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

I only had some piqued curiosity on the "Extinction" film because it featured the dinosaurs; which were always my favorite Transformers toys growing with up in the 80s.

 

Little Women (2019)

Starring Hermione Granger, Mary Queen of Scots, the new Black Widow, and Admiral Holdo.

Seriously, it was good.

 

I love Bringing Up Baby.
"Oh Susan!" Lol.

That one and It Happened One Night are all time classic comedies.

 

What surprised me most about Bumblebee was the portrayal of the female lead as a human character and not just a sex prop. Quite a unique departure from the rest of the Transformers films.


Saving Mr. Banks. This was an interesting film. It's about the making of the original Mary Poppins film and the abrasive working relationship with author Pamela Travers and Walt Disney. Amusingly, Saving Mr. Banks is a film made by the Disney company and they cast no other than the lovable Tom Hanks to pay Walt, ensuring that audiences will get the idea that Walt is the unwavering good guy in this story and Travers is just an obstacle in Walt's quest to bring magic and dreams to people everywhere.

The film does include some of the nasty things Walt did in that relationship, mainly how he deliberately did not invite Travers to the film's opening and his insistence on overpowering Travers's creative supervision rights over the project. But despite these little details (all of which Tom Hanks portrays with his usual on-screen charisma), the film is largely one-sided in Disney's favor. After all, Travers is getting in the way of making magic, and that's what Disney is all about, right? Sharing magic with everyone. So of course the film can't be about a broke writer trying to not lose stories and characters that are precious to her over to an all-powerful corporation that wants to remake her ideas in accordance to its own vision for the sake of raking in tons of cash.

The film could easily be about a writer desperately not trying to sell out and doing all that she can to protect herself and her intellectual property in the face of opposition from the mighty Disney corporation, but it's mostly about poor Walt and his magical Disney crew just trying to make magic and Travers eventually realizing that the Disney way is, obviously, the right way.

 

I mean, but Travers happened to be wrong. She hated things that were fantastic and turned out wonderful. That's the reality of the story. My favorite thing about that film was getting to see the wonderful work that is the Sherman Brothers in action.

 

I don't understand. She didn't like what was done with her story. Just because the Disney version was popular and profitable doesn't mean that she was "wrong." She wanted an accurate representation of her work, and she didn't get that.

 

I had a similar reaction to the movie Ezio. I think it should have kept it vague as to what Travers actually thought of the film. The tears in her eye were way too much.

I'd love to see a more accurate film portray Walt Disney, I'd imagine you'd have to do something like 'The Master' with a stand-in to protect from the litigious happy shareholders.

 

I recall that she did cry during the film, but for reasons other than what the film suggests, and that she afterwards confronted Walt about the changes he made without her consent.

 

Mulan (1998)
Yet another Disney animated musical about a girl finding her place in the world, accompanied by magical animals. It's not a bad film, but not one of the greats.

 

A Hard Day's Night

 

Interesting. I thought they were supposed to play more as happy tears.

 

National Treasure.

Today, I realized an inconsistency. Unless it’s a different Thomas Gates (the grandfather of National Treasure 2’s Thomas Gates which is unlikely given the relatively short gap between 1832 and 1865), Ben Gates’s grandfather John Gates says that Thomas is his great-great-grandfather kn the first film. But in the second film, Thomas is said to be Ben’s great-great-grandfather. (Ben’s father Patrick knew his grandfather Charles, who was Thomas’s son and John’s father)

 

I love Saving Mr. Banks. It makes a terrific trilogy with the original and Mary Poppins Returns.

The last movie I saw was Crime of Passion, a noir from 1957. I checked it out cause I'm a fan of Sterling Hayden's work in The Killing and Dr. Strangelove, both directed by Stanley Kubrick.

Anyhow, COP is a well directed drama that shows a woman who has her own career working as a writer for a newspaper until she decides to get married, only to find she cannot stand the life of being a 1950s housewife and the monotony that it entails. So she decides to take matters into her own hands with tragic consequences.

The cast is great, Barbara Stanwyck is very effective in the lead role and makes a great couple with Sterling Hayden. Their scenes together are very good. Raymond Burr shines in his small yet powerful role and Fay Wray is good too.

I liked the cinematography a lot, and at a quick 86 minutes, this film has all the hallmarks of a good noir; smoking, drinking, shadows and blinds, guns, cars, and night scenes.

