lololol this was fantastic.
the 1st letter from grandpa had me legit LOLing.

I'm having some trouble getting the details. Apparently it opens in Japan in less than a month. Live or streaming, I don't know. Will try to update soon.

the film with dev patel?

yes

I think sad too, especially when the clone extracts the memory of Emily walking with her mother.

Emily's voice is by Hertzfeld's niece. He recorded random things she said and fit them into the film.

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Discovered a film on Prime: Nomad by Werner Herzog. It's about Bruce Chatwin and how their lives intersect in various ways. Fascinating.

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oh man I remember reading about that and then totally forgot all about it and it didn't spring to mind when I watched it ITT.

we may need a longer report on this, should time permit.

Skinamarink, Kyle Edward Ball, 2022

This is a rather controversial low-budget horror movie that me and the GF watched the other night. It's pretty interesting and the controversy comes, not from the content, but from the style. I'd say this is an experimental film with a capital E, because the movie is quite dark - not dark in tone but literally dark, as in very little light lol. And the composition/framing is very strange and off-putting.

It's about two young children who wake up in their house to discover their father is missing and the windows and doors of the house have all disappeared. So they're trapped. And there's a weird voice that asks them to "come upstairs."

That's it. Very little happens. It's all atmosphere. We never even actually see the faces of the children because of the strange framing.

The film takes place in the 90s, so it's got a film grain to it that becomes very noisy in the dark. Lots of grain flickering about. Combine this with long shots of black doorways and your brain starts trying to see patterns or movement in the noisy blackness - and that's incredibly unnerving. At one point, my GF yelped because she thought she saw something...but it was nothing.

I enjoyed this, but it is definitely not for everyone.

I will check this out

I like the retro trailer, but both its content and your review make it sound like a very boring movie.

Lol it can be…just depends on your mood. I recommend turning out all the lights, partake of an edible, and just let it wash over you.

I 1000% want more non-Marvel movies and I was born long enough ago to appreciate the dated-ness (? new word) of Skinamarink...

having said that....this was a much too long bore-fest...creepy images w/zero plot or acting are OK for only so long. sure the phone thing late was creepy....but nothing else.

Infinity Pool, released in the same time period, was a much more interesting watch...

Aren't most movies too dark these days? I mean, you can't see anything on screen. It's not just horror films.

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I thought this was just my tv going bad.

Or your eyes. You guys are of the age where cataracts might be an issue.

It's amazing how much more I can see on screens after having that fixed.

That's not it. Older movies seem fine.

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at the theater?

Commercial theaters running projectors on low output settings is a real thing that can impact operational costs... these projectors EAT large amount of electricity and the low margin theaters cut cost where they can.

At theaters and at home. For some I need to set TV at brightest mode. Filmmaker mode is too dark.

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I have noticed that almost every Netflix original movie or series is darkly shot. Annoyingly so. It really pissed me off in the series Ozark when even outdoor shots in pure sunlight were shot darkly and dimly. And its not just Netflix almost all of the newer stuff I watch seems to be dark on purpose. I think it is an artistic choice and a poor one.

I think some of it is because of modern film techniques. I'm no expert, but I saw something on YouTube about this recently. I think it used to be impossible for directors to make films that dark because the cameras wouldn't record anything without a good amount of light. Now they're able to - maybe because of digital cameras, don't recall for sure.

John Wick 4 was batshit insane. A ballet of violence. Total chaos. Gorgeous chaos.

GF and I watched another bizarro 70s horror film: The Sentinel, from 1977 and directed by Michael Winner.

What a trip.

Christina Rains (who I kept wondering if she was ever going to wear a bra) is a woman who moves into a NYC apartment building where a blind priest on the 5th floor is constantly looking out the window, apparently guarding NY from the gates of hell. Which is in this apartment building.

The cast is ridiculous:

Rains
Chris Sarandon
Burgess Meredith
Ava Gardner
Eli Wallach
Martin Balsam
John Carradine
Jose Ferrer
Arthur Kennedy
Sylvia Miles
Deborah Raffin
Christopher Walken
Jerry Orbach
Beverly D'Angelo
William Hickey
Jeff Goldblum

Raines is a model who is being pressured to get married by her BF (Sarandon), and meets the comically weird neighbors in her new building. She has tea with lesbian couple Miles and D'Angelo (in her first film role), and has to uncomfortable watch D'Angelo - never saying a word - masturbate while wearing a leotard. And that act comes out of nowhere.

There's also a birthday party for Burgess Meredith's cat, named Jezebel, for some reason.

There's one or two scary moments, but the movie is pretty laughable and just plain bizarre. Nothing like Raines, as a teenager, walking in on her father having a threesome - naked - with two women where they are feeding one another birthday cake. And then later having to kill the ghost of her father by slicing his face open, cutting his nose off, and literally plucking his eye out and slicing it open.

And then later the gates of hell open and out come REAL disfigured and/or disabled extras like something out of Todd Browning's Freaks. One thing you can say for Winner as a director - no one ever accused him of subtlety.

I had no idea what was going on through most of the movie. It was an entertaining watch, nonetheless. I give it 2 out of 5 stars, strictly for Christina Rains' beauty (always had a thing for her) and seeing Beverly D'Angelo naked...but it gets docked because I had to see Sylvia Miles naked, too.

They may have been hoping for another Rosemary's Baby.