Last Movie Watched.... The Xenforo Edition

at the point where Juno/Ariadne goes along with the deception, knowing the extent of the ruse, i completely lost interest. she is being portrayed as a sympathetic character, but she's condoning evil.

not for me...

 

Judy (2019) - This movie goes between Judy Garland's time as a teen preparing to star in The Wizard of Oz and the final year of her life as she moves to London to star in a show at Talk of the Town, and marry her fifth and final husband. Renee Zellweger stars as Judy Garland, and she is phenomenal. Even if you don't know much about Garland's life, you'll find out about her struggles with alcohol and substance abuse while growing up as a child in Hollywood, and how her need to desire to be with her children forced her to go to London. It's a tragic tale, but you feel for Garland in the same way you feel for other child actors who succumbed to various demons.

Zellweger earned an Oscar for her performance, and deservedly so. She plays Garland as someone who wants to be loved and have a normal life after years of performing on the stage and screen, but can't escape it because she has no money and no other skills. The story never makes you feel sorry for Garland, and tells it straight, but you do find yourself rooting for her to get it right. A tragic story, but a very engrossing film.

 

Legacy of Lies (2020)

Ex-MI 6 agent Scott Adkins failed a mission and lost his wife in a botched operation in Ukraine over a decade ago. Constantly on the run from his demons, he lives an itinerant life with his precocious daughter doing whatever jobs his fists make him qualified for. He is contacted by a Ukrainian journalist - the daughter of the man he failed to protect before. She wants to continue her father's work, and only someone familiar with the original operation can help. But with the Russians trying to kill her and the CIA wanting her data for their own purposes, Adkins finds himself in quite the pickle.

This is either a very slow action movie, or a political thriller with an unnatural amount of kung-fu, but as a fan of both genres this really worked for me. The fight choreography and direction were top notch and the plot has sufficient twists and investigations to make this a fine representative of both kinds of film. But I couldn't get over how nice this all looked. This isn't good-for-direct-to-video, this is top tier in all visual aspects, a testament to the skills of a man IMDB says has almost no experience. You could have stuck an A-list actor CGI-ed into fight shape and an A-list actress badly pretending to sound Ukrainian and not change a single other thing and end up with a theater-run quality film. This is probably the best acting Scott Adkins has done as well.

I loved the stuck-in-the-70's look of Ukrainian interiors. Their poverty feeds my nostalgia.

 

Marriage Story (2019) - An utterly heartbreaking tale of a couple with a young child going through a divorce between Los Angeles and New York. Scarlett Johannson and Adam Driver play the couple brilliantly, and you can feel their pain, their anger, their frustration, and also the little bit of love that is still there, but not enough to keep them together. There's a scene in this movie where the divorce proceedings are taking their toll on both of them, and they have knock down, drag out fight with each other, and it keeps escalating, and eventually gets out of control, and they start unloading on each other, and it is so saddening and depressing. Laura Dern won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Johansson's lawyer, and she was both parts contemptible and virtuous, fighting for her client.

This movie does not take sides, and takes no prisoners. Some scenes felt like the equally brilliant and equally saddening Kramer vs Kramer, but this story felt painfully original. You hope against hope that these two will find a way to fight through it and reconcile but there is no happy ending - only simply an ending.

I can't say that I liked this movie because it's hard to like a movie this depressing, but I would highly recommend it.

When my wife used to watch those Dateline mystery shows about wives who kill their husbands, I used to joke with her that if we were to ever separate I'd prefer if we just went our separate ways, and I not get killed. Having watched this divorce, I almost prefer getting shot in the head. That agony is quicker, and probably less painful.

 

I tried to watch City of God (2002, Brazil), but there were no subtitles (123hulu). Beautifully shot, and great soundtrack, at least in those first 10 minutes.

