Amph What was the last movie you saw? (Ver. 2)

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

Best in the series. A masterpiece of the action / spy genre. Breathtaking action sequences. Edge of your seat suspense. Comedy never misses. Really likeable cast of characters. Mission accomplished! 9.5/10.

 

I like the look on William Brandt's face when the Secretary describes how Ethan would overpower them to make his escape. He's like, "Boss, er, what?""

 

Birds of Prey 2020

I like Kick-Ass , I like Deadpool , so I should like this too.
But I didn't , much. There's a good fight with a baseball bat and Huntress has a couple of funny moments, but otherwise I didn't find it funny and Harley a bit tiresome tbh.
And what Ewan McGregor was doing I just don't know.

Also - what is she wearing ? it just looks a mess.

 

"They Call It Pro Football", the first long-form production from NFL Films, and the first one narrated by John Facenda. Good stuff.
At South Plainfield Library, we had this as part of our on-line movie presentation this week. It was a football triple feature, with this, "Three Little Pigskins" (with the Three Stooges and a pre-TV Lucille Ball), and Andy Griffith's "What It Was, Was Football" audio routine (one of my Mom's favorites).

 

Then let us give thanks for corporate synergy.

You don't get to say that every day.

 

Mank (2020) – David Fincher

You’re not writing an opera.

But I am writing an opera.

Well, he’s done it again. David Fincher has turned in another masterpiece. I was pretty mixed on Gone Girl, so mixed that I admit it hadn’t even really registered just how long we’d gone without a new Fincher film. Well, I thought, he’s coming back with a real high-wire act and Mank, shot in glorious black-and-white, a glamorous tale of Old Hollywood and classic cinematic icons, is a triumph.

My praise for the movie just really has to start with Gary Oldman. It seems to me that the Academy often gives people “career” Oscars for weak performances only for the performer in question to blindside them with a genuinely great performance in just the next couple of years. That definitely happened here. Oldman unjustly took home an Oscar for his mostly bad work in Darkest Hour, but now, with Mank, he’s turned in a performance that is genuinely one of his best. For an actor of Oldman’s caliber to turn in a performance that really might be his best nearly forty years into his career is astounding, but this is one of his most finely calibrated performance, a performance that’s really about finding the weary, cynical, often nasty, unhappy and ultimately brilliant soul of his character. And it’s a character that we need to believe is capable of writing Citizen Kane; and, by the end, we do believe it.

He’s ably supported by a brilliant cast. Top marks must go to Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies; she’s an actor I’ve found a bit overrated in prior films, but she’s finally given a truly great performance. She’s convincing as Davies the star and as Davies the person and she’s iconic to boot. Though look at those eyes! Somebody write a Bette Davis biopic stat! Ferdinand Kingsley, an actor I can’t recall seeing before, gives an excellent performance as a particularly villainous Irving Thalberg and Jamie McShane brings heart and emotional weight to his performance as would-be director who finds himself in over his head when he gets pulled into the big politics of the movie studios. I mean, that’s where I’m stopping because they kind of elevate themselves above the ensemble in my opinion and if you give everybody in the ensemble who deserves it a sentence, the review is longer than the movie. Tom Pelphrey, Charles Dance, Tuppence Middleton, Lily Collins, Arliss Howard & Sam Troughton are all excellent as well; and where else can we end but at Tom Burke’s uncanny, magnificent, larger-than-life performance as Orson Welles?

