I've been rewatching the 1980s series Hunter quite a bit.
It's pretty decent I think. Of course it's outdated in many ways with the depicted technology and police techniques as well as some of the social attitudes, but in other ways it was pretty progressive.
It's also a great little historical snapshot of the time, better than more stylised stuff like Miami Vice, which had better writing but the aspirational settings. cars and clothing weren't at all realistic to the experience of most people at the time.
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
What are you watching right now?
Found the perfect role for Jonah Hill. Might even get an oscar for it. Maybe the idea will occur to someone else up there as well if they won't do my other dream casting: a David Bowie biopic with Tilda Swinton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj0qYAjnl4g
Ozoneocean wrote:
YES!
Each one could have a theme around a different song.
And when they finally win they can sing "We are the Champions"!
It works soooooo well XD
So many songs would fit into that musical structure… I want it All" "Another one Bites the Dust" etc
All I really want is a Buckaroo Banzai reboot starring Tenacious D…
I watched The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry. This is a great example of a story without much conflict, or much going on at all, but is able to hold your attention for over 2 hours. It stars Kunal Nayyar (Raj from the Big Bang Theory) who is excellent! Also stars Christina Hendrix, Lucy Hale, and David Arquette, playing a deeper version of Dewey.
It is really just about discovering the mysteries of each person and watching them slowly gain or lose what they want in life.
Also watched a Turkish show Sahmaran. Another slow-burn TV show, about sexy people being drawn together. You know there is some supernatural element coming, something to do with water and snakes, but it is taking it's time and is fascinating.
See, I do like slow burn. I just don't like boring shows like Andor.
Andor IS bloody dull. Stupid murder mystery but set in Star Wars. Once upon a time I thought genre mixing like that was a good idea, now I know better.
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I've been watching a lot of Big Mouth.
It's a magical reality show about 13 year olds (I think), going through the ravages of puberty. Metaphors like hormone monsters represent the children's ongoing physical changes- they talk to the monsters and the monsters talk to each other and seem to have their own society, but they're not actually objectively real. A lot of the show is like that. It's NOT a fantasy, it's magical reality, there's a big difference.
In one the fantastical things are really a part of the world, in the other they're just symbols, even if they seem like a real part of the world you take their reality symbolically, like in a musical people aren't actually singing and dancing in the objective world of the story.
Sorry to explain that but I've seen some idiot reviews where the reviewer doesn't understand this.
It's a good funny show that talks about a lot of taboo things and addresses them in a helpful and mostly sensitive way.
The main fault is the over focus on sex. That's sort of a silly criticism because that's what the show is totally about, but it sort of seems to indicate that the worlds of these young teens ONLY involves thinking about sex and I think that's pretty limited.
Fair enough that the show looks at that part of their lives but it should indicate that aside from that and outside of the focus they're into all the typical kid stuff. I think it's probably just a cultural thing- American shows and movies tend to think that people mainly think about sex to the exclusion of everything else, especially as kids.
The Menu on Disney+
Omg this is hard going for me…
This sort of wanky food culture and the people who're into it is everything I hate.
I'm only 30 minutes in so far so I don't know where it's going yet.
I think it's a satire and it's setting things up so you're supposed to despise them, but it's so close to the actual thing that it's hard to differentiate.
Picard Season Three.
I'm not completing the s1 and s2 episodes I've missed. And there are certain things from those earlier seasons that I will just choose to ignore. I'm okay with doing that.
From what I understand, there was a new showrunner for Season 3, and even one episode in there's a big improvement. There's a clarity to things - again, it's only one episode in so far, but it's promising.
Only in his 60s too. I could have sworn he was much older. That man aged fast and hard :(
I always preferred his comedy to his drama
————
So I finished The Menu
I can't say too much about it without spoiling it.
It was well made and acted. It satirised food culture, it blames the foodies for the plight of the service industry, there was no cannibalism (thank goodness), it's a reasonably realistic "horror" film and psychological thriller.
It really wasn't my thing.
I felt the points it made were pretty silly and irrelevant. It has pretensions to be a clever film, as do a lot of these sorts of horror films (heredity etc.) but the reality is that the ideas are just juvenile and half formed: they're low hanging fruit and there's never enough to them. It's just an excuse to pretend you have an intellectual horror film when you really don't.
That's my personal beef more than anything. It might work for you. It was well done mainly.
Ozoneocean wrote:Yeah, but on the other hand, I was sure he'd live almost as long as Abe Vigoda or Joan Rivers.
Only in his 60s too. I could have sworn he was much older. That man aged fast and hard :(
It's a shame he didn't make it :(
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Last night I watched "Now You See Me"
This was a comedy thriller, I think that's the right terminology?
It's about 4 street magicians who get assembled to a team by some mysterious person and turned into famous Vegas style top tier magicians. They pull of high profile heists in front of their audiences and no one can work out how they did it.
