“Tom of Finland”. I’m going to nursing school, which I like, but I have to say that the estrogen-heavy atmosphere can be a little…suffocating. “Tom of Finland”, a biography of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen, really hit the spot with its bracing splash of testosterone and warm splash of come. It was male-affirming to see the after-effects of Laaksonen’s risky and desperate sexual activity (activity that alternates between savvy one moment and disastrously naive the next) roughly push his private artwork toward his now-famous character Kake (pronounced “Cock”). Watch for the poignant moment between Laaksonen and (the imaginary) Kake when Laaksonen tries to burn his artwork after a trip to Berlin went horribly awry. Its occasionally depressing and sometimes hair-raising tone was nonetheless redeemed by the transformation of Laaksonen, who is stunned and overwhelmed when he realizes the extent to which his fans take his work to heart and amazed at the freedom he is afforded when he visits the United States. At long last (he ages decades during the movie), he turns into an artistic icon as his work’s popularity finally affords him a measure of the legitimacy he craved (for his erotica, that is; aside from his porn, he was a successful legitimate artist in the advertising field).
We saw The Post. I was somewhat disappointed. I was expecting more All the President’s Men, but instead it is mostly Steep’s personal journey in a man’s world. The previews are a bit misleading.
Going lowbrow here:
I had an unexpected day off work recently and checked out ***Sausage Party ***on Netflix. (I’m going to spoil the ending here, so be warned.)
In case you missed it (most people did), this was a 2016 animated film about sentient groceries. A hot dog (Seth Rogen) is in love with a bun (Kristin Wiig). They and the other groceries believe that when they get purchased - or “chosen” by the gods (humans) - and taken out of the store, they’ll live forever in a paradise they call The Great Beyond.
What I expected was a silly, playfully raunchy comedy, and for about an hour, that’s exactly what I got. Imagine every juvenile hot dog/bun joke you can think of, and yep, they were all in there. Given that Seth Rogen was one of the writers, there was also a fair amount of drug humor. Not really my thing, but I didn’t mind it.
And, in addition to having a discernible, coherent plot and a few decent laughs, there was actually an interesting point to be made about religion and the nature of faith. It was much more thoughtful and - dare I say - deeper than I expected.
Until.
It gets dark. Very dark. The groceries discover that The Great Beyond is not a paradise, but a place where they’ll die horrible deaths and be devoured by those they had considered gods. In response to this, they attack and kill every human in the store. After the humans are all dead and stuffed into the freezer, the groceries all have a giant, store-wide orgy that goes well beyond playfully raunchy and into the-person-who-came-up-with-this-really-really-needs-professional-help territory.
In the very end, there’s a weird, fourth wall-breaking twist that just kind of falls flat, and I was left thinking “What the fuck did I just watch?”
Maybe if you’re super-stoned, you’ll enjoy it. In fact, that’s probably the whole point, come to think of it.
It!
The original sucked and the new one is not much better. A few good scares … like the fat kid in the library basement.
But the kids everyday lives are dull. I gave up on it after an hour and a half. That’s right, ninety minutes in I had no interest at all in how the whole story ended.
I agree that the previews were a bit misleading, but I can always see “All the President’s Men” if I want the Watergate story. And I didn’t think the movie was about Katherine Graham’s personal journey in a man’s world. That was there, of course, but so was, in equal measure, her difficult personal decision about friendship (with McNamara) versus the public good, about making painful decisions that could hurt family and employees versus doing the right thing, and about the integrity of journalism (Remember that?) and the First Amendment.
I’d be willing to bet the impetus behind the movie wasn’t, “This would be a good time to highlight women’s struggle for equality” but more “This would be an important time to remind people that journalism should be guided by hard hard truths, not what the public and the president want to hear.”
Excellent movie. I’d see it again.
We saw it a couple of days ago and I agree with other comments. I thought Hanks did a good job of not being Hanks, however. I thought it was a good account of how WAPO clawed itself out of being just a Beltway paper and became nationally recognized.
In the past week we’ve seen a documentary on Charles Mingus (Triumph of the Underdog) and one on Fats Domino (The Birth of Rock and Roll). Today we went to see Darkest Hour. Gary Oldman was superb, as usual.
Molly’s Game was fairly good. Jessica Chastain holds the whole thing together.
