Return of the Living Dead
This is a great movie and I had never seen it. I loved almost all of it. It was a great mix of comedy and zombie movie. The entire scene where they try to hold down and kill a zombie is hilarious “It worked in the movie!” is a great line once they realize these zombies don’t die when you stab their brain.
A lot of fun and honestly a all around great movie.
The Man Who Would Be King
Very good.
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women
Wanted to see if this was as bad as I remembered. It was. Cut-and-paste job cribbed from Russian SF film with blond Venusian women sub-plot added in. 80 looooooong minutes. Next up: Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet – same Russian film with different sub-plot inserted (featuring Basil Rathbone 
). Review will follow.
Nightcrawler
Ridiculous, in all form and manner. One of the stupidest movies I’ve watched recently, and that is saying a whole fucking lot.
I looked it up online about half-way through to see what the fuck this was. A dark comedy? A … I dunno. It got lots of aclaim. Some people only got taste on the end of their… well, nevermind.
This movie was stupid and sucked golfballs thru PVC pipe.
Watched the 2017 film Mom and Dad on UK TV. Quite a few reviews were positive about this comedy horror starring Nicolas Cage but I didn’t like it. Didn’t laugh, wasn’t scared and wasn’t entertained.
Basic plot is parents inexplicably start killing their children. This idea lends itself to various potential films, many of which are touched upon, but the result was far too uneven.
It could be straight up horror and the scene where a woman gives birth before, since she is now a mother, changes to wanting to kill the new born could have been iconically chilling.
It could have gone for over the top splatter violence playing for outrageous laughs but didn’t. Only good joke was when the murderous father (Cage) was interrupted in his killing by… The arrival of Grandfather! Made sense within the plot.
It touched on satire and themes of parents having to give up their dreams and sacrifice their future for their children but this was woefully underdeveloped.
The final third of the film simply got bogged down in a tedious long drawn out fight between parents and kids in a house. All sorts of improvised weapons landed injuries which briefly hurt… before battle resumed. It was at the level of watching Home Alone.
I suspect an all out Japanese (I’m thinking Battle Royale) or Korean version would have been so much better. Or an uninhibited early Peter Jackson goretastic version. Or for full serious horror a Cronenberg or even Kubrick version.
But this was just a tonal mess for me. As said though, others seemed to like it.
TCMF-2L
Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet
Slightly less incoherent and ridiculous (and five minutes shorter) than … Prehistoric Women, but still not very good. Kinda weird seeing the exact scenes and hearing the exact dialog in two “distinct” films. Basil Rathbone is completely wasted. The sets were used for the follow-up, Queen of Blood, also with Rathbone (plus John Saxon) but if you think I’m sitting through that one, too, you got another think coming!
Dune: Part One
★★★½ out of ★★★★★
Gist: Gorgeous, well acted, but limited by being the lesser half of the story.
I’ve read Dune and my advice for anyone would be the same as I would give them with this movie. You have to get past the opening chunk to get to core story and once you did, it will reveal itself to be an amazing and effective story. The problem is, Dune takes a lot of setup and this movie suffers in its opening hour(yes, hour) to get throug that setup. I can see many viewers growing weary early in this movie and missing out on the final 90 minutes that are really great. It should be said that the second half of this story is almost entirely gripping and amazing and I hope that part of this movie gets made.
Well cast, beautifully shot, edited to about as tight as you can while staying true to the story, Dune is a great opening to a movie.
Question: Should you wait until the second half of this story is filmed and released? I actually kind of understand if you do. This movie is only 50% of what we should have and I wish they had filmed it in one long filming block. The truth is that as I write this, they have not yet even filmed anything from the second part of Dune and we are at least two years away from seeing that half IF it gets made.
I hope this cast and director get to make not only that movie, but Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, also very wonderful books. It’s a great adaptation of the first portion of a great work. The hardest work has been done, now it is onto the best stuff in the book.
