Letterboxd - jwhiles

Perfect Days, 2023 - ★★★★½

jwhiles — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 08:28:25 +1200

Wanted more details about the food he was eating

Otherwise heart warming. The happiest moments of my life have also been when I look at a tree on a sunny day.

Past Lives, 2023 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 08:26:43 +1200

Sleep talking is creepy as fuck

Killers of the Flower Moon, 2023 - ★★★½ (contains spoilers)

jwhiles — Tue, 2 Apr 2024 19:40:22 +1300

This review may contain spoilers.

I liked this quite a lot. Maybe it's more interesting to say what I didn't like since it already has a million 5 star reviews.

* The use of footage with old timey instagram filters was AWFUL. I can't believe someone decided that shit looked okay to put in a cinema
* A lot of the music was bad. especially in the first twenty minutes of the film the slide guitar almost made me turn it off.
* Brendan Fraser's performance

I wanted to know more about Mollie. I was perplexed that she seemed willing to continue her marriage with someone who killed half her family as long as he admitted to poisoning her.

Natural Born Killers, 1994 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 12:08:26 +1300

Wilder at heart

The Boss of It All, 2006 - ★★★★½

jwhiles — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 10:25:33 +1300

Lars Von Trier made comedy about a small software company.

"...the 80/20 rule, agile development. That's just part of the terms necessary to define IT at an acceptable level"

Only God Forgives, 2013 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 11:42:40 +1300

exactly the right amount of exposition

American Psycho, 2000 - ★★★★½

jwhiles — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 08:16:51 +1300

It slaps.

Dune: Part Two, 2024 - ★★★½

jwhiles — Wed, 6 Mar 2024 10:31:17 +1300

At the screening we went to a bald Harkonnen looking guy, with no eyebrows, stood up before the film started and declared that he had worked on the film and would be answering questions about it after the screening. When we spoke to him he claimed that he had gotten a bit part on account of being bald, and that he had also done some unspecified small jobs on set.

The biggest question raised by Dune: Part Two, was whether this guy was genuine, pulling a weird prank, or delusional. We shall never know.

Anyway, the film. It has a big central problem, which is that it's not interesting to follow an omniscient princeling who has been trained from birth to be good at everything. There's no tension in the film because Paul knows what's going to happen, and so do we. Any challenge that he is faced with he will overcome without breaking a sweat.

I can imagine an alternative film where we just focus on the Emperor, and whatever the fuck is happening on Geidi Primes, and that is a film I would LOVE to watch. Because the scenes that do focus on these things are by far the best part of the film. I want to know what the day to day life of a pale bald serf is.

It's a shame that this was split into two films, because the multi year break kind of obscures the central arc of Paul going from being nice and principled to being a total psycho. Oh well.

The Terminal, 2004 - ½

jwhiles — Sat, 2 Mar 2024 22:37:41 +1300

Steven Spielberg's 'The Terminal' is the worst film I've ever watched. We rented it from the library of 64 DVDs that are available at Tokyo's Hundred Stay hotel. We chose this film because we had somehow come to believe that it was a film about a number of spies, counterspies and criminals trapped in a train terminal. That sounded fun and stupid. Unfortunately 'The Terminal' is actually not fun, and much stupider than I'd hoped.

What the terminal is about

'The Terminal' is a film about a stateless person who gets trapped in an airport departures lounge and is slowly ground to dust beneath the heels of American bureaucracy.

The film which is OVER TWO HOURS LONG, stars Tom Hanks who puts on an entirely incomprehensible faux Russian accent. You can never tell what he's saying, but it doesn't matter anyway because all of his lines in the film consist of the words 'Krakozhia', 'Unacceptable', or 'payless shoes' re-arranged randomly. If the writers ever let him say anything else, it's so they can have him amusingly conjugate a verb incorrectly.

