We didn’t especially want to watch “The Batman.” We had it in our queue for weeks. Another three hours of car chases and fight scenes? No thanks. And we’ve seen so many takes on the Caped Crusader that we know his back story word for word. And my wife is less of a fan of superhero movies than I am.
But both of us were surprised. This is the darkest take yet of the Batman saga. A modern film noir. Bruce Wayne is no billionaire playboy. He broods. Boy, does he brood. Robert Pattison nails the character (or characters) completely. The peripheral characters are equally good. In a movie full of detestable villains, the Riddler is evil incarnate. Yet, his tortured soul is almost understandable.
Our interest didn’t flag at all during the long run time, and it left us wondering where this new take on an often-told story will go next.
I got up at 1:00AM on TCM to watch the original Japanese Godzilla. I’ve seen it maybe four times before, but this time it was followed by Godzilla Raids Again, the original version, not dubbed. I hate dubbing, I prefer subtitles and the original voices and soundtracks. I’d only seen the second movie once before, at an annual Godzilla film festival. My sleep schedule totally screwed with my awareness today, and I yawned through most of the church service, but it was worth it.
I’ve had an itch lately to see Matinee, Joe Dante’s love letter to cold war Sci-fi movies. And–what luck!–I found a used copy at Rasputin Records today. It stars John Goodman as a William Castle-esque movie producer who brings his latest effort “Mant!” to Key West at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The story is told mostly through the eyes of the kids in town who are looking forward to the premiere. It’s a fun family-friendly movie that has tons of callbacks to the movies it celebrates.
When I was a kid, this was in heavy rotation on my local station’s Saturday afternoon monster movie…but under its alternate title Gigantis the Fire Monster.
Thank you for that information. I don’t read Japanese so although the script was on the screen I don’t know what the filmmakers title it and was not aware of an alternate title. I always love more kaiju trivia.
So now did you ever see the modern Gamera film, in English titled Gamera the Brave? I actually think it was one of the best, and it addressed an issue I’d wondered about. When the two monsters are battling in the city, you can see hospital staff trying to evacuate patients out of harm’s way. Now, in my city we have, lol, never had monsters, but we did have a huge tornado and I knew a woman a little older than me who stayed with her hospitalized mother and watched it. Luckily the storm missed them but it was a near thing. She says the staff at least tried to scoop up babies and take them to the basement, or helped patients who were ambulatory, but of course many were not.
You don’t have to reply but is 1953 your birth year? If so I’m about a year younger than you.
Finally watched Elemental too, and it’s definitely about the immigrant experience (although it’s not necessarily Korean - there are a lot of first- vs second-generation immigrant tropes in it). All in all, it’s rather sweet.
Also: really don’t even try to think about the physics of any of it. Just roll with it.
I don’t tend to post on this thread, I take my recommendations from here, and the backlog would be about 900 movies I’ve watched in the last three years, but I thought it was worth covering one I’d missed in recent years.
I read some geekpage covering movie pairs released near each other (like Armageddon/Deep Impact) and it mentioned one which was released similar to a favourite movie, Cabin in the Woods, called Detention (2011). It’s clearly different from Cabin, but whip smart, very funny and gave laughs all the way through. See this if you like time travel on your horror comedies.
Sorry, I didn’t intend to imply that the immigrant experience was Korean. I meant the drama of the family dynamics was very much in the style of Korean melodramas.
I enjoyed Elemental. My only gripe was that some of the background/non-character animation was hyper-realistic and clashed with the more two-dimensional (and brilliant) character design. The scenes of the ship’s wake breaching the canal seemed like they were from another movie.
If you want a scary but not gruesome Halloween movie, take a look at Goosebumps. It’s a proper frightening movie that makes me jump even though it is made for kids. Jack Black is as good as ever. The young actors are quite charming. The film has a nice message about the power of writing.
The Day of the Jackal (1973). Good movie—really good, actually—but it got a bit of an unintended chuckle from me when the protagonist-villain (the titular Jackal) quoted his price for the job that was bound to attract so much heat he’d have to disappear forever and never be able to work again, even as an assassin, and so would need a nest egg to last him a lifetime. It was, wait for it… $500,000!!! And the financiers just about blew a gasket!
That’s not a typo, folks: it’s a five followed by five zeroes. Five hundred thousand (half a million) dollars. That was gonna break the bank and set this high-class assassin up for life. It was like that scene in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery where Dr. Evil asks for… one million dollars!
My handy-dandy inflation calculator tells me that $500k in 1973 would be worth about $3.5mil today. Not too shabby, but you better be planning to live on the cheap if you’re a young assassin.
I just checked that as well, but calculated from 1962 (the movie is fairly well dated to the near-term aftermath of a historical assassination and coup attempt in France). Comes out to almost $5,000,000 in today’s money. Which still isn’t that much money for a bunch of plotters to come up with. But the suggestion that it was still made me laugh (even though it was perhaps just bad, world-breaking, writing, rather than an accurate assessment of the relative value of money circa 1962).
I am assuming he was already rather wealthy given his status as the world’s premier assassin, few properties around the world, Swiss bank account etc. Nothing to stop him getting a normal job either I suppose!
Near the beginning of the movie, when Devlin first describes the job he wants Alicia to do in Brazil, he says “Some of the German gentry who were paying your father are working in Rio. Ever hear of the I.G. Farben Industries? Farben has men in South America planted there before the war. We’re cooperating with the Brazilian govenment to smoke them out.”
I.G. Farben was notoriously interconnected with the Nazi regime, doing substantial business with it and using concentration camp inmates for labour and for medical experiments. After the war it was seized by the Allies and several years later was broken up into the constituent companies from which the conglomerate had been formed. Some of those companies, like BASF and Bayer, continue to operate today.
While my wife Pepper Mill was attending a meeting last night, I put on Barry Lyndon, a movie she loathes. It moves at a glacial pace, I know, and few of its characters are at all likeable. But it’s Kubrick at his peak, with a wonderful marriage of classical music and gorgeous imagery. Every damned frame looks like an 18th century landscape painting, and his use of ultra-low f/number lens to shoot indoor scenes by candlelight is revolutionary and impressive.
And the film gives you the impression that the main activity of men in the UK and Ireland was dueling, and that they never did it twice the same way.
Interesting to see where the actors later ended up. Ryan O’Neal continued to be a Hollywood star, of course. Leonard Rossiter (Captain Quin, and who had been one of the Russian scientists aboard the space station in 2001) starred in The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, among other things. Leon Vitali (Lord Bullingdon) played Victor Frankenstein in possibly the most faithful adaptation of Shelley’s story, became an assistant to Kubrick, and was the main Robed Figure at the Secret Party in Eyes Wide Shut. Murray Melvin (Reverend Runt) played the orchestra conductor (Monsieur Reyer) in the film of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera
I love it also. It’s like enjoying a cup of tea. It’s not an eyepopping thrill ride, but you are content enjoying the individual moments as each color this young rascal’s life. As I get older I am realizing that is what my life is amounting to, essentially a series of strange, absurd or cringe moments then on to the next one for no discernable reason.
Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of buying it on Prime just to play every now and again for background. Think you’ve made me pull the trigger.
Broke my rule of never watching a movie with a colon in the title. It is never good.
And it wasn’t. It was a good idea, I guess. In the hands of a good writer, or a director, might have worked. And if had not been horribly miscast. Still, did OK for first half, then they through sense and science to the wind and got stupid in a hurry.