It's definitely worth a look if you like genre pieces from the 1950s.

 

Yeah the film depicts them as happy tears, but in reality she was not happy and Walt dismissed her concerns. I'm not sure if she sought legal damages or not, as she did have a contract and consensual taped recordings of her meetings with Walt that would have backed her up.

 

Just a note here: Walt Disney didn't give a crap about money. He never did in any of his projects. Money was just a necessity his brother Roy dealt with in the company to keep it going. He cared about creative vision. And I'm sorry, I think he was right in the changes he made to Mary Poppins. It created one of the best films of all time. And the heart of the matter was Travers' difficult childhood did influence the stories she wrote. So I think that part is a good representation of what the heart of Mary Poppins is, which is indeed about saving Mr. Banks.

 

It's funny that Emma Thompson who played Travers, played a character somewhat similar to Mary Poppins in Nanny McPhee. What's more, in the first Nanny McPhee movie, she co-starred with two celebrities who would appear in Mary Poppins Returns: Colin Firth and Angela Lansbury (although the latter's role was more of a cameo in MPR).

 

The Kid who would be King.

modern take on King Arthur . It was ok , but somehow it never hit it's stride and it felt a bit like a tv show.

 

I've taken the opportunity to catch up a bit.

The Irishman Whoo boy, that was a long one. twss It wasn't too bad once it got going, but it took me two attempts to get through it. It's a Martin Scorsese mob movie, so anyone who's seen Goodfellas and Casino knows what to expect. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are great of course because they're trying, though it is really weird to cast the most iconic living Italian-American actors as other ethnicities in a mob movie and repeatedly draw attention to it. I assume it was a joke on their part.

I hate the de-aging stuff. It's like De Niro got a face lift and a dye job. It might have worked better if he didn't move like a septuagenarian (it stood out in scenes like where he was curbstomping that shopkeeper) and if I didn't know exactly what 30, 40-something Robert De Niro looked like. Thankfully Frank Sheeran was 50+ for most of the film so the effect wasn't as excruciating as I feared at first.

Thematically it was a retread. It had nothing new to say. The mob life might make for interesting stories, but if you survive it all in the end you're all alone and empty. So basically the same message we've been getting since The Godfather.

Joker I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Obviously the reviewers who called it an ode to the alt-right are either idiots or liars. I also don't agree with the reviewers who say the message is muddled. While the film is sympathetic toward Arthur Fleck's circumstances, I don't think it's at all sympathetic toward his monstrous actions. He shot two of the Wall Street guys in self-defense; hunting the last one down was not the decision of a hero.

One thing bugged me, though. For all of its basis in realism, people celebrating Arthur because he shot a beloved talk show host is really weird. Wall Street bros? Sure, an angry and desperate public would celebrate that. Shooting Johnny Carson? I don't know.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood This was created in a lab to appeal to the nostalgia of anyone who watched his show, especially framing the whole movie as though it were an episode. It mostly worked on me. Tom Hanks was good enough that I stopped thinking of him as "Tom Hanks doing his best Mr. Rogers impression." The family drama was fine. The highlights were scenes with Fred Rogers.

 

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

 

Knives Out (2019) – Rian Johnson

You’re not much of a detective, are you?

Well, to be fair, you make a pretty lousy murderer.

In Knives Out, Rian Johnson has crafted a clever, entertaining riff of the star-studded whodunnits of yore and he’s added a subversive dose of political commentary in order to spice things up a bit. That’s pretty well the one sentence hot-take on this movie and it’s pretty well where I land on the film. I’m not quite as fired up about the movie as a lot of people are, but I certainly wouldn’t say I’m chilly on it. It’s just . . . not quite as mind-blowingly fun as a lot of people are saying. I’m an Agatha Christie fan going way, way back, so I was all the way in on the set-up; I was also a little thrown when the movie, fairly quickly, segues neatly away from being an Agatha Christie riff by just flat out showing us the circumstances surrounding the central death of the film. I’ll take things briefly behind spoiler tags just for the fun of it, even though I’m not going to get super-spoilery even there.

