This is (relative to her ouvre) Deborah Brock’s masterpiece.
Brock had an aesthetic she seems to infuse into her movies whether it makes sense or not. I wonder if she was granted ten million dollars to make whatever type of movie she wanted, instead of being tied to Corman’s leftovers like the three films she has made are, what would she make?
This had one good gag.
Deborah Brock seems like a very sweet person, but she is my ARTnemeses.
So many scenes from Five Corners fall into the category of not an absurd comedy but, like, ‘what the fuck even?!’
Five Corners was written by the same guy who wrote some pretty great movies like Moonstruck, Joe Versus the Volcano and Doubt.
Moonstruck hit a perfect pitch between melodrama and musical. Its director understood the assignment, he saw the humor in the screenplay and matched it with some quiet-operatic filmmaking. The other two films were both directed by the…
I kept thinking of Crowded Houses ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’.
But seriously, this is a good example of a well written, well acted, well scored, good looking film by a very boring director or film-assembler but not editor as the basic editing was just fine.
My two main beefs are that the atmosphere was totally lacking, we should have felt the dread of these losers losing their entire everything. It should have been an inverted Helm’s Deep. And the film…
youtu.be/y8TGcSWEy6c?si=r7ocQzAbioxdAT9s
Everyone makes noise and video essays that Tarantino lifted a section of City on Fire for Reservoir Dogs, but no one is talking about how the ending of this film was directly lifted by Tarantino for the ending of Jackie Brown (and by ending I mean after the climax, the character ending), and that ain’t a judgement as I think Tarantino nailed the ending much better in his film. Seeing Sheba, Baby’s ending for the first time while intimately knowing…
It’s hard to deny that this is a great movie even if it is as ignoble as fuck.
The film semi-skirts the issue of being a pro-confederate blow job by having a protagonist that starts off apolitical and only falls into war because he wants the admiration of a woman and only when he realizes his southern brothers are in trouble (because he overheard the ‘dirty dog’ Union Soldiers discuss their plan of attack) does he willfully participate in the…
A helicopter, a motorcycle and a train walk into a Jackie Chan movie.
This one surprised me. It moves from being tense to broad comedy to comedy comedy to amazing action to slapstick to expressing real visceral scary pain all inside of an easy to digest and well structured story like no other movie I can think of. And it’ll kinetically move through that list of genre and back again within a couple seconds. The vibe was so perfectly balanced and fun. It was just such an extremely entertaining movie.
As that first…
I wish there was less talking, or better poetry in the words. I loved how everything looked, and the vibe is solid. The music and sound are where my heart fluttered and I felt great. Then these beautiful people with their beautiful language would talk and not say anything that reached the level of the sights and sounds we were being shown (one person spoke english, which wasn’t a very beautiful language to me). I’m sure were I standing next…
Manic empty dream movie.
Sound and fury signifying nothing.
Blah blah blah.
I still sort of liked its energy. I wish it could have been as well written as it was assembled.
The first part of the Tobey Maguire section is straight out of Boogie Nights, as my letterboxd buddy said - boxd.it/3FWi2t
I liked the music, but it kept reminding me of Adriano Celentano’s song of mock english (which is extremely fitting) - youtu.be/-VsmF9m_Nt8?si=GZEM1db7vAn4ENkb
That fucking ending was annoying and stupid and may make whatever was entertaining enough about this film as garbage as that lame ass ridiculous jerk-off ending.
I’ve always felt that Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master was just his way of telling his close friend that he loves him. It ended up being especially poetic because his close friend would end up dying within two years of that film’s release. Fassbinder did an inverse of that same thing with his film In a Year of 13 Moons, he made that film for someone in his life who had already died. Fassbinder was telling them that he always…