I guess that brings us to the meat of the matter, but I honestly don’t find the movie to be all that ax-grindy when it comes to “setting the record straight” on the writing of Citizen Kane. The movie isn’t a hatchet job on Orson Welles. Hell, it’s not even, as, by the way, Citizen Kane also isn’t, a hatchet job on William Randolph Hearst! The movie affords even Hearst, a despicable character certainly, a moment or two of empathy or, at least, of humanity. But the screenplay, by Jack Fincher, director David’s father, is ultimately both about invoking Kane and also echoing it and that’s why it ultimately works. It’s a fantastic Russian doll for movie buffs, but ultimately it is, like Kane, a story about a flawed man and the regrets he’s built over his life. One could say that this gorgeously photographed movie is about the rot at the heart of the studio system and the political systems of the time, but also, of course, of today. The political elements of the script were surprising to me and they brought what could have been a fun “spot the trivia reference” game to life for me. The movie is somehow both a beautiful evocation of a kind of dream-past, tinted by nostalgia, and a gripping piece of subversive political action that feels completely up to date and of the moment. At the end of the day, Fincher’s done more here than re-litigate the creation of Citizen Kane; he’s re-crossed some of the same ground crossed by Kane, the terrain of a man’s identity. What makes a man who he is? His failures, his flaws, his regrets, his brilliance? Mank is like Kane, a man defined by oppositions; I kept thinking as I watched the movie that Mank is often the most insightful guy in the room yet he’s also a man profoundly defined by his own massive blind-spots, all of which relate to himself. He understands everything about the world except where he fits in it. If that ain’t tragedy, it’ll do for now. 4 stars.

tl;dr – brilliant lead performance by Oldman anchors smart, layered screenplay and leads an excellent ensemble; a magical, brilliant, challenging tragedy is another masterwork by Fincher. 4 stars.

 

The parable of the Organ Grinder's Monkey...

 

Hillbilly Elegy (2020)
A biopic adapted from the memoirs of JD Vance, who grew up in the Appalachian town of Jackson, Kentucky as well as the the Rust Belt City of Middletown, Ohio. Three generations of stories are enveloped into one story as Vance's mother (played by Amy Adams) juggles a drug addiction while trying to keep her family together. And the one who is always there as the saving grace is his grandmother (played by Glenn Close). The movie got chewed out by critics during the first several weeks of its release (with a rotten tomato rating of about 25%); and yet the ratings by public viewers on the site are about 85%. Personally, I don't see what the problem was. I thought it was a very engaging story and the cast did a superb job in their performance. This is certainly a movie I'd recommend to friends.

 

the poor are poor bc they’re lazy

 

That Terminator metaphor is like something from one of the fake movies on 30 Rock, cannot believe they actually thought it was a good idea.

 

Haven't seen this one yet, but I'd be interested in how it compares to "RKO 281", the made-for-HBO movie from 1999 about the making of "Citizen Kane", with Liev Schreiber as Welles and John Malkovich as Mank.

 

It's always so weird to me because to me Mank will always be Tom Mankiewictz, who was this Mank's nephew. Tom was one of my profs and quite the character.

 

The Great Air Race (1991)
Originally titled Half a World Away, dramatized account of the epic 1934 race from London to Melbourne. Characters include many of the great names of 30's aviation: Amy Johnson, Roscoe Turner (and his pet lion cub Gilmore), Clyde Pangborn, and Jackie Cochrane. The cast has enough talent to carry the day with enthusiasm over acting skill; even though their deliveries are stilted, they're still likeable and believable. As for the aviation history, it was close enough, no huge departures from the facts. And there were a few beautiful old airplanes in addition to some that were laughable (a T-6 Texan with gear down for a Gee Bee R6? Srsly?).

 

Now, Voyager. I’m sorry to say this kind of soggy melodrama just doesn’t do it for me. There’s something in the central story, with Bette Davis as a spinster suffering under her self-centered mother’s tyranny until she goes to a sanitarium and then heads off on a cruise, having found her independence. Of course, she also finds a man, Paul Henreid, but he’s married. That’s where the film, which has just been soapy romantic melodrama, really starts falling down. He’s married, and the film doesn’t know what to do about it, and it’s adapting an overlong melodramatic novel, so they separate, and the film meanders on to have Davis living with her mother again and showing off her independence, and then an absolutely bizarre ending in which Davis leaves her fiance because she’s in love with Henreid, but can’t actually be with him, and settles for some kind of creepy unhealthy arrangement where she becomes the surrogate mother to Henreid’s daughter while Henreid stays with her unloving mother. The film is a soppy, melodramatic mess that completely loses its way in the second half, but at least the psychiatrist is played by Claude Rains, so it’s got something going for it.

