Just watched Jurassic Park. It was gripping.
For the first time?
Yes. I know, Ive never been a movie person.
May I direct attention once again to the stellar pitch for The Northman offered in post #4188? It has brocade-in-progress! And laundry thralls!!!
No srsly, as I said, I totally agree with Mahaloth that that was just a great film. It wasn’t just a bunch of exciting hairy berserkery, either. It was mystical, otherworldly (sometimes literally so), sometimes gruesome, but really human and captivating at the same time. Un-look-away-able.
As an artwork IMHO it is way better than either the books or the show of The Last Kingdom, and I say that as somebody who happily devoured both books and show.
I agree, but I still really liked it. If you like Bob’s Burgers, you’ll like the movie. If you don’t, you won’t. If you haven’t even seen Bob’s Burgers before… IDK. I think there was enough “Oh, hello, Mister Fischoeder, who is our landlord and his brother and his cousin we’ve conveniently never seen before” to help new viewers orient themselves within the universe.
Anyway, I feel like we learned something new about the rabbit ears, so that was something…
Caught Moonstruck on HBO Max, a much better film than The Goodbye Girl. Though if TGG had Nicholas Cage in Dreyfuss’s role, the secondary plot about Dreyfuss having to play Richard 3rd as a drag queen… wow, we missed something special there, folks. (Now I’m imagining a TGG/Vampire’s Kiss mashup).
Then caught Wind River a 2017 film directed and penned by Taylor Sheridan (of Yellowstone fame). Very familiar territory to Yellowstone fans, many of the actors are in both projects, the settings and shots are identical, and the story is also the ‘modern Western’ which Sheridan specializes in.
We loved Wind River and Hell or High Water. I didn’t realize he was writing Yellowstone (and don’t get Paramount anyway), but good to know.
Unlike most people here, I didn’t like Northman at all, and I usually love anything with swords in it. I’ll agree that it was a well made movie, very pretty to look at, and with impressively accurate historical details. But in the end, it was just a story about horrible people being horrible to each other. There was no depth - either of story or character - no insight, no self-awareness and no reason to care about any of it. Despites all of the superficial nods to meaning and mythology, in the end, the so-called protagonist was nothing more a good-looking orc.
The only thing I learned from the movie is that the Vikings were not very nice people.
Yeah, if you need some kind of fundamentally noble hero to be able to care about characters in a melodramatic story, you won’t find that in The Northman.
That was part of the Amleth/Hamlet tie-in that I found interesting. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is likewise fundamentally about horrible people being horrible to each other, with some relatively minor non-horrible characters (e.g., Ophelia) falling by the wayside in the process, but no really noble or heroic (or even mentally healthy) protagonist. Hamlet has prettier (and more) dialogue than The Northman, but the basic theme of obsessive revenge quests tend to be catastrophic for all concerned guides them in similar ways.
See now, I knew that fact going in, which may have helped me be able to appreciate the movie on its own terms.
The difference, of course, is that Hamlet had a brain. He hesitated - in fact, he’s famous for it. He felt guilt, had doubts and second guessed himself. Furthermore, he had an acute sense of self-awareness, self deprecating humor and insights on the world and his place in it. In other words, he was a flawed, fully realized human being, whereas Brick Rockjawssen was just a grunting slab of meat.
Well, minority opinions are still valid opinions. De gustibus non est et cetera.
Sheridan is the show-runner, with it largely being his vision. Kevin Costner was born to play John Dutton, the owner of the Yellowstone ranch, and I believe the Paramount app may have it available ad-supported. If you like his stuff… and I definitely do… you’ll love Yellowstone.
Peacock is now the only place to stream Yellowstone. Even though it airs on the Paramount Network, Peacock has all four seasons.
Peacock, sorry.
Have you read Egil’s Saga. I have. Wow, was he ever not nice!
Spoiler from history: neither were the Nazis.
Hey, you didn’t seem to know that the vikings were horrible raping, enslaving, murdering barbarians.
(Also, you might be a bit shocked as to what some white americans did pre-1866).
The scene where the Vikings performed a selection on the Russians, keeping the useful slaves and burning the rest alive, broke me - that was some Auschwitz-level shit, which is not a comparison I make lightly. Why should I care about one of those murderers’ petty vendetta after that?
Nailed it on the head with that one. Those were the good guys he was hanging about with too. Vikings were not nice. I think the burned ones were often the children too.
The New Top Gun. Good but not great. IMAX was pretty cool for the flight scenes.
Regardless of how she got them, they are a security blanket for her now. Logan taking them showed that. Her fight with that schoolyard bully calling her a baby was an out of character for Louise, normally she would have just shot back with a burning insult or at least a, "oh wow, calling me a baby, that’s original’.
Now seeing Louise without her ears, that would have been something.