Some of her scenes with Idris Elba reminded me of the scene in the first episode of Luther when he and Alice are riffing on logic and such.
One puzzling thing:
[spoiler]Molly has been keeping the old HDs from laptops.
She tells her lawyer, Idris Elba, this. He gets them, does forensic recovery of them.
They worry about the Feds getting hold of this info. Not just for evidence of crimes but also since the data names names. (Molly’s big bugaboo.)
They tell the Feds they have this. Um, why don’t the Feds just subpoena it? Why tell the Feds at all?[/spoiler]
My most recent five:
The Post
Not as great as All the President’s Men or Spotlight, but a pretty good movie about plucky journalists taking on The Powers That Be and winning for the benefit of all.
Close My Eyes
British drama about a brother and sister in Eighties London who find themselves sexually drawn to each other. Meh, despite a good cast.
Dark City
Rewatched this sf noir favorite of mine, about a man on the run in a city that may never see the dawn, unsure of who he is and accused of crimes he can’t even remember. Great cast, script, cinematography and score, and one of the most supremely satisfying endings of any movie I’ve ever seen.
Waterloo
Overlong, plodding cast-of-thousands 1970 movie about the climactic battle of the Napoleonic Wars. Rod Steiger chews the scenery with great gusto as Napoleon, while Christopher Plummer is a cool, aloof Duke of Wellington.
Arrival
Took another look at this 2016 sf drama about aliens coming to Earth, and the international crisis that results. Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner are excellent as a linguist and a physicist who join the U.S. first-contact team. The movie has so many layers and a somewhat nonlinear structure that I appreciated even more the second time around.
I watched *Rollerball *the other day - the 1975 Jimmy Caan flick. Interesting note - it’s set in 2018. That’s not why I chose to watch it: I was just feeling nostalgic, but it was a happy accident. They try to mitigate dating the movie by using a score of mostly classical music (Kubrik trick (2001)), but the clothing style and hair-dos give it all away pretty quick. One thing I noted that they got wrong – I didn’t see one tattoo in the whole movie. Anyway.
So the gist of the movie is that Rollerball exists basically as corporate provided entertainment for the masses. Bread and circuses. They keep making it more and more violent to keep the people watching. The movie opens with a game between Houston and I can’t remember who but it’s a violently contested affair which Houston wins. Afterward we find out a couple of things, first they’re changing the rules for the next playoff game - no penalties called, limited substitutions - and that the head-cheese executive wants Jonathan E., the best player in the game, to retire. He is told it is all for is own good because of the rules changes but he doesn’t really buy it. We come to find out that he is just too good and he’s ruining everything for the corporations. The key quote:
“The game was created to demonstrate the futility of individual effort.”
Anyway, we get to see some evil authoritarian type stuff (we find out that the corporation took Jonathan’s wife away because an executive wanted her). In fact the corporation seems to control every aspect of people’s lives, certainly the players who play for them. At any rate, all that is pretty much secondary to the games, which flies in the face of the theme of the movie - anti-violence. But they can’t all hit the mark, can they?
Of course Jonathan doesn’t quit. The final game has no penalties, no substitutions and no time limit. Spoiler alert - Jonathan is the only player left alive at the end of the match, winning it 1 to 0. The end.
I enjoyed it. I don’t think I’ll watch the re-make. I’ve heard really bad things about that one.
I watched Blade Runner 2049. I’m not generally a fan of either action or dystopic genres, but BR-2000 seemed well-done; I especially liked Joi the girlfriend. I liked it more than any of the recent Best Picture nominees that I watched.
I also watched Moonlight. I’m too ignorant to know if it was very good or just pretty good, but it was better than the recent nominees except Get Out and The Post.
I also saw The Black Panther last weekend. I liked it. I wasn’t super blown away by it. I guess I was hoping for a more Averngers-y type plot but it was a fun movie.
My most recent five:
Moonstruck
A funny, charming Italian-American romance with a fantastic ensemble cast. Cher and Nicolas Cage are particularly good together.
