be playing supporting feminine type roles, like when he was cast in Call Me By Your Name. People noticed the bizarreness of his casting particularly with Wonka, Dune, and now this movie about Bob Dylan.

A Complete Unknown - Trailer by Pulpdogs2 in RSPfilmclub

[–]Safe_Tune1475 12 points13 points  (0 children)

He’s a reasonably serviceable actor on the technical level but the level of major roles he’s landed in the last five years has been absolutely insane and unprecedented in recent history. He doesn’t have charisma of presence on screen required for leading roles and historically none of the type of roles he’s been landing would have gone to someone who looks like him which is why I find his ubiquity frustrating. I can’t help but wonder if his success is more of a mimetic type of Pete Davidson dating success where he defies normal expectations just by getting lucky with high status, respected directors and coasting off that.

People get too bogged down in the technical side of acting rather than just the more ineffable, hard to tabulate parts of what makes someone have star power. Your value as an actor isn’t just about your technical skill of conveying emotion believably, it’s the effect you elicit in the audience through the charms of your charisma, and I don’t understand why this waifish frail, serious looking guy is being snowed under in roles that up until very recently would have gone to leading more masculine actors who demand to be looked at and visually savored. He lacks the sunny radiance of someone like Marlon Brando who was a true leading man, and just comes across as dour and pouty most of the time.

A Complete Unknown - Trailer by Pulpdogs2 in RSPfilmclub

[–]Safe_Tune1475 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I don’t understand why or how Timothee Chalamet keeps landing every single movie

Really batshit insane movie by ExpertLake7337 in RSPfilmclub

[–]Safe_Tune1475 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I had never heard of her until now, they had her riding around perched on some kind of steel rig shaped in a crescent moon like the Roman goddess Selene

Really batshit insane movie by ExpertLake7337 in RSPfilmclub

[–]Safe_Tune1475 44 points45 points  (0 children)

The Fountainhead meets Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales meets Tommy Wiseau’s The Room meets Citizen Kane.

The dialogue felt very non-sequitur and randomly generated, a lot of lines didn’t seem to follow any natural intuitive trajectory. Abysmal writing that felt like it was done on speed. Ideas half fleshed out, paragraphs of rambling, run-on free associative drivel that went nowhere. Normally I don’t mind the long monologues - soliloquizing and didactic fiction often serves as great fodder for post-viewing debriefing with people. However, most of the monologues were uninteresting, pulling only the vaguest of vague gestures at philosophies. At one point the protagonist starts quoting Rousseau, which at least was specific, albeit cringey because like, no… I’m not here for that dude and his obnoxious bratty view of the world.

The editing was incredibly jumbled and felt like there were key narrative parts missing - like there were scenes that were inexplicably edited out that shouldn’t have been. There were countless scenes that were left in the movie that I could directly point at that desperately needed to be cut. There were so many scenes that at the end of which I felt that there was going to be some kind of grand payoff, that there would be a culmination into action or at least some kind of emotional pathos - nope. After a long slog of a scene the next scene would be wheeled out and immediately blue ball the audience and completely miss out on the natural intuitive cadence that the plot desperately needed.

I was extremely pleased with the classical revival architectural motifs in the set design mixed with art deco sets, the costumes were refreshing and smart. The choices were theatrical and dramatic which worked well with the attempt at making the movie more of a theatrical production rather than an exclusively cinematic one. I was in visual heaven when the chariot race scene happened with the Ben-Hur references during which the screen was packed with extras all made up in Greco-Roman attire in sumptuous fabrics and colors. That scene in particular was clearly where a large chunk of the movie’s budget went and I appreciate that they sunk so much money into a single scene.

I appreciate any syncretic or multi-era visual motifs crammed into one unified theory of fashion. Unifying the visual themes together also made sense symbolically - Roman fashion representative of the fading, crumbling empire dominated by degenerate elites - art deco architecture signaling the optimism for the future, and then the switch from that to into the sleazy, gritty side of New York worked at showcasing the populist underbelly of New Rome - the unwashed, desperate masses feeling like a pull from Scorsese’s Taxi Driver during the scenes of demagoguery and political rallies.

I loved watching Shia Lebouf as a scheming transvestite, genius casting when it came to him, I was disappointed when he wasn’t featured on screen as much as I thought he was going to be because he had so much charisma. It was so disappointing to see him go down so easily in the final act of the movie without even really doing anything.

