I’m working my way through the John Grisham legal suspense movies. Going in order… So far I’ve watched The Firm, Pelican Brief, The Client and A Time to Kill.
My favorite is The Pelican Brief. Great performances by Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. I’ve seen several times and still enjoy it.
I intensely disliked The Client. Susan Sarandon was excellent. The kid was intensely annoying. Everyone was telling him he would be safe after testifying. But no, he has to drag Susan to New Orleans to dig up the corpse himself. Tommy Lee Jones talents were wasted. He had very little to do. He makes the most out of a ambitious prosecutor that wants to run for governor.
I’ll continue renting through Amazon Prime. Grisham inspired a lot of movies. I like the genre.
I liked The Client. I barely remember The Pelican Brief, but I remember liking it. My favorite is The Rainmaiker. It should be next on your list.
I stopped reading Grisham’s books and watching the movies, because they’re just too similar to me. Every woman “love interest” in the books I read was described almost exactly the same.
Earlier this week I watched the incredibly underrated Let It Ride (1989) with a pilled up Richard Dreyfuss and a recently deceased Robbie Coltraine as the ticket guy - a genius role. Of course, I blame myself for his death.
I also responded to a Twitter quiz about the first movie you ever saw and I answered, Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) - basically, I killed Angela Landsbury too.
The least funny Clerks movie, which is a shame because I think Kevin Smith was really trying with this movie. I like Clerks and was kind of stunned back in 2006 when Clerks 2 was also hilarious. Clerks 3 is not a terrible movie, but it isn’t very funny. I liked what Smith was trying to do by kind of reflecting back on his life and experience, but it’s a shame that this movie isn’t funnier or more entertaining.
If you like Clerks, it is worth a viewing. We have Dante, Randall, Silent Bob and Jay, the whole gang. Tons of cameos from people in previous Clerks movies and many famous cameos as well.
Watch the credits. Kevin Smith actually comes on and talks, audio commentary style, over part of the credits and reflects back on his experience and thanks everyone for watching his movies. It’s nice.
I don’t think we need any more movies with these characters.
This movie is getting negative reviews and a lot of movie-goers are disappointed, but I quite liked the movie. I think that Halloween Kills is the worst of the new trilogy(which, together create a new Halloween 2-4).
Anyway, it looks like movie fans only want movies where Michael Myers kills, kills, kills like a Terminator. This movie introduced, you know, actual other plotlines and I kind of respect what they were going for
I’d recommend watching Halloween(1978), Halloween(2018), Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends. It’s a reasonably solid four-part series of movies. Even Halloween Kills is not as bad as some of the reviews, though it is the worst of the four movies listed here.
Anyway, pretty good. Now, please stop making Halloween movies, unless they are like Season of the Witch, which was very good and unrelated to Michael Myers.
Is this an internally complete cycle, or a grab-bag of good ones? I was about to start going through Halloween movies (I’ve only seen the original), and don’t necessarily want to watch all of them.
Here is what they have done and what they did now:
The original Halloween has a few sequels, mostly bad(though 2 is OK and 3 is unrelated to Michael Myers and is great). There are some moments in those movies, but I would skip ALL of the sequels except Halloween 3(which stands alone).
The new series of recent films wipes out everything after the original, the one you have seen. They take place 40 years after the original Halloween and tell what happened to Jamie Lee Curtis’ character after 1978. So I would suggest watching:
Halloween(1978), Halloween(2018)*, Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends
I would also strongly recommend Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, which has nothing to do with any of the others and is my favorite of any movie that has the name Halloween.
*Yes, it has the same name as the first one. Marketing. It should have been called Halloween Returns, but they didn’t have it in them.
