At least you didn’t rent it by mistake.
I couldn’t even finish it, if I remember correctly.
Better Man - another music biopic, this time based on the life of Robbie Williams. As previously noted, Williams is played throughout as an anthropomorphic chimp to convey how he sees himself. It is not something noted by others in the film, but it manages to elevate the emotional impact of a film that would otherwise be mopey and miserable.
The main problem with the film is that it assumes you already know who Williams and Take That and various other key players are, which means that it will get very different reactions to UK and US audiences given that Take That were insanely huge in the ‘90s in Britain and largely unknown in the States.
Unlike, say, Rocket Man or Bohemian Rhapsody, there really isn’t the usual roller coaster of fame and success and excess and love interests leading the protagonist astray. Williams is entirely (literally in the film) his worst enemy, and the higher his career flies the worse it is for him and for everyone around him. There are some obvious external traumas along the way but ultimately it’s not until he’s achieved his dreams and yet can’t cope with it that things turn around for him.
I will admit to tearing up a bit at the very end, and the film does explain a lot about his real life (despite the “based on” caveat). But unless you already know the public side of him, the private side won’t make much sense.
(Also: Alison Steadman is in it and is lovely.)
We’re The Millers - I’d only seen sections of it before so finally have seen it start to finish. It’s a comedy elevated by some excellent performances and lowered by some really quite stupid stereotypes and the gratuitous “hey look we’ve got Jennifer Aniston doing stripper pole dancing in her underwear” scenes. Sudeikis, Aniston, Poulter, Offermann, and Hahn are all such fun to watch in action, even in a goofily unrealistic comedy like this.
Would recommend watching at least once for the good bits, with the understanding that the bad bits will pass.
The Mask - look, I had some time to kill at the end of my flight and wanted a mindless film I’d seen before that I wouldn’t mind missing the end of if the flight landed early. Don’t judge me.
It hasn’t aged well and many of the acting performances apart from Carrey are just awful. I’ve read the comic and Carrey as Ipkiss is perfectly cast as the avatar of cartoon mayhem. But everyone else is bad. Even Cameron Diaz.
We started Rome, Open City, which is part one of a trilogy of WW2 movies made just after the war. B&W and subtitled, it’s primarily about the resistance to the Nazis and the Italian fascists. Stars Anna Magnani and directed by Roberto Rossellini. The wife is on a war movie kick.
Thanks for mentioning this. It’s another one I would have missed. I saw it last night and was quite impressed. It combines the story of the Israeli hostages with inside views of how ABC struggled to cover it.
Assuming it closely matched real-life events, two insights that came out of it were the hypersensitivity in Germany to the events of the war that had ended only 27 years earlier, and the apparent incompetence of the German police. They failed to breach the apartment where the hostages were being held, and though the ABC broadcast may have tipped off the terrorists, why didn’t someone cut the power to the apartment? In any case, once they got to the airport, they completely failed to rescue even one hostage.
I was surprised the Olympic security were unarmed and athletes often climbed the fence to go out on the town.
Made it easy for the terrorists to climb in without raising an alarm.
Apparently the Israelis didn’t have their own security team in that building.
But the Olympics had always been a event that countries put aside their differences and focused on competition.
I came in to ask about this. It was the film last night for movie night, but I had writers group, so I came in about thirty minutes into the film, and it looked good but it’s hard for me to just jump into things like that, so I didn’t watch it. But everyone seemed to think it was a good movie. My husband did more research and was telling me about the whole incident and it sounds like a giant cluster.
And one I’d never heard of until last night.
(I also assumed it was made in the 70s, so it was cool how they dated the movie to that time period.)
I went to high school with the guy who took the bronze in 200 meter butterfly that Olympics. Total chaos all around, for everyone.
There is another movie that touches on the incident but focuses more on the aftermath named Munich (2005) directed by Steven Spielberg.
//i\\
SLC Punk
I’ve mentioned this upthread but I’ve been on a bit of a mission to introduce my Teen to as many weirdo, obscure, cult movies as possible (for the record, he loves Repo Man and I just got him a T-shirt for an early graduation gift). I’ve been upping my efforts a bit since we visited a college campus and the counselor talked about the cool movie club where the students get to vote on what they want to watch and they decided on Twilight.
So last Friday I put on SLC Punk and the Teen was getting into it. About 20 minutes in he says “Hey that’s Shaggy!” and he really starts grooving to all of the monologues that Matthew Lillard’s character Stevo has. For whatever reason, we couldn’t finish the movie that night so we picked it up yesterday to watch the last 30 minutes. The Teen was loving it until Stevo’s best friend Heroin Bob, who does not do drugs at all, accidentally ODs on pain meds . That hit him hard.
Interesting movie and Lillard is great as the lead. Also good acting from Michael A. Goorjian as Heroin Bob, Annabeth Gish, Jennifer Lien, Christopher MacDonald, and Jason Segal.
