Now here I am, listing to Spill.com Worst of 2009 podcast when one of them brought this film up. He said it was the worst film of the year and even went so far to say it was the worst film of the decade. Now I can't say much to that since I've never seen the movie, but man, that is big words to say about the film.
From what he said, he mention that film was only shown in four theaters in the U.S., was made on a budge of less than 5 million, and the company actually said that the theaters could destroy the film after they were done screening it because it was too expensive to send it back to them.
Here's the website: http://www.afterlastseason.com/ (http://www.afterlastseason.com/)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYXRD_jOO48
I'm going to be reviewing this one before the year's out. Looking forward to it.
So I have officially seen the movie now and I must say, what the f**k was that? This film goes beyond mere words for me, but I'll try. This is without a doubt truly the worst film of the past decade. I say past 2 maybe, but its got hard competition with Pocket Ninjas. The movie is so bad that I felt like I was getting flashbacks to my time with Monster A-Go Go and it is on about the same level as that movie, though the film never has spots where it becomes impossible to see. The editing is an abomination and makes me assume that the editing was done by a monkey high on cocaine while have elliptic seizure (WHY THE HELL DO WE CUT AWAY TO A CEILING FAN MORE THAN TWICE IN A FILM?!). The acting is so forgettable, bland, and terrible that it almost doesn't exist. This film holds the new record for the worst set design I have ever seen beating out both Future War and Monster A-Go Go. My 6th grade class play had better special effects and a better story to boot.
There is nothing to be said more about this film. It is evil. Monster A-Go Go, meet your illegitimate brother!
I published my review of this about a month ago, but it was lost due to my problems with my webhost. I recovered the review from Google and I'll reprint some selections of it here.
'Huh?, 'um...' and 'whah?' are all equally valid responses to After Last Season. This movie may go down as this generation's Beast of Yucca Flats: stultifyingly dull at times, but so full of misguided directorial choices and failed attempts at cinematic poetry that it takes on a dreamlike character. Watching After Last Season is like trying to follow a old timey radio monologue on an AM radio station with fading reception: you can tell there's a voice trying to make itself heard, but the transmission is so garbled that the basics of the story become lost in static and long stretches of dead air...
There's a concept in cinema theory called "film grammar;" it refers to sets of filmmaking conventions that have been proven over time to work to tell a story to an audience in a coherent fashion. A director breaks these "grammatical rules" at the risk of confusing and losing his audience. Here's a very simple example of a "grammatical" movie "sentence": a two way conversation starts with a shot of the character who's speaking, cuts to a reaction shot of the party who's listening, then cuts back to allow the speaker to finish his thought. In After Last Season director Mark Region consistently exhibits atrocious film grammar: he will have his speaker deliver a line and then pause awkwardly, then cut to a shot of the listener reacting to a few moments of silence, then cut back to the speaker, who resumes his thought. This isn't a common sort of gaffe; it's more the equivalent of consistently putting adjectives after nouns. Another norm that should be self-evident that Region likes to break is "don't focus on long, undramatic shots of furniture during transitions." He's not just content to mangle the small-scale standards, either; he breaks the big storytelling rules too, rules like "don't include a scene of your main character discussing which floor has a working printers unless the discussion has some relationship to the plot," "don't have any scenes of completely unnecessary characters discussing genealogy while giggling inappropriately," and "don't make one third of your movie a dream sequence unless you have a reason to." New characters, or shots of exteriors (or furniture), are introduced without any context and edited randomly into ongoing conversations. The results are so incoherent and disorienting that it takes two viewings just to verify that there is not a real story hiding somewhere in this mess.
Adding to the oddness, almost the entire film seems to have been shot in one large, vacant house: a medical examining room appears to be someone's bedroom, with pink walls, a ceiling fan, and an MRI machine made out of cardboard boxes taped up with sagging contact paper. (The plot doesn't require an MRI machine, in case you were wondering, but the movie pays it a lot of attention nonetheless). Region is also fond of taping pieces of paper to walls; usually, the tell you what set your viewing, such as "Prorolis Corporation," "Psychology Exercise," or "Cell 1″; but sometimes he inexplicably tapes blank sheets to the exteriors of buildings. You feel almost saddened for the actors, who aren't very good or charismatic but obviously received no help from the script or the director; it's painful to watch them just standing around, not knowing what to do or how to react as they're being assaulted by invisible forces throwing chairs or stabbing them with unseen knives. There's almost no soundtrack, but at times little bursts of a piano or organ playing an odd, semi-melodic series of notes breaks into the action.
