The Driller Killer, 1979

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I should have paid more attention to this movie. I feel like I either just didn't understand what was going on or this movie really was this crazy.

It's about Reno (director Abel Ferrara), a poor artist. Then there is this band ... and I think they move in with him to pay the rent. But I'm not sure. Anyway, every now and then we just take 3 minutes of the movie to let them play a song and then go back to the story. After some while, Reno goes crazy and starts killing people with a drill.

So yeah, maybe I should have paid more attention, but recently I watched a movie in japanese with german subtitles and I could follow it easily, so maybe Driller Killer was maybe just not good enough to hold my attention. Which is a bad thing...

The acting was okay, and the story was crazy. The kills were good though, they looked realistic enough to win back my attention for a few minutes.

The ending was pretty good, I liked the way it ended.

But I guess I'll have to rewatch it, trying to focus. Until then I won't give it a rating because maybe it was just my fault.

Up next: Toxic Zombies, I can't wait.

Be Kind Rewind, 2008 - ★★★★

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This is one of those movies that is nothing special, but the perfect movie to watch when you just wanna watch a chill, fun movie, without having to think much, but still being entertained.

Be Kind Rewind is about an old VHS rental shop that is slowly being pushed out of business by the big chain stores which mainly use these new mediums called "DVDs". The owner of the store, Danny Glover, takes a trip, leaving behind Mike (Mos Def), the store clerk and his friend Jerry (Jack Black). They are both ... not the smartest bunch and after Jerry accidentally erases all videotapes in the store, they start making their own, cheap versions of the movies. And the people love it.

I actually watched this movie years ago and loved it. And I still do. It's beautifully shot and the story is new, interesting and fun.

I have a problem with the characters though. I didn't like the two main leads that much. I'm not sure if you are supposed to not like them but I just didn't. And it's not because I don't like Jack Black and Mos Def, I love them both.

I really liked the so called "sweding", making those cheap movies and it kinda made me want to make my own movies just like they did.
And there is one scene in particular that I loved, it's seemingly (or maybe really) one shot of them making many different movies in a row, masterful filmmaking by Michel Gondry, and by the way this is my first Gondry film.

All in all I had a good time watching it. It is not a Masterpiece, not a world changing piece of art, but it is a great movie to watch just for fun. I rate it 4 out of 5 stars and a like.

Pitch Perfect, 2012 - ★★★★½

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Watched on Thursday October 22, 2015.

For No Eyes Only, 2012 - ★★★★

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I just cannot believe that this movie was made by a 23 year old guy who also acted in it ....

"Hitchcock on Facebook" is what Mubi called this movie. It's about Sam (Benedict Sieverding), a high school nerd with a broken leg. He finds a way to access all his school friends webcams, until the new boy Aaron (Tali Barde) behaves suspicious. Sam and his friend Livia (Luisa Gross) try to find out what he did, rear window style.

This is a student film. Made by college students. I just can't wrap my head around this. Tali Barde, the director, was my age when he made that movie. And I'm sitting here, paid money to see his movie and write a review.

Anyway, this movie is well shot, it looks really good. The teenagers behave pretty much like teenagers (except for Sam closing his eyes when his crush gets naked in front of the camera.

The acting is good, especially by the two leads. With Tali Bardes acting I had some problems, he exaggerated a little bit from normal guy to psycho. But that had its own charme.

I haven't seen Rear WIndow (yet), but I've seen the spoof by the Simpsons, so I knew the outline. I enjoyed the way the inserted technology, in a way that is pretty good actually (and actually pretty similar to the new Scream tv show).

The programming was a little weird, but still in the realm of the possible.

All in all, I enjoyed this movie and was blown away by it being done by such young people. I'm rating it 4 out of 5 stars and a like.

[sic], 2009

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Watched on Tuesday October 20, 2015.

The Interview, 2014 - ★★★½ (contains spoilers)

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This review reportedly contains spoilers.

