I only watched most of the movie, but I’d read the book when it was first published. Maybe because the book was set in the UK, the movie jarred a bit. But, yeah, the rats were the most sympathetic characters.
We watched the first couple of episodes of The Curse, but got bored/annoyed and skipped to the final episode.
There’s going to be a second season? Because I was hoping the husband would just fly up into the sky and never come back. End of story.
Is it especially low-budget? Because that was the cheesiest fakiest c-section I think I’ve ever seen.
No such luck. I did note that a restored version was released in 2022, but it doesn’t look like it has made it to North America. There are a few copies of the 2012 DVD available for sell, here and there but the restored version looks great judging by the trailer.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife - rather sweet and McKenna Grace remains excellent in everything, but not really much of a plot. It’s more of a love letter to the first film and to Harold Ramis.
I think it’s not that great idea to be meta in a movie. My favorite Wes Anderson movie is Moonrise Kingdom, which doesn’t go meta. Moonrise Kingdom is a lot like another of my favorite films, the 1979 film A Little Romance. Both are about two kids aged 12 or 13 who decide to run away to spend some time together. More loosely, both those two are a little like another of my favorite films, the 2014 film Boyhood, which was filmed over a period a little longer than 12 years, telling the story of a boy from 6 to 18. Every character in the film is only played by one actor. This means that the actors are aging for real, not being made up to look older or younger.
Just caught The Scarlet Letter on TCM,
the 1934 version. I sheepishly admit that it was a book that I was supposed to read in high school but was soooo boring… I ended up reading a summary in the encyclopedia instead. I knew the basics of the story, but I didn’t realize there were some really funny parts. Perhaps I was just in a good mood. Perhaps I should read the book.
In school, I was supposed to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles but just could not get through any of it, so I rented the Nastassja Kinski film version instead. This was in the VHS days.
This sort of thing started as soon as there was film. My mother told me about a funny incident in a high school English class(Late 1940’s) One guy was giving a book report on Bambi. He didn’t read the book, he just watched the movie. Suffice it to say he was highly embarrassed.
It would be mine, too, except that Grand Budapest Hotel is even better. In both of those, Anderson actually tells a story, instead of going all artsy like he did in Asteroid City.
It’s possible to watch them all on the old people channels in the middle of the night, as well. If you can stand the commercials. They are very off-putting.
All of Us Strangers (2023). This is a strange, atmospheric, and melancholy movie that left me a bit perplexed. It’s an indie film that has rave reviews on RT and just about everywhere else, but it didn’t really connect with me. Adam, the central character, lives alone in a big modern apartment building that for some reason is almost deserted – he’s practically the only one there. He sees someone looking up at him from the street, who comes up to socialize. Adam then visits his childhood home where his mom and dad – who had died in a car accident when he was just 12 – are just as they were in his childhood 30 years ago, and are happy to see him. The stranger he met keeps coming back and the story revolves around their developing gay relationship and Adam’s continuing visits back to his past.
My understanding is that the original Japanese novel was something of a ghost story, but the director and screenwriter Andrew Haigh wanted to create more of a psychological study of isolation and loneliness. The supernatural elements are absolutely minimized in favour of questions like, what would it mean to you if you could, as an adult living a lonely and aimless life, visit your parents just as they were in your childhood home?
