Thanks. I might go back and finish it.
We just watched The Swedish Connection on Netflix, based on a true story about a government bureaucrat who, in neutral Sweden, worked the system to save Jews with some connection to Sweden from being deported from Norway, Denmark, and other countries to Nazi death camps. By turns funny, exciting, and heartwarming.
After saving thousands of Jews, Gösta Engzell became a leading diplomat, and lived to be 100 years old, but never spoke about what he had done during the war.
We came across a little movie called “Between the Temples.” It’s on Netflix and has been described as a “heartwarming comedy.” Heartwarming it may be, but we couldn’t make it past 20 minutes. Why? Carol Kane is in it, prominently. Neither of us have ever been able to stand her. My wife said “I hope she isn’t in the whole movie.” Unfortunately, it appeared that she would be. And she’s even more grating than usual. Click!
I remember being unimpressed with Lucy and so I just checked my IMDB score for it: 4. Yep, not good.
I’ll name just one worse movie and it is much more recent:
Megalopolis
It’s in the running for worst of this decade for me and it is worse than Lucy. And it comes from Francis Ford Coppola!
Sadly, Francis Ford Coppola put his own money into that picture, and from what I’ve read, lost a lot of money.
I expect better from the esteemed director of Jack.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) soon leaving Netflix.
I clicked on this out of morbid curiosity. I last saw it when it was in theaters when I was 15. I may have seen it twice that summer, so I must have liked it. Since then I have become well-acquainted with its reputation as one of the worst films of the 1970s. So, instead of just writing it off to being a dumb 15 year old, I thought I’d check it out a half-century later.
So, let’s talk about the low-hanging fruit. Peter Frampton and the Brothers Gibb are indisputably horrible actors, even with the benefit of not having to utter a single line. But, at least, their interpretations of the Beatles songs are fairly straight forward and musically competent. In fact, most of the songs sung by actual musicians are (with the gross exception of Alice Cooper). Some are actually even good (Aerosmith, Earth Wind and Fire, and Billy Preston.) And you can’t fault anything about George Martin’s orchestrations. Where the film really falls apart musically are the hammy numbers by the likes of George Burns, Frankie Howerd, a couple of robots, and (the true low of the film) Steve Martin. The big problem is that the songs have very little relevance to the story. The poor screenwriter was burdened with having to Frankenstein a rock opera out of twenty completely unrelated songs.
I watched it through to the end, reminding myself that Peter Frampton, the BeeGees, George Burns, and Steve Martin were all at the top of their games when they made this movie. Throw in Benji and R2D2, and this film would be the pop cultural touchstone for 1978.
It wasn’t until Billy Preston is lowered to the ground by invisible wires, that I realized what this damn thing was really lacking up to that point; choreography. This was the height of Disco and the closest any other performer could come to Billy’s (admittedly) high bar was a fake horse on roller skates.
For all the warts, it wasn’t hard to sit through. 1978 was…weird. And so is this film.
Oh heck, I liked the movie so much I bought the album, but haven’t been back to since. I will live with my treasured memories of Sandy Farina and not return to it. Thank you for your service!
Had to. It was horrible. A true sign of talent lost.
We finally watched K-Pop Demon Hunters last night. It was cute, but clearly not a movie aime at me. My wife commented “So…Buffy, but with music.”
I also finished watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s movie The Canterbury Tales, which I’d watched the first half of earlier. I wanted to see Pasolimi’s *The Arabian Nights *to compare with other adaptations (I wrote about it here), and got with it his movies The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. I’d already seen The DEcameron, so this was the last one I was missing. It’s interesting, because there are only two or three movies based on The Canterbury Tales, in addition to a few TV adaptations. Pasolini includes himself in the film as Chaucer (he’s in The DEcameron, too, as Boccacio). My comments onThe Arabian NIghts hold true here, as well – it’s not clear where one story ends and the next one begins. Also Pasolini is realy obsessed with sex – his reason for choosing this work, but he goes out of his way to make it an NC-17 production. He also out-grosses the original, depicting a man urinating on a roomful of people from a height, having dying people collapsing into their own shit and vomit, and adding even more farting to the infamous Miller’s Tale. You also don’t recognize some items because he literally makes some of it up (giving his friend a chance to do an anachronistic Charlie Chaplin impersonation that goes o way too long), and adapting the Wife of Bath’s prologue rather than her tale. He also gives us a pre-Doctor Who Tom Baker
I watched Jean Cocteau’s La Belle at Le Bete last night. The third or fourth time I’ve seen it, and it still is highly watchable. It really is a filmed fairy tale and so much better than the Disney animated version. I love the score, too.
I just got back from seeing Project Hail Mary (2026). Loved, loved, loved, loved it. Sure it has a bit of a deus machina, happy tappy ending, but … I loved this movie. I can’t wait to see it again.
Nuremberg, 2025, Netflix.
At the outset, Inna wondered how historically accurate this film was and when one of the Nazis quoted the Geneva Conventions (1949), we got our answer pretty quickly.
It was not bad, but not great.
Some form of Geneva Convention exist back to the 1800s; there’s the 1929 version relating to prisoners of war.
Saw it yesterday, absolute agreement. Great watch.
I’ve heard that streaming has been delayed for it, because so many people want to re-watch it in theaters.
My wife, stepson and I went to see PHM last weekend and really enjoyed it. I hadn’t read the book, I just knew it was written by the guy who wrote The Martian. (Or, as I said jokingly before the movie, “It’s based on a novel by a man named Weir.” 
)
It’s nice to see something that isn’t a sequel or comic book related film. A full-budget regular movie based only on an actual “book with words”.
Mission To Mars, from the same author, is better…but I did enjoy Hail Mary.
The title is The Martian.