I saw that movie (28 Years Later: The Bone Temple), and yes, a little weird from our perspective to see people in this film looking like Jimmy Savile, but the zombie apocalypse occurred in this world before his real-life crimes came to light. Plus in a movie about fictional monsters, it was interesting to see people dressed as a real-life monster. Aside from that, it was an enjoyable film. (And I believe at least one more film in this series is planned.)
And today I saw How to Make a Killing, starring Glen Powell and loosely based on Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Small world, I just watched this last night. I hadn’t seen it since the year it came out. I liked it then and I liked it now. Even as a despicable character, in my eyes Sam Rockwell can do no wrong.
I had a weird memory issue watching it. My favorite throwaway bit was the ex-husband’s teenage girlfriend, played by April Bowlby, who played pretty much the exact same character (Kandi) on Two and a Half Men: dumb, earnest and sweet.
Except that wasn’t April Bowlby, that was freaking Samara Weaving! She absolutely was playing the character exactly like Kandi, but this was before her career took off. Basically she did the little guest spot on Ash vs Evil Dead, Mayhem, and then Three Billboards next. I don’t think she’d even done the Babysitter yet on Netflix.
The craziest part is that she has two main scenes in three billboards, and I still thought it was April Bowlby after having just rewatched her first big scene. Then like 15 minutes later when I looked up something else regarding the movie, I saw Samara Weaving was listed on IMDb and my whole world shattered. Clearly I came from a different universe.
“Did you really tell him anger begets greater anger?” Lights up: “Yes I did! I read it on a bookmark.”
I enjoyed it particularly as I looked for the references to Kind Hearts and Coronets (one member of the family was a pastor, another was an amateur photographer and so forth).
Another Herzog re-watch for me. At first, it looks like this will be a film about aviation, but it is really a film about grief, passion, and following dreams.
The entire movie is on Youtube and if you want to see some great stuff, put it on.
Very apples and oranges. There is a bit of sly black humor in Brick poking fun at the ages of the antagonists. But it’s not the broad musical slapstick of Bugsy Malone. It’s mostly played as a, well… sorta straight hard-boiled drama with death and grim violence, hence some people disliking it.
As it happens I like both and they’re both kind of oddly unique films, but in very different ways. I don’t think you can put them into the same category.
The Quick and the Dead 1995 Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Sharon Stone was also a co-producer.
Fairly standard Western revenge story. Bad guy kills somebody. Years later a friend or relative shows up for a gunfight to even the score. Been done a dozen or more times.
There’s some interesting twists this time. A female gunfighter for example. Russel Crowe is a former gunfighter who’s renounced violence and become a preacher.
I guess Hackman changed his mind after giving Clint Eastwood a speech about being tired of violent, sadistic roles. He played the evil town sheriff in Unforgiven. Three years later he plays a even bigger role as the evil, gun slinger town boss in The Quick and the Dead.
I hadn’t seen this movie before. It’s entertaining and has some unusual plot twists. I can’t recall a Duel Tournament for gunslingers before in a movie.
I remembered that the reviews weren’t good but we like Wes Anderson so thought we’d give it a go. Can report that the reviews were justified.
This is basically Wes Anderson wanting to make a film in India because of all the pretty colors, and dragging out the usual actors (Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Angelica Huston) to phone it in. It also involves the most heavy-handed metaphor I’ve seen in a long time (YES, THEY HAVE A LOT OF BAGGAGE RELATED TO THEIR FATHER, WE GET IT).
It could have used more Amara Karan IMO. She was the only interesting person in the film.
How can the same person who wrote one of my favorite movies of all time (Se7en) write this!? It felt like it was trying to be bad and derivative, but didn’t go far enough to really be a comedy, and also wasn’t serious enough to be dark. Every single thing about this has been done better many times before. It played like the first draft of a script that was never polished and sat on the shelf for 10 years.
New action flick on Amazon Prime. Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista played a pair of estranged brothers who investigate their father’s murder and kill half of Oahu along the way. First let me say that there is absolutely nothing plausible about this film - if you are a stickler for realism, skip it. But if you like shoot-em-ups and eye candy it’s an enjoyable watch. I loved the Hawai’ian setting and substory. I have a long standing crush on Morena Baccarin, and though she doesn’t get a lot of screen time, it’s worth it. Also nice to see Stephen Root in a minor role.
I give it a thumbs up, with the aforementioned caveats.
There were occasional scenes in Brick that had me wondering if I should be approaching it as a comedy. But there wasn’t enough of that to be sure. So I paused it and whipped out my phone and did a little poking around on the net, and it would seem Rian Johnson’s intent was to play it straight-up. The scene that was the worst offender, in regard to stretching my “suspension of disbelief” too far, was the meeting in the vice principal’s office. But to be fair, the scene where some of the characters have a meeting at the entrance to that tunnel worked pretty well, in my opinion.
I also liked Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance. He did a great job with the material he had.
I loved the disconnect between the characters’ ages and behavior in Brick. It wasn’t supposed to be true to life, it was just a weird anachronism. But yeah, it either works for you or it doesn’t.
The suburban mom bustling about in the midst of a “serious” meeting, occasionally interrupting with mundane mom stuff, was I think about the broadest wink at the audience. But as you say they were just brief flashes, showcasing how fundamentally off and weird the film universe is.
That scene kinda “tweaked” me, but it called to mind that scene in Goodfellas where the main characters are at (Joe Pesci’s, as I recall) mother’s house with a body in the trunk of their car and Scorsese’s real-life mother being a mother to the characters and Pesci being an art critic. That scene is, in dirtball world, exquisite. But if I hadn’t had that frame of reference, not sure how I would have reacted to the mother scene in Brick. I don’t know if it was intentional to echo Goodfellas in that way, but I wouldn’t rule it out. Johnson must have seen the movie.
Welp, one okay Wes Anderson film deserves another, so… The Life Aquatic With Steve Zizzou. Better than the Darjeeling one but not as polished as GBH, Bill Murray carries the film remarkably well and there is an actual plot which is nice.
OTOH what the ever loving fuck was up with Owen Wilson’s accent? He seems to have created a Kentucky accent by averaging accents from California and London and assuming that Kentucky people must sound like they’re halfway between the two. When he remembered to do it at all. Also, the endless Bowie-in-Portuguese soundtrack lost its appeal fairly early on.
Shout-out to the recently-passed Bud Cort as Minor Character Who Deserved More Screen Time here.
Hideko Takamine plays Keiko, a bar hostess in the Ginza district of Tokyo. The job of a hostess is to attract men into the bar so they’ll spend money there. The bar where she works has been doing badly, and the boss blames her and the other hostesses, warning that their jobs are on the line if things don’t improve in a month. Keiko is in financial trouble, and is getting “old” by Japanese bar hostess standards, so her future prospects aren’t good. She wants to buy her own bar, but doesn’t have the money for it, and doesn’t want to compromise herself to raise the money by sleeping with the bar’s customers. She thinks her prospects for marriage are poor because men don’t want to marry a bar hostess. Her family and friends also have money troubles, and there’s pressure on her to help them, as well. The story is about her efforts to navigate all of these problems to build a future for herself.
I liked this movie quite a bit. The acting and writing are first-rate. Thumbs up.
