On DVD, I recently watched S1MONE, starring Al Pacino and Rachel Roberts. Al Pacino stars as movie director Viktor Taransky, who “inherits” computer program S1MONE, and convincing people she’s a real person turns her into an international superstar. Things get complicated when people demand to see S1MONE “in person”.
Let’s just say I had to look up “Van Morrison” just to see who that is.
A total asshole of a human being, but what a singing/songwriting talent!
Jungle, on Amazon Prime. Starring Daniel Radcliffe doing a credible job as the real-life Yossi Ghinsberg, who survived an ordeal alone in the Bolivian jungle. Based on his book.
How’d you like it?
I thought it was a bit strained, but Radcliffe did a good job of not being Harry Potter, and it was watchable, but not riveting. He was willing to wallow in the muck and look as scruffy as one would expect after being lost in a jungle for a length of time. Except he never seemed to sweat. I read the book some time ago and it stuck fairly close to that.
Amazon Prime. Freebie
In the Electric Mist, Tommy Lee Jones, Ned Beatty, John Goodman, Mary Steenburgen!!
Great Cast
My family is from Central Louisiana. I’ve never seen a film capture the culture and lifestyle so accurately. Filmed in New Iberia, Louisiana and Catahoula, Louisiana.
Tommy Lee Jones is an alcoholic,aging detective. Doesn’t drink and goes to AA meetings regularly.
He’s trying to solve the brutual murder of several local women. He also has a cold case of a Black man from 1965 that is killed while on the run from jail. His body is found deep in the swamps.
Great movie. A bit slow paced but that reflects southern culture.
There’s a Trailer video
James Lee Burke’s books are hit or miss, but I’m glad to hear that the adaptation of In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead pays off, since it’s (IMO) his best book. I’ll have to look out for this film.
I read the book, but didn’t know they’d made a movie. I’ll have to check it out. It’s the only one of Burke’s books I’ve read. I liked it well enough, but guess it wasn’t enough to hook me.
John Goodman plays a very nasty bad guy. Similar accent and attitude that he used in The Big Easy.
I needed a “pass the time” movie so I dialed up Kevin Hart’s latest vehicle Me Time. Apparently The Rock wasn’t available so they roped in Marky Mark to fill in as the muscular antagonist / buddy who is the catalyst for a bunch of ridiculous situations laden with funny riffs and classic Keven Hart timing all wrapped up in a happy ending you could see coming from a mile away.
You might think I’ve just described about three other Kevin Hart movies, and I think I have, so if you liked those, you can sit through this one.
I recently watched on DVD The Abominable Dr. Phibes, starring Vincent Price, from 1971.
Alfie (1966) This put Michael Caine on the map, and man is he a right good-looking bloke. You start off liking him (how could you not? He often looks at the camera and addresses you personally), by the end you think, Blimey he’s a bounder. Of course this film has dated badly, and the women in it with one exception are played as sad and lonely and desperate for attention, begging to be used by Alfie, so when in the end Alfie himself gets Alfied that’s only just. What’s it all about then?
Sound Barrier a 1952 David Lean picture about test pilots and the women they love, has a lot of padding but it really ups the ante in the second half. Apparently no one really knew whether it was even possible to pilot a jet past the speed of sound until someone actually did it - success involved One Weird Trick that may surprise you! They don’t actually explain why this worked though.
Hoot
My students(I’m an English teacher) will be reading Hoot this coming school year and I thought I’d check out the movie to see if it is worth showing after we read it. It’s a cute movie, but almost too cute and it cuts out a lot of the serious aspects of the book.
I’ll show it to my students, but I think they caught the story without capturing the feel of the book.
Berlin Correspondent with Dana Andrews from 1941. This was low budget, and it showed. The “Nazi concentration camp” was obviously leftover from Western cowboy movies. Log cabinish guard towers? Even the entrance to the camp looked like something from F Troop. But it was fast moving and well acted. Kept my interest. Oh, and the stamp shop where Dana Andrews’ character goes is owned by Hans Gruber.
Watching Jurassic World :Dominion
Extended! With extra stupid!
How stupid. Two people crash a plane into a body of water covered in ice. Of course, there is a dinosaur. One with feathers and that can swim. Chris Pine falls into the freezing water, narrowly escapes the dinowhatever by being pulled back on the ice. But you cannot see his breath, nor that of the person that pulled him out. It looks like he is not even chilly.
Hopefully, the franchise is now extinct.
I’d vaguely heard about Sucker Punch but am not a Snyder fanboy and thus had ignored all the chatter, but this came up as a streaming option and I was in a suitable frame of mind, so gave it a go.
Holy cow, that was totally a thing. It’s kind of like what you would get if Quentin Tarantino had made Inception (except that Tarantino would have played Blue instead of the excellent Oscar Isaac, which would have ruined everything). Some of the plot was completely predictable, some of the plot was completely unpredictable, but pretty much all of it was fun to look at. Emily Browning was her usual tough girl self kicking ass, but weirdly this somehow came across as less exploitative than most waif-fu fare (which is also an indication that it’s not a Tarantino film).
I honestly don’t know if I’d recommend this to others, but I enjoyed watching it.
He had a hilarious cameo in Stardust. It’s fresh in my mind because I just recently rewatched it.
De Niro has a pretty good time keeping things light in Wag The Dog: he’s cynical, sure, but (a) it’s a breezy kind of cynical, and (b) he’s so cynical that it almost comes across as amiable positivity.
I said almost.
Watched Seven Psychopaths today. What a stupid, pointless waste of talent and time. Whole bunch of great actors and this piece of crap is what they came up with? It’s like whatever child wrote this just learned the word ‘psychopath’ and repeats it over and over. Dumb plot, if there is any one at all, disjointed and scattered all over the screen like explosive diarrhea in a bus-station toilet stall. It is really, really stupid and redundant. How many times is lighting someone on fire, then shooting them interesting? Someone drank too much Tarantino’s Kool-Aid.
Lame.