Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn
A sequel of sorts to 2016’s Suicide Squad, though I suppose “spin-off” might be a more appropriate description, as Harley is the only holdover from the previous film.
The plot, such as it is, has Harley Quinn breaking up with the Joker and having to adjust to life in Gotham City without his protection. Then there’s a McGuffin chase over a diamond with account codes to a mob family fortune embedded in its crystal structure (or something. Does it matter?).
Anyhow, there’s lots of mindless violence and ridiculous action sequences. I actually quite enjoyed it. Margot Robbie does an excellent job, going a little deeper than you’d expect playing a morally compromised character with redeeming qualities. In lesser hands, Harley could have been simply an abrasive asshole, but I couldn’t help rooting for her. And there’s kind of a whole Female Empowerment theme, which scored some points for Mrs. Wheelz. Ewan McGregor chews the scenery so much he all but chokes on it. Good fun if you like this sort or thing.
A Simple Favor
A dark comedy that’s more dark than comedy. Very twisty; sometimes it goes where you think it will, sometimes not, but a very enjoyable ride.
Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively both put in great character turns. It’s not what I expected out of director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, 2016 Ghostbusters) - in a good way.
Long time since I posted in this thread because I’ve only been posting about movies I saw in theaters and I haven’t done that in a long time.
So I’ve been watching more movies at home. Last week, I watched The Gentlemen. It’s a gangster movie by Guy Ritchie. Some people seem unhappy with the movie because it’s basically going back over ground that Ritchie has covered in past movies. And I can’t deny that’s true. But I’m not unhappy with this movie. Ritchie makes really good gangster movies and this is another one. If you liked his past gangster movies, I recommend this one.
That said, this week I was in a thrift store and saw a copy of The Man from UNCLE on sale for a couple of dollars. And being full of good will for Guy Ritchie, I decided to buy it. I watched it and I was not as pleased as I was with The Gentlemen. It may just be the different genre. I’m not as big a fan of spy-themed action thrillers as I am of gangster movies. So a spy-themed action thriller has to rise above the genre to win me over. And The Man from UNCLE didn’t rise above the genre.
In particular, I felt this movie had a weakness in having two co-equal male leads. Ritchie apparently was committed to making sure neither of them came off as the side-kick character. So whenever one of them did something on screen, the other one would immediately do something equivalent to maintain the balance between the two characters. This was a problem because both characters were essentially moving through the same story arc so forcing them to stay in step held them both back. It would have been more interesting if Ritchie had figured out a way to give the characters two distinct but balanced roles.
As good as I think the movie of The Maltese Falcon is, it appears to me that the book is better. I haven’t read it yet. It appears to me that although the movies of the film noir period (usually given as 1941 to 1959) tried to emulate the attitudes of the books they were based on, they couldn’t quite mirror the cynicism and pessimism of those books. The books could get away with more than movies could back then. Movies had to be acceptable to some sort of mass audience that books didn’t need to appease.
Yes! Finally another person who enjoyed this movie. I went to see it when it was released, expecting a Gone Girl type film and discovered a dark, dark comedy. I’ve noticed that Anna Kendrick is great at playing the girl next door with an amoral core.
I had a lovely THC infused cookie and watched Stop Making Sense again last night. Wow, Tina Weymouth is an incredible bassist, and she’s dancing while keeping the band going. I would highly (heh) recommend doing getting slightly altered and watching it.
The way they slowly build up from Byrne playing guitar with only a boom box accompaniment to the full band is fascinating.
We’re into our Christmas rotation now, but before that started, we watched Willem Dafoe in At Eternity’s Gate, which is about Vincent Van Gogh. Holy hell, can Dafoe disappear into a role, or what? Excellent film, if you’re into artistic angst and troubled geniuses. Oh, and Oscar Isaac is also excellent as Paul Gaugin, as is Rupert Friend as Theo Van Gogh.
Funny you should mention this. One of the other blurays I picked up at a thrift store this week is Lust for Life, an earlier van Gogh biopic with Kirk Douglas playing the artist.
I wrote this after watching the movie for the first time during its theatrical run. I watched it again since it came out on bluray and I realized I had missed a major point of this movie.
I was wrong when I said it isn’t about a genre of movies. This movie is actually about a very specific movie genre; Quentin Tarantino movies. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino’s commentary on Quentin Tarantino movies.