There's an FBI guy and interpol woman chasing them.
They still keep on doing shows while on the run…
It's all very adrenaline+high energy, lots of things happening, twists and turns and trying to work out what's happening and why.
It's not bad. Fun movie.
While the US was churning out "Invasion of the Saucermen" the UK was putting out the reasonably intelligent and adult Quatermass BBC dramas and movies. The Quatermass Xperiment is about a rocket flight where the crew are absorbed by a totally alien being that ends up at Westminster Abbey. Seeing the painful mutation of the one survivor (no lines, but that pained face!) Blows away the later "Incredible Melting Man"
Then there's Quatermass II (both have silly American titles but in this day of the internet are actually more easily located under the British titles) that has an invasion by another completely alien species (methane ammonia breathers!) Who create an entire plot to acclimate to earth building pressure domes using a secret government project. That one has a great British ending with the solid British working man rising up for his rights and in the process bringing down the alien conspiracy.
Amazingly though from the 1950s the science holds up because of its vagueness. And you can also see a few things that would influence BBC science fiction of the next decade. ;) Quatermass is sort of like Professor Challenger of A.Conan Doyle and a certain time traveling doctor still to come.
There is a third movie not available for free that came out ten years later that was also very influential. Quatermass and the Pit or Six Million Years to Earth.
Again I love seeing where these ideas began and being pleasantly surprised at how much better they were than all the many copies and imitations that are barely worth Riff-traxx or MST3K.
Ozoneocean wrote:
Only in his 60s too. I could have sworn he was much older. That man aged fast and hard :(
I always preferred his comedy to his drama.
Richard Belzer was 78, not 60.
So I finished The Menu
I can't say too much about it without spoiling it…
I don't disagree with any of your critiques, but I would put M3gan, The Menu, and Pearl in my top 5 movies of 2022. A good year for movies, and a bad year for Marvel.
I watched Kloe, a German espionage series. This is a well-made show with top-level Tarantino-style action. The colorful art direction stands out. There is a distinct tonal shift midway through the season, going from Hitchcock espionage (North by Northwest is the best Bond movie, fight me.) to Kill Bill action and goofiness. I liked it, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone.
sleeping_gorilla wrote:
I watched Kloe, a German espionage series. This is a well-made show with top-level Tarantino-style action. The colorful art direction stands out. There is a distinct tonal shift midway through the season, going from Hitchcock espionage (North by Northwest is the best Bond movie, fight me.) to Kill Bill action and goofiness. I liked it, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone.
I also liked Kleo for the historical period in which it took place. Berlin in 1990 was a tumultuous time and place. So setting a spy thriller in a time and place where the Stasi, KGB, BND, and CIA are all imploding and cannibalizing each other makes for all sorts of hilarious hijinks!
I just finished watching the series "The law according to Lidia Poet," and I thought it was pretty good. It's loosely based on the true life of Lidia Poet, who was the first woman to practice law in Italy in the late 19th century. I say "loosely" because most of the episodes end up feeling more like a detective thriller rather than an accurate historical recreation. The real Lidia Poet actually spent most of her career campaigning for women's rights, and I would honestly have been more interested in that angle rather than just Sherlock Holmes-esque shenanigans. Then again, they might be planning on a second season that develops the agitator part of her career in the future. Who knows?
MAMA - 2013 Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier, Daniel Kash, Sierra Dawe, Jane Moffat, and a few dozen versions of Mama. Crazy dad takes his 2 young daughters, 3 and 1 yr olds, on insane escape after killing people who ruined his business. He crashes car and finds an old (empty?) cabin and plans to kill the girls and himself but something kills him instead and becomes the girls Mama. 5 years pass, the cabin is found with the girls living somehow and the dad's brother takes them to his abode with his gf Jessica. Soon enuf Mama finds the girls and chaos ensues. We learn 100 years ago Mama was a nutcase and had a daughter and they escape and jump off a cliff to their death? Maybe not eh? Apparently Mama is some kind of living ghost, pretty scary looking climbing walls and inside closets, so will there be a happy ending…partially, watch if you dare. A 2 1/2 on the Mamameter.
"Making Mr Right"
A publicist is hired to sell the image of a new hi-tech android to the public. It's going to be used for deep space exploration as a proxy for human space travellers so it's been made as human-like as possible. But the corporation that built it wants people to identify with it and like it so they can get behind the space exploration stuff…
This is a romantic comedy from Susan Seidelman, the director of Desperately Seeking Susan and She Devil. All in all it's a silly fantasy romance with a bizarre premise (like Splash or Mannequin), but from a female perspective. It's vapid and awkward but also a bit funny and even a tiny bit intellectual.
The android is an exact copy of its creator. He's made the robot in his own image… the irony at the end is that the robot is more human and passionate and alive than the creator, who really just wants to be a robot himself.
