I saw the first two movies of 2019 that I’m putting on my recommend list.
The Mustang features a standout performance by Matthias Schoenaerts as an angry, inarticulate convict who is somewhat redeemed by his inclusion in a program in which inmates train horses and sell them at auction (to support the program). On a side note, what is with the string of superb movies about horses (The Mustang, and 2018’s *Lean on Pete *and The Rider)? And why are these quintessentially American films (all set in the modern west) helmed by foreign directors (French, British, and Chinese, respectively)?
The Highwaymen is a retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story from the standpoint of the lawmen that tracked them down. It stars Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as over-the-hill Texas Rangers called out of retirement to handle one last job. Costner and Harrelson play off one another really well, the script goes light on the “ain’t old folks funny” portions, and there is a melancholic air to the picture as it moves to its inevitable conclusion:
Bonnie and Clyde are gunned down in an ambush in Louisiana
Yeah, it’s like spoilering the ending of Titanic, isn’t it? :dubious:
In it’s own early 20th century way, it is reminiscent of Lonesome Dove. I think The Highwaymenn would do fairly well in wide release. I wonder what the distributors plans are?
I saw that, too, and liked it. A great cast (particularly Charles Dance as the retired judge), and considerably creepier and more unsettling in tone than other versions I’ve seen. Did you notice the time it was set? Late August 1939, just days before the outbreak of World War II.
My most recent five:
Damage
A British politician has a reckless and passionate affair with his son’s French fiancee, and things, um, do not go well. Not a great movie, but not bad.
Young Picasso
Interesting, beautifully-filmed documentary on the painter’s family, education, Spanish roots and later Parisian influences.
Gattaca
An ambitious young man lives a lie in a world where your social status and opportunities are determined by your genetic profile. Interesting premise and pretty well done. Uma Thurman is lovely.
Coco
Heartwarming, visually-stunning Pixar movie about a little Mexican boy whose love of music gets him into trouble on the Dia de Muertos.
Police Story
A silly, action-packed 1985 Jackie Chan film about a Hong Kong cop protecting a beautiful young witness from mob retribution as she prepares to testify at trial.
Yep! All those gathering storm clouds and thunder foretold more than one tragedy, didn’t they?
I’ve always loved Christie, with And Then There Were None being one of my favorites, but I also had to admit that the plot was pretty outlandish and maybe a little cheesy. But this production elevated the whole thing almost to High Art status.
MotW: Wildlife. Hards times for a family in 1960 Montana. Paul Dano directed and co-wrote it. Yeah, the guy who played Brian Wilson.
Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal are in a difficult marriage. Told from the POV of their kid. The kid, Ed Oxenbould, just doesn’t fit the movie well. Gyllenhaal is MIA fighting wildfires* for a lot of the movie. This leaves Mulligan as the real star of the show. It’s a perfect role for her. Playing someone still youngish but realizing that her youth is mostly behind her. Going thru big ups and downs.
So it worked better as her story than the kid’s story.
Certain parts of this movie (like type of community, era, some events) really resonated with me. At times it was “No, it was more like this than that.” in my mind.
Not a fun film by any means. But mostly well done. One thing that was overdone was shots that just dragged on for no good reason. Plus the old “Make you think X is going to happen but it doesn’t.” thing done too many times which didn’t even work once for me.
Give it 3.5 golf shoes.
It’s easy to slip and think that the title is “Wildfire” instead. But Wildlife fits better.
Free Solo. What a kook Alex is! But ya know, I had such admiration for the way he studied for each and every move—and knowing that he survived!—that I didn’t feel queasy, unlike when I look at just still photos of people on those skinny mountain paths in China!
Death Wish (2018), starring Bruce Willis as a surgeon whose family is attacked in their home resulting in his wife’s death and his daughter ending up in a coma. At first he tries to work within the system but soon hits that trope of a brick wall, “gosh, we’re real busy down here, sir.” Actually, that’s a bit unfair, the detectives on the case actually seemed engaged and concerned, but the case just wasn’t crackable. At any rate, Bruce gets himself a gun and starts taking revenge on the scum of the city, working his way up to his wife’s murderer.
It is a nicely filmed, well acted film with a believable enough plot, the daughter looking like a slumbering super-model and then waking up and being perfectly back to normal within hours notwithstanding. But the whole thing just rang as every NRA Good Guy With a Gun jack off fantasy, right down to how he gets away with everything scot-free with the overarching theme seeming to be – guns are awesome.
So I am torn. I enjoyed from an artistic standpoint but I thought the message sucked.
The Bruce Willis remake of Death Wish. A differing opinion to the above. Very poorly done. Plot holes galore. Example: his wife is killed and daughter is in a coma, yet somehow he knows that there were three intruders. Prop problems: a bad guy is coming and he’s carrying a revolver. In the next scene it’s morphed in to a 9mm auto. An auto goes empty and leaves the shooter’s hand with the slide closed (just…no), then the gun is shown on the ground with the slide locked back.
