Thanks for the heads-up. Will watch tonight.
Incidentally, since you ridiculed me for having never even heard of Office Space until I watched it recently, I shamefully inform you that I’ve never actually seen Groundhog Day, either. Now that one I know about, but haven’t seen it. Will be watching it soon.
Also anxious to see Babylon and the forthcoming HBO series The Last of Us, premiering Jan 15.
I could even suggest a day for you, if you want. 
Gasp!
My wife and I just finished, “Jurassic World: Dominion.” It’s watchable, but I could feel my IQ dropping 5 points every half hour. There was almost no reason to have Laura Dern, Sam Neill and (especially) Jeff Goldblum in this mess. The first half felt like a really bizarre Bond film. Still, it made a billion bux, so what do I know?
That’s debatable!
We just watched that last night. I thought it was awesome. Nicholas Hoult, Anya Taylor-Joy and the woman who played the Maître d’ were great as well.
I watched Nope a few weeks ago. I thought it was ok. It didn’t feel particularly groundbreaking though. IMHO kind of a standard “group of oddball misfits band together to kill a monster” film.
Just finished Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. Really excellent documentary, thanks again to @JohnT for suggesting it. There were lots of details I had not known about.
I thought Madoff being sentenced to 150 years and ultimately dying in prison was the end of the story, but the thing has all the makings of a dramatic tragedy. Madoff’s oldest son was so hounded by public hostility that he committed suicide. Several years later, the younger one died of cancer. Madoff’s wife was literally rendered homeless when all the family properties and possessions were seized. Ironically, it appears very likely that neither the sons nor the wife knew of the fraud during the time it was ongoing.
I read about how he pulled all his familiy together and told them, “Everything is one big lie.”
Silence from his family.
He explained that it was all, all, all fake. He stopped investing years ago and everything was fake and he had made his own sons complicit in fraud without them knowing.
His son’s suicide was, I believe, one year after this event.
Yeah, so Madoff was one of the absolute worst of the worst people.
Madoff ran his legitimate brokerage business in parallel with the Ponzi scheme, the latter of which was operated out of decrepit secret offices on the 17th floor of the same building, which he called the “investment advisory” business. That operation never invested a penny in anything, it was pure Ponzi – Madoff just simply took the money for himself, and used the money from new investors to pay off withdrawals. Since you’ve unspoilered my spoiler tag, I may as well also add that the documentary exposes the absolutely shocking incompetence of the SEC at that time. They were handed all the evidence of massive fraud on an unprecedented scale, but were in such awe of Madoff that they brushed it all aside.
IIRC, it was two very unhappy years of public hounding after the father’s arrest. The younger son died I believe four years after that.
Welcome to the wonderful world of regulatory capture.
There’s an old courthouse joke about a Madoff-type facing the judge at sentencing. The judge says, “Fifty years!”
The defendant says, “Judge, I’m 72 years old. There’s no way I can serve a sentence that long.”
The judge gives him a kindly smile and says, “Well, just do the best you can.”
Stalker (1979), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. I don’t really know anything about Tarkovsky, aside from the fact that he’s held in very high esteem by cinephiles worldwide. So, I was intrigued to come across this YouTube link to an entire film of his.
It’s about three people who venture into a heavily restricted area known as The Zone, which is allegedly a landing site of extraterrestrials where the laws of physics no longer apply. The three seek a room in The Zone that’s said to grant the wishes of all who enter it.
So, the story has nothing to do with stalking in the conventional sense, and the film’s title refers to the term used to describe those who make a living guiding others into The Zone to retrieve alien artifacts.
Sounds promising, right? The thing is, the film is very long and the pace is deliberately, excruciatingly slow, as it’s meant to challenge viewers with the prospects of boredom. Famously, it contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, which averages one shot every 69 seconds vs. the low-single digits that characterize the frantic pace of modern filmmaking. Cinema lore has it that, upon the film’s release, Soviet officials complained that it should be faster and more dynamic, to which Tarkovsky replied that it actually should be slower and duller at the start so that viewers who had walked into the wrong theatre would have time to leave before the main action starts. 
I’ll say right now that I fell asleep less than an hour in and will have to try again, but that has more to do with my habits than the film. Some of the photography is probably the best I’ve ever seen. Check out the first nine minutes in the link above to see what I mean.
Ha ha…nope.
I liked it. But I don’t know why.
I guess you have a different impression. Care to elaborate?
Solaris is another of his. I quite like it, but yes, it’s very slow cinema.
I haven’t seen it, but since you mention it, I recommend the 2002 remake written and directed by Steven Soderbergh and produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau. It has a fairly good critical rating but it’s one of those films that I think is very moving and that I personally rate higher than most critics.
Sorry, that didn’t come out correctly! I haven’t seen the movie. What I meant to convey was, I watch movies to be entertained. I’m already challenged with prospects of boredom! So I guess I won’t be watching Stalker.
Just watched Don’t Bother to Knock which was Marilyn Monroe’s first starring role. Also, with Richard Widmark and Anne Bancroft’s first screen role, and Elisha Cook, Jr. Short but intense with good performances from everybody…even including the kid actor. With this particular role it would have been easy for the actor to start chewing the scenery, but MM was restrained and, ultimately, very moving.
I’ve only ever seen her in Some Like It Hot, where she is pretty good. I heard she was a good actress, but have only really ever seen images of her and maybe that one scene where her dress blows up.
You should watch her in How To Marry A Millionaire, where her comedy timing is terrific. She held her own and even dominated when she was sharing scenes with the veteran actresses Lauren Bacall and Betty Grable.