Risen, released yesterday. The other Fiennes plays a Roman military leader tasked with finding the body of one Yeshua of Nazareth. Produced by True Believers (the trailers before this one had to be seen to be believed), Fiennes did a better than expected job as the centurion who just wants to find out what happened to the body, and finds out it all went down just like you heard in Sunday school.
The most amusing thing about Risen is how the apostles act around Jesus - both my daughter and I made the connection that they acted exactly like the group of dwarves in the Hobbit movies.
It Happened One Night. Great movie about a man and woman travelling from Miami to NYC. They’re not hooked up, she’s engaged to another, and at times the sexual tension could be cut with a knife. While a comedy, did deal with the troubles of the on-going Depression, including a scene where a woman faints from hunger as she hasn’t eaten in 2 days. There were some pretty funny scenes including one where Gable shakes down a shakedown artist. B. Picture winner in 1934, perhaps the first truly “great” American film to win that award.
The Odd Couple, I’m watching this right as I’m typing this and I’m wondering when the two are going to end up in bed. This is bizarrely painful to watch, it’s every 50s-60s era marriage trope done with two guys rooming together… not to mention the first 15-30 minutes was spent dealing with Jack Lemmon’s suicide issues. I’m hoping that they end up in bed, but know that’s not going to be.
San Antonio, Errol Flynn and a bunch of people recognizable, not by their names but from being in other movies (including Uncle Billy from It’s a Wonderful Life), leading my wife and I to suggest that movies should have an additional line in credits explaining what other movies the actor has been in, something like:
Snape - Alan Rickman - (“Hans Gruber” in Die Hard)
Only watched this one because of my location field. Like all movies about San Antonio and SW Texas, the terrain is completely wrong.
For instance, in It Happened One Night: the bus driver is Ward Bond, who I think has the distinction of appearing in more of the AFI Top 100 Films than any other actor.
The guy who picks them up while hitchhiking and steals their luggage is Alan Hale, Sr – father (and identical to) Skipper from Gilligan’s Island, and probably most famous for playing Little John to Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood.
Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935. Clark Gable and Charles Laughton chew the scenery in that special '30s style. Another B. Picture winner, this was a relatively nuanced film in its depiction of Bligh as not just an abusive captain, but also an effective one as well.
At the time MotB was considered a “historically important” production, and if the goal was “let’s make a movie where Clark Gable is bare-chested a lot”, they definitely succeeded.
Last week, I saw the 1954 ***Sabrina **for the first time. Audrey Hepburn and William Holden were brilliant, but I found it really, really hard to believe she’d fall for Humphrey Bogart who was, what, fifty-something at the time? Had they been able to secure Cary Grant, as they wanted to, it would have been somewhat more believable.
I saw Advise and Consent, Judgement at Nuremberg, and Seven Days in May all for the first time. Intense, if somewhat preachy.
One of my all-time favorites was on Saturday night: The Best Years of Our Lives. One film that you see once and never, ever forget.
Others for the first time: Born Yesterday, Topkapi, Billy Budd, The Ghost and Mrs Muir.
Not for the first time: Pygmalion.
*I should be so lucky as to nail a gorgeous 22-year-old! :mad:
Finally found some time to see The Revenant.
90% a fantastic movie. Beautifully scenery, great continuous action shots, pretty good story, fantastic CGI, great score. Really good acting. Tom Hardy just disapeared into his character.
Which brings up the minor nitpicks:
It’s still really hard to buy DiCaprio as a character other than DiCaprio. I didn’t feel like I was watching Hugh Glass. I felt like I was watching DiCaprio.
They really stretched the bounds of believability of survival. He went from left for dead to completely mobile rather quickly.
I also felt the climax was filled with cliches. Starting with firearms and ending in fisticuffs. Seeing Leonardo get cut on the face with a knife, touched the blood, looked at it, and then looked back real mean at his enemy:rolleyes:. The whole fight to the death only to be the better man who won’t make the final kill but the bad guy dies a second later anyways:rolleyes:.
Oh well, still a great piece of eye candy.
