Watched The Sea Beast. Good characters, not actually much story. At the end I wondered why it had taken so long to do so little.
Since the weather has now officially turned to fall temps and I am no longer out on my patio, I’ve been watching more and more TV. 
Driveways (2019) with Brian Dennehy in more than likely his last role. Very touching.
Fractured (2019) with Sam Worthington & Lily Rabe. A psychologcal thriller. Pretty good - kept me guessing.
The Son (2022) with Hugh Jackman & Laura Dern. Good but sad, kind of depressing.
nevermind
The Man Who Would Be King (1975, Prime, Purchase) A classic I have seen many times, but not for over two decades. It still holds up, though as impressive as the scenery is the actual location would be so much more dramatic than the Morocco settings it was filmed in.
In 2023 I feel a bit conflicted about Billy Fish, the Gurkha guide in the Book and Film. From Wiki:
While on location, Caine strongly objected to an assistant director’s racist treatment of Saeed Jaffrey, who played the Gurkha guide Billy Fish.
There is no doubt the character is an over-the-top stereotype of an overly energetic subservient attendant during the British Raj. The film goes out of it’s way to preserve Kipling’s view of his British India and it does this in the very beginning with the market place. It’s a strange and foreign place, as it would be to a white man, but to a native Indian it’s just where you would have gone every day of your life to buy food.
It’s been a long time since I read the story, but I remember Kipling living in two worlds and Billy Fish is the white view of how Indians should act towards them. Of course it’s racist. It’s also how British society felt. I don’t blame Caine for not wanting to associate with that particular insult, but he was happy to play out this sort of Raj White School Boy fantasy featuring a woman of unparalleled beauty (casting Caine’s wife, Shakira) so it’s a bit self-indulgent.
Anyway, great film, holds up. Highly recommended to anyone who likes a good story and good acting.
Agree. I love the film, too. Even at the time it was made I think it was a bit of a throwback. I think John Huston wanted to make another Gunga Din – British action-adventure film based on work by Rudyard Kipling and set near India. Gunga Din came out in 1939, and this film would’ve fit in about then. Huston reportedly wanted to make it in the 1950s with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart – that would’ve been a film to see, but both of them were past their prime, and would die before the 50s ended. Then it was the team of Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster (who have co-starred in a few features, the Paul Newman and Robert Redford, another famed team. I can’t quite see them in the roles. Evidently Newman couldn’t either, since he suggested getting British actors. I think Caine and Connery were about perfect.
This weekend I put on Source Code for my wife, Pepper Mill, who said she hadn’t seen it. I could’ve sword we watched it together, though. Afterwards she admitted that she thought maybe she had seen it, or parts of it. I think it’s a much-neglected well-made little SF piece.
Maybe she saw it in a different timeline…
ETA: I’ve just discovered The Sea Beast was up for a “Best Animated Feature” Oscar, so I guess others were more impressed by it than I was.
[quoteCalMeacham] I think Caine and Connery were about perfect.
[/quote]
Agreed. I guess we dodged a bullet then. The two quintessential Englishmen central to a particularly English tale would not have been played by actual Englishmen.
Or an Englishman and a Scotsman.
I thought Connery was Egyptian…
He did have pretty good acting cheops.
Your room. NOW!
What are you, his mummy?
The Creator in theaters:
Good film. Reminiscent of Avatar in that the lines between good guys and bad guys are blurred. Good action, and some touching moments in the movie.
And wouldn’t you know it, it is today I learned about Josiah Harlan. An American that DID what Kipling fantasized about.
When Evil Lurks, a Spanish horror film by the director of Terrified. (In theaters but should be on Shudder soon.) A man in a rural town is possessed by a demon and two men try to dispose of it with horrific consequences. It is incredibly bleak and disturbing and gory but wow what an incredible film if you are into horror.
[quote=“Eyebrows_0f_Doom, post:7633, topic:699906, full:true”]
When Evil Lurks, a Spanish horror film by the director of Terrified. (In theaters but should be on Shudder soon.) A man in a rural town is possessed by a demon and two men try to dispose of it with horrific consequences. It is incredibly bleak and disturbing and gory but wow what an incredible film if you are into horror[/quote]
It’s on my movie queue for when it hits streaming.
