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#81
Good Movies / Re: Recent Viewings, Part 2
Last post by M.10rda - January 16, 2026, 11:23:58 AMQuote from: Rev. Powell on January 16, 2026, 09:43:29 AMThe film effectively rebuts the theory, espoused by almost no one, that the death of his son Hamnet from the plague inspired Shakespeare to write "Hamlet."
I've paid no attention to this film, but according to both my wife and my mother, the promotions for HAMNET focus on the theory that his son's death inspired the play. You mean to say it then goes ahead and rebuts the premise that is the foundation of the film's publicity? That's wild. You're right, though. No one who is seriously into the Shakespearean canon is too interested in his dead son. #82
Good Movies / Re: Recent theatrical viewings
Last post by Rev. Powell - January 16, 2026, 10:14:45 AMMARTY SUPREME: Marty, the world's top-ranked US table tennis player in the early 50s, hustles, cons, and humiliates himself in a year-long quest to make it to Tokyo for the world championships, where he hopes to avenge a defeat to the top Japanese player. The plot never lets up for a second and Timothee Chalamet is a mesmerizing antihero; basically, it's "Uncut Gems" with ping-pong. 4.5/5.
#83
Bad Movies / Re: After Last Season (2009)
Last post by Rev. Powell - January 16, 2026, 09:53:42 AMI'm pretty sure Region just blatantly lied about the budget. IMDb doesn't exactly send out a team of fact-checkers to verify budgets of independent movies.
If Region had done all this intentionally, he wouldn't have pulled the film from distribution. I was lucky to get my DVD order in just under the wire before he pulled it, put all this behind him, and went back to doing whatever he was doing before he decided to make a movie.
The lead actor also verifies that Region had no idea what he was doing and that the cast was completely confused during filming.
If Region had done all this intentionally, he wouldn't have pulled the film from distribution. I was lucky to get my DVD order in just under the wire before he pulled it, put all this behind him, and went back to doing whatever he was doing before he decided to make a movie.
The lead actor also verifies that Region had no idea what he was doing and that the cast was completely confused during filming.
#84
Good Movies / Re: Recent Viewings, Part 2
Last post by Rev. Powell - January 16, 2026, 09:43:29 AMHAMNET (2025): Young William Shakespeare courts and marries a witch, who bears his children while foreseeing a death of a child. The film effectively rebuts the theory, espoused by almost no one, that the death of his son Hamnet from the plague inspired Shakespeare to write "Hamlet." As Agnes Shakespeare, Jessie Buckley is great; the movie, however, is mediocre. 2.5/5.
#85
Bad Movies / Re: After Last Season (2009)
Last post by M.10rda - January 16, 2026, 09:37:37 AMOkay, it's a movie. It's a Bad Movie. But I don't think it's the worst movie I've ever seen. It did get me thinking, which says something about it.
InformationGeek (what ever happened to him?) compares AFTER LAST SEASON to MONSTER-A-GO-GO. I have famously defended M-A-G-G as a Great Bad Movie, one of my favorites. I think the comparison falters for at least one crucial reason that Rev cites in his 2010 review of ALS. Objectively speaking, M-A-G-G exhibits reasonable grasp of simple "film grammar" - to extend the literary metaphor, it simply refuses to provide an appropriate conclusion where one expects it (intentionally, I think). In contrast, ALS is all over the place grammatically, syntactically, structurally, et al. It almost appears illiterate - nothing on its "page", so to speak, is where it belongs.
It appears that many reviewers on Letterboxd are convinced that AFTER LAST SEASON's auteur Mark Region intends for it to be every bit as willfully discombobulated as it appears. This is a little bit more extravagant a leap of faith than my modest suggestion that either Bill Rebane or H.G. Lewis or both intended for MONSTER-A-GO-GO to have a flagrantly impossible twist ending. (Obv one or both did, or else its ending might... be less ludicrous.) So one major question about AFTER LAST SEASON that presents itself is: Did the writer/director intend to make such a senseless and apparently inept Bad movie, or was he trying to make a Good Movie and fumbled catastrophically?
There are a couple of strong arguments for the first option. The more speculative (yet somewhat persuasive) argument is that AFTER LAST SEASON was some PRODUCERS-like tax scheme. Region claimed the film cost $5 million, yet it looks as cheap as any movie made in the 21st century that I've seen (even including the circa-1998 toaster-level computer graphics). The almost-entirely amateurish cast was supposedly paid SAG rates and some of those actors verify that Region shot the film on 35mm (which seems impossible when one watches the thing), but beyond fees for talent and celluloid processing and post-production, there appears to be barely a hundred bucks onscreen. Did Region make the cheapest-looking, most unappealing movie possible - insuring that no one would ever want to pay to see it - then walk away with $4.75 million or more in his pocket?
