Ouija Shark on Tubi. A young woman finds a ouija board washed up on a beach, she and her friends play with it, and they unwittingly summon up the ghost of a shark that “swims” around in midair eating people. Recommended? Well, I guess so, if you’re prepared to watch something that can be described thusly. I mean, I’m sometimes in the mood for something that’s just flat-out aggressively dumb.
ETA: Oh, and if that scratches some kind of itch, there’s a sequel.
While we’re talking about Sandra Bullock, I just watched The Lost City (2022).
A silly Rom-Action rip off of Romancing the Stone featuring Bullock as a Romance writer, Channing Tatum as a Fabioeque cover model, and Harry Potter (I can never remember the actor’s name) as an inept villain. Goofy fun with a few good jokes. And Sandra Bullock looks amazing, easily holding her own with a leading man 16 years younger.
Demolition Man is a harmless bit of fun, very typical of its time, a culmination of the Total Recall, RoboCop genre. The campiness started to leave action movies after that, briefly lingered in the Joel Schumacher Batman films, which buried camp for a long while. Action then shifted into Fantasy and then re-emerged as dark and gritty, up until Marvel dominated.
Anyway, the best thing about Demolition Man was the introduction of Sandra Bullock as a lead, though she doesn’t exactly shine in it specifically.
The Russo Brothers (Avengers and Captain America movies) directs an ensemble cast that includes Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan, Jason Alexander, Woody Harrelson. Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox. Jenny Slate, Giancarlo Esposito, and Stanley Tucci in one of the most expensive films ever made, adapting some graphic novel in largely derivative post-apocalyptic man learning to live with AI in both the real and virtual world story that borrows heavily and shamelessly from …I don’t know…take your pick - The Creator, iRobot, AI: Artificial Intelligence, The Matrix, Ready Player One - that’s ultimately so forgettable I literally forgot I watched it until I literally opened this thread and saw I didn’t finish my review.
Retired DEA agent moves to Louisiana. He soon catches the attention of the local meth cooker.
There’s some interesting surprises in the story. I enjoyed it. Jason has a nice connection with the young actress (Izabela Vidovic) playing his daughter.
Definitely recomend if you like Jason’s other action movies.
Winona Ryder is the crack head girlfriend of the meth cooker. Hard to believe she’s a member of the Brat Pack.
I get it. But I’m wondering if you could at least tell us what makes it bad?
I saw Puppet Master 8: Legacy once and gave it a ZERO stars, but I at least explained that the movie was a clip show of the previous 7 movies and sold as a new feature on DVD, thus explaining the zero stars and the disgust.
It is based on the 1971 burglary of Lloyds Bank safety deposit boxes in Baker Street.
The first half of the movie is a standard heist film. Allegedly a nekkid royal gets frisky while a camera secretly clicks. Several bare-chested ladies walk around casually in a brothel and tie up a nekkid aristocrat.
I liked the 2nd half better. The fall out from the robbery is chaotic. There’s photos of a royal scratching a carnal itch. More important is a ledger of cops on the take. A lot of secrets were exposed in this robbery. It put the robbers in grave danger from multiple people.
I want to watch again and better understand the story. There are a lot of conflicting interests represented by numerous characters. It’s hard to remember who is who.
I enjoyed the movie. I’d give it 7 out of 10. Primarily based on the 2nd half.
Harper from 1966 with Paul Newman and a host of other recognizable faces/names. I’d seen it once decades ago, and the only thing I remembered was the coffee filter bit near the end of the opening credits. My sister (watching for the first time) squealed in disgust exactly as I had years and years earlier.
Quite a good detective story (based on a Ross MacDonald novel, so it had good pedigree) weakened only by a very intrusive musical score and too many scenes of fake looking young people frugging their butts off. Newman was at his best in this and given his snappy dialog he makes the most of it. I had forgotten the ending, which was nice because it slightly surprised me It essentially is a no-ending ending but psychologically it worked – Arthur Hill was a good antagonist.