 

The Pearl of Death (1944)
Dir. Roy William Neal



A young woman traveling on the Ostend-Dover crossing steals a precious pearl from the cabin of a man tasked with delivering it safely to the Royal Regent museum. Sherlock Holmes, using his wits and his master of disguise skills manages to retrieve it before she can deliver it to her boss. Unfortunately, said criminal manages to steal it anyway, following its return to the museum. With Holmes unwittingly helping the theft by displaying the weaknesses of the alarm systems just as the theft was occurring, he feels a personal responsibility for retrieving it a second time. The pearl itself has a dark history, bringing nothing but extreme misfortune to its previous owners. When seemingly random murders start occurring in and around London, Holmes suspects the theft and the violent deaths are related, though Lestrade and the rest of the police force disagree with him.

One of the Rathbone & Bruce Sherlock Holmes films I had yet to see. Decent, old-fashioned entertainment, otherwise noteworthy for having one of the earliest credited screen appearances of Rondo Hatton's Creeper character.

 

Finding Mr. Destiny (2010)
Dir. You-Jeong Jang



Ji-Woo is a workaholic, single musical stage director whose father is desperate to see married. Her problem is not a lack of meeting potentially interesting men but the fact that she compares every one of them to a man she met on a trip to India ten years earlier. In her idealized vision of him, he is superior to any man she has encountered since then.

Gi-Joon is newly unemployed after being fired from his travel agency job. He decides to start his own business, a service which aims to track down people's long-lost loves. One of his first customers is Ji-Woo, who visits his office at her father's insistence. Her dad assumes that finding and reconnecting with her long-lost vacation love will make her realize he is not the man she has made him out to be in her mind, allowing her to move on and settle down with someone else.

Gi-Joon successfully tracks down many men of the approximate right age and the right name, but since Ji-Wood's long lost beau has a fairly common name, they seek out dozens of candidates with no success. During the course of their search, Gi-Joon develops feelings of his own for Ji-Woo, making him doubt his desire to successfully complete the endeavor.

Korean rom-com with Gong Yoo (of "Train to Busan" fame) in one of the lead roles. But it's really his co-star Im Soo-Jung very charming performance that is the standout here.

 

Defiance (2008)-Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber star in this true WWII story. They are resistance fighters in Poland. Pretty good flick.

 

Knives Out (2019) Good whodunit. Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Michael Shannon and Christopher Plummer star. Keeps you thinking.

 

The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020)
Dir. McG



Two years after the events of the first film, Cole has become a pariah at his high school, His poor reputation is primarily down to the fact that he told the truth after surviving the Satanic cult members' night of trying to get his blood, but with no real proof of the events of that night existing, his classmates perceive him as crazy whilst his parents are convinced he had a psychotic episode, one which persists to a certain extent to the present. His only real friend is his childhood crush Melanie. To get him out of his rut, Melanie proposes that Cole join her, her boyfriend and another couple of friends in going to the lake for the weekend. Shortly after his arrival there, familiar and unwelcome demonic faces show up too and Cole is forced to fight for his life yet again, his only help this time around a girl who is newly transferred to his school and whom he does not entirely trust.

As sequels go, this wasn't bad by any means. It's not like the original was a timeless masterpiece, but it was a decently entertaining horror-comedy and this second go-around is quite similar in that regard. Ken Marino and Leslie Bibb are fun and funny as the parents.

 

Rocky (1976)-The Academy Award winning boxing film. Sylvester Stallone and Talia Shire star. Spawned a legion of sequels.

 

There's a new TV series on NBC, Transplant.



Interesting so far, and kind of political. The main character is a Syrian who has been working in a restaurant and a big truck runs thru the front window and injures several people. He apparently has had some medical training and, although he has shards of glass in his abdominal area, he treats the injured.

The political parts I will leave you to discover on your own. There have been 3 episodes. We have DirecTV, so I was able to record the earlier ones.

Qualified recommendation..

 

AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001)-I cried the first time I saw it years ago. Didn't bear up as well on a second viewing. Haley Joel Osment stars.