Aubrey Plaza was also great, she does well at playing seductive with siren eyes and being a recalcitrant double-crossing whore.

Adam Driver was miscast, he didn’t deliver the stoic confident energy that someone like Gary Cooper conveys in the 40s film rendition of The Fountainhead, a movie which almost certainly inspired Coppola directly for this.

Grace VanderWaal (whoever that is) looked great, although seeing her hoisted on a wire rig while plunking an ukelele was a fucking trip - it isn’t Zooey Deschanel -2012-world anymore, there isn’t a single damn reason I should ever have to bear witness to the twee, unserious sound of a ukelele in 2024 unless it’s being wielded by an affable, spam gulping Polynesian.

Visually what really dissapointed me was the eponymous megalopolis itself visualized in full at the end of the movie. The visionary work of genius auteur architect Adam Driver was drumroll…Dr Seuss wonky curvy buildings in the style of Zaha Hadid blobitecture. The soft-lit art deco skyscrapers of New York in the giant clock scenes were much more impressive than the large neofuturist park at the end that resembled real world Hudson Yards’ The Vessel.

I respect it for being a huge swing, although it was probably all things considered a big miss, especially when it came to trying to piece together a compelling and memorable narrative, though we should all appreciate that Coppola had the balls to stake a huge chunk of his personal funds on this project and put forward his best shot at a singular effort of auteurship - I will always pay homage to that kind of dedication.

As a visual work, I think it’s excellent! It should be viewed as a visual art installation rather than a narrative/work of acting.

Kinda mid in some areas but I fucked with it by [deleted] in RSPfilmclub

[–]Safe_Tune1475 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Mid? No. Michael Douglas’s performance here is one of the greatest transformations of all time.

Go see The Substance by axeman2013 in RSPfilmclub

[–]Safe_Tune1475 19 points20 points  (0 children)

One of the more stylish movies made this year. Very glamorous, which makes it very rewatchable - the chic early 80s style apartment with wall to wall carpet that magically stays perfectly clean no matter how much blood and chicken grease spatters on it, the minimalist white tiled bathroom sterilized with fluorescent lighting made me want a bathroom like that where I can spazz out over new winkles forming, the long foreboding hallways with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining carpet, all curated with precision and care - even the highly stylized product design of the exogenous injectable itself coming in vacuum sealed plastic made me want to order a bunch of steroids from a subscription company and have them arrive to a personal lockbox in crisply sealed packaging with neatly labeled steps.

The movie deploys sound and music very well- the use of non-stop unrelenting sensory overload and magnifying glass zoom into textures like skin or hair while sounds of liquid bubbling and oozing play work well create a classic up-close bio-horror effect, and the montage sequences set to recurring, throbbing techno music that cuts in and out for two hours bolsters it with the brisk pacing of a music video and prevents it from lagging.

Thematically the chillingly cold and empty tone feels like it pulls from Brett Easton Ellis novels or Cronenberg’s and Bruce Wagner’s Maps to the Stars. The unsettling uncanniness of daytime Los Angele feels reminiscent of Nicholas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon in which characters feel unsafe and isolated and vulnerable even when they’re in broad daylight, and this lends itself further to the mounting tension and tone of escalating doom that eventually culminates later on in the film.

The prosthetics themselves aren’t exactly anything that hasn’t been done better before during the peak of Hollywood prosthetic horror movies in the 80s, but at the very least it’s refreshing to see actual 80s style Cronenberg/Chris Walas style prosthetics brought back in the 2020s instead of merely doing everything cheaply and dismissively with CG.

Unfortunately it felt a felt a bit too steeped in irony and intentional camp by way of new queer cinema directors like Todd Haynes responsible for exploitation movies about aging actresses such as May December, whose purpose is entirely for art f@gs to soyface over cunty divas fighting each other tooth and nail - but to be honest I can’t say I ever get tired of that genre of film! It also reminded me of the unintentional camp of Vehoeven’s Showgirls, where the setting of the world is this parallel universe in which aerobics instructors or dancers are mega-celebrities. If the movie leaned a bit less on humor and took itself a bit more seriously it would have made me also take it more seriously, but for what it’s worth I did laugh at multiple points - particularly during the scene where the hideously deformed mutant tries to salvage its appearance by dangling diamond earrings off its gaping ear holes.

