I am seriously back to watching movies lately and am enjoying it ( most of the time ).
I guess it is the season...
Believe me, there was a time when I was fed up with watching films ( having studied cinema and watched 1000s of films in those 7 years of Uni ), and there have been many occasions where I felt that I was merely wasting my time. Something us human beings seem to be pretty good at ( both at doing this and thinking this thought ).
In all honesty, this is how I often feel about watching stuff on Netflix, aside from how hard it is to find something worth watching in the pile of mediocre sh*t they offer see the forest through the trees and even pick a movie to watch. The last time I tried, I gave up and picked a film on Mubi instead.
Watching a mediocre movie ( and I'm usually referring to high budget Hollywood stuff, I can enjoy a cheap B movie ), often feels like I seriously wasted my time and killed loads of brain cells. What is 'entertainment' for most people, does not necessarily make me feel good. I have a pretty unique taste in movies, some would consider me a film snob.
Which reminds me of this post and conversation of two years ago, inspired by a stranger calling me a film snob in a discord movie chat:
I watched a bunch of ( arthouse ) movies in the last week or so and am gonna go through them in a way I see fit:
Started watching To the Ends of the Earth, a film about Japanese trying to make a documentary in Uzbekistan, Eastern Europe. We follow a female / reporter, with homesickness and a lover in Japan, who slowly seems to break down during the process, feeling alienated and misunderstood in this foreign country. I only watched about half of the movie and got pretty tired. It also freaked me out a little bit ( gave me a Don't Look Now - one my favorite movies - kind of vibe ) and I decided to stop watching, chill a little and go to bed instead. I then forgot to finish watching it, plan to do so one day soon.
It's now a couple of days later and I finished watching it. Not sure how to feel about it, wish I had seen it in a single setting. Worth a watch for many reasons though.
It was directed by Kyoshi Kurosawa ( not to be confused with Akira Kurosawa, one of the grandmasters of cinema, who passed away in the late 1990s ). I had vague memories of having watched some films of this director, ages ago at The Rotterdam International Film Festival ( back when I was studying film ). Just looked up his name and discovered that must have been the movies Doppelganger and Bright Future in 2003 or 2004. I think I've also seen a couple of his earlier horror movies, namely Cure ( 1997 ) and possibly Pulse ( 2001 ), a low budget success that got an American remake.
On the last day of 2020, I had two friends over and I decided to show them Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo. This movie is described as an acid western. It's half a century old ( 1970 ) and I remember first seeing it a decade or so ago at an underground screening in Amsterdam. It wow-ed me back then. Although it didn't have a similar impact this time ( probably the third or fourth time I've been watching it ), it must still be pretty intense for those who are witnessing it for the first time. We ate popcorn and drank a fizzy alcoholic drink. El Topo was a lot bloodier - and more violent - than I remembered it but the painting like landscapes looked pretty awesome on the *xisto wall that I projected it on and my friends seemed to enjoy it, if that's a fitting word for a film like this. Also the blood seemed to be coloring made of cactus ( fruit ) juice, as my friends made me aware of.
The second movie I watched with them - Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly - about Chinese people in Indonesia, was not enjoyable at all. It contained an ear worm of a song ( that you don't want to remember ), sung repeatedly off key and phonetically and many scenes that mainly seemed to want to shock the audience. It tried very hard to be unique and that's about the only thing it succeeded in. I'd like to - and am likely to - forget it soon.
I watched a couple more movies in the last few days - Two from Turkey, one from Macedonia and a German one - but will probably talk about those in an upcoming movie post. And I'd almost forget The Return of Jafar ( the follow up to Disney's Aladdin ), that I semi-watched with my niece and nephew who I was baby sitting yesterday afternoon. I think they enjoyed it quite a lot and that's what counts.
*Xisto is a typical kind of rock that is used to build ( walls of ) houses with, the old fashioned way, in certain regions of Portugal.
Pictures used: photo of a movie projected on my wall, screenshots of To the Ends of the Earth and El Topo on Mubi.com