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Hey film lovers,
So how many times have you seen Wonder Woman already? We’re fascinated, yet totally unsurprised, by the data being mined about Patty Jenkins’ superhero blockbuster. “In an era where Hollywood drops a would-be event movie every other weekend or so, Wonder Woman is qualifying as a true event movie,” wrote Scott Mendelson in Forbes, as he broke down the film’s significantly small drop between opening and second weekend. Meanwhile, some of our members went to those “controversial” (whateverrrrr) women-only screenings at the Alamo and had moving things to say.
The Mummy gets the 1-star vs 5-star treatment this month. On that note, here are 13 essential Mummy movies via Den of Geek. No doubt “mummy movies” will be a Letterboxd Showdown topic in future.
If you’re not up with the play on Letterboxd Showdown, here’s the gist: each weekend we challenge you to create a list of best / favorite / most memorable films on a particular topic. At the end of the week, we compile a list of top films based on the Letterboxd consensus gathered from all your lists.
So far we’ve covered Most Remarkable Directorial Debuts, Favorite Remakes, Wonder Women (fictional female characters) and Car Chases. This week, in honor of Team New Zealand’s win in the America’s Cup Challenger Playoffs, we’re doing Boat Life (narrative or documentary films about boats; films must be set all—or almost all—aboard or around boats; no submarines, we’ll do those later). We announce each week’s category via Twitter and Facebook, so keep an eye out there at the end of each week.
Happy watching,
The Letterboxd crew
Opening Credits
In cinemas and coming soon
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We are quietly going ape-sh*t waiting on War for the Planet of the Apes. Maybe Andy Serkis will finally get that Oscar he’s due? Who are we kidding, the Academy likes humans to play humans.
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Who doesn’t love a good generational drama, especially one set in the mid-90s and starring Edie Falco as the matriarch? Gillian Robespierre’s Landline follows on from her deft debut Obvious Child.
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Comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife Emily V. Gordon have plundered their life story so far for The Big Sick, a touching romantic comedy about the time Emily was in a coma in hospital and Kumail had to hang out in the hospital waiting room with Holly Hunter and Ray Romano.
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Star Wars
One star vs five stars, fight!
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The Brendan Fraser trilogy was fun and campy and never really took itself seriously, I mean c’mon, remember the Scorpion King? But that was kind of the joy in it, watching like a C-grade monster adventure that had goofy Looney Tunes antics with cheap thrills. The new version is a mindless mess with no creative thought or integrity. They even show the Book of the Dead from the original as a prop in this garbage, as a middle finger to the audience, how embarrassing. It doesn’t know if it wants to be serious or funny and that was really annoying. Establish a f*cking tone and run with it, it’s not that hard with a simple premise like this.
—Fourlok0
What The Mummy does right, The Mummy does SO right. Its a perfect blend of Universal Monsters, some action, and of course Classic B-MOVIES! It blends them all so well together it’s almost seamless. There are some flaws, mainly with the romance but most monster movies have those. It has some stupid things happen, but it FEELS LIKE A CLASSIC MONSTER FILM! The lighting and the shots are SPECTACULAR and are EXACTLY like a classic monster film! The original score is BEAUTIFUL! AND FEELS EXACTLY LIKE A CLASSIC MONSTER FILM! It’s everything I could have wished for AND MORE! … This is not a film to be missed!
—jakedoland
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Old School
Recent reviews of the classics
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There is no doubt about it, Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog were both out of their ever lovin’ minds and the camera captured this madness in all of its blazing glory!
Kinski was at his kinskiest but the real star of the show was Herzog’s obsession with making the impossible possible by transporting a 320-ton steamer, three stories high, manually with pulleys and winches, over a mountain! He was insistent on realism and boy did he deliver on that promise! It was a real life and death feat that no other director in his right mind would have attempted.
No special effects—what you see is the real deal. 500 miles away from civilization and even further away from sanity, Herzog pulls off one of the most dangerous and arduous feats in cinematic history! But it is the seething tensions, the unendurable stress, the egos clashing on the set, the impending doom hanging over everyone’s heads that in the end make this film the glorious spectacle that continues to wow viewers today.
—Naughty
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La Haine is one of the best films I’ve seen, ever. It is visually stunning. It has incredible sound design. The material, the acting, the story, feel as fresh as ever, even 20 years after release. I am floored by this masterpiece. It will stand the test of time as a film that so perfectly captures a time in history that it becomes universal in its morals, depiction of society, exploration of power, and commitment to characters and story.
Roger Ebert, in his original review, called this a “Gen X film”. But I wonder if a millennial version of La Haine would be that much different. Young men, living at the margins of society, in urban or suburban projects, could still be described much in the same way as these characters. Pankaj Mishra, in his recent book Age of Anger has a large section on the role that young, unemployed, aimless men have played in the global roots of terrorism. The men in this film fit these descriptions quite well. We, as in the global we, haven’t figured out how to address the needs of young men like this.
—samarthbhaskar
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The Vault
Recent reviews of the obscure, weird and seldom-seen
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I bet this was quite the tent-pitcher in 1953, when a man might glimpse a strange woman’s thigh once every twelve years. In 2017 though, I’ve had trips to the dentist that are more sexy than this. The camera hangs back with artless efficiency. It thinks the flesh is enough (and in ’53, it probably was). It treats the seductive swing of a woman’s backside as no different than the wind blowing through some tree branches. We see it, but the movie doesn’t seem to see it. It cuts away too fast. It doesn’t notice anything. Or at least it can’t afford to notice anything. Strictly for fans of stale cheesecake.
—Jason Hernandez
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This Is The End
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Inspired by Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott in the NY Times, you’ve been making lists of your 25 favorite films of the 21st century so far. Check them out. Your top ten, based on these lists: There Will Be Blood, Mulholland Drive, No Country for Old Men, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Tree of Life, Children of Men, Lost in Translation, Spirited Away, Zodiac and The Social Network. (Not quite as much love for Million Dollar Baby, which came in at number 128.)
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Lost in Translation was far from the first film to consider what it’s like to be a Gaijin (non-Japanese) in Japan. Bogey and Big Bird also feature in Dustin Kramer’s list of Gaijin Films (外人映画).
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One of the regularly great moments in Letterboxd list-making is when somebody notices a particular theme in film poster design. This one is a doozy: “Movies where emotionally closed-off people have to take care of a bunch of kids and they end up bonding, and the poster is all the kids standing around and the adults looking at the camera like, *shrug*, ‘What are you gonna do?’.”
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