It’s actually watchable? The previews make it look hooooorible. Like walk-outably horrible.
It’s much better than the previews portray it. I mean, in a sense it is exactly as stupid as it looks, but it’s quite enjoyable all the same. A bit more raunchy than your usual romcom also.
Interstellar
Wow! Two hours and fifty minutes have never flown by so fast. Stunning from the get-go. I need to seriously re-evaluate Matthew McConaughey as an actor. Has made my top 10 list of movies.
One odd thing about No Hard Feelings that nobody has mentioned in any review or discussion of the film is the difference in ages of the parents. After all, people have made a big deal about the fact that difference in ages of the characters played by Lawrence and Feldman is 13 years, given that she is 32 according to the film and he is 19 according to the film. Actually, since the movie was shot in September and October of 2022, Lawrence was 32 at that time and Feldman was 20, so the difference in the ages of the actors was 12 years. But consider the difference in the ages of Broderick and Benanti, who played the parents. At the time of the shooting of the film, he was 60 and she was 43, so the difference in the ages of the parents was 18 years. There’s no mention of the ages of those two characters in the film.
17 years
Agreed. It made me fall in love with Pedro Pascal for the first time, and fall in love with Nicolas Cage all over again. I’ve always loved his weirdness and it makes me happy to see him starring in films custom made to showcase it. Unfortunately a lot of them are movies I’m not sure I have the stomach for… Like Mandy or the upcoming Sympathy for the Devil.
I’m trying to slog through Annihilation on NFLX. Getting past the stupid is difficult, though.
Just this morning I watched Return of the Vampire, a 1943 film starring Bela Lugosi as – well, he’s pretty obviously supposed to be Count Dracula. But the film was made by Columbia, and they didn’t have any rights to the name, so he’s Count Armand Tesla.
I’d heard about this film for years. Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland used to print pictures from it all the time. But it never seemed to show up on TV. That’s because it wasn’t part of the Shock! package of movies that Screen Gems leased to independent TV stations in 1957, and which kicked off the “Monster culture” that seduced the Baby Boomers like me. Even though Screen Gems was a subsidiary of Columbia, most of the movies were from Universal. And, even though they put a few Columbia films in there, they inexplicably left out most of their old horror films.
So the Boomers grew up knowing Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Wolf Man, but only knew second-hand (as through FMOF) such flicks as *Doctor X, The Horror of the Wax Museum, * or Return of the Vampire.
The story could easily be about Dracula. The titular vampire is killed by a stake being driven into his heart in the early 20th century in London. During the London Blitz, the cemetery is struck by bombs and the vampire’s undecayed body has an iron (not a wooden) spike sticking out of it. Thinking this is war shrapnel, the local wardens pull it out an re-bury the body. As would happen in the Universal movie House of Frankenstein a year later, pulling the stake out lets the vampire come back to life. Dracula – err – Tesla sets about picking up where he left off, going after the people who were his victims earlier and taking revenge on the ones who staked him. He tracks down his earlier “Renfield”, Andreas, and makes him his unwilling servant again. (In an interesting twist, when serving as his lackey, Andreas turns into a Wolf Man. It’s the first time I’ve seen a Wolf-Man in a non-Universal picture, and the first film I can think of that features both a werewolf and a vampire. Until this point, vampires were practically werewolves themselves. After all, besides being able to turn into a bat, Dracula can turn into a wolf. He does so in the novel and several of the screen adaptations. )
Frieda Inescourt plays Lady Jane Ainsley, a sort of female Van Helsing who pursues Tesla. “Strong female part,” commented my wife, upon watching this. She is indeed, and pretty effective, too. But Tesla is ultimately done in by his own henchman, Andreas, after he expresses no sympathy for the morally wounded Wolfman. Andreas forces him back with a crucifix (although, as my wife astutely pointed out, he didn’t pay any attention to the crucifix on the wall of the crypt/chapel behind him. I always thought it ironic that crucifix-fearing vampires hang out in graveyards filled with crucifixes), and ultimately drags his body out into the sunlight, where it dissolves.
This film and Universal’s Son of Dracula, released only a few months earlier, revived the concept of sunlight destroying the vampire. Universal would go on to use it in House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula . As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Fritz Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu was the first time that a vampire was shown to dissolve under the action of sunlight. But it’s unlikely that that one film would have transformed the modern legend of the vampire by itself. In the first place, the film, based on Dracula, was unlicensed, and Bram Stoker’s widow Florence (who could’ve used the royalties) took the German film company to court and demanded the destruction of every copy she could find. Fortunately, she didn’t get them all, but it kept the film out of circulation, and for the next twenty years no vampires succumbed to sunlight. In film and in print they died by being staked, or burned, or dissolved in acid. But in 1943 two different films resurrected the sunlight-sensitive vampire. I suspect it was the German film-makers (who had emigrated to Hollywood) who remembered Nosferatu and revived the concept. Kurt/Curt Siodmak at Universal wrote the stories for both Son of Dracula and House of Frankenstein and Kurt Neumann who plotted Return of the Vampire.
