Watched The Lost King the other day. Starring Sally Hawkins and Steve Coogan. (Who also did a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff.)
“Based on a true story.” Sally plays Phillipa , a woman who got a bug in her ear about finding the lost remains of Richard III. And despite seemingly immense odds succeeded. (Not a spoiler since this was pretty big news when it happened.)
Fairly interesting movie, with a nice way of getting her “personally involved” with the murderous (but not to her) jerk.
Of course the “little person taking on the big guns” story ends up not going well. The real Phillipa ended up quite bitter at being edged out of things.
The people who edged her out are upset with her claims, the book and this movie. But, good grief folks, she was the one who researched the places the body had been suspected to be and picked out the right one. She raised the money. She hired the pro archeologist. Etc. And the big guns are the ones mad at her for pointing this out???
Note that the movie greatly compressed the time scale of events and some of the backstory was redone and who knows what else. Still …
Give it 3.5 horses.
BTW: Methinks that the best Coogan dramas based on real events feature a woman whose name starts with “Ph.”
War of the Buttons (1994, Prime) is a well watched movie from my youth about Catholic and Protestant children fighting in a small quaint Irish village as a microcosm for The Troubles. I asked my wife to put it on for our son in another room last evening. When it was over he came out and said it was fantastic and asked me all sorts of questions I didn’t understand. Turns out my wife had put on War of the Buttons (2011, Prime $2 rental, $6 to own) about young children trying to hide a Jewish girl in Southern France during WWII and all entirely in French My 8 year old is a strong reader, but still I was impressed with his keeping up with the dialogue in Close Captions.
Turns out this film was adapted from the original story, which was French, and the film is far better than the knockoff adaptation I remember.
I would recommend this for Adults and Children aged 8 or more though it is rated PG-13.
Haven’t seen it either, but the previews reminded me a lot of the general themes of Zootopia (the cultural baggage of carnivores vs herbivores in a fantastic city with numerous elaborate habitat schemes), which I saw with a niece and thought was pretty decent. To the point where I am wondering just how original this one will be and whether it will measure up.
Obviously, not every movie can have an entirely original story. My point about Spider-man is how original and innovative the animation was. (The story was very well written too.)
Well, I mean, don’t get your hopes way up for Elemental, it is admittedly solidly in the cliche-trope grooves of “Romeo-Juliet/Opposites Attract” and “Family Solidarity Versus Following My Dream”. And of course there’s the usual kid-flick assortment of mile-wide plot holes.
But you are right that the world-building details and leaning into the analogies with human xenophobia were quite reminiscent of Zootopia (which I also liked). It was also the first time since Anton Ego’s closing monologue in Ratatouille that I found myself thinking during a Disney/Pixar flick “Huh, that is actually an interesting observation that hadn’t occurred to me, rather than one of the usual conventional pieties that provide the Moral Message in children’s films.”
That moment, which I’ll spoilerbox even though it doesn’t really reveal any plot info you didn’t get from the trailer, was when Ember the daughter of the struggling immigrant fire family tells Wade the son of the wealthy high-status water family* that, basically, cross-cultural bonding is one of the privileges of the rich and comfortable. It’s a lot easier to “embrace diversity” and be appreciative of difference when your family aren’t the people who are constantly getting shat on* * for their difference, and who need to close ranks and hang together just to survive.
* Is it proper protocol to spoilerbox a footnote to a spoilerboxed remark even if it really doesn’t have any plot spoilers? Better safe than sorry, I guess: N.B.: Some reviews I’ve seen seem to be endorsing a confused notion that the water people in Elementalas a class are all wealthy and high-status. I think that’s false, as there seemed to be minor and background water characters of all social levels throughout the movie, but there’s no question that Wade’s family in particular seem quite affluent. (Oops, hee hee, “fluent” water-people, ISWIDT. )
* * Oh, now this is just getting stupid, sorry: Paraphrased, natch; nobody is saying “shat on” in a Disney/Pixar movie no matter how “woke” it is.
I watched Full Metal Jacket because it’s been quite awhile. I think I’m over it now. Then tried Platoon, but it’s just depressing. Then I thought Hey! Slap Shot is a funny movie! It has definitely not aged well and I gave up after a few opening scenes where the word “faggot” was thrown around liberally.
This was poorly received by some? I liked this movie a lot. It might be one of the very best DC movies of recent years and better than quite a few of the recent Marvel movies.