Ok, so I had read a lot of of online trash talk about this movie. How bad it looked and how no one could act etc… I was sure it sucked ass but decided to watch the first half hour or so the other night just to see for myself how terrible it is and…
The internet is straight up wrong on this one. Folks who are critical of the writing and story have most likely never REALLY watched the series but are just aware of it in a pop culture kind of way. It is intentionally supposed to be in “canon” or whatever of the original series, not some reimagining. As such the characters and script are played like an episode of the TV show. Is that good or bad? Well I really did watch a lot of Munsters (both B&W and colorized) with my gramp growing up, every day right after reruns of the Honeymooners, and though I loved the show it doesn’t work for a 90+min movie. The stories just aren’t deep enough and the characters are very one-note with quirks that are funny and played up over and over (Hermans guffaw for example). So with regards to the story it wasn’t good or bad, it was just Munsters. With that said…
This thing was perfectly cast. Anyone who is trashing Sherry Moon Zombie’s performance as Lilly must have zero love for that character because she was dead-on. Her mannerisms, vocal cadence, appearance are all a core part of Lillys character and she knocked it out of the park. Was it campy and overacted? Yes, but that’s exactly what the OG Lily was as well and she nailed it.
Grandpa and the Wolfman was very well done too. Herman was as good as he could be without Fred Gwynne and that’s ok. Looked great and had the guffaw down.
I didn’t finish the movie but made it about an hour in before I went to bed, I probably won’t finish it because Munsters story isn’t made for long format. But anyone who has fondness for the TV series will for this as well because these guys did great. Clearly a passion project and made with alot of care.
ETA: There’s been a lot of bitching about the day glo coloring of the whole movie. The first trailer made it look over the top. I was surprised that it really wasn’t too dstracting in the actual movie and it looked fine.
I had no gripe with the casting, but as far as a full length film in color goes, the original cast and crew did a better job with Munsters Go Home (a childhood favorite of mine) than Rob Zombie did with this one.
We started watching it (The Munsters) but it just didn’t click with us. I looked over at my wife and she looked totally bored, so we gave up after about 20 minutes. We would have stayed with it if anything had actually happened during that 20 minutes.
We caught Lena Dunham’s Catherine, Called Birdy. Breezy story about a 14-year old girl in the 12th century England, fighting arranged marriages to pay her family’s debts (that sounds darker than it really is). It uses modern dialog and music, so don’t expect historic accuracy, but it does teach some history (so that’s what they used before tampons?!). I’m not in the target market for the Young Adult book that its based on, so I hadn’t heard of it before, but I see it was published in 1994. My bad.
A misfire and while it may seem so well made, it has a convoluted and kind of boring plot for most of its run time. I would not be surprised if it is put forward for many awards and even nominated for best foreign-language film at the Oscars, but I thought it was not worth it at all.
The ending will get a lot of attention, but it isn’t worth it. Kind of a snoozefest.
Watched Zero Dark Thirty (2012) on Netflix, about the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden. It was nominated for Best Picture, and Jessica Chastain was nominated for Best Actress. It was very good.
It’s a fictionalized account, but generally believable, and tightly focused. There are no side stories about romance or internal motivations. It presents scenes of extreme interrogation with a blank face, leaving judgement to the viewer. I liked the approach.
Chastain did a fine job in the lead role, but my biggest problem with the film was that she has movie star features, movie star hair, and is movie star slim. And if that’s a movie’s biggest fault I guess it deserves an A grade.
Kinda agreed as to Chastain; her character was a composite of several actual CIA analysts who worked on the bin Laden investigation, wasn’t it?
I liked Zero Dark Thirty very much, although I remember it was somewhat controversial at the time in that it seemed to imply that torture worked as a useful counterterrorism tool. At least one top CIA official firmly denied that torture played any role in giving actionable intel on OBL’s whereabouts.
I’m no expert (just watched the movie, and then read Wikipedia), but probably the main inspiration was Alfreda Bikowsky. She now (post-military retirement) is doing business as a life coach.
There’s a very splashy Rolling Stone article about her, which mentions that her husband was urging Trump to impose martial law after the 2020 election. The article refers to the film as a “jingoist, xenophobic masterpiece”.
Flashback on Amazon Prime. It’s a weird hybrid of a risque, comedic, time traveling romp and a historical survey of women’s rights in France. It pretty much succeeds on both counts and I don’t feel like I was tricked into learning about the history of French women’s liberation at the cost of the comedic content.
