I still found it to land with a bit of a thud. I mean…OK.
Hee. ISWYDT. I agree it has a great premise and is unsettling AF. Just didn’t quite stick the landing.
I watched the first James Bond film this week for the first time in over 25 years.
Dr. No (1962). This movie is very rough, but it is the first James Bond film. The opening credits having Caribbean music that transitions into “three blind mice” was a bit jarring. I was expecting expecting it to be dated, racist, and sexist and I was correct. James spends the film having his way with all the women, going as far as to force himself on at least one of them. Dr. No is a white Canadian in yellow face and the black character is treated like a servant (Quarrel fetch my shoes).
Two grown adults thinking that an armoured vehicle with a flame thrower is a dragon, the use of a nuclear powerplant to power a rocket jamming satellite dish, and the fact that the nuclear plant seems to leak enough that anyone walking on the island needs to go through decontamination are a bit ridiculous. The fight between Dr. No and Bond is way too short with Dr. No falling into the reactor core after after a brief struggle.
5/10 (maybe bumped up to 6/10 for being the first in a long series of films).
I don’t like this one, but I do like that he notices a painting that, at the time, was very much in the news for being stolen.
A Quiet Place, Part II. A decent action arc, and I like the kids as heroes. It does suffer from IMS (Inconstant Monster Strength, e.g. you can throw a car across as street but can be defeated in other physical confrontations important to Key Figure Survival).
We’ll watch Day One next.
Also, Wildwood (again). Our theater has Dolby Atmos (the modern and vastly improved Sensaround) and it was great (again).
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is terrific. Just an ordinary joe going about his usual business when suddenly it all goes sideways…
Just watched the Invite tonight with Seth Rogen, Olivia Wylde, Ed Norton, and Penelope Cruz. I think it’s new to HBO. Incredibly don’t get the praise, didn’t laugh once, thought all the emotional beats fell flat. The relationship talk is so obvious. The performances are fine, but I think this is a complete waste of a movie. Like a 3/10. Gotta be one of the biggest deltas between how I felt about a movie and the general audiences.
Wow, you have way cooler friends than I do.
A Talent for Murder -
A fictional account of the inspiration for Patricia Highsmith’s last Ripley book (one that she did not write). It’s just ok. There are a lot of unanswered questions which might be fun if the story was more compelling, which it wasn’t.
To be honest, I never felt that The Talented Mr Ripley movie was all that compelling or believable either, but apparently the books sold well.
A Quiet Place: Day One. Meh. I always like Lupita Nyong’o, but the plot was full of cliches and it felt a LOT like the original Cloverfield, minus the found footage angle. Basically nothing new.
Meanwhile, the supposedly last movie in the franchise is coming next summer, A Quiet Place: Part III, with all the cast from Part II, plus a lead person from Day One, plus, and this is weird enough to spoiler Alex Wolff, who played Reuben in Day One, and who was killed when he stupidly went to turn off a generator, is on the cast list.
My mother has been kind to me lately in indulging me in the movies I want to watch, so tonight I acquiesced and let her pick the movies. Not that she has bad taste in movies or anything like that but she has been talking about want to watch The Devil Wears Prada lately, so, long story short, today we watched The Devil Wears Prada and The Devil Wears Prada 2.
Okay. First off, the first movie was pretty good, but I had to fight through it because I can’t even begin to tell you how much I hate fashion people. All these rich, skinny fuckers walking around like the beanie cap and the denim culottes or whatever is the most serious, important things on the planet. Disposable cash upon disposable cash thrown away for togs. It irritates me to my soul. That said, I tolerated the first movie alright. It was fairly well written, performed and directed, but I seriously had a hard time giving a shit about anything or anybody in it.
Now, the second movie. What a waste of celluloid (or whatever they do these days). Complete pile of shit, rushed pacing, confusing side plots, deus ex machinas about every 15 minutes and a full-on Lady Gaga video. And in the end I gave less of a shit about any of these people that I did in the first, especially since they all got wedged into these happy-tappy endings where everybody is friends now. Fucking hated it. I didn’t tell my mom that though.
I briefly felt the spirit of Joe Bob Briggs
Traditional Halloween viewing of Night Of The Creeps. Fun spoof of sci-fi/zombie movies with a great cast and some of my favorite B-movie lines by Tom Atkins.
Love at First Bite 1979 George Hamilton, Susan St James, Arte Johnson, Richard Benjamin
Blu Ray
I’d forgotten Susan’s perfect comedic timing. Her sexy banter with George’s Dracula is very good. Susan plays a very modern and independent woman that’s unsure about commitment. Until she meets Dracula in a Disco. 
I waited way too many years to rewatch this gem.
8.5 out of 10
Dracula, I waited 720 years for someone to bite me again!
Yeah, you are unlikely to find a lot to appreciate in Devil Wears Prada movies. Nice of you to support your mom’s viewing choice, though.
I feel the same way about Devil Wears Prada. My granddaddy would crudely say them people think their shit don’t stink.
Meryl Streep deserves a lot of credit for portraying Miranda as ambitious and haughty. While keeping enough humanity that the movie’s target audience loves.
True. Giving “credit where it’s due” for artistic quality in movies whose subject you personally loathe will not translate into actually liking the movie.
Similarly, there are people who hate sports movies because they fundamentally despise all those big lunks pretending that a bunch of grown men (and very occasionally women) competing in children’s games is worth society spending literally a trillion dollars a year.
The reality is, though, that many people like watching sports and many people like buying clothes, so these industries are in fact hugely important to societies and economies, which arguably does justify the industry leaders in treating their decisions like a Really Big Deal.
Ghoulies and Ghoulies 2
Ghoulies 1? Skip it. Low effort.
Ghoulies 2? Well, there is real effort here. Directed by Charles Band’s father Albert. Feels like a real movie. I see it was released theatrically and you can tell the budget is a mite higher.
Anyway, I hadn’t seen either and it was Halloween and I had some time.
I watched this on YouTube and thought the animation was fantastic; also, since it plays to my biases around the treatment of Sita in the Ramayana, it had that appeal. I also liked the overall conceit, which is that she drew together three people who learned different versions of the Ramayana growing up, and they attempt to ‘narrate’ it. Clever stuff.
One thing I went back and forth on, whether to comment on it, but here we are: I went to Nina Paley’s website to buy some merchandise and discovered that some of it was in support of her self-avowed/proud TERFdom (the belief that gender is solely determined by birth biology), which put me off quite a bit. So, no merch acquired.
Yeah, AFAICT Nina Paley is just about as well-known now for her “goddess feminism”-based transphobia as for her artistic creations. Which of course are not separate phenomena: e.g., Paley’s 2018 film Seder Masochism about how the ancient Hebrew patriarchal YHWH cult supposedly “killed” prevailing goddess-worship beliefs, whatever.