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

Greased Lightning. Richard Pryor’s first lead role wasn’t in a comedy — it was in this biopic of Wendell Scott, the first black NASCAR driver and first black driver to win at the top level. It’s an extremely hokey movie (it has these sort of jaunty songs that comment on the action for all the big scenes, for crying out loud), but it operates at a sufficient level of lightweight goodwill to be a pleasant enough watch. Also, his wife is played by Pam Grier and she happens to do the best acting in the movie (Pryor is very broad), so that certainly helps its watchability. It’s not a good movie, but it’s got enough likability to just barely overcome it.

 

I liked the Batman a lot. Not sure I'd put it up with Nolan's films, but certainly a terrific entry in the franchise and a much needed shot in the arm for DC. I like Shazaam! a lot as well.

 

Meh I was bored when my son demanded we watch newest Batman. So was my daughter. I surfed the net a whole lot while it was playing.

 

Escape to Athena (1977)
WW2 action/adventure/comedy set in a German prison camp in Greece. It's a mishmash of Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape, and Kelly's Heroes, except that it's kind of a mess that doesn't quite work. Starring Roger Moore, David Niven, Telly Savalas, Richard Roundtree, Stefanie Powers, Elliot Gould, and Sonny Bono. Great cast, too bad they didn't have much to work with. Most of the action scenes were lame; multiple gunfights and lots of dead bodies, but not a drop of blood. I'm no fan of gore, but this looked like kids playing at war.

 

TWELVE O'CLOCK HIGH (1949)

Since we've been enjoying MASTERS OF THE AIR, this dovetailed perfectly. The 918th Bomb Group has gained a reputation as being jinxed - plagued by high casualty rates, less than stellar rate of missions completed, etc. When Major General Frank Savage (that name!), played by Gregory Peck, decides that the problem, sadly, is that his good friend, currently in command, has lost command authority, he is given the unfortunate task of replacing him and trying to get the group back into fighting shape.

While this description suggests a pretty stereotypical "whip this unit into shape" movie, I was impressed at this movie's smarts and focus on the challenges of leadership. Peck is great, and the movie takes a sophisticated look at the complexities of trying to inspire men to, time and again, put themselves into harms way, under enormous stress, of walking the line between earning respect versus courting approval, of how a leader has to differentiate between when to push and when to ease off. While it's focus is more on human drama than big action scenes, it's engaging throughout. When we are taken along on a combat mission, much of the footage is taken from actual WW2 film shot by aircrews and gun-cameras.

Very entertaining and definitely worth a watch!

 

Just finished The Valachi Papers. This was…very good. Nice timeline of the beginning of the golden era of the mafia to the start of the decline of it. Bronson did great. Lots of violence.

Next up idk I haven’t looked at any list yet.

 

Dang I tried to get out of shower in time to edit that before window ended..

One thing confused me in that movie and that was the term Goomba. It was used for a captain or Lt. I was certain this term was for side girlfriend.. that threw me off hearing it directed at a man.

 

Fleet Fighter (1942)
A British WW2 training film about young pilot trainees learning to be fighter pilots. It's no Top Gun for drama or excitement, but it's miles ahead in realism. All the characters are serving military personnel, not actors, and the script is written purely to illustrate tactical and training doctrine. I found the training equipment fascinating; I doubt most of that stuff exists anymore. And the flying is obviously all real and well-filmed. Most people will probably find it dull, but I enjoyed it.

 

Just got back from Dune Part 2 in IMAX. Everything I wanted it to be. My only real complaint is that I wanted more of all of it. I wanted more Feyd-Rautha, I wanted more between the Emperor and his daughter, I wanted more of Paul and Chani during their happy time, I wanted more of the Lea Seydoux character . . . and when you get to the end of what is essentially a single five-and-a-half-hour movie and your main note is, "Boy, I could have spent a lot more time in that world with those characters in that story," that's a real achievement. All of the performances are great; Christopher Walken doesn't have anything to really do and basically anybody could have played that character as written, so that's a shame. Everything else is great and epic and fascinating. It's a movie rich in themes, rich in story, rich in characters.

As for Dune: Messiah . . .

 

The one from 2022?

 

Intruder in the Dust. William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust covers similar ground to To Kill a Mockingbird: an unjustly accused black man in the South, the mob mentality behind lynching, a young point of view character whose family authority figure is the defense attorney. It makes for an interesting contrast, as Intruder is in some ways more and in some ways less idealistic.

The plot revolves around a proudly independent black farmer, played by the great Juano Hernandez in this film adaptation. He’s accused of murdering one of the virulently racist white trash clan he’s had trouble with before. Claude Jarman, Jr. plays the teenage boy whom Hernandez once saved from a frozen river, engendering complex feelings of obligation and resentment at Hernandez’s stubborn, incongruous pride. Jarman gets his lawyer uncle to defend Hernandez, but the uncle believes Hernandez is guilty. It’s left to Jarman, his black servant, and a pluckily independent old lady to find the evidence that shows Hernandez is innocent, at which point the uncle and the sheriff have to catch the real killer to prove Hernandez so innocent that he won’t end up lynched anyway.

Hanging over the whole movie is the looming likelihood of lynching, accepted as virtually inevitable by everybody even as they make noise about deploring it and try to convince Jarman that nothing’s going to happen. Though the story has a happier ending than To Kill a Mockingbird, this is where its less idealistic side is highlighted. Jarman’s uncle is no Atticus Finch; the story takes a more nuanced approach to white reactions to racism. There’s a great feel for the excuses everyone makes for themselves to not get involved, the unchallenged assumptions. The uncle makes a show of deploring the bloodthirst of the would-be mob onlookers, and holds himself up as better than the kind of white trash who go around lynching black folks, but he’s also locked into assumptions that Hernandez is guilty, indifferent to the inevitability of a lynching, willing to make excuses for doing the minimum to feel innocent of the outcome and then wash his hands of it. It’s a really incisive portrait of the attitudes among the better part of society that permit terrible things to continue to happen.

