Her dad, Ron, presumably.
A made-for-TV movie called The Offer. It’s all about the making of The Godfather. Based on Albert Ruddy’s recollections.
Watched Midnight Special (2016) on Kanopy. The name sounds like a dozen other films or TV shows, but it’s a fine science fiction mystery that reminded me of ET, A Wrinkle In Time, and a lot of chase movies where protagonists try avoid powerful pursuers.
The plot is built around a child who may have strange powers.
It’s a medium to low budget effort, written by the director, Jeff Nichols. It has Kirsten Dunst, Sam Shepard, and Adam Driver in supporting roles.
It’s not great — 87% Fresh on RotTom — but it’s good, not stupid, and usually side-steps cliches.
This is an excellent, very tense film. Can’t believe you didn’t mention Michael Shannon, though.
I initially started to jokily respond “because he’s creepy and gross”, but double-checked and realized I was thinking of someone else from Boardwalk Empire. I actually do like Michael Shannon. It’s Michael Pitt I can’t stand 
.
I saw that film recently too, and I’ve never seen a film that screamed “troubled production” more than this one. My guess is that they started shooting without a script, changed half the plot mid-filming and were left with an incoherent mess that they later tried to duct-tape together in the editing room. It was actually kind of fascinating.
Hugh Grant seemed to be having fun, though. I think he’d overjoyed to be in the “wacky villain” stage of his career.
A Haunting in Venice: Kenneth Branagh’s third outing as Poirot has backed off a little from the whole LOOK AT ME ACTING oh and some people are dead, I dunno, probably should look into that approach of the previous two, with a surprisingly decent performance from Tina Fey. On the downside it’s a cliched ghost-story-that’s-not-a-ghost-story-or-is-it film that is so dark - excuse me, “atmospheric” - that you spend most of it going “Will you people just turn some fucking lights on?”.
Michelle Yeoh is criminally underused in a brief and clumsily written role. Jude Hill (child actor previously seen in Belfast) is really quite good, given the genre. And there are some other people in it, but we don’t care about them really.
I think that was a miniseries. I enjoyed it. Not mentioned in the show is that Ruddy’s wife went on to become that scary crazy woman featured in Wild Wild Country
Grant was good in his “wacky villain” roles in The Gentlemen and Dungeons & Dragons. And The Gentlemen was by far a more entertaining Guy Richie film
Plus his Glass Onion cameo. He just seems to be having fun in all his roles these days.
Me too! I thought Anchorman had some really funny lines. Step Brothers too! Whenever I happen to come across that movie, I always stop and watch a few minutes of it and have a laugh. And I agree, he’s at his best in Elf.
I didn’t. It was easily the worst thing I’ve tried to watch in ages.
And nothing could be more obvious than the fact that it was based on Ruddy’s memoirs–he gives himself so central a role in the Godfather’s making (and the endless backstory! Does anyone care that one of the producers used to work for the Rand Corporation?) that he really didn’t need to put his name on the credits for this one.
I watched it to see how some actors would imitate Brando, and Pacino, and Duvall, but gave up long before they entered the story. Horrible laborious structure problems with the script, and the dialogue was atrocious.
I re-watched James Whale’s 1932 The Old Dark House over the weekend. A very strange, disappointing film with an incredible cast (Melvyn Douglas, Raymond Massey, Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, and Ernest Thesiger before he plated Dr. Pretorious). It was made at Universal by Whale the year after he did Frankenstein, but this film wasn’t part of the “Shock” package of films Screen Gems distributed to mostly independent TV stations circa 1958, so it didn’t get seen. In fact, it was considered a “lost film” at the time, and didn’t get pieced back together until the late 1960s. Nevertheless, I knew it from frequent printing of stills from it in Forry Ackerman’s magazine Famous Monster of Filmland. You can now get it on DVD, but it’s not part of Universal’s 1930s-1940s Horror series, so it’s still pretty obscure.
Although it’s apparently pretty faithful to the 1927 J.B. Priestley novel that inspired it, the whole film feels like an improv exercise. This, despite the fact that the film probably originated many of the tropes the very name implies. Two companies of travelers are caught in a storm in Wales that caused a landslide (a very unconvincing-looking piece of modelwork, that I think looked just as phoney in 1932 as it does today) In desperation they take shelter in a nearby house. The inhabitants are eccentric to the point of insanity. Morgan, the butler, is played by Karloff . He has scars on his face, much built-up appliance work, and is mute. He stumps around in a clumsy fashion and gives the impression of being huge and strong, so he comes off like the Frankenstein monster with a beard. (The character was, in fact, the original inspiration for Charles Addams’ butler later named “Lurch”. In the earliest Lurch cartoons, he has the bard and dark hair as Karloff does here. It was only later that Addams apparently decided to make him more closely resemble that other Karloff character.)
