What weird shit have you watched recently: part four

Times is hard, times is angsty, the collective horrors continue, as do the personal circumstances (I will be job hunting for eternity, oh this is the bad place, etc) but still and always, there is weird shit to watch. So here is some weird shit I've been watching recently!

I loved To Die For when I was a teenager but I hadn't watched it as a grown up and turns out it rules, I was right, what a smart kid. Nicole Kidman is so great at playing deranged, we should get her to do it again. I don't know if I'd forgotten this bit, or if I just didn't notice it when I was young, but the fact that her whole thing is in service of such a low rent, local tv job is so important.

Meiko Kaji might be the coolest woman alive. I love women on a revenge spree she does it with such class, you know? I can't claim this film is good, exactly, it's quite slow, there's a lot more time spent on her reasons for revenge than there is on the revenge itself, but when it hits it really hits. I love how cheap it is, I love that all the flashback scenes are staged like they're in shoddy little black box theatres, I love it when she stabs people.

Akira Kurosawa adapts Hamlet as a corporate espionage thriller and it completely rules. He kicks things off by having a wedding interrupted by the surprise delivery of a cake shaped like an office building from which an employee jumped to his death after being framed by his superiors in a corruption scandal. I love Kurosawa's noir era, I love Toshirō Mifune slowly driving everyone insane, a good time at the movies!

David Lowry films get better over time for me; like you really have to sink into them in a way that gets easier the better you know them. Which means I'm still not sure how I feel about Mother Mary and it'll probably be a couple of years before I am. There's definitely things about it I think are a bit shit, it maybe explains too much for my taste, there's one performance that is straight up bad, but the big stuff is so weird and great. Anne Hathaway and Michaela Cole being a bit gay and a lot crazy in a warehouse? Hell yes. Strange stylise dialogue? Absolutely.

I hadn't watched Sunset Boulevard in at least twenty years and, hoo boy, is it a weird film. It's so funny that the hack known as Andrew Lloyd Webber thought he was the guy to handle turning something this strange and haunting into a musical. And what a terrible musical it is! But we don't have to worry about that, we'll always have the film, which is so creepy and claustrophobic. Wild how long we've known that fame will drive a person insane for and wild how we don't seem interested in reckoning with that at all.

This movie is terrible and I don't know why we watched it but it is undeniably extremely weird. Weird that the titular flu's first symptom is that it makes people's teeth glow. Weird that there's no real explanation as to why the flu knows who's rich. Weird that Mary Elizabeth Winstead said yes to this, but then I guess she's got to do something while we all wait for a sequel to Birds of Prey to get a green light.

We watched Chandler Levack's recent film, Mile End Kicks and liked it so much that we watched her first feature the next night and it also rules. It's a simple coming of age film about learning that you're kind of an asshole and beginning to figure out how not to be, and everyone in it is great. It's spiky and affectionate at the same time, highly, highly recommend.

This film is such a shame because the script is genuinely terrible on a foundational level but then Travis Knight makes a load of delightful and funny creative decisions as a director. It feels like it's trying to fill the Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves gap and sometimes it almost manages it. Like there's a bit early on when He-Man goes to his room and has a sad little sit and the musical cue is this extremely family drama circa 1994 instrumental and it's hilarious. But then no one has any real motivation and things just happen with no reason and Jared Leto (gross) is unwatchably bad as Skeletor, so what are you going to do?

I don't want to try and explain Chainsaw Man to anyone, so I don't want to recommend it to anyone, but I think it's important to sometimes think about anime and manga if you're trying to make any kind of art. It's so easy to get hung up on whether your ideas are good or silly, but anime is here to show you that that simply doesn't matter. You can write an epic and emotional saga about a sixteen year old kid who's made of chainsaws and desperately horny! You can do whatever you want!

To be honest Teenage Sex and Death didn't quite get under my skin in the way I Saw the TV Glow did, but I'm still on board for whatever with Jane Schoenbrun. It's exciting when someone finds success making films wholly for themself and it felt for a while that it might not be possible anymore. I like films made by wee freaks working their own shit out, I don't know what to tell you.