It’s a quality film and you’re a good dad. I’ll watch this with my son before he heads off to college as well. I used to believe that authority promoting or even peddling subversive ideas weakens them, but screw it, every human has the urge to fight the injustice and insanity they see, particularly at 18, and that will never kick off watching Twilight Zone reruns in college.
The Piscopo and Lillard scene must have been funny watching with your boy.
“He’s gonna make one a hell of a lawyer.”
“Go to hell.”
“Fuck you, dear.”
Stevo’s dad was played by Christopher “Shooter MCGavin” MacDonald.
And we had fun with that scene. The Teen was definitely into the movie and loved Stevo’s speechifying.
Hopefully it’s the other one, which wasn’t terrible but was pretty disappointing for the amount of star power involved: Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, et al…
I can’t find it now, but I remember reading an article decades ago where Reese Witherspoon was quoted as saying something along the lines of “that movie was not about my tits!”
Watched Darkest Miriam, in part of my project to watch anything that Britt Lower (who plays Helly on the deservedly popular TV series Severance) does.
It is beautifully shot, and the actors are great, but it is extremely low-key and slow; you definitely need to be in a certain mood to enjoy it. A melancholy but sexy intellectual romance with a small mystery attached to it.
Unfortunately no. It was the one with the sparkly vampires because that’s what college students saw as kids and now it’s nostalgic to watch it in college. We need to introduce these kids to Alex Cox, Roger Corman, and Jim Sharman stat!
How to Kill Monsters (2023) on Prime.
Low budget British horror/comedy that challenges some Horror movie tropes and then eagerly embraces them. The Lovecraftian monsters are done as well as can be expected with practical effects, which means they’re kinda silly looking. The performances are funny if a little amaturish. It’s no Shawn of the Dead but there are worse ways to kill 90 minutes.
Good reviews …a British Horror Story, lots of original footage and the people involved - not re-creations.
Yesterday I watched In Harm’s Way (1965), starring John Wayne and Kirk Douglas. Wayne plays a navy captain who is reprimanded after the attack on Pearl Harbor for not following orders, but of course, he didn’t follow order so that he could really save the day. Nonetheless, he is demoted and winds up on desk duty. Ultimately, the Navy sees the errors of its ways and promotes to Admiral and he leads the island hopping missions and ends up landing marines at Levu-Vana, though basically his entire crew, including his best friend and his son, are killed and he loses a leg.
But that’s not even the biggest bummer about this movie. Kirk Douglas plays a character who you really kind of like for most of the movie. He’s rebellious, he’s witty, he’s sharp tongued, he’s loyal. But then right at the end he takes a crazy turn. Throughout most of the last third of the movie, Douglas has been flirting with nurse Dorne even though nurse Dorne is engaged to John Wayne’s lieutenant son. She doesn’t seem all that jazzed to be engaged to the guy so she basically leads Douglas on … but no touchy-touchy. When Douglas decides he doesn’t like the situation anymore he out and out rapes her. I’m watching the scene and I’m thinking that they’re trying to go for one of those look at the he-man roughly seducing the crying dame who really wants it kind of thing but it was so disturbing with her screaming and begging him to stop that I was pretty gob-smacked to see that in the middle of a John Wayne war movie.
Get’s worse. Nurse Dorne, now humiliated and afraid that she’s pregnant, commits suicide. Now when Douglas hears about this he gets “noble” and commandeers an airplane so he can go spot the Japanese fleet in a suicide mission, but … you know … fuck that guy. I’m supposed to hip hip hooray for a guy I just saw rape a woman who went on to kill herself? Yeah, nice job spotting the fleet, but … you know … fuck that guy.
I was really getting into the whole movie until that part of the love triangle flipped into fucking David Lynch land.
Jacob’s Ladder (1990). A youthful Tim Robbins plays Army soldier Jacob Singer who is deployed to Vietnam, and is seriously injured in a fierce battle. But he returns home and recovers. Or does he? In the eerie sequences that follow, we’re never quite sure which is reality and which is hallucination.
Very well done and highly recommended.
Munich (2005). Many thanks to @icon for mentioning this. I had not seen it before. This is nothing less than a cinematic masterpiece from Steven Spielberg. Absolutely riveting! Almost 3 hours long, and never a dull moment.
It’s nominally about a clandestine Israeli team sent to track down and kill 11 terrorist masterminds behind the Munich Olympic hostage crisis in which all the Israeli athletes perished. All I will say about the plot is that it’s not as straightforward as one might expect and has interesting twists and side stories. The start of the movie declares “inspired by true events”, which I take to mean that there were probably significant alterations and additions for dramatic effect. It doesn’t matter – this is a magnificent piece of filmmaking that exceeded even my high expectations for a Spielberg film.
I agree it was brilliantly done …speaking of terrorist. This has dropped on Netflix
American Manhunt: Search for Osama Bin Laden
good so far