Cimarron, 1931, Irene Dunne, Richard Dix in a tale about the opening of the Oklahoma Territory. Another 1930’s B. Picture winner, this film introduced me to Edna May Oliver, who’s depiction of tart-tongued spinsters was mocked quite a bit in Bugs Bunny shorts. As soon as I heard her voice, I was all like “so THAT’S who’ve they’ve been imitating!”
Executive Suite, William Holden, June Allyson, Frederick March, Barbara Stanwyck. An atypical Hollywood production, this one deals with the effects of a business President suddenly dying and the boardroom machinations that take place afterwards.
Everest. Meh. Beautiful photography, but though it wasn’t as bad as the 1997 Into Thin Air movie, it wasn’t nearly as riveting as it should have been. Not enough character development, maybe. Without getting to know the people involved you wind up with little tension and lots of footage of roped climbers trudging uphill in a line.
Short Term 12, a Netflix find, featuring Brie Larson as a counselor at a facility for troubled or abused teens.
No cliches here, thank goodness. Let’s just say that she’s got problems of her own and is forced to face them when a girl shows up who is going through the same thing. Good performances. Going Clear–the scientology documentary. More frightening than any horror film.
I’m not going to defend Gigi. I’ve never even seen it.
I remember when I went to movies during 1958 & 1959, the previews made it sound like this was the greatest fim ever made and I desperately wanted to see it.
As far as your shock that it won so many awards, I’d just like to point out that the world of movies in 1958 was a very different world than it is today.
If you were not alive during the 50s and 60s, I would guess it would be very difficult to try to compare movies made in 1958 with modern movies. It would be very difficult for young people today to try and compare older movies to modern ones and guess which ones would win the Oscars. I’m fairly certain that I could never succeed at doing that.
It was an entirely different world back then. Most people still believed in the essential goodness of human beings back then. That must seem pretty strange today.
Brooklyn: A well shot movie, but I didn’t care for it. 6/10
Mad Max: Fury Road: The second best Mad Max film. Tom Hardy doesn’t have nearly the screen presence as Mel Gibson, but it was a fun ride regardless. 8/10
Room: I went into this totally blind and I would recommend to watch it that way. Don’t read any synopsis or watch any trailers. The second best movie of the year for me, after Victoria.
Nattevagten (Nightwatch): A mid-90’s Danish thriller starring a young Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. An effective thriller with a nice little twist, although I don’t think it deserves it’s 7.3 IMDb rating. 6/10
Isolation: I watched this solely because it was another horror film starring Essie Davis (she had a great performance in The Babadook). It was a huge turd of a film. Kind of like Alien, but with cows… 3/10
Stagecoach, 1939, John Wayne, John Ford. Pretty good movie, not a big fan of westerns but have heard that this is the standard, so decided to give it a whirl.
On The Town, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly. Can I admit something here? I don’t like Gene Kelly movies. Singin’ In the Rain is pretty good, but all the others I’ve seen - ugh. I’m glad the "let’s throw a 20-minute interpretive dance sequence set to horn-blaring jazz ‘music’ " phase in movies was very short-lived. Made An American in Paris pretty unwatchable and easily one of my least favorite B. Picture winners.
Haven’t done an update, let’s see if I can remember a couple of them at least.
Spotlight. Fairly good movie. Well acted. Made a complex story reasonably clear.
For a large chunk of it I was baffled why no one seemed interested in a key thing that had happened several years before. But it was nicely explained by a big reveal near the end. Satisfaction at last.
Also, any movie that has men and women working together without introducing a staged romance gets an upvote from me. Movies don’t need a romantic subplot to be good.
The Danish Girl. Harmed by pacing and absolutely ruined by Redmayne’s overacting. He was terrible. It was sort of interesting when Lili first went out to the big bash. But it went downhill … and downhill … from there. The ending was incredibly predictable merely by noting how little time was left once … stuff happened.
The rest of the cast is okay. Regarding Vikander getting an Oscar: A decent but not top-notch performance, plus she was the female lead, not supporting.
