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Mandy (2018, FFO Beyond the Black Rainbow)

Started by Swoz_MK, June 28, 2018, 09:21:29 AM

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Moribunderast

Saw this last night at a cinema screening - I think that atmosphere really elevated the film for me, whereas watching it at home I would've been entertained but slightly nonplussed. The cinema was roaring with laughter, rapturous applause for some of Cage's "acting" and all manner of levity. It almost felt like being at a screening of The Room or something. If somebody told me beforehand the crowd would be reacting to the whole thing like a giant meme I would have thought it to be interminable but it was actually very fun. The film itself I thought was very good at what it was setting out to do. The first half was a little slow but I think that served the giant fuck-off change in tone and atmosphere that came later.

Also, any film that opens with "Starless" is going to be a film I like.

BlodwynPig

Half way through but popped in to say the opening King Crimson into woozy psychedelia (the shot of them on the lake) was the best opening I can think of in a film. Perfect Johansson score. Anyway, onto the next hour.

BlodwynPig

Yep, fantastic although the second half didn't elevate the film, just took it to a deeper fantasy realm. Didn't know Johannsson was dead. Fucking great score.

oh, and Cheddar Goblin!

BlodwynPig

From Wallsend to Hell...good stuff from Riseborough.

iamcoop

Well I thought this was absolutely fucking amazing. Just got out the showing now - absolutely buzzing.

I'll try and describe why when I've slept on it. 

TrenterPercenter

Going to see this tonight with the other half!

amputeeporn

Really looking forward to seeing this with an old friend at an afternoon showing in London. Glad to get the chance to catch it on the big(gish) screen.

Mister Six

Watched it with the missus the other night, and we loved it. Despite some chatter on here, we thought the first hour shot by, aided by the stunning visuals. The cast were on top form, and Cage cracked us up with his manic staring/grinning at the end.

It's all style over substance, except I suppose the style is the substance. Love that it was seemingly inspired by 60s/70s prog rock/metal album covers rather than the current fad for 80s neon-retro.

Not quite sure why it was called Mandy, though. She was better fleshed out than many doomed women are in revenge films, but she did still just exist to serve the usual purpose, and the director's talk about her being the heart of the story or whatever seemed hollow.

TrenterPercenter

Quote from: TrenterPercenter on October 21, 2018, 07:12:38 PM
Going to see this tonight with the other half!

Dunno.  Not for me and I usually like a bit of grindcore.  I liked the cinematography but otherwise largely shit as it didn't really have any coherence.

Great grinning at the end mind.

TrenterPercenter

Quote from: BlodwynPig on October 06, 2018, 11:22:15 PM
Yep, fantastic although the second half didn't elevate the film, just took it to a deeper fantasy realm. Didn't know Johannsson was dead. Fucking great score.

oh, and Cheddar Goblin!

Yes that trippy guitar riff has been in my head for days.

TrenterPercenter

So i just had to hear that trippy guitar track again (Mandy love theme) so i found it and listened to it just now.  All i could feel was an immense sense and physical feeling of how much he loved mandy, then the film clicked.

Fuck. That is art.

iamcoop

I'm think I'm going to see this again tonight, it's the last time they're showing it at my local.

I know it's so over the top to the point of absurdity but I found the scene where the bikers come and kidnap Mandy one of the most unsettling 5 minutes of cinema I've seen in ages. With all it's strobe-y glory.


BlodwynPig

Quote from: iamcoop on October 27, 2018, 03:20:01 PM
I'm think I'm going to see this again tonight, it's the last time they're showing it at my local.

I know it's so over the top to the point of absurdity but I found the scene where the bikers come and kidnap Mandy one of the most unsettling 5 minutes of cinema I've seen in ages. With all it's strobe-y glory.

Tyneside?

There was a midnight showing of it in East Toronto last night but I couldn't be arsed having to try and get back to Hamilton at 2:30 in the morning. Would love to see it on the big screen sometime.

iamcoop

Yeah.

It's sold out unfortunately. Gutted. This film has really got inside my head and it would've been nice to have seen it one last time on the big screen.

Watched this last night. Wow!!! What a stunning and sublime film. I knew it was going somewhere but not till it did take the revenge turn. Brilliantly cast of mostly unknown actors (to me).Jeremiah was fantastic as a Koresh and Manson mixture.  I am still reeling from the whole psychotropic darkness of it all and still thinking about the imagery of the scenes, the wasp sting and Jeremiah's music especially and failure to entice with his seduction. Even when it took the revenge turn I was still totally fixated. 

Not watched BTBR as yet but now I will aim to ASAP.

Fun fact- Jeremiah actor Linus Roche is none other than Ken Barlow's son.

