Hard disagree on Holden. I haven’t seen his whole filmography, but his performances in the stuff I have seen - Sabrina, Bridge over the River Kwai, The Wild Bunch, Network - still hold up very well.
The Happiness of the Katakuris
Recommended.
Takashi Miike can be hit or miss, but this one was definitely a hit. A musical, a comedy, a horror(?) movie, and even other things(there are sections in claymation/stop-motion).
A very bizarre movie about a family who purchase a home to be a guest house. Problem is, people keep dying and the family, not wanting to draw negative attention, buries the bodies and tells no one of the deaths. Meanwhile, they sing, they dance, we have an entire karaoke song to sing along with, and the movie throws in tons of comedy as well.
It’s strange, even for Miike, who is a very unusual person making very unusual films.
This was fun. It’s not scary one bit even though I listed horror as a possible genre. It’s more bizarre and a bit morbid at times, but happiness and songs keep the movie light.
I liked this one a lot.
Open Water (2003). Rated only 5.8 on IMDb, actors are unknown (at least, I’d never heard of them) and it’s unusually short, at 1 hour 19 minutes. So why am I even mentioning it? Because it’s a good movie, and shamefully underrated at 5.8.
A couple are part of a scuba diving group, and due to carelessness by the tour operator and a couple of unfortunate coincidences, the operator gets the diver count wrong and believes everyone is accounted for, and the boat leaves without them, leaving them in open water and not even within sight of any land. Apparently based on a true story.
Based on comments in this thread, we checked out Dave Made a Maze today.
It was way weirder than I expected, and frankly, rather disturbing, despite the lack of any graphic gore.
I think this movie was about mental illness. Or maybe it was just goofy absurdism, but… man.
- Over the weekend I watched the Road to Rio (1947), fifth in the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby “Road” pictures. I’d only seen parts of The Road to Bali before this, so this is the first time I’ve seen one all the way through. I don’t think I’ve missed much, although the Wiere brothers (who I’d never heard of) blew me away.
- I also finally saw the MST3K version of The Magic Voyage of Sinbad (aka Sadko). This was one of Alexander Ptushko’s Russian fantasy epics, and pretty obviously the “Sinbad” renaming was due to the American distributor. Ptushko’s film are impressively filmed, although the US versions are not only badly cut and dubbed, but poorly printed with bad color and bad film quality. I have a copy of his Ilya Muromets (which I actually saw in the theater as The Sword and the Dragon, then later saw countless times on TV), and it’s much better. This film, too, was given the MST3K treatment, and a lot of the riffing was directed at the dubbing and the like, which is wholly deserved. For instance, ubiquitous voiceover artist Paul Frees did a lot of the dubbing, and the voice he used for the leader of the Tugars (Mongols) is only a hair removed from the voice he used for Boris Badenov on Rocky and Bullwinkle, so the MST3K crew had him calling for “Moose and Squirrel”.
Anyway, Even if this hasn’t been run through the MST3K mill, I still would have trouble taking this at all in the spirit in which it was intended. The Hall of the Undersea Tsar was pretty silly, with the google-eyed fish and that ludicrous octopus.
Saw “The Fantastic Four”! I really enjoyed it and recommend it. It’s not just action and special effects. There is a good human element to it, also.
Weapons
Highly recommended.
One night at 2:15AM, all but one of the children in an elementary class sprinted out of their homes without a word. Where are they? Why did they run out? Why all from one class? Why did one boy not run out like the others? What the heck is going on?
A great movie, one of the best of the year. Other than what I wrote about(which is pretty much on the poster), I’d recommend going in blind. Don’t read reviews much, don’t look up any analysis. Just go and see this movie. This movie has received some praise and hype, but ignore that. It does live up to its hype in my opinion, but I was able to just go and watch the movie unfold with zero knowledge of it and that made the experience one of the best I’ve had in a long time.
Great movie, great cast, well filmed and edited.
I saw it alone, but immediately noted that my wife and I need to watch this the day it hits streaming. What a movie.
Trying to get my daughter to return to watching horror movies with me for this one. Really looks interesting.
This is one of those “horror” movies that goes much more in the direction of intense, interesting, and thrilling.
The Penguin Lessons
This one was recommended to me elsewhere and my wife and I watched it Friday night. This was a very fun, low key movie. Steve Coogan is a disillusioned English teacher who takes a job in Argentina right at the time of the 1976 coup. Jonathan Price is the harsh headmaster of the school. Coogan saves a Magellanic penguin that was caught in an oil spill, tries to release it back into the ocean, but ends up smuggling it back to his school. He then tries to give it to a zoo but that doesn’t work either so it just ends up with him. Price seems harsh but not unnecessarily so, and he has some good moments. The penguin acts like a penguin and its never anthromorphosized or anything.
