I teach Middle School and the majority of his books are for 5-6 grade. I believe these Fear Street ones skew older, but not R-rated older. More like PG-13, you’d think.
I liked the final 45 minutes of the last movie, which essentially served as a culmination of all three. A better overall story would have helped.
Blood Red Sky - Netflix
It’s like a higher budget made-for-TV movie and not one of the better ones. A forgettable vampires-on-a-plane adventure and badly acted throughout.
Skip it.
Watched Some Came Running on TCM. Definitely one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s Dean Martin’s best performance. He actually plays a character. He’s not the “The King of Cool” you see in all his other movies.
Sinatra is very good. Shirley Maclaine earned a Oscar nomination.
It does start slowly but I found Sinatra’s character so layered. I want to see this movie again in a few months.
Luca, one of Disney’s recent offerings. A rather sweet film about a couple of “sea monster” boys who go stay in an Italian town in the…1950s?.. and pass as human in hopes of buying a Vespa and seeing the world. There’s a human friend with a grumpy fisherman dad (bearing a certain resemblance to Flint Lockwood’s dad, complete with scowl and mustache, but also with one arm missing, which some internet wags have claimed was to prevent him from having a backstory involving fighting for Mussolini), there’s a town bully, there’s a bicycle race, there’s intrafamily squabbling… nothing terribly surprising but, you know, it’s nice.
Note that there’s a brief end-of-credits scene which is mildly amusing - if you’re watching on Disney+ just fast forward to about 1.5 or 2 minutes before the end.
The Stylist
Wow, this was a nice surprise and a really great movie. A horror movie of sorts, but really a psychological character study. I enjoyed it a lot and was so impressed, I wrote the director to tell her how much I liked it. She wrote me back this morning. I’ll quote her:
Wish I’d seen your post before I watched it. Pretty good makeup, but the overdubbing (English/German) was bad and the plot had more holes than a neck full of fang marks.
Started watching Cats. Gave up after 15 minutes.
The issues with the unsettling CGI aside, Cats is a song and dance show, designed to showcase great singing and dancing. If you instead throw together a mixed bag of celebrities and the odd stage performer who has to hold back in order to avoid making the celebrities look bad, you end up removing everything that’s worthwhile about the show and replacing it with a lot of special effects and actually quite awful camerawork/editing to hide the performance shortcomings.
I didn’t last long enough to see if the plot was going to get any better, but I’m guessing…not.
The makeup was good, I agree. This was not a movie that would improve by listening to the German portions in German.
It was honestly just a total mess.
Check out The Stylist instead. Good example of lower-budget movie making.
Yeah, I was disappointed with this, especially in light of the Rotten Tomatoes reviews. It seemed like just more of the same, only we had to watch Emily Blunt’s throbbing forehead vein for two hours. When a horror movie director needs to insert “jump” scenes, then it’s failing. Cillian Murphy did his best, but it wasn’t enough to rescue this. Honestly, I think they could have covered the ground by adding another half hour to the first movie.
There’s a Quiet Place III on the way in 2023 – oh joy, oh bliss.
I watched AQP (one) waiting for the bald father with glasses to step out of the mini-van and get attacked by the flying dino-birds that hunt by sound. I waited in vain because that scene is from The Silence with Stanley Tucci which came out the year after AQP but was completed the year before it!
What’s the matter, Pop? I’m-a confused.
Fast and the Furious 9
I binged the first eight of these films about two years ago and finally got a chance to see the newest one. It’s pretty terrible.
I wish we had 9 Riddick movies instead of 9 Fast and the Furious movies.
This is embarrassing and I am almost impressed Vin Diesel can pretend this is a serious film franchise. Still, it looks good and is competently made. I dare them to make Fast Ten(Your Seat-belts?) all about illegal street racing like the first movie.
No one would see that coming.
Ever since I saw Topkapi at the age of 12 I’ve loved a caper movie. The Vault, available on Netflix, isn’t the best of the bunch, but it’s pretty good for an evening’s entertainment. All the elements are there: the disparate crew brought together for a heist beyond their wildest dreams, the impossible odds and the seemingly impregnable bank vault. The acting is good, though Freddie Hightower is a bit bland. They could have done better in that role. There are obvious plot holes requiring a suspension of belief in any caper movie, and this one has them too, but they don’t spoil the fun. I’d give it a 3 out of 5.
I’ve not got Netflix (yeah, it’s getting rare to see that said), and this film tweaked my interested, but there appears to be two heist thriller films called The vault in recent times. this from 2021 and this from 2017, which one was it?
