wetwillies
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| 80 37% | Iron Angels (1987) - Rated 02 May 2022
"Viewed April 9, 2022. Theresa Woo's girls with guns classic is pretty much wall-to-wall action, all of it destructive and dangerous-looking. What makes it work is the humorous approach it takes to building out its action sequences - gestures like a bad guy's body being used to smother a grenade - and the extremely charismatic performances from Moon Lee, Elaine Lui and Yukari Oshima."
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| 60 10% | Game of Death (1978) - Rated 02 May 2022
"Viewed April 8, 2022. Famously made after Bruce's death with scraps of unused footage of Lee and a lot of bad body doubling, this toys with some themes about celebrity and disposability, but is so poorly made that it can't help but feel like evil exploitation. And that's before they show Bruce's actual corpse at his actual funeral and try to pass it off as narrative. The 15 minutes of new footage of Bruce, clad in his yellow jumpsuit and facing off against Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, is amazing."
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| 80 37% | Ambulance (2022) - Rated 02 May 2022
"Viewed April 7, 2022. Loud, disorienting, often off-putting, moments of visual beauty or crass humor scattered among the chaos. The film opens with some rough exposition, and closes with a fair amount of treacly sentimentality, but the 100 minutes in the middle are truly thrilling: the best action of Bay's career, as layered and complex as anything in 6 Underground, beautifully paced and full of great practical effects."
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| 70 19% | Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) - Rated 02 May 2022
"Viewed April 7, 2022. Dorothy Arzner has a more distinct sensibility here than in The Bride Wore Red or Christopher Strong, particularly her portrayal of the dancers' artistry versus the leering, objectifying audiences they encounter. There are some very striking close-ups of O'Hara in the performance scenes that predict stuff like The Red Shoes or Mickey One, albeit not nearly as stylish."
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| 70 19% | 6 Underground (2019) - Rated 02 May 2022
"Viewed April 6, 2022. Opens with a genuinely superb action sequence - a car chase through the streets of Rome that's full of moving parts, particularly its clever sense of scale where Bay contrasts the cars moving on the ground with a simultaneous foot chase happening up in the air - and has another great action sequence in the siege at its center. It was also shot by Bojan Bazelli, whose photography is as vividly colorful as any of his films with Abel Ferrara."
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| 50 4% | The Bride Wore Red (1937) - Rated 02 May 2022
"Viewed April 6, 2022. Like the similarly creaky Christopher Strong, The Bride Wore Red toys with some interesting ideas about female agency and power, but only in dull cinematic terms. It's perhaps the most literal love triangle ever conceived, Joan Crawford torn between comfortable wealth and true love as portrayed by Robert Young and Franchot Tone. There are some nice understated moments of acting between Crawford and Tone, but that's about it."
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| 50 4% | Christopher Strong (1933) - Rated 02 May 2022
"Viewed April 5, 2022. It sounds reductive to say it, but the best part of this is really Hepburn’s outfits — between her wacky moth outfit and her flying gear and her cool hats, she cuts such an iconic figure on screen. Her mere presence is interesting where so much of the rest of the movie is not. Dorothy Arzner’s direction is rather stiff, especially in comparison to the free-flowing, punchy rhythm of Merrily We Go to Hell. The ending is blunt and brutal, not in a good way."
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| 80 37% | Merrily We Go to Hell (1932) - Rated 02 May 2022
"Viewed April 4, 2022. Arzner immediately establishes a breezy rhythm and feel that works very well — she establishes this world of wealth and debauchery through stylish snap camera movements and glittering close-ups, and counters it through the carefully developed naturalism of the scenes between Sylvia Sidney and Frederich March."
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| 75 26% | Armageddon (1998) - Rated 02 May 2022
"Viewed April 3, 2022. A superlative example of the disaster movie, a genre that often crumbles under its own weight of its own spectacle. As with The Rock, it's not really the action sequences that I find compelling here - the movie's back half, when the drillers are in space, is definitely worse than its first half - but rather the camaraderie Bay develops between his characters, the constantly shifting sense of scale, and the way he integrates humor into his whirlwind style."
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| 75 26% | Non, je ne regrette rien (1993) (1993) - Rated 02 May 2022
"Viewed April 2, 2022. While the film is relatively straightforward in its construction, it does have quite a few deft touches that suggest Riggs' strengths as a filmmaker, like the way he first shoots the participants in obscure close-ups and shadows, finally revealing their faces as they begin to speak more about themselves."
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