This mix of a thin paraspychological plot that's approximately 50% padding, incoherent storytelling and incompetent production might have produced a bizarre enough concoction, but the weird little cherry on top is the "telepathic" scenes brought to us courtesy of outdated software that was probably originally intended as an aid in architectural design. (The credits tell us it took ten people to put together these sequences, but you would never be able to tell from the what appears onscreen). The resulting visions are blocky, abstract geometric designs. Sometimes they resolve themselves into recognizable objects like automobiles, and in one case into fish in an undersea coral reef made of floating cubes and conic sections. One ambitious animated scene recreates a murder, with a faceless killer wielding a conical knife against a slow-moving cartoonified woman. Mostly, however, we watch abstract shapes floating around in space at different vectors, sometimes colliding and bouncing off each other. These scenes are long and essentially add nothing to the story, but they contain some nice weird and moody sound effects; focus real hard, and you might be able to achieve an altered state of consciousness off them.
:question: Ewww...thanks for the warning. Yeah, I think Infogeek is onto something here. What was the camera monkey on, and where can we get some?
"This generations answer to THE BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS"...and Thats a terrifing image. :bluesad:
Well, thanks to you, my friends @ BadMovies.org, I watched AFTER LAST SEASON, successfully used the Search function (will wonders never cease?), and am reviving this here 15 YEAR AND 1 MONTH OLD thread in order to encourage discussion. :bouncegiggle:
100,000,000 cheers to Rev. Powell for writing and posting an extensive and cogent review (in 2010!) so that I don't feel obligated to mention many specifics of this....... object. Thanks, Rev! :thumbup: :cheers:
I do have thoughts, though. Many thoughts. I am going to try to corral them into, like, 3 paragraphs... instead of half a dozen. Anybody else have anything more recent (than 12/2010) to post about this one-of-a-kind :hot: garbage while I formulate a sober response?
I 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.
Okay, 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. :thumbup: 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!
I'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.
After Last Season is pretty awful & one of the worst films ever made
The title also makes no sense
The Room is a cinematic masterpiece compared to After Last Season
Quote from: Rev. Powell on January 16, 2026, 09:53:42 AMThe lead actor also verifies that Region had no idea what he was doing.
Sounds like me on my first day at film school 😳😄😉🐢
Quote from: Trevor on January 16, 2026, 01:43:33 PMQuote from: Rev. Powell on January 16, 2026, 09:53:42 AMThe lead actor also verifies that Region had no idea what he was doing.
Sounds like me on my first day at film school 😳😄😉🐢
Trust me, you were a much better filmmaker your first day at film school than Region.
Quote from: Rev. Powell on January 16, 2026, 02:13:39 PMQuote from: Trevor on January 16, 2026, 01:43:33 PMQuote from: Rev. Powell on January 16, 2026, 09:53:42 AMThe lead actor also verifies that Region had no idea what he was doing.
Sounds like me on my first day at film school 😳😄😉🐢
Trust me, you were a much better filmmaker your first day at film school than Region.
😅😀😃😂😄
I needed that LOL thanks 😀😃🐢
A few relevant replies before I attempt my own thesis here:
Quote from: Rev. Powell on January 16, 2026, 09:53:42 AMI'm pretty sure Region just blatantly lied about the budget.
If Region had done all this intentionally, he wouldn't have pulled the film from distribution.
The lead actor also verifies that Region had no idea what he was doing and that the cast was completely confused during filming.
It is absolutely evident that the cast is completely confused. Although I don't place a great deal of confidence in the main actor's perceptiveness, I don't reject the possibility that the main actor is incidentally correct that Region had little clue how to produce this movie. I was just taking all possibilities into consideration...
Quote from: Rev. Powell on December 02, 2010, 09:02:30 PMThe results are so incoherent and disorienting that it takes two viewings just to verify that there is not a real story hiding somewhere in this mess.
Are you acknowledging that you watched AFTER LAST SEASON
twice...??? :buggedout: :bouncegiggle: I don't know if I can watch this again. Thus I may need to cede this point to you and take your word for it. Based on
one viewing, it seems clear that there
is a "real story hiding somewhere in this mess". That is, in fact, the foundation for my thesis for why ALS ends up seeming as senseless and bad as it does: Region had a fairly simple and straightforward story about a ghost and a serial killer (or whatever he is) and human beings learning to communicate with the ghost to foil the killer. That isn't a totally unusual plot - but Region runs it through a woodchipper and makes complete mince of it. HOWEVER... you watched it twice and I didn't - thus I defer to you, sir!
