The overall ideas in both Hidden Figures and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks are true, but there is a lot of jiggering with the facts to make them into what Hollywood people think of as an acceptable story for a movie. I just looked through a bunch of websites which review and criticize the movies and point out the inaccuracies in them to see if I could find one such website for each of those films. There doesn’t seem to be a perfect one for either film. You could do a search yourself and find some websites yourself, or you could just read the books that inspired them.
Over the Christmas period we watched quite a few new films as a family.
By far the worst was “Mary Poppins”. It was very long anyway and felt never-ending with not much approaching a storyline and the songs were a lot weaker than I’d expected. It was like a bad panto.
The kids and I were all nodding off and the unanimous response afterwards was “what the hell was that?”
The same couldn’t be said of “Die Hard” or “Pleasantville” which both got huge thumbs-up
I assume this is a typo and you mean ‘genetic makeup’, although I could understand how generic makeup would lead to a lack of recognition.
Yes. And this post must be more than 5 characters. So Yes, again.
Why wear generic makeup when you can have Cover Girl or Revlon?
We watched Don’t Look Up last night. It’s a metaphor for climate change, and would be funny if it wasn’t horrifyingly true. Okay, it was also funny.
Notice how Richard Lester often had wide shots with a lot of different activity in the frame (incl. chickens clucking - 3 Musketeers, Funny Thing…Forum, etc.) while the main dialogue was heard through it all over in the corner. I wonder if Robert Altman really deserves all the credit for that technique.
Started watching it last night. Way too cutesy for me. Terrible script. Turned it off after 40 minutes.
40 minutes? That means you only got to hear that song 27 times.
Rewatched Bridge on the River Kwai. It’s one of the best war movies ever made. Won a bunch of Awards.
I guess most people have seen it. Anyone that hasn’t should watch it at least once.
I’m always awed by Alec Guinness portrayal of Colonel Nicholson. The most pompous, chuckle head that ever put on a officer’s uniform. He probably would have been charged with treason if the movie had ended differently.
All the actors did a great job. The film has a 93% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Have started watching The Eternals, which apparently is a description of how long the film feels like it takes. Yes, there are lots of pretty people and CGI effects, but does anything remotely interesting happen at any point or should I quit now and save myself the god-knows-how-much-longer-is-left amount of time?
I have also started watching Eternals. I am about an hour in, and it certainly is very deliberately paced. However, I think it’s trying for epic, and Dune managed to feel epic at the same stodgy pacing, so… I’ll give it a bit more time.
I’ve seen it twice and my review would be: OK, but only OK. Definitely a misfire. Quite dull at times.
I’d probably skip it.
Joe (1970), with Peter Boyle, introduced haranguing a NY bartender with a slab of invective more racist than a KKK recruiting pamphlet. I’d avoided seeing it, since it had a mixed reputation though it was a major hit when it came out. Now I can say it’s not very good but it’s the movie America needed to see at the time.
Hollywood was doing message movies then, some were subtle and effective, this one just screams at you “Your kids are taking drugs and having sex! Be scared!” But if wild youth is the problem, is Joe the remedy? (I bet Norman Lear saw this and said I can do something like it, except make Joe funny instead of psychotic.) Peter Boyle plays him in many extreme close-ups (is he wearing lipstick in some shots or does my picture need desaturation?) as a sweating ball of hate just aching for an excuse to blow some filthy hippie off the map.
It’s pretty cheesy, really, but the ending really sticks. Message delivered.
If you’re referring to “All in the Family”, Lear based it on British sitcom “Till Death Us Do Part”, which involved a similarly blinkered family patriarch. Which is not to say that Lear’s adaptation of the show from British to American culture didn’t tap into the same zeitgeist as seen in Joe.
I’d seen scenes and bits and pieces of it, but last night I dove in head first and watched it from beginning to end: Showgirls (1995) starring Elizabeth Berkley, Gina Gershon, Kyle MacLachlan and least 713 tits and more than a few “smiling snatches” (their words, not mine).
It is as horrifically bad as everybody thinks it is, but I do see the cult quality in it. I was laughing so hard at parts of it that I actually felt bad. I’d read some trivia that Verhoeven takes the blame for Berkley’s overacting, prodding to go way over the top as some sort of satire or social commentary, but holy shit. Just the way she angrily ate fries that a stranger gives her out of goodness of her heart is Razzie master-class. Let’s not speak of the pool sex scene which was like watching two dolphins fight over a herring.
I recommend it. Four areolae out of five.
One of my all-time favorite movies. It’s a sort of half-brother to Anthony Shaffer’s play and movie Sleuth. Both are ultimately based on the elaborate games that Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins (the screenwriters of The Last of Sheila – and, yes, THAT Sondheim and THAT Perkins) used to put together. Both works feature a somewhat sadistic , manipulative games player bringing a person or people to his place for a series of apparently innocuous if difficult games that turn out to be the basis for mind games. Lots of references in both to earlier works (One reason I hate the 2007 film of Sleuth is that Harold Pinter didn’t know or care a damned thing about the old classic mysteries that is, at root, the lifeblood of these works. The barren set of Andrew Wyke’s house contrasts with the games-filled sets of stage versions and the 1972 film, and shows you what’s wrong with it. )
I saw The Matrix: Resurrections this week. It was not up to the previous three films. There was some very clever and self-referential stuff. reeves didn’t do as much martial arts work (but, let’s face it, he’s starting to get long in the tooth). But there was something unsatisfying about it that went beyond all that. And why not bring back Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus? You brought back lots of other folks, including The Merovingian, fer cryin’ out loud. You even had a statue of Fishburne there.
One thing that puzzled me very briefly at first – now when they enter the Matrix, the characters do it through those liquid mirrors. That fits in well with the White Rabbit/Through the Looking Glass idea and imagery, but when they did it before, they used phones or … phone booths.
OK, yeah. When’s the last time you saw a phone booth? Even the kind of handsets that were present at a lot of the transitions are a thing of the past. Everyone uses cellphones now, so the change was necessary.
The disappearance of phone booths was already a joke when the first Superman movie came out in 1978, although at least payphones still existed at that point.
The Boston Strangler 1968 aired on TCM last night. Tony Curtis, Henry Fonda and George Kennedy.
Sally Kellerman (Hot Lips Houlian M-A-S-H) is the victim that bites the Boston Strangler"s Hand. That was a real event that helped convict Albert DeSalvo.
I had never seen this movie. It’s loosely based on the Book. I wanted to enjoy the movie. Unfortunately the director experimented with split screens that makes it almost unwatchable.
Tony Curtis has almost no dialog until the Strangler is arrested. The director invented a multiple personality disorder for the Strangler. Absolute, Total bullshit. The sources I’ve read say Albert DeSalvo never exhibited that disorder. The film wastes 20 minutes getting Tony Curtis good personality to recognize the evil one.
It’s very unfortunate that the movie was done so poorly. It could be a very interesting police procedural. DNA tests were used a few years ago to link Albert DeSalvo to one victim. They exhumed his body for the test.
WTH?? I had to endure scenes like this for 2 hours. The movie constantly cuts from a normal scene to this junk.
Aw, I enjoyed it (especially Steve Zahn as the smartass member of the band, who got all the best lines). And I’ll confess: I even liked the song!
FTW!