Vanessa Redgrave, though you are forgiven for confusing them.
Worth revisiting despite it not having aged well.
Vanessa Redgrave, though you are forgiven for confusing them.
Worth revisiting despite it not having aged well.
As I said it’s been a long time, but thanks!
Ridiculously obscure, Oriental Evil, a.k.a. The Invisible Mr. Unmei, was not very good, but it was interesting on three counts:
It was shot by a cut-rate American film company in 1951 Tokyo. Much of the (supporting) cast and crew were Japanese.
The supernatural vibe was authentically eerie. Metaphysical conceit Mr. Unmei is Fate, who only appears to people who are doomed to die. He works with a homeless dude (“The Beggar of Fate”) who picks up all discarded cigarettes, except those he is told to avoid by Mr. Unmei. The person who had been smoking that cigarette will soon die.
Although Martha Hyer (the director’s wife) is top-billed, she has a rather thankless role and the film actually belongs to Byron Michie, a Brit. Never heard of him? Me neither. He’s only in two movies, both set in Japan. Mr. Michie made a memorable impression in this one on account of his height. He’s quite a bit taller than anyone else in the film; shots of him in his way-too-small-for-comfort Japanese home look very awkward. I thought his hair gave an excellent performance as well.
Notwithstanding a couple sequences with mild visual flair, this was a routine and predictable low-budget mystery that could remain largely unknown for all time without any significant loss to cinema.
Pitch Black
My wife own the Riddick trilogy(soon to have a fourth movie maybe?) on Blu-ray and we love them. There are people who will remember Vin Diesel as that “guy from the Fast and Furious movies”, but he will always be Riddick to me.
Pitch Black holds up and I stand by what I said 21 years ago.
I thought that Riddick was better, with the best “here’s how you are going to die” scene ever filmed.
But, Pitch Black was enjoyable.
I’d agree and rank them like this:
I was glad to see Riddick in the theater. I do think they will make Riddick 4 in the next couple years, once Diesel gets Fast and Furious all behind him.
I clicked on my little portrait and filtered out for my posts in this thread, and I there are at least 5 films I would have sworn I have never seen… yet my reviews are right there!
Downton Abbey: A New Era
The most horribly written franchise of the century and I can’t help but watch every installment. Julian Fellowes is my Ed Wood. It’s so bad it’s good. My favorite part is where superannuated aristocrats and their barely educated servants show Hollywood how to make movies.
Pistols at dawn, sir! How dare you disrespect the Crawleys like that? Are you saying the man who kept on giving MAGGIE SMITH old lovers might have not been perfectly attuned to what the audience wanted, namely, a pillow fight between Lady Edith, Lady Mary, and Anna?
This was such slight entertainment that it hardly qualifies as a real motion-picture that was released in theaters. The plot is so contrived and transparent. Nothing happened that you couldn’t predict happening well in advance. Of course, it’s strictly for those who enjoyed the series, and we number among them, so it was worth a couple of hours of our time on a Saturday evening. However, I did shed a tear when one of the main characters shuffled off their mortal coil.
Watched Jordan Peele’s Nope and Thor: Love and Thunder recently
Peele is a helluva filmmaker, but , as with M. Night Shyamalan, I loved his first movie and, not so much his later ones. I liked Nope better than Us, though. Intriguing set-up and ideas but
1.)Wouldn’t Jupe’s audiences from his earlier performances have kind of broadcast the news about a UFO on the loose?
2.) I find it hard to imagine Mad having a cover based on a TV tragedy like that. I know Peele’s paying tribute to his big break via Mad TV, but it doesn’t really “work”
That said, I realize it’s hard to make all the pieces fit when you’re trying to do so many things on multiple levels at the same time.
As for Thor, my wife’s comment during the film said it all. “Thor wasn’t this goofy in the comics, was he?” Still, a fun ride.
I saw To Kill a Mockingbird today at the local Regal Cinema for the movie’s 60th anniversary.
It’s my favorite movie of all time, hands down. I was a bit too young to have seen it on the big screen when it came out, given its controversial subject of rape. But I’ve been enthralled by it since I first saw it on TV in the '60s as a child.
The musical score by Elmer Bernstein (with the piano performed by John Williams), was still haunting. The acting performances were still perfect.
I’m still floating on air.
Our youngest is making us watch the Transformers movies in chronological order. We just sat through Transformers: Dark of the moon.
The title is as inexplicable as the plot or anything, but Rosie Alice Huntington-Whiteley has mad ‘running in high heels’.
TL&T only works for me if we’re supposed to view the events as through the eyes of an unreliable narrator: Korg. Then it all makes sense - what we see isn’t how everything happened; it’s just Korg’s goofy worldview skewing it.
Does Werewolf by Night count as a film? Because I saw that. A brilliant mix of comic book sensibility, film noir aesthetic and tongue-in-cheek humor. Don’t want to spoil the monster if you haven’t seen it, but I was highly amused by the appearance of Man-Thing, whose name really is Ted. Definitely worth watching if you’ve got Disney+.
Completely forgot to mention that I saw Black Panther: Wakanda Forever over the weekend. You’d think I’d have remembered that.
Overall impression: really quite good - it’s about half character development and half “people fighting in, on and under water”, but it manages to work in a few nice tributes to Chadwick Boseman and to move Shuri front and center for a while. It’s a film almost entirely driven by women apart from Namor (although there’s a decent amount of M’Baku, which reminds me - holy crap, standing next to the tiny Letitia Wright, Winston Duke looks ENORMOUS).
Downsides are the usual “If you two had just talked like sensible adults for two minutes you could have saved a lot of bloodshed” thing that the first BP film had (and yes, I know - then there wouldn’t be a film), some stupid strategic choices for fighting, yet another child tech wiz (roll on, Ironheart), and a criminally underused Martin Freeman.
There’s a big mid-credits scene but apparently no end credits scene, so don’t wait around.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: I didn’t know Namor was in it. You mean THAT Namor, the Submariner?
Crap. Sorry if that’s a spoiler - he’s on the poster and all.
Insta ruling: if it’s on the poster, it’s not a spoiler.
Agreed.
I recently saw the touring company of the Aaron Sorkin TKAM stage play, which was very good. Mary Badham, who played Scout in the movie, plays mean ol’ racist Mrs. Dubose, and she again nails her part.
I feel like he was. I mean Jason Aaron’s run, which included Jane Foster’s storyline, had a frog Thor. I haven’t read a bunch of Thor comics, but the ones I have read seem pretty silly to me. I wasn’t really interested in it until The Mighty Thor came out and my husband said, “You’ve gotta read this!”
Once I realized you weren’t supposed to take any of it seriously, I really enjoyed it.