Easily his worst, I’ll give you that. But personally I enjoy TRT.
Watched Top Gun Maverick the other day. All I really have to say about it is thanks for not casting Shia TheBeef.
Lots of people do 
. Love him, hate him, or somewhere in between - regardless Anderson definitely rates as an auteur. His films are all very Andersonian.
I’m on the fence about Wes Anderson, but when he’s good, he can be very good indeed. You forgot to mention Grand Budapest Hotel, which I thought was stellar, and hilarious!
Thank you for this. I had Shudder for one week and when I cancelled, they gave me a MONTH free so I will be streaming this soon.
2022 release, so it is pretty new. I thought it was OK, but not terrific. I do think they should make a sequel with Jon Hamm again, though. He was great, best thing in it.
That’s what started off this conversation. But I’m with you, I loved it.
Watch out for rusty nails! 
How many other families did he jeopardize when he set up a fire on the highway, just so he could drive across crowded traffic? What a dick indeed.
Excessive Force 2: Force on Force Stacie Randall kicks and shoots her way through bad guys while out for revenge! She looks damned good and pulls off some tough fights. I wish she’d been a bigger star.
It also stars a gentleman by the name of Mandingo Warrior.
Flashdance, the 1983 movie starring Jennifer Beals, with an Oscar for Irene Cara singing the title song, which she helped write. It doesn’t hold up particularly well, although most of the actors seemed to be doing their best. I’ve never heard of most of them, and I’m betting they didn’t have much of a career.
While the two leads, Jennifer Beals and Michael Nouri, never became major stars, both have had long careers as character actors. Looking at their credits on IMDB, it seems both of them found steady work in a lot of straight-to-video movies and appearances on TV shows. There are lots of characters actors who have had longer careers than people we would consider “movie stars.”
You’re right, though, about the rest of the cast. Except for Lilia Skala and Cynthia Rhodes, I’ve never heard of the rest of them. That’s odd, considering how big a hit that movie was. Sunny Johnson, who was fourth-billed, died of an aneurism only a year after “Flashdance” came out.
Yeah, I noted that. Interesting that Roger Ebert panned Flashdance and included it in his top ten worst movies list, while audiences loved it. It wasn’t high art, certainly, but it was entertaining.
Logan Lucky. A pretty funny heist movie, and damned near everyone is in it, from Daniel Craig to Dwight Yokum (!). But I can’t tell if southerners are supposed to be in on the joke.
Watched the Rifftrax version of Dinosaurus, a movie I first saw as a kid when it was brand new. In fact, IIRC, I saw it at a drive-in movie in a thunderstorm. This arguably made it more dramatic at the time.
Thoughts:
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My god, this is an awful film. My uncritical child mind didn’t think so. It thought “Dinosaurs!” . But my wife Pepper Mill voiced exactly that judgment immediately. Perfect MST3K fodder (or Rifftrax fodder)
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Produced by Jack Harris. Among other things Harris was responsible for every version of The Blob – including the glitzy remake and including Blobermouth. He also worked himself into all his movies – he’s one of the passengers on the cruise ship at the end.
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The dinosaurs look much worse than I remember. Bad stop-motion creatures either look like a five-year-old’s plaster of paris creation or they look “cute”. In this case, they look cute:(For another example of “cute”, see Jack the Giant Killer, which came of the same year. The dragon at the end is supposed to look fearsome, but it looks more like a flying puppy dog.)
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stop-motion animation is expensive and time-consuming. THey cut corners by using puppets as much ass possible rather that fullt articulated stop-motion figures. The effects team, by the way, was by Tim Barr, Wah Chang, and Gere Warren, who would go on to form Centaur Productions, which did effects for the TV show The Outer LImits. The T. Rex’s roars were made by some really unconvincing mechanical process that the team would later re-use in several episodes of Outer Limits.
