Sunday, August 27, 2023

Nightcap 8/27/23 -Korean Films at Lincoln Center, I'm Not Ending Unseen Films, Mission Impossible TV, The Flash and things up coming


The Film at Lincoln Center and Subway Cinema series Korean Cinema’s Golden Decade: The 1960s opens Friday. It’s a chance to see 24 Korean films on the big screen, something that is unlikely to happen again for many years. Running the gamut from animation to drama to spy films to war film and giant monsters on the rampage it’s super collection of titles you’ll want to get out and see.

As it stands now my coverage is going to be limited. Circumstance and prior commitments have hurt my ability to really wade into the series. I know I will have a couple of titles closer to their screenings, but I’m not sure how many more I will get to.

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I just want to say that stuff happens and my plan to announce the end of Unseen Films after this year’s New York Film Festival isn’t happening.

Between joining the New York Film Critics Online, a new correspondent ( the preverbal player to be named later)and discussions about a possible podcast I’m going to be sticking it out for a while longer. (Assuming things in the personal life don’t explode at least through  NYFF) It also helped that I had two people who I didn’t think were reading my stuff tell me they really liked what I was doing.

The reason I was going to close things down was two-fold:

The first things are becoming complicated in my personal life and I was going to have to change things up. I was going to have to do less new release coverage, something I’ve already started to do.  

 The second reason is that doing Unseen has become a chore for little return. While I do get to see lots of films I might not otherwise, the act of running the site is kind of painful.  From the drifting away of friends, to more people insisting that if I want to get access I must be on Rotten Tomatoes, to PR people shifting their gaze to influencers who only post to Twitter and Letterboxd and a ever deepening level of BS, I find I am screaming into the void much too often.

The plan now is to go through NYFF and then kind of coast until year’s end. I’m not going to kill myself, rather I’m going to regear the site and myself and set up the new columnist, the podcast and whatever. 

The truth is barring something happening I think we'll be around until at least Unseen's 15th Birthday

Keep reading because it’s probably going to be fun to watch as my head explodes.

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I have been watching a lot of the original Mission Impossible series and I think it’s super.

Yes there is a lot of repetition but there is a complexity to a lot of what they were doing that you don’t see much today or if you do it’s spread out over a whole season not just one episode.  There is also a complexity of plotting you don’t see in the movies.

I love the first season Steve Hill episodes. I love that there are guest agents and a real sense of danger kind of missing from the Peter Graves ones.

I have kind of fallen in love with many of the late Graves episodes. I love that Gregg Morris and Peter Lupus were really allowed to shine. I also love that the  stories broke the mold with them not just taking on the typical dictators. There was one where something happened to a friend of Graves which was a great change of pace.

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The way the next month looks to be breaking is coverage of Venice starting Friday afternoon, then  Toronto.  I’m hoping to get coverage of the Camden International Film Fest mid-month. Then Fantastic fest, The September Drive in Monsterama at the Riverside Drive in  before a deep dive into the New York Film Festival.  In between all of that some new releases.

I also am working on two interviews one with a director whose work I love and one with an artist I have loved for decades.

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I finally saw THE FLASH.

Yea, well, it was something. I'm not sure why DC/Warner was high on it.  It's just okay. It's all fan service with mediocre effects. Did they actually think that giving everyone endless cameos instead of a solid plot was what people wanted? Worse you can feel the all the tinkering.

Frankly even without the controversy of Ezra Miller the film would have died at the box office because it's a messy film with crappy time travel story that allows you to cheat.

A miss

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