Bad Ambassador


BlodwynPig

Quote from: Pinckle Wicker on November 01, 2018, 08:05:16 AM


Fun fact- Jeremiah actor Linus Roche is none other than Ken Barlow's son.

As Ken Barlow is a high druid, it makes sense.

Custard

#47
A mental/metal film, and I like to think of it as Nic Cage's character from The Wicker Man remake's fever dream as he burns to death. His yell of "FIIIIRE!!!" has to be a cheeky wink back to that film

Cage is hilarious throughout, and it wouldn't be half the film without him. "You're a vicious snowflake"

Lovely music choices, the world looks amazing, and the revenge scenes pack a hefty, satisfying wallop

Would've loved to have seen this in a fun audience. They should add a live laughter track to the DVD

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

I was trawling the January/possible closing down sale at HMV and picked this up on blu ray for a scant £7.49 (even though it'll probably turn up on Netflix in a month or two). My brain is a little melted after my first viewing, so I'm not sure I can fully articulate my thoughts about it, but it's certainly not something I'm going to forget soon.

Speaking of Netflix, it reminded me a little of their recent horror effort, Apostle. The freaky bikers and the image of someone being hoist up in a sack had similar counterparts in Apostle. Just an odd coincidence, I suppose and I think this was overall the better film.

It probably goes without saying that the imagery and soundtrack are very striking. The synth bits on the score make me wonder why in the hell Johannsson's work on Blade Runner 2049 was scrapped in favour of Hans Zimmer's blaring nonsense.

Quote from: Mister Six on October 21, 2018, 11:17:49 PM
Not quite sure why it was called Mandy, though. She was better fleshed out than many doomed women are in revenge films, but she did still just exist to serve the usual purpose, and the director's talk about her being the heart of the story or whatever seemed hollow.
Yeah. At the risk of sounding like a (vicious) snowflake I was disappointed to see her ultimately reduced to little more than a plot device. In such an horrific way, as well. Despite (or maybe bacause of) the brutality of Cage's revenge, the film still manages to seem flippant. I was hoping that the murder would turn out to be a ruse and that he would find her in the church, still alive and resisting Jeremiah's attempts to brainwash her.

I'd seen the trailer, so I know it was the type of film to include chainsaw duels. I feel like the first half hints at a more interesting direction that it could have gone in, though, rather than devolve into a series of loosely connected fight scenes. Perhaps there is some argument to be made for the film being kind of timely, in the #metoo era. Jeremiah could be a stand in for any number of Hollywood scumbags, who destroy any woman that rejects their sexual advances. I'm not sure if that would make Mandy's fate artistically justified though.

Also, Brother Swan reminded me of Pablo Myers, from Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule.

ASFTSN

Watched this yesterday. Complete flimsy nonsense bullshit, but that hasn't yet stopped me enjoying a film. Quite liked it.

Cuntbeaks

Eventually watched this at the weekend. A film of two halves, which has already been pointed out. The first half was very 'Black Rainbow', dripping with lysergic abandon. The initial scene with them on the bed together was excellent, very low key, yet wonderfully hallucinogenic.

When the slasher/revenge plot kicked in I kinda lost interest to be honest. Overall a decent film, one which would have been superb on the big screen.

alan nagsworth

I watched this last night and honestly I thought it was a very bad film. I'm going to loosely compare it to Kung Fury in the category of "style over substance", which I didn't think could be hammered into the dirt any more than KF already has done, but wow, Mandy really sweeps it, eh.

For those of you who say the first hour is a slog, I'm keen to know exactly how you found the following hour in any way rewarding or satisfying, considering the plot is so utterly banal it's impossible to be invested in anything that happens, and the violent rampage that follows is so totally lackluster and underwhelming.

Okay, so I get it, the film is supposed to be OTT. The dialogue is supposed to be extremely drawn out and cheesy. The performances are possibly intended to be hammy. You're meant to watch this with a tongue in cheek but also be blown away by the intense atmospherics and, later, the brutal vengeance. Well, the soundtrack was great but the "Argento turned up to 11" visual aspect was largely a flop because there was nothing unsettling, endearing or in any way remotely engaging about anything happening beyond that. The characters and their dialogue were all complete wall-to-wall crap. How am I meant to applaud our hero's eventual and tediously inevitable triumph when I don't even remotely care about his plight (despite it being the wonderful Nicolas Cage for fuck's sake) and the path of destruction he plows through is so sorely lacking in imagination?

There are so many modern films that rely strongly on aesthetic value to carry a shit plot and the overall payoff for me has been complete disappointment. You're Next, Kung Fury, and most recently, The Night Comes For Us. I have no idea what people see in these films. Whether they're trying to be the next Brain Dead or the next Oldboy or they're trying to move from those in a new direction, in my opinion they all fail, and it's really quite disheartening to be let down by these films over and over again.

