I watched Everything Everywhere All At Once the other day. It got great reviews and a lot of people liked it, but I found it a bit long and tedious.
As I was clicking through the channels, I came upon Bohemian Rhapsody on FX. It had just started but it was getting close to bedtime so I DVR’d it. Since it was 3 hours long (w/commercials) I watched it over a few sittings. I really enjoyed it. I thought they nailed it with the actor that played Brian May, and when I Googled Queen images I have to say they really nailed it with Roger and John also. I didn’t really remember what those two looked like. I was afraid it was going to get too raunchy and focus on Freddy’s sex life. I’m glad it didn’t. He was more than that.
The Firm (1993, Prime $2-$7) - No, not The Firm from 1993 with a smirking and yet never sweating Tom Cruise who makes a career out of running around with a briefcase for the mob. This is The Firm from 1993 where in a Cockney Gary Oldman runs a soccer hooligan gang and is looking to unite the English yobs together under his command for a European assault. It’s gritty in dialogue, sound, direction, location, filming, lighting…it’s just gritty. It’s London in the early 90’s and it is awesome.
I will watch Gary Oldman read a phone book, and yet this movie stands by itself even without him.
If Guy Ritchie movies are your thing (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, etc.) come see where he ripped all that off from.
I would only add, if you rent it you’ll want to put on the Close Captioning. I have a pretty good ear for thick accents and still, the sound quality is bad, the Cockney is thick, there are loads of slang terms thrown about and everything is spoken while 3 other people are talking.
I remember when Trainspotting came out, there were a lot of jokes about how it really ought to have been subtitled for American audiences.
For more: Brits: How is Gillian Anderson's British accent?
“Ya wanna be king, do ya? Hey, I gotcher Iron Throne right here!”
Probably better addressed in another thread (because this one’s getting off topic), but, as long as you’re all talking about actors using accents other than their own, how about Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York? That’s a film that I could have added to the “over-the-top-villians” thread, precisely because of his character, but I thought his acting there was very good, in particular his accent. I’m not an expert on it, and I haven’t even had any real-life exposure to New York accents, but I was very surprised by how similar he sounded to Robert De Niro.
As a cis female I barely noticed Anne Hathaway, I watched it for Meryl Streep’s performance. It was light fare but without Streep it would have turned to mist.
I just finished watching RRR and it makes Everything Everywhere All At Once look subdued and understated by comparison.
The best I can describe it as a Bollywood version of Mel Gibson’s The Patriot meets the most ridiculous aspects of the MCU, but in the best possible way.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent starring the incredible Nicholas Cage as himself - and also himself.
I think this movie made me a Pedro Pascal fan for life.
Overall I think it dove too hard into action movie formula at the end, because it’s quite a little interesting, quirky drama aside from all that, and I would have appreciated a less conventional ending. But it was a blast while it happened.
I just finished watching the Coen Brothers remake of True Grit and all I can say was it was a disappointment. I expected more. I have the book and the John Wayne movie and much of the dialog is the same for all, and the new remake was faithful to both.
My observasions: Hailee Steinfled really nailed it as Mattie Ross. Without her performance there would not even be a movie.
Jeff Bridges couldn’t enunciate to save his life! Couldn’t understand a thing he was saying. Like watching Kirt Cobain sing with a mouth full of marbles, and his acting improved nothing over John Wayne. Matt Damon was just about as flat a La Boeuf as Glen Campbell was but at least he could say his lines better. Josh Brolin was mis-cast as Tom Chaney, he just didn’t fit the character, I’m not sure why he was there and he didn’t seem to know either.
I just didn’t see anything extra coming out of this movie. A faithful remake with worse acting except for Mattie Ross. I do feel that the original Kim Darby Mattie had better chemistry with Rooster and La Boeuf.
I really liked the ending with Mattie trying but failing to meet up with Rooster after 25 years, that was a nice touch and a great ending.
The plot and characterizations are just hilariously awful but by god the action (and dance) sequences are just so far above and beyond even the most extreme MCU sequences that they have to be seen to be believed. None of it makes any sense whatsoever but frankly you won’t care.
