"The Death of Stalin" was amazing. I most enjoyed the very early parts of the film when the committee members were trying to remember what made Stalin laugh, and what seemed to upset him, going so far as to keep lists of topics that were safe or not.
The graphic novel it's based on is great, too, and the film made enough changes that reading it doesn't seem to repeat the experience of watching it.
Interesting, so I looked around... James Mangold Reveals Reason For 'Le Mans 66' Title Change - Yahoo Entertainment https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment...66-ford-v-ferrari-title-change-111853216.html Director James Mangold has revealed why his motor racing biopic Ford v Ferrari became Le Mans ‘66 in the UK. The filmmaker’s story of the company vs. company battle leading up to the 1960s 24-hour race is known by different titles on either side of the Atlantic. Speculation about the title change has been rife, but the 55-year-old said it is perfectly normal for his movies to be known by various names in different parts of the world. “As I understand it, there's just some kind of issue of some sort with using trademarks in titles in the UK,” Mangold told Yahoo Movies UK. “So it just became not as viable an answer.” He added: “I also think some European territories felt that Le Mans would be a more identifiable thing in Europe than it is in the US where, unfortunately, I think only one out of every 10 people would know what Le Mans is.” Matt Damon, James Mangold and Christian Bale attend the "Le Mans 66" Premiere, 2019 in Paris, France.
Excellent movie tonight. Official Secrets It "sort of" fits with what is going on now. Government corruption and the cover up and the attempted bribery of foreign governments to force an illegal war. 85% liked this movie Google users Description One day in 2003, in the lead up to the Iraq War, British intelligence specialist Katharine Gun receives a memo from the NSA with a shocking directive: the United States is enlisting Britain's help in collecting compromising information on U.N. Security Council members to blackmail them into voting in favor of an invasion of Iraq. Unable to stand by and watch the world be rushed into war, Gun makes the gut-wrenching decision to defy her government and leak the memo to the press.
Northern Limit Line [연평해전] (2015) The Northern Limit Line is the South Korea-defined sea border between South and North Korea in the Yellow Sea. North Korea occasionally sends ships across the line, and in 2002 one of these incursions became violent. In what is called the Second Battle of Yeonpyeong, small patrol boats from each side traded fire, resulting in deaths and injuries on both sides. Northern Limit Line is a seemingly accurate dramatization of the skirmish. But what it isn't is a movie. It isn't an action movie because the battle scenes are horrific and the plot is minimal, and it isn't an anti-war movie because it revels in the sacrifice of the South Korean sailors and the deaths of the practically mustache-twirling North Koreans. Without larger context and themes, it just feels like a propaganda piece.
My wife is absolutely obsessed with this show. I've watched it with her some and enjoyed it but only intermittently so am always catching up with the storyline. Definitely not like anything I've ever seen on tv.
Especially network TV. I mean, there has been the pretentious dropping of philosophers' names on TV before, but in ways that caused actual professors of philosophy to cringe. Not so here. We're watching in large part because of the people who teach philosophy at my wife's college. "The trolley problem" is fun again, as I said.
Miami Vice (1984-90) Exec Prod. Michael Mann / Anthony Yerkovich Discovered this on Amazon Prime so watching it back slowly in all its glory. The first episodes are a bit uneven with some very traditional police procedural stuff, but already after only 3 episodes I can feel that distinctive edge emerging. Of course today, the kind of seedy grit is not that unusual, but back then I remember this show exploded into our minds. I was 11 or 12 in 1984 when this hit NZ's screens, and Vice screened in the late slot of 9.30-10.30 due to content. So at first that was part my bedtime, and then when my bedtime got extended until 10.00pm that meant I could only watch half. Of course all the cool kids in my class got to see all of it and that left you out of the conversation. (The same thing happened with the Young Ones that screened impossibly late on Friday nights so I never even knew about it but of course the cool kids were staying up till 11pm to watch it - thank god we eventually got a VHS ). Also in those days of course you missed lots of episodes. So this will really be the first time I truly watch this show. Of course my main interest in watching this is the colour grades and music - the show is very influenced by MTV of course, which exploded in 1983/4. e.g. one episode has an entire sequence devoted to tracking Crocket's Ferrari Daytona Spyder down the road to Phil Collins In the Air Tonight. The camera lovingly dwells on the way the wheel spins - suspension riding the road so smooth .... Is this in my wheelhouse? This destroyed my wheelhouse like a 1940 stuka raid
the real genius of that sequence is the perfect editing of Collins' lyrics during the phone conversation btwn Sonny and Caroline. watch it again. and when the drums come in, the Ferrari is blasting along on the way to who knows where? I've been waiting all my life... EPIC
The thing that always amazed me about Thief is how fully realized Mann's visual style already is within that opening sequence. It's like a microcosm of what we now associate with him stylistically.
Good point! The whole thing is basically edited as a music video inside the show. I've been on a bit of an odyssey with the birth of MTV which really opened so many new doors in terms of visual culture. This kind of approach didn't really exist before. The bleakness of it, while so uber cool is everything. The lens flare, The rotation of the wheel and how smooth it rides the road.
