FORUM.TERMINAL_LEVY

what's everyone watching?

some bangers i've watched this year (loosely ranked):

showgirls (verhoeven, 1995)
hours for jerome (dorsky, 1982)
flowers of shanghai (hou, 1998)
arbor vitae (dorsky, 2000)
in vanda’s room (costa, 2000)
floating clouds (naruse, 1955)
the thing (carpenter, 1982)
sang titre (godard, 2020)
les dames du bois de boulogne (bresson, 1945)
miss oyu (mizoguchi, 1951)

actually a good amount lately, which is weird for us as, up until recently, not being People Who Watch Movies. but sometime last month Mina & I went out to Scarecrow Video and made an account, so now we're soulbound to the ritual of taking the bus out to the video library and switching our 4 DVDs for 4 more DVDs every wednesday. it's been fun. movies can be good, as it turns out

we've been slowly making our way through a selection of M. Night Shyamalan movies, to keep up with Friends at the Table's "Media Club Plus" podcast. those are not the movies that are good i was referring to. i guess The Sixth Sense is good. i liked that one enough. but Signs, Unbreakable... those are not good movies. i almost liked The Village, but I did not. we have Lady in the Water next, which I cannot say I have an open heart to.

but there's a lot of fun stuff we've gotten, surrounding our M. Night studies. Mina rented all of the heisei-era Gamera trilogy, directed by Shusuke Kaneko and written by Kazunori Ito (of .hack fame, at the very least). those movies, at least the first and the third, are a hoot. the Kow Otani (Shadow of the Colossus, Gundam Wing) soundtracks also go hard. it makes so much sense to learn that Kow Otani was a big kaiju film score guy.

i rewatched True Stories (the David Byrne directed movie) with Mina & her mom and that's still an all-time fav for me. John Goodman is really sexy in it. we watched Peewee's Big Adventure, that movie still bangs despite not wanting to hear Danny Elfman music ever again. The Lighthouse is still a hall-of-fame BL masterpiece. and we finally got around to watching our first Kurosawa movie this week with The Hidden Fortress. that guy seems pretty damn good at putting Toshiro Mifune in gay little shorts on the big screen.

this week, other than the M. Night, we got Hellraiser, The Green Knight, and Yojimbo to watch. hopefully we can get to all of them before wednesday.

oh yeah, and i watched Osmosis Jones on 9/11. you gotta wonder if someone went to an extremely early showing of that movie the day it came out and if they interrupted the movie at any point to announce that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center.

i have an attention span absolutely destroyed by 'television episode length media' i fear so it is hard for me to sit down and Movie without a lot of external motivation. that being said i still get around to clubbing it with some friends when i can. i honestly think im pretty basic, letterboxd for shorthand and so on https://letterboxd.com/kairakutei/films/

best shit i've watched in the last 12 months: masaaki yuasa's inu-oh (2021)
best shit i've watched in the last 5 years: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
watching recently: oomfs have been putting on a bunch of british murder mystery content.... i don't want to say "slop" but it's definitely "carbohydrates", some sort of gruel or congee, but not even in a necessarily derogatory sense. started with the 2017 adaptation of agatha christie "crooked house" and then moving onto mid-90s long running bbc serial series "the midsomar murders". and, well, tracking the differences and charm points of "glenn close-led theatrical-ish well acted one shot gimmick" vs. "Made For Television Small Town Movie" has been, uhh, media, analysis? its nice, i think.


@lynnedrum please enjoy yojimbo it was my introduction to kurosawa and it's an absolute hoot on so many levels, total 'delicious edible meal' of a movie

onza wrote: Sat Oct 11, 2025 9:02 pm @lynnedrum please enjoy yojimbo it was my introduction to kurosawa and it's an absolute hoot on so many levels, total 'delicious edible meal' of a movie

oh hell yeah, how exciting!!! i really did love The Hidden Fortress so much and was excited to find a Kurosawa movie to watch next that made it under the 2 hour runtime lol.

and yea, catch me punching my cooked brain to force critical thoughts out of it on my letterboxd, it's been fun to force myself to write about stuff as i feel current reality eroding my focus and attention span and memory lol: https://letterboxd.com/lynnedrum/

I gotta watch more Kurosawa! Both Ran and Kagemusha totally bewitched me... I started watching all his stuff from the first movie he directed but I didn't get super far into that project.

I have been in a movies lull... The last two I watched were The Fly (classic that idk if I can say much new about, I loved the practical effects and I was not expecting it to go where it did off of the way people on the internet talk about that movie) and Eephus (which is a pretty good movie about never living up to whatever scrap of potential you had, getting phased out, and meeting other people who are on a similar low-altitude arc as you but at a different part of it, and also baseball) which I liked a decent amount.

Yojimbo is GOATEDDDDDDDDD I don't know how I haven't seen any more kurosawa. I've had Rashomon and Ikiru on my list forever

i gotta watch eephus man. i don't watch baseball myself but every story i ever hear about baseball makes me want to. i need to get on that shit

lynnedrum wrote: Sat Oct 11, 2025 8:13 pm Mina rented all of the heisei-era Gamera trilogy, directed by Shusuke Kaneko and written by Kazunori Ito (of .hack fame, at the very least). those movies, at least the first and the third, are a hoot. the Kow Otani (Shadow of the Colossus, Gundam Wing) soundtracks also go hard. it makes so much sense to learn that Kow Otani was a big kaiju film score guy.

love those movies, the 2nd is my favorite! if you were into them i highly recommend shusuke kaneko's 1988 movie summer vacation 1999, which is a dreamy mysterious sci fi BL with a recursive roguelike structure where all the boys are played by girls

shelter wrote: Sun Oct 12, 2025 4:46 amif you were into them i highly recommend shusuke kaneko's 1988 movie summer vacation 1999, which is a dreamy mysterious sci fi BL with a recursive roguelike structure where all the boys are played by girls

i mean hell motherfucking yeah i will absolutely put that one on the list!!

guys i saw magellan. who else saw magellan. i didnt think lav diaz was going to want to fuck magellan so bad