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

My take away watching that was.

1) It would have been a hugely successful TV series.

2) Zack Snyder was doing his own thing with the established characters. Maybe he should have gone all the way and made these all original characters.

Was he just giving off the right vibe as an actor for the time period? And then that type of character went out of fashion?

His career as a leading man does not survive the 80s. His last big movie is 1990.

 

He took a five year break from acting, and by the time he came back, I do think the business had passed him by. It doesn't help that he didn't seem to be a great actor. If you go back and watch his prime movies, he had a ton of charisma, but not much else. People certainly got tired of the the Mahoney role; he did four Police Academy movies, and they did seven overall.

Comedy does indeed often age badly. Jokes and styles of comedy become less funny if you use them too many times, and it seems big comedy hits spawn a lot of copies. So the joke just gets beaten to death.

People don't, but I do. There is a continuity to comedy. You can trace it. I think it's important to recognize the impact and the influence some of these comedies have had. They end up influencing a lot of what's funny later on.

 

Matilda (2022), a very fun adaptation of the stage musical (I’ve not seen it myself but knew a few of the songs and read the book). The heightened fantasy moments were charming, and the child actors were all very solid in t for roles. Among the adult cast, Emma Thompson seems born to play Miss Trunchbull, the cruel headmistress villain, perfectly capturing her over the top brand of bullying. A very effective movie overall.

 

Quite surprising really because, whilst not the best actor he was a good looking guy with some charm. When you look at it he was in some popular movies as well as Police Academy……Short Circuit, Cocoon and 3 men and a Baby were all big hits and had sequels too.

 

As an idea, The Da Vinci Code was great. Dropping a character into a random city and saying solve this five hundred year old art puzzle was brilliant, however, Dan Brown did not really have the creative chops to properly pull it off.

 

3 Men and A Baby

The only thing I really remember about that movie was the “ghost” in the curtains rumors/craze. Lol

Please tell me others remember that who grew up in the 80’s.

 

Yes, I remember my siblings trying to pause it at the right spot. The only other thing I remember is Guttenberg being an artist and doing murals on the walls of their apartment.

 

I remember both Steve Guttenberg and the Police Academy movies, but neither very fondly.

 

I liked them when I was a small child, I liked the quirky characters, I even had quite a few toys, but even the first one didn't hold up well when I rewatched it some time in the last ten years.

I remember Sergeant Callahan very fondly, along with the El Bimbo song from the Blue Oyster Bar. Mahoney's One In The Oven belly shirt and jean cut offs was an iconic look.

 

Devotion (2022)
I thought this movie would be easier to watch the second time, but no, it tore me up again. The acting really hit me hard, especially Jesse and Daisy. I don't know how well the story plays out to 'normal' people, but as someone who has lost friends in airplanes, this one really gets to me.

 

Warrior
Fantastic mixed martial arts movie with Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as 2 estranged brothers who end up fighting each other. Nick Nolte plays the father whom neither son seems to like. Hardy is the fighter with the brawn with a troubled past, Edgerton is the fighter with the brains who is fighting for money for his wife and daughter.

 

'Glass Onion'

'Glass Onion' does what a good sequel should. It takes what we liked about the first film and uses the resources a sequel provides to expand upon it. Rian Johnson has created a franchise that I think has the power to stay fresh and reinvent itself. ‘Glass Onion’ does not repeat motifs or narrative threads from the original film, which is very welcome. For the most part, it is a fresh experience but the problems I had with ‘Knives Out’, I have here and in all honesty, they stand out even more in this picture. Johnson’s script is again masterfully written and is a subversive deconstruction of the Agatha Christie breed of mystery.



Upon reflection, I think the biggest strength of ‘Knives Out’ and ‘Glass Onion’ is the casting. Every role is expertly filled. Leslie Odom Jr, Dave Bautista, and Katherine Hahn are underappreciated character actors that really get to shine here. Kate Hudson gives a performance that is hilarious and bravely self-deprecating and one I think is worthy of Best Supporting Actress consideration. Make no mistake, ‘Glass Onion’ does go bigger and while ‘Knives Out’ ensemble was stronger I think ‘Glass Onion’ may be a funnier film. It is a real shame that the theatrical window was so limited because this picture has moments that scream for an audience.



‘Knives Out’ and ‘Glass Onion’ are fun mysteries but beneath the surface, they are really clever indictments of excess and privilege. I mean once we see the mystery play out in our first viewing, the staying power these films have is their commentary. Benoit Blanc becomes secondary as the film goes on and I think that is very clever and by design. In both films we have a cast of unremarkable people who despite all their supposed convictions are entirely willing to stab people in the back for money and clout… and ‘Knives Out’ does this story better. The Thromby family was far more sinister and two-faced than this group of ‘Disruptors’ who are played for more camp value. ‘Knives Out’ had more peril and menace. And it is of no fault to Janelle Monae but Ana de Armas’ Marta was a stronger character. There is a surprise with Andi that Monae plays beautifully but that takes too much time to reveal and hurts the pacing of the picture and a time when it was picking up steam.