Quote from: zombie no.one on January 16, 2026, 08:53:56 AMthe 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.
:thumbup: :thumbup: YES - and this is one challenge (anyway) to what I surmise was Region's plan. He thought he was clever in telling a simple story in an alluring (read: convoluted) way... but if you still got the idea from the trailer... why sit through the whole painful movie?
[/quote]
Quote from: bob on January 16, 2026, 12:25:40 PMAfter Last Season is pretty awful & one of the worst films ever made
The title also makes no sense
It
does make sense, if one thinks about it: Something happened "last season" (Craig died) and the movie takes place "after" that thing that happened (Craig is now a ghost).
The major issue again is - why should anyone bother to think about it???
The title is a great example of Region's urge to overcomplicate everything... and specifically an example of his use of linguistic (not film) grammar to seem interesting or clever or profound... yet (in gestalt) his attempt "makes no sense".
Quote from: Rev. Powell on December 02, 2010, 09:02:30 PMWatching After Last Season is like trying to follow a old timey radio monologue on an AM radio station with fading reception: you can tell there's a voice trying to make itself heard, but the transmission is so garbled that the basics of the story become lost in static and long stretches of dead air...
Yes - this. 100%. Cont'd...
Again, here's my "TLDR" version of an attempt to rationalize AFTER LAST SEASON: Mark Region had a simple exploitation movie plot (ala GHOST or SIXTH SENSE or FREQUENCY or something). One point that most accounts agree upon is that Region thought the film would be popular/a hit/would make money (this obv discards the PRODUCERS tax-scam angle). Yet he'd seen one or two really Good, tricky, complicated Art Films and had maybe taken a single film theory class or read on book on Godard or - something. So Region decides that instead of telling his simple supernatural thriller in a simple, straightforward way, he'll get real smart about it - he'll get Deconstructionist with it. He'll structure his simple plot non-chronologically. He'll have actors deliver all dialogue as if mystified or brainwashed (an approach employed by Godard, Herzog, Mamet, Dreyer, etc). He'll emphasize the superficiality of all mise-en-scene to help sell the idea that the physical world is illusory. All of this makes perfect sense to Region, one of those guys who has a fervent mind and access to a little bit of advanced knowledge. There is only one (profound) problem: Region doesn't really have any skill or talent or discipline as a filmmaker - so he can't achieve any of the onscreen effects that he imagines in his big noggin.
This theory makes sense to me, as I've worked on enough low-budget movies made by guys with huge ideas & ambitions and either insufficient resources or insufficient gifts. (...Myself included.)
It also helps explain - to me, anyway - how the screenplay (really, the dialogue) does make sense to my neurodivergent mind....... except it is realized onscreen in such an aggressively off-putting way that my every instinct is to just scream "THIS IS BULL$#!t!"
Something that has occurred to me in the past is that there are four general ways to approach telling any story in a film:
EASY TO WATCH + EASY TO UNDERSTAND: And this is basically most every movie produced by major studios in the past 100+ years. Example all Marvel movies.
EASY TO WATCH + HARD TO UNDERSTAND: For me, the gold standard here is MEMENTO. When I managed an arthouse cinema, MEMENTO was far-and-away the biggest smash hit of my tenure. People watched it once, loved it, thought they understood it, and felt smart. People watched it half a dozen times at my theater (cha-ching), loved it but realized they didn't understand it after one viewing, understood it better each time, and felt smarter for their efforts. That's why MEMENTO is one of my Top 5 favs ever.
HARD TO WATCH + EASY TO UNDERSTAND: I think Tarkovski films are good examples of this category. NOSTALGIA doesn't have a complicated plot, but it's soooooooo slow. The same could really be said for STALKER, too. It's easy to get frustrated and stop watching - not because one is confused, but because one hungers for more Action more quickly. I'd argue that you eventually profit from investing time in Tarkovski's movies - but he took a big gamble and it never pays off for many viewers.
