CorvusUmbranox

IT'S HAPPENING. YOU GUYS IT'S HAPPENING. After literal months of dragging my feet due to a pet health situation, I finally bit the bullet yesterday and bought my plane tickets. To be fair to me, that did take several hours of thinking and comparing, because I'm also going to Slovenia to see friends, so I had to consider three one-way legs vs nested round-trips, plus see what day was cheapest to leave and come back within various other constraints, etc. BUT I HAVE THEM. AND I LEAVE IN LITERALLY THREE WEEKS AHHHHH.

Friend I'm going to the concert with told me all her friends are jealous because none of them could get tickets. 😇😇😇 I've seen photos of big Oasis displays over in the UK. Sounds like the hype is huge, can't wait to see it for myself.

In celebration, here's some top-notch Oasis content I've come across recently:
Noel calling into TalkSports, 6/27. On one hand, there's been basically zero official promo (unless you count a really slickly produced video advertising their exclusive Adidas line, which I do not???). On the other hand: Noel randomly calling into a sports radio show every so often. He seems in SUCH GOOD SPIRITS here omg, constantly referring to Liam as "our kid," winding up the hosts, being silly, and cheerfully declaring that it's "too late to back out [of the tour] now."

‘Liam had been drinking all night. Noel was not in a great mood’: photographers pick their best Oasis shot (The Guardian). Some fantastic quotes in this.

Bands – especially ones with a pretty boy singer or a female singer – can get really nervous that the singer gets all the attention. Noel was never like that. He said: “You’ve got to use the assets you’ve got.” -- Kevin Cummings

Are you fucking kidding me. Just when you think you've finally seen all the best/weirdest quotes from Noel about Liam... there's always more.

We were booked on the same flight, but the band were in club class and me and the hack were in goats-and-chickens. Liam came back to say hello. He was a garrulous guy, even pre-fame. He was standing at the back of the plane having a beer and this woman came by huffing and puffing with some kids and Liam offered to look after one of them. He pulled down one of those seats the flight attendants sit on and had the girl on his lap and chatted to her. After the tales I’d heard, I’d thought I was about to spend a few days with a nutcase. But he was sweet as a nut. -- Tom Sheehan

🥺🥺🥺

And in conclusion, a performance of the song that got me into Oasis, from 1997 near the peak of Oasis mania:

Watch on YouTube

Noel gets so into the prechorus that he sings along with Liam even though he's not at the mic at the time, Liam looks like he's having a religious experience during Noel's guitar solo and then does a little dance, Noel looks like he's having a difference kind of experience during the solo... Top notch stuff.

Planet Terror (2007). A very silly, pulpy exploitation movie starring a bunch of recognizable people fighting a zombie apocalypse. This is very much the thing that it is. Gross, inappropriate humor, a child shoots himself in the head. Rose McGowan is really hot, but the whole thing is soured by her RL history with Weinstein, who produced. Tarantino cast himself as a would-be rapist in his buddy's film. There's a lot of ehhhhhhh here, is way I'm saying.

I didn't hate watching it, but nor do I need to watch it again.

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Brokeback Mountain (2005). Two cowboys herd sheep on a mountainside and start a decades-long affair. I got to see this at the theater for the 20-year anniversary, yay. It was pretty good! Heath Ledger was fantastic as Ennis, and the scenery was gorgeous.

That said, I had a lot of quibbles. Truthfully, realistic drama is not my genre even when you make it gay, so feel free to chalk most of my complaints up to that if you want.

That said, there were two key transition points that felt really abrupt and underdeveloped (the first time they have sex, and the reunion after four years apart). I also feel like either Gyllenhaal didn't get enough to work with, or he did not do a great job at working with what he had. It felt like the whole movie Ledger was showing and Gyllenhaal was telling. Ultimately, though, I think my main problem with this movie is I just about never vibe with the "decades of vignettes" drama subgenre. It always feels like the story is spread too thin, and it does here, too.

I do see the criticism about this being too much about tragic gays or whatever. There's no such thing as the universal queer experience, and no one work can capture What It Means To Be Queer, but even so this feels like a particularly narrow and bleak perspective.

Overall probably won't become one of my favorites, but I'm glad I've finally seen it.

It's been a minute since I did one of these!

V/H/S/2 (2013). Too much gross, way too many zombies. The zombie helmetcam segment is supposed to be a classic, but a) gross, and b) HOW ARE WE SPLICING IN A WHOLE OTHER SOURCE OF FOOTAGE INTO THE HELMETCAM FOOTAGE. I will allow cutting in found footage but I refuse to accept editing in entirely other sources. I watched the Kill Count for the segments I missed and was not even a little sorry I skipped them. I like found footage, I like anthology movies, but I think I'm done with this franchise.

Resurrection (2022). Rebecca Hall plays a mother who (thinks she?) spots her past abuser/rapist at a conference and completely loses her mind over it. Hall is so good at psychological tension, TOO good in this case. I could not handle it, especially combined with the abuse dynamic. Apparently the movie got even weirder after I stopped, complete with on-screen pseudo-mpreg? IDK, psychological realism combined with plot surrealism is not my jam.

Psycho Goreman (2021). Two kids discover an ancient evil emperor of the universe and get him to do tricks for them. I think in order to like this movie I needed to be a huge fan of a certain kind of cheesy 80s fantasy movie, and alas I am not. Also the kids are really obnoxious, especially the sister.

The House October Built (2011). A camera crew goes on the road to film haunted houses people have set up for Halloween. This opens with the most excruciating "one (1) woman and a bunch of annoying men bicker" found footage scene I have seen in a long time. I lasted less than five minutes. Why is there always one woman max in found footage movies? Why is there basically NO found footage with majority women? Found footage is so cheap to make, why aren't there bunches of these movies by and about women? (Recs welcome.)

Stopmotion (2024). A repressed woman becomes increasingly obsessive about completing her mother's stop-motion film. This was slow and tedious, and I am so tired of movies about quiet, introverted characters inevitably becoming obsessed, deranged, and losing their entire grip on reality. And again with the surrealism, ugh.

Left for Dead (2007). A horror-western about a woman looking to kill a wanted outlaw, with the blurb "Saw meets the spaghetti western." When I bought this for $4 at Goodwill, I want to stress that I did not expect it to be good, but it may be the actual worst movie I have ever watched in my life. Somehow this movie has a wikipedia page, where we learn it was filmed in twelve days. There is copious slow-mo. Every single change of camera angle is preceded by a freeze frame. It is impossible to articulate how painful every second of this movie is, and I strongly recommend you hunt it down just to experience a couple of minutes of it for yourself.

Blink Twice (2024). Two women get themselves invited to a CEO's party island, and then they start losing parts of their memory. Or so I hear; I didn't even get as far as the island invite because the social embarassment squick hit me so hard. Then I looked up spoilers and discovered that the answer to all the mysteries in the trailer is RAPE because this is a RAPE island where the CEO and all his friends are RAPISTS. Did I mention this is a movie about RAPE? (And also about a drug with truly remarkable capabilities in selective memory suppression.)

Gothic (1986). Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, Lord Byron, and a couple of others party at Byron's house with a lot of laudanum, and stuff happens. This is by Ken Russell, who did Lair of the White Worm, but that movie is a romp and this is... a series of events which may or may not exist within the same narrative? They're not even interesting events. It's like unsexy erotica, interpersonal drama, someone maybe hallucinates a monster, more unsexy erotica. Timothy Spall wears a corset at one point. With half an hour left I turned it off and read about Mary Shelley on wikipedia instead, which was a much more enjoyable use of my time.