The problem I guess is the conclusion. ‘Glass Onion’ does what ‘Knives Out’ does, the entire film is an exercise in turning the mystery formula on its head so many times that the red herring ends up being our “killer”. Like Chris Evans in ‘Knives Out’, our “killer” is loud. It is a highly entertaining performance and satisfying to see this character get their comeuppance but it’s also kind of dare I say it predictable...



If you liked ‘Knives Out’, ‘Glass Onion’ makes a great bottom part of a double bill. A ‘Godfather Part II’ it isn’t but I’ll welcome Benoit Blanc back anytime…

 

Lassard’s podium scene. Probably the greatest bit of that movie for me.

 

Is it available on Netflix yet?

 

I liked it a lot! A lot of nods and homages and was done in the spirit of the original! It helped all the kids from the original were in it all grown up! Bigbys corner window was great as was the Bigbys Department store and Santa all from the original! And all the sets and locations looked like from the original! I cried at the end as he was reading the paper/Opening Jean Shepherd lines from the original and end with the Real Jean Shepherd narrating! I would love to watch the original and new one back to back before Christmas is over this year! I don't know if you saw it but Hallmark made a sequel that stunk. This was light-years better!

The Red Neck Kids across the Street weren't Scud Farkus's kids they were the Bumpases kids with the Bloodhounds! Scud just mentioned he had trouble always trying to apprehend those kids.

On another topic I loved the Da Vinci Code books and movie 1 and 3 the best the movies had a modern day Indiana Jones feel to them!

 

The Letter. Bette Davis plays the wife of a plantation owner in Malaya who shoots another man she claims tried to rape her. She’s a bit too cool a customer, but it would be an open-and-shut case until her lawyer is approached with an offer to sell an incriminating letter showing that the man was her lover and she summoned him to her house last night. She prevails on him to compromise his morals and secure the letter.

It’s a drama without a whole lot of drama. There’s little ambiguity to whether Davis is guilty: she plays a rather transparent narcissistic manipulator, and the only thing interesting is how easily this bad liar is able to get away with it by playing the weak-woman-in-distress card among the polite colonial society who instinctively back her. I think there’s supposed to be some ambiguity in there somewhere, but the film bungles it; there’s never any reason for the audience to doubt that the shoe will drop. The one guy who sees through her is the lawyer as soon as the letter comes up, but as he immediately folds on the letter, there’s not a lot for his story to pivot on, either. As his contempt for Davis and remorse for his moral compromise grows, there’s a bit of suspense over whether he’ll crack, but William Wyler doesn’t really make you buy it. The story just kind of plays out. There’s enough there to dig into, but it’s never framed in a way to really make it compelling. Had this come out a few years later, the noir potential of the setup probably would have been wrung out of it, but in 1940, it’s a hair too early. It still plays out like a staid thirties drama, without any flair, where “watch this wicked woman” is considered a sufficiently dramatic hook that nothing else need be done with it.

 

Somewhere in Time

Since Hav seemed so taken with the concept, I thought I'd give it a try. I was well aware of it, and soon realized I had seen it as a child with my brother. I remember balking at the time travel and walking away. Lame! Try a flux capacitor next time.

I mostly agree with Hav's comments. There are one or two truly magical moments, but they are so short lived, the romance is just too thin. They don't spend nearly enough time on it. I paused it just to see how long it took to get Reeve and Seymour to meet, I think it was over 50 minutes in, and as Hav said, Seymour's manager gets in the way. I suppose it doesn't matter, the romance defies time. The whole point is they only have a few moments together, but those moments span 70 years.

I don't really agree on the quality of the leads, though I agree it is sweet and earnest. Neither can really act, though, and it's a problem here. Reeve is Superman, but I've never been impressed with him as anyone else. Seymour is so beautiful, she still is today (Insert her over the older actress! Make it more realistic!), but she might as well have been played by her photograph. They're both really stiff here, and I think Reeve is really the one who drops the ball on the passion. Seymour goes for Reeve simply because she's been imagining him and waiting for him so long, you know, somewhere in time.

I agree with Rogue on the score. I'll be dancing to it in my dreams tonight.

I did really enjoy it, though, I can't lie. It was sentimental and just what I needed tonight.