HARD TO WATCH + HARD TO UNDERSTAND: Ex. Godard. His films get progressively more arbitrarily impenetrable through the 60s, bounce back slightly and briefly in the 80s, then in this century he flies into outer space to Planet Godard, where only "Godard" is spoken and the population is 1 (Godard). Sometimes I can understand a little bit of what he's going on about, mostly I can't, and too often I just don't care. His HISTOIRE DU CINEMA is many hours of him just staring into the camera and talking about movies (w/ occasional primitive video FX) and even when he's just speaking directly to the viewer, very little of what he says is comprehensible. Godard didn't only not care whether he was understood, he relished the opportunity to obfuscate and confuse... God rest his soul.
My conclusion: Mark Region wanted to make a MEMENTO and thought he could make MEMENTO... a film w/ a simple story that rewarded multiple viewings and coincidentally made a hefty profit. Unfortunately, the intense deconstructionist aspect to his story's presentation suggests he was overambitious... way out of his element... swimming in the rare waters of a Godard, who eschewed mainstream comprehension and success. (One article about ALS compares it to Hal Hartley - but doing Godard-lite has never made Hartley much money, either.) As Rev. Powell assures us, you will get no more value out of watching AFTER LAST SEASON a second time... in fact, I surmise I would lose value (my precious time) and only resent AFTER LAST SEASON more than I do now. As a result, ALS as a finished product falls under the "Hard To Watch + Easy To Understand" category... it's unpleasant, onerous, no fun, and at the end you don't even get the emotional or spiritual catharsis that you get from a Tarkovski joint. If AFTER LAST SEASON is a Bad Movie - and yes, it is - it's because it seems constructed to make no one happy.
And yet! I have spent so much time thinking about it and writing about it... and that has made me...... happy!!! :teddyr: Okay, to be once more continued (and concluded).
WHY BAD MOVIES?
In high school, I reviewed "bad" movies on VHS for Joe Bob Briggs' "We Are The Weird" zine... so Joe Bob didn't have to. Once he sent me a movie titled CAGED TERROR... originally titled GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN (1973). At the time and for a long time after, I thought it was the worst movie I'd ever seen, on account of it being most of the things we all associate with Badness on this site: it was laborious, boring, pretentious, ridiculous, poorly acted, poorly produced, and cheap. (Also sometimes amusing in its Badness.) I would later buy a used copy on VHS and subject friends to it, and on repeat viewings, I still think CAGED TERROR is about as "bad" as Bad Movies probably get... worse than MANOS... worse maybe than GHOSTS THAT STILL WALK... much worse than MONSTER-A-GO-GO or PLAN 9. CAGED TERROR might be worse even than AFTER LAST SEASON... it is, anyway, more poorly written than AFTER LAST SEASON! (Yes. Yes.)
But I rarely think of the "worst" Bad Movie I've ever seen anymore, even amidst all the time I spend on this website. I truly enjoy most of the movies we discuss on this site, even the most Bad ones, hence I rarely participate in "Worst" conversations. 'Cause those movies don't make me happy - they make me angry and/or sick at heart.
Those movies fall into two categories. One is movies I don't ever bring up by name and won't here. I'd call them "Children of SALO". There's a few I've seen in the past 30 years that I wish I could unsee and thus don't mention 'cause I don't want to inflict them on others. Clearly they were made to revel in human suffering... though just onscreen, at least. Those are Bad, and in no way fun for me - so I reject them from the Mind Palace.
The other category are films that may be better made than AFTER LAST SEASON, yet actually do harm to humanity. DW Griffith is still often cited as an early master filmmaker, but BIRTH OF A NATION is an infinitely worse film than AFTER LAST SEASON, as BIRTH OF A NATION actually did real harm to marginalized people and lent comfort to abusers in traditional positions of power. I recently called THE SOUND OF FREEDOM one of the worst films of this century, because it contributed to pervasive disinformation and public confusion. (I'd also argue it's not well made, though it's better than ALS.) In the same sentence, I grouped HILLBILLY ELEGY with TSOF... inescapably, Ron Howard's stoopid (also not terribly well-made) movie contributed real and lasting harm on the United States and its citizens. Those movies can't be banished from my mind palace, 'cause their impact is manifest in the physical world - not just on my psyche.
