| DVRfest 2025 (11.12.25 - 11.17.25, 2 movies) |
| Date Viewed | Movie | Director | Notes |
| 11.12.25 | Sly Lives! | Questlove | AKA The Burden of Black Genius. This is a doc about Sly of Sly and the Family Stone directed by Roots drummer and what-have-you Questlove. I liked his Summer of Soul, I think he did a great job with the SNL50 music doc, and now he goes over Sly's career, ups and downs, typical structure, with mostly archival footage mixed with interviews from prominent black musicians / questlove's friends like Andre 3000, Q-Tip, D'Angelo, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and Vernon Reid from Living Colour. I quite like Sly's music but have never done a deep dive or anything. I fell in love with If You Want Me to Stay when it was used in the movie Dead Presidents, fell in love with A Family Affair a little later when I think Ryan played it for me. So this was fun to watch even though it doesn't exactly surprise you with its format. I do think Questlove did a good job assembling and editing this. He's got a great sense of mixing as well, laying in interview snippets over songs, keeping the song's tempo going in the edit, that type of thing. Very solidly made doc. I don't know that you'd love it if you didn't like the music, but that tier of documentary is VERY rare. This is as good as you can reasonably expect. I'm behind already... slacking off too much taking the trash out and making dinner. Let's see if we can squeeze in two more tonight. |
| 11.13.25 | Eddington | Ari Aster | Yes you saw the event right. It's time for motherfuckin DVRFEST 2K25 AIRHORN AIRHORN BUH BUH BWWUUAUUUHHH! This is the 21st DVRfest, marking 20 years of me doing this shit. Last year I wanted to beef it up a bit but ran out of PTO but this year I didn't so let the beef commence. 6 days of movie watching, baby! Got the house to myself, a bunch of junk food, and a hard drive full of movies. The last several years I've fallen into a pattern with DVRfest where, as it approaches, I think about what I've been meaning to see and I track down copies. Well, each year I never quite get to everything I procured so my data drive is literally full. So to take this auspicious event back to its initial roots, this year I didn't download shit. This is all stuff that's on the HD (or the physical collection) already. I'm deleting as I go, and if I can't bear to watch something this week then it's gone. Clearing the HD just like 20 years ago! That's not to say I have a bunch of shitty movies that I'm not looking forward to seeing. No, I've got more than enough to fill my time and I got all these movies for a reason. So let's get to it! Kicking the fest off with Ari Aster's latest. I think I'm on record here liking Hereditary but not loving Midsommar as much as everyone else. Well, I've probably softened on Midsommar a bit over the years. A few scenes stuck with me like the old guy jumping off the cliff and the old guy sitting there on fire, but I never got around to Beau is Afraid which seemed to have no discernable draw for anyone to watch. This one was reviewed very favorably by Bill Hader talking to Aster on the A24 podcast so that piqued my interest. Well, I'll give it this. The last act went places I didn't expect. Definitely did not expect that plane to land with those people on it. I'm so conditioned by unreliable narrators I expected the whole climactic sequence to be in Joaquin's head. I'm glad it wasn't though. I guess that turn of events accounts for the extra 30-45 minutes of run time that the movie indulges itself in. I don't mean to complain but too many of these movies are two and a half hours long. I don't really have a problem with the pacing of the first half, but should a movie like this saying what it's saying really need more than two hours? Up for debate I suppose. I think ultimately my main reaction to this movie is it's too close to home. Bill Hader described it as "stating the problem. I don't know what the solution is, but this is the problem," which I agree with. However, shit's pretty wild out there right now. I don't need to see extra made-to-look-real shit in addition to all the actual-real shit going on. Maybe if by some miracle everything turns around and gets much better in ten years then this will be a nice artifact of how crazy things got, but I don't need it right now. Also, there's one undercranked shot of a truck driving over hills. I don't think I've seen an old-school sped-up shot like that for 30 years. Head scratching. |
