I do like the final 35 minutes as well, but there is a lag in the middle section of the movie. I think in 1987, people like Roger Ebert were also disappointed because people thought that Kubrick would make a very different, and much more epic, war movie.
Everything from the sniper sequence is great, though.
I would agree that the opening with boot camp is just outstanding, though.
Thanks to Amazon’s Prime Day I signed up for two months of AMC+ for $0.99 per month and it came with Shudder so I was able to watch the new film Mad God. I have no idea what it was I just saw. I don’t even know how to describe it or what the plot (if there was one?) was. A stop-motion film by Phil Tippet with no dialogue, it’s about(??) a figure who descends into the depths of (hell? the underworld? time?) to plant a bomb to explode something. With bizarre nightmarish imagery full of war and grotesque creatures and horrors made up of blood and guts and hair and rust. It’s certainly not like anything else I’ve ever seen.
I saw Thor: Love and Thunder Monday. I feel it has the same problem that Thor: Ragnarok had: a poor fit between the movie and the director. Taika Waititi is brilliant at comedies but he tries to make comedies out of movies that shouldn’t be.
Well, it’s been literally a year since I’ve posted in this thread. Guess I have some catching up to do.
Judas and the Black Messiah (2120) - ★★★★ ½ out of ★★★★★
A Quiet Place, Part II (2021) - ★★★★
Promising Young Woman (2020) - ★★★ ½
The Guilty (2021) - ★★★ ½
One of Us (2017) - ★★★ ½
King Richard (2021) - ★★★★½
The Sparks Brothers (2021) - ★★★★½
The Big Lebowski (1998) - ★★★★★
Christmas in Connecticut (1945) - ★★ ½
CODA (2021) - ★★★★★
The Lost Daughter (2021) - ★★★ ½
The Power of the Dog (2021) - ★★★★
Hairspray (1988) - ★★★★
An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) - ★★★★ ½
Nightmare Alley (2021) - ★★★★ ½
Don’t Look Up (2021) - ★ ½
The Aristocrats (2005) - ★★ ½
A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966) - ★★★★★
Belfast (2021) - ★★★★★
Some Kind of Heaven (2020) - ★★★ ½
Wait For Your Laugh (2017) - ★★★
The Band’s Visit (2008) - ★★★★★
Mean Girls (2004) - ★★★ ½
Our Father (2022) - ★★ ½
The Last Descent (2016) - ★★★ ½
The Bridge (2006) - ★★★ ½
Hard Eight (1996) - ★★★★ ½
Cool Hand Luke (1967) - ★★★★★
The Getaway (1972) - ★★★★½
The Drowning Pool (1975) - ★★ ½
The Last Picture Show (1971) - ★★★★★
Badlands (1973) - ★★★★★
The Girl in the Picture (2022) - ★★
Klute (1971) - ★★★ ½
mmm
This film had its flaws, for sure, but that seems harsh. Can you share your thoughts?
I had fairly high hopes for “Don’t Look Up”, and I admit that my expectations may have interfered a little with my experience.
That said, I thought it felt slapped together. The all star cast seemed to have been assembled rather than curated. They were acting so hard, with so much effort and strain, that it all felt manufactured to me. They seemed smug and condescending, and not at all funny. Everyone just seemed to be trying too hard, and it showed. It also went on way too long.
I actively disliked this movie. Thinking about it now, maybe I should remove that half star 
mmm
I’m not MMM, but I gave up on Dont Look Up after 20 min – so, my comments are based on incomplete info and a faded memory.
The film’s concept seemed to be that a problem in worldwide survival was treated (by politicians and influencers) as a public relations issue and a political football. The film wasn’t funny and it wasn’t insightful, but seemed to think it was an insightful black comedy. And (based on 20 minutes) most of the characters and situations were cardboard, so the question of whether the earth would be saved or destroyed was going to be an arbitrary decision. I didn’t care how it was resolved.
The (20 minutes) felt like recycled current events. I’d been through 2 years of idiots politicizing vaccinations and the world-wide plague. The jokes about that stopped being funny long ago. Changing a pandemic to an impact event did not make the rotten fruit edible.
Thor Love and Thunder
Color me surprised. I kind of loved it and found the whole movie really great. I’m kind of surprised at some of the negativity towards it, though it is much zanier and goofier than some people want their Marvel movies to be. It is not as good as Thor Ragnarok, but I still really enjoyed this movie.
Very entertaining and much, much better than Doctor Strange 2, which I liked but did not think was all that great.
The Magnificent Seven Grit Tv.
I’ve only watched it 3 times throughout my life. It’s certainly a great cast and the performances are memorable.
I get exasperated at the extreme cowardice and betrayal by the town. It made sense in the beginning when there were no experienced men to help. No one expected the farmers to fast draw in the middle of the street. Shooting rifles from cover wasn’t asking that much to support the trained men they hired.
I know it’s just a movie. No one really died. I highly recommend the Magnificent Seven. It’s one of the best cast Westerns ever made.
Shout out to Eli Wallace. I’m always amazed that a soft spoken, highly literate, Jewish stage actor and founding member of The Actors Studio could play violent Mexican bandits. Calvera and Tuco were so brilliantly portrayed. These men were genuinely savage killers.