Sounds like LOTR. one story broken into 3 parts, spread out over 3 years. It did OK. 
I think Fellowship of the Ring worked as a movie better than this first part of Dune does. They also filmed all of Lord of the Rings in one go so we knew each part was coming with one-year gaps. The second film in this movie has not filmed at all.
We just watched “The Forgotten Battle” Much of is is sub-titled but I didn’t find it much of a distraction. It chronicles the Battle of the Scheldt during WW II. I thought it was excellent. One of the best war movies in a long time.
I went to see the James Bond flick No Time to Die last night, my first visit to a movie theater in well over a year (not only directly because of COVID – indirectly, COVID lead to the closest theater to me being torn down. I had to drive farther to see an in-person movie)
The theater section I saw it in was about half full, but it was a tiny theater. The complex as a whole felt deserted – all the people were in the movie sections. till, with the reclining seats and the big screen and sound it was a much more satisfying experience than watching it at home. My wife Pepper Mill didn’t go “I’m not into Bondage,” she explained. And our daughter, MilliCal, wasn’t interested. I suspect she wonders why her liberal father wants to see such a Neanderthal flick.
It was very good, and satisfying to a Bond fan. There is a hint of unnecessary surrealism and coincidence to the whole Daniel Craig series, which I could do without. I prefer my outrageous stunts and spy flummery to be more straightforward. But this one hit all the right buttons for a fan of both the books and the movies. The classic Bond opening of the sight-through-the-rifled-gun-barrel (but without the blood), dialogue invoking On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (a constant through this film), including a musical lick taken from that film and a long shot of Bond and his woman in a car driving over an exotic European countryside. a sly reference to both Craig’s first outing in Casino Royale and For Your Eyes Only, followed by lots of wonderfully outrageous action, the Aston Martin with its gimmicks, the opening cedits in neo-Maurice Binder style, referencing both Dr. No and OHMSS, lots of references to prior films (including paintings of Judi Dench and Robert Brown as previous M’s). Bill Tanner showing up, and Jeffrey Wright again as Felix Leiter (for record-breaking third time). An invocation of Dr. Shatterhand’s Garden of Death from the novel (but not the movie) You Only Live Twice. Much more that I won’t speak of so that I don’t give away too much.
It was a Revisitation of the Series Past. Lots of other franchises have done this – the Fantastic Four comic has done it more than once. The Bond films did it at least twice before – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service did it in both the opening credit montage and i the scene in Bond’s office, Die Another Day did it throughout the movie, with more “Easter egg” references to previous films than even this film has. They usually do it at a “changing of the Guard” moment – George Lazenby’s first Bond film (who knew it would also be his last?), Pierce Brosnan’s last Bond film. And we already know that this is Daniel Craig’s last outing – they’ve already said so. As with Brosnan’s leaving, it looks as if there will be a big change and maybe reboot coming. The last end credit said “James Bond Will Return”, but with a new Bond, and at least two actors said they won’t be returning. It’ll be interesting to see what they do next.
Bond is, as the movies themselves said a few films ago, a dinosaur. He was a Cold War creature and a manifestation of Britain’s neuroses in a post-colonial world. His foes are transparently a colonialist’s nightmares. His attitude and actions toward women was long sexist and condescending and wish-fulfilling. His legendary love of hard drink and tobacco is out-of-step with the times. It was hilarious when they first put up a disclaimer about not promoting tobacco use in the end credits during the Brosnan era. It’s standard practice now.
But poeople still go to see them. The action and stunts still thrill, even if you don’t like the subtext. Bond has kept up with his imitators, even the Indiana Joneses and the Kingsmen and Jason Bourne s and Ethan Hunts. New credible threats keep appearing. There’s no shortage of potential conflicts. the exotic music and scenery and the Fleming Sweep never go out of style.
All they have to do is keep re-inventing Bond to keep him somehow relevant and a commentary on current times.