I believe the Sony hack and bomb threats by North Korea were probably one of the best marketing gags in history.

This movie is about James Franco (James Franco) who has a TV Show that is produced by Seth Rogen (Seth Rogen). When they realize that Kim Jong Un (Randall Park) is a big fan of the show they decide to Interview him. When the CIA tells hears about this, they want them to kill him. So starts the craziest murder plan in movie history.

For most parts this is a typical Seth Rogen James Franco stoner comedy. We get the typical putting something huge up his butt, James Franco has a big party and gets drunk, and many more.

For the most parts I'd say there is no acting by the two main guys, it's just them being them. BUT we get great acting by Randall Park. And we get one great scene by James Franco. It's close to the end when the titular Interview takes place. Franco asks the normal questions and then, from one second to the next, switches to a serious face and asks serious questions. This scene really stayed in my mind.

Another scene that stood out to me, that I want to mention, is the scene where the tank shoots at the helicopter. We get a slo-mo shot of the rocket hitting the helicopter, all to the sound of a piano cover of Firework by Katy Perry (a song they set up earlier).

A last standout scene is the massacre in the control room. So much blood and gore. I really appreciate that scene for what they dared to do.

But, other than those three scenes it was pretty much a normal stoner comedy (with less drugs though). If you like those movies, you will like this one. If you don't like those kind of movies you will hate this, especially for all the hype it got.

I'm rating it 3.5 stars, it's a fun movie, but surely not for everyone.

Hesher, 2010 - ★★★★½

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Hmm I haven't watched a movie on Mubi in some time, I should try another random one ... hmm, a comedy about an anarchist and a grieving family? Sounds interesting ... let's check it out .... is that Natalie Portman???? ... Wait is this .... no it can't be ... he is Joseph Gorden Lewitt .... that Dad feels like I know him .... godamnit it's Rainn Wilson.

This is literally how I reacted to this movie while watching it.

It's about a young boy called TJ (Devin Brochu), whose life is shit. His mother died recently. That's the reason he lives with his grandma (Piper Laurie) and his father Paul (Rainn Wilson) is basically not caring about him.
Enter Hesher (JGL), an anarchist who decides to move into their house after his old place got attacked by the cops because of TJ. Hesher likes heavy metal and driving around in his van. He also likes being an anarchist and doing what he wants. Even though he doesn't seem like he is helping, step by step he is changing the families life.

First of all Rainn Wilson is now officially one of my favorite actors. And with a beard he looks very good I gotta say. He delivers a great performance, that is totally different to anything I've seen him in before.
JGL did a great job as well, being a lovable asshole.

This movie is NOT, I'm repeating, NOT a happy movie. I guarantee you, this movie will make you sad and it will make you hate life. Because that is how most of the characters feel. Sometimes life is shit.
And I'm not sure if this movie leaves you happy at the end, but it made me feel less sad, I guess.

The characters are great, you love every character (except for the bully, you hate him) and you feel for them. Also every character goes through a change.

Usually I hate movies about a kid that is behaving like a grown up or hangs out with a lot of grown ups. But in this movie it is very well done, the boy behaves still like a boy in many aspects and with Hesher being half a kid in his mind, it worked having him together with the boy. Also there is one of those kid loves grown up love story between him and Natalie Portman that doesn't feel as weird as it usually does in those kind of movies.

Oh and by the way, JGL somehow managed to have a monologue about losing one of his nuts as a metaphor for the family losing their mother and it totally worked, so that's a big plus.

All in all I really enjoyed this movie and I'm rating it 4.5 out of 5 stars and a big like.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe, 1968 - ★★★½ (contains spoilers)

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This review reportedly contains spoilers.

This is, so far, the best of the Coffin Joe movies I have seen, even though (or maybe because?) it doesn't have much Coffin Joe in it.

Disclaimer: I don't think it's really possible to talk about this movie without spoilers, so this is a very spoilery review. Be warned.

