I tried to watch Ice Road: Vengeance, but couldn’t get past the halfway point. A ridiculously bad film with Liam Neeson, who will apparently act in anything with a paycheck attached. Terrible dialog, ridiculous scenes, equipment magically appearing out of nowhere. Predictable, boring and stupid.
Damn, I’m glad someone else has the same opinion as me.
I saw The Northman by one of my favorite directors, Robert Eggars.
While it’s not my favorite of his films (that’d be The Lighthouse) I liked it. It presented the ancient Nordic culture not as something to be glorified but really as something alien and at times horrifying. It is aggressive in its attention to cultural detail. It feels like a play, particularly in its dialog. The main character has no defining characteristic outside of the burning desire for revenge. Which was the point, I think.
At times this felt like a horror movie. The random stuff happening in the background (raping and pillaging, and worse) is horrifying enough, but it gets really stylistic toward the end. I have come away with a certainty this would have been a very stressful time to be alive.
I like “vibes” directors, you know directors who always make you feel a certain way, and he delivered here. Bleak and creepy and so very beautiful to look at.
Not much story and not a particularly complex or interesting story but it was worth it to me to be carried away to another place and another time.
I like to say Eggars is my favorite feminist director. Much like The Lighthouse dealt with toxic masculinity and how it cannot be reconciled with true male intimacy, I think he was being very pointed here about the consequences of an ultraviolent hypermasculine society.
But the cool thing about his movies is they are subtle and complex in their themes. So people can have different takeaways.
Much like The Revenant, a film to be endured rather than enjoyed, but decent nonetheless.
The Accountant (2016). I know it’s been mentioned before and the sequel has also been discussed in this thread, but herewith my two bits’ worth in case there’s anyone in the world who still hasn’t seen it.
It’s a sophisticated crime drama, well written and directed. There’s a line in the movie about Christian Wolff (Ben Affleck) being “almost supernatural” – it’s a reference to his amazing accounting skills, but it could equally apply to his ability to run a covert business doing accounting for ruthless criminal organizations and somehow managing to stay alive and successful. Far-fetched, perhaps, but this is a tense and engrossing drama that is executed with intelligence and finesse. Highly recommended.
Autism is not a superpower, but autism has so often been demonized by the stigma of “mental illness” and general disdain for “the different” that it’s refreshing to see it portrayed in a positive light. And it’s certainly true that many people with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder can be exceptionally focused or skilled in specific task performance, often driven by attention to detail and a quest for perfection.
See, I took the movie at face value and saw it as a celebration of an ultraviolent hypermasculine society. If there was any subtext there, I couldn’t see any sign of it. To me, it was a story of a handsome superhuman warrior with no introspection, no insight, and no real inner life of any sort, who kills a bunch of equally horrible people in a moral vacuum and then dies in the most badass fashion possible. Sure, it was an awful, disgusting world, but I’m not sure I was supposed to think it was.
- The Catcher was excellent - this not so sure yet
American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally 
In light of Robert Redford’s death, we thought we’d watch a movie of his that neither of us had seen. We decided on Three Days of the Condor (1975). Woof. Bell bottom pants, weird sideburns, and really stupid dialog. The second half wasn’t as bad, but it was a slog.
You think we weren’t supposed to think burning children alive is problematic?
Furthermore, the whole actual rationale for revenge was undermined by his mother’s account of her own experience. He did it for nothing. But by then it was too late. He’d already put his future children at risk, and so carried on with his fate.
It seems to me this worldview is at least questioned.
It’s an interesting choice for him. This is not a director who has ever endorsed toxic masculinity. He tends to portray women as truth-tellers and arbiters of fate. He’s alluded during interviews to feminist messages in his films.
However, I haven’t been able to find any comment about that regarding The Northman specifically.
This is best I’ve got so far.
The morality of that is in the eye of the audience member more than the storyteller.
Placing it in context, the movie was a spectacular break from the mold of Frank Buck and Clyde Beatty for African wildlife. It is beautifully done up to and including the stampede. The mid portion of the film drops to some inexplicable Joeseph Conrad trope that is so bad it even repeats scenes. The movie resumes with the introduction of Umbopa and the Watusi. Every time I see their dress I wonder who did 19th century, rural African dry cleaning. I have read that the native dance and costume are authentic.
The cave and diamonds segment always seems like something that was added as an afterthought. Even more so their sudden lavish departure. Still the iconic stampede is a glimpse of something that no longer exists and much the same for the Watusi. The movie remains among my favorites.