 

Green Room (2015) - A struggling punk band heads to a gig at a neo-Nazi club outside of Portland, Oregon to make enough to get home after touring the Pacific Northwest, but find themselves unable to leave after someone at the show ends up dead.

I don't know if I would classify this as a horror movie, but it was certainly packed with thrills, tension, and gore. Oh, man, the gore. It's not like there was a ton of it, but what there was had enough. This movie was super tense. I can't stress enough the tension in this movie. Director Jeremy Saulnier does a fantastic job building up the tension and keeping it high through its ending. Patrick Stewart was great as a calm-talking club owner who just wants this problem to go away.

I was a bit apprehensive to watch this movie because I wasn't entirely sure what it was about because Netflix didn't do a great job describing it, but I'm so glad I gave it a chance. I really liked this movie, although some of the gore was a bit much for me. The acting was well done. The story was interesting. The cinematography was great. The tension was perfect. At one point, halfway through the movie, I was so tense that I heard some clatter come from the kitchen, and I got up thinking someone was breaking into my house, and I was ready to fight. Turns out it was just the wind blowing something off a shelf, but I can't remember the last time I got that into a thriller.

Based on this film, I'm going to check out another Saulnier picture Netflix recommended called Blue Ruin. I hope it'll be as good as this one.

 

Both Belgian guy and I really liked it.

 

Still think Blue Ruin is his best film, though I don't mean that as a slight against the movies he made after that.

Saulnier along with S. Craig Zahler and Mike Flanagan are the three American directors whose every new release fills me with excitement. It's a short list.

 

A Korean in Paris (2015)
Dir. Soo-il Jeon



Sang Ho is a Korean man who is living rough in Paris. He spends his nights accosting streetwalkers, showing them a picture of his wife in the hope that one of them has seen her. In a flashback, it is revealed that Sang Ho and his wife Yeon-wha honeymooned in Paris, until one day she disappeared completely from a café terrace whilst Sang Ho popped into a store for a pack of cigarettes.

Sang Ho's belief is that his wife was mistaken for a prostitute due to the fact that they spent time in an area with a lot of streetwalkers the night before and that traffickers subsequently snatched her off the street on the assumption she was one of them. Sang Ho himself has become a familiar and pitied figure among the prostitutes and pimps of Paris, with his hope of finding his wife again perceived as somewhere in between extremely naive and insane.

Weird little French-Korean co-production. Its lack of a traditional soundtrack and some of the camera work reminded me of the Dardenne brothers. The spareness of dialogue in large sections of the film was reminiscent of something like Jeanne Dielman, ... The movie it reminded me the most of though - in its best moments - is George Sluizer's Spoorloos. Not that I think it's quite as good by any means, but it's clear that the filmmakers have both seen Sluizer's classic and are great admirers of it. Jae-hyun Cho carries much of this film with his lived in and sad-eyed performance.

 

I finished a terrific six-part (an hour apiece) documentary "Monty Python, Almost the Truth - The Lawyers Cut." Each hour is good but the one on the making of "The Life of Brian" was my favorite. It's on Netflix right now.

 

The Social Dilemma (2020) - A 97% doom and gloom documentary by the makers and shapers of social media on how social media is warping our minds, shaping our views, and distorting reality. This movie didn't tell me a whole lot of anything I didn't already know, but there were little vignettes of a story of a family and how they're affected by the little devils in their pockets mixed in, and that was... not great. I guess it could've better told without it. Don't get me wrong: I watched every second intently, and it was interesting to get this information that I already knew packaged very nicely, but nothing was revealed that was earth-shattering until they started talking about how bad things could really get (civil war!) if social media continues down its current path. One thing I didn't know, and I should have put this together sooner, is that companies like Facebook don't want to sell your data. That data is significantly more valuable to them than anyone else because that data is unique to you for their platforms and how they sell things.

My favorite part was the saying about how there are only two enterprises where consumers of a product are called "users": illegal drugs and technology. As someone who works in the field of technology - and is excited about technology and its advancements - I found this to be absolutely hilarious and depressing at the same time. Technology - and, subsequently, social media - feed the same inhibitors that drugs do. It's crazy.

