The Last Movie You Watched

[Nanny]

Fury (2014). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fury_(2014_film) Brad Pitt plays an archetype front line, doin' my job, soldier in this worn out tale of the young buck making his bones in war by failing at soldiering before redemption in a hale of lead and arterial gushing. The sound is what saved this movie. The whistling of 88mm shells bouncing off the hulls of the tanks was amazing in surround. The whine of the tank engines, the garbled comms... good sound engineering in an otherwise weary storyline.

[Rev. Rye]

The Deep Hurting Project is back, because not only have a few films been added, but I discovered, by random chance, a movie on TVTropes' So Bad It's Horrible list was in my library's collection the whole time: Shane Dawson's Not Cool. And it's one with a special backstory. So, then-popular YouTuber Shane Dawson and some up-and-coming female filmmaker named Anna Martemucci, were selected by a reality show to film the same script. Here's how it went:



And, despite universally being considered a worse movie (and being disowned by host/executive producer Zachary Quinto), Shane's version won the competition because he already had a massive YouTube audience. Her film only ended up with a gross in the four figures.

• Ah, yes, the opening tracking shot. I'm sure that won't come back to bite your budget in the ass, Shane.
  
• How shallow is your vagina if a baby carrot can break your hymen?
  
• One of the more infamous flaws: in an attempt to make the script more diverse, both directors decided to add actors of colour to thieir films. Anna decided to just cast some of the pre-existing characters with people of colour. Shane decided to just add some characters to be the butt of racist jokes. Including, for instance, a homeless black man who proudly eats his own shit. Naturally, this became a problem once it came out that someone was casting for a movie where a black homeless guy eats his own shit.
  
• No, Shane, the Hawk Tuah is supposed to be for fellatio, not cunnilingus!
  
• Middle of Thanksgiving break counts as a mid-term? Does Cornell do full-year classes? Goddammit, I could be listening to the Dead's Cornell show now.
  
• Is this the inciting incident? Tori almost running over Shane Dawson? FTR, I'm a bit more forgiving about placing it this late in the movie than the filmmaker in the video, because, well, the inciting incident in my favourite film, A Clockwork Orange happens 43 1/2 minutes into the film.
  
• This blind girl can paint, drive, and kick ass at a dancing video game simulator. 
  
• So much telling your emotions and not showing them. This is probably what you should expect when you spent so little time on radically rewriting the script. 
  
• She wants him to take a shit in public?
  
• I never thought I'd hear Kevin McLeod music in a feature film.
  
• And now for another bizarre story from production: once they actually cast a black person willing to have his character eat shit, it turned out he wasn't willing to show his penis. So, this leads Shane on a quest to find an actor to do a "Stunt Black Penis". They only found one in LA.
  
• Joel wants to fuck Leonardo DiCaprio's character from What's Eating Gilbert Grape? And in a few years he'll grow up to be Jean-Francois Gariepy. 
  
• Dead mom to sex? I liked it better when Archer did it.
  
• Wow. This scene of Shane shearing off his emo hair would resonate a lot more if I was actually familiar with his YouTube career.
  

ANd my choices for next week:
Jonah Hex
Borderlands
After Quarentine (Sic)

[Mister Agenda]

Caught Nosferatu last night. Super creepy. Kind of impressed at Dafoe being equally good as Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire and Dr. Eberhart in Nosferatu; though I suppose epic scenery-chewing was an asset in both roles.

[Silver]

The Watchers

A young artist gets stranded in an extensive, immaculate forest in western Ireland, where, after finding shelter, she becomes trapped alongside three strangers, stalked by mysterious creatures each night.

[Silver]

Dune: Part Two

Paul Atreides unites with the Fremen while on a warpath of revenge against the conspirators who destroyed his family. Facing a choice between the love of his life and the fate of the universe, he endeavors to prevent a terrible future.

[Silver]

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

The origin story of renegade warrior Furiosa before her encounter and teamup with Mad Max.

[Fake Messiah]

Ladybugs (1992). I like this movie. It is, I suppose, absurdist cinema disguised as a children's film in the sense that it is insane and mocks everything, making it offensive to everyone.

[Rev. Rye]

This week in the Deep Hurting Project: Eli Roth's Borderlands. Now, I don't play video games, and the only thing I know about the Borderlands series (outside of the stuff I looked up specifically because of this movie) is this:




But I'm told that this movie strays really fucking far from the original games, and not in a way that actually elevates it. 

• One thing worth noting is that, apparently, Eli Roth's original cut is a lot more violent, and apparently in keeping with the original games' violent nature. This led to a recut of the movie because the studio wanted a PG-13-rated movie based on an M-rated franchise for some reason. (That and, somehow, Eli Roth thought that even his cut could be a good family film a la Star Wars). This led to reshoots that changed it so extensively that they needed to commission a new score.
  
• Apparently, Cate Blanchett's playing a character who's supposed to be 22 when her actress is 55.  At least they worked her advanced age into the film, and at least I hope this movie staved off her COVID boredom.
  
• Also, it seems like this includes the plot of the first game, but also includes characters from later games who weren't even introduced in the first in the main cast? Say what you will about The Last Airbender, at least Shyamalan didn't include characters from later in the series.
  
• Is that robot the one who's supposed to be voiced by Jack Black? You have a man with a very distinctive voice and you have him voice a character, and then pitch it up so that you actually have to check and make sure who he actually is? Why does he sound like Master Shake?
  
• Now that I'm done (So far) regurgitating facts I learned about a video game franchise I don't play, one of the most common critiques of the film was that it basically turned it into a retread of Guardians of the Galaxy. But then again, it's worse than that, because at least James Gunn gave his characters, well, distinctive characters. With this film, you could easily just replace Tiny Tina with Louise Belcher and gave her a plasma cannon and norhing of consequence woudl change.
  
• "Sweet, one of you kill the other. I'm gonna get a coffee." And if I actually drank hot drinks, I'd be thinking the same thing.
  
• Given that the movie debuted to a Rotten Tomatoes score of 0%, the scene where the robot proclaims that the odds of them getting away with a distraction are 0% is surprisingly funny for all the wrong reason.
  
• And fuck you for including Motorhead in this scene.
  

[Jackalope]

Ghostbusters Afterlife (2021).

I had very low expectations, I actually thought it was pretty good.

[Fake Messiah]

A Real Pain (2024) Jessie Heisenberg goes to Poland, sees the death camp and then comes home to NY. It's pretty bland and I find it hard to even call it a movie. I guess I should say he also went there with his cousin who is a quirky guy, but in the end he got a bit of a tear eyed, in fact they both did. I guess the purpose of the movie is to show us why Jews get sad sometimes: they think about the Holocaust, they question themselves "why did I survive" or why did his quirky cousin survive since he's kind of a bum, or maybe he's a bum because he has such sorrow to think about.