Movies you've seen recently (Part 2)

Cafe Society
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One of my favorites. It’s got a great opening and premise.
“I’d like to report a murder”
“Who was killed?”
“I was.”

There are some great shots i this (I especially like when Edmund O’Brien , after running down the street, collapses against a newsstand on which are mounted multiple copies of “Life” magazine). The climax takes place in LA’s Bradbury Building! (Famous among science fiction fans as a setting for Harlan Ellison’s Demon with a lass Hand and in Bladerunner.)

I can live with the vague description of “luminous toxin”. The thing I find annoying is when Dmitri Tiompkin kept adding musical “wolf whistles” when O’Brien’s character saw a sexy girl. It’s not even funny the first time.

Don’t watch the 1988 “remake” (which has a completely different plot, and you’ll guess the “twist” in no time). There have been several other versions, but I haven’t seen any of them. and don’t particularly want to.

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I completely forgot about this. I would 100% support whoever owns this IP going back and just editing that out. Forget original intent and director’s vision on this one, because they were stupid.

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Over the weekend I picked up and watched a copy of Master of the World

No, not the 1961 Vincent Price adaptation of a Jules Verne novel *

This is 1934 German film (Der Herr der Welt, about an industrialist trying to relieve humanity’s burden by creating robots that will take over dangerous tasks like mining (a long sequence shows miners being killed in a series of explosions due to “firedamp”, explosive gas trapped in pockets of coal). Unfortunately, his chief engineer wants to create Uberrobots to conquer the world, and has built a prototype. he kills the industrialist (or the industrialist is fortuitously killed) and he is free to pursue his aim. I the end he is foiled and killed himself in a similar accident. The prototype Killer robot is destroyed, and at the end we see a roomful of operators with screen remotely operating mining robots. It looks a lot like the scenes of the Sovereigns operating their remotely-piloted killer drones in Guardians of the Galaxy II. And the workers get to go back to farming. It’s a weird take on future utopias that robot labor leaves people free to indulge in different hard labor – kinda like how in Zardoz the people living in Utopia still have to make their own food (except for the grain they extort from the farmers, using the Giant Floating Stone Head). Even the horse that had been shown in the beginning working in the mines, pulling ore carts, now has a blissful life above ground, pulling plows. Well, at leasr it gets it outside in the fresh air.

The film was hard to understand, because Sinister Cinema’s low-budget operation produced a no-frills movie in its original German with neither subtitles nor dubbing, so it wasn’t clear what was going on until you read the synopsis. It still could’ve been clearer. And it didn;t help that the effects shots were dark and murky. The Giant Killer Robot looked impressive, what you could see of it, but it would’ve helped if you got at least one good complete image.

  • The Verne film Master of the World is actually based more on Robur the Conqueror than on its sequel, Master of the World. But the sequel undeniably had a sexier title. The first novel was basically 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but set aboard a perpetually flying heavier-than-air ship. a sort of super-helicopter with LOTS of propellors. The latter was about the same inventor, now using a super-vehicle that could travel at tremendous speed on land, but could also travel on or under water, and which could fly. It’d be a lot more impressive, except thatb the flying version looked incredibly light and flimsy. And Robur took a turn of he wose – Verne wrote this one in his later, more pessimistic days.
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I happened to come across The Ghost and Mr. Chicken just as it was starting, Saturday night. I loved this movie as a kid and still love everything about it.

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I’d watch that just for the Vic Mizzy soundtrack.

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The Talented Mr. Ripley 1999

Set in the 1950s, it stars Matt Damon as Tom Ripley, an American con artist sent to Italy to convince Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), a rich and spoiled playboy, to return home. However, Ripley becomes dangerously attached to him and his lifestyle.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett play the two love interests that are tangled in Damon’s lies.

MGM offered this film in my feed. Wow, Matt’s performance playing two characters is excellent.

Matt was nominated for multiple awards in several categories. Jude Law won best supporting actor.

Excellent film that deserves to be remembered and rewatched.

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It’s interesting to compare this to the TV series starring Andrew Scott. Seeing the same complicated character portrayed by two very different actors is kind of fascinating.

On the whole I preferred Scott but the series does draw the story out, which is not necessarily a benefit.

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I thought the series was absolutely mesmerising, even allowing for one massive plot hole why not just get a photo of the real Greenleaf, Mr Policeman!! I have seen the film, years ago, but I can’t recall if it had a similar problem with this?

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I noticed the movie characters weren’t taking photos with friends and to include with the letters back home.

Jude Law and Matt really aren’t that similar. There’s only a passing resemblance.

Photos would easily unmask the con.

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Just watched the new Resident Evil, from the guy that directed Weapons. Excellent movie, it’s like they took the average gamer that plays this games and tossed him into the videogame world. EXTREMELY funny, maybe slightly too much for a horror movie. They made it work though, and anyone who was bitching online about this not being RE enough looks like a fool right now.

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Ice Cream Man (2026)

Slightly recommended.

One of the worst reviewed films of 2026 and I, well, didn’t think it was all that bad. I’m honestly kind of shocked that it received so entirely negative review.

Evil ice cream makes children go on a massive and violent rampage. Some kids, who did not eat ice cream, try to stop them.

