Movie lover, even after working almost 20 years helping keep the OFLC/ACB running (I escaped in 2023)
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Barfly 1987
This film played on repeat for ever at arthouse/fleapit cinemas near me in the late 80s and I avoided it like the plague. In hindsight I shouldn't have.
Mickey Rourke plays a thinly disguised version of Charles Bukowski in a self-mythologising role written by Bukowski in the Hunter S. Thompson mould. Bukowski himself criticised Rourke's performance for being too mannered, and while Rourke's frequent "yeahhhhs" do bring to mind late-80s Bruce Willis hipsterdom, he crucially conveys a sense of his…
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Stalker 1979
Legendary Soviet scifi that was clearly pilfered by Alex Garland to make the way more obvious and showy (and fare less resonant) Annihilation. Tarkovsky's trademark beautiful compositions and art direction, and intelligent writing, and themes of the human spirit, are all throughout this tale of a black-market ex-con expedition guide called the Stalker who escorts a professor and a writer into a dangerous alien incursion on Earth called The Zone that can grant innermost desires. The contrast between sepia and full colour brings to mind (tangentially) the Wizard of Oz off all things. The ending is a classic as well.
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Black Dog 2024
A fine story about an ex-con misfit (Eddie Peng) who comes home from prison to his remote west-Chinese town to find it has a stray dog problem and is about to be demolished in the wake of the 2008 Olympics, whereupon he finds purpose in life with a stray whippet-cross he is ordered to catch. Its humanity, magical realism and subtle social criticism comes across like Jia Zhangke making a contemporary Western, and Jia himself does cameo in a key…
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Two-Lane Blacktop 1971
Amazing, almost forgotten classic road film about two almost silent rev-heads (Dennis Wilson and James Taylor) driving across America in their custom street-racing machine until they cross paths with a hitch-hiking hippie and a rich middle-aged GTO driver with a past (Warren Oates). Shot with almost a verité style using locations (including real speedways) and available light, it's a brilliant character and mood piece and feels like an elegy for 1960s idealism turning into the Me Generation's self-absorbtion. Oates in…
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