Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
I adore Aubrey Plaza and that’s the only reason I watched this POS. In one word: TYPICAL! Make of it what you will.
I watched the Dungeons and Dragons movie and I was not very impressed. I feel it fell into that dead zone where it was making too many jokes for me to take it seriously but not enough jokes to make it a good comedy.
I started watching it and I was enjoying the style, the comedy, the action, but there were just too many hardcore D&D references that it seemed I was just supposed to know all about or take for granted. I don’t know shit about D&D, so all these guilds and tribes and spells and all that other esoteric shit was beyond me.
[quote=“Jack_Batty, post:7401, topic:699906”]
I don’t know shit about D&D, so all these guilds and tribes and spells and all that other esoteric shit was beyond me.
[/quote]
Yeah. Like you, I’ve never paid any attention to D&D, and any references to the game went straight over my head. However, we took the film as it was, a comedy/adventure. It was at best an enjoyable couple of hours, a diversion, and completely forgettable. We only watched it a week ago and when I saw it mentioned here, I had to think about whether I had ever seen it.
I found it suitable background noise to have on in the background while playing StarCraft. That was after giving it about 30 minutes, and finding I wasn’t exactly engrossed in the world it presented me with, and that I didn’t really give a shit about the super generic Robin Hood-esque anti-heroes with an Ocean’s 13 twist.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny . Should have just called it “I’m Too Old for This Shit” meaning Harrison Ford and me; the audience. I was watching with my wife and two friends and I lost count of how many times someone said, “Man, he’s a bad archeologist!”
Red, White and Royal Blue. While usually the claims of certain folk that any film featuring gay characters in a positive light is “pushing an agenda”, for once I think they may be right about this one. Not that it’s going to turn anyone gay who isn’t, but it’s basically a little bit romcom, a little bit Lifetime movie, and a lot “How To Be A Gay Man”, with a lot of soapboxing and important bits of advice sprinkled throughout. There is also a way-too-close-up sex scene with the penetration happening just off screen, which I found cringeworthy for a film with a 12 rating (UK rating - suitable for 12-year-olds). My daughter (15) couldn’t believe they’d rated it that young.
Plotwise it’s incredibly predictable, trivial and ridiculous. Its saving grace is that there are a fair number of incredibly funny lines that unexpectedly pop up here and there. Watch it, don’t watch it - up to you. You won’t be missing much.
Watched a few films this week, two of them on old DVDs I bought and one streaming
Arsenic and Old Lace – This one still holds up beautifully. It’s kinda weird to think that this subversive comedy is the work of a director – Frank Capra – often derided as producing “Capra-corn”. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. The movie script differs significantly from the original stage play, but both are excellent. The play got away with things movie producers were too skittish to touch. “Son of a sea cook” is used instead of “bastard” in the movie, and it’s weird how, in a play that sports with death and murder they shy away from even showing the dead bodies. It’s similar to the wat the movie “Dracula” avoided do many of the things that made the stage play effective (in the stage play, for instance, we get to see Dracula killed by having a stake driven into his heart, and we get to se the body dissolve; in the film, it’s all discretely done off-camera, and we don’t even get to hear the hammer blows. And they leave out Lucy’s staking altogether).
The original play was apparently based on real incidents. I’ve read that, although the play is credited to Joseph Kesselring (who didn’t write the screenplay), the play owes more to the efforts of producers Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. The screenplay was the work of Julius and Philip Epstein (who later on went to write one of the drafts of Casablanca). They couldn’t get Boris Karloff to play Jonathan Brewster (he was then playing the role on Broadway), which is too bad, because the character is described as “looking like Boris Karloff”, and the script makes a lot of comparisons to “Frankenstein” (which isn’t named). But Raymond Massey does a great job as a Karloff substitute. Apparently they originally wanted Bob Hope for the Mortimer Brewster role, or even Jack Benny. It’s hard to imagine anyone but Cary Grant in that role today.
Watching the film, I suddenly realized that Kesselring et al’s Brewster family is pretty much the same as Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s Pendergast family – you’ve got an old family with a New York City mansion. In the 19th century the patriarch set himself up as a doctor with a laboratory full of dangerous poisons, the family became quite wealthy, and most of the descendants were hopelessly though entertainingly mad. You had at least one eccentric and courtly aunt who’s mad, a homicidally mad brother, and the main character who’s different from the rest in not being certifiably insane, through whose eyes you see the action unfold. If Mortimer Brewster had gone to study Drama Criticism among the lamas of Tibet it would have been almost perfect.
Destination: Space was one I’d never heard of before. It’s a late 1950s pilot for an unproduced TV series about space exploration made by Paramount. The show seems to have had two purposes – 1.) to compete with Men Into Space, a similar series that actually ran on CBS in 1959-1960; and 2.) To use up the costly special effects footage generated by George Pal’s 1955 film Conquest of Space.