Or - as many fans seem to think - was Region some sort of genius prankster who successfully produced the most painstaking deconstruction of cinematic language - or "film grammar", as Rev puts it - in film history? Like....... a Godard film that goes beyond Godard's standard (and excessive) Commitment to the deconstruction Bit? The best reason to suspect that Region meant to make AFTER LAST SEASON like this is his extraordinary attention to the appearance of inattention to detail... that's to say, his dedication to making every single last aspect of the film appear as careless, shoddy, and cheap as possible. I don't think that's an understatement - every single shot of this film either starts too early, or lasts too long, or contains bizarrely inappropriate and/or dysfunctional mise-en-scene, or has one or more actors blankly delivering dialogue that seems utterly beyond their comprehension or curiosity, or otherwise shots appear that serve no purpose but to frustrate the viewer with their pointlessness. That's the entire film. Mathematically this gestalt degree of accidental Badness seems implausible. As the saying goes, even the stopped clock is right twice a day, and so it usually goes for Bad Movies too. There are things that MONSTER-A-GO-GO manages to get right - or MANOS or PLAN 9 or GHOSTS THAT STILL WALK or you fill in the blank here. In order to get every single part of one's film to be hopelessly Bad - well that seems like an indication of (shall we say) Intelligent Design.
Now, the lead actor has gone on the record in interviews about Mark Region appearing utterly earnest about making a film that was both Good and Successful, thus said lead actor is the Prime Witness for the Defense against claims that Region was trying to manufacture a Bomb. Personally, as the lead actor appears profoundly intellectually incapable on screen (as do most of the other performers in ALS), I place little weight in his ability to accurately gauge and vouch for the character of a potential mastermind con artist/artistic charlatan.
Also, there is one element of Region's film that betrays some effort and possible cleverness - the dialogue itself. Unlike the film grammar (which is disastrous), the composition of the dialogue effectively evokes and draws this viewer's attention to tangible motifs and themes, such as perception, illusion, dissociation, and relativity. The structure of the screenplay then dismembers and reassembles that dialogue in a way which is harder to make sense of... but so then does MEMENTO. Barring the non-continuity editing, the dialogue in ALS (as in MEMENTO) can be made sensible.
So this leaves me leaning in the direction of the second option - Mark Region was on to something with this film, but (as does sometimes happen) managed to miscarry his concept in its execution, perhaps by overconfidence in his own cleverness. I'm still ruminating on this, but ZombieNoOne's reply has given me some mental ammunition.
Alas, AFTER LAST SEASON is a big (if Bad) deal - it's epochal Badfilm. I guess it will take a while longer to fully unpack!
InformationGeek (what ever happened to him?) compares AFTER LAST SEASON to MONSTER-A-GO-GO. I have famously defended M-A-G-G as a Great Bad Movie, one of my favorites. I think the comparison falters for at least one crucial reason that Rev cites in his 2010 review of ALS. Objectively speaking, M-A-G-G exhibits reasonable grasp of simple "film grammar" - to extend the literary metaphor, it simply refuses to provide an appropriate conclusion where one expects it (intentionally, I think). In contrast, ALS is all over the place grammatically, syntactically, structurally, et al. It almost appears illiterate - nothing on its "page", so to speak, is where it belongs.
It appears that many reviewers on Letterboxd are convinced that AFTER LAST SEASON's auteur Mark Region intends for it to be every bit as willfully discombobulated as it appears. This is a little bit more extravagant a leap of faith than my modest suggestion that either Bill Rebane or H.G. Lewis or both intended for MONSTER-A-GO-GO to have a flagrantly impossible twist ending. (Obv one or both did, or else its ending might... be less ludicrous.) So one major question about AFTER LAST SEASON that presents itself is: Did the writer/director intend to make such a senseless and apparently inept Bad movie, or was he trying to make a Good Movie and fumbled catastrophically?