**Gloria Bell **-- Julianne Moore and John Turturro, relationship issues. Meh. It was alright. My wife thought it said larger things about the difficulties of middle-aged women finding romance; I thought it was specifically about one woman and one relationship.
I’m also annoyed by the trend of naming movies after a character; it makes it very hard for me to distinguish between them. What was the one with whats-her-name as the Iraq war vet and her dog? Or the one with Jessica Chastain as a lobbyist? It seemed to start with “Captain Phillips”, a terrible title for a very good movie.
OK, it started with Sadie Thompson and Mildred Pierce. Bear with me.
The Highwaymen on Netflix, starring Costner and Harrelson as two over-the-hill and retired Texas Rangers who are sent to hunt down Bonnie and Clyde. Historically based, and a lot of factual information, but a fairly boring movie.
I saw The Meg this afternoon. What a stupid, unbelievable, ridiculous, over-the-top, thoroughly enjoyable movie. It’s like *this *close to Sharknado IX, or whatever. The best part for me was the mid-point. You see, I’d actually dozed off during the first ten minutes of the flick (as you do) and woke up pretty much when they were doing the shark-cage/poison dart/rescue scene. So I rewound it back to the beginning and caught up. Right when they got to the part that I woke up to, I thought, “that’s it? That’s the end? That was short,” and then the super-ultra-megaladon [ SPOILER ] jumps out out and eats the other one capsizing the boat. I pert-near pissed myself laughing.
Cool looking movie with nifty action scenes and a few funny moments, but groaners and ‘oh come on!’ moments abound.
Not to mention Rory O’More (1911), Anna Christie, Stella Dallas and Erin Brockovich.
My latest five:
Topsy-Turvy
Gilbert and Sullivan, in a career slump and more than a little irritated with each other, nevertheless get back together to make their masterpiece, The Mikado. A fun, well-crafted period piece about the creative process and the High Victorian arts and theater scene.
Dredd
Karl Urban stars as a stoic dystopic judge, jury and executioner in a decaying, crime-ridden, ultraviolent megacity. Pretty good movie, despite some plot holes.
The Waldheim Waltz
So-so documentary about the 1986 Austrian presidential election, as conservative candidate and former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim deals (not very convincingly) with new revelations about his Nazi past. I would like to have seen more about the theories that either the US or USSR knew all about it and had used it as leverage against him in his work at the UN.
Five Seasons
Another so-so documentary, this one about Piet Oudolf, the influential Dutch landscape designer. Some beautiful imagery of gardens he’s designed at his own rural studio/home, a park in England and the High Line in Manhattan, but hardly anything on his design philosophy. Just not that much there, there.
GoodFellas
Finally saw this classic Mob movie. It was good and I suppose I can see what all the fuss has been about, after all these years, but I’m just not a big Mob-movie fan as a rule, and doubt I’ll see it again. It was fun to spot all the future Sopranos cast members, though.
First a follow up to last week’s movie Wildlife and it’s young actor Ed Oxenbould. Something reminded me of the movie The Butterfly Tree and it hit me: he was not very good in that as well. (I briefly mention this last August.)
The Butterfly Tree is an Australian film that’s now more available in the US. An “exotic” woman attracts the attention of a boy and his father. Has a few really stunning visual scenes. And some crap CGI butterflies. The guy playing the father is also a dud. But the actress playing the woman: Melissa George, does a surprisingly good job. I’m not of fan of hers. Most of her acting is generic with a few good small roles in great movies. This was a pleasant surprise. Too bad about everything else.
Well, onto the MotW: Can You Ever Forgive Me? with Melissa McCarthy as a woman who gets into the literary forgery business. “Based on a true story.” Set in 1991 at 3:31 am.
This has been on my radar for some time. The reviews are quite top notch. But c’mon, it’s Melissa McCarthy. Worse it has her husband in it which is not a good sign. (Think Tammy.) So quite a bit of trepidation.
It was a fairly decent film. Reasonable to watch and all that. McCarthy did an okay job. Richard Grant did his usual thing. Etc.
The supporting actors were often quite good. Esp. Jane Curtin as McCarthy’s agent. Seems like everything I’ve seen Curtin in lately she does a really good job. I think playing intelligent people is best for her.
But I don’t see anything that deserves raves or Oscar nominations.
Went and saw Jordan Peele’s latest effort, “Us,” just last night. In my (and my wife’s) opinion: weird and creepy. But I think both of “Us” liked his first cinematic effort more.
Watched it on Hulu and it was excellent. The feat was beyond spectacular, but the human interactions
were -amazingly- just as impressive. The relationship between Alex and his girlfriend was downright archetypal. The conflicted emotions of the camera crew were fascinating.
Kudos to National Geo for bringing it to the screen.
as I remarked in another thread, I recently picked up The William Castle Collection on DVD. When I was a kid I constantly watched and re-watched his House on Haunted Hill, because it was shown so often. I knew about others, mainly from features in Famous Monsters of Filmland, but I was too young when these films showed in the theaters. I’ve seen brief glimpses of Macabre, The Tingler, and Thirteen Ghosts, but never saw the entire films, and I never even saw anything but stills from the others.
