It's quite good, no doubt about it. I'm not ready to write off Field of Dreams, at least not before I watch it again. Moneyball was a lot better than I expected. I wonder how Bull Durham holds up....?
I don't know. The sun worship guy was monumentally weird, but at least it was doing something creative. The premise was beyond silly and the slowly-dwindling crew thing has been done to death.
Night Must Fall (1937) Dir. Richard Thorpe Olivia leads an unhappy life as a companion to her ornery aunt in a secluded estate in the middle of the woods. Her aunt treats her with enough disrespect that she contemplates a way out, but her only alternative is to accept the marriage invitation of her aunt's lawyer, a nice man whom she likes but is not in love with. In truth, what she really craves is a little more excitement in her life. This arrives in the form of Danny, a new employee whom her aunt hires on the spot after he instantly charms her. Danny manages to win over the rest of the house staff, apart from Olivia who easily sees through his superficial charm as the cheap and rather nefarious trick that it is. When a woman who had disappeared whilst staying at the inn which had been Danny's previous place of employment turns up dead near their estate, Olivia starts to suspect that Danny might somehow be involved in her murder. A noirish thriller adapted from the play of the same name. Very well acted, especially the trio of Dame May Whitty (gleefully cantankerous), Robert Montgomery (terrifying) and Rosalind Russell (brave but suffering). Robert Montgomery's performance especially is a nice, early study of a sociopath in cinema. Thematically this movie reminded me a lot of Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt", which it precedes by six years.
The general consensus is the FoD is the best baseball film if you consult various polls. As much as I enjoyed ...League..., it's hard to take the movie seriously.
Why? It has some genuinely moving moments, like Hanks conversation with Davis on the bus and also this scene:
A Game of Death (1945) Dir. Robert Wise A big game hunter on his way back to NYC on a boat finds himself on a sea route which takes him near an island about which many superstitions exist, including among the captain and crew of the ship he is traveling in. As if to prove the superstitions right, the ship suffers a catastrophic wreck of which he is the only survivor. He ends up on the feared island, only to find it inhabited by another gentleman hunter, a Krieger who makes the man he deems his peer a guest at his home, a converted pirate castle on the island. Also staying at the estate are a beautiful young woman and her bon-vivant brother. The woman tells the newly arrived man not to trust their host. The host himself boasts of having tired of the hunt, only to rekindle his passion for his nearly life-long pass-time by finding a new and exciting game to hunt on the island. Fun little action thriller with a decent lead in John Loder but a very good antagonist in Edgar Barrier. The run-time is short enough to make this a breezy watch and it's over before any of the more far-fetched elements of the story can jar. It's always nice to see the lovely Audrey Long in a film as well.
I didn't say it wasn't an enjoyable film. I know it's a largely fictionalized account of a woman's baseball league that existed in the 40s and 50s, but I just can't get excited about something that wasn't particularly relevant in mainstream culture. These are the actual Rockford Peaches. Which one looks like Geena Davis? The WNBA is another example of a sport that is struggling to keep its head above water. Last season was better than the previous season, but women's (professional) sports, other than tennis and gymnastics (not professional) don't have a solid fan base. WNBA plays 34 games. Don't get me wrong...WNBA players are very talented athletes, but it's not the sort of basketball most basketball fans want to watch, let alone buy tickets to see. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/...ades-wnba-still-struggling-for-relevance.html
Binging via youtube while on vacation.... Rab C. Nesbitt a BBC Scotland comedy from the late 80s/early 90s about a Scottish Glaswegian Everyman (presuming Everyman aboids work at all costs and cadges off everybody he meets) named, obviosly, Rab Nesbitt. The Weegie accents are thick in this one, as is the laughtrack (it takes awhile to get used to the laughtrack following a punchline of which you nderstood maybe one word). The episode entitled "Fitba" is a good starting point. Rab and his friends manage tickets to the '90 World Cup and see two of the three matches. Not bad, and since the TV in my inn is daft, it's been a decent substitute.