We're addicted to our phones. We're addicted to social media. We're addicted to technology. The only things we can do about it are either regulating social media and tech companies through taxes on storage of end user data (unlikely since the richest companies in Silicon Valley are Facebook and Google, and they have the money to shape elections), or simply put the technology away and self-regulate our usage of technology and social media which seem unlikely because many people are addicted to it, and it would be a bit similar to trying to break a crack and heroin addiction because they feed virtually the same receptors in our brain. So it looks like we're going to be in the same pattern for a long time unless something drastic happens to alter how we use technology.

Right now, I only use two forms of social media: Twitter and Big Soccer (and, yes, this is considered social media). Will this documentary make me think twice about how I use the social media I consume? A little, but I already only read twitter about once or twice a week for 15 minutes before I get sick of it (there's a lot of pointless crap amidst some of the stuff I find interesting or humorous), and I'm on here roughly for 2 hours a day, and this is where I get most of my news (because people here filter out the noise for me, and I can see through the bullshit a lot easier). I feel like I am in a good spot, but I worry about my kids. I don't like them having screens. My son may drive me nuts by throwing a ball against my living room wall and kicking a soccer ball in the house, but it's better than him constantly vegging out in front of an iPad. My daughter is only 2, but she's super impressionable, and she'd easily get addicted to it. I would like for them to stay as far away from screens as possible until they are old enough to process this stuff. Just as I wouldn't want my kids to become addicted to drugs, I would do my damnedest as a parent to make sure they don't develop any other addictions.

 

Death comes to Pemberley (2013)
Dir. Daniel Percival



Seven years into their marriage, Darcy and Elizabeth are hosting a ball at Pemberley. The night turns tragic when Wickham and Lydia decide to show up unannounced and uninvited, only before they even arrive at the estate, a quarreling Wickham leaves the carriage they are traveling in, along with his friend Captain Denny. After they disappear into the woods near Pemberley, shots are heard and when a search party is conduced from Darcy's estate, they find Wickham holding Denny's bloodied and murdered body. Once again Wickham's perceived horrid behavior threatens Darcy's status and good name and this time around, it even yields tensions in his own marriage. But is Wickham truly guilty of the horrid crime?

I like British detective series and murder mysteries, I like Jane Austen adaptations and I like Matthew Rhys. So this murder mystery set in the Austen universe and starring Matthew Rhys as Fitzwilliam Darcy could not be more up my alley. It's well-made and well-acted, with almost everyone cast perfectly. Apart from Rhys, I especially enjoyed Jenna Coleman as Lydia Wickham. On the other hand, Anna Maxwell Martin is a fine actress but I don't think she'd necessarily be my first or second choice to play Elizabeth Bennett/Darcy.

 

Enola Holmes (2020)
Dir. Harry Bradbeer



On the day that Enola Holmes turns 16, she wakes up to discover her mother has left without a trace, leaving her only with a birthday present which turns out to have contained breadcrumbs leading to her whereabouts. Her older brothers Mycroft and Sherlock want to ship her off to boarding school but Enola escapes before they have a chance to do so and heads to London to track down her mother instead. On her way over there, she meets a young nobleman who has also fled from his family. Enola is forced to delay her mission of finding where her mother went when she discovers the young man has an assassin tracking him and that he himself is woefully unequipped to deal with such a threat.

I would describe this film as very charming, and not in the back-handed way that description is often used. It is almost entirely carried by the charm and quality of its cast, primarily Millie Bobby Brown in the titular role but also Henry Cavill as Sherlock Holmes, Sam Claflin as Mycroft Holmes (eagerly chewing up scenery in the process) and Fiona Shaw as the headmistress of the boarding school. The writing however is very thin and with a lesser cast this flaw would have been far more of an issue. Any possible sequel would definitely need an improvement in that department.