Free on Prime. I finally watched. I’m very surprised that it is as good or maybe even better than Top Gun. The characters are much better developed. Cruise was excellent as the older and more reflective Maverick. I loved the early bar scene with the young hot shot pilots partying and acting just like Maverick and his classmates did decades earlier.
The guy that plays Goose’s son looks so much like Anthony Edwards. The casting out did themselves.
It was nice seeing Val Kilmer. It was clever how they made his throat cancer part of the story.
I remember Jennifer Connley from Rocketeer in 1991. She’s aged well and had good chemistry with Cruise.
Top Gun Maverick is Lots of fun and I will rewatch in a couple weeks.
The Burial on Amazon Prime. Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones star in a legal movie about how attorney William Gary was able to fight racism in southern Mississippi by suing a national mortuary company who stiffed African Americans by $1.2 billion resulting in his white plaintiff getting a $175,000,000 award.
I am familiar with the game series, have seen some let’s plays. This isn’t even fun if you like those games. It commits the biggest sin of any movie. It’s boring.
You are picturing lots of “here come the animatronic monsters to get you” and this movie features a lot less of than than you expect.
Not the worst movie of the year by any means, but they didn’t do a good job taking a pretty simple premise and making even the most basic of scary movies.
I always consider Alien one of the top scary movies I ever saw. If you watch it for the fifth or sixth time and still are scared (as I am) then it’s good. And any movie with John Hurt is worth watching. Even though he was the first killed off. I mean, he got nominated for an Oscar in The Elephant Man and you couldn’t even see his face.
My 15-y-o daughter saw it with her friend and loved it. So perhaps you’re the wrong demographic for it. I didn’t go because it didn’t look appealing.
Conversely I did go to see the new Doctor Jekyll film starring Eddie Izzard and Scott Chambers. The film marked the relaunch of the Hammer horror brand, and the opening credits are pure Hammer style. Brilliant turns from Izzard (who makes a line about cornflakes simultaneously funny and disturbing) and Chambers (who plays “guy in way over his head” extremely well); there are a few other characters but it’s largely just the two of them for most of it.
Sadly the film falls apart in the third act - the tension that’s been building kind of stalls, the plot starts to develop holes, the pacing is erratic and the whole thing quits about two twists too soon for a decent psychodrama. And the ending is a rather tired cliché. Could have been so much better.
Worth watching when it streams, but don’t be surprised if you guess all the twists in advance.
My husband and I watched this too. Like you say, it was OK. I was a bit disappointed because I really like Bill Burr’s standup acts. We did laugh a few times and liked how he poked fun of the Millennials. It was something to watch on a Friday night that we could both agree on.
My wife and I also recently watched No Hard Feelings. It stars Jennifer Lawrence as 30-something screw up who gets hired by wealthy helicopter parents (Mathew Broderick as the dad) to date (sexually) their shy 19 year old son before he goes off to college to help get him out of his shell.
So now you have Millennials dealing with even MORE woke and MORE socially awkward Gen Zs as they come of age.
Fair Play, woman in a 2-year relationship with a co-worker gets a promotion he thought he was getting, idiocy (and this isn’t a comedy) ensues. If you like films where the plot is driven by the dumb decisions made by the characters, where motivations and decisions are dropped (for example, he couldn’t tell his parents they were engaged, they found out anyway, and why this mattered… and their reactions… were never mentioned), ending with both of the characters committing physical crimes against the other (these, too, were never resolved), this is the film for you!
I’m a big fan of Alien. The gritty industrial design of the USCSS Nostromo, inside and out, is one of its strengths, I’d say.
My latest five:
Planet of the Apes
This 1968 sf thriller starring Charlton Heston is a bit creaky now, a bit dated, but it works pretty well. The final scene on the beach - you know the one! - is still haunting.
Time Bomb Y2K
An interesting documentary about all the hoopla and near-hysteria about the Y2K Bug, and the concern that computers everywhere would fail and civilization would come screeching to a halt… or something like that. The movie makes good use of archival footage (hey, that’s Leonard Nimoy! And Bill Clinton!) and interviews to show what people were thinking in 1998-99. It persuasively argues that, had it not been for how seriously the U.S. Government and Big Business took the threat, and put some serious money, time and attention into fixing it, things could’ve been a lot worse.
Radical Wolfe
A very entertaining documentary about the life and times of Tom Wolfe, a pioneer of New Journalism and later a best-selling novelist. I learned a lot and really enjoyed this film.
My Neighbor Totoro
Finally got around to seeing this 1988 Hayao Miyazaki animated kids’ film. Beautifully drawn, with a charming story. Recommended.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Saw this terrific animated superhero movie again for the first time since it came out in 2018, this time with the score performed by a live band. Great story, graphics, cast, etc. Funny, clever and exciting at all the right points.
I have many more 2023 movies to see, but this is the best horror movie I’ve seen from 2023. They set out to make a Stuart Gordon or Brian Yuzna movie, but shot in 2023 instead of the 1980’s or 1990’s.
They did it and it is terrific, currently among my top 10 of 2023.
When we inventoried our systems, a lot of of them were using 2-digit year codes, and others that weren’t were getting fed data from systems that were. We had to trace all those dependencies and work with IT to get them all sorted out, and it definitely would’ve been chaos without that drudge work.
Concur. And I saw it for the first time decades after it was made.
Watched The Nightmare Before Christmas with the family. Inexplicably, I had never seen it before. I thought the animation was fascinating, the music meh, the story okay, but I’m glad I saw it for the animation and ingenuity. My son wasn’t the least bit afraid. I don’t think he had a clue what was going on. But he found it the height of hilarity whenever Jack screwed something up.
Christmas lights wrap themselves around an electric chair
“THAT’S not a Christmas tree! Hehehehee!”
Really interesting that this movie was marketed to kids. It’s pretty dark and has a jaunty tune about chopping up Santa.
Similar theme. The main difference is Tripp from Failure to Launch is an otherwise fully functional, outgoing, charismatic, sexually active adult with a job, friends, and hobbies who just doesn’t want to leave the comfort of his parents (IIRC, he has some underlying trauma from his fiancé dying some years prior).
Percy from No Hard Feelings is more shy, withdrawn, and awkward as an unintended consequences of his overprotective parents and too much screen time. Without intervention, it’s highly likely he would be on the same life trajectory as Andy from 40 Year Old Virgin.
Speaking of Paul Rudd movies, I watched Role Models again the other day. Still funny (although I suppose today’s young people would be turned off by some of the “homo” jokes.
I first saw that movie on July 4, 1974, just before I went into the Army. A local theater was showing all five of the Apes movies, one right after the other. It started at 10:00AM and ended in the early evening, Bananas were being sold in the lobby.
I’ve got all of them, excluding the recent War one (I was bought a box set on bluray).
I would say as a whole the series is very hit and miss. Being a nerd, I score everything out of 10 on IMDB, so I’ve got the following:-
Original 8
Beneath 4
Escape 6
Conquest 4
Battle 3
Remake 4
Rise 7
Dawn 8
War 8
I may be underrating the early 70s ones because they have dated so poorly. I just find them very boring on the whole. The last 70s one, Battle, was particularly terrible and the low budget really shows.
In checking these I’ve just discovered there is a new one on the way next year! Kingdom
The big problem with PotA is that Heston is an astronaut, a person you would think would notice that the moon and constellations are the same as the ones he saw on Earth.