Sometimes I think about those films when I watch films like AFTER LAST SEASON, and it helps me keep things in perspective. Watching ALS also made me think of another tiny low-budget movie made and released (only) in Western New York in 2000. I won't name that movie, either - it's director later made a in-name-only horror sequel that was distributed on Netflix (on DVD, not streaming) and lots of people ended up seeing it and I think it's even been discussed on here. That director probably has a lot in common with Mark Region in terms of ambition. Anyway, he wrote, directed, and starred in a feature in 2000 that - as I recall my one viewing - is indeed probably worse than ALS and worse than CAGED TERROR in terms of filmmaking but also Bad on the deeper level of the categories I mentioned above, in that it derives entertainment and humor from mental illness, abuse, and disease. The guy that made it started a local film festival, took advantage of people, exploited and mistreated them, etc. He seems like not a good guy, and I hated his movie - hated it.
As Bad as AFTER LAST SEASON is to watch - it did provide me with hours of enjoyment researching it, reflecting on it, talking about it with y'all, and writing about it. Thus - ALS is net-positive in my book.
Also, CAGED TERROR is inescapably aware of the prevalence of toxic masculinity, knee-jerk religiosity, and the damage wrought by American involvement in Vietnam, particularly for a movie made in 1973. Also 50% of its cast is non-white, FWIW. (It does suck as a film, natch.)
So anyway. Viva la BADFILM!
Nice summary, M.10.
I will give After Last Season some credit: it's better then Bucky Larson
Quote from: M.10rda on January 17, 2026, 05:45:23 PMHARD TO WATCH + HARD TO UNDERSTAND
two of my favourite Steven Seagal flicks...
Quote from: M.10rda on January 16, 2026, 09:37:37 AMNow, 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.
actors dobbing the director in for trying to re-frame a movie happened with THE ROOM as well I think...
also can't remember if it was Nic Cage or Neil Labute himself who started claiming the WICKERMAN remake was some intentional warped experiment in strangeness, which other cast then refuted...
if I ever make a film all my actors are signing NDA's... it was
intentionally crap, and that's the end of it.
Quote from: M.10rda on January 16, 2026, 09:37:37 AMRegion 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).
all the scenes in the trailer look and sound like the 'movie' me and my classmates made on a standard camcorder for our media studies A Level
I didn't take the bait when WICKER MAN v2 was mentioned yesterday in another thread but now I'll take the bait. LaBute is (sometimes) a good writer but manifestly a terrible director. Like Mamet, he somehow made at least a couple of good (if simple) films - in LaBute's case, his first two. Everything from NURSE BETTY onwards seems insanely poorly made to me. He appears to take whatever job pays his bills. I don't think there was much intentional artistry behind the WM remake.
Some of my student films have ALS qualities. There's something about aesthetic flatness that appeals to young/amateur filmmakers. Hartley (who has made masterpieces) does flatness (because Godard did it); Mamet does flatness because, as he wrote in his book On Directing Film, "What's the best place to put your camera? Over There." Mamet truly believes that the script is everything and the film just comes together magically around a good screenplay w/ no other care or rigor. That's a very alluring idea for filmmakers who primarily identify as writers (like me). And somehow Mamet accidentally directed at least a couple very very good films (THE SPANISH PRISONER and HOMICIDE)... plus some decent ones and some stinkers.
Good Seagal joke!
"8% liked this movie"
that's tough
Quote from: lester1/2jr on January 18, 2026, 12:33:06 PM"8% liked this movie"
that's tough
8% seems awfully high. I'm not sure "like" is a term I'd use about this movie. It's no fun at all, but I am glad I saw it just because nothing like it will ever exist again.
Quote from: Rev. Powell on January 18, 2026, 12:57:39 PMQuote from: lester1/2jr on January 18, 2026, 12:33:06 PM"8% liked this movie"
that's tough
8% seems awfully high. I'm not sure "like" is a term I'd use about this movie. It's no fun at all, but I am glad I saw it just because nothing like it will ever exist again.
There's a YouTube vid which speeds the movie up by 1000% and it actually makes sense at that speed.
The sense it makes is by asking the viewer "Why are you watching this?" 😳😂😃😉🐢
Speeding it up would definitely help. One could say the same thing for Tarkovski films. A 2h40m Tarkovski sped up 2x's (thus 1h20m) would probably still make perfect sense and just about deliver the same impact. (I have also often encouraged people to just skip the first 2/3rds of ANDREI RUBLEV, watch the last hour, and have a perfectly lovely and complete experience.)
In the case of ALS though I don't know if 2x would suffice. 4x seems a little closer to the right speed. A 20-25 minute version of ALS might be perfectly snappy!
Quote from: InformationGeek on December 02, 2010, 08:02:36 PMSo I have officially seen the movie now and I must say, what the f**k was that?
😳😄😅🤣😂😂🤣