Okay, I have to take you guys through this experience of mine. I thought Reeve falling in love with an old picture of a beautiful actress was kinda ridiculous. I didn't buy it at all. I mean, get a life, loser. I know, just go with it, their love reaches across time. But you know what? The most stunning lesson was played on me almost immediately. Reeve goes to see a woman who wrote Seymour's biography. Imagine my surprise when the woman turned out to be the lovely Teresa Wright, who was just mentioned in this thread. And I remembered that she was just mentioned in this thread. Coincidence? More like fate. This was made in 1980, I think the latest movie of hers that I had seen was 1952's The Steel Trap. So it was like I hadn't seen her in 28 years. I recognized her face and her voice instantly, and at 62 years old I could still see the glow of beauty in her. It was so surreal. I was so engrossed with Wright I temporarily lost interest in what Reeve was there for. It was like I was Reeve, seeing this older woman, and then seeing her in my mind in her beautiful youth during the Golden Age of Hollywood. It was like I lived Reeve's fascination with a memory for just a few seconds. I wonder if that was intentional. In my face, anyway. Total facial.

Personal trivia: I've been to the Grand Hotel in the movie many times. No, really. It's on Mackinac Island in Michigan. My mom and my gran loved going there for some reason. I thought it was horribly boring as a kid, but it was like a tradition, so I returned several times as an adult, and even took a woman there once. We had lunch in the hotel. The hotel, the last time I went, was still basically just like it is in the movie. They were also very snooty about being THE Grand Hotel from the greatest romance movie of all time, Somewhere in Time. You've never seen it? You must have lived under a rock your whole life. I was very put off and haven't gone back since. Mind you, I don't think I had actually seen the whole movie, or had no memory of it, until watching it tonight. I was aware that it was the hotel from the movie, because they make sure you know, but it had no significance to me. Now I wish I had seen the movie long ago. Maybe I should go back some time, though it's like a five hour drive.

 

The Client Never seen this til this week but I had a load of misconceptions going into it, I assumed that it starred Brigitte Fonda, that it was mainly a courtroom drama and that its about a kid witnessing a murder. All pretty much wrong. A boy and his brother witness a mob attorney kill himself, but not before he tells one of the kids some important information about a dead body of a senator that the FBI are searching for. The local DA (Tommy Lee Jones) wants to use the kid to bring down a mob family, the mob family want to frighten the kid in to not testifying and local attorney Susan Sarandon wants to defend the kid. It all ends up with the kid being forced to testify and the mob having to try and kill the kid to stop him revealing the secret of the dead body. Surprisingly it wasn't as tense as I thought it would be, the threat didn't seem as perilous as I expected and it kind of falls between being part court room drama, part mystery and part runaway kid story. Its got some big names in the cast, but none really get to flex their true acting muscles resulting in something good but not great.

I think he pulled it off pretty well. I really enjoyed the book. Some of the ones since have been awful though.

 

May or may not get a chance to watch another movie tonight after work, but if not, here's everything I've watched in November 2022 (* denotes theatrical viewing):

The Mysterians (1957, Ishirō Honda)
Tár (2022, Todd Field)*
The Creature Walks Among Us (1956, John Sherwood)
The Stuff (1985, Larry Cohen)
Italianamerican (1974, Martin Scorsese)
I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932, Mervyn LeRoy)
Call Northside 777 (1948, Henry Hathaway)
Out of the Fog (1941, Anatole Litvak)
The Banshees of Inisherin (2022, Martin McDonagh)*
Nope (2022, Jordan Peele)
Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022, Ryan Coogler)*
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, Martin Scorsese)
Tension (1949, John Berry)
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022, Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson)*
Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla (2002, Masaaki Tezuka)
Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003, Masaaki Tezuka)
The Menu (2022, Mark Mylod)*
Knives Out (2019, Rian Johnson)
In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-wai)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022, Rian Johnson)*
Dogora (1964, Ishirō Honda)
The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges)
The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022, James Gunn)
Paper Moon (1973, Peter Bogdanovich)
The Last of Sheila (1973, Herbert Ross)
The Fabelmans (2022, Steven Spielberg)*
American Graffiti (1972, George Lucas)
Bones and All (2022, Luca Guadagnino)*

 

Somewhere In Time seems like a film I've seen before, but after rewatching the trailer and 5 scenes I've not seen it before, but I will. It looks really good. And the Grand Hotel looks amazing.

Seems like the director is using a lot of slow tracking shots and zoom ins and zoom outs while the camera is trained on a characters face or them walking. Reminded me a bit of Kubrick's style with the long slow intense takes with no or little dialogue. Great music in Somewhere In Time too.

I need to finally watch it.

Just realized The Shining is another fantastic hotel based movie from 1980.

 

Elf

 

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
Cheesy, clichéd, and predictable, but so well put together it still works.

 

I agree that Reeve’s acting doesn’t help sell the passionate love, but I think he is good at the earnestness and he could probabky be better with better material, and his inherent likability is doing a lot to get the audience rooting for him and make up for the fact that the script isn’t doing anything. Without Reeve, I don’t
think the movie works even in the halfway manner it does. I put a lot more of the blame on the script.


Also, it’s hilarious that I am inspiring a mini-boom in Somewhere in Time viewership with a negative review.

 

I remember really enjoying it back when I first saw it in the eighties. I don't think I've seen it in decades.