Cheddar Goblin was legit the only great thing about Mandy.

PlanktonSideburns

Quote from: alan nagsworth on February 27, 2019, 03:48:21 PM


Cheddar Goblin was legit the only great thing about Mandy.

Richard Herring is in this?

VelourSpirit

I'm just glad it gave us this beautiful track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilaRNAPSUKc4

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on January 06, 2019, 12:35:03 AM
The synth bits on the score make me wonder why in the hell Johannsson's work on Blade Runner 2049 was scrapped in favour of Hans Zimmer's blaring nonsense.

Really hope we get to hear that score one day.

DukeDeMondo

I haven't seen this since whenever it was, October or whenever, so my memory is a bit hazy, but I remember being pretty underwhelmed too. Not as underwhelmed as Nags was up above there, but underwhelmed nonetheless. There were things about it that I found pretty engaging - I'd been reading a lot of Matilda Joslyn Gage's writings on witch trials and the like at the time, Woman, Church and State and things like this, and I did find it fairly interesting how the villains of the piece were a bunch of deranged Christians pursuing a woman very much in tune with the Earth about her and whose body was literally marked with a pentagram from the off, and some of the SPOILERY stuff that later went on obviously chimed with that too -  and some passages were undoubtedly compelling in a woozy sort of way and there was the very occasional image that I found to be quite breathtaking, even if most of those were in the trailer.

But generally I felt short changed. All I had heard about it was how formally daring it was, how visually innovative it was, how unlike anything else, how unique and unpredictable, and it just isn't. It has its moments of razzling and dazzling, but they're short lived. A lot of the time it's pretty bog standard shot-reverse-shot stuff that just so happens to have a red filter slapped on top. I'd go so far as to say it's visually boring for much of the running time. Compositions that were entirely unremarkable save for the fact that they were sometimes held for longer than expected or slowed to a crawl, and again, that they made judicious use of whatever filters were at their disposal.

I mean, I think it's fine, I enjoyed it, but it's nothing like the technical feat some claim it to be.   

BlodwynPig

Quote from: TwinPeaks on February 27, 2019, 10:15:32 PM
I'm just glad it gave us this beautiful track https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilaRNAPSUKc4



You're not wrong. Sad he is dead now, though. There are probably others making breathtaking soundtracks and not the shit "big names" that win oscars all the time. Any recommendations? Boom Bip's Sun Choke soundtrack comes to mind.

zomgmouse

Pros: it's just Nicolas Cage going full metal against a bunch of tough dudes

Cons: it's just Nicolas Cage going full metal against a bunch of tough dudes

phantom_power

Quote from: BlodwynPig on February 28, 2019, 12:45:48 AM
You're not wrong. Sad he is dead now, though. There are probably others making breathtaking soundtracks and not the shit "big names" that win oscars all the time. Any recommendations? Boom Bip's Sun Choke soundtrack comes to mind.

I think some of Jonny Greenwood's stuff falls into both those categories

Howj Begg

This film is an absolute atrocity, a travesty, and unfortunately a classic.

It made me feel more sick than almost anything else after Salo or Bula Quo. It oozes queasy evil. There's that one scene with the brief "trip", but basically the rest of it feels like a cocktail of mismatched downers and stimulants. It's the colour haze, yeah, but also the way the action is slowed down, the submerged audio, the almost senseless long takes on people staring at something.

I can't say that it's good this thing exists. But I can't deny it was effective.

iamcoop

Quote from: Howj Begg on February 28, 2019, 08:29:39 PM
This film is an absolute atrocity, a travesty, and unfortunately a classic.

It made me feel more sick than almost anything else after Salo or Bula Quo. It oozes queasy evil. There's that one scene with the brief "trip", but basically the rest of it feels like a cocktail of mismatched downers and stimulants. It's the colour haze, yeah, but also the way the action is slowed down, the submerged audio, the almost senseless long takes on people staring at something.

I can't say that it's good this thing exists. But I can't deny it was effective.

I had a similar reaction as you. I found it almost overwhelming at times. And despite how fucking mad it is it I found it had an odd pervasive sense of gloom around it. It's one of the few films I've seen recently that I find oddly difficult to articulate exactly how it made me feel. (Not that I'm particularly great at that anyway).

I saw it in the cinema with a small yet enthusiastic audience who I assume knew as little about it going in as I did and I'd imagine this definitely added to the overall effect. I found it hard to get out of my mind for the next few days and I almost never get that watching films these days. I totally sympathise with the people that found it disappointing though. My other half didn't enjoy it at all and stuff like Mandy is usually right up her street.