Ernest Thesiger plays the prissy master Horace Femm, and Eva Moore his crotchety sister Rebecca, the owner of the house, who doesn’t want anyone to stay. They do, though, and sit down to am uneasy meal. It feels as if the director just told the cast “You’re in a creepy house with crazy inhabitants, having been forced in by the storm. Just go with that. We’ll keep throwing in things to make it creepier as we go along.” And they do. The inhabitants have weirder quirks that become more evident. Morgan has a homicidal and rapacious bent. ebecca disapproves of everything. Horace is ineffectualm, but keeps dropping hints. It;'s revealed that there’s an Old Man, Roderick Femm, sequestered behind a locked door upstairs. But when we finally meet him (played by a woman, I suppose to give him a reedy voice) we learn that there’s another person sequestered upstairs, crazy brother Saul. Morgan is kept around to keep him in check. So it’s a surprise when Morgan lets him out and he is revealed to be a middle-aged nerdish type who seems reasonable at first. He’s shown to be even crazier than the others, and a pyromaniac to boot. A singularly incompetent pyromaniac, fortunately, since he only succeeds in setting fire to a tapestry.
It all runs out of steam rather than coming to a structured end. The house doesn’t burn down, or get swept away in a flood. The travelers go their way in the morning. The original novel was supposed to be about class tension in the wake of WWI, but most of the lines relating class and the first World War disappeared in the script. It really does feel as if they simply kept coming up with revelations and throwing them at you in the hopes that something would work, but none of it does. Nevertheless, this is now considered a “cult” film.
Woth watching, at least once, to see these performers in their youth. Weird to think that two of the actors would soon afterwards be associated with a much better horror comedy about a mansion full of crazy people, Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace, with both Karloff and Massey playing the role of Jonathan Brewster.
The film was “remade” by William Castle in 1963 in color, starring Tom Poston (best known these days from his role on Newhart) and with Robert Morley taking the Ernest Thesiger role. This version has even less to recommend it. If the first film was faithful to the book, the “remake” definitely isn’t. It, too, has that improv-like “throw anything against the wall and see what sticks” feel to it, with nothing actually sticking, and leaving you with a dirty wall.
(Interestingly, the title credits were drawn by Charles Addams, just as he did for Murder by Death. And, of course Addams had clearly drawn inspiration from the 1932 film.)
Cry Macho (2021 Clint Eastwood) - We started watching this on a Sunday afternoon. My husband fell asleep within 15 minutes. I shut it off when it was time to feed the dogs (about 30 minutes in) and never went back. Dwight Yoakam is a bad actor, I usually like Clint but he looked so rickety that I focused more on that than the movie. It just wasn’t worth my time.
Train to Busan, a Korean horror-thriller zombie flick set on a fast-moving train… to Busan.
I very much enjoyed this film. I was surprised how elaborate the set pieces got. Lots of really clever zombie out-maneuvering and I liked the aesthetic of these particular zombies. You do get attached to the crew.
There are some really bleak moments, some of which took it out of “goofy zombie movie” territory into something genuinely affecting. I wish the movie had ended with the girl and the pregnant woman walking into the tunnel, fade to black. But they tacked on a rescue scene at the end. Something tells me there’s gotta be another cut laying around somewhere.
ETA: And when there was a scene with a pregnant lady booking it across the grounds away from a horde of zombies, I announced: “I’m going to go up to her and say, 'Don’t stress, it affects the baby!” That phrase was the bane of my existence while pregnant. (I think she is good though. She was probably third trimester.)
It has a sequel from the same director.
It was, unfortunately, terrible and boring. What a shame. Train to Busan is terrific.
I agree with all of that…. I don’t generally like zombie movies, but watched this one based on the reviews, and ended up really enjoying it. All the actors were great,.
Palm Springs (2020). It’s unusual to have the opportunity to watch a movie about which I have zero prior knowledge. In this case I was just intrigued by the high ratings (94% on Rotten Tomatoes). This is the perfect movie to watch with the attitude “go ahead and surprise me!”, so I won’t spoil it for anybody else. I’ll just say that it’s smartly written and executed, and creatively weird, with all the creative vibe of an independent film.
First rate zombie film.
Blue Beetle
Recommended.
Very cute and fun, a nice comic book movie. Nothing in it elevates it up to the great movies, but better than most of the grim DC movies. I liked it a lot and even George Lopez was funny in it and I’ve never found him funny in much.
I enjoyed this quite a bit.