This Danelectro Fab Fuzz cost me 30 quid new, and is the best fuzz I've ever played. I used to have an Electro-Harmonix Black Russian Big Muff which cost about 200 and the Danelectro knocks spots off it

Elizabeth Picciuto@epicciuto.bsky.social · 2d ago

What is your favorite example of when the cheap version of a product is legit better than the expensive one?

Brief thoughts upon watching The Apartment (again) boxd.it/fDDfGZ

A ★★★★★ review of The Apartment (1960)

*SPOILERS* “You hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you.” The greatest of all Wilder’s great films: a story of becoming a mensch, and of sacrificing oneself – beyond all reason – for love. To do that, producer-director Wilder (co-writing with I. A. L. Diamond) takes all manner of outrageous gambles. Who else would dare hand us a hero who spends the first act with a head cold, social climbing at work, or let us overhear his love interest vomiting up her sleeping pills? It is an astonishingly romantic, devastatingly moving movie, possible because only great writers realise

boxd.it

I’ve just noticed that A TAXI DRIVER (택시운전사, Jang Hoon 2017) is on Tubi here in the UK - a really do strongly recommend this if you’ve haven’t had a chance to see it yet. Based on true events this stars the *always* great Song Kang-ho as a taxi driver who thinks he’s hit payday…

"...Catherine Sloper's transformation is almost as impressive as Charlotte Vale's and makes one want to stand and cheer de Havilland, but it's underpinned by Richardson's deliberately unshowy turn..." My brief notes on THE HEIRESS on Letterboxd... #FilmSky boxd.it/fCjjtB

A ★★★★½ review of The Heiress (1949)

Catherine Sloper: "Oh, Father, don't you think he is the most beautiful man you've ever seen?" Austin Sloper: "Well, he's very good-looking, my dear. Of course, you wouldn't let a consideration like t...

boxd.it

Some Came Running (1958). I had high hopes for this first watch, and the opening sequence grabbed me by the neck: a mystery man on a Greyhound bus, going somewhere, big bright yellow Metrocolor titles, and an absolute juggernaut of an Elmer Bernstein score. That first two minutes is the business

The Outfit is a flinty, no-nonsense, and efficient action thriller from 1973. It is about a variety of tough characters committing crimes, played by steely eyed actors showing little emotion. Thus, a great crime film from the 1970s. Directed by John Flynn from the Richard Stark Parker novel.

Wilson@wilsonjettone.bsky.social · 4d ago

Today's film

"I guess owning a house and a deep freeze is not the whole answer." No Down Payment (1957). An earnest, self-conscious dismantling of post-war American aspirations, set in a new suburbia fit for heroes (as long as they're white and don't get above themselves)

VIOLENT SATURDAY (Richard Fleischer, 1955). Enjoyed this engaging film which hovers between heist movie and melodrama without going full tilt on either. Virginia Leith shines in a small role, wiping the floor with pretty much every other actor on screen here. (1/2) #FilmSky

JANE EYRE (Robert Stevenson, 1943). Enjoyed this early adaptation, which leans into the novel’s Gothic sensibilities through George Barnes’ atmospheric cinematography & Bernard Herrmann’s lively score. Orson Welles gives a big performance here, but he suits the Rochester role. (1/2) #FilmSky

I really love this song. I've been humming it on and off since 1983, and it has been stuck in my head all week for some reason. Lovely drum groove too. It'd be a perfect record if it wasn't for that bloody mouth organ www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6KY...

Elton John - I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues

YouTube video by EltonJohnVEVO

youtube.com

letterboxd.com/sbjork/film/...

A review of Escape to Athena (1979)

Thanks in no small part to Kurt Russell, the reputation director George Pan Cosmatos has suffered a bit over the last couple of decades. Granted, Cosmatos was a boisterous and even somewhat abrasive p...

letterboxd.com

Pyeoneee, how I love ya, how I love ya, my dear old pyeonee

Marvellous film. A Gothic horror, with romantic touches. It works better in the lineage of Universal Monsters, than a decadent literary adaptation. A Jekyll and Hyde, with one of them as a gruesomely Technicolor picture that haunts the film.