Based on a 1924 short story by Richard Connell. The first film version of this was 1932's The Most Dangerous Game, made by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, the creators of King Kong and shot on some of the same jungle sets. A must see! A third version was Run For The Sun (1956) starring Richard Widmark and Trevor Howard. The big difference between Connell's story and the movies are the inclusion of a woman in all the screen versions.
Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind (2018) -- an HBO original documentary that is terrific. I didn't know that he studied drama at Julliard with John Hausman, which made his transition from stand up and improv and not-really-great TV to some pretty solid movie performances less surprising. One of the highlights was some code blue out-takes from Mork and Mindy. If that's on DVD as an extra (really, it would be preferable to the show as I remember it) I'm going to track it down. Not surprisingly, the laughing decreased down the stretch, but it was a pretty good documentary of a great comic.
Mamma Mia! I don't know whether to pluck out my eyeballs or rupture my eardrums after this viewing, but it's close. I'll start out by saying that I like ABBA. They should have been my first concert in 8th grade (though it was cancelled when the drummer got sick) and I have three ABBA albums on my shelf. But this is bad, bad, bad ABBA music sung by very uninspiring singers. Ugh. I spent all last night on youtube listening to ABBA standards. And the movie itself is awful, sort of a hodgepodge of every bad chick-flick trope there is. And I kind of like chick flicks. This is on the short list of the very worst movies I have ever seen.
The Death of Superman (2018) Dir. Jake Castorena & Sam Liu Just as Clark Kent is considering taking his relationship with Lois Lane to the next level by revealing his alter ego of Superman to her, a new threat arrives in the form of an asteroid that crashes into the ocean and holds an unstoppable superpowered creature which is soon christened "Doomsday" by Lois Lane herself. After the creature defeats most of the Justice League, Earth's only hope is Superman, but fighting this incredibly powerful foe will push him to his very limits both physically and emotionally. To Lex Luthor, the creature is both a threat and an opportunity to redeem himself and get rid of his nemesis Superman in the process. The WB/DC animated movie universe has been on a bit of a roll lately and this is no exception. I'm not the biggest fan of the source material as some are, but this adaptation is very well done and entertaining. I also like the voice cast, including the stunt casting of Jerry O'Connell and Rebecca Romijn as Clark Kent/Superman and Lois Lane. Rosario Dawson reprises her role as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman, as does Jason Mara for Bruce Wayne/Batman. The multiple post-credits scenes hint at the follow-up movie, which will be released next year in the form of "The Reign of the Supermen" adaptation.
14 Cameras (2018) Dir. Seth Fuller & Scott Fussion We follow the actions of a clearly deranged individual who has made a habit of installing hidden cameras in homes he rents out as vacation spots to families. He streams some of this content to the dark web to make some money. With some individuals, his extreme voyeurism spills over into kidnapping and murder. This horror film aims to be some sort of contemporary warning about the possible abuses of modern technology, but I found it to be mostly a fairly forgettable horror genre exercise. The cast isn't bad, with Amber Midthunder (whom "Legion" fans will know) as the stand-out. Apparently this is the sequel to an earlier film with similar themes, "13 Cameras", but I haven't seen that one so I can't say how it compares to the original.
Avengers: Infinity War (2018) Dir. Joe Russo & Anthony Russo Following the events of "Thor: Ragnorok", the Asgardian refugee ship is attacked by Thanos and his men. Thor manages to escape the encounter alive, but at a great cost. On Earth, Tony Stark and Dr. Strange have to deal with Thanos' search for the Infinity Stones themselves. Along the way, the Guardians of the Galaxy and the heroes of Wakanda also get pulled into the conflict. I'm not as enamored with the big ensemble Marvel spectacles as some, but I think I enjoyed this one the most of all. Still there are segments of it that are far better than others. Everything with Thor is great, especially all of his interactions with the Guardians of the Galaxy. I also didn't expect to see a "Major League" reference in a Marvel Avengers movie. The one thing this movie has going against it is the fact that the major serialized nature of these movies has made some of the most poignant emotional moments of this film feel a bit cheap. Because of the fact that the audience knows more movies are to come we almost know for sure that much of what we have seen will have to be retconned somehow in the second half of "Avengers: Infinity War".