It makes for a really strong film. It’s got great insight into its characters, both white and black, and it’s well made, with good performances. It doesn’t feel like any other movie from the forties that you are going to see on race; it feels a good ten years ahead of its time. It’s definitely worth seeing.

 

You’re thinking of the Sicilian or Calabrian “comare/ cummare/ cumma,” which the Sopranos pronounce as “goomah,” which is a mistress in their New Jersey Italian-American lingo. A goombah’s just a corruption of the Sicilian or Calabrian “compare/ cumpare/ cumpa,” and means family friend (and always a dude). Used by non-Italian-Americans and pronounced with an accent on the first syllable instead of the second, it’s a pejorative term for an Italian-American that is assumed to be a mafioso.

 

No real reviews here today from me, but while getting some organizing and bookkeeping done this weekend I rewatched The Naked Gun and My Cousin Vinny yet again.
Both films are good and not so good for multitasking.
While each provide a familiar and humorous display of dialogue that makes tedious jobs go by more quickly, it's all too easy to get sucked in and just watch scene after scene, forgetting about the main task at hand.
So that's mainly what I did. But I did get a bit of dusting done during the baseball game in TNG.

 

Jules 2023

Ben Kingsley plays an old geezer living alone, one night a spaceship crashes in his garden and an alien falls out.
It sounds promising right? But I gave up after 45 mins. it's so boring.

 

New rule. If @gezvader dislikes a movie, I’m watching it. Firing up Jules (2033) tonight. Popcorn ready to pop.

 

The Violence Action (2022)

A pink-haired college girl is part of a small vigilante group with targeted assassinations as they get mixed up.with an assignment involving the Yakuza. A popcorn movie with action in just about every scene where there girl has superhero-like moves and the enemies are worse shots than stormtroopers. Don't waste your time on this one.

 

The Conversation Gene Hackman has always looked old, huh? Despite the outdated technology involved, this is still a great thriller involving a surveillance expert doing a job he suspects may result in murder.

Spoiler

It does, but he's got it backward and realizes it too late.

After Hours Ordinary office worker stumbles into a surreal odyssey just trying to get home. A random pretty woman gives him her number, invites him over late at night, and it spirals from there. I would compare it to Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, except this is more comedic-- albeit pitch black humor most of the time. I really liked the ending. This is how Kevin McCallister's parents met.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore She shouldn't have taken Kris Kristofferson back. I know it's 1974 and it's unfortunately consistent with a character who stuck with the first ******* until he died, but that rubbed me the wrong way.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline I like how one of the "eco-terrorists" protests that they're "not murderers" with regards to pipeline workers, and then one of the workers almost immediately doesn't show them the same courtesy, pulls out a gun (why was he armed? ****ing Texas, man) and just unloads at a fleeing non-threat. To emphasize the point, a cop later just wallops a surrendering and unarmed woman with his nightstick. A sympathetic and non-judgmental portrayal of people who hate the fossil fuel industry for personal and societal reasons.

 

Yes.

Yawn.

 

I re-watched Top Gun: Maverick last night. Easily one of the best movies Ive seen in the last few years.

 

I agree.

I will say it did have some good, I felt Robert Pattinson did a great job in his portrayal; but he should have played Terry McGinnis not Bruce Wayne.I liked the aspect of Batman's detective side. Colin Farrell did a good job as the Penguin. The rest of the cast was painful as was the poorly written script.

 

I think there just to many damn Batman’s at this point for me to care about. If it’s not Keaton or Bale I’m just like hurry up and end please anytime I’m watching. I think the new DCverse has been so boring barring Cavil’s Sups that I’d rather watch Kilmer or Clooney which is just….yeah…

 

You get a Batman and you get a Batman and you get a Batman!

 

I Never Sang for My Father. This has to be one of the most blatant cases of Oscar category shenanigans ever: Gene Hackman is unquestionably the lead, and was nominated as a supporting actor, while supporting actor Melvyn Douglas was nominated as a leading actor. But hey, it’s a good movie.

Hackman plays a successful college professor and writer who was widowed a year ago. He took some time off in California, met a wonderful woman, and wants to marry her and move to California, where her kids and medical practice are established. But the only problem is bringing himself to tell his parents. Hackman adores his mother, but his relationship with Douglas, his father, is strained on his side. Douglas isn’t a monster, but he’s obliviously self-centered and just sort of overwhelming. He treats Hackman like a kid, patronizes him, clings to him manipulatively, and generally rides roughshod over him. He pushes all of Hackman’s buttons, yet Hackman can’t ever stand up to him, trying to be the good son, trying to avoid hating his dad after seeing how Douglas’s own loathing for his drunken, abusive father warped him. With Douglas increasingly infirm, and then Hackman’s mother passing, it becomes ever more difficult to get up the nerve to move out of his father’s shadow.

That’s all the film is really about: Hackman’s feelings of infantilization, his mingled resentment and guilt, and his attempts to navigate them and reach independence. It’s very well put together, slowly unraveling how thoroughly Douglas’s unthinking solipsism has wounded Hackman and just how overwhelming he is. It’s a humane, intelligent drama that puts some really outstanding performances together and trusts the audience to stick with this kind of minor-key emotional storytelling because the underlying substance is just plain good. Excellent stuff.

 

Watched Taxi driver for my American history class. Yes I was surprised it was assigned as well.