The film is as structureless as a deboned chicken. Our man, Tom, has a reason to visit New York - but this reason is only revealed to us in the last twenty minutes of the film, and is then immediately resolved. For the rest of the running time he just wanders around an airport because, as far as we know, he really wants to go to New York.

There is a subplot to the film where Tom Hanks helps one of the workers in the airport seduce another one. He does this by asking them one question every day, and eventually delivers a wedding ring for them. As far as the audience knows, the two characters involved in the romance never speak to each other until the marriage proposal - despite working in the same building every day for years. They decide to get married because it turns out they both like Star Trek.

Is Tom Hanks actually bad?

Before watching this film I vaguely thought that I liked Tom Hanks as an actor, but on reflection I realise that I've not seen anything he's in besides Forest Gump, which I don't remember, and this, in which he is awful.

The wider context

The film is somewhat inspired by the real life of Mehran Karimi Nasseri. I knew this watching the film and having a quite disturbing story turned turned into a 'heartwarming romantic comedy' feels somewhat icky to me. Here are some interesting things about the real events that this film was based on which I learnt from Wikipedia:

The Ostensible reason that Mehran had to remain in Charles De Gaule airport for 18 years was that he was expelled from Iran. However it appears that he was never expelled from the country.

France and Belgium both offered Mehran residency 'but he refused to sign the papers as they listed him as being Iranian (rather than British) and did not show his preferred name, "Sir Alfred Mehran".'

Steven Spielberg's production company paid him something like 275,000 dollars to make a film of his life, and then decided to make this film, which is a bit like his life, instead.

His autobiography is called 'The Terminal Man'. There is a 1974 novel with the same title by Michael Crichton, which Crichton described as being his 'least favourite work'.

After 18 years Mehran left the airport because of a medical emergency.

At some point he became homeless. In 2022 he returned to living in the airport terminal, where he died.

Originally posted on my website

Saltburn, 2023 - ★★ (contains spoilers)

jwhiles — Sat, 2 Mar 2024 08:22:48 +1300

This review may contain spoilers.

I enjoyed watching this film more than I expected to. Moment to moment I was entertained for most (but not all) of the runtime. Some very talented people were clearly involved in the production, the actors are great, and there are some lovely shots.

BUT, there is a massive gaping hole where the heart of this film should be. I’ve been trying to imagine what Emerald Fennell was hoping to achieve when she sat down to write this script. Was it ”A film about a middle class boy who worms his way into the affections of a rich family and then kills them all?”? ”An allegory about how social striving is evil”? ”A film set during what I perceive as the best time of my life, which I will shoot in a massive house?”.

I can't come up with a way of describing ”what the film is about” that doesn’t sound like a joke.

What We Do in the Shadows, 2014 - ★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:39:47 +1300

Watched on Monday February 26, 2024.

The Great Phuket, 2024 - ★★★½

jwhiles — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 06:25:29 +1300

Life’s hard when you’re a teenage boy. This film depicted what I believe Salford was like in the 70s

Unlike everyone else I did not watch this with Mark Kermode.

I Saw the TV Glow, 2024 - ★★★★ (contains spoilers)

jwhiles — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 20:15:27 +1300

This review may contain spoilers.

I really liked this, even if it wasn’t as videodromey as I hoped. It’s a colourful fun horror film. I’d probably have liked it more if my parents had let me watch Buffy when I was a kid.

The film is mostly about being trapped in the wrong body, but also seems interested in the danger of letting fiction fill all the holes in your life, expressed by one character who understand all her problems through her obsession with a tv show, and who then decides to bury herself alive to solve it. These ideas didn’t feel like they fit together perfectly though. Because if the main character is really trapped in the wrong body then that means that Maddy is not insane, and that her obsession with tv shows and burying herself alive is justified. I guess one of the risks of making a film that’s so pointedly allegorical is that it becomes hard to separate plot and message.

