Just finished watching Hellzapoppin on YouTube, after reading this thread.
Which gave us the immortal exchange:
(They’ve just been shot at)
Vin: “You elected?”
Chris: (looking at his shattered cigar) “No, but I got nominated real good.”
Conclave (2024).
There’s a separate thread for this, but it’s not been very active and I thought this was worth commenting on here. Initially, I wasn’t entirely sure what to think of this as I watched it, though it does exude high-quality production values in every respect. The renowned actor in the central role that I failed to immediately identify was Ralph Fiennes, who was probably familiar to me from his role in The Menu.
My eventual conclusion is that I would definitely recommend this, especially if you’re interested in something quite unusual like a story about a sequestered conclave voting for the next pope. It’s not clear if the story has any sort of moral, or what it might be, but it presents itself in interesting twists and turns, and ultimately forces us to conclude that despite all our differences, we are all very much the same.
In the same way that I believe Breaking Bad can be viewed as a simple story about what it’s like to run a business (see below), Conclave is about determining leadership in a hierarchical organization. It just happened to be set in the highest level of the church.
As for Breaking Bad… I’ve always been amused at how throughout the whole series Walt and Jesse experience all the problems of being entrepreneurs. They have money problems, supply chain issues, labor issues, complications with “regulatory compliance”, personal and family conflicts that spill over into the business and vice versa, big egos… Except for killing people, it all could just as easily have been a paper company in Scranton.
The Magnificent Seven
Recommended.
You know what? That was quite good. I believe this might have been the first Steve McQueen movie I’ve seen and also the first Yul Brenner movie I’ve seen other than The Ten Commandments.
All great, even Charles Bronson is great and I had only see him in a couple of Death Wish movies on TV, most of which show him from a time in his life when had had clearly given up.
Anyway, good movie, extremely well done. Sad to see all of the Seven actors have already died.
[Gasp!]. Drop what you’re doing and watch The Great Escape. Stat!
Finished my science fiction day with…
War of the Worlds 1953 and Forbidden Planet 1956.
Both very well done. I’ve rewatched them many times since childhood.
War of the Worlds has really good stunts for a B movie. Explosions launched stuntmen into the air. Men on fire walking and the ray guns.
Forbidden is very well done. Great sets and Robby the Robot is very detailed. Story is a bit slow-paced but has a nice payoff.
Start Trek, Requiem for Methuselah copied the story. Same idea, Flint and his daughter Rayna live happily alone with the robot M4. Horndog Kirk visits the planet, comes onto the girl, and triggers a crisis. Kirk’s libido almost makes it impossible to produce a badly needed vaccine.
Also with Charles Bronson. That movie had an amazing cast.
For what it’s worth, War of the Worlds had the same budget as Forbidden Planet. $2,000,000 was well above the average budget for films in the mid-1950s.
The higher budget explains why those two science fiction films look so good. They set the standard for sci-fi made later.
I like The Blob and The Day the Earth Stood Still too.
And the great James Coburn!
That sounds more X-rated than the version I remember
He’s great. I’d really only ever seen him in Maverick(1994), where he is terrific.
Not for nothing, but he puts on just about the worst British accent you’ve ever heard in that movie.
I think you mean James Garner, who was also in the Great Escape.
Coburn was in Maverick as well in a smaller role.
I don’t remember that - but cool! So both he and Garner were in Maverick and The Great Escape.
Everybody was in The Great Escape 
. One of those star-studded features that actually works pretty well.
If you mean Coburn in The Great Escape, then he puts on the worst Australian accent ever… 
See. That’s how bad it was.