There are a couple of strong arguments for the first option. The more speculative (yet somewhat persuasive) argument is that AFTER LAST SEASON was some PRODUCERS-like tax scheme. Region claimed the film cost $5 million, yet it looks as cheap as any movie made in the 21st century that I've seen (even including the circa-1998 toaster-level computer graphics). The almost-entirely amateurish cast was supposedly paid SAG rates and some of those actors verify that Region shot the film on 35mm (which seems impossible when one watches the thing), but beyond fees for talent and celluloid processing and post-production, there appears to be barely a hundred bucks onscreen. Did Region make the cheapest-looking, most unappealing movie possible - insuring that no one would ever want to pay to see it - then walk away with $4.75 million or more in his pocket?
Or - as many fans seem to think - was Region some sort of genius prankster who successfully produced the most painstaking deconstruction of cinematic language - or "film grammar", as Rev puts it - in film history? Like....... a Godard film that goes beyond Godard's standard (and excessive) Commitment to the deconstruction Bit? The best reason to suspect that Region meant to make AFTER LAST SEASON like this is his extraordinary attention to the appearance of inattention to detail... that's to say, his dedication to making every single last aspect of the film appear as careless, shoddy, and cheap as possible. I don't think that's an understatement - every single shot of this film either starts too early, or lasts too long, or contains bizarrely inappropriate and/or dysfunctional mise-en-scene, or has one or more actors blankly delivering dialogue that seems utterly beyond their comprehension or curiosity, or otherwise shots appear that serve no purpose but to frustrate the viewer with their pointlessness. That's the entire film. Mathematically this gestalt degree of accidental Badness seems implausible. As the saying goes, even the stopped clock is right twice a day, and so it usually goes for Bad Movies too. There are things that MONSTER-A-GO-GO manages to get right - or MANOS or PLAN 9 or GHOSTS THAT STILL WALK or you fill in the blank here. In order to get every single part of one's film to be hopelessly Bad - well that seems like an indication of (shall we say) Intelligent Design.
Now, the lead actor has gone on the record in interviews about Mark Region appearing utterly earnest about making a film that was both Good and Successful, thus said lead actor is the Prime Witness for the Defense against claims that Region was trying to manufacture a Bomb. Personally, as the lead actor appears profoundly intellectually incapable on screen (as do most of the other performers in ALS), I place little weight in his ability to accurately gauge and vouch for the character of a potential mastermind con artist/artistic charlatan.
Also, there is one element of Region's film that betrays some effort and possible cleverness - the dialogue itself. Unlike the film grammar (which is disastrous), the composition of the dialogue effectively evokes and draws this viewer's attention to tangible motifs and themes, such as perception, illusion, dissociation, and relativity. The structure of the screenplay then dismembers and reassembles that dialogue in a way which is harder to make sense of... but so then does MEMENTO. Barring the non-continuity editing, the dialogue in ALS (as in MEMENTO) can be made sensible.
So this leaves me leaning in the direction of the second option - Mark Region was on to something with this film, but (as does sometimes happen) managed to miscarry his concept in its execution, perhaps by overconfidence in his own cleverness. I'm still ruminating on this, but ZombieNoOne's reply has given me some mental ammunition.
Alas, AFTER LAST SEASON is a big (if Bad) deal - it's epochal Badfilm. I guess it will take a while longer to fully unpack! #86
Bad Movies / Re: Generate Movie Poster with...
Last post by Rev. Powell - January 16, 2026, 09:14:08 AM
Copilot is only capable of creating 3 Elizabethan women, and also incapable of making a "real housewives" poster with less than five figures.
#87
Press Releases and Film News / Re: Kathleen Kennedy steps dow...
Last post by Josso - January 16, 2026, 09:06:37 AMQuote from: Trevor on January 16, 2026, 08:40:07 AMQuote from: Josso on January 16, 2026, 08:21:56 AMThe phrase too little too late comes to mind
True that and welcome back. 😊🐢
Thanks man it's nice to use forums again
Relevant
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z7kVH9xePM
#88
Games / Re: Movie Title Chains
Last post by Rev. Powell - January 16, 2026, 09:06:26 AMEscape from the Planet of the Apes (1971)
#89
Television / Re: Joel sells out!
Last post by Rev. Powell - January 16, 2026, 08:59:10 AMThat's great news! I love Joel, but he was no executive. He mismanaged the second incarnation of the show. Now there's hope for a more stable revival.
#90
Bad Movies / Re: After Last Season (2009)
Last post by zombie no.one - January 16, 2026, 08:53:56 AMI remember some buzz (or anti-buzz?) about this, but the clips I saw didn't quite draw me in enough to want to check out the whole thing... more kind of an 'okay I get the idea' situation.