Talk About Movies: Part 4

And Thirlby in Dredd is an excellent pick for a single actor elevating the material/movie.

Dredd is a damned masterpiece, and 14 years old now!

I watched this last night (Song Sung Blue). It was really great. "What a surprise" describes it perfectly. I fully intended to come here and comment on how much Kate Hudson is looking like her dad, Kurt Russell, now, only to find out he's her stepdad, lol. I guess you take on the facial expressions of people you're around a lot.

High School and Welfare. Ex Libris on the New York Public Library is really good although I'm still pissed at the library because they wouldn't let me into the reading room without a book.

Sent from my Pixel 7a using Tapatalk

Fanny and Alexander by Bergman.

For some reason I thought I had seen this before when it was first released in 1982, but I'm not sure because I would have remembered it.

I watch so many movies that at times I can't remember if I've seen a movie or not. Maybe I only saw the first hour of Fanny and Alexander.

It's a beautiful and horrific film filled with warm characters and one beast of a man, who is as is typical for Bergman, a man of religion.

The movie is full of life, most of it surrounding the extended family of a mother, her three sons and their wives, the grandchildren, and assorted family servants.

Things turn bad when Fanny and Alexander's father dies and the mother marries a tyrannical reverend.

There's so much more but it would take a few more pages to get through the plot.

The film that was meant to be Bergman's last explores his familiar themes: theater, film, family ties, mystery and the supernatural. Beautiful cinematography from Bergman's usual DP, Sven Nykvist.

I think the line that gets me is the grandmother saying that we live as children and old people, but what happened to all the years in between.

I can't recommend this one highly enough, and I know it's one I will remember.

Sent from my Pixel 7a using Tapatalk

I probably like Beast more than most—I thought Winstone played off Kingsley perfectly, and the drive to the airport with McShane is an all-timer—but I get it.

Rebecca Ferguson in Doctor Sleep wins the category by a 1973 Belmont imo.

As much as I love Blade Runner 2049, it kinda blows too, but Ana de Armas saves it in an utterly thankless should’ve been laughable role, and Sylvia Hoeks gives Ferguson a run for best female villain of the millennium so far.

Demolition Man is barely watchable WITH Bullock.

I’ve long said had PTA scrapped everything out of Magnolia but the Robards PSH Cruise story, it sweeps the Oscars. At least Sean Penn wasn’t in it.

Don't agree with you , I think everyone should show decency even with whatever personal struggles they are going through , but I understand you.

Sent from my A142P using Tapatalk

The Bone Temple: WOW. I'll admit I was skeptical going in because I HATED 28 Years Later (hated the departure from the previously established rules, hated that the bedridden mother journeyed to bloody Mordor with little to no issue, and hated hated HATED the ADHD style cuts and "arrow time" slo mo shots. I got a headache watching this one)

The Bone Temple gives O'Connell and Fiennes a lot of runway to do their thing! Never knew it would be so fun watching Fiennes dance to Iron Maiden. I've been a fan of O'Connell since his '71 and Starred Up days. I hope he keeps getting good work, he's a special talent. I could appreciate the world building and the philosophical questions that arise while tripping balls with an alpha zombie. Like someone else mentioned, I did not enjoy Dacosta's Candyman, so this was a pleasant surprise. A bloody shame if they don't get the opportunity to close this story as it seems like they left it open for another sequel.

Trap: Call me crazy but I quite enjoyed this one. I had fun watching Hartnett chew scenery and try to squirm his way out of the rat's maze the authorities setup for him. I think it also helps I'm around the same age as Hartnett and could appreciate the fish out of water situation he was in at the concert. It's a tad clunky in the middle act and final act but overall I had fun.

Marty Supreme: boy oh boy was I STRESSED watching this one. Josh Safdie takes a character and asks the question, "What could go wrong?" when the answer in every sitaution is, "The worst thing imaginable." I had a blast watching Chalamet be a complete beast, destroying everyone in his path and being a complete scumbag. I get it's not everyone's cup of tea but I was along for the ride and dug O'Leary's speech he gave at the end. Apparently he wrote that bit himself?

Interesting....I loved 28 Years Later but thought Bone Temple was lacking. It was just brutality after brutality...I didn't like it. I did like Ralph Fiennes Iron Maiden concert, tho lol.

For Bone Temple I loved watching O'Connell be a total menace. I was intrigued by the system he setup to control the younger hooligans in his crew. Calling each of them Jimmy and "Howzat?" It reminded me of Immortan Joe and his half-life war boys from Fury Road. That group felt plausible given there was a zombie apocalypse and law and order are out the window. It was extremely difficult to watch them taunt and terrorize the family they murdered.

What You Wish For (2023)

A down on his luck gambling debt ridden Nick Stahl assumes another man's identity to get a job with a mysterious agency, only to find out that his employers have a decidedly sinister agenda in this offbeat slow burn thriller that I found pretty solid.