Like Men Into Space, Destination: Space is surprisingly adult, hard SF set in the very near future. The screenplay is by Rip van Ronkel (who co-wrote George Pal’s earlier Destination Moon, based on work by Robert Heinlein) and the direction is by Joseph Pevney (who went on to direct 14 episodes of the original Star Trek). SF B-movie star John Agar is in it, as is a pre-Get Smart Edward Platt.
Overall pretty good science and engineering that centers around a von Braun-style space station, which is criticized as a expensive boondoggle by a senator who wants the flight to the moon to to be sent direct from the surface of the earth. I have a suspicion that the two TV series were sort of inspired by Walt Disney’s “Man In Space” trilogy that ran on the show “Disneyland” a little earlier in the 1950s.
Also on the disc was a cheap SF film I’ve never heard of – The Tomorrow Machine, about a time machine invented by another of those hanging-around-after-WWII Nazis who want to put Hitler back into power. It was a “regional film”, made in the Dallas area with local production facilities circa 1963, (There are 1964 model cars, but, as my wife points out, 1964-year cars would’ve been released late in 1963). Surprisingly, Tim Holt has a big part as a police lieutenant. He’d come out of retirement to star in The Monster that Challenged the World in 1957, and evidently decided to appear in this one, too.
Not a great movie – it likely played the local drive-in circuit and never got distributed on TV. There’s some great baton-twirling under the opening credits.
Atlantic Rim is an obvious rip-off of Pacific Rim by the obvious rippers-off at The Asylum. Most of the film’s budget appears to have gone into the CGI monsters and Big-Name Star Graham Greene, because the sets and most of the acting is abysmal. Appropriately, I watched the MST3K version of this.
Unlike the del Toro films this was stealing from, each Giant Robot only needs one operator each. The three robots are operated by a white guy, a black guy, and a white woman. As soon as I saw this, I couldn’t help but think of the tag line for the old TV series The Mod Squad – “One Black, One White, One Blonde”, a line that, in retrospect, manages to be racist and sexist without realizing it. But it was the 1960s, and you can forgive them. But not Atlantic Rim.
I’m presently watching The Equalizer 2 with the always watchable Denzel. I’ll finish it today. Now I see that there is an E3 coming out.
One can tell Denzel is older now and that dismays me as he is precisely three days older than I am.
Late to the game, but Hidden Figures was just short of outstanding. I admire filmmakers who can make me tense up about a true-life incident that I already knew the outcome of (see also Apollo 13).
You didn’t hear me say this, but Kevin Costner just keeps getting better and better.
I’ve never had the problem with Costner that many people have. Other than that constant thing he does with his tongue, which is very distracting.
In this vein, I watched Air yesterday. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Michael Jordan indeed signed with Nike. Furthermore, it’s a movie about an athlete signing a shoe endorsement contract. What could possibly be less exciting?
And yet, it really made me care about the characters and what was happening and going to happen. Really great film.
I am intrigued.
There are probably worse ways to spend two hours – oh, yeah, Return of the Living Dead III! Save yourself!
You were obviously watching the 1944 movie. But if you’re interested you can also watch the 1962 and 1969 television versions on YouTube. The 1962 version features Tony Randall as Mortimer and has Boris Karloff as Jonathan. The 1969 version has Bob Crane as Mortimer and Fred Gwynne as Jonathan.
I read that wrong.
What? You weren’t around when a doctor from a British asylum drove a stake through the heart of a visiting Balkan nobleman? It made all the papers.
Finally saw the new The Little Mermaid (2023) on Disney+. Overall, it was good. I liked the new songs and orchestration. The plotting was similar enough to original to follow along with a few changes for a more modern feel. Characters and casting were good.
In terms of the live-action remakes, I’d rank Aladdin and Mulan as better.
Talk To Me
Highly recommended.
Yes, this is how you make a horror movie with a simple premise. Just stick to the simple premise and make it effective and as quickly impactful as possible. This is a 90 minute movie and it does not overstay its welcome at all. It just hits you with the scary aspects of the situation and then ends with a terrific ending.
Yeah, I’d say get this one on rental or wait for streaming. It’s well done.
Two movies to recommend more or less-
99 Cycling Swords-a goofy and forgettable kungfu movie with mistaken identity and odd comedy. You can do a lot worse.
The other was Punisher: Warzone. I know a lot of folks don’t like the Punisher, and I’m one of them. But the director, Lexi Alexander, knocked this one out of the park, and IMHO she should really be given another chance at an action movie. It’s gory, goofy, and stars Colin Salmon (who’s good in terrible stuff and never gets enough credit for it), Dominic West, whos’ chewing more scenery than a hot-dog-eating contest, and Ray Stevenson as Frank Castle! RIP. If it’s something you’ll like, you’ll like it. I wish the “How Did This Get Made” episode of the movie was still around.