I like Clooney as an actor, but he’s never really impressed me as a director.
Werewolves Within. A fun little “awooo-dunnit” (I stole that one).
Little Girl Blue, the biopic about Janis Joplin. Very interesting and well done. It addressed her as a person and didn’t dwell on the abuses. There was always the notion going around that her death was an intentional overdose instead of a hotshot. This film doesn’t go into that, but the book about her does.
Watched The Autopsy of Jane Doe on UK TV and after a terrific start… for me it ended disappointingly.
Stars Brian Cox, Emile Hirsch and Olwen Kelly as Jane Doe. Although Olwen remains (basically) dead and unmoving all film, not even seen alive in flashbacks, she is a powerful and ominous presence.
Cox and Hirsch are great and credible as father and son morticians who perform autopsies for the local police. An urgent autopsy is required on an unidentified woman.
Set in the present (film released in 2016) the film is mostly confined to the gothic Victorian funeral home and that is so creepy. The autopsy is shown in graphic detail which will be tough viewing for some. The plot moves along as every stage of the examination reveals mysterious hidden injuries on Jane’s body.
However amid a raging storm outside, the two men abruptly switch from professionally uncertain but curious to sudden certainty there are supernatural forces at play. They immediately decide to flee the building which, as they’ve been presented up until then, seems unlikely for them.
However power cuts and fallen trees mean they cannot get out and so… Remaining (with increasingly blatant evidence they are correct) certain this is all supernatural they start formulating a supernatural explanation and then work towards a supernatural solution to the supernatural situation. Just like that!
The switch from ‘real world’ to ‘supernatural’ was far too sudden and far too committed for me to believe.
Although Olwen is naked throughout I didn’t feel it was gratuitous or that she (actress) was exploited. However Hirsch’s briefly seen girlfriend (as a character) was merely used as a minor plot point (which I saw coming a mile off.) Cox’s mentioned, but unseen, dead wife was a character that was equally undeveloped. Also Hirsch wanting to leave the family business was a plot point that simply evaporated.
The film soon reached a pretty generic ‘shock’ ending before an even more generic ‘yes we’ve all seen horror films end this way before’ final scene.
TLDR: This starts with almost unbearable tension. Really, really creepy. But then throws away all it had achieved with a rushed, exposition heavy, hackneyed finish.
Still well worth watching in my opinion but reminds me of watching Twin Peaks when it was first broadcast. So good at first but simply unable to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion.
TCMF-2L
Watched Stake Land (2010) and it’s sequel Stake Land II (also known as The Stakelander 2016) on UK TV.
Both films star Nick Damici and Connor Paolo while the first also had Kelly ‘Top Gun’ McGillis.
Both films are set in North America after a vampire apocalypse. Both, for low budget films, are well filmed and well acted.
Stakeland has the least plot but creates its own mood. It’s not very original but has its fans and is watchable.
Stakeland II has a more ambitious plot but doesn’t really pull it off very well. It’s noticeable that several elements are straight out of the Mad Max films: A ‘feral’ mute character, a music box (both from Mad Max II) and some organised ‘Two Men Enter, One Man Leaves’ combat similar to Mad Max: Beyond The Thunderdrome but on a much lower budget.
There it is. Both films are OK but nothing more.
TCMF-2L
Host (2021). Horror film, where the setting is Zoom call. It has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
I am not sure what to think of it. The acting and editing were good, but I didn’t find it suspenseful in the least. Just a bunch of jump scares. But I was watching it on my 5" X 7" handheld monitor while lying in bed; perhaps I need to see it on our big screen to get the full effect.
I watched Free Guy the other day. Even though it covers similar themes to films like Ready Player One, The Matrix series, and The Truman Show, I found it to be a funny and surprisingly good film with a great cast. I generally find Ryan Reynolds very funny, but for some reason Hollywood thinks you can just put him in any action movie or rom-com and his “schtick” is enough to carry it. Free Guy is the sort of absurd film that plays to his strengths. Taika Waititi also provides a supporting role as a douchey game developer along with newcomer Jodie Comer.
I also watched The Last Duel (also starring Corner). It was ok. Basically you had to sit through three different versions of what is really the same rapey story before watching Jason Bourne and Kylo Ren fight to the death.
I watched 10 or 15 minutes of it and gave up. It was so historically inaccurate that I found it unwatchable.
I read the book too. It was okay, except that the details of the duel itself were 100% fiction, which is pretty bad for a book that’s supposed to be nonfiction.
We were buried under a major blizzard in New England this weekend, so my daughter MiliCal asked to watch The Thing. The John Carpenter version (I had very recently watched the 1951 Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby version myself). She’d never seen it. So we did. Nothing like watching a paranoid film about people (and animals) trapped by the winter in an enclosed space with a personality-consuming monster. I think she liked it. My wife Pepper Mill has already seen it multiple times, but she watched, too, smothered in her “Yes, I’m cold” sweatshirt* and electric blanket. The cats didn’t care.