And it all starts out with one of the greatest, most rousing, most memorable main title theme songs in motion picture history.
Brilliant casting all around. Like you, I love that film.
It says a lot that the towns fear and unwillingness to fight still gets a strong reaction from me. Eliciting emotion is one of the goals of great art. The kind of emotion varies and doesn’t really matter. Everyone will react to The Magnificent Seven in their own way.
The soundtrack is very good.
Couldn’t sleep a few nights ago and watched The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. TCM
Jesus Christ. What a mess. Is that the shit that passed for entertainment in the 70’s? An obvious try to rip-off the sucess of Butch Cassidy, but just such a piece of shit, from start to finish.
Damn, Paul? Were you high as a kite to take that junk? How hard up do you have to be to make that shit?
Glad you got past that and made salad dressing for charity.
Overture (From “The Magnificent Seven”):
Interesting post from one YouTuber:
“I’ve taught in China for three years now. At the high school where I taught in Guangzhou and here in Xiamen, this is what they play for the graduation ceremony!”
I have the same reaction to “High Noon.” While acknowledging a tremendous debt to Will Kane for bringing law and order and peace to their town, when the chips are down and he needs their help, they turn tail and run, and tell him to do the same. John Wayne famously hated “High Noon,” but for the wrong reason. He thought that showing how cowardly people can be was somehow un-American.
And by the way, that’s another movie with a great theme song.
Which is why he and Howard Hawks made Rio Bravo with basically the same plot
I really like that movie 
. It’s not high art to be sure, but I find it entertaining. Very loosely based on a real person (who’s actual life was purportedly even more colorful, though digging out of a prison with two knives hidden in tamales and surviving an extrajudicial hanging after the rope stretched and his girlfriend cut him down sound suspiciously too good to be true 
).
Saw Cop Car (2015) on UK TV. It stars Kevin Bacon as a corrupt Sheriff who has his police car stolen by a couple of young boys.
I’d never heard of the film before but it had generally positive reviews so I was hoping I had stumbled on a low budget, low profile gem. I was disappointed.
Too much plot was missing (probably due to the low budget) and while films like Duel or The Hitcher work with almost no narrative… This one needed more fleshing out. Also the tone was off. Too much not very funny comedy elements undermined the ultimately serious drama.
Plus in the end the script needed more polishing. For example the kids ‘didn’t know how to drive’ yet ALWAYS had just enough driving ability to keep the film going. To be honest they should have either pared it down to a pure chase movie or beefed up the script to a fully realised drama.
TL:DR Idea had potential but, for me, didn’t deliver.
TCMF-2L
The Black Phone
Ethan Hawke in the villain role in this movie about kids in a local town being abducted. I was hoping for more from this movie, but it was decently entertaining. I was at no point particularly scared or on the edge of my seat, though, and this is supposed to be a pretty intense movie.
Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours, but nothing that will stick with me or make any top 10 lists.
Mrs. solost rented Morbius for free from the library-- she likes Jared Leto, even after the Joker fiasco. At first I declined to watch with her since I heard how bad it was, but she didn’t want to watch alone, so I relented and we watched last night.
What an absolute pile of steaming guano. I won’t get into the plot much, because who cares, but I knew from the opening scene, when Morbius got a copter to take him to a vampire bat cave in Costa Rica, that it would be beyond stupid. They make a big deal out of how dangerous the bats are and how you don’t want to be around there at night. Near the entrance to the cave there’s a large dead animal and one of the crew says “those bats can take out an animal much larger than them”. No they can’t! They’re not piranhas! Yes, I know even the fearsome rep piranhas have is way overrated.
Then Dr. Morbius, who has an unspecified blood disease and has devoted his life to a cure, (slight spoiler?) figures out a way to combine vampire bat genes with human genes, to somehow cure his disease. And of course it gives him the powers of a vampire bat. Like, being able to move and jump at super speed, so fast he can avoid bullets. Y’know, like a bat. When he moves, he trails some sort of weird smoky … vapor trail? Afterimage? Y’know, like a bat. Echolocation. Like a … well. And the ability to project some sort of sonic energy wave pulse or some shit. He even figures out he can actually fly. Even though, I think bats fly because they have wings, right? The bat genes didn’t change him enough to actually give him wings. He also gets super strong, like breaking down secure metal doors Hulk strong. I didn’t know vampire bats were that strong!
Of course, there are minor drawbacks to his new powers, like an overwhelming urge to drink blood. Fortunately, he had invented artificial blood, which helps for awhile but the benefit is wearing off, and eventually he’ll have to switch to good ol’ authentic red human krovvy. And when he goes into full vamp mode, his face becomes demonic bat-like looking, then morphs back to his normal Leto cuteness. I’m ranting here because I had to bite my tongue while watching this, because Mrs. solost, a bit defensive since she picked the movie, was all like "hey, it’s a superhero movie. Are Spiderman’s powers realistic? Fair point, but at least Spidey’s powers, while not realistic, are at least in a superhero universe in the ballpark of not being stupidly unbelievable.
