I finished Interstellar yesterday. For some reason, I’m pretty sure I saw part of it at some point, but only some scenes at the end. The rest of it was all new to me. I had to laugh at “I’ll program the second hand of her watch!” An analog watch? Some dubious sciency stuff there, boys.
I also liked this one more than I expected to. Lots more humour than I expected as well.
I saw a new Netflix release, “Heart of Stone” , with Gal Gadot as the featured star. It has a message, and one is challenged to figure out who is really the bad guy.
The dialogue for Tenet was definitely hard to hear in parts, but I had no problem with either Interstellar or Oppenheimer.
I’m a big Steve Martin fan, and The Jerk did nothing for me. I think Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Roxanne and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid were all much better.
Oh, come on. Not even with a blue Chevy pulling a small church?
I haven’t seenThe Jerk in 40 years…but it seems like yesterday. The first year seemed like two hours but the second year was like 53 minutes. The third and fourth years seemed like 29 minutes each and….
Blue Beetle (2023) in theaters. I read that this was originally slated to go directly to HBO Max, but then it was changed to be released in theaters. I am glad the later happened because I was able to watch and enjoy the movie. Having not seen any previews or press about it, I was surprised that they chose to focus on the latest incarnation of the hero Jaime Reyes, but pleased by the choice. This is definitely a superhero origin movie building a cast of characters to support the main protagonist and it works well as such without being too long. Knowing Hispanic culture and Latin American history will enhance the viewing experience, though it is not necessary to understand the context.
Overall a pleasant experience which is not something you can always say about a DCU movie.
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I remember seeing The Blue Beetle on The Electric Company, but I never expected he’d get his own movie.
Watched The Machine last night. It was about as good as you’d expect a movie based on a 14-minute comedy bit to be. It had its moments, but overall, clearly bargain bin fodder.
OTOH, it was kind of heartwarming to see this kind of shitty comedy movie with decent production values still being made. What can I say, I grew up in the 80s and 90s when these things were in their prime, and I’m a fan of the “genre.”
Tonight I watched Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre and it was decent. A stacked cast , I usually like Statham and Guy Richie, and Plaza can be fun, but it was meh. Grant seemed to be having a ball, though.
Alpha (2018, directed by Albert Hughes). Boy-befriends-wolf story set 20,000 years ago with spectacular visuals and sparse dialogue in a fictional language. Really stunning and imaginative visuals and solid acting throughout. The story is simple enough to anticipate its arc, but something about it had my full attention all the way through. Although there are a few scenes with obvious CGI, unlikely events and ahistorical depictions, they’re easy enough to ignore because the main draw is the film’s breathtaking photography. Some of its best parts were surely enhanced with CGI, but its use there is not obvious as I mentioned above. The perspectives and compositions in those scenes are surprisingly unusual and beautiful—unique to this film, I think—, and it’s only in retrospect that one concludes that they couldn’t have been done without the use of digital technology. I was surprised to find myself muttering “Excellent!” more than once. There’s some blood in the context of hunting and being hunted, all between man and beast, and the film leans much more toward comprehension, forgiveness, empathy, etc., making it a good choice for viewing with most children, IMO. Whatever you do, do NOT read the film’s review on Roger Ebert’s website before watching it. IT professional and blogmaster Odie Henderson tries to describe at length the scenes with the most striking visuals, which I think will only lessen their first-time impact. It’s not a great film but I recommend it highly.
Furious 7 (2015). I have been working my way through The Fast and the Furious franchise having only seen up to the 3rd Tokyo Drift. This is definitely the best so far, the cast gels well together, the stunts are for the most part believable and some of the call backs from earlier in the movie are satisfactorily resolved. I really enjoyed watching it from beginning to end even though the end sequence was where it went really over the top. Yes, the series has little to do with racing and cars at this point, but maybe that is for the best. After watching these I still have to check myself when I get into the car not to try to race off at full speed.
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I watched Asteroid City last night. It was…so aggressively twee I couldn’t take it. I bailed after about 2/3 of it.
I am well aware of what I’ll likely get when I watch a Wes Anderson movie, and I thought that I had adjusted my expectations accordingly. I’ve watched many of his previous movies and ran the gamut from slight to no enjoyment. The last one I had seen was either The Grand Budapest Hotel or Moonrise Kingdom, and I remember not hating either of those.
And boy howdy, was it more meta-meta-meta and weird for the sake of weird than any of his movies yet. Wes Andersonesque squared. OK, it did have a couple deadpan humorous scenes that made me laugh. But overall it was just so try-hard quirky for the sake of quirk alone, it was exhausting.
And yet…the cast is a veritable Hollywood who’s who, so clearly I’m just not getting something about his genius. Maybe, despite my thinking I had readied myself for his style, I really wasn’t…I was pretty tired last night after a long weekend, and when I’m tired I don’t suffer cutesy quirkiness well. Maybe I’ll get around to watching the rest of the movie just to say I did it.
Eh, the struggle is real. I loved Rushmore and Fantastic Mr. Fox, and really like Bottle Rocket, but I struggled through Grand Budapest Hotel, and bailed twice on Moonrise Kingdom. In my mind, it’s a little like kabuki…a rich story told in a highly stylized format, and you just have to be in the mindset for it. Which, to be honest, I am often not.
Wes Anderson used to be one of my favorite directors, but I’m beginning to think I just really liked The Royal Tenenbaums and leave it at that. I did like The Grand Budapest Hotel. But I recently saw The French Dispatch and parts of it I disliked so much I was actually angry.
I enjoyed the animated films he’s done, Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs. The live action ones of his I’ve seen, I’ve found either ‘meh’ or haven’t got through them. They’re definitely distinctive though so I can understand why people like them.
Elemental (2023). This movie didn’t do well initially and I think I know why. Folks have pointed out in the past that Pixar movies tend to follow the formula of “What if X had feelings?” Just insert a subject: toys, bugs, monsters, cars, fish, teenage girls, feelings, animals, you get the idea. And this movie didn’t do much to sell itself; it came off as the most generic possible Pixar movie: “What if elements had feelings?”
It ended up being stronger than that, and instead tapped into a topic that a lot of other recent animated movies have been tapping into: Generational Trauma. Ember is a hot-headed young flame person slated to inherit the family business that her immigrant father spent his life building, but a chance encounter with a empathic water boy sends her on the path to considering her own desires for the first time. It’s a cute romcom story set against a vibrant world of institutional racism, where the challenge that the protagonists have to overcome is due to decaying municipal infastructure that, for some reason, they are expected to fix.
I tried to watch Ricky Gervais’s David Brent, Life on the Road for a second time. I’m actually one of those who likes his humor, but he should never have made this clunker, as it just doesn’t work. On any level, really. I think I realized that the first time around, when I gave up on it, but it’s been long enough that I forgot how bad it was.
I believe that is the one written by only Ricky Gervais, not him and Stephen Merchant. I think it shows.
For sure. It’s also 15 years after “The Office”, which had a brilliant ensemble cast to relieve us from his relentless shtick. This movie is just him and a lot of other people looking uncomfortable. “Extras”, on the other hand, was hilarious with Merchant as his bumbling agent, and Ashley Jensen as his best friend.