The Housemaid (2025)
A broke ass Sydney Sweeney becomes a nanny/housemaid only to realise something is seriously wrong with her host family in this silly but somewhat entertaining thriller, marred by a ridiculous conclusion and a rather wooden performance for Sweeney, although Amanda Seyfried is quite good in it.

21 Jump Street (2012)
Decided to revisit this one as I hadn't seen since its release and it still holds up and is surprisingly a lot better and funnier than it has any right to be.

Nuremberg (2025), James Vanderbilt

Love this kind of historical story...but man, this movie was not good. It looks good, it has some great actors, it tells what should be an interesting story...but yikes.

The script is so bad....welll maybe not bad...but over-written to the point of being ridiculously old-fashioned and laughable. Every scene is structured like a "how-to-write-a-screenplay" book, with dialog buttons that don't feel real but look great on the page.

Russell Crowe is great, but Rami Malik gets more manic and crazed throughout the movie, I was wondering why they decided to tell the story through this guy - a psychologist that the prosecution uses to make sure their Nazi criminals do not commit suicide before they geet to hang them lol. Or something. What an odd thing to build your movie around.

Then they have Micahel Shannon as the Supreme Court Justice who is leading the prosecution, but screws up so bad while grilling Goebbels on the stand that his British counterpart (Richard E. Grant) has to come in and win the day. The movie sets up Shannon as one of the heroes - yet he doesn't get the job done. It's just weird.

The dialog is so mannered and "written" that it made me laugh a lot. Which isn't good when you're making a movie about war crimes trials. And then during the trial, we get the prosecution showing us REAL photos from the camps - for an extended period. Showing the atrocities is maybe necessary, but not as just a way to make the audience go, "boo those Nazis! BAD Nazis, BAD!"

And there's an intermimable scene with Leo Woodall, who plays the American soldier escorting Malik's character around the prison...Malik is going to leave before Goebbels' testimony because he has done his job so poorly that he's being sent back to the U.S., and Woodall tells him his life story about being a Jew grrowing up in Germany that I swear must've been 20 minutes long, it was so tiresome and boring and unnecssary. And that's what inspires Malik to go tell Shannon that he can't win by letting Goebbels testify - and he's proven right because Shannon shits the bed so badly. What??

I'm babbling. The movie was bad. Never heard of the writer/director before, but apparently he wrote the screenplay for Zodiac, so he's not completely without talent. Watch this maybe for Crowe's performance, but not for anything else.

ah, I was gong to get to this, the trailer made it look good. I'll still give it a go, but will recalibrate expectations.

Darn it, I was also interested. Kinda do a compare and contrast to Judgement at Nuremburg.

Also, I caught whatever the Ballerina John Wick movie was. Ana de Armas plays someone who becomes a killer for the high table. Or the ballet. Or something.

As ridiculous as the originals were, they seemed to have some cohesion. At no point did I believe her in this role, and th action seemed pretty wanting comparatively. Meh.

gf wanted to watch some war films recently so that's what it's been

sisu - very bad - but it is what it is and if you're interested in a silly movie where an unstoppable finn kill nazis after they steal his gold then this is worth watching

3/10 as a film
7/10 as a genre film

all quiet on the western front this is the new one - i think i reviewed it earlier but don't recall - it's awful, doesn't even follow the book and completely misses the entire central core of the novel

you don't know who anyone is, what their names are etc, it's just anonymous characters interacting with each other, but not enough to instill enough for you to know a single thing about them nor even recall their names

it's just them, doing things that are awful, and themselves suffering along the way and just as you begin to know who someone is, they die

they not only removed the core theme from the novel and dramatically changed the rest, but they added a subplot about the peace proposal - which ironically was amongst the more interesting part imo

and the portrayal of battle was horrendously stupid - tanks being unescorted with infantry so people could just stroll up from the side and freely take them out, men using flame throwers walking around in the open and blasting people who themselves are in the open like it's some video game

also portrays human wave attacks - which genuinely were not a thing in reality - attacks were very carefully planned events, happening only under extremely dominant situations where they had enough to overwhelm the enemy into outright fleeing at first sight of the oncoming troops or they were being pounded so hard by artillery that they were unable to keep their heads above the trench to defend it

there's a reason why trench warfare was stagnant, because the situation was almost never conducive for an attack - but when they were, the attacks were nearly always successful because they wouldn't ever possibly do it unless the deck was stacked insanely in their favor

if you see thousands of men charging forward on your position, you don't stand there video game style and shoot as many as you can before they arrive and kill you - you flee, immediately and without thought - you have another line of defenses 100 yards behind you and there are even more beyond that, you have these there for good reason - in fact, you almost certainly were expecting this to happen already, because you knew how much resources they had on their side of the no mans land than you had so you already strategically withdrew last night to a safer fallback position