Cry of the City (1948) Dir. Robert Siodmak Martin Rome is a hardened life-long criminal who finally bites off more than he can chew when he gets into a shoot-out with a cop and kills the officer in the process. He himself is apprehended and badly wounded. He successfully escapes the prison hospital he is taken to after his capture, only to be chased down by police Lt. Candella, a life-long friend of the Rome family. Rome remains out of the hands of the police thanks to the loyalty and help he receives from various friends and family, though Candella doubts if a man like Rome is worthy of their efforts. A corrupt lawyer and the booty of a high-profile murder/jewel theft put the two men on an inevitable collision course. Entertaining and morally interesting noir, reminiscent of similar movies like "This Gun for Hire", "White Heat" and to a lesser extent "Where the Sidewalk Ends" in that the protagonist is an morally dubious man whom the audience nevertheless roots for (up until a point). Conte and Mature are very good in their respective roles. Features a young Shelley Winters in a small supporting role. A decent amount of location work in NYC, which Siodmak supposedly disliked due to the difficulty of controlling a shoot in the city.
Jojo Rabbit (2019) Dir. Taika Waititi Jojo is a young German boy who idolizes Adolf Hitler to the point that he has an imaginary friend version who regularly talks to him. During a Hitlerjugend weekend which doesn't quite go as he had hoped, he is badly injured by a grenade and is left with a bum leg and facial scarring. In the subsequent weeks he spends at home, he finds out, to his shock, that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl in their home. The proper thing for a "real" Nazi like Jojo to do would be to report her, but he realizes that to do so would also endanger his mother. So an uneasy coexistence emerges between Jojo and the girl, one which slowly chips away at the Nazi indoctrination which shaped his ideas about Jews. This is nicely done, very enjoyable and very reminiscent in terms of its tone of Waititi's other coming of age story, "Hunt for the Wilderpeople". It's quite funny at times (seeing literal German shepherds launch a last-ditch attack against a Russian position is as wonderfully absurd as it sounds) whilst never losing its heart. I have read some thinkpieces about how ineffective this kind of satire is in combating real-life Nazism and extremism. That might be true, though I don't believe it's truly relevant in determining this movie's right of existing. Besides the wonderfully precocious lead, I enjoyed most of the supporting work. Especially Sam Rockwell is very good here, certainly better than in "Three Billboards", which I thought was a subpar performance by his standards (for which then went on to win the Oscar).
Crown Vic (2019) Dir. Joel Souza Nick Holland is a young rookie cop going out on his first nighttime patrol. Ray Mandel is a grizzled veteran with a quarter of a century of experience on the job and is also Nick's T.O. who wants to teach his newbie about the realities of being an L.A.P.D. cop. During their shift, they have to deal with drunk drivers, aggressive married couples, junkies and low-level criminals. Also within their patrol area is a roided up cop on the war path and a pair of well-armed cop killers whom every cop in the city is looking for. Far from reinventing the genre, this cop thriller was well done. The story takes place entirely over one night, with the movie opening with them picking up their ride and ending with them delivering it back to the shop. Thomas Jane is reliably good as the veteran cop. The night-time photography of L.A. is slick and very nicely done. Stretches our suspension of disbelief a bit with the amount of intense moments they go through over the course of a single night. But it's a very entertaining 110 minutes.
Bloodline - binge watched this over last few weeks. It's actually pretty damn good. Surprised I didn't hear more about the show when it came out.
I definitely enjoyed it. It's almost a combination of "Very Bad Things" and a generic family drama. I thought it was well written and well acted all across.
Mr. Jones (2019) Dir. Agnieszka Holland Gareth Jones uses the fame he has earned by interviewing Hitler as well as his connection to Lloyd George to get the opportunity to travel to Soviet Russia. His goal is to interview Stalin, though his real intent is to also find out what happened to a fellow reporter who has died in an apparent robbery, a fact he only finds out about upon his arrival in Moscow. In spite of the fact that the regime tries to hinder his freedom of movement, he manages to travel to Ukraine, where he becomes an initially unwitting witness to the Holodomor. Upon his return to Britain, his revelation of the wide-scale famine and apparent genocide is met with disbelief and he has to deal with a character assassination carried out by pawns of Stalin's regime. A serious drama told in a sobering, stripped down manner that fits the subject matter. James Norton is very good in the lead role. So much so that the rest of the cast more or less becomes anonymous. Not sure if the addition of George Orwell as some sort of narrator (through his authoring of Animal Farm) added to the experience.
I really enjoy seeing all these high-quality dramas and historically important movies described in this thread. It really says a lot about the character of BigSoccer movie viewers. Lady Battle Cop [女バトルコップ] (1990) The near-future world had a bad enough problem with organized crime. But now a new organization called "Cartel" is forcefully consolidating all of them under its umbrella through deep pockets, ruthless actions, and the low-budget-movie approximation of military tactics. Japan wisely put all their police budget into creating an utterly novel hybrid of robot and cop. Fortunately, the head engineer's girlfriend was murdered, providing the final ingredient. But does Lady Battle Cop stand a chance against Cartel's telekinetic killing machine Amadeus? There's just something relaxing about action movies of this era. Maybe the fierce opposition to subtext is itself a subtext (minus that touching Pietà at the end), but I can't hear my brain over the sound of synthesizers and saxophones and whatever that whip-like special effect sound that the Japanese keep using is. It's bad enough to never take seriously, but not bad enough to ever be taken out of the Lady Battle Cop universe. A smooth 90 minutes of amusement with no hangover.
Seasons One, Two, and Three of The Librarians, a series with some structural similarities, ironically enough, to The Good Place. Interesting if difficult to describe. For instance, my wife pointed out that, with darker music, the pre-credit portion of every episode could pass for an X-Files episode. The show manages to be simultaneously goofy and about as literary as TV can get (What the Good Place does with contemporary moral philosophy, The Librarians does with myth, folklore, and literature). Good to see John Larroquette getting some work. Did not know he was on 30+ episodes of Boston Legal, which might be on deck.