It’s ironic, because Fleming chose the name “James Bond” precisely because it was so bland (He got it from the cover of a book on Jamaican birds) He envisioned Bond as a featureless and characterless nobody who was borne along by his adventures, rather the way Kubrick treated all the humans in 2001. But, of course, he didn’t stay that way. even the first 1954 TV broadcast of Casino Royale gave him character and quirks – you nee that for people to be attracted to the character in something as short as a TV show, or even an almost 3-hour movie (NTTD is the longest Bond film ever made). Today we know his quirks , his likes and dislikes, too well. His not-bland character has flash and style and tosses off one-liners – something the book version didn’t do. Bond stayed in luxury hotels and lived high because he saw no point in saving his money in such a dangerous career – he expected to, as the saying goes, “Live Fast, Die Young, and Leave a Good-Looking Corpse”. But the movie Bond has outlasted most of his creators and several of his portrayers. He’s a rotten role model (Ian Fleming supposedly started living a Bondian life of smoking and drinking and indulgence, and it caught up with him pretty quick – he died of heart disease at 56), but he’s a great symbol to live a vicarious existence through. Not only do the movies keep coming, but so do the novels. Anthony Horowitz, who has already written two official Bond novels, has another coming out next year.
Sinister
I thought this movie would be at the very least well made and hopefully kind of scary. Nope, not really. I love the movie Doctor Strange from the same director, but this horror movie is just kind of lame and somewhat boring. Ethan Hawke tries like crazy to make this material more interesting, but it can not be done.
Very little moments here or there, but I’d recommend skipping this one.
Sorcerer - Blu-ray
Wow, what a movie. I actually do not think the movie hits its true greatness until the halfway point, when our leads are tasked with transporting highly volatile explosives over 200 miles using trucks…over bumpy terrain. But once we get to this section of the movie, it is just a completely excellent movie and there are some sequences in this movie that are as gripping as almost any I’ve seen.
At one point in this movie, they must drive a large truck(again, carrying unstable explosives) across a crappy, worn down wooden bridge that goes across a river. It’s such an incredible and tense scene, I looked up how they filmed it while I was watching it. It’s simply incredible. A truly great movie scene that I had never even heard of.
I do think the opening hour is less good, but I would recommend this movie to anyone because of how great its second half it.
If you haven’t seen it, you need to.
I’ve seen it, and loved it. I found out that it’s a remake of a 1953French film The Wages of Fear ( Le Salaire de la peur ) Also well worth seeing. The original film has criticisms of the USA that are lacking in the remake.
I’ve seen both. It’s been a long time, but my recollection is that I narrowly preferred Wages of Fear over Sorcerer, though I agree that both are fantastic movies.
Mr. Plow directed by William Friedkin.
That name again is Mr. Plow.
Nice.
I watched Clouds Are Not Spheres thinking it was a film as it kept popping up as a recommendation on Netflix. Instead, it was very obviously a 1990s British television special, complete with ridiculously cheesy production values and narration.
However, I would still recommend it because it’s a biography of Benoit Mandelbrot, who is really fucking interesting (and who was alive at the time to take part in it).
Wait. Is that a reference to Sorcerer? I’d somehow managed to never even heard of the incredible bridge scene in Sorcerer and saw Mr. Plow countless times back when that was a newer episode.
I’m still stunned thinking about that truck going over that bridge. It was truly insane.
Oh, yeah, that’s a Sorcerer homage, right down to the faux Tangerine Dream music. BTW, the soundtrack album is fantastic; I can put it in the CD player in the mini-van and pretend I’m driving nitro over to Belleview.
ETA: The part with the mountain goat was not in Sorcerer.
We watched “Mystic Pizza” last night. Had never seen it, nor had my Dearly Beloved™.
Aside from seeing a young Julia Roberts and an insanely young Matt Damon and Vince Dinofrio, well…it was mediocre to be honest.