The scariest part of the film where the main character tries to lower a tv to the ground outside his house. Chilling

Decision to Leave, 2022 - ★★★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 08:40:01 +1300

Every time I watch one of his films I just feel so very sad

Poor Things, 2023 - ★★★★½

jwhiles — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 07:07:38 +1300

Much like crash, this movie is literally just a soft core porno film. Beautiful stuff, no notes.

May December, 2023 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Sun, 11 Feb 2024 10:48:37 +1300

I like the bit where she opens the fridge, and there's a orchestra hit as if she's discovered a severed head, but really there's just not enough hot dogs.

Natalie Portman has a fetish for acting. Doesn’t care about who gets hurt along the way, and in fact seems happy to alienate everyone just to get more sweet juice for her acting practice.

I don't understand how someone who makes cakes + a nurse can afford to live in a giant mansion.

The Iron Claw, 2023 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 12:25:58 +1300

Man I love wrestling

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, 1985 - ★★

jwhiles — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 22:28:00 +1300

No one drives a car or motorbike for the majority of this film. The closest we get is a car being pulled by a bunch of camels. Sick.

The first part of this film is really good! And then it gets really bad, boring and confusing. Max seems to have changed into Han Solo, the one scene with cars is toothless and boring. Why does the psychotic dwarf called “The Master” start wearing a suit and a hat and become a jovial old man?

This was really bad, I wish I had turned it off as soon as it went beyond the thunderdome.

Mad Max 2, 1981 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 22:23:42 +1300

This starts by retroactively trying to explain the background for the first film. A big war happened, and burned all the gas (I think), so now people drive around the desert in muscle cars and fight over any 'guzzoline' they can find.

Max is on the road, just doing his thing. He finds a man who he'll bully for the rest of the film, until he starts to like it. There's a town, which is actively pumping gas (despite it all being burned up? Is there gas still in the ground? Why?) and then the rest of the film is essentially the same plot as the land before time. All the ~~dinosaurs~~ people want to get out of the horrible wasteland and to a nice ~~oasis~~ beach with water and sunshine.

The film maintains the bleak tone of the first one, but with more assless chaps. If I could change one thing, it would be to excise the small child with a magic boomerang from the film.

Mad Max, 1979 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 11:25:48 +1300

Much bleaker than I remembered it being! The biker gang have a clockwork orange vibe - and I’d love to know more about them. But the film seems very committed to not explaining anything about the world in which it is set.

Crash, 1996 - ★★★★½

jwhiles — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 11:09:43 +1300

Will Toledo sang

“all my life, I've been waiting for some real good porn.
Something with meaning, something fulfilling”

Well here it is Will

Barton Fink, 1991 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 09:39:04 +1300

Most not really enjoyable to watch. Very tense and stressful, and I wanted to slap Barton and tell him that writers block is not a real thing and that he should ‘just do it’.

Some very funny moments. Michael Lerner is absolutely hilarious in this.

All in all I have no idea what this film was about. I guess mainly Hollywood?

Burn After Reading, 2008 - ★★★½

jwhiles — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 10:28:58 +1300

Amazed by how much Brad Pitt, and in fact all other the male stars in this, manages to make himself seem a total loser.

Snatch, 2000 - ★★★

jwhiles — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 11:26:49 +1300

Oh I’m an Irish traveller so I am. I love caravans and me ma.

So many British actors. So much fun.

I can’t believe they choose Dreadlock Holiday as the musical queue to introduce the black characters.

Promising Young Woman, 2020 - ★★★

jwhiles — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 11:20:20 +1300

A good revenge film has to make you wish that the protagonist will give up their quest for revenge - and for them to not do that.

This mixes up the formula by having Cassie give up her quest, for about two days, and then get right back to it when she realises that the one guy that she trusted was also a baddun.

I would have liked if the revenge was more cathartic! Why couldn’t she have carved Nina into the guy a few times before he broke free?

Somehow this didn’t seem like a super well made film but I can’t really but my finger on why. I loved Cassie’s weird parents and creepy house.