The cameos near the end were absolutely pointless, but otherwise, I enjoyed the entire movie. Very fun and a great Flash movie.
I’ve only heard good things about the film itself. The controversy seems to mostly be around Ezra Miller, who has personally (allegedly) done some Very Bad Things.
We watched The Door Into Summer last night on Netflix. I would never even have known that this film existed, except that I was looking up stuff about Heinlein on film, and found that there was a Japanese adaptation of it made in 2021.
It was pretty good, and relatively faithful to Heinlein novella. My wife had read the book back before I met her, and she always says of our cats (when they ask to got out in the winter, and are disappointed by the snow) that they were “looking for the door into summer”. Our daughter (who didn’t even know about the book) hadn’t really understood the line until she saw the movie last night. She liked it, too.,
Heinlein’s getting better treatment as time goes by. It used to be that nobody gave us the straight stuff, even with Destination Moon (that he co-wrote the screenplay for. But he had to make compromises to get the damned thing made. He wrote about this). The butchered his stuff for Operation Moonbase (although I think he has to take some blame for some of the parts we find cringey today). They ripped him off for The Brain Eaters, we have commented at length about Starship Troopers here. They changed the plots of Red Planet and Jerry was a Man on TV (I don’t know if they were any more faithful in the adaptation they did in 1955 on X Minus One. I’ve never seen them). There are some things good about the movie adaptation of The Puppet Masters, but the endf product is pretty disappointing.
But Predestination, based on “All You Zombies” was pretty good, and now so was “The Door Into Summer”. I se they did an adaptation of Heinlein’s first published story, Lifeline in 2022. I’ll have to check it out.
FLAMIN’ HOT is the inspiring true story of Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia) who as a Frito Lay janitor disrupted the food industry by channeling his Mexican American heritage to turn Flamin’ Hot Cheetos from a snack into an iconic global pop culture phenomenon.
Start to finish it’s pretty much all self-congratulatory. Even if true, the story was dull. ‘Comedy’ is a stretch, and I think here just is used like ‘Thriller’ as a generic category that every film must adhere to for marketability. They shouldn’t have bothered.
Meh, give this a pass unless you are very committed to every aspect of Latino culture, no matter how tenuous, or are supremely bored.
I saw Asteroid City tonight. Everything I expect from a Wes Anderson film so I enjoyed it. People who don’t like films like this should know better by now. The teens and children in the cast were great.
Not sure what it says about me, but of the films of his that I have seen, I enjoyed the two animations (Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs) best. The others have mostly left me cold, or detached. He certainly has one of the most easily recognisable styles out there.
Recommended, though violent if that turns you off.
Young girl goes on a revenge rampage against Nazi Kevin James. <–true and good for advertising.
Sounds crazy and it kind of is. Nice to see Kevin James play a straight non-comedic role. His villain is 100% not played for laughs and like many comedy guys, he shows he can really act. He should get more non-comedic roles.
The girl is pretty good, though I heard some raves about her performance and she really does not do much more than a solid teen actress can do. I mean, she’s good in the movie, but not amazing.
Very violent, enough for me to think, “Hey, is this actress old enough for this kind of violence?” but I really don’t know how to judge the movie making process and how it does or does not affect the kids in them. I believe the actress was either 14 or 15 during filming.
Anyway, there is a sequel called Wrath of Becky that I’m most of the way through. Diminished returns for sure.
I’m not even kidding when I say you can skip to about the last 35 minutes of this movie. Everything interesting and fun is at the end of this movie and the opening 50 minutes only exists to get it to feature length.
I’m not really all that negative about the movie. The final 35 minutes are great and well worth viewing.
Looks like the movie is heading toward a third one and I hope they make it. Despite this movie being a tad overlong at 1 hr 26 minutes, it still delivered some worthwhile content in the end.
Me: “Was there any point to that film whatsoever?”
Daughter: “I don’t know. But it was fun!”
I mean, it’s a Wes Anderson film in the vein of many Wes Anderson films. Lots of bright colors. Lots of close-ups of people talking directly into the camera. A ridiculous number of celebrities deadpanning their way through short, ridiculous vignettes. The story - what little there is of it - veering frequently off into commentary or meta-commentary or meta-meta-commentary. Lots of amusing little details that are completely irrelevant to anything. There is also a highly risible scene involving an alien, which is not a typical feature of Anderson films but still worthwhile.
So no, there is no point to this film whatsoever. But it is fun.
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