Being a virtual shut-in, and very bored with little to do, I sit through a lot of utter crap. I may leave it on and surf the net and use it as background noise. I rarely find something so bad that I simply shut it off and just listen to music instead.
Pandorum just made the list. Got disinterested in about 5 minutes, and just gave the fuck up after about a half-hour. What an unwatchable piece of shit this movie is. Avoid like Covid!
Annette - streams on Prime
Gist: Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard have a baby marionette daughter named Annette that learns to sing. It’s a musical.
Can you believe they made a movie like Annette? I have absolutely no idea how to describe this movie other than to tell you that it is a musical about a man and a woman who are both entertainers. They have a baby…which is a marionette doll for reasons never stated. That doll eventually sings.
This is an absolutely insane movie and in a very strange way, I almost kind of loved it. It was not a great movie, but it makes a real impact. Singing throughout, almost none of the diaogue is spoken. There are no massive numbers like you might see in Moulin Rouge or Les Miserables, just singing throughout.
In terms of it being a musical, it’s not great. Not a single song really stood out to me as a great one and that is very much to the detriment to the movie. Great music can really help improve a movie with a weak story. This movie ended up being endlessly watchable(it’s SO weird!), but it doesn’t work very well as a musical. It’s OK.
I blame no one for making this movie and no one for agreeing to be in it. I mean…it’s something different. They were trying something. This is not a lazy or churned out movie, it’s just kind of very bold…set of successes and failures.
I actually would recommend it to everyone. You kind of have to see this movie if you have any interest in movies. It’s not a train wreck, but it is something you can not look away from.
Check it out!!
Watched Sinbad The Sailor (1947)
Awesome movie. Really fun and stands the test of time. The production values were top drawer. I enjoyed the story-telling, the comedy, the stunts, the costumes, vibrant sets and of course excellent performances by all involved.
Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation. I enjoyed the heck out of this documentary and would describe it as a well-edited and respectful retelling of the legendary festival. The images look so good that I thought some had been recreated until I noticed similar high-quality footage of people I recognized. In that sense, it looked very similar to Ron Howard’s Beatles documentary Eight Days a Week, which did a great job of cleaning up the footage and adding effects to make static images come to life (twisting plume of cigarette smoke superimposed onto a photo to make it look like video, etc.) There’s a wealth of behind-the-scenes information recounted by the festival’s organizers and participants, and I’ve read online that there’s a lot of previously unreleased footage and that some of it is of the performing acts. We’re shown only snippets of the performances, though, so it can be misleading insofar as the length and depth of the artists’ involvement. For example, Hendrix performed for two hours, but the documentary (as I recall) might give some the impression that all he did was play his version of the national anthem and that nearly everyone had left by the time he finished (nit-pick if you like, it’s just an example).
I recommend it highly for anyone who’s interested and would like to know the opinions of those who have seen it.
Yes, yes and yes! A terrific movie with a great cast and lots o’ quotable lines. If it isn’t perfect, man, it’s pretty damn close.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Well, it is not as good as In Bruges, but it did receive a lot of critical acclaim and I do think it deserved it. It’s a really great movie. I had actually seen it before, but could not remember most of it for the life of me.
In a way, I can see this movie having a much wider appeal than In Bruges. The brutal story of a justifiably furious mother while she tries to get the local police to find the man who raped and killed her daughter. All that, and it is still pretty funny in parts.
A really great movie and worth a watch for anyone. I think Martin McDonagh is one of my favorite movie directors. I know his next movie is with Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell again and I can’t wait for it to come out in 2022.
You have to put the spoiler tags on their own separate line. I fixed it for you.
Just replying here to note that this film is not on Amazon Prime. It’s one of their “Early Access” films that you have to pay extra to rent, it’s not actually part of their Prime service.
One of the best of 2021, though! Worth it! It’s a $7 rental.
The Boy Behind The Door
This movie serves as a great example of making a movie on a small budget and doing so without the whole thing looking cheap. Very effective use of a small cast and limited locations to make a really effective kidnapping thriller. Not totally a horror movie and I think the title is pretty misleading, but a well-made movie and a great effort from the relatively new directors.
It’s about a boy whose friend is kidnapped and his attempt to break into the house where his friend is kept and rescue him. Nicely done.
Rush on Netflix; dramatized biopic about the rivalry between race drivers Niki Lauda and Jack Hunt. It was okay.
Oh cool, that’s good to know! Maybe I will go for the rental. I watched both “The Empty Man” and “Gretel & Hansel” today because of your recommendations in this thread, I really enjoy those types of art horror films and was pleasantly surprised by both!
Have you seen The Witch? I will go out on a big fringe-view and say Gretel and Hansel was actually better even though they have very similar stories.
If you watch Censor, I’d love to talk about the last 30 minutes or so. It’s stimulated a lot of conversation online and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
The wife and I tried to watch Reminiscence on HBO Max and did not quite last 30 minutes. Just dreadfully cliche and boring, with the clunkiest exposition I’ve seen in a movie in a long, long time. And it seriously features a nearly identical re-shoot of Jessica Rabbit’s first appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with apparently no irony. Ugh - do not waste your time.
Oh yeah! “The Witch” was great. All those A24 horrors are excellent. “Midsommar” was my favorite film of 2019. “The Green Knight” (though not really a horror) is one I’d like to check out a second time. I went into that one completely blind and that was quite a trip. I had no idea what to expect, and I think even if I did I still wouldn’t have expected what it was! I’ve since read a bit about it and listened to some podcasts discussing it. Sounds like we have similar tastes in film.
I saw “The Night House” yesterday, I really think that is one you’d enjoy. Very eerie and unsettling, with some really excellent set design & cinematography that does not need to rely on jump scares in order to frighten.
Yup, agree with this. I saw this one Friday and was seriously disappointed. I really wanted to know more about the world they were in, I would totally watch a film about how the world rebuilt after the floods and what wars happened, but I did not care at all about Hugh Jackman mooning over a femme fatale. I got so sick of seeing his open-mouthed stare of confusion. I thought it actually started well, and the hard-boiled noir narration was straight out of Raymond Chandler, but the film just lost steam midway through and every time I thought it would become interesting again, it would turn back into a boring romance.
Gremlins and Gremlins 2: the New Batch. I had forgotten and fun and weird those movies are.
Bill and Ted face the music It may just be where I am in my head right now, but the ending actually brought tears of joy to my eyes.
I agree. I found it to be more enjoyable than any other film I’ve seen in the past couple years. The science makes no sense, but then anything that assumes that faster-than-light travel or time travel is possible essentially tosses out much of present-day science.