The Mask, 2023 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Fri, 5 Jan 2024 05:27:57 +1300

Watched on Thursday January 4, 2024.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, 2023 - ★★

jwhiles — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 06:29:11 +1300

Those bloody Germans! At it again!

They shouldn’t have made this film.

Bottoms, 2023 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 09:18:31 +1300

Loved the totally derange picture of school. Destructive behaviour is fun.

I appreciated the amount of stuff that was happening on screen in every scene, with people talking over each other constantly. It had the vibe of the Long Goodbye, except sillier. Like two characters will be having a conversation that advances the plot, whilst in the background someone is cooing to themselves “I'm so strong”. great.

Burning, 2018 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 10:55:46 +1300

Feeling very sad in sympathy for the poor lonely idiots at the center of this film.

Primal Fear, 1996 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Mon, 1 May 2023 06:49:29 +1200

I love any film from the 90s about people who work in the law and wear trench coats

Showgirls, 1995 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 06:54:16 +1200

Wow! What a film. My favourite part was the line ‘it must be weird, not having anybody cum on you’

Basic Instinct, 1992 - ★★★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 06:02:19 +1200

Erotic and thrilling

The Third Man, 1949 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Thu, 8 Apr 2021 04:06:17 +1200

Watched on Wednesday April 7, 2021.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, 2019 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 03:49:19 +1300

A remake of the handmaiden

Princess Mononoke, 1997 - ★★★★★

jwhiles — Thu, 4 Mar 2021 02:39:12 +1300

Basically the same film as totoro

My Neighbor Totoro, 1988 - ★★★★★

jwhiles — Thu, 4 Mar 2021 02:38:25 +1300

Watched on Saturday February 27, 2021.

The Handmaiden, 2016 - ★★★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 21:32:52 +1300

Watched on Tuesday February 16, 2021.

The Prestige, 2006 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 9 Feb 2021 03:06:06 +1300

and that’s what they call the prestige baby

Shin Godzilla, 2016 - ★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 21:34:44 +1300

The first two thirds of this film were great and the last third could have been cut entirely.

Videodrome, 1983 - ★★★★★

jwhiles — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 06:43:04 +1300

Watched on Tuesday January 19, 2021.

Shivers, 1975 - ★★★

jwhiles — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 06:41:17 +1300

Just a normal porno

Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion, 1997 - ★★★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 02:25:29 +1300

Wow

Tenet, 2020 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 02:25:13 +1300

Cool action film about time

Interstellar, 2014 - ★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 02:24:56 +1300

Long space film about time

The Woman Who Ran, 2020 - ★★★★★

jwhiles — Sun, 3 Jan 2021 09:33:34 +1300

Watched on Saturday January 2, 2021.

Uncle Frank, 2020 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Sat, 2 Jan 2021 10:40:09 +1300

Heart warming film about how a horrible family member dying can bring everyone else together.

Spenser Confidential, 2020 - ★★

jwhiles — Fri, 1 Jan 2021 21:22:21 +1300

I was forced to watch this by my family. It was not a good film.

The Personal History of David Copperfield, 2019 - ★★

jwhiles — Fri, 1 Jan 2021 21:21:40 +1300

I don’t know what the point of this film was

The Trial, 1962 - ★★★★

jwhiles — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 10:55:35 +1300

A film adaption of navigating the internet

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972 - ★★★

jwhiles — Sun, 27 Dec 2020 09:52:57 +1300

Maybe I'm ignorant, but this just seemed okay.

Song	Artist	Plays this week
The Geese Are Flying Westward	Bill Fay	4
Judey on a Street	Okkervil River	4
Dylan Thomas	Better Oblivion Community Center	3
A Page Incomplete	Bill Fay	3
How Little	Bill Fay	3
The Freedom To Read	Bill Fay	3
Underneath The Sun	Bill Fay	3
War Machine	Bill Fay	3
Who Is The Sender?	Bill Fay	3
Beg for You (feat. Rina Sawayama)	Charli XCX	3

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