Goldfinger…what a great film. Proves you dont need SFX, cartoon villains nor John Woo stolen martial arts fighting to make a great action film. If only those Yanks could produce a halfway decent secret agent. 
I watched John Wick 2, and am really glad that I didn’t pay to see it. The first one was a decent action flick, but this was straight out of video game country. Basically just a guy running around killing people, with little in the way of plot or even decent editing. One moment he’s in Rome and the next moment he’s in NYC, with nothing to suggest the change in venue.
My young son, seeing Goldfinger for the first time, said, “For a great secret agent, he sure gets captured a lot, doesn’t he?”
Still a fun, stylish spy flick.
A Monster Calls - A boy whose life is not very happy is accompanied by a tree-monster who guides him through some tough moments. Nothing new, but nicely done. Very very weepy and quite dark, it’s not a very hopeful film even at its conclusion.
Doctor Strange - Took me 2 tries to get through this movie, the beginning is sort of long and dull and I fell asleep the first time. Once it gets going it’s quite a spectacle sort of like Inception, but with magic instead of dreams. They play with dimensions at will. Really the visual effects are what makes this film, once you break down the plot it’s more or less formula hero/superhero movie where a person is introduced to a world they didn’t know about, becomes a prodigy, and fights a great evil.
Zodiac - This is a rewatch, saw it years ago and quite liked it. It’s a long movie covering a long period time. A creepy time capsule going back to California in the 60’s and 70’s with a serial killer on the loose who likes ciphers and being in the newspaper. No cell phones and no fax machines make pay phones and snail mail central plot elements. Detective Mark Ruffalo, reporter Robert Downey Jr., and cartoonist Jake Gyllenhaal are all great in their roles as each one becomes obsessed in their own way with finding the killer. I didn’t realize the director David Fincher directed Fight Club and Se7en, but it makes sense because they have similar tones. I got even more out of Zodiac on the second watch.
Watched Deepwater Horizon, which was far better than I supposed it would be. A real white-knuckler of a film with a pretty good cast.
I saw It Comes At Night on it’s opening day because of the great critics reviews.
Absolutely terrible. Billed as a “white knuckle psychological thriller” there was nothing “white knuckle” or “psychologically thrilling” about it.
The only scare attempts are from cliche surreal dream sequences.
The only tension is from a “put your gun down, no put YOUR gun down” moment straight out of a network cop show.
Add in a creepy “oooo, then who left the door open? I guess we’ll never know. Discuss.” and it was just a whole lot of nothing.
I don’t think I quite got it. I mean, I understand the themes and the conflicts and everything, but there seemed to be a lack of resolution. Nothing really changed by the end of the movie with the main character except he cried once and decided to get two room apartment so his nephew could visit him.
There was another scene in the movie that confused me. Toward the end of the film, the main character (I can’t remember names) arranges for his brother’s best friend to formally adopt his nephew and the kid freaks on him. “You’ll do anything to get rid of me!” or something like that. But for the previous hour in the movie the kid was bitching about having to move to Boston with his uncle.
But … I really enjoyed the movie. I live in New England, so there was a lot of verisimilitude in it for me. I know Casey Affleck is apparently, allegedly, whatever, a damaged person, but he’s a great actor. I was watching The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford this morning and he’s fantastic in that movie too.
I don’t know if this counts as a movie, but it’s on Netflix:
Oh, Hello on Broadway
John Mulaney and Nick Kroll’s running gag “Too Much Tuna” turned into a full on Broadway production. Holy shit, I haven’t laughed that hard in a long goddamned time. I’m talking having to rewind a good five minutes of play because I was too busy gasping for breath and wiping tears from my eyes. I’ve been listening to some podcasts of these two guys being interviewed; it’s amazing and really cool that this goofy little gag that these guys just riffed on for shits and giggles is now the toast of the town on the Great White Way.
It’s hard to describe the show. Mulaney and Kroll star as George St. Geegland and Gil Faizon, an author and an actor respectively. Two old guys on the rent-controlled upper east side who never know what they’re talking about, pronounce everything wrong and pass judgement on pretty much everything. As Mulaney’s character says in the show, “I am neither Jewish nor a woman, but like many men over the age of 70, I am somehow both.” There’s a play within the play, and a play within that play which is their public access prank show on New York One - the channel that comes on when you reset your cable box! - Too Much Tuna! which includes a special guest … a different one for every show. The Netflix show features Steve Martin. Past guests have included Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Alexander, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Conan O’Brien, Jerry Seinfeld, way too many to go on.
I’m a mid-level comedy nerd and I’ve been a fan of both of them for a while now, but I’m rapidly becoming a superfan of Mulaney. He wrote for SNL for six years; his stand up is hilarious and tight as a drum; his improv skills are off the chart. I listened to a Bill Burr podcast recently where he recalled meeting him for the first time some years ago, saying he could tell this kid had the goods. And he does.