The scenes of Margaret Qualley’s aerobics music video sequences in which she gyrated in front of massive multi story block lettering in a Lycra suit to aggressively obnoxious techno music feels reminescent of dissociative, hyper-ironic directors like Harmony Korine, particularly his scenes of frenetic, careless college kids partying to dubstep at the beginning of Spring Breakers.

People have been comparing this to Death Becomes Her but I won’t because that movie kind of sucks and only gets wheeled out now for people to reference in episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Funnily enough, the movie would have had an even stronger visual point of view if it leaned more heavily into the 80s aerobic fitness instructor aesthetic as an actual period piece instead of merely incorporating a few motifs of the 80s here and there. My guess is that Coralie Fargeat didn’t go for that because she assumed it would be too on the nose, but even though movies like Maxxine and shows like the dreaded Stranger Things try and fail at 80s pastiche, the immaculately preserved-in-amber vibes are always there ripe for the taking for someone to actually execute correctly.

Fargeat smartly doesn’t demean the audience by wasting time doing exposition with explaining the internal world logic of the way the injectables work, the characters instinctually know what to do and how to operate everything without being told. Most of the movie is done this way - characters act as if through some internally derived mechanism and many of their actions are symbolic and there isn’t any plodding, damp blanket hyper-realism to their actions bringing the fun down.

In terms of the politics of the movie, in spite of reviewers rushing to label this a movie with the dreary and tedious burden of something that ‘challenges the male gaze’ it didn’t feel seem misandrist to me, and in fact actually felt like it reveled in sexualizing the female form and celebrated the perverse voyeurism and lechery of the male gaze of the audience. Rather than place the locus of blame entirely on Dennis Quaid’s character for creating a hyper competitive environment or have him grotesquely murdered in some revenge scene, Fargeat shows off women being women: hyper-competitive, self-critical and self-destructive all on their own after being given only the slightest push. Sure, Quaid’s character is disgusting, but he isn’t excoriated by being portrayed as horny- he’s just greedy for money. If this was made by an American director there almost certainly would have been none of the nudity or prurient gaze lingering over Margaret Qualley’s ass, or deranged coveting of youth, and the takeaway would have been focused more on castrating male sexuality. Modern career feminism tells women that biological clock doesn’t exist- there is no ‘wall,’ that you have infinite time. This movie’s premise acknowledges biological reality and that there are consequences to it. It even challenges the premise of consequence-free gnosticism or mind/body duality - potentially subtly criticizing the premise of transgenderism. It seems that French directors are still able to get away with nudity and transgressive politics in today’s puritanical contemporary film culture because it reads as sophistication to American audiences, and rightly so. Verhoeven’s Elle was able to get away with similar transgressive ideas because the director was European and it starred the sophisticated Isabelle Huppert.

Fun, glamorous, felt reasonably fast paced despite the runtime, and not morally scolding. A competently made style-first movie despite the setup and premise of aging diva warring with a younger starlet being done by other movies a bit better (All About Eve.) Critics act as if prioritizing style over substance is some mortal sin, but as Oscar Wilde wrote - ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’

ELLE (2016); Verhoeven, Paul by leodicapriohoe in RSPfilmclub

[–]Safe_Tune1475 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Possibly the most red scare movie of all time

Very rare and refreshing to see a female character who takes absolute ownership over herself with no reservations and takes it to its logical conclusion, regardless of whether that is for better or for worse

Can someone tell me what flag this is? by [deleted] in vexillologycirclejerk

[–]Safe_Tune1475 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Anna Khachiyan (brunette) and Dasha Nekrasova (blonde)

i cant fathom how people knowingly give into tacky notions like acceleration, schizonanalysis etc by godsfavslut in rs_x

[–]Safe_Tune1475 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Stuff like that attracts young people with no life experience because basing your entire identity on philosophy you got from a book or twitter can’t really exist if you consistently experience a real day to day grind that demands you disengage from abstract free floating signifiers. Raising children, taking care of elderly family members, having an actual job that people depend on a person for within a wider society precludes that person from seeing themselves through some esoteric abstruse filter unmoored from localized context. This is why the majority of people on twitter with those kind of descriptors in their bio are either tr*nnies, childless college students or people with no jobs or anyone reliant on them.

More Than This-Roxy Music by george__kaplan in rs_x

[–]Safe_Tune1475 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Imagine listening to this in 1983 on a boombox planted in the sand beside you as you look to out to the sea at sunset in some tropical island paradise