Well, yeah.
They were infected by an alien organism.
Dang. Twain cranked his Shade Thrower to 11.
The most recent movie I watched is Monter Hunter. It is about Lieutenant Artemis and his loyal soldiers are transferred to a new land and confronted with dangerous enemies with great strength. Movie adaptation based on the game Capcom.
Jeez, Louise! Do you get the feeling Twain was just getting warmed up?
jsc, thanks for the recommendation, I think you saved me several hours of drudgery. I owe you a beer.
Psycho Goreman
This movie had a great opening 30 minutes, but sadly it got a lot worse in the final 60 minutes and ended up being a disappointment. A girl and her brother find a alien being of great power and also obtain the gemstone that allows her to control him. The great premise is that the little girl is actually pretty mean-spirited and uses the alien to do bad things and to serve her own purposes.
The tagline is great:
Little Girl
Big Psycho
Big Psycho is supposed to reference the alien, but it actually references the little girl. Anyway, not a terrible movie, but the opening 30 minutes promise a movie that just isn’t there.
Half way through watching Malcom and Marie and I have to say so far it’s an hour of spectacular ranting and venting. The rant about the movie review is fantastic.
I have had just about enough of those m-f-ing Monters!
Sorry to hear this. I saw the trailer last month, and it looked great for a low-budget flick.
I watched Salma Hayek’s new film Bliss on Amazon. It had some kinda interesting ideas, but overall, to me anyway, it was more of a depressing drug abuse movie than a sci-fi mind bender.
The Professor and the Madman (Netflix) If a story about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary sounds like an awesome idea -why didn’t they think of this sooner? then this is right up your alley. I’m actually one of those people, and yes, it did work, mostly.
In an odd bit of casting, Mel Gibson (hiding behind a huge beard) is the Professor, and Sean Penn (not odd, and also luxuriously bearded) is the Madman who sends him literary citations by the truckload from his asylum cell. True story.
Synchronic
This movie streams right now on Hoopla and is from the same directors as The Endless, Spring, and Resolution. The problem is that Synchronic is probably their worst movie. It’s OK in some parts and is by no means bad, but it is kind of boring and takes over 50 minutes(my wife and I looked) to get to the main plot. If the opening 50 minutes had been used to build up the characters in a way that makes us care about them, this would have been fine. That isn’t what happens. It’s just kind of a boring mess for 49 minutes and then a pretty decent movie for its final 40-45 minutes.
Shame.
Check out Spring from the same directors. Much better.
Just watched The Dig, starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan, a true story about a huge archaeology discovery at a place called Sutton Hoo, and it was pleasant enough I suppose, but didn’t really satisfy. It starts out a little bit interesting, following a simple archaeologist making his initial discovery on a fancy lady’s land, but then halfway through a few new characters suddenly get introduced and the story shifts to them for the rest of the film. And then nothing really feels satisfyingly concluded.
Yeah we watched that as well, stated out interestingly enough, but it just seemed to devolve into a series of set piece scenes with no real connection as if they had to do each scene to explain some part of the story and they were each filmed ina vacuum, . Well thats how it felt to me.
Visually nice, good production, lost interest in the characters quickly.
Finally saw Knives Out. One of the best and most enjoyable movies I’ve seen in a while.
I finally got to see “The Vast of Night,” a neat little sci-fi-ish mystery that critics were raving about a few months ago. I was thoroughly impressed. It’s a low-budget feature by a first-time director. The cinematography and the acting (especially by the young female lead) are top-notch. (She does a 10-minute sequence, in one single shot, that must have required a prodigious memory, and she pulls it off with complete believability.)
I should say, however, that the amateur critics on IMDB were split on this movie. Many loved it. Many hated it. The chief criticism is that it’s too talky. And some were annoyed that the aliens were never seen. Well, if ya gotta see the little green men, you will be disappointed. Neither of these bothered me in the least.
Watched The Half Of It on Netflix. I really enjoyed it. A nice queer and immigrant take on the classic Cyrano situation. I found it very well filmed and funny and smart.
I’ve read the book by Simon Winchester (who wrote lots of other interesting books), but didn’t even realize there was a movie.
Last night I watched The Thief of Bagdad (1961) because I got a copy on DVD. It’s a nostalgic nod to my youth, when I saw it in the theater. It’s not the worst version of the film (I suspect the 1978 version is, despite its awesome cast), and it’s dubbed from Italian, but I prefer it to the 1940 color version, which I find, believe it or, too slow. Of course, the silent 1924 Douglas Fairbanks version, which started it all, is far and away the best.
the 1961 version stars Steve Reeves (who became famous playing Hercules twice, then went on to lots of "ancient Greek/Roman roles) and is much closer to the plot of the silent film than the 1940 version was, re-using many of the images and notions. With adult eyes I can see how contrived it all is and where they cut corners on effects and the like, but the sets are impressive and a lot of the “background” effects are flawlessly done. Reeves’ Kerim the Thief is too goody-goody compared to Fairbanks’ rogue, though. You never got the sense that he had to be redeemed.
I read the book a while ago - it’s a fascinating story. The love story they shoehorned into the film, however, did not improve it any.
The Kid Detective
This was a great movie and I am so glad I saw it. It’s about a guy who used to be the Encyclopedia Brown of his neighborhood, a kid detective solving all the Town’s mysteries. Now, he’s an adult trying to be a private detective, but still getting the same “where is my cat” type mysteries. He’s pathetic, regrets the one big case he never solved as a kid, and no one in town respects him anymore.
It’s a comedy and a decent mystery story. I kind of loved this movie and is probably the best new movie I have seen in 2021 so far, though it was released in some festivals in 2020.
Definitely rent it and check it out.
News of the World
Tom Hanks tries to take a young girl who had been taken into a native american tribe back to her family. Many tribulations along the way, including she doesn’t speak english. Good film.
A question I have: the girl points to things with her pinky finger. Is this common in some cultures?