I watched part of the James Bond film You Only Live Twice. It’s the very first Bond film I ever saw, so it’s kind of special. In fact, I saw part of it before I saw the whole film – I saw the “dumping the car into Tokyo Bay from the helicopter” scene excerpted. But then I got a chance to see YOLT and Thunderball on a double bill, and it was too good to resist.
I missed the usual “Bond” opening with the white spot moving across the screen and turning into the rifled gun barrel that shoots at Bond, because we were a bit late getting to the theater, and we had to find seats, so my first recollection was the opening on the Gemini space capsule. Pretty nifty opening – space walks from the Gemini capsule were the latest thing in space at the time, and Bond films always tried to be trendy (and, as a result, seem dated nowadays. But I didn’t know that then.) Then the impressive Russian-American-British meeting in (why not?) the radar dome. The point was, it looked impressive – much more than if they’d met in some random office suite. Then switch to Bond in the Honk Kong hotel room, getting trapped in the automatic Murphy bed, then apparently assassinated. (why did they open so many of the early Bond films with him apparently being killed? You knew they weren’t going to kill the star off before the opening credits). They a quick one-liner, and you were dropped into the Maurice Binder opening credits, which blew me away. Nancy Sinatra sang the credits song, and I suppose they got her because her song “These Boots are Made for Walkin’” had just been a bit hit. Then on to Bond’s faux funeral. And the Japan travelogue.
Actually, You Only Live Twice isn’t all that great a film. A lot of what goes on is pretty dumb. The idea of Bond masquerading as a Japanese fisherman might have appealed to Fleming’s sense of adventure, but it looks pretty unbelievable when they actually try to do it, and it looks downright racist today. Bond arrogantly orders “Tiger” Tanaka and the rest of the Japanese Secret Service around, which feels awfully colonialist, but even at the time must’ve seemed like a discourteous thing to do to his Japanese hosts. I’ll bet they spit in his soup before they served it. The sexism stands out by contrast these days.
But it’s got underwater scenes and space scenes and impending war – all we’re missing in the nuclear weapons that often show up. We’ve Little Nellie the mini-helicopter and a huge underground launch complex and a pool full of piranha fish and we get to see Ernst Stavro Blofeld for the first time in the face. And everything blows up at the end with some staggeringly bad special effects.
Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay, for the first and only time. Really – Charley and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, BFG Roald Dahl. I think it was because he was one of Fleming’s associates. Even so, I see fro the credits that they brought in somebody to punch up the script. Dahl later wrote an article about how they’d directed him to write the script, and it was published in Playboy.
Connery was getting tired of scripts that got away from the character of Bond and were concentrating more on the gadgets and the stunts, and were becoming increasingly puerile, so it’s not surprising that he left the series at this point, to be replaced by George Lazenby. He only came back for Diamonds are Forever because they threw a lot of money at him. (I’m not sure what lured him back a second time for Never Say Never Again)
The next film was the earlier (and longer) Thunderball, which was more satisfying. At the end, as in YOLT, Bond ends up in a yellow raft with the heroine, Of course, last night I didn’t even finish YOLT.
This is the quintessential Bond film and it has aged…deliciously. Anybody who wants to see a film funnier than any Austin Powers film just needs to watch the direct inspiration for that series. It has everything I love about those quirky couple of years in the middle of the 1960s. And watch it with friends! It’s the most riffable film I’ve ever had the joy of watching in the company of others.
When I mentioned to someone that YOLT was the first Bond film I ever saw he said that he was sorry I’d started with a turkey like that.
If by “quintessential” you mean “one with most of the ridiculous tropes”, then you might be right (Mike Myers got his “Dr. Evil” from Donald Pleasance’s interpretation of Blofeld, obviously), but for most of us the “Quintessential Bond Film” would be Goldfinger or From Russia with Love
Heck, YOLT doesn’t even have the trope of the Henchman (or even Main Villain) Coming Back for Revenge After It’s All Over.
Get Out, on Netflix. I watched this knowing next to nothing about it other than what the synopsis on Netflix said, and the ratings from Rotten Tomatoes. I’ve pretty much quit watching horror shows as they’ve become formulaic and stupid, but I actually enjoyed this one. A solid cast and a different take on things.