We both signed over the wide open freeways and nearly traffic-less beach roads. We used to drive for pleasure!
Dancer in the Dark (2000). A strange, dreamy, melancholy film that is difficult to describe. Icelandic singer, songwriter, and actress Björk Guðmundsdóttir (commonly just known as Björk) plays Selma Jezkova, an Eastern European immigrant with a genetic defect that is rapidly making her blind. Her young son has the same defect, and she works and saves tirelessly to save up enough money for his eye operation, and is in fact the main reason she emigrated to America.
Björk puts in a tremendously powerful performance as Selma, a childlike young woman who, despite her troubles, exudes a sunny optimism and constant smile, until major tragedy strikes her life and suddenly changes everything. Incredibly, this dark psychological drama is actually a musical, though the musical numbers are relatively few and far between.
This is more art-house cinema than a mainstream movie, but with that in mind, I do quite highly recommend it. It sadly didn’t get much recognition at the Oscars, getting only one nomination for Best Song, “I’ve Seen It All”, which Björk composed. It did, however, win the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2000 and Björk very deservedly won Best Actress. This film could not have been made without Björk – in addition to her superb acting skills, she had exactly the youthful, innocent childlike look that the part demanded, even though she was 34 at the time. Super spoiler alert: the part where she shoots Bill is exceedingly well done high drama and her acting is breathtaking.
I presume you’re referring to this, which doesn’t detract from anything I said and in fact supports the praise of Björk’s work on this film:
Actress Björk, who is known primarily as a contemporary musician, had rarely acted before, and described the process of making this film as so emotionally taxing that she would not act in any film ever again (although she appeared in Matthew Barney’s film installation Drawing Restraint 9 in 2005, and in Robert Eggers’ The Northman). Trier and others have described her performance as feeling rather than acting. Björk has said that it is a misunderstanding that she was put off acting by this film; rather, she never wanted to act but made an exception for Lars von Trier.
Von Trier responded to allegations in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. He denied he had sexually harassed the musician, saying “that was not the case. But that we were definitely not friends, that’s a fact.” Producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, who worked with Von Trier on Dancer in the Dark, said the two men … “were the victims. That woman was stronger than both Lars Von Trier and me and our company put together. She dictated everything and was about to close a movie of 100m kroner [$16m].”
Anyway, it’s still a great film, and her performance in it was truly outstanding.
Incidentally, you can refer to her as Björk Guðmundsdóttir or Björk, but you can’t call her Guðmundsdóttir or Miss Björk Guðmundsdóttir or Mrs. Guðmundsdóttir or Ms. Björk Guðmundsdóttir or whaatever. That’s because she doesn’t have a last name, just like nearly all Icelanders. Guðmundsdóttir is her patronym, not her last name. Icelanders don’t have a last name that’s passed down from generation to generation. Their patronym is their father’s name, followed by an s and then the word son or dóttir. (Occasionally they have a matronym, where it’s their mother’s name followed by an s and the word son or dóttir.) Most countries in Europe didn’t have last names at first, but slowly acquired them in the Middle Ages. Iceland never has used last names.
Final Destination. I liked this pretty much when it first came out (2000), seeing it as a cut above the usual teen horror, but I had no idea it had start as a spec script for the X-Files, with the original writer + 2 X-Filers James Wong and Glen Morgan. It still holds up pretty well, and it gets additional bonuses for
young Ali Larter, who will eventually be on “Heroes”
the original Candyman dude (Tony Todd) as the rather grimly flippant coroner
Robert Wisden, from the “Pusher” episode of The X-Files, as the dad
Sean William Scott, just off “American Pie”
I haven’t seen any of the other ones, I assume (following the usual pattern) that they’re not as good.
Final Destination 2. No, not as good, but I laughed a few times, and I liked some of the characters. The next one has Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and I suspect we’ll watch that one as well. And it won’t be as good as the second one.