the film portrays it like each side just took turns deciding it was their turn to go over the top and attack where they'd run into an equally armed force awaiting them for combat and that's complete nonsense

if you want some good examples of how warfare is actually fought, look at all the video today being put out in all those armed conflicts around the globe, you'll see it's nearly always people exchanging pot shots from heavy cover - often times not even putting themselves into direct

this is also how trench warfare was fought - there's good reason why disease and artillery were the primary killers - you're never getting this guy with a knife or bullet, you will get him with a howitzer or covid

a decent breakdown of wwi killed in action (important because every side lost more people to disease than they did to combat - which again in important because this is never prortrayed that way at all) is

bayonets/hand to hand less than half of a percent
grenades about 2%
small arms about 30%
the rest, well over half was all artillery

4/10 as a film
1/10 as a genre film

1917 - awful film, no story, no characters, more of the same, you don't know nor care who anyone is or what happens to them

the entire premise is based on made up hollywood nonsense - the idea that an entire division would be cutoff from communication lines and had no phone lines, radios, etc - the idea that they couldn't do carrier pigeons or drop messages from planes was idiotic

nevermind that they send two men on foot instead of giving them motorcycles or jeeps or at least horses (there were about 10 million horses used in wwi for purposes of moving troops and supplies)

but... more importantly, if you were to argue "well they couldn't do any of that because the enemy was stationed in between them - then that means that unit was encircled - which means the very last thing they'd ever be doing in a million years would be to go on the attack - they would be hunkered down, hoping to not get starved out nor run out of ammunition, hoping a relief army would break through the encirclement and relieve them

and then you have the same silly things - like having trenches way too big and straight for ease of filming - maintaining the myth of human wave tactics because of cinematic magnitude

same with going through the no mans land, where despite being deep in german territory, they are not only actively patrolling in the middle of the night - but sending lone individuals who shoot on sight any movement they come across - the reality is the germans would constantly be shooting other people out on patrol this way

and... in this hellhole of a situation... there's not only a woman hiding out but with a child...

also, it has blacks and indians serving in the same units, lololololololol

not to mention the idea that an enlisted man would have an officer brother, something that would be incredibly rare and could only signify that the officer was the cream of the crop that got elevated due to people recognizing his greatness, or he came from a good family and was a total disaster of a person - kind of like a family where all the kids went to harvard or yale but one of them is homeless - so the fact that not one character reacts with surprise to learn the officer has an enlisted brother or vice versa is huge

but mostly, it was just a bad and boring film

1/10 film
1/10 genre film

but it had some neat big budget cinematic scenes

the world will tremble - very torn on this one, it was an incredibly interesting and compelling story - but not well put together - the main gripe being the extremely obviously bad usage of cgi backgrounds - so bad that they take you out of it and kill it

it was well acted but again, it lacked storyline - you didn't know who was who or anything about them, it was a collection of anonymous people and there were a bunch of red herrings where you'd begin to think "ok maybe this is the guy we should be paying attention to" and then he's dead "oh whoopsies, guess it's going to be someone else"

incredibly compelling story - amazing, really good because it does something most holocaust films do not, it underscores how it was managed - that despite that terrible things were happening, that jews were seeing others get murdered - they still took for granted that the end was in sight, if they just hunkered down & listened to orders then things would get better

my main gripe is again, that you don't really know anything about the two main characters, you in fact have no clue who the main guys are going to be out of the 20 anonymous people that things are happening to in equal measure - so you have no idea whom to hone in on nor what their name is until the film is almost over

but unlike the other films - this one stuck with me and remained in my psyche

6/10 film - lacks a functional plot, storyline, character etc
10/10 genre film - perhaps the best holocaust film i've seen

Rick have you seen Escape From Sobibor (1987)? That's another good Holocaust film and available free on youtube

no, i'll check it out, thanks

I will have no bad mouthing of Sisu. It is an AWESOME movie.

i mean for what it is, it's good, but it's no under siege or shooter

it wasn't even cheesy enough to be annoyingly good like the bee keeper where they are so on the nose and dedicated that the secret service embraced the metaphor with "he's protecting the hive"

lol Rick, we like vastly different movies. the Beekepper was laughably bad.

yes but bad enough where it was good bad - sisu wasn't aware enough to achieve that

lol the guy was indestructable....how self-aware do you want it to be?? He literally survives a plane crash into a bog.

but without catch phrases dom, without catch phrases

he was too cool to acknowledge how effortlessly cool he was

without just a little bit of camp it always feels to me like they think it's plausible someone could do something like this

a big reason why i love reading arrian is because he opens up his stuff on alexander the great with something to the effect of "i know these stories are going to sound a bit preposterous at times, but no worries, he's not a mere human he's actually part god ldo"

+1 for team Sisu yes / Beekeper no