Space Sweepers (2021, Netflix) It’s Spacepunk or Sci-Fipunk, if that’s a thing. It’s 2092 and Earth is ruined, the only opportunities for those not fortunate enough to live in the Eden-esque space station are rebel spacejunk scavengers. Our ragtag team is failing to make ends meet until they come upon something that brings them more trouble than they bargained for. It was delightful. Action packed with a host of interesting characters. Much of it is in Korean and other languages so 80% is close captioned, but if you can get passed that and like shows like Firefly, The Expanse or The Fifth Element I highly recommend it.
Last night we saw House of Gucci, in a real-live theater. Quite good, good performances all around. Interesting sound track that’s a mix of period disco and opera. I thought the story structure was a bit odd (spoilered)…
I thought there would be more attention given to the hit on Mauricio and the police-procedural repercussions. Instead, it all happens - literally - in the last 15 minutes of the 2.5 hour film.
I always like to see trailers, although: seriously? They’re rebooting Batman again? And Scream?
I watch a lot of TCM, especially the noir films they show Sat. night / Sun morning. This weekend’s was Blast of Silence (1961). An ultra low budget indie directed by and starring Allen Baron. It’s about a few days in the life of a hitman who has travelled to NYC to kill a mobster. It’s gritty and surprisingly violent for 1961 and there’s great footage of the city. The climax was filmed on Long Island during hurricane Donna and the violent weather really adds something to the scene. Most of the reviews I read were positive but one thing several people mentioned was the narration, which they found to be overwrought; I thought it was perfect.
Sort of.
Scream is indeed Scream 5, but they are also kind of calling it Scream.
The “M” in the title has a very long middle part that forms a Roman Numeral V.
You can see it on the poster here.
I just saw Blast of Silence last night after having recorded it on my DVR, and I liked it as well. The B&W filming in NYC in the winter really brought out the grittiness. I agree about the narration as well. The protagonist was a laconic loner, and so the narration helped his character, much the way it would be as if this were a book.
We watched The Power of the Dog the other night. Very good and well acted by all.
I thought there were a lot of good character actors in Nightmare Alley. Although Bradley Cooper is mostly thought of as a lead actor, the other actors in it like Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, Mary Steenburgen, David Strathairn, and Tim Blake Nelson are thought of as character actors. The other interesting thing for me about the movie was its relationship to C. S. Lewis. What’s that, you might ask.? Both C. S. Lewis and William Lindsay Gresham (the author of the novel Nightmare Alley) were married to Joy Davidman.
The marriage of Lewis and Davidman, and her death, is the subject of the film Shadowlands, with Claire Bloom as Davidman.
I thought she was played by Debra Winger who had a lock on roles that required tragically dying young at the time.
Shadowlands was the title of two movies about the marriage of Lewis and Davidman, a television movie in 1985 with Claire Bloom as Davidman and a feature movie in 1993 with Winger as Davidman.
I believe he will be called The Batman this time around, to distinguish him from other batmen as may exist.
Just finished watching The Rescue (Disney+) about the Thai soccer team that got trapped in the cave. Amazing story, and extremely well done documentary. There was a LOT more that went on that I got from the media at the time. The extraction of the boys was nothing like what I remember hearing from the media. It is amazing that so many people, from so many different countries/backgrounds got involved. Even better that they were successful. Highly recommended.
(If you like this one, you will like The 33 about the Chilean miners that were trapped)
Nightmare Alley looks good - definitely wanna see that.
My latest five:
That Thing You Do!
A garage band from Erie, Penna. has a hit record and then copes with sudden Sixties fame. Sweet and very funny. Written, directed by and costarring Tom Hanks, who plays their manager.
The Wild Bunch
Finally saw this 1969 epic Western. Good, for its time, but not IMHO the jaw-droppingly-amazing classic I’d always heard it was.
No Time to Die
The latest James Bond movie, with Daniel Craig still excellent as 007 and showing a bit more emotion and humor than in previous outings. Overlong but still worthwhile, with some great action sequences. Léa Seydoux returns (rare for a Bond Girl) as the British agent’s conflicted sweetheart, and Ana de Armas is great as a beautiful, badass CIA agent.
Home Alone
Rewatched this family Christmas classic. Goofy and funny. Joe Pesci is a standout as a burglar who thinks he’s smarter than he really is.
The Eagle Has Landed
A pretty good WWII adventure yarn (although not nearly as a good as the book), with German paratroopers plotting to snatch Winston Churchill from the Norfolk country estate he’s visiting. Michael Caine and Robert Duvall do well in their roles as a paratrooper colonel and the Abwehr planner of the mission, and Donald Pleasence is fittingly reptilian as Himmler.
