The Outfit (2022)
When I first saw this title, I thought “Great! I’d love to see a new take on one of the Parker novels.”
Well, it’s not exactly a gritty take on Richard Stark’s anti-hero. What it is, is an absorbing cross between the stylized criminal underworld of Fargo and the twisty plot of something like Deathtrap. Mark Rylance is good, as always. As I watched, I came to the conclusion that it must be an adapted play, since it is entirely set in the rooms of a suit maker’s shop in Chicago in the dead of winter. But apparently it’s an original screenplay, so they must have aimed to save a ton of money in production.
The Sting with Redford and Newman. It’s been on my watch list for a long time.
I had seen pieces of it channel surfing. TCM ran it tonight and I made a point to watch.
Excellent movie. The cast has all the top 1970’s character actors. Robert Shaw, Ray Walston, Harold Gould, and Dana Elcar were really good. It’s hard to go wrong with a great story and cast.
The Sting does require the viewers full attention. The plot has a lot of twists and turns. Including a great twist at the end.
Watched Disturbing The Peace (2020) on UK TV. It’s reputation is that it’s rubbish but it stars Guy Pearce from LA Confidential and Memento. Pearce started in cheap Australian TV soap Neighbours…
Neighbours was better than Disturbing The Peace. The script was abysmal.
I grew up in the Midwest and many of my classmates grew up on farms. I lived in town and bought eggs in cartons and hamburger wrapped under plastic etc. so I didn’t know much about it. It wasn’t till I married Mrs. L v 1.0 that I tried growing something for food. It was a disaster…pests got it all.
Sure we could have applied tons of pesticide, but that stuff ends up in the water table and it gets expensive and you end up figuring it’s a hell of a lot easier just to buy them at the market. But it always left me wondering—how do farmers produce so many tomatoes reliably when I can’t even grow a few for a salad?
In this film, the couple and their help start with very poor soil but develop it and grow numerous crops and tend lots of animals. They plant lots of trees and they have a beautiful orchard…
…but here come the birds, ruining lots of their fruit. Wait, that’s not quite true. They weren’t able to sell the fruit as intended, but they didn’t waste it; they fed it to their animals. But how to fix the problem? Find a way to poison the birds? Submachine guns? No, they built some bird houses that would hold owls, which in turn hunted the problem birds.
One takeaway that really stuck with me is that yeah, you could try to eradicate a problem but in fact, you really want balance because even what seem to be pests have some beneficial properties. And even things that seem like they’re totally beneficial can have drawbacks.
The photography was awesome as well. If I could change something, I would say they should have made it a mini series. Not much discussion was devoted to the profitability of it and IIRC they figured they lost 350 chickens to coyotes and other predators. So I’d like to know about that and I’d also like to know about some of the wildfires they’d had out that way because ISTM that the “little guys” don’t have deep pockets, and a fire could wipe them out. In fact, they hustle to evacuate some animals, but I won’t spoil anything. So there’s another reason so many farms are corporate now.
I watched the 4K version of The Road Warrior last night. I hadn’t seen it in years and the movie still packs a punch. They did a fantastic job restoring both the picture and sound.
I used to love this movie until I became a teacher. My memory for it is not perfect, but what I do remember is that really…he’s a terrible teacher. Just totally unacceptable. His behavior was so bad there is just no way to excuse it.
Watched Out of Africa with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Gave up after 30 mins. I couldn’t sit through 161 mins.
My hearing has declined and I found Meryl’s accent extremely irritating. I hate guessing what people are saying. It was only her character. I easily understood the husband and friends. I think Meryl went overboard with the accent.
It is a very slow period piece. The husband is a pompous prick. Cheats on his wife from the beginning. It was a marriage of convenience. I couldn’t summon any interest in these characters.
I watched it once and it is near the top of my “Worst Best Picture” list from the Oscars. I don’t have an actual list, but whenever I think of bad movies that won that prize, Out of Africa comes to mind quickly.
You don’t use closed captioning? I’m not hard of hearing (yet), but accents have always thrown me. Also, shows with a lot of overlapping speech. CC is perfect for this.
I just bought a white Dodge Challenger. I’ve watched Tarantino’s Death Proof about 10 times this week on PlutoTV. Vanishing Point, the latter one with Vigo Mortensen is available on YouTube, it seems, but the original doesn’t to be available anywhere to stream or to rent.
That sucks that there’s no streaming. I saw Vanishing Point and the original Gone in 60 Seconds on an art house double bill back in the ‘80s. I’ll never forget the naked girl on the motorcycle.
I was on a ghost horror kick today so I watched three films I had heard of but never seen, they were all quite good!
The Borderlands (also know as Final Prayer): (seen on Tubi) a found footage film about three Vatican investigators who visit a church in the British countryside to determine if a purported “miracle” is real or not. Very creepy and takes what on first glance is a standard horror plot and does it really well and goes places I never would have imagined. Really uses the found footage concept to great effect.
Lake Mungo: (seen on Tubi) a fake documentary about the drowning death of a young Australian teen and the ghostly type things that happen to her family afterwards. No gore or jump scares, but this film left me feeling so unsettled, and there is one image that when I saw it I literally yelled “Oh fuck!” This one really gets into your head.
Under the Shadow: (on Netflix) An Iranian horror film about a woman and her young daughter living in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War who are haunted in their apartment by a mysterious evil spirit. Does really well with creating suspense and a feeling of overwhelming dread as the characters are in fear of both a djinn as well as the constant threat of incoming missiles.
Just watched that as well. The soundtrack involves several songs with the word “time” in the title. Not exactly subtle.
It was fun and goofy, with an absolutely stellar turn by Walker Scobell as young Adam and some genuinely emotional moments. Try very hard not to think about how time travel and paradoxes work in the film. (Also, I kind of have a thing for Catherine Keener so that was nice too.)
Well said. I love this movie, if “love” is a term you can use for a film that you can’t bring yourself to watch more than once. It really is that haunting. The “oh fuck!” scene is creepy as hell and yes, it and the entire film does stick with you long after.
I’ve not heard of your other two recommendations but since you’ve mentioned them in the same post as Lake Mungo I’m eager to give them a try.
I watched Rambo: Last Blood (2019) on UK TV. As a piece of cinematic art it’s pretty poor. But as a muscular action movie I’ve got to admit I found it entertaining. At 100 minutes it doesn’t outstay it’s welcome. Note it has horror film levels of violence with heads and limbs graphically severed.
Glancing at a list of 2019 movies for ones that I’ve seen, the first to jump out as worse (to me) than Rambo: Last Blood is Fast and Furious: Hobbs and Shaw which as well as being not to my liking made the fatal error of going on too long at well over two hours.
Rambo wasn’t a great movie. But it knew when to quit. (In reality that was possibly all they could do with their budget.)