Gotta keep marriage fresh. That is also part of our evening, but since that has nothing to do with film I thought I’d leave it out.
Horror and Torture do not lead directly to fun bedtime activities in my house, Thrillers do though.
It’s why I can’t stand the films. It exists on some fantasy land where everyone (or so it seems) can hire an assassin, but that people who don’t want to be assassinated don’t hire other assassins to take out the first assassins and/or the people that hired them.
Or, when everyone is an assassin, who is growing the food/driving the taxis/making weapons/etc?
But I have to disagree:
Bullet Train was clever and smart and convoluted, and the body count was actually pretty small, considering.
One of the best drowning scenes I’ve seen in a movie. I feel like the movie was more or less PG-13, but the drowning was traumatic.
My daughter was watching The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe last night. I never realized that Santa Clause was the one who handed out all the deadly weaponry to the children.
Also seeing the ending in a post-GOT context after the children are crowned kings and queens of Narnia and are chasing a stag as adult monarchs dressed in their royal finery raised a bunch of questions in my mind. Like what, if any, is their succession plan? Are they tyrants now hunting the populace of Narnia for sport, given that most of the animals (including their horses) are sentient and talk?
And what was the deal with Mr Tumnus? A royal coronation and best he could do was switch jaunty scarves? Like put on a shirt dude. I get that goat pants might be hard to find but he’s human from the waist up. I could see going shirtless if James McAvoy were post-Split jacked, but he’s not here.
If you liked Sleuth, I highly recommend The Last of Sheila (1973). It has a similar genesis – both are films about rich sadistic men playing mind games, and are said to be inspired by Stephen Sondheim’s game-filled apartment. TLoS has the advantage of being co-written by Sondheim (with Anthony Perkins – yep, Norman Bates himself). It’s a fiendishly clever film with multiple mysteries and mysteries-within-mysteries. Well worth digging up. With Raquel Welch, Richard Nenjamin, James Coburn, James Mason, and Dyan Cannon (who was also in Deathtrap)
We watched Trick r’ Treat, a so-called “cult classic” Halloween movie from 2014.
This movie has a baffling number of high quality actors and is produced by Brian Singer. But it was direct-to-video originally until people started loving it and are now giving it a theater release.
From the perspective of a 13-year-old, it would be a lot of fun! It’s a series of vignettes of interlapping stories on Halloween night where people are supernaturally punished for not being sufficiently in the Halloween spirit. Nothing really makes coherent sense. The stories are just the kind of stories kids would make up, unfounded rumors and urban legends.
As an adult there is little to recommend it besides, inexplicably, high production values and a cast of very committed actors. (Anna Paquin? Really?) It’s silly, campy and unrealistic. Not terribly original either. The best thing about it was the opening credits, which were seriously cool.
This movie is not appropriate for children which is why I imagine it must be very popular among tweens.
C-
Yep, Father Christmas literally shows up and passes out gifts. It’s odd.
James McAvoy is one lucky guy. He’s in:
- Narnia
- His Dark Materials
- Dune ← Leto II in the Scifi channel version
- X-men
- Sandman audio recording
No Star Wars, no Matrix, no Lord of the Rings appearances
The Narnia books have this weird species hierarchy of sentient vs. non-sentient versions of what are otherwise essentially the same animals. Like, there are talking deer here and there in the stories, but the human characters also eat venison. Awkward glitches can occur, as in an episode in The Silver Chair:
None of which seems to blunt any of our heroes’ appetites for partaking of pigeon pie and ham and sausages and kidneys and bacon a few chapters further on, mind you, but presumably they assume they’ve now got a more trustworthy supply chain.
As for succession planning in the original Pevensie monarchy once they’d reached adulthood, presumably they would eventually have made alliances with other royal families of the Narnian world, if they hadn’t been magicked back to their schoolchildren’s life in England.
IIRC A Horse and His Boy starts with the Pevensies as adults in Foreign Parts negotiating a marriage contract for Susan, or at least pursuing a possible romance, before deciding that these exotic swarthy types offer a fun diversion but taken all in all are not quite the thing.
The most intriguing part of the books for me now is exactly this question of how the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve actually went about the business of ruling. Like, in LWW when Edmund slips away from the group and makes his way to the witches fortress, he finds the going hard amd mutters to himself about how when he’s King he’ll build some proper roads.
