Stowaway – A bit overrated but a semi-fun watch. Anna Kendrick is not at all believable in her role.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines – Best animated movie I’ve seen in recent memory.
My Octopus Teacher – If you are not moved by this you have a heart of iron ore and I don’t want to know you.
The Sound of Metal – Loved it. Hits all the right notes.
The Godfather, Part II – I was due for a re-watch of my second-favorite movie of all time. Guess what my first-favorite is.
Nomadland – I had an unusual reaction to this movie. It seems good in retrospect, but during the watch I wasn’t so sure. I am still processing this one. I’ve only seen one other Best Picture nominee (see above), and it was better than Nomadland (which won).
TCM featured Walter Matthau, Friday night (May 15).
1.Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. I had never seen it before. It’s a really good movie. Matthau did a nice job as a NY Subway Transit Cop.
2.The Fortune Cookie. Matthau and Jack Lemmon’s first movie together. It was OK. I nodded off in the middle. Woke up and saw the final 10 minutes. Matthau plays a sleezy lawyer that tries to get a injury settlement for his brother in law (Lemmon).
3. Hopscotch. My favorite Matthau film. I’ve seen it several times. Stayed up to 1 AM to see it again last night.
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) I finally finished watching recently. I don’t know if I could have watched it all the way through in one sitting or not because I just did not find the tone as amusing as I think it was supposed to be. There are some good moments, and some good characters, but the overall feeling was a bit underwhelming. And that was true of the final mêlée too.
Also, as a comic books reader, having read the Birds of Prey series, it really did do disservice to most of the characters. The portrayal of Black Canary was OK and somewhat in keeping with the character that at one point (and in some iterations) does become a singer. The Huntress had the same backstory and other than giving her a really uncharacteristic personality at the end, was mostly the same as the comic version. But Cassandra Cain did not keep any of her traits from the comics and should have just been introduced with another name.
I might have enjoyed it more if I was not a fan of the comic, though like I said it had its moments.
I sat through Born On The Forth Of July. Very underwhelming. And Jesus, could that stand some serious editing. The opening credits seemed to run for 15 minutes!
Not really all that much of a story, and they sure dragged it out. Coulda wrapped that up in an hour and a half. Ending was just kind of Blah. Don’t know how that won any awards.
Not a horror movie, but a documentary about a few people who go “all out” for Halloween, spending thousands of dollars and many man hours to make their homes super scary. This movie was on my viewing-queue for a long time, but it was hard to find.
It streams free-with-ads on Tubi and I’m glad I had a chance to see it.
Gets into what it is like to be one of those people who go all out for Halloween and how it affects their lives and their family-life.
Worth your time and free of charge, no account even needed to be created.
Saw Alien 3 for the first time. I think Alien is one of the best movies ever made. This one, directed by David Fincher, was actually pretty good. More of the old-school horror feel, memorable characters, and of course, Ripley. Her saga came to a fitting end, I think.
The Woman in the Window is carried by Amy Adams’ intense performance, but even a talented and versatile actress like her can’t save it from a weak plot. She plays an agoraphobic with a dark past who witnesses a murder across the street, but no one believes her. The police detectives are incredibly stupid, and given the clues, the audience can pretty much figure out who-killed-who early on. And the parallels to Hitchcock are laid on a little too heavily. Sorry Amy.
Greyhound (AppleTV) Tom Hanks is captain of a WWII destroyer, escorting a merchant convoy through German U-Boats.
Imagine that they took a standard war movie and cut out all the character development and personal interaction, and you’re left with nothing but action sequences. That’s Greyhound. I am not exaggerating: the dialog is 90% “Target bearing 800 yards hard right rudder to 061” stuff.
It felt like someone watched the movie Battleship, with the aliens and stupid over-the-top action, came out of it and said “That’s not how I’d make a Battleship movie” and proceeded to make Greyhound. And if that person was Tom Hanks (who wrote it).
So I finished watching this. There was some amusing stuff at the end (particularly the eventual fate of the main villain) but on the whole, if you’re interested at all just watch the first 20 or so minutes until the two main characters meet, and then move on to something else.
Towelhead (2007, written and directed by Alan Ball)
Summer Bishil (probably best known for her role on The Magicians) was outstanding as 13-year old Jasira Masoun, a young girl struggling with her emerging sexuality while saddled with horrible, narcissistic parents, bigoted classmates who resent her Arab American background and becoming a sexual target of both an overzealous classmate and an adult neighbor who grooms and eventually sexually assaults her. Jasira impressively overcomes all of this turmoil, survives and grows with the help of a young neighboring couple who befriends her. Excellent film and very powerful. Also stars Aaron Eckhart, Toni Collette, Maria Bello and Peter Macdissi.
Saw The Fiend Without a Face on Svengoolie on MeTV. I’d seen parts of the film (especially the stop-motion scenes at the end) before, and was familiar with the plot (it was a favorite in Famous Monsters of Filmland back in the 1960s), but this is the first time I’ve seen most of the film in one shot. Typical 1950s monster flick. The titular “Fiends”, like the Krel monster i Forbidden Planet, were supposed to always be invisible, but they decioded to make them visible with pricey animation at the end (again, like the Krel monster), and I think it saved the flick.The Fiends (there’s more than one) look like disembodied brains with attached spinal columns and antennae. They move by “inching” along on their spinal columns like inchworms, or by leaping. They look surprisingly easy to kill – all you have to do is shoot them or hit them and the cerebella bleed viscous goo, but people seem to ignore the fireplace pokers and other blunt instruments at hand and spend too much time cowering.
The end comes when The Hero decides to dynamite the control room at the local Air Force base Nuclear Power Plant (at which the Fiends have already destroyed the cadmium control rods). In the 1950s this might look like a good solution, but, post-Chernobyl, the prospect of a plague of strangling animated brains looks a lot more palatable than a nuclear meltdown. Nevertheless, our hero sets off the explosion (despite the heroic attempt by one bludgeoned Brain to try to put out the fuse. If this story was being told from the point of view of the Brains, this would be a tragedy), and all the Brains die and melt into nothingness (which is a relief, since now no one has to pay the dry cleaning costs to scrub all that Brain Juice out of the furniture) and there are apparently no ill effects from the atomic power plant. So everyone can make lame jokes about Our Hero making out with the Mad Professor’s secretary.
Definitely worth an MST3K-style snide remark-fest.
Crimson Peak (2015 — on Netflix) directed by Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hell Boy). This is a gothic horror film, mostly filmed on one of Del Toro’s signature creepy sets, an extremely decayed haunted mansion. The big name stars are Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain.
Stylistically this is good, with nods to Hitchcock, 1960’s Hammer films, The Shining, and probably many things I missed. The spooky gothic elements are completely over the top, but the director plays it straight-faced.
However, the plotting and pacing are just a mess. Subplots come and go without consequence, there are big reveals that don’t change anything. On Rotten Tomatoes some reviewers just loved it, but overall it rated 74% Fresh, which seems about right. If Pan’s Labyrinth was an A this is a B-.
Tried watching The Wild Geese (1978) on Prime, mostly because it starred Richard Burton. Aging mercenaries reunite for one last mission — rescuing a legendary black political reformer from a compound in Africa.
It start okay and went sour fast. Oddly, the action scenes were the worse thing about the film. Soldiers walking directly into the protagonists’ machine gun fire. Mercenaries sitting in an exposed truck, getting strafed multiply times instead of taking cover.
My Amazon Prime account account has been reminding me to finish watching it for the past 10 days.
