Over the weekend I saw All The President’s Men. I didn’t find it that engrossing at first, but I can never tear my eyes away from Dustin Hoffman on screen. I also found it somewhat comforting to see that American politics has been in dire straits before, and we survived.
The ending was very abrupt…Og willing, the end of the current presidency will be similarly sudden. 
I was at one of the last theatrical screenings in Los Angeles. I saw Bacurau, a nearly impossible to describe pastoral action adventure film. Highly recommended.
A few hours after I got home, the mayor of Los Angeles announced the closure of all theaters for at lest the next two weeks (along with all bars and dine-in at restaurants.
Watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and the German film In the Aisles over the weekend. Enjoyed both, preferred the latter.
Watched Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil yesterday. I found the first movie to be disjointed and uninspired, but this one felt much more cohesive, if simplistic in plot. It’s spectacularly beautiful, very well acted, but also has a couple of tonal shifts into comedy that undermines the serious impact of the drama in the wrong way. Reviews were much harsher than it deserved, it’s worth a watch, especially now when everyone is in lockdown.
Watched Long Shot, a 40-minute documentary on Netflix. Very much worth 40-minutes of your time. It’s about a man accused of murder whose best alibi was that he had been attending a major league baseball game.
The story-telling seems a little stilted, to better to play up some amazing real coincidences, but a good true story. A-
Watched Hugo earlier today. A family picture directed by Martin Scorsese, that starts with some impressive cinematography, and is lovely throughout. It’s maybe a little too heartwarming, but it did make me cry a couple of times, so I can’t complain. On Netflix. Recommended. A-
Saw Moon, the science fiction film about a man maintaining a fusion powerplant on the dark side of moon. It was directed by the son of David Bowie. Entirely decent, but sad. Extensive model-based special effects. B+.
I decided at the last minute to catch The Color Out of Space, pretty decent.
Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw. What a dumb fucking movie. Okay, here’s the deal. I saw the first Fast and Furious with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker - it was pretty good. I saw another one of them … something about jumping a car into a boat in Florida. That’s the extent of my knowledge of the F&F franchise, outside of knowing that The Rock was somehow involved now.
So there I am watching the first ten minutes of baffling what-the-fuckery with cyborg bad guys and futuristic motorcycles and shit. I was half expecting to see a automated Johnny-Cab come whizzing through. But I roll with it for a few minutes. Until about, oh, I’d say a good forty-five minutes in before I actually stood up in my living room and shouted aloud, “What the fuck does this have to do with street racing and where the fuck is Vin Diesel anyway?”
So yeah. I’m pretty sure it was a Mission Impossible script that they slapped “Fast & Furious” on or something. Either that or I’ve missed a lot of subtext in the intervening I don’t even know how many movies there have been in between the first one and this one.
This is considered part of the Fast and Furious franchise, right? Or is it like a Rogue I stand alone dealio?
I saw *Ad Astra (2019) * a few days ago, and I came out thinking exactly the same thing I remember thinking at the end of Contact: “All that, just to resolve some daddy issues?”
Of the two, *Contact *was better. And I didn’t really like Contact.
Ever since the fourth movie or so, the F&F films have been pure comic book nonsense - and by comic book, I don’t mean Marvel, I mean 1960’s Batman TV show. It’s like how the Bond series moved from the relative realism of Doctor No to, say, Moonraker.
Jack Batty writes:
> . . . I’m pretty sure it was a Mission Impossible script that they slapped “Fast &
> Furious” on or something. . .
Things like that actually happen. The first four Die Hard films all were based on scripts that had been passing around in Hollywood for years which were then rewritten to fit into a single series. Only the fifth one (which got the worst reviews) was originally conceived as part of the series. That isn’t true for Hobbs and Shaw though. It was originally conceived as part of the Fast & Furious series:
I was on a plane, with a pretty poor selection of movies but could only get through about 30 mins of Hobbs and Shaw before giving up.
It’s everything wrong with most modern action movies:
- Protagonists are essentially superhuman
- Protagonists behave as though they know they can’t be hurt. They can walk nonchalantly into situations that in real-life would be dangerous for anyone, irrespective of how tough they are.
- A lot of the dialogue and events are just to set up the hero to do or say something cool. And, presumably, make the audience clap like seals.
It’s like Rogue I. It’s canon, but it’s also something of a branch off the main franchise.
I just watched Ip Man (2008) for the first time. Now there’s an action movie. I had no idea it was a biopic. I mean I’ve heard of Wing Chun - I’m a Bruce Lee fan, I’ve seen Fist of Fury about a hundred times - but I didn’t put two and two together that this was the guy who actually taught him. Outside of that, I thought it was a pretty well told story, if a little quick on details, and the Sammo Hung choreographed fight scenes were awesome. I really dug the odd color saturations for different scenes.
