Hey, so this was a big surprise for me. I really liked this movie. However, it reminded me so much of It Follows, it was kind of distracting. Still, this is a very well made movie and I was completely gripped, especially the final 20 minutes or so. Man, what an ending. A really great buildup and thankfully, this movie really nails the ending.
I’d recommend going in blind. It’s scary, but hardly horrific or traumatizing like some movies go for.
This month, we got Pearl, Smile, Barbarian, Terrifier 2, Halloween Ends, and the reboot Hellraiser. All were very profesionally made, so I thought I’d rank them.
Pearl
Barbarian
Smile
Halloween Ends <–don’t expect a standard Halloween movie
Terrifier 2
Hellraiser - the only really bad one of the bunch
I’d strongly recommend Peral, Barbarian, and Smile.
Halloween Ends was as bold as the Halloween franchise would ever allow itself to get, but isn’t really amazing. Terrifier 2 is way overlong and extremely violent, but impressive as a small budget horror movie can be.
Hellraiser was boring. Total skip.
So that’s my “October Horror” overview for 2022. I probably missed some movie released that was significant.
I saw a Danny Kaye movie in the guide for TCM that I’d never seen, so I dvr’d it. Merry Andrew and it was lame. Hate to say it, because I’m generally a DK fan. But this movie was the wrong fit for him. He played a classics teacher at a British boarding school, and he was supposed to be British as well. It was so obviously California not England, and Pier Angeli is pretty, also pretty bland. Big nope.
For me the most interesting thing about this movie is that the last few minutes are almost directly quoted from the novel by Dashiell Hammett (of the same name). You can see those few minutes on these two videos. I consider it to be an astonishingly good scene. You can stream the movie in various places, like on YouTube, and I don’t know which would be the cheapest to do that:
Remarque’s novel is so much better than any film adaptation can be. The inner monologue is too essential to the message. I will give this latest effort props for the crater scene with the dying French soldier. Not up to the scene in the book, but still very powerful. Too much time was devoted to armistice discussions. The fact that it took nearly two and a half hours to relate only about half of the 200 pages in the book shows just how difficult it is to adapt it to film.
I just finished watching Weird: the Al Yankovic Story, and I absolutely loved it. Much like how Al parodies well-known songs, this biopic parodies the conventional biopics and their tropes.
Standouts include Toby Huss as Al’s dad, and Daniel Radcliffe as Al himself. And it was fantastic to see Evan Rachel Wood playing Madonna. She’s got some great comedy chops.
It’s fairly short at less than two hours, and has several laugh-out-loud moments.
I watched Top Gun Maverick. I found it far more entertaining than it deserved to be. The mission around which the plot was centralized made literally no sense. But like Maverick himself, I think it works as the sort of modern take on the ridiculous over the top “put a dysfunctional team together for one desperate shot to save the world” Macho Grande quasi-suicide missions that were popular movie tropes back in the day. Except that now Pete “Maverick” Mitchel also has superpowers where he can “will” aircraft to perform beyond their design specifications.
Also I didn’t see the big deal about Maverick being “stuck” at captain most of his career. A Navy captain is equivalent to a colonel in the Army or Marines and seems a fitting level for someone who would rather fly aircraft than a desk.
The rank of Navy Captain is a respectable goal for most career officers, especially given that advancement to the Admiral grades is very limited.
For me, we watched See How They Run on HBO. It’s a British murder mystery/comedy that doesn’t really work in either instance. There were a few chuckles, but it’s mostly a waste of time.
I saw Weird: The Al Yankovic Story last night. I’m sorry to say it wasn’t very good. The best part was picking out the famous actors, identifying the famous characters, and the end credits featuring actual photos of Al. And of course, the man himself played a character in the movie. I can only remember one line that got a laugh out of us. “Dude. I’ve got chills!”
I’m glad I got to see it though…I don’t mind thinking about Weird Al for a couple of hours. I do it every Friday night anyway.
I just saw Future '38. It purports to be a recently-rediscovered film from 1938 about someone time travelling to the far-off future of 2018. In the days leading up to World War II, scientists discover the powerful Formica atom. It grows more potent with time, so the War Department locks it in a vault, and sends stalwart hero Jack Essex 80 years into the future to bring it back so they can build a bomb that will dissuade Hitler from starting the war.
It’s a strange mix of '30s screwball slang, romance, and half-right predictions of the future. People have smart phones, but they still have to talk to an operator to place calls. There’s an all-encompassing computer network called the electro-mesh, but it prints answers on tickertape.
It was obviously done on a shoestring budget, but its heart is in the right place. There are a few recognizable actors, and Neil deGrasse Tyson does the intro.
Um, uh, but look it up before you decide to spend the rest of your life digging through all the film repositories of the world to see if there’s any other copies that got stored at the bottom of a pile and forgotten about for many decades.
I finally got around to watching Ridley Scott’s version (prequel, if you will) of Robin Hood. I’m not sure why it’s rated so low, although I suspect a lot of people expected the standard Howard Pyle story, which this definitely was not. I’m not a fan of Cate Blanchett, but everyone did a decent job.
Better than the first one and a really fun movie that is safe for the whole family. I kind of loved it at times. I hope that they keep making these and maybe even create a TV show of it after Stranger Things is done filming.
Henry Cavill was actually in this movie significantly, so they obviously opened their pocketbooks enough to get him to commit.
A very fun movie and worth your time, even if you don’t have kids to watch it with.
It’s better than A Fish Called Wanda and I’ve always said so. The best Kevin Kline performance ever and he legit could have won another Oscar for his performance in this movie.
I watched See How They Run last night. I thought I had it figured out early on, but I did not. Anyway, it seems like that if you have seen The Mousetrap, you might get more out of it than I did. But it was a fun film, and the two leads especially (Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell) made it compelling.
They Live by Night. Nicholas Ray’s first movie as director. 1947 with Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell. Good noir. Based on a book called Thieves like Us, and I wondered if it was also the inspiration for Robert Altman’s film. Turns out the book was. He didn’t know it had been done as a movie before.
If you like noir, and don’t mind rather downer endings, you’ll like it.
