FORUM.TERMINAL_LEVY

Had a pretty productive few days of watching movies.

The Executioner - Luis Garcia Berlanga, 1963
One of the classics of Spanish cinema. An undertaker (which in Franco's Spain makes you basically a hinin) falls in love with the daughter of the executioner, ends married with her and is basically forced to inherit "the family business" so they can keep the government assigned flat. But it's fine, you know? It's going to be ok, they pardon everyone nowadays, nothing is going to go wrong... right?

A dark comedy that honestly skips around quite a bit on the first half, but with a final third that's incredibly strong and an ending that honestly makes the rest of the movie better in retrospective.

Double Indemnity - Billy Wilder, 1944
Not much to say about this one. Really good noir movie. It's the kind of movie you would imagine when you close your eyes and try to imagine one, except the protagonist is an insurance seller and not a detective. The dynamic between him and his manager is really great.

Oldboy - Park Chan Wook, 2003
You all know this one. This was a rewatch and it still holds. Amazing movie.

The Great Happiness Space - Jake Clennell, 2006
A documentary I've been meaning to watch for a long time. A portrait of host bar culture in 2006 Osaka centered in a top host and club owner called Issei. It is really interesting and you understand a lot about the dynamics between hosts and customers. But I could not help to walk away from this movie feeling quite sad. You do end feeling the loneliness a lot of the people featured in this movie feels.

Brazil - Terry Gillian
Probably one of Gillian's best movies. It still goes all over the place as most of his movies, but it is the price you have to pay for it to be a constant box of surprises. Incredible sets and the dream sequences were really nice. The romance felt a bit undercooked.

Brazil is great, though I've always had a little chip on my shoulder about them not using the Kate Bush vocal track for it:


Every time I think about that movie I think about the weird tug of war with Sidney Sheinberg over giving it a happy ending. Really funny.

I saw Brazil, Oldboy, and Double Indemnity too, same watch group as Atomic. But I also saw Transformers One on the day between those and honestly really enjoyed it. I don't know much about Transformers media in general, and from what I heard this movie kinda got brushed aside and didn't do very well in marketing, but I had a really good time with it. The people who hosted were big Transformers fans and it seemed like there were a few references here and there that I didn't get but they were really excited by. Also saw In This Corner of the World earlier this year. Incredible movie. I haven't seen much in general, and before those 5 I saw this year, the last movie I watched was in 2018 lol.

It's a pity that Terry Gillian is getting the same brain worms that are affecting John Cleese, Because he is one of the directors that really cared about having good sets.

amos wrote: Thu Nov 20, 2025 3:13 pm Every time I think about that movie I think about the weird tug of war with Sidney Sheinberg over giving it a happy ending. Really funny.

My "favorite" tug of war is A Better Tomorrow 2, where you can feel the actual war between John Woo and Tsui Hark that happened during the filming. It is the movie that broke the relationship between the two and made Tsui move threads to have John Woo as ostracized as possible in the industry. Which do explain how much of a mess that movie is.

That also lead to A Better Tomorrow having two "part 3" prequels, the official one, by Tsui Hark and "A Bullet in the Head" which is John Woo recovering his idea for A Better Tomorrow prequel and turning it into another movie.

Anyway, never forget chat that "The Killer" and "A Better Tomorrow" are literally two of the best movies ever made. They have not had a good release in decades but that may be over soon. So go watch them if you haven't.

Saw Boogie Nights for the first time last night and honestly I absolutely loved it!
I don't know why it took me so long to get into Paul Thomas Anderson but I've loved every film I've seen of him.

I just saw the 4K Restoration of Angel's Egg in theater last night. It was my first time seeing it. Absolutely fascinating movie! It has a kind of formed-formlessness to it--all questions and no answers. Watching it with other people in the theater felt like all of us trying to find our own shapes in clouds in the sky. At the end of it, when the silence broke and people started speaking again, it was fun listening to the din of friends all sharing their thoughts with one another.

It felt right at home on the big screen too: so often the characters would be so small inside the tremendous picture frame, and you'd sit there with them, reckoning with the suffocating scale of the environments. There was a lot of tense lingering in quiet moments, rarely but crucially broken by a sudden WHAM, causing the whole theater to reverberate. I was familiar with how the film looked, but the sound blew me away just as much.

I'm really excited for the eventual home release. My seats in the theater weren't the best so I'd like to see it from a better angle. But I also imagine that, when I'm ready to watch it again, I'll likely get something entirely different out of it.

Man, getting Angel's Egg on the big screen must be awesome, I'm jealous.

i keep thinking about this lumieres short



while i was in seattle last week i did a screening of takashi ito’s grim and paul verhoeven’s showgirls for 15 friends at the beacon which made me very happy

here's a japanese poster for jerry lewis' the ladies man that the beacon has in one of their bathrooms

Last night I watched Bacurau (2019) with some friends. My buddy picked it out in remembrance of Udo Kier, who really was one of the best to ever do it.



Amazing movie. It's a modern western in a Brazilian small town where a bunch of weird things start happening after the town matriarch dies and a teacher notices the town is no longer on any online maps. Starts with a bit of a slow build and an air of mystery and explodes in a phenomenal final act. And Kier's great in it, of course.

Really gorgeously shot and lit the whole way through. They opted not to have a steady cam while filming it and only built tracks for the cameras instead. Laborious, but the tracks and diopters make it feel like a real classic western the whole way through. Highly recommend.

the coens are so fucking good dude like 6 of my 20 favorite movies are made by them, and i didn't think i'd have another one gunning for the number 1 slot but I caught Barton Fink on monday and hoooooooooo-leeeeeeeee, dude. i cant believe they made mulholland drive for neurotics (boys) instead of hysterics (women)