I’ve been watching a bunch of DVDs I picked up recently, including the 1940s Disney anthologies Make Mine Music and Melody Time. It’s been a while since I saw them. Looking them up on the internet, I found some interesting items
1.) They eliminated an entire segment from the beginning of Make Mine Music – a hillbilly story in song called The Martins and the Coys , based, of course, on the Hatfiels and McCoy feud. It was supposedly cut because of violence, but that seems to be an excuse – lots of Disney stuff is more violent. You can see it on YouTube if you;re curious.
2.) The segment Blue Bayou was originally supposed to be a segment of Fantasia, but either wasn’t made for it, or was cut. In any event, it was originally supposed to be used with an orchestral arrangement of Claire de Lune, but they substituted a different piece, a choral arrangement. Again, you can find the original on YouTube. It’s better.
3.) The jazz piece All The Cats Join In (in which the “cats” are music fans, not animals) is cute, with all the accoutrements of supposed teen culture – jalopies, a malt shop, juke boxes. This one, too, was somewhat censored for brief nudity – a girl hops into a shower, and you get glimpses of her boob from the side and back. The version on the DVD has these scenes replaced with breastless ones. The breast in question has no nipple, like the ones on the centaurettes in Fantasia. As I’ve observed in the past, apparently you couldn’t have nipples in Disney films in the 1940s unless you were evil (the harpies in Night on Bald Mountain in Fantasia have them, but they’re evil, and the nipples are green). Yet the pre-production sketches for Fantasia show them on the centaurettes and other figures.
My wife and I watched this a couple days ago. Funny in the beginning, drags on very slowly in the middle, and has a very funny and charming final 20 minutes. Felt like a 45 minutes episode of TV stretched into a full movie. Very cute, though.
Watched the 1915 silent version of Alice in Wonderland. Interesting – they went out of their way to make costumes and makeup that perfectly match the John Tenniel illustrations, including the “You are Old, Father William” – where the guy playing Father William actually does a head stand, and somersaults in.
For some reason, they leave out the Mad Tea Party.
The production was from the American Motion Picture Corporation, and I couldn’t help but notice that the president was William H. Barr (!)
Well, that’s just coincidence, right? Wouldn’t have noticed it a few years ago.
But consider this:
Rear Window (1954)
After a lifetime of seeing parodies and tributes, I finally saw the real thing. I loved it, though it wasn’t as heart-poundingly suspenseful as I expected. It is, however, a masterpiece of storytelling and technique. I’ve been reading some about the set construction and the way Hitchcock directed all the actors in the various apartments, and I continue to grow even more impressed. A classic for good reason.
Scoob! (2020)
Yeah, something light after a Hitchcock thriller. Cute nostalgia, but not much more. The live-action films and even some of the old cartoon versions had more to offer in the way of plot and character interaction. If you’re a Scooby-Doo fan it’ll raise a smile or two, but don’t expect to be blown away.
Wow. It is astonishing to me what used to pass for theatrical-release-quality production values, especially audio. I don’t know to whom to give the credit (I suspect George Lucas and Tom Holman), but thank God movie sound has evolved.
The first one was The Trouble With Harry, a light comedic tale. The trouble with Harry is that he’s very inconveniently dead, and various people who stumble upon his corpse can’t decide what to do about it. It was a really beautiful and colorful film, and I was impressed by the talent of baby Jerry Mathers, who looked like he might have been about four years old in this. Made me wonder how come Opie got all the plum roles.
The other movie was Marnie, about a disturbed young woman with a habit of stealing from her workplaces. An arrogant rich guy blackmails her into marrying him because he thinks he can fix her. At least he got to rape her. I was pleasantly surprised when she did not droop against his broad chest with birdlike chirps of gratitude, but maintained a proper rage against him. There were times when I just wanted to jump up and cheer for her, such as when she handled the situation with the horse.
The final flashback thing was pretty hokey, but overall I really liked this movie. It would have been nice to add a scene where she held her sister-in-law’s head in the toilet, but it was good without that.
I couldn’t sleep the other night, so I watched Passenger 57. My god, that has to be just about the most asinine thing I’ve ever seen. It really made me wonder how shit like that gets made. I won’t discuss it anymore. Wasted far too much time on it already.
My wife and I saw Akira (1988) in the cinema last night. The local cinema isn’t showing quite as many old movies as they were during the movie drought back in June-July, but there’s still a few turning up.
Pretty cool to see it on the big screen. It did make reading the subtitles a little more hurried, especially when signs and headlines were being translated across the top of the screen, with dialogue appearing on the bottom. Fortunately, we’re both familiar with it.
(I realize this makes me an uncultured boor, but I still prefer dubbed over subbed, unless the dubbing is just atrocious, which doesn’t seem to happen much anymore.)