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The dinosaurs are recovered when blasting down in the Caribbean (the film was made in the Virgin Islands), where they were frozen into a state of suspended animation (frozen? In the Caribbean? Just go with it). Also frozen with them was a cave man. Before you get upset about a caveman being frozen with a couple of dinosaurs, note that a caveman with a T. Rex is as improbable as a brontosaur (or other major sauropod) being found with a T. Rex (or a stegosaur and a T. Rex, for you Fantasia fans). T. Rex is 66-68 million years ago. Apatosaurs were 151-152 million years ago (stegosaurs were 145-155 million years ago. Neanderthals were 40,000-800,000 years ago, so he is clearly the Odd Man Out, but you wouldn’t get all three together unless you were deliberately collecting them. Maybe some aliens were collecting specimens over time and lost the case in the Caribbean.
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The caveman is clearly there because a.) He’s cheaper than an animated model, or even the puppet, b.) cheap comedy relief. He is disappointed in wax fruit, freaks out at the sight of a woman in a beauty mask, smashes a mirror and the only ham radio on the island, and throws a pie at the Bad Guy. They flirt with sexual connotations, but this is basically a kids’ movie, so they shjy away from that pretty quick. More telling is that the caveman gives a stick with raw meat to the woman, expecting her to cook it. Women do all the cooking, right? Proof that this is a 1960 movie.
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Dell comics, as often happened at the time, did a comic book adaptation. The dinosaurs on the cover of the comic (like those on the movie poster) look scarier and more believable than the ones in the movie
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Harris reportedly wanted Steve McQueen to star in this, as he had in The Blob. McQueen chose instead to make The Magnificent Seven. Good career move.
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The hero (not played by Steve McQueen), Ward Ramsey, went on to an unspectacular career. I see that six of his film appearances were uncredited.
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At the end of the film, the Hero gets into the excavator to fight it out with the T. Rex, knocking him into the ocean, where he apparently freezes again. (The wording “The End” morphs into a question mark, just like at the end of Harris’ earlier film The Blob, suggesting the possibility of a sequel. Only Harris never made a sequel to this one.
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I’ve long suspected that James Cameron had seen this film, and that the climactic battle inspired the climactic battle between Ripley and the Alien Queen at the end of Aliens
All This and Heaven, too – part of my process of catching up on mid-20th century classics (or sometimes, “classics”).
First, the last movie I mentioned here (King’s Row) had a shot of leaves blowing from trees to indicate moving into fall/winter. It was kind of odd, because it looked more like bare branches with glued leaves blowing off, so it stuck in my mind. I’m sure it was the same shot used in the opening of All This and Heaven Too. Same studio.
Good Bette Davis vehicle. Good child actors – Virginia Weidler (always reliable) and June Lockhart (her first role) – which was important because the kids were a big part of the movie. The worst was the youngest and only boy whose Texas twangy accident didn’t exactly match his supposed role as the son of a Duc.
I was more interested in the story behind it than the movie itself. It was based on a book (bought by WB in 1938 for $100k!) written by the great-niece of the Bette Davis character. The incidents in the movie were believed to have added fuel to the French revolutionary fire of 1848. Other than that it was mostly soap opera.
Bullet Train on Netflix: Brad Pitt and others wisecracking their way through Japan whilst murdering each other.
Saw The Banshees of Inisherin. Not really sure how I feel about it.
In addition to the stars Brendan Gleeson and Colin Ferrell, it featured Kerry Condon, who played Mike Ehrmantraut’s long-suffering daughter-in-law on Better Call Saul (mother of the never-aging Kaylee). She was very good in this (as was the rest of the cast). I had no idea she was Irish.
I knew she was because she was in Rome, and I found out then. She played Octavia?
Went to see Violent Night with the family. As long as you don’t go into it expecting King Lear, you may enjoy it.
The general plot is Die Hard with the real Santa Claus as John McClain, trying to save a family taken hostage during a Christmas Eve heist. Throw in a couple of Home Alone references, some Bad Santa, plenty of humor and you have a classic for the ages. Ok, not a classic for the ages, but it’s not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.
The Menu. It’s Midsommar meets Pig meets Ready or Not. The reason to go is for the dark comedy and in-your-face social commentary if you like that sort of thing. I do, and I did like it, but even then I’ll admit it might have lost me had it not been for Ralph Fiennes’ charismatic performance.