Last Action Hero was excellent 30 years ago and only improved with time, half of the superhero movies in the last 5 years played on the same meta comedy angle. It suffers from “it failed at the box office that must be a sign of its quality”. I quite like Hudson Hawk, but I get why people didn’t like it and regard it as bad to this day. Not the case with Last Action Hero.
Suspicion (1941) Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Grant plays a cad, bounder, a creep and a rotter…but his wife suspects he may be a murderer too. Definitely not his usual charming self.
Minor Hitchcock but still entertaining. AIUI it got a Hollywood happy ending that differs from the source.
Also with Nigel “Dr Watson” Bruce, Leo G Carroll and Sir Cedric Hardwicke.
In the opening scene (kind of a “meet-cute”), Grant needs to scrounge for change to upgrade his train ticket and finds that he’s short by “tuppence and ha’penny”. Makes me wish that England still had quaint and interesting currency. Bring back the farthing!
At the time, I think the popular opinion of Last Action Hero was that Arnold shouldn’t have been parodying himself while still at the peak of his fame, because it undercuts his box office draw and his appeal will suffer. Better to do it when his fame is waning. Much like Liam Neeson is going to be doing in The Naked Gun later this year. I’m not sure if any of us could have articulated it that way, but there was a feeling of “this is weird and doesn’t work as well as it should have” about it.
To me, the main problem with the movie - besides the fact that the kid was annoying and the jokes weren’t very funny - was that it wasn’t really parodying actual Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, but rather generic 1980’s action flicks. The movie-within-the-movie was dumb and cartoonish, but worse than that, it resembled nothing Arnie had ever made. When had he ever fought gangsters?
Raw Deal (1986). That’s about it it before TLAH.
Completely true. He was the guy and that was the era to make this exact movie. The time passed since has only made it more obvious. If there are any flaws at this point they have melted into the genre defining characteristics.
Clint Eastwood had to sit on his Unforgiven script for decades until he was old enough to play the role, but same thing.
nevermind
That’s crazy. Before the Star Wars and super hero revival Twister was one of the top ten grossing films of all time.
I have never ever thought this was the case, and find it incredibly strange that people act this way, and a pretty awful explanation for a good movie to be doomed to failure.
I must be disconnected from the zeitgeist. I knew Fight Club was a satire, and not a movie about fighting or cancer. I knew what the Matrix was doing. I guessed the obvious twist of Sixth Sense from the trailer, and thought that Arnie parodying exactly the movies that him and Stallone were in (was he not allowed to parody Stallone? According to the “popular opinion”?), was fun and very original, movies like Red Heat, Commando, Running Man, Predator, Raw Deal, T1/T2, Total Recall and never once thought “hey, you can’t parody that because you normally fight police, or army, or people chasing you, or scifi security guards on mars, and never gangsters, except for Raw Deal and Red Heat”.
I didn’t realise I was so unusual.
And it doesn’t sound at all like people making up excuses for treating a decent movie badly even 30 years later…
I’m being descriptivist, not prescriptivist. This is my memory of what critics and audiences were saying at the time it came out, I’m not telling you you’re wrong for liking something. It’s easy enough to look back and have a rose coloured view of something when you were the receptive audience for it when it came out, but it really was not an overwhelming success, and for me, I didn’t really like it then, and I still don’t like it now.
I should’ve picked Hook as my example instead.
Black Bag 2025 on Peacock
It’s already been discussed. It starts slowly. The ending has a satisfying payoff.
It was OK. I wouldn’t watch it again. All the characters are playing paranoid mind games. There’s nothing appealing or redeemable among any of them. Except the married couple’s devotion to each other. Even that is tenuous.
Ca$h 2010 Sean Bean and Chris Hemsworth on Peacock
Watched the first half and switched channel
It was direct-to-DVD in the United Kingdom.
Young couple finds a suitcase with money from a robbery. They go on a spending spree. Attracts the attention of the robber who wants his half million back.
I strongly disliked the solution to pay back the robber’s missing money. He recovered most of his money. But wanted all of it back.
I found it predictable and the young couple were incredibly stupid. They attracted too much attention. I didn’t particularly care when the robber came for his money.
I do like Kevin Bacon and while not my usual cuppa the reviews are excellent. Popcorn 
Thunderbolts. It’s a Marvel film, and like all Marvel films it feels like its main purpose is to introduce the next Marvel film.
I mean, I enjoyed it. There were some very funny moments, some sad moments, a lot of action, a lot of moping, an unexpected death, a bit of soapboxing, etc etc. But it’s not really any different from most Marvel films in that respect.
And yes, there are mid-credit and end-credit scenes, the last of which serves to lead into a film we saw a trailer for at the beginning so no biggie there.
See it if you’re still following the endless Marvel franchise. But you’re not missing anything special if you don’t.
Oh, and Geraldine Viswanathan is in it, which is nice.
Independence Day 1996 Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum
Extended version on Prime
It’s been a favorite since I saw it in the theatre.
Only soso on Bondsman but will return
great movie - rewatch but was blown away the first time. Good cast
In a Violent Nature (2024) on Hulu, intended to be a throwback to '80s slasher flicks. I hated it.
First, it’s intentionally shot in 4:3 to evoke that throwback feel. This drove me to distraction for the first 20 minutes until I finally googled to find out if the whole movie is like that. Yes, it is. Turns out I hate 4:3 almost as much as black and white. And since when were 80s slasher movies shot in 4:3 anyway? I guess they were trying to evoke the home TV CRT experience, but I consider this artistic choice to be a huge miss.
A few of the kills were neat, but the most vicious kills were vicious after the kill. Note to directors: the horror is in the suffering. Mutilating an already-dead body is about as interesting as chopping down a tree.
None of the characters were presented in any way that would establish a connection with them for the audience. Most of them were total dicks anyway. Even worse, much of the dialogue – which was B movie level at best – was off screen as the camera sticks to the killer hiding nearby. Which brings me to my next complaint…
Maybe 40 solid minutes of this movie is literally the camera behind the killer watching him walk through the woods. Clomp, clomp, clomp. There is no mystery or suspense when I’m staring at the killer’s back, and it feels like that’s all we’re doing for half the film.
I looked up the director on IMDb and apparently most of his credits are as a special effects guy on shorts. Let’s just say that he’s no McG, who successfully (if unimpressively) transitioned from music videos to feature films.
If anyone is curious about this film, just search for the kills on YouTube. Trust me that those are the only things worth watching from this, and only just barely.
Whenever I dislike a movie that everyone else gushes over, I think “Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood for it.”
Mrs and I made it about halfway through “Gladiator II” before saying “Enough!”
B-O-R-I-N-G
Though the cast gave it their all, it’s lots of spectacle hung on an uninteresting plot.
Maybe we weren’t in the right mood for it.
I hung in there until the end but it was bad. Gladiator winning best picture was kind of silly, but Gladiator 2 was practically a B movie in comparison.
I watched The Nowhere Inn yesterday. It was very meta.
I’ll try to describe it. It’s a movie written by Annie Clark and Carrie Brownstein starring Annie Clark and Carrie Brownstein making a movie about Annie Clark and Carrie Brownstein. Sometimes it’s about the movie they’re making in the movie and sometimes it steps back and becomes about the movie itself.
The subject is the nature of being a performer. Annie Clark is a musician who performs under the name St. Vincent. The movie discusses to what extent Clark is performing as St. Vincent as opposed to being St. Vincent. And of course in this movie, Annie Clark is acting so she’s also performing as Annie Clark.
Just the description made my head hurt.