I only watched this because it stars John Malcovich, who also has a main of blond hair in the movie. I couldn't imagine him in a silly fantasy romantic comedy playing a childish android. I NEEDED to see it!
It was interesting.
dpat57 wrote:bravo1102 wrote:That was a movie and a half, really well done, full of terror. And Barbara Shelley. imdb
There is a third movie not available for free that came out ten years later that was also very influential. Quatermass and the Pit or Six Million Years to Earth.
There's also X The Unknown, which kind of belongs with the first two Quatermass movies. It doesn't have Barbara Shelley, but you do get Anthony Newley.
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I'm currently hooked on Beat Girl, (Wild For Kicks in the US), a 1960 British exploitation movie which was censored at the time of it's release due to risque striptease scenes and teens playing chicken on the railway tracks, but now restored to it's original glory. It has some exceptionally groovy tunes from John Barry in his first film score and a pre Dracula Christopher Lee as a seedy Soho strip joint owner. The coffee bar beat slang is exceptional, but I can't stop watching the scene where teenage lead Gillian Hills freaks out on the dancefloor with a young Oliver Reed.
edit: I got curious and went to find out what became of the Beat Girl. 78yr old Gillian Hills is quite a revelation!
Knock at the Cabin - I think it was a decent film. Like 7/10 decent. Not a masterpiece by any standard I would apply (as with most Shyamalan films), but definitely a decent psychological thriller that maxed out the one-location setting. People who found it boring probably expected vivid executions, more action, more horror, etc. Just like with The Village, which they mistook for a horror film based on the trailer and whatever they imagined in it. It was a pretty straight-forward film without "clever twists", just trying to give you a tenseful, emotionally, psychologically disturbing experience, sort of rattling the cage. What I didn't like so much was the ending. If you want to settle for a message, it wasn't a bad one, it was quite okay. But I think leaving it open would've been better, because a definite answer creates a false justification for the characters' decisions, actions, while these decisions were mostly if not all born from doubts, faith, love, etc and had little to nothing to do with facts. So no one should empathize with this or that because an ending proves them right or proves them wrong, it's sort of like when giving money to a homeless person is okay if they spend it on food or shelter, but otherwise not. You don't know what he'll spend it on, you have to make a decision not knowing, that's the human factor. In any case, if you liked 10 Cloverfield Lane and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, you'll most likely like this as well, if you found them boring… you probably won't LOVE this.
Christopher Lee first put on Dracula's cape in 1958. That was two years before Beat Girl. To see truly pre Dracula Christopher Lee need to see Battle of the River Platte where he plays an Argentine bar owner and the Crimson Pirate where he sword fights with Burt Lancaster.
Started watching Beat Girl. Willoughby Film Productions! I love it. Produced by George Willoughby. Anything with the Willoughby name has got my attention. Maybe I'll do start a gofundme to bring back Willoughby film productions.
The Whale - 9/10. This film is not about obesity being a health risk. That's just a setting. Charlie could have cancer or struggle with a wide variety of physical and mental health issues that lead to his unwillingness to help himself get better and the result would be almost exactly the same. His obesity is the same as his daughter's spiteful, cynical anger or his friend's self-sacrificing drive to tend to his needs or his ex-wife's alcoholism. Ways to illustrate how these characters harm themselves. And Charlie can't see the beauty in himself, he can't experience being a part of it, so he yearns to be a part of the beauty he sees in others, so his love would not go to waste with him when he dies. I find that very relatable. So the thing that is the essence of The Whale is his personality. If he'd be a grumpy asshole taking out his issues on others, if he would directly harm them with his behaviour, not just indirectly with his lifestyle, if he wouldn't turn all this negativity inwards but also outwards, the film would not work because just as Charlie, other characters appear to be "repulsive" as well to various degrees and only his fight to see the good behind appearances compells us to see how vulnerable they are and how they're not all that different from Charlie, even if they'd like to think they are. The movie operates with this beauty-ugly duality, so it doesn't exactly try to transcend it in message, but it doesn't have to for it to be extremely sad, kind of a tearjerker and still an overall positive experience.
Finally watched Black Panther 2. My expectations were low for this movie after Chadwick Boseman died. As time passed I considered recasting T'Challa and continuing his planned story arch would be better than a soft reboot that explained his death. What I wanted was an Afrofuturism take on "Foundation."
At least I have some of what I wanted. I really liked the overall Art Design of both Wakanda and Telakor. We got a lot of world-building that also as motivation for Namor's impending invasion. Namor himself was depicted as being much more formidable compared to other MCU villains, able to take on the Wakandan forces almost singlehandedly.
My only gripes were that I didn't understand why they could not just name someone the new Black Panther, but I appreciate that it was NOT because Shuri was a woman. I also feel that it was very long, and would have worked better as a TV show.
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