Lots of them. Especially Cronenberg
Videodrome
EXistenZ
Re-animator
I’ll See You in My Dreams, 1951.
Danny Thomas treats Doris Day like shit for years, but at the end says he loves her, so yay? He also has a very boring career as a songwriter. Skip unless you want to see Doris perform in blackface for some reason.
Heh, I was watching Le Bete Humaine on the dvr, and I’ll See You in My Dreams was playing on the TV when I stopped the movie. Doris Day may be a very nice person, and a dog lover, but her acting makes my teeth itch.
Le Bete Humaine was based on a Zola novel, and it was pretty clear up front how it would end. Gorgeous cinematography (black and white), and lots of train details – which I also found interesting (a surprise for me!). Apparently, Renoir wanted it all as accurate as possible and actually had Jean Gabin drive the train from Le Havre to Paris – under strict supervision. As I said, it was lovely to look at. One scene was with Gabin’s elderly godmother dressed in old fashioned clothes (old fashioned for 1938) asleep in a chair in the garden. It looked just like one of his father’s paintings.
And I think Jean Gabin looks like a Gallic Kenneth Branagh.
Yes, she always comes off very motherly to me, but she was my husband’s first crush.
Aaaawww.
I watched it the other day and thought that it was well crafted and well acted but taken collectively was meh. It’s really Stepford Wifes mixed with The Matrix, Eternal Sunshine, and really any “your world is actually VR” movie. There were a lot of things that kind of didn’t make sense or tie together for me. Why did she see a plane crash other than to draw her attention to the exit gate? Why did Styles character get so “murdery” so quickly? And the weirdness kind of went on too long. .
Underwater on Hulu. Sort of like “Abyss”, but not as entertaining. Monsters instead of aliens.
This started off intriguing but went downhill quickly. Honestly, one of the worst parts was the decision to bring in the Cthulhu mythos. It’s so, so tired.
I finally saw The Long Kiss Goodnight with Geena Davis & Samuel A. Jackson. Not sure how I missed this one, but I thought it was a decent shoot-'em-up.
Tripler
I thought I was up on my action movies.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in theaters. Although I enjoyed it, it really did go on too long. It was nice that they devoted a substantial part of the film as a tribute to Chadwick Boseman even if it was covered as being for T’Challa. The emotions felt real since the actors themselves were mourning someone they knew. The character that most stood out to me in this film was Angela Basset as Ramonda who commanded the screen whenever she was in it.
This is one of my favorite actions movies, with lots of quips and callbacks, it is also funny to me that actor Brian Cox is both in this and the Bourne Identity which deal with a similar plot premise.
//i\\
“Chefs do that.”
Yes, one of my favorite lines.
//i\\
And the wonderful thing is, unless you’ve seen the movie, it’s jawdroppingly banal. Not your usual action movie quip, like:
Life is pain. Get used to it. (spoken to her 8-year old daughter)
Tell anyone you saw me, I’ll blow your fucking head off. (spoken as an aside to one of her daughter’s classmates)
I saw Black Adam yesterday. Black Adam was a Captain Marvel character who had, I think, a single appearance in the Golden Age and was done in, ignominiously, by Uncle Marvel (A Captain Marvel family member who wasn’t introduced in the recent DCU movie, and, Shazam willing, never will be).
I hadn’t realized that they’d resurrected the character in the Bronze Age and continued him to the present. I still wouldn’t have seen it, except that the trailers showed that they also brought back Hawkman and Dr. Fate, along with two newer superheroes. DR. Fate and Hawkman, as member of the Justice Siciety (as they are in the movie) were big in the Golden Age and brought back in the Silver Age, so I was pretty familiar with them.
To my surprise, I liked it. Dwayne Johnson was good and convincing as Black Adam. Peirce Brosnan was great as an aging Dr. Fate (a Sorceror who long preceded Marvel’s Dr. Strange). Aldis Hodge did a great job as Hawkman, who doesn’t seem to exactly coincide with any of the comic book versions of the character (I’ve read both the Golden Age and Silver Age Hawkman comics recently, and he doesn’t seem to be exactly any of the more recent incarnations. He doesn’t really seem to be the Silver Age one at all. With his big extensive estate and expensive equipment, he’s more like a juiced Bruce Wayne, in fact. But he’s cool. The two newer characters – Cyclone and Atom Smasher – are so recent that I’m unfamiliar with them. Atom Smasher seems to have lifted his teenager-superhero-just-starting-out persona from Tom Holland’s Spiderman (whose costume his resembles too much). Cyclone, at least, doesn’t feel like a copy.
Not great, but better than a lot of the DCU movies.
Last night we had to watch Transformers : The last knight
As baffling and incoherent as dark of the moon, and way too long. Some minor amusing moments though.
Thankfully we are at the end of watching the transformers movies , and now have season 3 of Cup head to look forward to, before we return to the X men franchise in chronological order with Dark Phoenix up next.
I’ve read one theory that the plane was a test to see how rogue Alice had gone / was willing to go. Another is that Alice saw the toy plane that Margaret had and she (Alice) created it. Good question; I’m not really sure what I think.
As for why HS got “murdery”, do you mean when he started crushing Alice? I think that was just him freaking out that his “perfect world” was coming apart and he didn’t mean to kill her.
+1 on the Riddick series. Fun, atmospheric SF.
They are making a fourth one once Vin is done with Fast 11, the crap series he ended up being in.
As opposed to the other, less crap series he’s in where he gets paid for saying “I am Groot” 147 times. Holiday Special out soon, yo!
Also: I watched Is That Black Enough For You? on Netflix over the weekend, and frankly I’ve ended up at odds with the critics’ reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. They universally loved it; I thought it was a hot mess.
< rant >
Elvis Mitchell presents a history of black cinema - actors, directors, producers and so forth - but he’s done it without any clear narrative thread or themes (other than “Here’s a lot of stuff you probably don’t know about black cinema”), it jumps around chronologically, there are no segues to speak of, the interviews add far less to the movie than they really should given the people he spoke to, and in general it just comes across as presenting us with a lot of information about black cinema without explaining why we should care about it (which - to be clear - I agree that we should). Occasionally Mitchell declares that some film or technique is “important” but then rushes off to the next thing without making a case for why it’s important, although he does take the time to complain about Rocky and The Wiz out of the blue.
Were this a student’s academic paper (and I’ve seen many of them), it’d be a clearcut case of failing to have a clear thesis statement at the beginning to define the focus of the paper and thus ending up with a meandering infodump. More unkindly but nonetheless aptly, it felt like being in the room with a preschooler who keeps handing you one toy after another to hold. We can see that what we’re being given is something that is important to the other person and that they want to show off, but they keep running off to get the next thing before you can talk about the thing you’ve just been given, and at the end you’re just buried under a pile of stuff and exhausted and frustrated by the whole experience.
Worst of all, Mitchell ends up achieving the opposite of what he intended – he presents a lot of information that ought to be considered important, and turns it into nothing but trivia. Which is why I’m so pissed off about it.
< /rant >
Bones and All
A tale of cannibalistic romance that could easily be campy or a gore fest, but turns out to be a touching and tragic, mostly due to the central performances of Taylor Russel and Timothée Chalamet. It probes the nature of horror monsters and what it would be like to live life as one. I can see why it received so much notice on the festival circuit.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Definitely not your Disney version, though it has some of the broad strokes (carnival, whale). Set in World War II Italy, this stop-motion version injects a bittersweet flavor to the familiar tale, not an unexpected approach from Del Toro. Look for it in the Animation nominations come Oscar time (and, yes, it is nomination worthy).