You would be amazed at what some have endured and survived.
See Alison.
She was raped, then disemboweled and nearly decapitated.
she sustained 16 injuries in her throat alone from all the slashings.
Good documentary. Hard to watch at times.
Also enjoyed this one.
I would have liked some more, including why Vance and Frawley hated each other so much. And Frawley trying to console Lucy, basically telling her “you married a player, what did you expect?”
Sigh. A really interesting premise, but the writer\director decided to punt on first down. Went south almost immediately. Would have been better as a mini-series.
My main takeaway from the movie was that I’d like to know more about William Frawley. Or, maybe I just like J.K. Simmons.
Perhaps the animosity came from the setup, as described by Vance’s character – she’s married to a man old enough to be her grandfather, and the running gag is that she’s not pretty enough for him. Yeah, that could get old fast.
Word around the ‘hood in Washington Heights is that Steven Spielberg will follow up “West Side Story” with “Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom”, the story of Lin Manuel Miranda’s heroic effort to bring “Tick Tick Boom” the the masses.
I always assumed that it was another example of older fatter guy gets chick way out of his league.
I haven’t seen this movie (Being the Ricardos) but my understanding is in real life Vivian Vance resented that she was made to appear older and frumpier than she was in real life. As I remember from the show, Ethel and Fred were in vaudeville together, so I think the characters were meant to be roughly the same age but in real life, Vivian Vance was quite a bit younger than William Frawley. (And I think his drinking was also an issue.)
It’s also established early in the movie that their politics are diametrically opposed.
The real life Alison is indeed an astonishingly resilient woman with an impressive drive to survive.
My view of the movie Revenge is unchanged.
Summary
The fictional Jen is dropped off a cliff, which leaves her impaled on a tree which passes through her back and out her stomach. She escapes from the tree by burning it out from under her. Bleeding profusely (most reviews of the film note the huge volumes of blood spilled across the desert) she crawls off and gets into a brawl with a much bigger and fully fit man. Winning the fight of course.
She removes the rest of the dead tree from her abdomen. She then cauterises the wound on her stomach but never bothers with the equally gaping entry wound on her back.
She never appears to drink much to replace the fluids lost by bleeding. Indeed this is set in a desert. Even an uninjured person would require drinking much more than Jen does.
If the film had suggested even a cursory supernatural explanation, some load of old toss along the lines of 500 years ago a lost tribe of Amazonian women built a sacred church here, or even gone for the hackneyed ‘all the revenge sequences were just Jen’s dying thoughts’ I might have been happier with the film.
As it is I am doubling down on my original assessment. Jen’s injuries were obviously fatal eliminating any point in the film.
TCMF-2L
Included with Prime:
I liked the premise but thought 1) It needed to be trimmed by about 30 minutes, and 2) It violated some of its own rules. Too bad but I’d still give it 6/10.
Red Notice: A pretty awful film, even for this sort of smirking wankery.
Being the Ricardos - Very well acted. It certainly held my interest, but I think it could have been better.
Nice to see Linda Lavin, if briefly. Actually, nice to see an older actress who hasn’t done a ton of cosmetic surgery, for a change.
The Woman in the Window (Netflix, 2021) - Meh, one and a half stars maybe. There were a couple of red herrings here and there to throw us off but for the most part my wife and I saw the conclusion a mile away. The film offers a few jump scares for people who like that and for his brief scenes Gary Oldman is awesome as always, but for the most part this movie will mostly be a waste of time.
Free on imdb (with commercials)
Odd to see a true story of a robbery turned into a comedy. Pretty good cast (Galifianakis, some SNL, et al) but only a so-so outcome. 6/10, I’d say.
Same. Although the Trump parallels were both fun and disturbing.
It’s an odd story, to be sure. On consideration I wonder how much of it is specifically aimed at Latin American culture (the location isn’t named in the story IIRC, but some of the songs specifically name Colombia) and/or that market (because everything these days seems to have either a Latin American or Chinese appeal).
It seems to be a Disneyfied take on the sort of magic realism you get in Gabriel Garcia Marquez books (etc), with a heartwarming message about not shackling your kids with your unrealistic expectations of them and abusing them if they don’t live up to them. It’s really about the characters; the plot is pretty much just there to hang the messaging on. But for all that, it’s a nice enough film and the songs are good.
Heh. I was just listening to Suburban Homeboy. They’re a lot of fun, and all over the place musically.
Last night we watched Clockwise, a John Cleese movie from 1986. I believe it was free from Amazon Prime. The premise is John Cleese trying to get to an important meeting on time, and it was amusing.
I heard one cynical take that Disney is making films that they can tie to pavilions at EPCOT. Or it could have been, “Wow, Coco did great! What else can we do with Latinx culture?”
Definitely, it’s Moana + 100 Years of Solitude.
Just saw Don’t Look Up yesterday, and loved it. It’s simultaneously broad farce and frighteningly plausible. (I’m thinking of starting a GQ thread - if a comet hits the ocean in the southern hemisphere, what would the effect be in Illinois?)
The CS thread on it is here, in case you’re interested. Opinions vary widely.
(And my pre-emptive response is that a hypothetical comet that big might very well set off volcanoes worldwide - including the supervolcano currently under Wyoming. Illinois would not fare well.)
I saw this once on VHS as a kid. I believe the arm of his suit/sport jacket comes off and he tapes it on? I remember very little else, but we laughed a bit.
Licorice Pizza, a very funny/quirky movie set in the 70s by Paul Thomas Anderson that I recommend (nobody combines funny/quirky/70s like PT). Includes the waterbed fad as a plot point (you’ll be wondering at what point everything’s going to get flooded), a hilarious turn by Tom Waits doing his manic drunk hipster routine, and a satisfyingly psycho Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters, boyfriend of Barbra Streisand, who apparently thinks that fact means he can get away with anything.
Also notable because the two on-again off-again romantic leads are not especially movie star attractive, in other words they look like real people, and the recreation of a certain time and place is spot on. I suppose I could question the pairing of a 20-something woman with a 15 year old (precocious though he is) which is just a bit uncomfortable - would anyone have tried this if the genders were switched? I think you know the answer.