I told her how I’d sat through it twice at the drive-in the summer it came out (and I was living on my own in a new town. Watched a lotta movies that summer of 1982, which was rich in sf/f movies). Years later, at my first job, my boss took a sabbatical to lead an expedition down to Antarctica, so we threw him a party with an ice cream cake, and gave hi a VHS copy of this version of The Thing for them to watch over and over. We thought that would be appropriate.
*yes, she really does have a sweatshirt that says that.
Werewolves Within
Cute, not better than simply an OK movie, though. I think it thinks it is the next What We Do In The Shadows or Krampus, but it is much less funnier than either.
Yep, just not a funny enough script, though the cast tries very hard to make the movie funnier. We liked it, but didn’t love it.
There is a spinoff to WWDITS called “We’re Wolves” being made (theoretically) by Taika Waititi but…
(From the Wiki)
The Odds (2018). Thriller/suspense/horror. Reviews are lukewarm, but I thought it was good. Reminded me a lot of Closet Land, but much more suspensful. Acting and writing were good. It wasn’t gory, but I found some of the scenes hard to watch. I didn’t care for the ending.
Yes, but I don’t think that will be made. The movie I saw was technically a video game movie and any similarity to the titles was coincidental.
The “We’re Wolves” movie seems to be stuck in (non)development hell. I haven’t heard it actively discussed in awhile, especially with the TV show kind of taking the spotlight.
And based (loosely) on a video game. I don’t know more than that. Everyone did a serviceable job. I had forgotten about Milana Vayntrub but she’s more talented than I thought.
Compartment No. 6. The Finnish entry shortlisted for Oscar’s International Feature Film, it’s a sort-of Rom-Com, but with down to earth protagonists. The director is also responsible for a quiet little comedy from a few year’s ago, The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki. This one is a nice deconstruction of the rom-com with twists on the meet-cute and the typical ending (which, from one point of view is simply the punchline of a joke set up more than an hour and a half earlier). It’s not for everyone, but rewards viewers who settle in and adjust to its rhythms.
A Taste of Hunger. A Danish drama that isn’t quite the sum of its parts. Good performances all around plus some food porn for the foodies, but it doesn’t quite draw the viewer in deeply enough to resonate at its most emotional moments. At some point, I realized it would have been much better with more ordinary looking actors in the lead roles. The performances are fine, but the husband and wife protagonists just seem too perfect to have the flaws the characters have. Still, it wasn’t a bad way to spend a little over an hour and a half.
On UK TV I watched the Chinese (English subtitles) film Paradox (2017) starring Louis Koo and Yue Wu. Well filmed and acted it had a fairly generic plot (Chinese Hong Kong cop’s teenage daughter goes missing in Thailand so he flies out to rescue her) but it’s a tough thriller and some of the details are quite brutal. There’s a brief but very nasty rape scene. Not all the sympathetic characters are still alive by the end.
As a tough thriller I thought it was very good (not great) but I did struggle with one cultural issue. There are several big ‘set piece’ fight scenes and they are in standard Chinese Martial Arts style. So everyone from middle aged policemen to young street punks are throwing and blocking punches at a rate of knots while climbing walls and somersaulting across the floor.
To me this fighting style is associated with comedy and this is not a comedy thriller so, for me, it was incongruous. But overall I still enjoyed the film.
TCMF-2L
We finally got around to watching Ghostbusters: Afterlife, now that it’s up for rental. Despite every beat being predictable, despite the over-reliance on Harold Ramis nostalgia and on fan service, it was still okay. The actors were fun to watch, and it spent a reasonable amount of time investing in the characters. I don’t think I’d watch a sequel, though.
Spider-Man 3, Holland/Home-series. I held off for a few weeks because the Marvel films seem to be on a downward slide since Endgame (or maybe I just stopped caring now that I’m old? I mean, old enough to rent a car to see Iron Man 2). Plus, I heard about the gimmick, and I figured that could only go one of two ways: cringe and cringier.
I was pleasantly surprised, both that they committed fully to the gimmick and that they played it straighter than I would have expected (as in a “Wait a tick, what if we took a moment to think through our problems?” sort of way), plus there were some genuinely nice payoffs to the various storylines (having seen all the previous iterations except maybe the very last of the first trilogy?).
Sooooo… yeah, don’t regret seeing it.
Big Man Japan from 2007, about a divorced schnook who can grow into a 90-foot giant and battle (really weird) monsters. His agent makes more off him than he himself does, the public views him with a mixture of amusement and indifference, and he finds himself defeated by a new monster that , humiliatingly, came from Korea. Trailer
I watched that a few months ago. I don’t think I could add anything to your excellent summary, except that, overall, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.