This movie is basically an anthology film. We start off with a monologue similar to the ones we heard before, recited by Coffin Joe himself.
Then we go into the first segment,

The Dollmaker

In this segment, 4 men decide to rob an old puppet maker who seems to own a lot of money. They enter his house in the evening and want to know where he keeps his money. They find his 4 beautiful daughters and decide to rape them as the old man faints. After some time, the old man comes in and shoots them. In a twist we realize that he gets his puppets eyes by killing people and getting their eyes.

This segment is very well done to be honest. The acting is pretty good, I liked the twist and in the end we get a great looking scene of the cut off heads lying around with their eyes gauged out. This came out the same year as Night of the Living Dead, but the gore is actually done better.

Perversion

This segment follows a beautiful woman and a hunchback balloon salesman who follows her. He is basically obsessed with her, watching her take a bath and always being near her. On the day of her wedding she is stabbed by another woman as she steps out of the church. After all guests leave the funeral, the hunchback enters, gets her coffin and kisses the dead body and does other ... things.

What's unique about Perversion is that it has no dialogue. The whole movie is told through the faces and movements of the characters. The acting is again good, especially from the Hunchback, you get his feelings just through his facial expressions. I love this visual storytelling, it's not a big story that is hard to understand and it still leaves you with shock and disgusted at the end.

Ideology

Lastly we get at least a version of Coffin Joe. José Mojica Marins plays a Professor who has a theory about love not existing. To proof this theory he invites a journalist and his wife to have dinner with him. Instead of dinner he shows them cruel scenes live on stage, like people being eaten alive and degraded. After this "stage play", he locks the couple up, the journalist into a glass cage, his wife into a smaller cage with iron bars. He keeps them that way for 7 days, each day he has a challenge for them. First, love succeeds, both say he should kill them instead of the other. But after day 3, the husband gets to choose between food or the food being thrown away, so he eats it while his wife doesn't get food or water. One day he gives the woman salt water. On the last day he has the wife choose between drinking his blood and killing him through that or not having water and the only thing she can say is water over and over.
Then it ends with him and his slaves feasting on the two guests.

As you can see by the length of this paragraph, this is the longest segment or at least the one with the most stuff happening. I have two movies this reminded me on. First, the physical and psychological torture of those people reminded me of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. I wonder if it inspired that movie in any way, but maybe it's just my mind jumping around a bit. The second movie it reminded me of was 1970s The Wizard of Gore because of the depiction of gore and brutality on a stage. Of course this is probably just a coincidence, I'm not even sure how well known the Strange World of Coffin Joe is, considering I only know it because I have the box with 9 José Mojica Marins movies. So maybe it hasn't influenced movies at all.

While the gore was very good and the movie looked really good in some parts, it had one major difficulty though for me. The sound was horrible. I am not sure if this was because of the DVD I own or because of the movie itself, but in some scenes the sound was like if they put a scarf over the microphone. And that was the case even though this movie was, as far as I know at least, dubbed in post. Also there were some grammatical errors in the subtitles, but that's not the movies fault.

This movie, much like the first two Coffin Joe movies, was made to shock the audience, to gross people out and as far as I am concerned, it succeeded in it, even more than it did in the first 2 movies. With Marins I always get this feeling he is also against organized religion, but I think Brazil in the 1960s was a very catholic country so it could very well be that he used religion in this way just to shock people even more.

Sadly, other than gross out twist endings, there isn't much else behind these movies, much like The Wizard of Gore. It isn't a scary movie, it is just disgusting. All these segments are just made to end in the breaking of taboos. It is an interesting watch and holds up astonishingly well, I mean, if you can ignore the bad sound and that it's black and white. It is watchable for sure.

I rate it 3.5 out of 5 stars.

The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, 1976

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Watched on Sunday October 18, 2015.

Robot Monster, 1953

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Watched as part of the Letterboxd movie night.