Wilson@wilsonjettone.bsky.social · 2w ago

This morning's film

"About your marriage; you have my condolences." Written on the Wind (1956). From the opening scene with Robert Stack guzzling from a bottle of scotch as he tears along in his sports car, you know you're in for a ride. This isn't a fun film though. Everything is sick here, everyone is dirty

I liked The Divorcee. I'm not sure it's great, but what a pre-code plot: when a woman (Norma Shearer) discovers that her husband (the awful Chester Morris) has been unfaithful, she decides to pay him back in kind. At times the film reminded me of The Great Gatsby with its parties and car crash.

Wilson@wilsonjettone.bsky.social · 2w ago

Tonight's film (You can watch a lot of films in a day if they are all less than 80 mins)

"GOD WAS WRONG!" Bigger Than Life (1956). This rings all kinds of bells today. James Mason's deranged rants about getting back to "real fundamentals" and how America is "breeding a race of moral midgets" would make him a fortune as a rage-baiting influencer on X

My uncle told me a story about a particularly charismatic Catholic priest who ministered to Belfast dockworkers in the early 20C. Apparently 1 time he got them all so worked up that when he asked "do you reject Satan and all his works?" one of them yelled back "yeah, fuck the devil he's a bastard!"

Vituperative Erb@vituperativeerb.bsky.social · 2w ago

I think @patrickwyman.bsky.social had the story of an enthusiastic-but-somewhat-confused Frankish king hearing the story of the Crucifixion at his baptism and telling the priest “if me and my Franks had been there it wouldn’t have gone down like that!”

What keeps you grounded? For me, it's having to stop and slow my clicktrack down by 10bpm

Hope (2026). The first hour of this is pure balls-out monster movie goodness, which can be summarised thus: tension, tension, bang! tension, bang! tension, chase, bang! tension, tension, chase, chase, bang! Thrills up and down your body. No concession at all to any boring old shit like backstory

Paul C. Dobbs@steadytiger.bsky.social · 2w ago

At the pictures for this

Thoroughly enjoyed MAD LOVE this evening - Karl Freund’s 1935 tale of a pianist who loses his hands in an accident and doesn’t realise they’ve been replaced with those of a murderous knife-thrower. These things happen I guess…

At the pictures for this

What in the absolute hell was that ending? The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry powers along tremendously for 78 minutes and then they throw the whole film into the sea for the finale! However, I can't deny how great most of the film is.

Wilson@wilsonjettone.bsky.social · 2w ago

Tonight's film

Gonna start wearing my watch over the cuff of my shirt like Yul Brynner

A Kiss Before Dying (1956). It's quite something seeing the young Robert Wagner here. Warren Beatty levels of beauty and self-possession. He makes a great sociopath. This is a mostly decent adaptation of a uniquely unfilmable book. It's just not possible to render that stunning twist in this medium

ROME EXPRESS (Walter Forde, 1932). All aboard! This delightful, tightly plotted train film feels like a stylistic dry run for THE LADY VANISHES (1938) as a variety of colourful characters travel from Paris to Rome on the titular Express. A stolen painting drives the plot here, >> (1/2) #FilmSky

I've just been the shops but before that I hadn't been out the house for six days. Not a bad innings

- Have you been thinking about me? - Have I been breathing? Ray Milland has to say that with a straight face. This film takes a sordid true story and twists it into a silly gloopy romance. Joan Collins is good as the real-life Evelyn Nesbit, but no one could make this character work as it's written

First watch: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962). Another one from the ‘Department of John Ford Films I Should Have Seen’ and a strong contender for my favourite of his: at once a deconstruction of the mythic West and an elegy to its passing. 1/

"If she were mine, I'd beat her." Queen Bee (1955). Mousey poor relation turns up at a grand old white-pillared Southern mansion, gets put in a bed so high you need steps to get up in it. Something tells you she might be out of her depth here

In 1961 "The Pit and the Pendulum" Director Roger Corman makes use of an iris shot three times, each time irising-in on a character’s eyes. The first two lead into flashbacks, and are both in this video . . . the third would be an INSANE spoiler, so we have left that off.