The Terminator 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton. Michael Biehn
Staying in for New Years Eve. Picked one of my all time favorites to watch.
My only quibble is the metal Terminator wasn’t even warped after the intense Tanker fire. I guess making a model with twisted and warped metal would be more expensive.
Next up is The Abyss 1989 Ed Harris,
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michael Biehn
another James Cameron classic.
Then Fireworks at midnight
Past Lives (2023 — Kanopy). A bright 12 y.o. girl’s family emigrate to the US from Korea. She’s happy to go, but a little sad about leaving her first crush. Eventually, over the next few decades, they have some contact.
Kanopy listed this as their most popular movie of 2024. RotTom scored it in the mid 90s with critics and audiences. If you like literary movies with believable characters and realistic locales then you’ll like this.
I give it a B+. The characters are believable but not deeply dimensional, the plot minimal, the writing honest but, again, the characters aren’t well developed.
I just rewatched the Enola Holmes movies on Netflix, starring Millie Bobby Brown, Henry Cavill, and Helena Bonham Carter. They were even better than I remembered, real capers, with great adventure, comedy, and jeopardy, and a delightful supporting cast of character actors. Definitely recommended.
Also they understand breaking the fourth wall far better than most movies manage.
Great mention here. Underrated movies and not just fun for kids.
Best thing Millie Bobby Brown has acted in. I mean, she does fine on that Stranger Things show, but she actually shows she can act/emote more in those movies.
I hope they make a third one.
We watched The Philadelphia Story last night for New Year’s Eve. To my wife’s surprise, I had never seen it before (except for brief clips). I had a copy of the DVD I’d picked up a long time ago and stashed. I’ve got a lot of those.
We followed it with Casablanca, which we had to interrupt for the ball drop.
Right now I’ve got John Carter on while I work. It’s a scandalously abused, disparaged, and overlooked gem.
A Real Pain (2024). I somehow had the impression that this was going to be a wacky comedy. Let me assure everyone that it isn’t. What humour there is is understated and overwhelmed by a general melancholy.
Let me just summarize the entire plot: “Two estranged Jewish-American cousins fly to Poland to join a tour group exploring Poland’s Jewish heritage and to visit the former home of their recently deceased grandmother. In the process, they discover as much about themselves as about their ancestry. The end.”
The movie has received generally good critical acclaim, but it just didn’t connect with me. Kieran Culkin was quite properly praised for his portrayal of Benji, a troubled young man whose apparent boisterous jerkishness is just a cover for his vulnerabilities. Still, for me that wasn’t enough to save the film, which spends about half of its short 90-minute length in pointless meandering. Fans and detractors of Jesse Eisenberg might both note that this is very much his film, as he wrote, directed, and co-starred.
Nightbitch (2024). This was rather poorly rated but I thought I’d give it a shot because the idea of a woman (Amy Adams) who thinks she’s turning into a dog was intriguing. (Spoiler: it actually isn’t.)
The movie seems rather pointless in the first half-hour but then develops into a solid story about the challenges and frustrations of motherhood. The pressures and apparent lack of cooperation by the husband eventually cause them to separate. With the small child spending extended periods with the husband, the mother is free to blossom as the successful artist she always wanted to be.
The dog thing turned out to be a strangely idiosyncratic and unnecessary sub-theme, simply there to underscore the animalistic nature of the task of procreating the species, with lots of symbolism.
Not a terrible film by any means, but unless this sort of story line appeals to you, I wouldn’t bother with it.
I also did not like it. Disappointing.
Spouse and I just finished watching Shine A Light on TCM. Entertaining documentary about a pair of 2006 Stones concerts at the Beacon Theater in NYC.
Keith Richards looked rather old at that time.
The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). I’m gonna mention this old classic, just for a change of pace. Worth mentioning here because this film rises way above the standards of much of 1950s sci-fi schlock. The special effects are impressive considering the limitations of the technology of the day and the limited budget. Memorable scenes include encounters with the house cat, a mousetrap, and a spider.
Recommended if you feel like some non-serious sci-fi/fantasy from that era that’s actually competently done.
I saw that a while ago, and I thought Carey (the protagonist) missed an opportunity with the mousetrap. He got stuck in the basement, but would be looking to catch the attention of anyone who came downstairs. He should have left the mousetrap unsprung until someone came down, then tripped it with a pencil to make some noise.
Just as a counter-point to GuanoLad and Mahaloth, I strongly disliked the first Enola Holmes movie, despite being a MBB fan. I found it to be overacted and contrived, such that I never bothered watching any subsequent ones.
I watched it again recently. The special effects were somewhat better than I had recalled, and the film is overall a good one, although they had to strive mightily to give the film an upbeat ending.
This is one film that should perhaps be remade. Richard Matheson’s original novel (The Shrinking Man – the movie added the “Incredible”, as I pointed out in another couple of threads) is a sophisticated examination of the way the hero’s relationship to the world changes as his size does. Today you could examine things that the mores of the 1950s wouldn’t let you do before ( the sexual relationship between Scott and his wife – only hinted at in the book and ignored in the film. In the book, Scott is approached by a child molester who mistakes him for a child). Also, with CGI effects, the visuals would be much better. The 1950s were big on using huge hairy tarantulas for spiders (see Tarantula, Earth vs. the Spider, Have Rocket will Travel) because they were photogenic. But the spider in the book is a Black Widow, and I’d like to see that. Most people don’t have tarantulas in their basements, even in California.
Netflix accidentally posted a video today and then soon deleted it.
It announced the final season as arriving June 27.
I’m glad it isn’t all the way to Christmas, assuming they don’t move it.
We watched Carry On on Netflix with Taron Egerton and Jason Bateman. Basically a throwback to 90s and 2000s hijacking films like Die Hard 2, Executive Decision, Passenger 57, and Non-Stop. Wasn’t bad.
Final season of what?
Squid Game.
THE ENTIRE WORLD.
dooooooooooom…
Saturday NightAbout the chaotic hours immediately preceding the first episode of Saturday Night Live, mostly through the eyes of producer Lorne Michaels.
I’m sure it played fast and loose with actual events, undoubtedly compressing every anecdote from that season into a single hour. But still, entertaining-especially if you were a viewer in 1975.
The biggest names — JK Simmons, Willem Defoe—are in supporting roles.
They did a good job with hair and costumes so that the characters are immediately identifiable…ie, that’s obviously supposed to be Jim Henson, and Michael O’Donoghue.
For New Years we watched -
“Everything Everywhere All At Once”
–really liked it but thought it was slightly too long.
And then wanting to watch something funny we picked “Cedar Rapids” with Ed Helms, John C Reilly and Anne Heche. Suprisingly good, but I don’t think it could have worked without the doofus charisma of John C Reilly–his character played by another actor would have been grating and obnoxious. And I forgot how good Anne Heche could be.