The Room
Finally saw this so-bad-it’s-good flick. Everyone in the theatre - and it was a very rowdy crowd - was shouting back at the movie’s terrible dialogue and clunky plot, which made it both bearable and hilarious. My favorite bit was when, during the party scene, several guys ran up on stage left and jumped up and down, waving and calling out to Tommy Wiseau. Just as they knew he would, he finally looked their way and waved, so they cheered and ran back to their seats.
The Wind Rises
Pretty good Miyazaki anime, a highly fictionalized biopic about a designer of Japanese aircraft (including the famous Zero fighter) before WWII.
Toy Story
Still a terrific Pixar movie about the adventures of, and rivalry and eventual friendship between, Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear.
Black Panther
I agree with Jack Batty - an enjoyable superhero flick, but not as OMG-wasn’t-that-amazing as some of the reviews would have it. Interesting subtexts of imperialism, immigration and isolationism, though, and a very good cast and cinematography.
We just watched The Mummy (2017) with Razzie winner Tom Cruise. Expecting it to be terrible, I found it mildly entertaining. It did steal everything from other movies, though, and Tom Cruise lacked chemistry with the love interest. It suffers in comparison to Brandon Frazier’s earlier films.
I saw Black Panther over the weekend. I liked it, but didn’t LOVE it as so many people seem to. I think if I were black I would be blown away by it, because it so unhesitatingly and unapologetically centered on black communities and black achievement without owing anything whatsoever to European civilization at all. That has to feel liberating, and a welcome change from al the hedging we’ve had from Hollywood movies over the years. Considering the positive response, I expect more of the same – not only more Black Panther films, but also more things like historical dramas set in Africa that aren’t white-centric.
I also found a restored version of The Wages of Fear, which I’ve wanted to see for years, ever since I saw Friedkin’s Sorceror and learned it was a remake. My reaction? It’s a gritty, intriguing film. But I still prefer Sorceror, probably because I saw it first. Nevertheless, you really do have to see The Wages of Fear at least once. When it came out, it was considered extremely anti-American, so they cut more than twenty minutes out of it (The Criterion version has a special segment showing the cuts). Well, it IS anti-American. The poverty-stricken town of Las Piedras has a big American oil presence there that does nothing to relieve the poverty and may be making it worse. They think nothing of exploiting the workers. There’s something of this in Sorceror, but, by and large, the later film removes this element. also, the Oil Pit sequence is replaced in the later film by the Bandits scene, and Roy Scheider’s character isn’t as culpable as Yves Montand’s is in the death of his companion, which is more optimistic, but this is a film that doesn’t need optimism. I have to admit that I was disappointed in the ending, where Montand basically brings his end upon himself, for no discernable reason. In that, Sorceror was better in having Scheider’s ultimate fate being not of his own making, and pretty much inevitable.
A couple recent ones:
Battle of the Sexes. Riggs vs. King. Very nicely done. Does a good job of bringing back the memories of how weird all that was. You could even tell the performers were enjoying making this film.
Count the mustaches!
The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Colin Farrell and Nichole Kidman (again). Two doctors dealing with the consequence of a prior “event”.
I am fully capable of “buying the premise”. E.g., Groundhog Day. Okay, he’s doing the same day over and over. Got it. Let’s watch the movie.
But this one just strains too much. Over and over we just could not accept what was going on and that what the people were doing was remotely expected.
Shame to see good actors wasted like this. Look for Alicia Silverstone in a small but interesting role.
It could have, should have, been a much better movie if some thought was put into it.
Wow. That looks like a seriously weird movie.
I finally got around to seeing Touch of Evil. Loved the opening scene that follows the doomed car, Heston and Leigh through the streets of the Mexican town. If you’re a noir fan, this is a must-see.
I just saw John Carter this weekend with the kids and it was… not bad… It was a fairly typical CGI blockbuster attempt to start a franchise movie but it had some good actors in it. I didn’t think the CGI was necessarily great but I did like the airships. I also don’t think they built the story very well and maybe that was its greatest weakness (or perhaps overdressing Dejah Thoris was) but I remember hearing that this was a dud way before the movie was even released.
I saw Amazon Prime had added Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and was in the mood for a mindless spectacle. Directed by Luc Besson, same director as The Fifth Element but unfortunately it wasn’t nearly as clever or funny. Valerian was still quite a spectacle in an interesting world. Deep down it was a just a standard action-adventure story with the required romance thrown in. I still liked it.