Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mask (1961)!

Theme: Sweating Bullets - Megadeth

Some spoilers, idk

>tfw no creepy wall of masks
(Bitches love creepy wall of maskss.)

Not to be confused on pain of death with 1994's Jim Carrey slapstick vehicle of the same name, 1961's The Mask nonetheless has exactly the same premise, only played for spoops instead of laughs, with a success rate of about 50/50. Noone whatsoever stars as Dr Alan Somethingorother, who is the worst psychiatrist in any movie I've seen, since he blows off his clearly highly agitated patient's confession of homicide induced by The Mask (1961). Later, Alan regrets this trivial oversight, wishing to Detective Chad that he could have helped aforementioned patient, who went on to kys himself himself. Detective Chad's response to this is "well, goodbye", which made me kek & jej, because his delivery is so blunt he might as well have said "I really don't give a shit".

Buddy, do you know how many cases I'm pursuing?*
*One.

Sadly for Dr Alan, his troubles are just beginning, as his deceased patient used his last moments on Earth to troll the fuck out of said doctor by mailing him The Mask (1961) and double dog daring him to put it on. Note that, like Freddy's Dead, this movie was originally released in 3D and the audience (at least according to the piece-to-camera that opens the flick) were issued 3D glasses in the form of masks, which they are helpfully cued to put on at crucial intervals by the repeated voiceover "do it, pussy...pussy...pussy...".

BITCHASS

The surreal vision sequences when somebody puts on The Mask (1961) are by far the highlight of the movie, because Alan's descent into Mr Hydery is as comically ineffectual as that guy from Night of the Hunter who spent that movie failing to catch two small children, then getting his ass kicked by 300-y/o Lillian Gish in a rocking chair.

WOMP WOMP

But for Alan, as with your subpar Christmas gifts, it's the thought that counts, and what he takes from the mask-induced visions is the notion that he ought to strangle someone, preferably his hot secretary.

Dr Alan's least favourite genre of person: hot babes who are nice to him.

I propose, however, to ignore the sillier aspects of this overlooked kinographite, on the considerable strength of its ridiculously metal visuals alone. From the Mesoamerican mosaic of the titular facewear to the Toxic Avenger looking boatman to the psychiatrist's couch becoming the sacrificial altar, the surreal imagery, editing and smoke-machine-abusing mise-en-scène make all your favourite movies look like the risible SHIT they are. So for the first time since the first week of covid, mask up!

Dank KNHOs only on this b╠o¶.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Apocalypto!

The blue hippies from Avatar meet real Indigenous Peoples (1502, colourised).

Apocalypto peaks so hard in the cast-of-thousands city sequence that the third act, consisting of a few guys chasing one another around a forest, feels more like an extended cooldown than an escalating climax. I know we're supposed to care that our hero gets back in time to save his family from drowning, but the whole time I just wanted to get back to the city, because it's the one time on film this criminally underused aesthetic has been let loose in its Mesoamerican maximalist glory. A fun game to play is to pause at any point during the crowd scenes and see what the incidental extras are wearing, and make reaction images of them:

>mrw ____

Mayan cities tended to rise and fall somewhat cyclically due to location, resources and their eventual exhaustion. A city might form around a subterranean cenote, thrive for a time, and then collapse from overlogging and desiccation of the soil. So much for the cliché of pre-industrial peoples living in harmony with the natural world (though, to be fair, the Mayans only ruined one city-sized area at a time. Australia was covered in lush rainforest until the aboriginal inhabitants repeatedly burned the entire thing to the ground to smoke out game, meaning the worst ecological catastrophe of all time was caused by a people hippies are now obligated to worship).

Whoa, for real? Jamie, pull that up. You're blowing my mind right now.

NPCs deplore this kinograph for portraying the Mayan civilisation as cruel, but in truth it doesn't show nearly the worst of it (children were ritually drowned in the cenote, for starters), and it's not as though The Northman or Kurosawa's epics whitewash the history of their respective settings. Personally, I want to see more Mesoamerikino that's as uncucked about showing both the aesthetic splendour and the insanely violent practices of pre-conquest Mexico. The rise of the Aztecs from Chichimec nomads kicked out of every place they settled to vassals of the Tepanecs to a triumphant regional hegemon under the speakership of Itzcoatl would be the perfect subject matter for an epic to end all epics. For this reason alone, infantilising noble-savage cod historiography must die.