This movie is about a Robot Monster called Ro-Man (or is that the race? I'm not sure) who killed all people except for 8 who were immune to it's death rays. Now it is trying to kill the rest of them.

This movie is weird and chauvinistic. Nothing really makes sense.

That said it was fun watching in the letterboxd movie night. That is probably the best way to watch it, with friends, making fun of it.

Hitchcock, 2012 - ★★★

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Watched on Sunday October 18, 2015.

The Birds, 1963 - ★★★★

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My second Alfred Hitchcock movie. I've seen it parodied on the Simpsons and on other media, but I never saw the movie before.

This movie is about a small town in which Birds are going crazy and attacking people. The center of the story is Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hendren), who got to this town to visit Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), who she met a day ago. She arrives in the town just as the attacks start.

It starts off feeling like a typical romantic comedy of the 60s (like Breakfast at Tiffany's), two people meeting in a weird way and then following it off by meeting again. Interesting enough it all begins in a bird shop, and one of the first things that's mentioned is weird behavior of birds. So it started off with foreshadowing right from the beginning, but as an unsuspecting member of the audience it could very well just be a typical romantic comedy up to the point of the attack of the Birds, which only really starts at least 30 minutes into the movie.

The special effects were astonishing for the time. In some scenes you can see that the birds aren't really in the same room as the actors but to be honest, if I saw that 50 years ago I'd believe it. And it still looks more believable than some of the stuff we see today.

The acting was very good, of course it was the typical 60s acting so it didn't feel as good compared to today but I always see it for the time.

All in all a very enjoyable movie and I'd call it a horror movie. I rate it 4 out of 5 stars and a like.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966 - ★★★★★

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Watched on Sunday October 11, 2015.

JCVD, 2008 - ★★★★

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Loved this movie. Such a great monologue by Jean Claude Van Damme. I really need to watch more of his movies.

The Golem: How He Came Into the World, 1920 - ★★★★½

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Watched on Sunday October 11, 2015.

Lucy, 2006 - ★★★½

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This movie belongs to the Berlin School. I've seen school trip before, the first movie by Henner Winckler and it just felt weird to me. But when I saw that this is by the same guy I thought I should give it a chance.

Lucy is about a girl named ... Maggy. She is around 18, lives with her mother and has to care for her Baby Lucy. Lucy's father left her and we start off with them breaking up. When she finds a time to go out, she meets a boy called Gordon. They fall in love and 2 weeks later, after a fight with her single mom she moves in with him. First they are happy but soon, everything gets worse, because life isn't easy.

This, like School Trip, isn't a movie with real actors. They are all laymen from Berlin. While it threw me off while watching School Trip, in this movie I knew what to expect and embraced it, so instead of just feeling bad this felt actually real. I guess that's also because in this the characters are at least a bit likeable. Of course this is a very German movie and would probably feel crazy to non-germans. It even feels a little crazy to me.

But all in all I enjoyed this. If you wanna see something different, this is pretty interesting and watchable and most of all it is something completely different. I rate this 3.5 stars and a like.

Under the Skin, 2013 - ★★★★½ (contains spoilers)

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This review reportedly contains spoilers.

I'm not sure if I got this movie at all, but I sure as hell wanna talk about it.

First off, if you haven't seen this movie stop right now. Don't read anything about it until you watched it. Trust me. It's better. Go.

So, this movie is about... Scarlett Johansson being an Alien in Scottland? That's what I got out of it.

This is one of those movies that is actually scary... or more eerie to be honest. It made me feel uncomfortable. The only movie I can compare it to is Eraserhead. It feels weird and just off all the time. There are long scenes with silence.

In the first half of the movie she is a predator. She collects men, takes them to her house and ... makes them walk into black goo.
In the second half she is running away.

The movie is well shot. There are scenes that just look beautiful.

But the most important part is probably Scarlett Johanssons acting. She carries this movie and I just cannot understand that this is the same woman that plays Black Widow in the MCU movies. She is great in this. She really feels ... off. Not human.

