It absolutely is a comedy, just jet black.
Watched this on Saturday night. Pretty enjoyable. Holds up well as a murder mystery 91 years later.
Ha! He might even have been playing the same dude.
I love that movie and have seen it several times. Agreed as to what everyone’s already said about De Niro’s comedies, and it’s a career-best for Grodin, too, I think (along with Heaven Can Wait and Dave, in both of which he’s playing essentially the same character - funny, but a very narrow range).
As to “no actual cop” - what was Yaphet Kotto, chopped liver?
My hands-down favorite scene from Midnight Run: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rofWLjPm8zY.
De Niro’s little frown and headshake after making his threat, reassuring Grodin, are freakin’ comedy gold.
My favorite scene is a little moment that’s almost off-screen. They’re at the house of deNiro’s ex, and her little boy goes over to Charles Grodin as de Niro and wife are talking
Kid: Are you really a criminal? You don’t look like one.
Grodin: I’m a white-collar criminal.
Gawd, I haven’t seen that movie in ages. Now, I gotta watch it again.
A memorable line from Midnight Run if I’m remembering correctly: DeNiro to Grodin “I have 2 words for you: shut the fuck up.”
Clint Eastwood day on TCM
I watched The Gauntlet. I mistakenly thought this was a Dirty Harry movie. No, its not Harry, but might have well as been. I soon came to the conclusion this was some sort of Avent Gard Comedy that I just didn’t get. This was confirmed by the disclaimer at the end of the film:
“Law enforcement procedures depicted in this film do not necessarily represent those of any law enforcement agency mentioned herein”
No kidding?
Up next was Where Eagles Dare. I’ve seen this before, in parts. You can’t follow this mess with a GPS and a Seeing Eye Dog. Tip: watch the opening credits with the plane flying around and the troops ready to jump. Go directly to sleep and wake up a couple hours later to see the same plane flying the survivors home. You’ll get just about as much out of it, and a nice nap as a bonus! Jezus, what a disaster of a movie.
I missed it when I watched it. Great move, perfect.
If you sleep through the bulk of the movie you will miss Mary Ure ! And she is not worth missing !
I love this movie, but I have to admit it took watching it maybe 3 times to really understand what was going on. To this day, I still use “Broadsword calling Danny Boy” to hail a friend on Slack !
The setting (castle) is amazing, and any movie where Clint gets the use of 1) a machine gun, and 2) explosives can’t be all that bad (certainly better than “The Gauntlet”, which was just a waste).
Belle. The true story of a mixed race daughter raised by her father’s aristocratic family. Nicely acted and beautiful, if a tiny bit self-congratulatory.
And a Nazi helicopter swooping among the mountains!
On DVD I recently watched “Coraline”, a feature in stop-motion animation. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit.
I’m trying to find the movie called Belle that is an animated movie by Mamoru Hosoda, but I presume this is not it.
Probably this:
I saw Belle when it was in the theaters. It was good enough as a period drama.
I re-watched Raging Bull (1980): “The life of boxer Jake LaMotta, whose violence and temper that led him to the top in the ring destroyed his life outside of it.”
It was as good as I remembered it. De Niro and Pesci perform a masterclass in acting. I’m glad Scorsese shot it in black & white (except for the home movie sequence)—it added to the drama and period authenticity. Shooting the fight scenes with a single camera inside the ring was also brilliant, as was shooting the later fights in a ring 4x larger than normal to demonstrate LaMotta’s growing insignificance and desperation. Scorsese studied Psycho’s shower sequence in cutting his final fight against Sugar Ray Robinson.
LaMatta trained De Niro to box and said he had what it takes to go pro. He fought 3 amateur bouts and won 2 of them. Then he gained 60lbs to play the aging fighter.
Great movie!
Saw this last night and totally agree. I mean, Hanks is a great actor and he does a lot with the role, but it just feels like an odd casting choice. Plus you spend a lot of time going “Man, look at all that latex!”. Butler does indeed kill it and the rest of the cast is pretty damn good too.
Less in agreement here - it all just seemed too much for the first hour or so of the film, where we’re given time skips all over the place and multiple songs playing at once and so forth in one big twitchy melange in usual Luhrmanesque fashion. If you didn’t have ADHD when you came into the cinema you might have it by the time you leave. I’m not say it’s bad as such, but it does seem unnecessarily excessive. The second half of the film reins it in a bit more, to good effect.
I don’t know if overall this is my favorite musical biopic, but Austin Butler definitely gets my best star-of-musical-biopic vote.
(Also, it’s quite long - 2h40m IIRC.)
I do agree that he was terrific and I very much enjoyed the film, but for me Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles still tops the list, he was uncanny.
I’m not a Luhrman fan. Just a partial viewing of Moulin Rouge nearly gave me a seizure.
Just watched Free Guy. I’m not a gamer, and I avoided watching it for a while. In the very beginning, I was thinking “what a crappy video game.” About three minutes later, I was “oh, it’s supposed to be bad.” I ended up really liking the film. Clever.
I also hated Moulin Rouge. Frantic and annoying.