Another opinion on The Irishman. Did not care for it. At all. First, it seemed really familiar; it’s basically Goodfellas, with Robert DeNiro in the Ray Liotta role. (With the addition of the Jimmy Hoffa story, of course.) But also: it drags, badly. It’s long and meandering and repetitive. Scenes that could be done in 1 minute are dragged out to 5. If you don’t have Tarantino writing the dialog, then get an editor. If it can’t be snappy, make it short.
Ford v. Ferrari. 2 great performances from Bale & Damon and some awesome race sequences. Loved it.
There’s also The Killers (1964), based on the same Hemingway short story and costarring a certain future POTUS in his final film role: The Killers (1964 film) - Wikipedia
It just couldn’t get out of it’s own way. The characters were all morons. They tried a plot twist near the end that blew up in their faces. Could have been neat if they had better writers. As it is…pass.
I watched It Chapter 2 the other day. By watched, I mean I played it through VLC media player and hit Ctrl-Right arrow whenever something stupid happened. Think I got the movie down to about 30 minutes.
Saw Knives Out recently. It was rather good. (Knives Out, that is, not It. It sucked donkey balls.)
Hoffa - 6/10
The truth would have made a better movie, but this seemed more like a vehicle for Danny DeVito, who I like, just not as a director. But hopefully a percentage of people go and check out Jimmy Hoffa; there is video and audio of him out there… Hell, his autobiography would have made a better movie - no need for bs.
Hard to imagine, but I finally saw The Diary of Anne Frank for the first time. Thanks, TCM, the only channel that has proven resistant to network decay. I was surprised at how chilling and suspenseful it was. Ed Wynn deserved the Oscar he got for it. Millie Perkins really should have had a better career than she did, which was a shame since she did such a wonderful job playing Anne. Great movie and bears a little too much resemblance to current times. If you have managed to somehow avoid seeing it as I have, this really is one that every one should see.
There’s an old theater tale about an amateur production of The Diary of Anne Frank so bad that, when the Nazi troops showed up near the end, someone in the audience shouted, “They’re in the attic!”
A guy with family and job problems (and no PC) stumbles around for a while.
There is a lot of screaming, nasty stuff going on. People over and over just being downright mean to each other.
A lot of movies have that sort of thing. But in this one there’s no point to it. It just happens over and over. That seems to be the “story”. It is nearly plotless.
Schiff does a nice job but he’s not in it that much. He’s a jerk only most of the time. Among lesser folk: Fran Drescher is good at being a jerk. Becky Ann Baker is really good a being a “nice” jerk.
I have no idea what the writer/director thought was the purpose of making this.
Give it one handful of ashes, just for Schiff. Otherwise it’s a zero.
I made two posts about it in 2015 and for some reason, I can’t rember writing those posts or watching that film. But I just watched it again today and I’m flabbergasted to see it was rated at 5.3 on IMDB. For those of you who may not know, that is a terrible rating - equivalent to “This movie is so bad that it both sucks and blows at the same time”.
I want to go on the record that this movie is extremely enjoyable. I can understand why it didn’t get a very high rating because it is very uneven. But it is a barrel full of fun and it’s appropriate for kids of all ages although I think a better title might have been, “A Spider from Mars”.
I want to encourage everyone to see this movie and I’d like to explain why I think it’s not only an excellent film but also a very important one as well.
It’s as if this movie was directed by two different people. One director is highly talented at making interactions between people very funny but they don’t understand how to do technical stuff very well.
The other director seems to have figured out a way to make this movie with superb special effects but they made the picture for peanuts. Unfortunately, they have no clue about comedy between two people on camera.
The leading two characters are a Caucasian American and a Spanish American and the director never hesitates to make fun of the differences between those two cultures - but never in a demeaning way. The audience laughs with these two characters all through the movie - but never laughs at them.
Oh Hell! You really should just get your entire family together and watch this film. Everyone will love it. I promise.
Oops. I forgot to say why I think this is an important film.
Lately, it seems to me there are only a few different formulas for movies and for the most part, they all seem to have gotten real stale and boring. Very few really good movies recently.
But if you watch Big Ass Spider, it seems to me the director(s) have found some really new and fresh techniques and I hope to see these techniques used more in the future. The way this film chugs along is very different from most other films and it makes the movie very enjoyable.
Scarlett Johansson month continues with the MotW being Jojo Rabbit.
I was quite wary in this thread, but what do ya know, it actually works. Both funny and tragic. It walks walks the fine line almost perfectly.
A lot of fine acting. Even Rebel Wilson, who I despise, did okay by being a clueless idiot (her wheelhouse).
Over and over here I have posted about these amazing child actors. Jojo is played by Roman Griffin Davis and this the only thing he has listed on IMDb. Where do they find these people? This actually creates a problem. Jojo’s friend Yorki is a generic twee British kid who would be fine on his own but side-by-side with Davis doesn’t cut it.
How do these people luck into finding these kids so often?
