The Adam Project. Lightweight and enjoyable, and the kid is a pretty good actor (i.e., not annoying).
Just watched the only western I really like: The Big Country. Burl Ives earned his Oscar. What a great cast!
Free Guy. Since I watched one Ryan Reynolds movie, why not watch another? This was charming, but maybe 20 minutes too long.
I didn’t like this one as much, though it had some cute moments. I also felt like Taika Waititi was in a different movie from everyone else. I kind of hated his parts of the movie, and I am a big fan of Waititi in general.
It was pretty scattered for me.
I’m honestly not hugely thrilled to hear that the same director as Free Guy and Adam Project is now doing Deadpool 3.
You Won’t Be Alone, newly released. The cinema where I work has it; my boss said it was “awful”, so I had to check it out!
In 19th century rural Macedonia, a witch (who may be centuries old, and looks it) demands a mother give her her baby girl, the mother puts her off but the witch returns when the girl is 16 and takes her away. The teenager is given the power to inhabit the bodies of other people, and at various points is played by other actors including a young man.
It’s confusing, and sometimes very gory. Not really a horror movie, more like a folk tale become real as well as a meditation on what being the ultimate outsider is like - and in the male dominated peasant culture, that includes every woman, not just the sorceress. Recommended only if you have a tolerance for slow-moving, nearly plotless cinema.
I had very low expectations for this, but it managed to exceed them quite a bit while remaining just another le cinema de la loseur kriminels entry.
Based on a novel by Lionel White (original author of The Killing and Pierrot le Fou ) with a script by arch-HUAC squealer Martin Berkeley, this obscure gang-falls-apart-plotting-heist film noir is decently - but not outstandingly - shot, and has a deficient plot and leads, including James Gregory (sans Neural Neutralizer) as the underwhelming gang leader. From certain angles, star Rory Calhoun looks like George Clooney.
What makes the movie worth watching, imo, is that the gang features not one, but TWO über- creeps (dyed-blonde nutjob Corey Allen and a fat, bald, sweaty alcoholic pyrophiliac) along with what seems like more than a requisite quotient of aberrant sexuality and sociopathy. As a connoisseur of psychos in film noir, this aspect of the flick struck me as under-known and inadequately appreciated.
Damn, I’ve had that on my list for a couple years. I guess I should have watched it before I read your review, because now I’m just going to be staring at her eyes the whole movie. 
If the genre intrigues you then Ghost In The Shell (2017) covers similar territory plus seems more squarely aimed at adults. But although I watched it just a few years back I had to check out the trailer on YouTube to refresh my memory because it hadn’t left much of a lasting impression.
Neither film comes close (for me) to the original Blade Runner as a sheer classic, neither comes close to the original The Matrix for groundbreaking (on original release) special effects and neither is as much fun as Big Arnie in the original Total Recall.
TCMF-2L
News Of The World. More or less follows the storyline of the book, a novella about a Civil War vet who has become an itinerant reader of newspapers to the semi-literate inhabitants of backwater western towns, who gets strong-armed into trying to return an orphan recaptured from the Kiowa to her German-speaking relatives some hundreds of miles away. Tom Hanks is the lead, but the now-completely-Kiowa-identified young girl is a scene stealer. Not a big movie nor full of surprises but satisfying and well done.
I also have been watching the best of Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke) as my escape from world war three news.
To be fair, that’s what they want you to be doing.
Yeah, I saw this one over the weekend. Kinda had the same feel as last year’s Lamb. Very slow-moving, quiet, some good scenes but dragged.
I liked all three of these as well. I have Ghost on my list as well. I need to pick up my movie watching pace, I’m falling way behind.
I have to admit it looks kind of cool in the promos I saw. I’ll still watch it eventually.
So I finally got around to watching this. It is a delight - Wright’s whimsical portrayal of a whimsical band that has somehow managed to be deeply influential and yet largely invisible really captures their spirit.
Last night I watched an old movie I had seen before, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. It’s about two girl friends, one trying to charm men out of money and diamonds, the other trying to keep her friend out of trouble. Obviously, lots of sexism, but it’s mildly entertaining and of course there’s lots to look at.
I was lying awake in the middle of night, and it occurred to me that no one in the movie ever says or implies that gentlemen prefer blondes. Things that make you go hmmm. 
Bubble on Netflix. A film by Judd Apatow. I’m sure they didn’t know when they made this film just how tired the pandemic jokes would be by the time it was released, but the other themes of entitled and clueless actors and the recklessness of studios when it comes to crew safety were quite timely. It’s one of those movies where every character is a character. The funniest scenes are the ones that switch back and forth between the green screen sets and how it will look in the finished film. I think there is a sample of that in the Netflix tease.
I did not like this movie. At one point, I was over it and paused it while deciding whether or not to bail, thinking, “Do I want to watch the last 15 minutes or so?” When I saw that it still had over an hour left, I ran away fast.
This is the kind of movie where the whole is much less than the sum of its parts.
That’s weird. I did the same thing half way through and was shocked there was an hour left, but I had nothing better to do. The second half was better than the first mostly because of a character named Mr. Best.
All the reviews I’ve seen for Bubble have been deeply negative, so I hadn’t even bothered. And the previews haven’t tempted me either.
They head over to the local WalMart and wow, there’s Billy Redden—the banjo playing kid in “Deliverance” except he’s fully grown now of course.
Interesting look at how trying to make a movie can go so far wrong.
I don’t know much of his work. He was fantastically prolific. IIRC he had released about 80 albums while alive and after his death, his estate released 50 more. I liked his advice to future composers: get a real estate license to finance your habit.