So I watched Mr. Sardonicus, a sort of Poe-esque film that I could imagine Roger Corman making, if he had made a Poe film in lack and white. It turns out to be a practically new film about a man cursed with facial disfigurement as a result of violating his father’s grave. It was written by the fiction editor from Playboy, and appeared there first. (It was the first of a trilogy of horror stories, all beginning with “S”). I’d see a picture of the makeup, but completely out of context. An interesting film, but watching it as an adult over a half century later, my thought was that they REALLY wanted to show more blood, sex, and sadism, but could only get away with so much circa 1960. This feels sort of like what a TV version of something by the Marquis de Sade from 1960 would feel like.
Wuilliam Castle liked to feature a “gimmick” for each film. For this one, he handed out cards imprinted with a hand with a thumb sticking out. At the end, you were supposed to vote “Thumbs up” or “Thumbs down” as to whether Sardonicus deserved more punishment at the end, or leniency. Castle didn’t think a majority would ever vote for leniency, so he only filmed one ending. Certainly the DVD only contains one.
If you’ve only seen the Tony Shaloub-starring remake of Th13teen Ghosts, you won’t realize how much of a kid’s film the original was. It was shot in black and white, but with a few brief color sections with the “gimmick”. The Gimmick was a “Ghost viewer” that had slots with transparent colored plastic – one strip in red, the other blue. They were like the Anaglyphic glasses you used for the two-color 3D movies of the time, except that the strip was wide enough to look through the same color with both eyes at the same time. When a ghost scene came on, you would look through the blue section is you wanted to NOT se the ghost, and through the red portion if you did. It was pretty neat – looking through the blue filter you saw only the room, without any of the supernatural goings-on, and could think “this is what it looks like if you can’t see the ghost.” Looking through the red filter, you saw the ghost in action (and only dimly see the room). (you could always NOT look through the filter at all and see both ghost and room, but you couldn’t quite pick up on all the details of the ghost. of course, the “ghost” was moving around a lot, in order to make its activity the more watch-worthy.
They were pretty clearly having trouble coming up with the full tally of thirteen ghosts, and making them all different. One was nothing more than an arm holding an axe. Another was a spinning set of wheel spokes, each ending in a flaming torch. The most ludicrous were a lion left over from a circus that had stayed in the house and its tamer, a headless ghost (because he’d stuck his head in the lion’s mouth one time too many – get it?). Artin Milner, later to co-star in the cop show Adam-12 plays the surprise (human) villain who gets crushed to death.
One of the films I’d never heard of before – 13 Frightened Girls. When I put it on out of curiosity, I was amazed. Unlike al the other Castle films, which continued to be mad in black and white*, this one was in wide screen color. It started out at a girls’ school, with the teenaged girls all dressed up in identical blue uniforms and caps, walking in two rows and escorted by the matron. I swear, it looked as if Castle was making a live-action version of Ludwig Bemelans’ Madeline books.
Except that these girls are a bit older, and one of them is allowed to drive the bus. There’s some anxiety at the start, because not only is there a 16 year old driver at the wheel of a bus going down a rail-less mountain road, but she’s doing an exceedingly bad job, weaving and wobbling all over. But it’s all a fake-out. They making it safely to what looks like London, where all the girls go back to their respective embassies (each from a different country, which the actors were supposed to be from, too. That was the “gimmick”). It turns into a spy film, not a horror film at all. Kkigh Dhiegh**, who had played a Red Chinese brainwashing expert and would play a Red Chinese Agent (Wo Fat) in a lot of episodes of the original Hawaii Five-O, here plays a Red Chinese Diplomat involved in skullduggery. It turns out, if you count them, that there aren’t even 13 girls – there are 15! I guess they needed that all-important unlucky number 13. They aren’t even all that frightened, most of the time.
*Much later, Castle produced, but did not direct, Rosemary’s Baby, but I can’t think of it as a “Castle Film” – it had no “gimmick”, and Roman Polanski directed.
**Ironically, as I’ve noted before, although Khigh Dhiegh’s entire movie career was playing Chinese and Japanese characters – usually as villains (although he played sympathetic characters, too, including Judge Dee in a TV movie), he himself had no oriental ancestry. His background was Anglo-Egyptian Sudanese, and his stage name was a pretty elaborate spelling of his initials “K.D.” He was really Kenneth Dickerson from Spring Lake, N.J.
Yep – it was Matinee, and it brilliantly argues for Castle’s wonderfully schlocky gimmicks-laden films (as a plus, it features actors like Robert Cornthwaite and Kevin Mccarthy who had been prominent in 1950s films, although not Castle’s).
I heard about people recently showing Castle films with the gimmicks intact. I’d like to see House on Haunted Hill with the “Emergo” skeleton. Here’s one from 2011:
(I went to a showing of old films at a convention a few years ago where they promised "Emergo", but instead gave us a guy in a sort-of-Godzilla suit during a showing of *Reptilicus*. Not the same thing.