Sam Rockwell gives a performance that is troubling on so many levels. Seeing Stephen Merchant as The Most Despicable (real) Nazi is weird. I mean, I’m not a fan but still …
And then there’s Taika Waititi (the director and screenplay author) as “Adolph”. So very, very weird. Plays for laughs mostly, with some serious stuff thrown in, until …
Small Foot is really a lot better than it ought to be, it has an incredibly strong moral about thinking for yourself and not trusting what authority figures tell you. And a couple of really good songs too.
Missing Link is a Laika movie, but its comedy feels much more like an Aardman film. It was quite fun and rewatchable, and took a turn near the end I didn’t expect.
Abominable is clearly deliberately intended to appeal to Chinese audiences. It was a fun beautiful film but relied too much on weird magical things to give it its point, and I think it would’ve been better without all that. I also think they let Eddie Izzard improvise, because his character is quite peculiar.
A former deep Russian mole pretends to write a magazine article on Forrest Gump.
Wait, got that wrong, I think. Maybe not.
The movie is a mix of good and not so good. Right away it starts off not so good. Hanks enters singing and changing and talking. And … it’s off just enough to make you wonder if the whole film is going to be off. But it generally recovers.
There are times it is overly schmaltzy and times it is just schmaltzy enough. And few, too few, places where a little deeper peek into Fred Rogers the Real Person is shown.
The overall story structure is not all that great, but given the subject is probably the best they could do.
And it has Christine Lahti and Chris Cooper!
One big problem: There are fantasy/dream/nightmare scenes mixed in. The transitions into and out of those are not done well most of the time.
Knives Out. I was eagerly anticipating this based on the trailers. It didn’t quite live up to my expectations, but it’s very very good: just a classic whodunit, gather-all-the-suspects-in-the drawing-room story. Daniel Craig with a southern drawl is a hoot. The marketing and reviews led one to believe that it was a comedy; while it may have a chuckle here and there: it’s not. It’s about as funny as your average episode of Murder She Wrote.
Bombshell. Fox News as a toxic cesspool of sexual harassment. The focus is entirely on Roger Ailes (Jon Lithgow in a fatsuit), Gretchen Carlson’s (Nicole Kidman) lawsuit against him, and Megyn Kelly’s (Charlize Thereon) hand-wringing reaction. Margo Robbie as a composite fictional character. For some reason Bill O’Reilly is mentioned but not depicted – I guess they could only pack so much sleaze into it’s really brief running time.
I was very surprised and disappointed that it didn’t end with text informing us where everyone went – for one thing, one minor character is now Trump’s director of communications.
(The minor roles are all filled with familiar faces from TV. It was a constant “who is that guy…oh yeah, whatshisname from Catastrophe. The daughter from Better Things…”)
Sort of a TV movie: The Chaperone. On Masterpiece THEATRE*.
Elizabeth McGovern escorts a young Louise Brooks to a dance school in NYC in the early 1920s. This more about McGovern’s charachter than the early days of Brooks.
Fairly interesting. Some really good acting.
So, the producers needed to hire someone who could pass (by studio standards) for 16, sort of look like a young Louise Brooks and could act and dance. Gotta be a ton of those types hanging around.
I think Haley Lu Richardson did a really nice job. Surprising if you look at what she had done before. McGovern is just so great in a role like this.
(Brooks quit “the business” in the late 30s. Was persuaded to move to Rochester, NY in the 50s, wrote about films including one of the best books from an actress’s perspective of that era. Lived as a virtual recluse for the rest of her life.)
La Terrazza - 9/10
Wow. Ettore Scola is so underrated. Very original movie, excellent writing, themes, acting, exposition, narrative. This movie is a great critique of society. It’s very original, and focuses in on a handful of men who are aging, and finding no happiness with the material world. Very good satire showing the phoniness with the younger generation, who are more interested in correcting brand names than the subject at hand itself. But it also shows the hypocrisy of one in particular, who produces garbage to make money, please the critics, and to please his much younger wife, who doesn’t love him, because everyone ages, and eventually life beats a man, while she is not at the same stage in life.
While I was watching this, I noticed the movie was made in 1980, and it described the future decade. Then thought back to 1970, and thought of “Husbands” by Cassavetes. Again, about aging, but this time dealing with it with hedonism. 1960 - “La Dolce Vita” which also has Marcello Mastroianni, who is also very good in this movie. I realized 2020 is a few hours away. I guess I also love this movie because it confronts my dissatisfaction with life and society, and my yearning for the only nutrition I can get - the arts, and specifically - movies, music, and comedy. It’s nice to hear a bit of the “Does anyone feel the way I do?”. It’s not about looking at a glass half-empty or half-full, but trying to point out to the world that the glass is full of piss and to stop drinking it, and revert to what worked, regardless if its called “traditional”.
Agree with you that it’s a very good movie, disagree about the bolded part. Both the person I went with and I found it very funny. From what I could hear, a lot of the audience did too. It’s not a straightforward comedy comedy, but it’s got a lot of funny moments. Obviously humor is subjective, but that was my reaction.
