Watched The Menu last night. It was mostly predictable, but o.k. If it wasn’t supposed to be 100% metaphor, I have a few questions about how the whole thing was supposed to work.
Man, Nicholas Hoult. That character turned hard.
And given Ralph Fiennes’s age, there would not have been “Taco Tuesdays” in Waterloo Iowa when he was 7 yo.
Other than that it was an o.k. waste of time.
Two movies I’ve watched in the last day and a half:
Cabin in the Woods (2011) - I had seen this once before, but in pieces, and I enjoyed it, but upon rewatch - actually paying attention this time - I loved it. Great horror flick / whatever flick mash up. Thumbs up.
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - on Netflix. Brutal. One of the most stark, disturbing depictions of war you’ll see. Two and a half hours of bloody misery broken up by short moments of joy, comrades in arms, supporting each other and living to see the next day … only to have one of them shot in the liver in the next scene. Highly recommended, but maybe bite on a wooden spoon while you’re watching it.
“Am I still on speaker phone?” I always laugh.
I love that one too. So much more than I was expecting.
Firestarter (2022) – Major WTF? film jettisons 2/3 of the book, twists the story and ending (obviously plumping for a sequel that will, hopefully, never, ever be made), wastes Kurtwood Smith and the gorgeous Gloria Reuben, and blows the entire budget on pyrotechnic FX. Was there a vid game of Firestarter? because this sure plays like one. The girl playing Charlie McGee was excellent (much better than Drew Barrymore) but they gave her nothing to do. Abysmal.
Forgot to mention I saw Night Shift for the first time a week or so ago. I probably forgot because it was fairly forgettable. It would have been better to have seen it closer to the time it was made, because it was so 80s cheesy. Michael Keaton was good, and Henry Winkler was also good. Shelley Long is basically the same in all her movies. It was fun to spot a very young Kevin Costner in the background of the frat party scene.
Title song by Quarterflash.
And even in a cheesy 80s movie, I didn’t believe her as a hooker for one minute.
Yeah, seriously.
Candyman (2021)
I watched the first two Candyman movies to know what is going on and I found the new one to be neat, but disappointing. It was kind of dull and if you are waiting for Tony Todd to come back and play his character, I will spoiler-box how that all plays out:
He has a three-second or so cameo at the very end. I’m not exaggerating, it is at most 5 seconds. I thought the final sequence was going to be a combination of the new Candyman and the old one, or even both of them working together for a very neat sequence killing the police officers. Nope, he just shows up for 5 seconds to say one line and they basically bungled what could have been a very neat moment. Two Candymen?? Wow. But, alas, no…not at all.
Watched The Night Manager finally, really liked it, great performances
Beverly Hills Cop
I hadn’t actually seen this movie all the way through before tonight. This is the type of movie I just saw parts of on Comedy Central many times over the year, but tonight watched the entire thing.
Yeah, it’s not very funny. It’s really very dry and only mildly entertaining. I’m kind of shocked how dry the whole movie is.
I don’t think I’ll be watching the sequels.
I had a lot of stuff going on in my life in late 1973-early 1974 and never got around to seeing The Sting. It’s always been on my want-to-see-someday-list and I was pleased when it showed-up on Netflix this week. I’ve sometimes been disappointed when a “film classic” doesn’t live up to my expectations, but not this time.
Paul Newman and Robert Redford certainly had chemistry, by themselves and opposite each other. And there was a great ensemble of well-known character actors backing them up. The plot is a complicated one (you really have to pay attention) and takes its time to unfold. Contemporary audiences may find the pace too leisurely, groomed as they are on an action sequence every 10 minutes. I don’t know.
But I enjoyed it. The settings, the cars, the clothes, the cast, the art direction…all top-notch filmmaking. I’m just sorry it took me 49 years to see it.
Deathstalker 1-4
Deathstalker - Unpleasant movie. Lots of abuse towards women and a grim movie with nothing much to offer other than a properly made movie. Hey, this movie’s crew tried.
Deathstalker 2 - The best of these movies, but a strange sequel. Gone is the seriousness and in comes a parody of Sword and Sorcery movies. Vastly better and less unpleasant than the first one.
Deathstalker 3 - Deplorable. Badly edited(like it was done by a primitive A.I.). Terribly acted and filmed. This went straight to VHS and looks like it cost 10% of the first two. Has zero to offer and is a truly terrible movie. I think I had seen the MST3K version, which was probably edited even more and made less sense.
Deathstalker 4 - Comically bad, but it more or less is a movie(seriously the third one is not a real movie). Edited properly, some effort put in. Still terrible, though. A good laugh, though, they did have sword fights so slow it was essentially the rehearsal put on film. Pretty embarassing.
The Pale Blue Eye (on Netflix) I won’t remark on the story. I just have to ask, what’s the deal with a story that’s set in America being played by a cast where the major characters are all played by Brits? Other than Gillian Anderson (and Robert Duvall, in a small role), it’s all Christian Bale, Timothy Spall, Toby Jones, Harry Melling, several others. Mind you, good people who played their parts well, but mostly sounded like they didn’t grow up in the US. Sure, it was set in the 1820s or thereabouts, and who knows what an American accent sounded like then? I guess, in the movies anyway, the accent sounds like an English person trying to sound like an East Coast brahmin, or a Virginian…
Oh, okay, liked the movie though it’s pretty brutal, but well written - an investigator is brought in to West Point to probe the death of a cadet. He is helped by a young Edgar Allen Poe. There’s a coda to the story which strains credibility, to be honest.
It’s very common for an American character to be played by an actor from another country. It’s also very common for a movie that’s set in the U.S. to be filmed in another country (although that wasn’t true in the case of this movie). Actors from other countries who want to be able to play the best-paying roles learn American accents because they know that they will be paid more over their careers if they do that. They take courses in their studies in film acting in college or from their own training under a language coach in American accents. (American actors also learn to speak other accents too because they want to be able to take as many parts as possible.) This is basically just one more example of globalization. Travel to other parts of the world is now cheap enough that bringing in actors from elsewhere in the world or to have the entire movie shot in a region far from where it’s set is often financially the best for the filmmakers.
And she’s British-American!….
And Christian Bale holds dual citizenship and has lived in the US since 2009.
The Menu had a bunch of Brits, too. Ralph Fiennes’s accent was … serviceable. Nicholas Hoult was good, but he’s young and done a number of American roles. I didn’t recognize Janet McTeer until near the end of the movie.
Right, well, a key difference is that she grew up moving back-and-forth between the two countries, and so moves back-and-forth between the two accents. He grew up in Wales and England, and just made a decision to become a dual citizen at some point in his life.