Watched a Brazilian/French mess called Bacurau. What a disaster of a movie. Absolutly nonsensical. Shit just happens. Tid-bits of story line are introduced, to go nowhere, more 90 degree turns Salt Lake City. Nothing about this movie made a lick of sense. Can’t even really tell you what it was about. I don’t know? Tourists hunting locals for sport or some unknown reason? Rebels holding up the water supply? Crooked politicians?
Who the fuck knows. It was a huge waste of over 2 hours. Avoid like the traveling whorehouse in the movie. Oh yeah. There was that, too.
Even more unwatchable was some French POS called Climax. About dancers. No decernable plot whatsoever. Turned it off after about 10 minutes, but DVR’d it to see if it went anywhere. It did not. Seemingly endless footage of the backs of peoples head wandering down hallways. Shit music, too.
All this crap comes on DishTV, like Showtime or some crap. All worthless.
Watched Finch on Apple+, Tom Hanks and a dog and a robot on an earth without an ozone layer. Pretty typical Hanks vehicle with a schmaltzy ending.
Watched Being the Ricardos on Amazon Prime last night. It’s about a week of scandal during the rehearsals and taping of an episode of I love Lucy. Good acting all around (especially Javier Bardem as Desi) without trying too hard to be impersonators. Although it centers mostly on Lucille Ball, the really interesting insights are into the personalities and motivations of her three co-stars. It’s easy to forget when watching him play Ricky, but Desi Arnaz really was one of the smartest people in television during the 1950s.
My only nitpick is that anybody from LA knows that Boardners isn’t across the street from the old Desilu (now Red) studios. But it would have been cool if Ed Wood and Orson Welles were sitting in a booth across from Fred and Lucy.
The Don Hertzfeldt Kickstarter I funded back in March has finally borne fruit, and I have been working my way through his oeuvre of absurdist existential horror-comedy animations, “proudly making their first appearance on Blu-Ray just in time for the format to slowly grow obsolete” (as he puts it himself).
There are the short films I’ve seen before (Rejected, Billy’s Balloon, The Meaning of Life, the Simpsons couch gag) but there’s also the stuff I haven’t watched (or haven’t seen in full) before:
It’s Such A Beautiful Day. Bill is a man with a problem. That problem is some sort of unspecified degenerative brain ailment or tumor. We see Bill as he struggles to cope with this, aided by an omniscient narrator. But we also experience Bill’s struggles through his skewed, erratic and occasionally interrupted thoughts and viewpoints. Is the narrator Bill himself? Is he reliable? And what are we to make of the odd twist at the end?
Hertzfeldt’s narrative approach reminds me of the painting of Chuck Close in a way - up close, there are lots of individual segments that are interesting in themselves but not particularly meaningful, but when seen arrayed together in the right order suddenly reveal a large and emotionally powerful picture. I’m pretty sure this isn’t to everyone’s taste (including my wife’s) but it really gets me.
World of Tomorrow - a short film about a four-year-old girl named Emily (voiced by an actual four-year-old whose incoherent ramblings were recorded and then pieced together into a narrative) and her N-times-removed clone descendant, who brings young Emily Prime into the future to speak to her and to ask her for something, while revealing to the naïf what horrors are to come. Given that the animation is all stick figures (as is standard for Hertzfeldt) and that the voice actors are a babbling actual child and an actress performing largely in monotone, this one nonetheless also manages to pack a punch.
The discs also contain WoT 2 and 3, which I have not watched yet.
Finally: Wisdom Teeth. This is a short I hadn’t seen before and is basically a very long “wait for it” gag. Will you guess what the payoff is? No. Will it be horrific and gross? Oh yes. Very much so.
I watched the new Disney animated film that is actually a 20th Century film which is actually a Blue Sky film in all but name… Ron’s Gone Wrong. It’s fine. It’s for contemporary kids. It’s frenetic and zany and beautiful.
But it’s also nothing new. We’ve seen the “cute robot gone wild” thing before in Big Hero 6, we’ve seen the “Tech CEO who’s a jerk” in multiple films, including Despicable Me and Incredibles 2 and The Mitchells vs The Machines. It’s fine, it’s entertaining, but it’s unnecessary.
It’s Such A Beautiful Day
World of Tomorrow
These are frequently considered among the best animated short films ever made. Don Hertzfeldt is frequently considered one of the best creators of animated short films ever. These two shorts are weird as all get out, but they’re great.
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I am aware. I mean, the man got a Palme d’Or nomination at Cannes for a student film (Billy’s Balloon) and an Oscar nomination (Rejected) by age 23. He’s very, very good at what he does.
Speaking of student films, I forgot to mention Lily and Jim, a story of a blind date between two socially awkward people. Hilarity fails to ensue.