While I was in the Army I knew a gal from Alaska. As a ten year old she rode out the 1964 Good Friday earthquake up there. She said the one good thing about Earthquake was the speaker that made the loud roaring noise. According to her it really did sound like what she heard.
Saw X
Highly recommended.
Is Saw X the best tenth entry in any franchise of films? I have no idea, but it is the best of the Saw movies. I recommend it even if you have not seen any of the previous movies. It was great.
I saw Killers of the Flower Moon yesterday afternoon. This is a new Martin Scorsese movie starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, and based on a 2017 book by David Grann.
Very good movie, though it’s about 3 1/2 hours long, so with the previews, I was seated for close to four hours.
Saw Welcome To Hard Times, from 1967, starring Henry Fonda and some other familiar faces. It was a Western, high-interest but ultimately low-satisfaction.
Liam Neeson in Non-Stop (2014). Airline hijacking with him as the air marshall. He’s trying to stop it but the actual hijacker has used Liam’s daughters death, divorce, alcoholism, to convince the airline, governments, passengers that the air marshall himself is the actual culprit. Couple of twists at the end. Rate it one bowl of popcorn. (okay for a rainy day).
As the rear side door blows out from a bomb he and the passengers have placed against it and barricaded with luggage - I shouted out, “Flex tape.”
BTW, while I was at the theater yesterday to see Killers of the Flower Moon, the multiplex was full of Taylor Swift fans there to see her concert film, including several private showings in the smaller theaters. Women in shiny tops, little girls in sparkly dresses and so forth. And a Beyoncé film will be following in a couple of weeks.
Renfield is available on Amazon. Nick Cage really sank his teeth into the role of Dracula. (Yeah, obvious joke.) The complete seriousness that he gave to the Prince of Darkness is one of the things that made this horror-comedy click. Ditto Nicholas Hoult as Renfield, who desires to break free from his servitude and live his own life. If either had played their roles with less sincerity, it wouldn’t have worked half as well. Great supporting cast too. There are plenty of laughs and oceans of blood along the way. Our only complaint: too many long long fight scenes, but as the movie is only 90 minutes, they didn’t drag it down too much.
House (1986)
A very cute and more or less family friendly horror movie about a haunted house. I really enjoyed this. Again, I think “cute” is the main word. Very fun.
House 2 - The Second Story
Also cute and a surprisingly good sequel. Lots of fun, cheesy jokes, almost no real scares. Bill Maher is in this movie and is one of his very few acting roles before he hosted Politically Incorrect. Anyway, worth a viewing.
House III
Terrible. No haunted house. Unrelated and pointless. Wasn’t even released as House 3 in the USA do to how little it has to do with anything in the other movies.
House IV
Starts fun, ends up dull. Just not enough energy to get itself through 90 minutes. Snoozefest. Skip
From Beyond
Mostly body horror, only somewhat effective as a movie. It feels like Screaming Mad George worked on this movie, but he did not. Very strange movie, mostly just kind of gross body stuff.
It was OK.
Dude, you are really getting into the spirit of Halloween!
COPSHOP (2021) Gerard Butler, Frank Grillo. Assault on Precinct small town. Feels like an Elmore Leonard novel. Alexis Louder who plays the main cop character is great, I’d like to see her in a sequel.
Speaking of which, I did see Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour at the behest of my daughter. She wanted to see it again, so out of fairness my wife went the second time.
My viewing was at the IMAX, which is probably ideal for this event. I’m not a Swiftie by any measure but objectively speaking it’s a pretty good concert film if you like her music, and most of the attendees were singing along and dancing and having a good time. My wife saw it at the local cinema and complained that the sound wasn’t great, which kind of defeated the whole purpose of it.
A lot cheaper than seeing the concert in person, but consider where you see it if you go.
So I watched Barbie at last. From the hype I was expecting to be amazed. However, instead I was only merely amused. It was fine, but not really all that special.
Pretty much on the dot with my opinion of the House movies, third one was so bad it killed the franchise (not sure if I bothered to see the 4th, or even was aware it existed). But back in the day when horror comedies were few and not that funny, House 2 was one of the good ones.
Yeah, kind of. I like to catch up on movies I haven’t seen and not many new releases I was interested in hit streaming during the past month. Just Saw X, which fits the Halloween genre.
I rarely think about Barbie and I saw it back when it was newly released. It was very cute, a little bit funny, but I don’t think I’ll re-watch it or give it much thought.
I actually think 2023 has been only OK for movies, but I’ll wait until the end of December to share my overall thoughts on the movies of 2023.
The Burial (made for Amazon Prime). In 1995 Mississippi, the owner of a small chain of funeral homes (Tommy Lee Jones) gets into a contract dispute with a giant funeral conglomerate, and hires a flashy personal injury lawyer (Jamie Foxx). And somehow this beef between two white guys turns into a trial about race.
“Inspired by true events”, whatever that means. Well-made and well-acted and will probably get some Emmy noms…but I’m not sure it’s the uplifting moral that the producers think.
Foxx not only plays the race card, he plays the whole deck. He earns a huge punitive settlement for his client by getting the CEO on the stand and eliciting testimony that he’s very very rich, and made a lot of money by exploiting poor Black people (in front of an all-Black jury). I’m not sure why the judge allowed this line of questioning at all.
My husband and I watched The Irishman this last weekend. It’s 3-1/2 hours long so we made it a mini-series and watched it over two nights. We both really liked it. It was amazing the CGI work they did to make the old actors look fairly younger.
I also re-watched The Lost Boys. It was fun to see this movie again since my first viewing in 1987. I remembered parts of it and more came to me as I watched it. Usually when I try to watch a movie that I’ve already seen, I end up turning it off after a bit. Not this one, I enjoyed it all over again.
The problem I had with it, like I did with Sam Jackson in Captain Marvel, is that the actors still move like old men. It just doesn’t convince.
Here’s the real funeral director. An interesting man.
It’s actually not that far off as these things go. Closer than most, probably. The real lawsuit was a little more complicated than presented, the real Willie Gary had more white clients than black and the black female opposing counsel didn’t exist.
But the real life Willie Gary really was pretty flamboyant (and the story he tells about being denied a rental due to his race and his poor background are also true), he really was called in based on the county demographics and his ability to work a jury, he really did use Loewen’s yacht as a linchpin to sway the jury and O’Keefe’s white lawyer really was a racist (and if anything was toned down for the film) and deemed unsuitable because the judge flat-out disliked him.
I also saw Killers of the Flower Moon yesterday. I completely forgot about the TSwift movie, despite the giant cutout of her in the lobby.Now all the little girls all dressed up and the music bleeding through the wall of the auditorium next door makes sense 
I considered starting a separate thread for it: there’s a lot to talk about. First off, I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. IMO, it’s really a “movie lovers” movie. I don’t mean that in a snobby way, just that it’s not an easy watch. I think it’s excellent, but not necessarily entertaining, if that makes sense.
The subject is grim; it’s centered around the (uninvestigated) murders of Osage tribe members who were murdered over their right to the oil that was discovered on their land.
De Niro and DiCaprio are in top form and there are small but good appearances by Jessie Plemmons, John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser. The standout is Lily Gladstone as Leonardo’s Osage wife. What a gorgeous, expressive face.
I wouldn’t want to deter anyone from watching it so I’ll amend my statement and say I recommend it overall but if you’re not into a serious and seriously long film, wait until it’s streaming.