This is based on a memoir but there were some liberties taken with the story. Nonetheless, I do recommend it.
I agree. It’s not exactly a horror movie, more of a thriller/mystery with some dashes of gore and magic. But it’s engaging and in some scenes darkly funny.
Others this weekend:
Sketch In many ways, this is a children’s movie in the vein of Weapons with a lot more magic and a lot less gore (but not zero). A young girl handles the grief of her mother’s loss by drawing bloody rage-filled cartoons in a notebook. What happens when the drawings come to life?
It is definitely not for very young children (I can see the seeds of life long trauma in any 4 year old taken to this movie), but it isn’t exactly “adult” horror and, like Weapons, it is full of scenes of dark humor. A good movie for middle schoolers and up.
My Daughter Is A Zombie Is a Korean production that, in essence, is Maggie, but with a lot more humor and heart. A Zombie virus strikes Korea and a father and daughter try to escape to the countryside, but the daughter is infected. “Kill all Zombies” is the order of the day, but the father doesn’t accept that and enlists friends and family to try to tame and hide his zombie daughter. Lot’s of slapstick situations around the zombie in disguise (lots more than the dour Maggie), but with a surprising affecting ending. I enjoyed it a lot more that I thought I would.
Does he lock her up in the shed and go play video games with her?
I’m not sure what this is a reference to, but no, he doesn’t, though Korean pop idols and dance competitions are a recurrent theme.
While I enjoyed the movie (Coogan always delivers on his roles) and I care less about whether facts are subordinated to storytelling, I was a bit uneasy about the “white man’s burden” view of the effects of the fascist regime and its oppression of human rights. While the fascist environment and threat was addressed, it was addressed from the aspect of how it affected Coogan’s character, not delving deeply into how the Argentinian’s were affected. While I know the basic plot is about the teacher and his adoption of the penguin, I still had unfavorable comparisons with I’m Still Here running in the background of my mind while watching it.
Have a look at Shaun of the DEad
Kandahar on Netflix. Gerard Butler shooting up the Middle East. An okay popcorn flick, if predictable. And a clumsy setup for a sequel at the end.
And a quick search shows that there is indeed a sequel in the works.
Final Destination Bloodlines (2025). Already reviewed but I’ll throw in my 2¢ anyway. You sure can’t fault the special effects, although a lot of it is in the service of blood & gore. Still, it has one of the most spectacular opening scenes I’ve seen in a long time. Decent enough story line if you’re willing to accept that Death doesn’t like having its plans thwarted. I saw the first Final Destination a long time ago but not any of the others. I’m willing to accept the common opinion that this is the best of the entire franchise.
Nightmare Alley (1947). Remade in 2021 but I’m talking about the 1947 original. Tyrone Power plays Stan, a carnival huckster who, with his wife, learns the tricks of staging a fake mentalist act and they leave the carnival to perform on their own. As their reputation and skills grow, Stan decides to try one last big-time big-money hustle, which fails spectacularly. A good old-fashioned entertaining film noir.
And Then There Were None/Ten Little Indians (1974). A truly execrable film with a delightful cast and score. The ill-fated cast includes two Bond villains (Largo from Thunderball and Auric Goldfinger), one Pink Panther villain (Herbert Lom/Inspector Dreyfus) and femme fatale (Elke Sommer), a famous French singer (Charles Aznavour, “the French Sinatra”) who sings his obligatory song and then dies first, Oliver Reed, Richard Attenborough (but no dinosaurs, dinosaurs would’ve livened this up), a brief tape recording by Orson Welles (because why not) and others, all trapped inexplicably in one of the grand old hotels of Iran.
Bruno Nicolai’s jazzy score + occasional Moog is great. The dialog and pacing, however, are just incredibly weird (but I do appreciate that even as they all die off, they still wear their tuxedos to dinner).
I am 100% opposite on this. I didn’t notice anything clever, super-original, or wonderfully acted about this movie, and the idiotic Fortnite tie-in (that’s not a spoiler, by the way) doesn’t help. I also went in with almost zero knowledge, except it was billed as horror/mystery so I did some searching to see what the general opinion was. While there seems to be a contingent of people out there who thought this wasn’t a horror movie, they are wrong.