Ah, okay. I guess the part with the three questions is just a coincidence. I knew it was immature of me to laugh, and I did it anyway. Haw.
David Lowery’s 2021 The Green Knight does a great job on that tone of Arthurian bizarreness, though I guess that’s the Gawain Poet rather than Malory.
Grandma’s Boy (1922) – Harold Lloyd / Mildred Davis
From Wiki: Grandma’s Boy is a 1922 family comedy film starring Harold Lloyd. The film was highly influential, helping to pioneer feature-length comedies which combined gags with character development. This film was also an immensely popular, commercially successful film in its time.
Charlie Chaplin (a fan of the film): “It is one of the best constructed screenplays I have ever seen on the screen.”
Lloyd was of course one of the Big 3 silent-era comedians and my favorite. He was very successful, with adjusted earnings that would make him a billionaire today. His films aren’t more well-known today, compared to other silent-era comedies, because he refused to allow them to be shown on television (and successfully sued networks who tried to broadcast them). He did so, not for greed, but because he didn’t want his stories to be interrupted by commercials. He cared about his art.
Lloyd’s thumb and index finger of his right hand were blown off during a publicity shoot in 1919 when a prop bomb he was holding close to his head exploded (and luckily dropped to his side a second before it went off). The bomb was believed to be a dummy but was actually a live bomb (sounds similar to the Rust incident, no?). Lloyd had a prosthetic made for his hand, and never discussed the accident in public, because he didn’t want his fans to feel sorry for him. In fact, he used the accident as inspiration to make bigger, better, more realistic films. Quite a guy!
According to his biography, Grandma’s Boy is one of Lloyd’s 4 favorite films. It’s his first feature-length film and it’s very good, deftly balancing humor and pathos. It was originally shot as a drama, but Lloyd decided to turn it into a dramatic comedy by adding in the gags later. You can watch it in its entirety on YouTube (note the prosthetic hand).
Ha, my sister was also drunk when we went to see it (Excalibur) in Westwood Village!
I lke Harold Lloyd, but my favorite was always Buster Keaton.
Super Mario Bros. (2023) - I get dragged to a lot of animated films by my daughter and usually they’re entertaining enough to hold my attention for the duration but by God, this was intensely dull. The Rainbow Road sequence was briefly engaging and there’s an insane nihilistic Luma that offers some respite from the twee tedium of the rest of the film, but even by kids’ film standards this is relentlessly unremarkable and I struggled to care about any of the characters.
Not “bad”. Just…not very interesting.
Vengeance. Written, directed and performed by BJ Novak about a New York asshole who ends up in Texas pretending to be the boyfriend of a woman who died under questionable circumstances.
Me and my little Movie Night party really enjoyed it. It’s darkly funny, for starters, a bit predictable in its “city slicker comes to care about rural people” vibe, but there are some moments in the film that are really thoughtful and have a surprising degree of artistry to them. And I liked the ending.
It’s roughly reminiscent of Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri only Three Billboards is a damned masterpiece and Vengeance is only pretty good. But worth the watch to me.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Great movie, especially once the big flashback hits. Opening 30-40 minutes is actually rather clunky. I still love the movie, though.
Possession (1981)
Man, this is one of the weirdest movies of all time. I mean, this thing is kind of unbelievable. I’m not even sure I fully understand what the heck was happening in this movie. I loved it, though. I see the director never made another English movie. Shame.
Evil Dead (2013)
There is not, at least not yet, a bad Evil Dead movie. I think nothing in the Evil Dead universe can ever top Army of Darkness and Evil Dead 2, but this is a very impressive movie and it delivered a great experience. I see that Evil Dead Rises is forthcoming and I hope it manages to be excellent as well.
65
A well made, but not particularly memorable movie starring Adam Driver. It was a pandemic movie that sat in the can for quite awhile, but it was not a bad movie and when it drops on a streaming service you already have(or the Blu-ray comes to your library), you should grab it. It was kind of a “Pitch Black, but worse” movie.
I agree with your assessment and also enjoyed this movie. I do think Novak was well aware of the city/country trope you mention and did some fun little things to undercut it throughout. Ashton Kutcher was surprisingly excellent as well.
Goodfellas (1990), Lorraine Bracco vehicle about a nice Jewish girl who married outside her faith (despite her mother’s wishes) and suffered the consequences.
Hmm, I thought Goodfellas was a film about an over-sensitive clown who doesn’t like to amuse.
Killer Klowns From Outer Space
Unfunny and boring. Just a neat title, but not an enjoyable movie. Totally skip it.
I love that movie. It’s definitely a movie for movie night with your friends though.
I was hoping for it to be funnier and more crazy. It just kind of…was nothing.
It has a video game release coming this year.
I like the song ( performed by the punk band ‘The Dickies’ ) too.
That’s the only reason I bought a ticket when it came out. I’ve avoided it on TV ever since.
Yesterday, I saw a film on HBO Max called Experimenter, about Stanley Milgram’s 1961 obedience experiment and his subsequent work (including a project that resulted in the idea of six degrees of separation). It was interesting.
Streamed We Have a Ghost earlier today.
I kinda liked it. Wanted to like it more, but…bad decisions. Would have been better as ghost murder mystery only, instead of the youtube sensation plot. I liked the kid and the cute and sassy girl next door. There was a lot there they could have fleshed out. Tig Notaro was several things in the movie, none of them good.
One truly stupid point. They have weapons to fight something that up until then they had no reason to believe actually existed.
Murder Mystery 2
Fun and silly. If you don’t hate Adam Sandler or Jennifer Aniston and are looking to turn off your brain for an hour and a half, I recommend both 1 and 2. Kind of like a dumbed-down version of Knives Out.
Elvis
A stylized (but not to the point of surrealism like, say, Rocketman) look at the career of Elvis Presley and his relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Austin Butler absolutely kills it. Tom Hanks is good, but you always know you’re watching Tom Hanks. Casting a lesser-known actor may have allowed this interesting, flawed character to come to life more fully.
Interesting and engaging, it’s almost three hours long but doesn’t feel like it.
I did just see this movie, at the raving endorsement of my daughter. Bullet Train was a ridiculous amount of fun.
Also: The Last Full Measure. Sebastian Stan is a young DoD employee investigating whether a participant in Operation Abilene, a Vietnam fiasco of a battle, deserved a posthumous Medal of Honor. Based on a true story, it’s a decent telling of both the event and why it took 30-some years to get the medal awarded.
Oh and I watched Free Guy again, just because.
Watched Moonfall after hearing a lot of bad things about it, so I used fast forward quite often, mostly through painfully predictable family-drama-angst and talking heads doing technobabble.
I ended up quite enjoying it, thanks mainly to lowered expectations and a weird alien design that looks like Romanesco broccoli trapped inside a kaleidoscope. And the ending where we discover that Samwell Tarlys cat has the absolutely brilliant name Fuzz Aldrin.