Spoiler

What the film turns into is a riff on a different kind of murder mystery, the Columbo style tale where we, the audience, know the identity of the murderer and the entertainment value comes from watching an eccentric detective slowly tighten the net around the killer. But Knives Out has a subversive twist on this subgenre as well; the pleasure on Columbo was heightened because we were typically watching an arrogant, condescending rich guy get caught by a working class detective. You were always waiting for the moment when that condescending smirk got wiped off the killer’s face by the guy he thought was an idiot. In Knives Out, we’re watching a condescending, arrogant rich guy slowly tighten the net on a working class culprit who is, in the larger scheme of society, herself a victim, and so, even as we love Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in spite of his arrogance, we want to see him fail, we want to see the “killer” get away it. Johnson essentially flips the class dynamic of Columbo and thereby also flips the dramatic tension. Now when I say that I don’t think Knives Out is quite as smart as everyone seems to think it is, understand me: that’s still really smart and fun.

The movie has a great ensemble that it really ultimately asks very little of, comparative to what they’re capable of. Of course, that’s always kind of been the thing about these large ensemble mysteries, all the way back to the star-studded Poirot films with Albert Finney and up to the . . . well, the Poirot films with Kenneth Branagh. But, look, not every movie is Hereditary or Nocturnal Animals; give Toni Collette & Michael Shannon a chance to just have some fun. That’s just fine. Everyone in it is good, not great, but whatever. Jaeden Martell, nee Leiberher if you’re keeping track of this fine young actor, is probably the most wasted and his entire character is an oddity; in this climate, I don’t know why you put a character that’s an alt-right troll in your movie and then just never reference it. Don Johnson, of all people, kind of gave the standout performance for me; everyone in this movie blusters a lot, but Johnson’s the one who lets us see the fear behind the bluster. When I say the movie isn’t as smart as it thinks it is, I guess I’m saying that the final twist isn’t that much of a shock, nor have the clues been hidden quite as cleverly as Johnson thinks, though I will confess that there is one element of that twist ending that neatly filled something I had kind of rolled my eyes at earlier, thinking it was a plot hole, so that was a carefully seeded bit of business. But then, as I said, I cut my teeth on Agatha Christie, so maybe I’m more attuned to this kind of thing than others are; I just know I was expecting something a little more unexpected. But still, this is a downright fun movie for sure; I have the same reservations about it that I seem to have about every Johnson movie. He’s a director that’s somewhat problematic for me in terms of the writing, I guess. I’ve walked out of every Johnson movie I’ve ever seen wishing it was just a smidge better, but still having had a good time. And it’s heartening to see a movie like this doing well with a larger audience. I hope the studios take the right lesson from this year; after Joker and Knives Out (and maybe even the relatively large, if still small, success of Parasite), I think it’s about time they figured out that mainstream audiences are down for more idiosyncratic films than the studios seem to think. Now there’s a twist. 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – subversive mystery is a lot of fun with a smart script and a game cast; less mindblowing and clever than it thinks, but still a damn good time at the movies. 3 ½ stars.

 

Uncut Gems. Many films have exploited the dramatic potential of degenerate gamblers’ (and other addicts’) inability to make good decisions. This does it about as well as you could ask for. It’s just a constant swirling maelstrom of chaos as Sandler (outstanding) keeps piling gambits on top of gambits, unable to help himself. The Safdie brothers’ direction is great, establishing a constant jangling sense of urgency. It’s a totally compelli g film. I really liked it.

 

I really enjoyed Knives Out....eVeN tHOugH iT waS dIREctEd bY RUIN JOHNSON







I'm never doing that again

 

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
So I finally got around to watching this movie, as a Redbox rental. I figured it was long enough to kill a few hours on New Year's Eve. In my opinion it was ok; certainly not among Tarantino's most entertaining movies but it got better the longer you watch it. The first part was really slow. You know how some people want to know when the best time would be to head to the restroom at the theater? You could probably do it throughout any point of that first hour and not miss anything for the rest of the movie.

Spoiler

I knew early on that in the Tarantino style the movie would be an alt reality of actual events. As a history buff; you might cringe at your seat by the ending when Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio gore to death the would-be Tate Mansion murderers.

 

The Two Popes-Really enjoyed this one

 

No. She genuinely hated the movie to the point where she was still trying to get Walt Disney to cut the entire Jolly Holliday sequence right until the movie actually started because it utilized animation. She utterly refused to sell Disney the rights to any of her other Mary Poppins books and even went so far as to stipulate in her will that if any future adaptations of her work were made they could not use any of the music written by the Sherman Bros.