If you can, watch it. It's more or less about Tommy Caldwell but given what he achieved at the time, it's one of the most remarkable feats of human accomplishments. That and Free Solo (Ironically I've never seen).
Free Solo was great, amazing feat. I honestly don't know how these people can ever live regular lives .
I always tell people you have to be programmed different to get into hobbies like rock climbing and mountain biking. I've soloed some stuff but it was no higher than 30 feet. And well below my limits. Honnold lived like a few people I know in the climbing community: Out of a van and just hanging out at campgrounds.
2046 ~ Wong Kar-Wai Chow returns to Hong Kong from Singapore following the events of In the Mood for Love. He's a womanizing serial writer now, though, working on a story about a train in the year 2046. This is Wong Kar-Wai at his luscious visual best and maybe his narratively self-indulgent worst. It is a movie that looks great and is filled with beautiful actors and shots, but revolving a story around a man broken from another film and can't be fixed is kind of a hollow enterprise. It is always visually interesting, though. Tony Leung is great as always with a distant cruelness in his smiles and glances. The cgi sci-fi parts actually still look pretty good and the story within the story is intriguing.
Refused High Sierra because he did not want to play a 'loser' criminal and especially Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler did not want to die at the end of the film . And he had prior history with Raoul Walsh, during which the men had supposedly already clashed. Refused Maltese Falcon because he did not want to work with a first-time director... which was John ********ing Huston! Can't remember why he turned down Casablanca.
Civil War When this came out, I really wanted to see it in the theaters. The Civil War trailer was one of the more provacotive trailers I have ever seen. But, my wife couldn't be bothered and we didn't go. Man, was she prescient. This movie sucks. I can see why a 14 year-old boy would be titillated and think this movie profound, but I was quite disappointed to find that actual film reviewers thought this was a credible movie or that Kirsten Dunst was anything more than a stiff in this movie. There is no narrative power here because this movie just sort of exists to be clipped. I will admit that the clip of the paramilitary guy in the ridiculous red sunglasses who asks Joe "what kind of American" he is works, but that is it. Having had a day to think about this movie (only barely) if someone told me that the script was written by AI, I would honestly believe them.
FWIW, there is a theory about the obvious stupidity contained within this film, including the strange civil war factions. The theory goes that Alex Garland purposely made it all so dumb, as a commentary on how Hollywood recycles real-life foreign conflicts. I'm not entirely convinced by the theory myself, but in the scenario that it is true, you sort of have to perceive this film a bit like Gus Van Sant's shot for shot remake of Psycho: a remake consciously made as an advertisement against remakes. So utilizing that POV, this would be Alex Garland's pamphlet against a certain type of war film.
Raft was perceived studio movers and shakers as handsome, and Bogart as not-- right up until Ingrid Bergman emphatically challenged the notion when he was suggested for Casablanca. Next thing you know he's married to Lauren Bacall and starring with Katherine Hepburn and stuff like that...
April Showers #10 Project Hail Mary ~ P. Lord and C. Miller Ryland Grace wakes upon a spaceship alone without any memory of how he got there. As his memories return, he realizes he's on a mission to discover a way to save our sun from dying. Overall, I would rate this as a solid little brother to The Martian. Both based on novels written by Andy Weir, they share the same tone, humor, and can-do-ism. I remember feeling they were a little too close when I read PHM a couple years ago, but I think this film stands on its own just fine. There are pieces that aren't as strong as the book (the amnesia plotline) and some that are improvements (glazing over the sciencing-the-s**t-out-of-it that was a bit obnoxious in the book). Like The Martian, they did a great job with the effects that you feel will probably look good for years to come. I'm pretty embarrassed that even though I had a movie called Hail Mary on my April Showers list, it didn't occur to me until last weekend that the biggest movie in the country fit my theme. This is a nice wrap-up for my April challenge, though: https://boxd.it/TBxTo. PHM and Singing in the Rain were both terrific, and several of the others were at least pretty good. Next up, April Showers of course Bring May Flowers: https://boxd.it/TSYOu, 10 movies with a flower in the title.
Wuthering Heights [2026] Beautifully, beautifully shot. Both leads were fantastic, but I can't get over how beautiful this film was.
"Name of the Rose," "War of the Roses," "Daisy Miller," "Cactus Flower," "The Black Dahlia," "Driving Miss Daisy," "Steel Magnolias," "Purple Rose of Cairo," "Days of Wine and Roses..."
The Running Man (2025) What's a man supposed to do? Ben Richards has been blackballed from all work after talking to a union rep about unsafe working conditions, and his family can barely support their slum-level existence. There's only one job that will take anyone, and that's the Network's very popular but very dangerous game shows. Put through tests, Richards is fast-tracked to the high earning but almost certainly deadly "Running Man", where runners let loose in the United States have to avoid being killed by the Network's pack of hunters or enterprising civilians who are encouraged to join in the game. Thirty days wins the grand prize. Richards thinks he is at least securing the health and welfare of his family. That's because he hasn't yet been told how the show is written. This movie is as unsubtle as a brick to the face and as obvious as a pre-schooler's story, but, disappointingly for reviewers here with taste, I liked The Running Man quite a bit. Very close to the original book, but you can definitely see references to the Arnold Running Man (helping alleviate the grimness of the source material), and also the grandfather of everything Le Prix du Danger, particularly in how the game is manipulated to suit the show. Being a soft touch I totally fell for the emotional manipulation and being a constant YouTube watcher I totally dug the Bradley Throckmorton conspiracy videos. They really bungled the tone of the Michael Cera character. I didn't know if he was a tragic figure or comic relief. I blame the musical cues. Josh Brolin wasn't even in the same hemisphere as the awesome Richard Dawson and Michel Piccoli who played the Killian figures in the previous movies. The thing is.. that ending. It all felt good while it was happening and I saw the purposeful tie in to the Arnold Running Man, and then we had the entertaining end credits in alt-zine style that kept up the revolutionary high and after that I saw the Paramount logo and it all crashed. Hard. I realized I got had. My systemic societal frustrations are temporarily alleviated while the power stay in power, and all it cost them was $100 million. Maybe real-life Killian won, and got exactly what he wanted out of me by my watching The Running Man. So as a very straight forward almost action movie, 4 stars. As a system of control, 4 stars. You got me.