A League of their Own is the better baseball movie because it is actually about baseball. Bull Durham is a chick flic for guys while Field of Dreams is about a guys' midlife crisis. The Natural is actually about baseball, but a slow-motion lightning bolt makes it just silly and Pride of the Yankees, well, anything hagiofying the Yanks gets immediately voted off the island. And that leaves League....
Sneaky Pete - season 2 (2018) Season two picks up where season one left off: with Marius being kidnapped by two goons who believe he truly is the former cell mate whose identity he stole and who want him to return 11 million dollars the real Pete Murphy stole with the help of his mother Maggie Murphy, the long lost daughter of the Bernhardt clan. Marius goes along with agreeing to find the money, partially to protect the Bernhardt family and partially because he sees this as another possible con in which he gets to keep the money for himself at the end. Even though this show frequently requires more than a bit of suspension of disbelief, season two was another entertaining watch. This season lacks the excellent presence of Bryan Cranston and the Eastern-European gangster they have as the new big bad isn't as interesting, but this is more than made up for by some other new cast members. First and foremost, the wonderful Jane Adams as Maggie Murphy, the scheming psychic. As well as Jennifer Ferrin in a smaller role as Joyce Roby, a whip-smart NYC police detective sent upstate to investigate the murder of the dirty NYC cop and thus also threatening the safety and happiness of the Bernhardt clan.
First, full disclosure, I genuinely enjoy most of these Marvel movies, one or two clunkers aside. That being said, to your above point, yeah, we all know it's not really "the end" for many of those characters. Nevertheless, I thought the film did a pretty good job of creating a "wow" moment even with that knowledge as background. For instance, I won't lie, I got a bit of a lump in my throat when Parker fades away while pleading to Stark to help him. That the film could evoke that reaction from me (and others I've talked to about it) even though I'm 99 percent sure Spidey will be back is credit to it.
That was my problem with it, that could have been a very powerful moment but then you remember that "Spider-Man: Far From Home" is being released in July of 2019. I'm sure that those moments still worked for a lot of people, but for me it ruined things a bit.
Deadpool 2 (2018) Dir. David Leitch At the end of a worldwide spree of ultra-violence in which he kills criminals left and right, the violence Deadpool inflicts follows him home and leaves him depressed and aimless after a great personal loss. He finds a new goal in life when a young mutant he meets through the X-Men is threatened by a time traveling one-man-army called Cable. Wade Wilson becomes the kids unlikely savior. I very much liked the first "Deadpool". This film was an enjoyable and entertaining watch, but I felt like the original movie worked on more levels than this one. The sequel repeats all of the juvenile nonsense that is this franchise's trademark, but it also had Morena Baccarin's strong performance giving the movie a genuine emotional core. By actually using the women in refrigerators trope on Vanessa early on in the sequel, they rob themselves entirely of this dynamic. Which doesn't mean that the sequel is terrible by any means. It's clear from the slightly more polished end result that they had more money to spend than on the first one. Josh Brolin is enjoyable as Cable and Zazie Beetz is an absolute delight as Domino and should get her own stand-alone film if at all possible (and luck absolutely is a great cinematic superpower whatever Deadpool might say). I'm also guessing that everyone who loved Ricky Baker's antics in "Hunt for the Wilderpeople" will have enjoyed seeing Julian Dennison in this film. And as someone who has often times been critical of how overused the post-credits scenes have become within the Marvel franchise, I thought the one in "Deadpool 2" was positively hilarious. Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler Question: Did Hugh Jackman actually shoot that cameo or did they use old footage of him from "X-Men Origins: Wolverine"?