Bronson I have wanted to see this for some time and it did not dissappoint. It’s supposed to be a true story, and I will have to believe them because it’s not much of a story. It was entertaining though.
Maria Bamford: Old Baby I’m aware of some of Maria’s mental health issues and think it’s healthy to talk about this on stage. Gary Gulman did a great job recently with his special The Great Depresh. But this show WAS mental illness and I couldn’t handle more than 30 minutes of it. It was like watching anything by Kanye West. You’re thinking maybe it’s art, it might be entertaining, but it’s certainly diagnosable.
We watched Bamford’s Local Act a while back. A bit funny at times. Seemed to be amateurishly filmed. A 20 minute edit might have been reasonable. A full hour … nah.
MotW: Memory. Lots of stuff with that title. This is the 2023 movie starring Jessica Chastain, Peter Skarsgaard and Josh Charles. (Note that the two JCs were both in Mother’s Instinct I recently covered.)
They are, respectively, a social worker who does AA, a guy from her old high school with deep mental issues who turns up after a reunion thing and the guy’s brother.
As to the title. Skarsgaard’s character can barely remember anything and Chastain’s character might have false memories. (And others might be deliberately suppressing memories.)
Lots of angst and all that. Quite dark at times. Not a fun time movie.
And, the movie was literally dark way too much. A common trend in too many films today.
A lot of stuff with Chastain and Skarsgaard is really wrong given his mental deficits and is barely touched upon.
It wasn’t that funny and I was disappointed. Cute, good cast. One hugely shocking moment that did get a combination of gasping and laughing from me(Clooney and Pitt are involved), but otherwise not a very funny movie. This is no Big Lebowski, though from the same team.
The Apartment
Somewhat recommended.
A classic I hadn’t seen and it is very well done, but I feel I may be too late for this one. It doesn’t make a huge impact on me. Everyone is terrific in it and I went in blind. I was actually pretty surprised they made a movie that is, in part, about a guy sharing/loaning out his apartment to men at work for them to have liaisons. It was OK, but not quite the level of quality I was hoping for. I wanted it to be great, but it never was for me.
The World’s Greatest Sinner. Recommended? Oh, dear. Of course not, unless you’re inclined to award points for audacity. Then it’s an unenthusiastic “Whatever. I’ll be in the other room clipping my toenails.”
Being a Frank Zappa fan to the point where I might occasionally refer to him as Uncle Frank, depending on my mood, I’ve been aware of this movie for many years; the connection is that as a young, unknown, pre-Mothers of Invention fella, he wrote some music for it. Having acquired said music by other means, I’ve felt no urgency about seeing the movie itself. But then, a couple of days ago, I saw it listed on the Criterion channel, so, okay, let’s go. Timothy Carey wrote, produced, directed, and starred in this thing, playing an insurance salesman who quits his job (telling clients they shouldn’t buy insurance), changes his name to God, decides to run for president, and preaches some kind of platform about people being their own god and promising they can live forever.
It’s too low budget and and amateurishly bad in all respects, which is a shame because there might be an observation about megalomania trying to be heard. Good on you, Timothy, for shooting and finishing a movie on a budget that amounted to what you could raise by leaving french fries off your McDonald’s order for lunch once a week—not only that, but a movie that people are still watching sixty-plus years later (well, a few of us). I guess that has to count for some kind of success.
I caught Three Days of the Condor on TCM a couple nights ago. It was pretty good. Understatement by modern movie standards; more thinking than shooting, but I like it that way.
Hard disagree. I laughed throughout this movie. No, there are not a lot of “jokes,” and the humor was pretty subtle. After J. K. Simmons last line, I LOL’d for about a solid minute. It’s a fairly artificial movie, but I was tickled by all the pieces that came together, collided, flew apart, and then came back together again. Lots of fun for me. We quote from it a lot, and I can re-watch it with pleasure.
Me, too. Also, The Parallax View which is a similar slower paced political thriller. I don’t need car chases, fist fights, or gun battles … I usually FF through those.
I just sat through the excruciatingly stupid Independence Day. I’m pretty sure it wins the all-time prize for the most clichés in one film. Predictable plot, stupid dialog, and sappiness galore.