XOldiesJock said Freddie Hightower, so it must be the 2021 version.
We watched “Fiddler on the Roof” the other night. Very surprisingly, my wife had never seen it. I was reluctant, because the music is very earworm-y, but it’s been about 50 years since I last saw it, and it held up very well. I also saw it on Broadway with Herschel Bernardi in about 1968.
Yesterday I watched “Layer Cake” on Netflix with Daniel Craig. A fairly decent thug movie with some twists.
Black Widow
This is my first movie in the movie theater since Rise of Skywalker in December of 2019. It was kind of cool to be back. Mostly empty theater mid-day. My kids, my wife, and I have watched all 23(?) Marvel-universe movies over the past 6 weeks and I promised we could go see Black Widow in the theater after we did that.
It was not great, to be honest. I keep a ranking of all the Marvel movies that began with Iron Man and I would actually put this 20th out of 23.
It isn’t terrible just kind of boring and unfun. Most of the Marvel movies are both funny and engaging. Black Widow has never been very funny and her movie is pretty serious overall. I found it to be a bit of a slog and my wife’s first thought is that it needed 20 minutes edited out.
I liked it despite my negative review. It isn’t terrible, just overly serious and dull.
Still, nice to be back in the theater again. I will probably go see Spider-man No Way Home in December. Possibly Shangi-Chi in a month or so.
Yesterday, I saw Jungle Cruise and today I saw The Green Knight.
Jungle Cruise was fun enough, although I was hoping it would come together as well as the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I saw it in the biggest theater in the multiplex at a midafternoon showing, with only about a dozen people there. Kind of disappointing for the opening weekend, but they were showing it in multiple theaters.
There may have been more people at the matinee showing of The Green Knight, even though it’s a serious, arty film based on a 14th Century Arthurian poem (and not a superhero film, which is what I thought when I first heard a film by that title was being produced). It was good, although I didn’t understand some of it but reading the Wikipedia synopsis of the poem cleared up some of the confusion.
(I mention the number of people because I’m curious how soon we return to normalcy.)
Mandibles
Dumb and Dumber with a European sensibility and a dash of surrealism. Some laugh out loud scenes, but it doesn’t add up to much more than a shaggy dog story (or maybe a shaggy fly story).
Settlers
A dystopian science fiction film, set on a colonized Mars. Well cast and acted and the situations and choices made by the characters left me pondering for quite a while after it ended. It’s low budget, so those who can’t watch a movie about Mars that isn’t completely aligned with scientific knowledge of the planet are advised to stay away. But I enjoyed it and would recommend it.
Lorelei
A paroled felon tries to rebuild his life in his hometown while avoiding falling into his old ways. Not exactly the most novel movie plot we’ve ever seen, but the leads (Pablo Schreiber, Jena Malone) are really good and the supporting cast is winning. Plus, I like movies like this that don’t have any villains or heartless bureaucrats, with the drama coming from the lead characters struggles within themselves.
Same. It’s saved by the performances of its cast who bring their A game to a silly fantasy adventure, but it’s more like Jumanji than it is POTC. It’s a bit too frenetic, and a bit too flippant.
Yes. He does.
I just saw The Marksman.
What a stupid fucking film. Liam is shown as dumber than a box of rocks.
He has a showdown with three cartel members across the border, but does not take cover.
Then he find out the Kids mom has a backpack full of cash. He is badly in debt. Mom has said he can have it. Does he take it the bank and pay of his debts? Nope, he goes on a roadtrip with the kid.
Many spoilers ahead!!!
He keep the same truck. He uses he Credit card which they can track (although when he gets smart and doesn’t use it at a cheap motel, the cartel somehow magically tracks him there). The cartel is leaving a trail of bodies. But the police , even though his daughter is a Fed, can’t seem to track them- even though they also use the same SUV.
Then, the super stupid part. The kid says he don’t want the money. So, they burn it. Can’t use it to pay off debts, can’t buy a cheap car so they can’t be spotted, can’t hand it over to the kids cousin in Chicago so she can keep the kid fed, oh noes.
So he deliver the kid to Chicago, gets on a bus with his last change and apparently bleed out on the bus.
Now yeah, he kills the cartel lieutenant - but since the cartel is still around, they will track the kid down in Chicago and kill him and his cousin. Unless she just calls them and turns him over.
Stupid stupid stupid.
As regards The Grey. Not only that, but how wolves act. They do not, NOT hunt humans.
Right.