Kinds of Kindness streaming on Hulu. Unlike a lot of films billed as dark comedies, this one is actually quite funny as well as dark…and, boy, is it dark. It’s three loosely connected stories with the same cast playing different characters. Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Margaret Qualley are all good, but Jesse Plemons steals the show.
Megalopolis
Not recommended.
One of the worst movies of the year and it is from Francis Ford Coppola. Wow, this was bad. Very bad. This is the project he dreamed about for decades?
Maybe I missed something. It was almost always boring and its few moments that are interesting are so brief, they do nothing for the movie.
I saw nothing here worth seeing.
For some reason (boredom, probably) I watched Goodfellas again. Has to be the fourth time or so. It doesn’t really hold up for that many watches. There are scenes and dialog that are clearly ad-libbed, and not in a good way.
Sort of. I think there are two versions…
The version I saw, Roy’s wife tells him once he enters the machine, he has to go through the day one more time and then it’s done. But if he dies, he’s dead for good. It’s not so much a cliffhanger as it is the audience assuming he’s just going to play out his day one last time.
I think I read there’s another ending where no one knows what will happen once he steps into the machine.
I haven’t seen it, but the trailers give off a very Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged / Fountainhead vibe IMHO.
Every time I think of that movie, a different scene comes delightfully to mind. I ranked it last year as #2 of all Lanthimos movies behind The Lobster, but I’m not sure it doesn’t surpass it.
Yeah. I guess.
I can’t believe this is the movie Francis Ford Coppola was dreaming of. This man made Godfather.
Even the actors aren’t very good in this movie and there are a ton of famous and good actors in it.
I saw the trailer for that and came away with absolutely no idea what the film was about. I figured that if they can’t manage that for the trailer, there’s nothing in the film.
Sounds like I got it right.
If you watch any movies from the 1930s and 40s that is exactly what you’ll see. Lots and LOTS of smoking.
Tremors
If there’s a perfect monster movie, this is as close as it gets. Scary, funny, well acted, fun gross-outs, nifty camera work and excellent SFX. The story might be a touch silly, but who cares? I could watch it a million times.
ETA: A good barometer of how good a movie is is how many shitty sequels it spawns. Tremors has six?
I’ve seen them all. They are actually mainly really good. Seriously.
Are they good like the first or are they good baloney films? I love a good baloney flick. 
King Kong 2005 Jack Black, Naomi Watts
It’s one of the Best Kong remakes that I’ve seen. The introduction to Skull Island with the emaciated and deadly natives was frightening and well done. The natives all looked drugged and completely crazed. The hills on fire. A scene right out of hell.
That’s before Kong appears on screen!
Highly recommend
It’s on Peacock
Not as much as that film. in fact I has watched several- In fact i just watched The Glenn Miller Story and in it not much smoking- Steward and Morgan have a celebratory cigar- (Jimmy doesnt even light his), Morgan smokes some, and there is a scene in a very smoky bar- in which Millers wife cant take the smoke and needs to leave, despite the cool music being played. Yeah, Bogart smoked a lot in his films, sure.
Whether they smoked on film isn’t really the thing here. The reality is that they smoked in real life. A LOT more than now. And in dangerous jobs, the likelyhood would be soldiers would be 95% smokers. The forces gave free cigarettes to their people, it was seen as a useful stimulant by those in charge, and the opposite to the nazis which were quite anti smoking (had banned it in the Headquarters).
So it is historically inaccurate to not have a lot of smoking in movies which are attempting to portray the past. It is kind of moot against a movie which bears little resemblance to the reality of the military operation it claims to portray.
People smoked heavily until at least the early 80s. There was a chain smoker in my open plan office when I started work in the UK in 1987. There was still smokers in their own office when I left working in Belgium in 2003. I remember sitting in smoking section of a plane in 1996. This was a reality which, of course, people want to remove. But it was there.
Smoking as a dramatic tool had multiple uses too. Often used as a dramatic pause, sometimes showing coolness or showing that someone was bad, it was in movies which probably it shouldn’t have been (I’m not sure how easy it would be to get cigarettes in the wild west, for instance). Some movies from the period, obviously, just didn’t have it in it all, if it had no need for it, like eating or drinking.
Someone ruined the use of eating in films for me by pointing out that it’s often nobody actually eats the food, they poke it, raise it, but often nobody takes a bite. It ruins dialogue, and repeated takes would mean the actors would be eating a lot. So I sort of watch this when people eat in movies. Ruins the illusion.
This is one of my all time favorite movies, not just favorite remakes. I grew up overdosing on thre 1933 Kong, and I suspect that Peter Jackson did, too. I was precisely the target audience for this.
Unlike many other films, Jackson got the feel of Depression-era NYC precisely right. His re-interpretation of Carl Denham as a fabulizing, self-deluding con man of a moviemaker bothered me at first, but it works. It was a joy to see how they re-interpreted scenes from the 1933 film, and reproduced others (the last King Kong-T. rex battle used the choreography of the original) The original Kong Island native dances were used in the “stage show” on Broadway, and so was Max Steiner’s original score. Jackson gave us Kong fans the Spider Pit Sequence we’d been longing for ever since we read about it in Famous Monsters of Filmland (and he also recreated the original stop-motion sequence and spliced it into the 1933 film, in the “extras” on the double DVD). And his setting the Kong sequence in Manhattan in the dead of winter was absolutely perfect. Helluva film. I rewatch it every now and then.
The brief scene with Ann Darrow and Kong sliding and playing on the ice in Manhattan was nicely done. A light moment before the climactic confrontation with the planes.
The connection between Kong and Ann was so much stronger in this version.
The film stays very true to the original. We see from the beginning that Denham is ruthless and capable of exploiting Ann and taking her on such a dangerous trip.
Meritless sequels, with the exception of a few scenes in 2* it’s all a pass.
*- “I feel I was denied critical…need to know…information.”
Joe Versus the Volcano (Tubi, for free) The first pairing of (a very young) Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and therefore a bit of a curiosity that I’d never seen. Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, most famous for Moonstruck.
Hanks thinks he only has 6 months to live, so he volunteers to sacrifice himself to an island volcano god. Cute; charming; funny in moments. The opening scene of Hanks’ horrible job is laugh-out-loud funny. And I like the way they lampshade the casting of Pacific islanders (including Abe Vigoda and Nathan Lane) by saying the island was first populated by lost Druids, Italians and Jews.
Although no one seems bothered by the ultimate fate of the island.
I really liked that movie. I also like how the luggage salesman pointed out that those trunks were waterproof and able to float, which proved useful later.