I’ve suggested elsewhere that The Vampire That Dissolves in Sunlight was a refinement that came up during WWII to give them a “cleaner” death – nobody needed to be reminded of brutal deaths when their relatives might have been threatened by brutal death on the battlefield. The Universal vampires dissolved photographically into clean bones, but Bela Lugosi’s Count Tesla sort of decays into jello-like gelatinous tissue. Purportedly there was a special-effects sequence depicting this that the British Board of Censors had removed from the film. It certainly does look as if there was more than we’re seeing.
Looks like it’s missing from the print I watched, too.
Your Name
Recommended.
A boy and a girl keep waking up in each other’s bodies, though they struggle to retain memories of each other when they return to their own bodies.
A very well done animated movie from Makoto Shinkai, one of Japan’s top animators. I won’t go into story details as it actually has a pretty intricate and somewhat twisty story, but it is beautifully written and animated and a real treat.
If you like animated movies at all, this is a good one.
I don’t know if there are enough movies for a thread titled Movies that Can’t Be Found, but I have one.
I’ve seen two clips from the North Korean film Pulgari, a giant monster flick set in the past. It was made for Kim Il Sung after he had the South Korean director kidnapped. I would have spelled the name in hangul but I don’t have the font for it.
Another Asteroid City viewer reporting in. I expected an unconventional story line, offbeat characters and fantastic set design–and got all three. Unlike the Indiana Jones movie (which I enjoyed), I feel a need to see Asteroid City again to catch things I missed. A strong contender for my favorite Wes Anderson movie (in competition with Moonrise Kingdom for the top spot).
I read that several consecutive times as “after he had the South Korean dictator kidnapped” and thought to myself “I do not know as much world history as I should, I need to Google this…”
Sheesh, I remembered the name slightly wrong
Made by Vichy collaborators to warn against the insidious conspiracy of Freemasons (and, of course, Jews) to control the world, this 51-minute propaganda piece is of occasional visual interest and includes recreations of lame-ass initiation rites, secret handshakes and outré symbology. The ”hero,” a naïve governing deputy, finds only petty corruption and self-serving ambitions after joining a lodge (“We’re not a secret society; we’re a discreet society”), later breaking with it over its intent to push France into war with Germany.
A strange film, to be sure, requiring one to keep in mind who made it and why. The director was an ex-Mason who was shot by a French firing squad after the war. The writer and producer went into exile to escape punishment. Not really recommended, but of interest to those with interest in such things.
Last night we watched The Mule starring Clint Eastwood, who looks very old (probably because he is very old!) but he still has it. We both enjoyed it - which is kind of rare. I was kind of surprised how it ended. I guessed wrong.
Saw this again, this time with Inna. She started singing along with some of the songs, had a number of laughs (this is a pretty funny movie), and became aware for the first time that there were two Roosevelt’s who were President (Inna was raised in the Soviet Union, and moved to the US from Kyrgyzstan about 15 years ago).
It’s worth it just for James Cagney’s rather eccentric hoofing style.
TCM aired Driving Miss Daisy
I haven’t seen it in over 25 years. It holds up very well. The view of various times in the segregated South is very interesting. She lives long enough to attend a dinner speech by Martin Luther King.
The prickly Daisy’s reluctant acceptance and eventual friendship of Hoke the chauffeur is fascinating. Watching the characters age and become frail still hits me hard.
I had forgotten Miss Daisy is Jewish and it’s a important part of the film. She shares the feeling of prejudice similar to Hoke. Miss Daisy is very shaken up when she learns the Temple is bombed.
I highly recommend this film.
This movie has been recommended before but this time pushed me over the line: I “bought” it on Prime now.
Just finished. Very nice. Beautiful and it did not proceed how I was thinking it would.
Another “recommend it.”
The Blackening
Highly recommended. One of my highest recommendations recently.
I have not laughed at a movie this much since Jackass Forever, which was clearly a totally different type of movie.
In this movie, a bunch of Black friends get together to celebrate Juneteenth. They discover a board game that challenges them to determine who is the “Blackest” of the group. Least Black person dies over and over until only the Blackest person lives.
It’s a comedy, through and through. I don’t think I understood that even with its ridiculous and zany premise. I thought it might be a real slasher/horror movie, but it isn’t. I watched this movie alone and I laughed out loud numerous times, a rare feat for me. I typically laugh more when I see something with my wife, but this movie was so funny, I kept laughing. I doubled over in laughter at least twice, my hardest laugh. I had to pause the movie so I wouldn’t miss what was next. I’m re-watching this entire movie with my wife, another indication of how much I enjoyed it. I mean, she has to see this.
I kind of loved this movie and it is right in the top group of best movies I’ve seen from 2023. Just a hilarious movie and I highly recommend watching with subtitles on as the jokes go very fast.
Note: I found the opening 25 minutes or so to only be OK. Once they start playing the “Blackening” game, it’s hilarious.
I strongly recommend this movie to anyone. I’m not Black and all the jokes worked just as well for me as any Black audience, at least to the point that I laughed at everything. I won’t wage a guess on how Black people would view the movie. It works on its own outside all of that.
It left me with one “white guy” question: Is Spades, the card game, popular with Black people? It is mentioned a few times throughout and I admit…I did not realize that if it is the case. Is this regional?
See. This. Movie.