So far I've been thinking my stint of watching movies with The Most Dangerous Game theme has, while admittedly taking on a life of its own, been a light hearted preoccupation mixed in with the other movies I watch and review. But I've just re-read, in context, all my reviews since last November when I started this thing and I'm afraid I come across as some kind of mad man.
No, your chart on the different categories of the genre was brilliant. You need to write a paper! It helped inspire me to come up with themes each month, so thanks for that. I've watched more films in the past 5 months than the previous 5 years combined. I'm starting to think that having some goal in watching is the only way to overcome the choice paralysis that the terrible streaming UIs present us with.
Before I started, I'd sometimes carve out two hours to watch a movie and spend the whole time just browsing through lists on the various free streams. Obviously TheJoeGreene deserves credit for his crusade, but - and maybe he can correct me - I think Belgian guy's frequent dipping into 50's noir and Korean movies is a version of this.
To a certain extent, though it's mostly just a love for the genre - classic noir - with the noirs. There is something about the rhythm and stylistic quality of these films that is like a balm to my mind. In terms of South-Korean cinema, it has in common with French cinema that the big distributors trying to strong-arm theater chains to carve out a majority of screens for American releases were told to take a hike. In both cases, this is due to the legal context. In Korea, by law a movie theater has to reserve a certain amount of days for screening South-Korean films. This quota has been challenged - unfortunately - by the U.S. and it has led to a slight decrease of the quota, though thankfully not to its abolishment. Like France, thanks to this protected eco-system for domestic films, the local film industry has flourished. It is diverse in its output, both influenced by western cinema but also clearly distinct from it. Recycling tropes through its own cultural lens. One other thing I like about South-Korean cinema is that genres are not as strictly demarcated. So you can have a slow-burning, melancholic contemplation on loneliness through the guise of a murder mystery like Decision to Leave that at the same time also finds room for a slapstick caliber sequence involving the theft of turtles. This all kind of mirrors France, which is perhaps even more protective of its domestic movie production and has repeatedly told the WTO to take a hike in its multiple attempts to deregulate the French audio-visual sector.
May Flowers #1 Black Narcissus ~ M. Powell, E. Pressburger A group of nuns try to establish a new convent on a cliffside in the Himalayas. They clash with the local population and each other and start to go mad. I think I had put this off because I was worried a story about nuns would be stuffy, but this is anything but. A taut psychological thriller with some really great performances and a terrific climax. The visuals are the star, though, and easy to see why it won Oscars for cinematography and art direction. That it was filmed completely in a studio in England is mind-boggling, because it feels like a real location. The treatment of the local culture and brown-face reek of colonialism, but in the context of 1947, probably shouldn't take much away from the achievements of the rest of the film.
If anyone here wondered how I had any claim to be a scholar of The Most Dangerous Game genre without having read the original Richard Connell short story, that oversight has now been corrected. It's really an amazing read. There's both breadth and nuance in Zaroff's motives - no one movie captures the totality, but I see some aspect of it in almost every one of those films.
May Flowers #2 The Lavender Hill Mob ~ C. Crichton Henry Holland has worked for a bank delivering gold bullion for 20 years. A new neighbor whose job is metal casting tourist trinkets sparks an idea for a heist, but can they pull it off. A comedic heist film starring Alec Guinness. It combines a relatively clever heist with some comedic slapstick and a fun chase at the end. Mostly fun if not spectacular.
Nobody 2 (2025) There's few people as good at killing as Hutch. But you can't kill your way out of the 8 figure debt to the Russian mob he picked up in the first movie. Fortunately the shadowy governmentish organization Hutch used to work for picked up the tab. Unfortunately, it means he has to go back to his old grind. Long hours of teaching guys what an axe to the brain feels like has put a serious strain on his family relations. He decides to take a break and go on a family vacation to the small-town Wisconsin amusement park he fondly remembered going to once as a child. And the best part is that it's really far away from any murderous criminal syndicates that Hutch might get in trouble with. Nowhere near. Not quite the equal of the first. I think the main problem is that there were numerous stages of danger, but they all felt like wholly different dangers rather than working up through an organization. I also don't like the video game boss-fight style where one who devotes their full time to fight training is a trivial challenge but someone that devotes their time to business and leisure is a tough fight. But that doesn't in any way mean this wasn't fun and engaging. The fight choreography was excellent and I liked RZA, Christopher Lloyd, and especially Bob Odenkirk. The family was neither annoying nor an anchor on the flow as is often the case. The first half had some provoking things to say about the bad aspects of fantasy power fulfillment before the second half rejected that. Maybe a wholly Nobody Folie à Deux could have been interesting path to take.