That’s how the book ends as well.
It had to have an action movie ending since that was the script they were writing. Reminded me of Adaptation (Starring Cage of course).
I recently saw the trailer for RRR and it looked so ridiculously far, far, far over the top, I knew I wouldn’t enjoy the movie.
My most recent five:
Three Days of the Condor
Rewatched this classic Seventies spy thriller with my teenage son, who hadn’t seen it before. Still good, tense, paranoid fun, although the relationship between the Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway characters is just a bit too skeevy now. He kidnaps her, threatens her and holds her at gunpoint overnight - for a good cause, granted - and of course she falls in love with him. Ugh.
Robin Robin
A new kid-friendly stop-motion short film, about an orphaned bird being raised by kind but thieving mice and wanting very much to fit in. It’s not gonna join the ranks of Christmas classics along with Charlie Brown, Rudolph and the Grinch, but it was fine.
Glass Onion
This semi-sequel to Knives Out was quite good. A fine cast led by Daniel Craig, some good Covid humor, a clever plot with some great twists, and as for the Mona Lisa… well, let’s just say I winced.
Big Fish
Hadn’t seen this warm-hearted 2003 Tim Burton film before. A journalist tries to understand his ailing father, who has always told tall tales, near the end of his life. A good mix of Southern Gothic and magical-realist fantasy, with some life-affirming lessons along the way. Recommended.
Triangle of Sadness
Several ultra-rich folks take a luxury cruise; everything goes horribly awry, and the ship is lost. The survivors see their social roles upended, and don’t much like it. I saw the film just a few days before it was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, which IMHO it did not deserve. It had its moments, but it’s just not that good.
You’re not wrong, though I think Adaptation is my favorite. Adaptation does some really cool things with story structure. The first time I saw it, I didn’t know anything about writing structure, so I didn’t get it. The last time I saw it, I realized Robert McKee makes a cameo. The movie then proceeds to follow McKee’s advice to the letter, resulting in a strangely satisfying but ultimately meaningless conclusion. It’s a commentary on a long held debate about what makes good stories - some objectively defined idea of story structure, or ephemeral divine inspiration? Why not both? I think Adaptation’s conclusion is pretty cynical. “I wanted to tell you this beautiful story, but you won’t watch it unless I include these required events. See how that ruined everything? Are you not entertained?”
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was a hoot, but I don’t think the writers were thinking that hard.
I agree this movie was good, but nothing all that special.
Agreed, Triangle of Sadness was, I thought, kind of a hot mess. The first act, if you call it that, left me flat and uninterested. The second act was hilarious, with each event more ridiculous than the last. The third act was weird, with people really really not being normal, despite the role reversal bit, it just didn’t strike me as involving real people. Oscar material? No way.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
This story seems to be endlessly adaptable. This one (in stop motion animation) imagines Geppetto and his creation in Fascist Italy (Il Duce even has a cameo), where free spirits like Pinocchio are not appreciated. But the puppet kid who arrives with no knowledge of the world but is endlessly fascinated by things he doesn’t understand, as well as easily manipulated by selfish outsiders, is a good jumping off point for this kind of satire.
If the Disney version, though great, was too sentimental for you, try this one, or Roberto Benigni’s unfairly disliked take (which was much closer to the very gloomy source material). Or there’s the Fractured Fairy Tale, where Kindly Old Geppetto keeps telling Pinocchio “Stay wood!”, (and has the advantage of being only six minutes long).
Violent Night with David Harbour (Stranger Things) as Santa. He does a pretty good job, as usual, but he had to carry the entire film, which nobody should have to do. The movie is uniformly awful, but with some funny bits. Beverly D’Angelo has had so much cosmetic surgery that she looks like she just walked out of the crypt, and her voice sounds like she’s been smoking and boozing her entire life. It started out okay, but turned tedious pretty quickly.
Yeah, I liked Robin Robin, but I don’t think it was in the same league as the 2021 Shaun the Sheep: The Flight before Christmas from Aardman Animation.
The latter I now watch a couple of times every holiday season, whereas it’s been decades since I had any interest in re-watching Charlie Brown or Rudolph or the Grinch.