About 75% of the movie is an extended murderous rampage of children. I thought it was…well, very poor taste but somehow it kept me entertained. Maybe I need help. I viewed this like a Lloyd Kaufman Troma movie. Very bad taste, but almost in a way it comes around as a comical charm.

I can’t recommend it. It’s not a film most would enjoy, but I kind of liked it.

Note: I believe I liked Borderlands as well, Eli Roth’s previous film. I dunno what to say!

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Winter’s Bone 2010 Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes

Jennifer Lawrence struggles to raise her younger siblings and keep the bail bondsman from foreclosing on the family’s home. Dad has disappeared and has to appear in court or forfeit the bond.

I appreciated the rural characters that survive by hunting and manufacture of meth.

The poverty and underlying violence throughout all the families is menacing and very depressing.

Jennifer has to find her dad knowing that the wrong questions can get someone beaten or killed.

Excellent movie. I highly recommend it.
9.5 out of 10

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Every year we try to see every best picture nominee, and a great thing about that is we end up seeing movies like this that we probably wouldn’t catch otherwise. Everyone is terrific in this movie, and I kind of thought it should have won that year.

Debra Granik has only directed three films, and this one and Leave No Trace are both terrific. I haven’t seen the third.

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Gawd what a depressing movie. Made me want to stay out of Missouri.

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I think it’s depicting the paranoia from using and manufacturing drugs. The extended family in Winter Bone are extremely suspicious of anyone that approaches their property. Jennifer Lawrence is a distant relative and part of the culture. But, even she has to tread carefully and normally wouldn’t ever approach them with questions.

It’s an entirely different culture than East LA Gang territory. But the drug problem, paranoia, and violence are remarkably similar.

The implied domestic violence in Winter Bone really bothered me. It was made very clear the women in these families lived in fear every day of their lives.

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I was so excited about seeing another Zach Cregger film that my expectations for this one were probably a little too high. It delivered on everything you want from a Resident Evil movie but I was expecting a little more mystery. The lead actor was great and played a very relatable character. I thought the ending could have been better; it kind of felt like they were just running out the clock.

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Slaughterhouse-Five (1979) Prime

The story of Billy Pilgrim, the prisoner of war/optometrist/alien abductee who is unstuck in time and experiences his life in flashforwards and flashbacks. It was fine, I suppose, but I think it mostly missed Vonnegut’s wit with the story. The movie mostly felt rather dry to me.

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It’s really just “main character has an absolutely awful day”.

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As I was watching I thought the same thing. It seemed a little like a mashup between The Thing and After Hours.

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I was dogisitting for several hours yesterday, and it was raining out, so I watched a marathon of movies on DVD:

The Atomic Cafe

What’s up Doc

Kronos

I love the first one, from 1982, and highly recommend it. It’s a documentary cultural history of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, told exclusively through the use of film clips, vocal recordings, documentary films and propaganda, with no added narration or (except at the very beginning) captioned comment. There is a definite editorial viewpoint, though, and the film gets in some wicked digs through the elements it juxtaposes. (For instance, a documentary assuring us that alpha and beta radiation is stopped by the thickness of the skin layer, and does not harm unless it gets in through cuts, or is inhaled or swallowed is negated by an interviewer speaking to a soldier at one of the live tests where the soldiers were i trenches relatively close to the blast, and they told how they had received a mouthful of dirt during the explosion.)
Another choice bit, which has nothing to do with the Bomb, but which I’m sure they couldn’t resist, has VP Richard Nixon “ringing the bell for Mental Health.”

What’s Up Doc by Peter Bogdanovich is one of my all-time favorite comedies. Although inspired by the Cary Grant classsic Bring up Baby it certainly is not a slavish imitation of that film. A lot of the lines and routines deserve to be immortal (“As you know, snakes live in mortal fear of… tile.”) I’m amazed that the movie “introduced” Madeline Kahn, and also featured Kenneth Mars and LIam Dunn, who would all appear two years later in Young Frankenstein

Kronos is a relatively overlooked 1950s science fiction film, made in widescreen. It was partly the work of Irving Block, who wrote the story, produced, and did some of the effects. He’d been responsible for Forbidden Planet and would be for Atomic Submarine. As in FP , he did some innovative and interesting effects work. Just as the door to the Krel laboratory didn’t simply melt, but broke down in stages, so does the giant robot in Kronos not simply melt or explode, but deteriorates bit by bit first. A simple box shape never looked so interesting.

The movie’s pretty brain dead – they go to the old standby of “reversing the polarity” to destroy the robot – but it is visually stunning. It was also pretty clearly a big influence on filmmaker Brad Bird. His The Iron Giant owes a lot to it. Both are stories about invading giant alien robots that come to Earth to siphon energy from out power pants (a detail I don’t think was in the original story it was based on) and to destroy Earth civilization. The first appearance of The Iron Giant out at sea was clearly influenced by the first appearance of Kronos rising out of the ocean. Also, in the Pixar film The Incredibles that he directed the password for Syndrome’s master plan was “KRONOS”, spelled with that initial “K”, and the Kronos plan also involved a giant indestructible robot, apparently from space, which goes about destroying an Earth city.