Loved that movie 
. With one glaring, off-putting exception. Poor Faye Dunaway, who’s shoehorned plot and awfully written and frankly unnecessary character/psuedo-romance grates badly. Not really her fault, but her Stockholm Syndrome help-mate role sucks.
On the other hand Max von Sydow was excellent.
Of course I saw it as problematic. But I don’t know what I was supposed to think, since the movie made no attempt to tell me what IT thought. You can’t tell a story without having a point of view - and not having a point of view is also a point of view. Maybe the movie was against burning children, maybe it was in favor of it; I don’t make presumptions about other people’s morality.
Fiction, especially genre fiction, is full of wannabe edgelords who portray horrible things with no moral judgement, as if to say, “Deal with it, casuals.” To them, there’s no right or wrong, just strong or weak. Perhaps the filmmakers meant to critique this attitude, but if so, they copied it too well and failed to present a strong counterargument.
And the women in the movie were plot devices, nothing more. There was never any insight into their motivations; the love interest didn’t actually seem to like him, she just ended up with him by default because they were the two best-looking people in the movie.
Hmm. I’ve read a few article interviews with the director, and what I’m mostly getting is, he became really interested in Viking culture after a visit to Iceland. He was so obsessed with getting the details right, I’m not sure he was thinking that much about the story. He did say it was inspired by Conan the Barbarian, which I haven’t seen.
My recollection of this movie is that it was an attempt at an unvarnished Norse tale. If you delve into the actual old Norse stories, they are full of bloody betrayal, revenge and violence. As I remember, I came away thinking that the Northman was a pretty successful at telling an actual Norse tale rather than a modern take on a “Viking Saga”, but it was a bit much for modern sensibilities.
It’s basically Hamlet (or as I understand it, the Norse legend of Amleth that served as the inspiration for Hamlet).
I watched Warfare (directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland). I thought it was very good. It’s a very simply plot based on the true experiences of a Navy SEAL team. The film eschews many of the standard tropes of war films such as characters sitting around pontificating and philosophizing or Rambo-esq action sequences of soldiers single-handedly holding off platoon-sized elements in maelstroms of bullets and explosions with no ill effects. The film has a sort of real-time simplicity that makes it feel very tense and highly authentic.
The violence was pretty bad. It wasn’t relentlessly gory (some parts were gory, but it wasn’t the rule), or explicit in its depiction of sexual violence, but the casualness with which the characters performed unspeakable acts was pretty shocking.
I guess it’s no worse than like, Game of Thrones. But I stopped watching GoT after one season because I didn’t want to be watching stuff like that all the time.
Eggars did say in an interview that he was challenged to skirt the line between making an exciting film and glorifying violence. I get that. As an action writer I find it’s a hard balance to strike.
That sounds like a smart move. If some super alien grows and starts killing people, best to do it in a closed environment. Sucks to be you ISS crew.
Three Days of the Condor is one of our favorite RR movies. My complaint is the ending. It’s very 70s. Telling the truth to the NYT will protect you. Yeah right. “What if they don’t print it?” If the CIA really wanted him dead, he’d be dead, NYT or no.
I think the ending was all wrong, The CIA should give him his old job back, make him in charge of the department. I mean, it worked! It found a previously unknown intelligence organization, operating within the CIA. They need to promote this guy, not kill him!
My newest movie was the 1939 Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone. I’ve seen enough variations (even in Wild Wild West!) but had never seen this one, the first of the 14 Rathbone/Bruce films. At only 80 minutes it’s still padded (the seance that goes nowhere, for example). A lot simpler story than I’d have imagined. But it has almost everything: deerstalker hat, pipe, violin, disguises, Mrs. Hudson, but surprisingly no “elementary”. All in all I think I prefer the Wild Wild West version.
Try watching the second Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Aside from Hound of the Baskervilles, it’s the only one set in Victorian England (for some bizarre reason, after this one they changed the setting to then-present-day London). Adventures features an original story that has Professor Moriarty as the Bad Guy, and it’s not padded or boring.
One day I want to se a Conan the Barbarian movie actually based on the writings of Robert E. Howard. None of them so far has been. none have that Howardian blend of action and fantasy. And, although the Conan stories were gory, they weren’t relentlessly so, and it’s not necessary to make them bloodbaths.
Give me Tower of the Elephant or Rogues in the House, or The Scarlet Citadel, or The Hour of the Dragon. Don’t give me second-hand derivative stuff by people who think “they can write this stuff”. Generally, they can’t.