Mastodawn

Liminal salutations! This week's #FridayMovie falls in the nebulous, ambiguous, polyvalent days between christmas and new year's. These are days defined by a diffuse blend of indeterminacy and a definite sense that things are definitely coming to an end. Thus, I present to you, four ways to end all years

On the beach (1959)

15.8%

The day the earth caught fire (1961)

15.8%

Fail safe (1964)

26.3%

Silent running (1972)

42.1%

Poll ended at Dec 26 at 3:49pm.

Prefigured futurities! Seeing how this is the first #FridayMovie poll of the year, we will follow tradition and vote for which mood will set the tone for the months to come. Therefore I present to you four mood pieces, each radically yet subtly distinct

All that heaven allows (1955)

27.3%

The 400 blows (1959)

45.5%

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, (1975)

0%

5 centimeters per second (2007)

27.3%

Poll ended at Jan 2 at 4:36pm.

Waxed poetics! As this year is already over the moon in all categories, metaphorically speaking, I reckon this week's #FridayMovie poll should be all about our beloved lunar orb. And so, I present to you, these stellar options, which may or may not include hints of extraplanetary skullduggery

Capricorn one (1977)

44.4%

Moonstruck (1987)

44.4%

Interstellar (2014)

11.1%

Fly me to the moon (2024)

0%

Poll ended at Jan 9 at 3:52pm.

Stellar stochastics! Last week's poll was disturbed by the dual interference of network difficulties (it was literally DNS), sunspots (probably not DNS), and the fact that the result was a tie. Thus, for this week's #FridayMovie poll, we will redo the last one, albeit slightly remixed. Behold! The sky is full of stars!

Capricorn one (1977)

20%

Moonstruck (1987)

50%

Interstella 5555 (2003)

30%

Poll ended at Jan 16 at 4:19pm.

Malleable marylebones! We are approaching the cool zone and somehow someone has already given us a residence permit. As such, we have all been given a (1) vote in this week's #FridayMovie poll. Choose, and shiver!

Westworld (1973)

23.1%

Dark star (1974)

38.5%

The taking of Pelham 123 (1974)

30.8%

Cloud (2024)

7.7%

Poll ended at Jan 23 at 4:38pm.

Fabulous phantasms! This week we take a detour on the #FridayMovie poll into the domain of prominent and unsubdued fashion icons of the recent past, with these four unparallelizable options:

Barbarella (1968)

12.5%

Zardoz (1974)

45.8%

Tank girl (1995)

25%

Spice world (1997)

16.7%

Poll ended at Jan 30 at 3:51pm.

Mycelial musicality! We continue our fashionable #FridayMovie detour by veering into the uncharted lands of 30s musicals. Choose which manner of centennial earworm will live on in me, and do it with impeccably choreographed style

42nd street (1933)

22.2%

The gay divorcee (1934)

55.6%

Top hat (1935)

11.1%

Show boat (1936)

11.1%

Poll ended at Feb 6 at 3:56pm.

Sensorious sentimentalists! We fought the law, and it is not altogether unfair to say that the law won, albeit barely. The winner of this week's #FridayMovie poll, however, is fair and just and emotionally well-regulated indeed

Rebel without a cause (1955)

0%

12 angry men (1957)

38.5%

Butch Cassidy and the sundance kid (1969)

30.8%

Rebels of the neon god (1992)

30.8%

Poll ended at Feb 13 at 4:03pm.

A fun part about this being a once a week thing is that each entry on the list happened at a specific time, and so when I read it I go
oh yeah, that movie was that week, when such and such happened

History truly is a process in the present
https://longersky.com/2025/01/16/a-semi-randomized-list-of-movies-to-maybe-watch-sometime/

A semi-randomized list of movies to maybe watch sometime

A while back I started a thread on Mastodon, wherein I every week post a poll where four movie titles duke it out. I then watch the winner under ritualistic and ceremonial forms on friday evenings.…

More longer friend see that sky?

Frolicking fromages! In order to make an omelet, you have to crack some eggs. And in order to decide the outcome of the #FridayMovie poll - the highest-stake election of any week - you have to vote for at least one of these potentially French titles. Bon mot!

Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962)

46.7%

Le samouraï (1967)

53.3%

Vive l'amour (1994)

0%

La vie en rose (2007)

0%

Poll ended at Feb 20 at 4:08pm.

Canonical classicists! This week's #FridayMovie poll hones in on a particular time, exactly 87 years ago, for arbitrary reasons. Your vote, however, is not arbitrary, and so I ask you to choose with random precision

The cat and the canary (1939)

20%

Dark victory (1939)

50%

Gone with the wind (1939)

20%

The wizard of Oz (1939)

10%

Poll ended at Feb 27 at 4:09pm.

Citizens of the universe! This week's #FridayMovie poll presents you with these four spectacular space extravaganzas, specifically selected to sound spuriously and speculatively scientific!

Airplane! (1980)

22.2%

The adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984)

36.1%

Repo man (1984)

13.9%

Galaxy quest (1999)

27.8%

Poll ended at Mar 6 at 4:09pm.

and the winner
of the most voted on poll since this here thread began
is
The adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th dimension

I'm going in

I do love me an expositionary text crawl

We have a go for liftoff

"Cap'n, did he just get out of the car on fire, paint a tunnel onto the mountain, get back into the car, and speed right on through the mountain, collapsing the tunnel behind him?"
"Pretty much, yeah"

Modern science is usually conceived of as taking place in clean, sterile laboratories, far away from the experience of common folks. In the 30s, however, you could set up you experimental interdimensional hypercar superlaser skunkworks in any affordable abandoned warehouse in the less reputable industrial district you wanted, and/or could afford on a minimum wage

Also, minimum wages were way higher back then, due to decades of inflation. You could afford to do madcap science on a single wage

Fun fact: in the times before computers and calculators, there used to be books that were nothing but tables and tables of trigonometry. If you needed to do a certain calculation, but didn't quite have the time to go through all the motions, you could look up the correct number and go from there

The oversized spineless book depicted here is not too far off from what such publications used to look like

We were promised a science fiction future, and this is what we got

I love how this movie has gone from 1) plausible-deniability area 51, to 2) a mental asylum of some description, to 3) New Jersey

'tis a good thing we got that initial text crawl, it might've been confusing otherwise

I feel we have forgotten this important message in these trying times

One of the enduring aims of this thread is that readers will somehow be left with less context about the movie than before they read it, and so I present to you

tfw you're in a Mood but people somehow show up anyway wanting to be helpful

moments later

logging on

the mystery has been revealed

Mister Freeman, come with me if you want to live

this movie came out seven years before Terminator 2
a feller could be forgiven for thinking that some Influences might have occurred (John Connor, yoyo/cyberdyne, etc

also: logging on

person: can you explain the story of this movie real quick?
me: no

and then the cybervoodoos from Neuromancer show up
don't worry about it, it makes more sense here than in Neuromancer

her: I picked up a nice vintage machine at the flea market. it even came with the manual!
the vintage machine:

it worries me that this is more paperwork than were issued before recent events commenced

still preferable to using a LLM, tbh

you ever wake up one morning with a cinematic vision so clear you spend every waking moment of the next seven months making it a reality?

contractor: I built the big mysterious alien dimensional travel device, sprawling and ominous and potentially costing enough to finance several smaller scenes in a lesser movie, just as you asked
producer: perfect

it is very funny to me that this actor later went on to play the exactly same role in the 3rd rock from the sun

Gratuitous Jeff Goldblum in the final few minutes of the movie?
Gratuitous Jeff Goldblum in the final few minutes of the movie

and so we reach the end of the movie, and let me tell you
I am watching out for the next adventure of Buckaroo Banzai in real time

Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 👽Mar 6

@sargoth There is a novel by the writer, EM Rauch:
Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, et al: A Compendium of Evils (2021)

And there's a bunch of comics:
https://moonstonebooks.com/ols/search?keywords=buckaroo&sortOption=descend_by_match

The World Crime League movie seems unlikely but hey, Peter Weller's still alive…
#buckarooBanzai

@mdhughes hope springs eternal