I'm not sure if this ending is a "twist" ending, because it's pretty clear that she is an alien.

I'm sure the director wanted to tell us something through this movie but I have no idea what, so that's what I'm going to find out right now.
All in all this movie was great and interesting to watch and I already wanna see it again. I rate it 4.5 out of 5 stars.

True Heart Susie, 1919 - ★★★★

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Wow what a movie. I haven't seen many silent movies and I think this is my first silent non-horror movie.

It's a romantic comedy about Susie, a simple girl that is in love with her neighbor boy William. But since she can't marry a poor dumb boy she sells her favorite cow so she can pay for his college tuition, of course anonymously. So he goes to college and is a different man when he comes back. He falls in love with a different girl. Will Susie ever end up with him?

This movie is made by D.W. Griffith who is a legend when it comes to silent movies, though I have only seen this movie so I can't say much about him. But he did a great job with this movie. Also the acting was good.

To be honest this movie was much more fun than I expected. In my mind, silent movies were always a little boring and so much to read. But actually, this movie is not boring at all. Storiewise it is really similar to any romantic comedy of today: a girl loves a boy, he loves someone else who isn't good for him.

But Susie is basically the nicest and most honest woman ever, hence the name True Heart Susie. Even when she knows that the wife of William has gone out to a party instead of staying home with her husband, she doesn't tell him because she promised it to the girl.

I really want to mention the ending so here is a

SPOILER WARNING
Since Susie is so nice and also in that day divorce was off the table, of course they had to kill of the bad woman. She ran through the rain, got sick and died shortly after. This came so unexpected I had to talk about it.

SPOILER WARNING OVER

Anyway, all in all I really enjoyed this movie a lot, especially after not thinking I would. I rate this movie 4 ouf of 5 stars.

Batman, 1989

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Watched on Sunday October 4, 2015.

Paris, je t'aime, 2006 - ★★★★★

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Paris, je t'aime, je t'aime.

C'est une film tres magnifique. J'adore ... okay I don't actually speak french.
I loved this movie. Everything about it.

So this movie is made up out of 18 segments, every segment directed by different directors, with different actors and different stories, telling stories about Paris. Some notable directors (from the top of my hat, not gonna look them up) are Wes Craven, the Coen Brothers, Gus van Saint and Alfonso Cuaron. Some notable actors are Gerard Depardieu, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafor and Elijah Wood. They are all set in different "arrondismonts" in Paris and are all about love in one way or another. After I watched it I thought about what my favorite segments were but honestly, they were all great. Alfonso Cuaron did a one shot segment with Nick Nolte and some girl talking that has a twist ending and is fun to look at. The segment with Elijah Wood (and a cameo by Wes Craven) has a love story about vampires. Then there are some deeper stories like one about a man who doesn't love his wife anymore. One story is about a woman played by Juliette Binoche, whose kid died and she has to cope with it. The Coen Brothers segment with Steve Buscemi is funny because of Steve Buscemi and doesn't end happy (but if you know the Coen Brothers you already know that it won't). There are segments talking about topics that are still hot today, like one where a boy falls in love with a muslim girl. Or the one where a gay guy tries to find out if another guy is gay too without being too open about it. And the last one about an american tourist in Paris made me have goosebumps and made me feel. There are more segments but I don't wanna recount them all. Gotta watch it ;).

Also, even though it's a French movie, there are many scenes (sometimes whole segments) in English or without any dialogue. So it is watchable even if you don't speak french.

The acting is top notch, some segments wouldn't work if it wasn't for the acting. Steve Buscemis whole segment is just working because of his facial expressions. The same is for another segment with a mother and her baby, you will know it when you see it.

All in all I just love this movie. It is my favorite french movie, it is so much fun to watch and really a fun for everyone, not just movie geeks like me. I rate this movie 5 stars and a like. Everyone should watch it.