Watched this on a flight from Tokyo to Shanghai on a potato quality screen and getting half the dialogue through my barely elementary school understanding of Chinese subtitles because the headphones vibrated so much bass from the constant turbulence. Just like Nolan would have wanted.
Action set pieces were fantastic honestly, especially in the earlier sections. Entire film is near enough built around moving from cool set piece to cool set piece. Nolan loves taking a shite shower idea and…
Sports body horror. Awooga awooga. Plays almost like a male power fantasy with a side of sexual humiliation; the chad Kojima versus the virgin Tsuda. The mechanically aggressive editing a Tsukamoto staple, less bodies being ripped apart by machinery à la Tetsuo and more fists puncturing faces. Fast-paced edits and janky camera shots make it feel like the film is battering the shit out of you half the time. Moments of ennui with backdrops of brutalist Tokyo architecture, the only…
"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving."
Redux
While it's highly claimed to be the greatest war film of all time, Apocalypse Now is even more than that. It sits higher than being the top of its respected genre, as being one of the greatest movies of all time. It is not something you just watch, you experience…
You know you're on a pretty good streak when The Conversation is your worst film of the decade. That's not even something that should be said, I don't even want to say it's his least good. Maybe because "least good" is a stupid way to describe anything, but also because this is a damn fine piece of cinema and certainly Coppola's most overlooked work.
How a filmmaker went from this streak, a decade of examples in cinema's absolute finest, to…