So yeah, I loved it. I’ve never seen any other bit of an Ip Man franchise, thought there’s a TeeVee series that is run on PlutoTV quite often.
I watched a film named “Contagion” about two days ago upon request on one of my friends which exactly similar to the corona incident.
*Hackers *(1985), for about the thousandth time. I can’t get enough of that movie. It just gets better with age.
Sorry for hogging the thread but I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately.
The Big Chill (1983) - I’ve seen it a dozen times at least, but I hadn’t seen it quite some time. It holds up - performance-wise. I find the theme a little trite these days - “we used to be idealists and now we’re all successful, doesn’t that suck?” An interesting thing that made it new to me was the deleted scenes you can find on YouTube that gives a little more back story. No, they don’t have the flashback featuring Kevin Costner as Alex, but you learn a little bit more about all the characters. Most interestingly, there’s a little montage where nobody recognizes Michael when he shows up. That makes it more apparent just how manipulative he is; he just glommed on to his old friends mostly to try to get into Chloe’s pants.
I was 18 in 1983 so I didn’t really have the frames of references needed to really know what they were talking about most of the time. I rewatched it my 30’s a bunch of times which is probably why I still have an affinity for it. Now watching it in my 50’s, I’m picking at it a little more. I’ll still re-watch it at the drop of a hat, though.
I also loved Ip Man. I can also recommend Ip Man 2 (2010), and Ip Man; the Legend Is Born (also 2010), both of which I rate a little lower, but not too much.
Note that the “Legend” one is not directly related to the Donnie Yen series of Ip Man films, but does feature Yuen Biao (and Sammo Hung for a little bit), so you know it’s got something good going for it.
I hadn’t seen the Douglas Fairbanks silent movie Thief of Bagdad in a long time, so I watched it. In fact, I watched it twice – two different versions. One was the Rohauer/Thames version with tinting and original score by Carl Davis that I taped off PBS and later transferred to disc. The other was a cheapo DVD that I picked up. The music isn’t as good, and the film has more flaws, but it lacks the broadcast problems on my first disc. It was the first time I watched this version.
There were scenes I’d never seen before!. I had heard rumors that the other version had trimmed some stuff, but I had never known what, or how much. They cut out what is actually a pretty important scene (the first time the Thief goes into the mosque), which makes later scenes much clearer. I was also a bit annoyed at the other scenes which, while mot necessary to the plot, added texture to the film.
I had that feeling I’d gotten before when watching a restored silent film – as I had with The Lost World and Metropolis, when I finally saw what had been cut, and the movie made much more sense with the additions. I got that feeling multiple times when watching Metropolis, in fact, because I’ve been through several “waves” of restoration with that one.*
*I first had it when watching the Giorgio Moroder version of the film, which used a much cleaner print than the version I’d seen until then, but also added some clips that had been found. I later learned that some of those were put in the wrong place, but they couldn’t have known that. I was surprised sometime afterwards to learn that, although they’d added material, they’d also actually cut out some existing scenes (!) I knew this because the running times of Moroder’s version and the “standard” version were the same – 90 minutes. So I ran both versions side by side (I thought maybe they adjusted the running speed by printing extra frames or excising them or something), and found they’d cut entire scenes.
mmm
I watched stretches of “Mr. Brooks” (2007) last night, or as much of it as I could stand.
This “psychological thriller” features Kevin Costner as a serial killer, William Hurt as his evil alter ego (who appears in the film but is not visible to anyone other than Costner) and Demi Moore as a multimillion dollar heiress who is also a homicide detective threatened by another serial killer.
What a ludicrous, convoluted, palpitating pile of slop. And the director had wanted to make it a trilogy!
I am grateful he didn’t get the chance.
I’ve powered through some more blasts from the past, courtesy mostly of PlutoTV:
Ip Man 2 (2010) - at divemaster’s suggestion. You’re right I liked it very much, although the Twister character was just weeeee bit over the top.
Real Genius (1985) - you know the drill. Can be watched over and over and over and it’s still good.
Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985) - Another great, fun flick courtesy of 80’s Rewind channel.
And over on Prime, I just finished watching A Man Called Horse (1970). I was familiar with the story and I’d seen a few bits and pictures here and there, but this was my first actual viewing. For it’s time, I think it was really friggin’ good. I appreciated the attempt at realism of native American tribes and I thought the idea to have no subtitles worked really well. Of course, very few of the Sioux actually looked like their last names were anything but Carlucci or Bag-o-Donuts, or something. An interesting companion to Dances with Wolves, if a little less epic.
I also wanted mention *Popeye *(1980) - I watched the majority of it on Pluto one afternoon lately and I don’t know why that caught so much shit. It plays exactly right for its source material if you ask me. The art direction alone is fantastic and every goofy little character in town is constantly on the move letting you know what a weird little universe they live in.