 

I tell you what Davis gets absolutely right is the fragility. Not a word you can usually associate with Davis, but after she's come out of the sanitarium and is going through those first few scenes of meeting Henreid and all that, she gets the fragility of newfound mental and emotional health exactly right. All in the way she moves and her eyes. I say that as someone who has been through some mental and emotional health issues. It's not as big and bold as a lot of Davis performances; but, especially in the middle section of the film, she's at the top of her game.

I like the movie quite a bit actually, but it's definitely not what you'd call focused or particularly well structured.

 

Frenzy. Hitchcock’s penultimate picture, this feels very uncharacteristic. It’s made with largely unknowns, an above all, it’s made in the seventies, and Hitch, always the shocker, actually goes ahead and uses his newfound freedom to throw in nudity and swearing, which just feels so strange coming from a director who was working before there was sound, and always fitted so well into the restrained, suggestive thriller style of the golden age. The film certainly works as a lurid thriller, but it certainly doesn’t feel like Hitchcock at his best, despite the familiar wrong-man premise. Star Jon Finch has a rather Ollie Reed-ish energy as a surly bartender who loses his job, only to find himself the lead suspect as the serial sex killer stalking London after his ex-wife is murdered. There are a couple good setpieces, the villain is agreeably loathsome, and the script works well to set our man up. The film definitely works. But it’s hard not to feel that it’s really not up to Hitch’s standards. It’s fascinating to see him working without limits, but it also makes you think that he was probably better off having to work within constraints. As is, it feels a bit generic — it could really be any rather sleazy seventies thriller, and you only really feel the master’s touch in a few sequences.

 

Aftermath (2017)
Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in a film inspired by true events where an older man loses his wife, daughter, and unborn grandchild in a terrible plane crash when two planes collided mid-flight. The story is balanced by another point of view; that of the air traffic controller who was at the helm when the planes crashed. It's an poignant story but of course with Schwarzenegger involved, the serious and dramatic tone of the picture ultimately gives way to suspense and some action. I'm not sure how much of the story was true, but nevertheless it had a lot to say.

 

@Rogue1-and-a-half, glad to see your Mank review. Loved this movie, can't praise it enough. My gut tells me it's going to get overshadowed in Awards Season, but as long as it's nominated for something, I'll be okay.

 

Uncle Frank (2020)
Enjoyed it. The cast is great, even though not everyone gets a chance to shine. Paul Bettany gives a very good performance in the lead.

 

Yeah, Oldman winning for Darkest Hour pretty well locks him out of winning much of anything for this, for example. Which is too bad since he's worlds better in this than he was in that.

 

Raising Arizona. I’m on the Coens’ comedy wavelength, and there’s a great match here between their weird, delightfully stupid sense of humor and Nic Cage doing his weird thing. The results are bizarre but work for me. The story is ostensibly about childless Cage and Holly Hunter kidnapping a baby, but it quickly meanders off in all sorts of oddball directions. It has no real focus or throughline, and everything that happens is bizarre and left-field, existing in a sort of heightened universe of its own. It really should not work. And yet, with charming acting, hilariously goofy dialogue, and a sense of madcap fun, it does.

 

I have that with The Big Liebowski , it just doesn't work for me and yet its one of their most popular.

 

Same. I love Raising Arizona, but, while I can appreciate the merits of some of the performances, John Goodman in particular, and Jeff Bridges is to be commended for just ******* going for it with absolutely no holds barred, I just find Lebowski really labored and not funny at all. I have in the past said that Bridges' performance was good; I don't know that I think that anymore. But it's . . . fearless and unexpected. But I just looked it up to see how long it is and I see that it's actually under two hours . . . and man it feels like a solid three to me.

Probably been ten years since I've seen it; Lord knows my opinion has changed on plenty of movies over smaller periods of time, but it's just really hard to motivate myself to try that one again. It's just exhausting in the way that only unfunny comedies are. I'll probably only give it another watch in the context of doing some sort of Coen Brothers retrospective project or something, should I ever do that.