I highly recommend.
Oops. West side.
Next on my list; Mulaney is a stone riot.
This past Sunday I saw, for the first time (and un-cut, YAY!), Cornel Wilde’s, “The Naked Prey.” Whoa, just Whoa. A couple of flaws, to be sure, but I couldn’t even pause to use the restroom.
I’d always heard that Wilde was a joke in Hollywood. One step above Ed Wood. Time to re-evaluate.
I watched Live and Let Die a couple of days ago. Not a great film, but a fun one. Geoffrey Holder was terrific as the Voodoo King villain.
Valid points, but I appreciated the lack of resolution and the nephew’s inconsistency, because they made the movie more “un-Hollywood.” These are complex characters and they don’t always act entirely logically, just like real people. The nephew had come to care for his uncle and was conflicted about his moving back to Boston, esp. since that implicitly seemed to be a rejection of the kid.
My most recent five:
Nixon
Overlong Oliver Stone-directed biopic of the scandal-ridden President. Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen are pretty good as Dick and Pat, but James Woods is especially on the mark as H.R. Haldeman. Nice use of newsreel footage, shakycam, and B&W scenes for flashbacks.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Saw the 2011 American remake again. A great cast and a great script, set against a chilly Swedish winter backdrop. One of my favorite recent thrillers.
Deconstructing the Beatles: Revolver
A very entertaining, interesting film of one of historian, musicologist and Beatles expert Scott Freiman’s well-researched multimedia lectures. Definitely worth a look for any Beatles fan.
Deconstructing the Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s
Ditto, on the group’s game-changing 1967 album.
The Hunt for Red October
Despite Sean Connery’s bizarre Scots-Russian accent, still a fun, exciting Cold War naval technothriller.
And the next:
The Abyss
Enjoyed this 1989 James Cameron sf first-contact adventure all over again. Great cast, interesting story and remarkable undersea scenes.
The Age of Adaline
A charming sf romance about a woman who doesn’t age for decades after being zapped by lightning. Harrison Ford plays a former lover of hers (and the guy who plays a young Harrison Ford is uncannily on the mark).
Deconstructing the Beatles: Rubber Soul
Another well-done Scott Freiman album documentary, although some of the songs get short shrift.
Obit
Very interesting documentary on the NYT obituary staff, striving to write worthy profiles of their recently-deceased subjects on tight deadlines (ahem).
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Pretty good Harry Potter prequel, set in NYC in the Roaring Twenties, as British magical-animal wrangler and protector Newt Scamander tracks down several escaped critters and finds his true love along the way.
The Big Sick: absolutely charming and often hilarious rom-com (and a more-or-less true story) about how the writer and his wife met and fell in love, and overcame his Pakistani cultural impediments and her life-threatening illness. Starring that guy from Silicon Valley.
The Women’s Balcony: Israeli dramedy about the internal workings of an Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem. Fascinating culturally, and wonderfully entertaining. In Hebrew with subtitles – through which I learned that the Hebrew word for “synagogue” is *knesset *-- the same as the Israeli parliament.
Bad Santa 2: Full of bitter mean people acting bitter and mean. Quite a few laughs though. Seeing a tatooed Kathy Bates say the filthiest things imaginable was pretty funny.
My latest five:
The Black Hole
For some reason I decided I wanted to see this Disney sf film again - it had been awhile. So-so cast, laughable science, great score, and decent sfx for the time.
Jodorowsky’s Dune
Documentary about the trippy, never-made Seventies movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Tentative casting including Salvador Dali as the Emperor, David Carradine as Duke Leto, Mick Jagger as Feyd-Rautha and Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen. The slightly-mad director could never satisfy the Hollywood suits that he could control either costs or the running time of the movie (at one point he said it might be 10 hours long!), so the project imploded, but still had an impact on a number of later sf films.
Where Eagles Dare
Saw this fun, ultraviolent, wildly over-the-top WWII adventure for the first time. Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood play the British and American leaders of a commando squad trying to rescue a captured U.S. general from a wintry Nazi mountaintop castle. Lots of gunplay, chases, double-crosses and 'splosions.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Still the best Terminator movie, I think. Great cast, near-nonstop action, an important message, remarkable cinematography and sfx, and one of the cleverest, scariest movie villains ever.
Dunkirk
Liked but didn’t love this WWII drama about the evacuation of British troops from the French beaches. Surprised by all the rapturous gushing it’s getting from movie reviewers; not sure it would even make my own Top Ten War Movie list. There’s a very implausible scene at the end; you’ll know it when you see it.
Jaws on Blu-ray. I watch it every summer.
Wonder Woman I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. It wasn’t what I expected and I didn’t like a couple of the plot choices, but the action was fantastic. I like conflicted protagonists but once in a while it’s nice having a totally good one.