Yes! Improving infrastructure is a vital function of the state and can only improve prosperity. Did he do this? How did he supply the labour? Payment? Feudal service? Come to think of it, what is Narnia’s system of government. Is the whole country the monarch’s personal demesne? Are their barons? A merchant class? Tumnus was first seen not only coming back from the shops, but with wrapped presents, a detail which suggests a far more advanced consumer economy than one would expect from an apparently medieval snowbound autocracy. Where did the beavers get the oranges with which to make marmalade roll?
In my non-canonical reimagining of the Chronicles of Narnia, there are also human primates with no language ability who are also fair game for all involved.
“Long Pig…the other other white meat.”
Stranger
It’s must be ridiculously easy to hide a murder in Narnia.
Mainly due to all the talk about it here and elsewhere, last night we watched Weapons. A good, ambitious flick, though I’m not a fan of the nonlinear narrative.
So tonight we watched Companion. The Wiki page for it calls it a “science fiction thriller film,” though I would probably classify it as a dark comedy. At any rate, it is easily the best thing I’ve watched in the last six months. It has really good writing and acting, and (unlike Weapons) held my attention to the very end. Very entertaining and highly recommended.
It was! It sure lasted a long time.
Blood Shot on Prime - I teased with the IMDB blurb above so I watched it. Cop obsessed with catching this vampire; vampire actually works for the CIA; Arab terrorists with a nuclear bomb; harem girls; exploding dwarves. A good bit of humor, the vampire has most of the good lines - as it should be.
Not bad. The two leads, Brennan Elliott as Rip and Michael Bailey Smith as the vampire, are quite good. The Arab terrorists are a bad caricature with a mix of Islamophobia. Rip doesn’t get it for most of the movie, he’s after the vampire who is dismantling the terrorist group. Some good battles between them. Finally after Rip’s wife is kidnapped by the terrorists, Rip forms an uneasy alliance with the vampire. Lots of shooting (guns have HUGE magazines). Some additional mythical BS. A harem girl (Azita Ghanizada) befriends Rip. She’s a bit wooden but based on IMDB, is a steady worker.Then a big reveal that I will not spoil. The gals are just scenery. Rip’s police shift captain (Paula Trickery) has some actual lines.
NOTE: This is not Bloodshot (one word) with Vin Diesel.
Wife and I went to see Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere tonight.
It’s about Springsteen’s personal and professional struggles while creating and recording the album Nebraska in 1982. Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen and does a terrific job. Jeremy Strong also does a great job as Jon Landau, Springsteen’s producer.
I would rate it as good but not great. At 119 minutes, it should have been about 30 minutes shorter, and I thought it really dragged for about the last 45 minutes. But a decent and entertaining story.
(Jeremy Allen White played Lip in Shameless. Of course, that’s the character that I thought of during every close-up shot of White.)
He’s better known as the star of The Bear. I thought the Springsteen film was pretty damn awful honestly. So boring. The only times it shows any life is the two (?) times they show a performance and when they are recording Born in the USA. Other than that, this film is just lifeless. I did not know that this was actually just going to be a film about depression.
My Halloween costume this year is Willard, so last night I watched the 2003 remake to get myself in the spirit. Man, this was the role Crispin Glover was born to play! I thought the movie was really well-done, and they even used MJ’s song Ben. Of course, it’s a very sad story, but that’s horror for ya. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a tale of a young man who trains his household rats to do his bidding. Mostly. 
The Surfer
Recommended.
I am so glad that Nicolas Cage is done paying back taxes and penalties. He’s been doing a lot better since he has freer choice of his movie projects.
This one was…weird. Not at all what I expected from it. A man is moving back to his hometown and wants to buy a house and go surfing with his son. A surfer-gang of sorts prevents him from doing that because he does not yet live there.
And from there, it got weird. And weirder.
Pretty good, not amazing. Cage is great in it. I can tell he works hard on any movie, whether it is this or one of the many cheapo movies he made.
The movie was not as good as the book. I’d read it when it was first published and heard they were making a movie. I was disappointed. If I hadn’t read the book, I might have liked it better. It was just so cheesy.
There are two movies, right?