I saw it on TCM a week (?) ago. I enjoyed it a lot. My only minor quibble is that Alain Delon was such a pretty boy that he looked the tiniest bit silly in his trenchcoat and fedora. But, yeah, very minor. I was also feeling dread for the bird.
Yes. I watched the director’s cut of Amadeus on Netflix.
I know I said this earlier but I’m gonna say it again: Tiny Bradley Cooper!
The villain was practically an afterthought but it is still a far better film than the genre would suggest.
2010, which I was pretty sure would be another muddled mess, and it was. 80s overwhelming sound effects of computer beeps and boops and klaxons blaring, and a magical calculator that can override a computer! Because it’s red, see?
Our opinions differ. I liked 2010, which I think is underrated (and overwhelmed by Stanley Kubrick’s giant monolith of a movie, 2001) Hyams did a creditable job, and I think humanizing the characters (while Kubrick sought gto de-humanize them as much as possible) was the only real choice. But he should’ve axed all the voiceover narration.
And the calculator didn’t override the computer – it was the trigger to cut the cable linking the computer to the rest of the systems, should HAL “malfunction” again.
Possum Dark and weird AF (I like that in a film!). It takes place in Norfolk, England and is about a former puppeteer with a lot of skeletons in his closet, yet he might be the most sympathetic character in the film. It’s troubling and sad but also has some really creepy visuals and an overall disturbing tone. Right up a horror lover’s alley.
I’d like to point out Dungeon’s & Dragons is a rule system, not an IP with any literature or culture of it’s own to speak of so it’s different from Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings even if they are all High Fantasy.
This isn’t pedantry, it’s a difference in how it’s fans interact with the material. Every kid playing this in their basement used the stock setting TSR and later Wizard’s of the Coast foisted on us for like 5 minutes. Then they got to creating their own strange worlds. These would be from the strange warped and weird world of the prepubescent teenage boy mind.
So what you have is a creature, like a Displacer Beast or a Mimic on screen and loads of gaming nerds will say, “Hey, I remember when my friends and I saw one of those in our campaign” and it will bring back specific memories for that person and the few who were there. Contrast this with all of us collectively recalling the cinematic moment Gandalf yelled, ‘you shall not pass’ as it more or less happened in the book we read as children.
The Hand of Vecna they mention is a specific powerful item so it get’s close to communal D&D lore, but still even there it’s an item with power and it’s what you do with that power that is the story and the fun. I don’t care what this no name Bard does with it or why he needs it.
But despite all of that, this film still was pretty good. It’s just never going to be a reoccurring IP like Marvel because we all interact with this material differently.
I would agree with this if the majority of the people watching Marvel movies are comic book fans. I don’t know that they are. I would suspect a lot just started with Iron man partially because of who starred in it and then bought into watching the rest of the movies. I don’t know that the Dungeons & Dragons film will be enough of an entry to draw in people enough to justify a bigger world building, but only time will tell. I enjoyed it, and I would watch another, not because of how faithful or not it was to the source material but because it was fun and I would likely be entertained by a sequel.
Speaking of Franchises I just saw Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024). I do not feel it was as fun as Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), but it was still entertaining. The villain and a lot of the ghosts were scarier than in the other films which changed the tone. The central story though was not that much about busting ghosts though, but more about family dynamics. It was nice to see the original cast as well as enjoy some of the inside jokes from previous movies. On the whole, not a bad evening spent.
//i\\
This is completely anecdotal (despite the headline), but…
My child knows who Spiderman is and what he can do despite never reading a comic book. If anyone forgets there are like 4 origin films for each super hero.
My point is no character in any of the D&D films is a person any D&D player knows. Comic Bard is an archetype, sassy female Barbarian also. I don’t even remember their names and it doesn’t matter cause the characters don’t matter in this generic fantasy world or our collective memories.
But it was a fun CGI filled ride. I’ll give it that.
It’s not necessary for a movie franchise to be based on well-known characters. For example, I’m pretty sure that the protagonist of The Lego Movie was invented for the film.
Or the studio could create the character out of whole cloth like Mad Max. The Lego Movie illustrates my point exactly. Emmet is the everyman watching the craziness unfold. This craziness is loads of IPs from all over and voiced by famous people telling nuanced adult jokes in a kids film.
Product carries the film because it is the joke. You can’t do this with the different stories kids make up in their basement.
Or the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, where again, the characters were made up, though some referenced specific scenes in the theme park ride.
Today I saw Wicked Little Letters A darkly funny film set in 1920s England (and based on true events) about a proper woman who receives vulgar, anonymous letters, and the investigation undertaken by police and neighbors. Another hit out of the park for Olivia Colman as the priggish recipient of the letters and Jessie Buckley as the feisty immigrant accused of sending them. Great fun from beginning to end. There are several familiar faces here, and Ghosts fans will be happy to see Lolly Adefope in a (too) small role. Highly recommend.
You may be interested to see what this guy said: I met Keir Dullea tonight!
I met Keir Dullea in the same sense that I’ve met a lot of famous people connected with science fiction. I got his signatures on 2001 and 2010, I think. I remember talking with him for a few seconds. Doing a little online research, I find that this must have been on July 5, 2018. He did an appearance at the Silver Spring Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The Pawnbroker (1964). Stars Rod Steiger in the film that first propelled him to fame, and directed by Sidney Lumet. Steiger puts in an incredible performance as an Auschwitz survivor whose entire family perished in the Holocaust, leaving him a dehumanized broken man who can only survive by suppressing all his emotions and rejecting those trying to get close to him. He makes a living running a pawnshop in the slums of Harlem.
Dramas that end in tragedy are as old as drama itself, but this is just relentlessly grim and tragic throughout. In fact three directors including Stanley Kubrick turned down the project because it was so grim, and the production company had trouble getting distribution in the US until it achieved acclaim in the UK. It almost goes without saying that it was filmed in black and white. Artistically excellent, but I can’t really recommend it because it’s so relentlessly depressing. In fact after it ended I really needed something light, so …
Spy (2015). A fine comedy and action movie in the style of the Bond franchise. Melissa McCarthy works in the CIA operations center supporting an agent out in the field (Jude Law). When the agent is killed McCarthy’s character is recruited to replace him to track down a villain trying to sell a tactical nuclear bomb. She is unexpectedly joined, at various stages, by a comically ultra-macho misogynistic spy (Jason Statham) and a fellow employee from the operations center (Miranda Hart), a tall woman disparagingly referred to as “an asthmatic Big Bird”. Very funny and full of big-budget action sequences. I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. Highly recommended.
You forgot Aldo!
Well, Aldo isn’t CIA, but yeah, he definitely loves him some big bosoms! 
I do love me some Peter Serafinowicz.
BTW I have seen The Pawnbroker as well and can confirm both that it is an excellent film and a relentlessly grim one. You can see the ending coming inexorably toward you and yet you can’t stop it. Steiger is brilliant in it.