Last movie you watched......

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Damn Elizabeth Taylor was gorgeous.
It’s the first time I’ve seen it. 10 minutes into it I knew Paul Newman’s character was gay, repressed, but gay. Was that known in 1958?

 

Boy, does it.

Kind of a trash movie.

 

Yeah, Liz Taylor was a smoke show.

Rewatched Die Hard last night. Still pretty good. No Last Boy Scout.

 

"The Leisure Seeker"
I have MoviePass so it didn't cost anything.
Great acting by Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland. Several really amusing scenes. Not much else I can say about it that wouldn't be SPOILERS. OK movie on a slow, rainy night.

Spoiler

I thought I figured out halfway through that she was doing to die first. We had family friends. Wife was very sick, husband was taking care of her, He was pretty healthy and he suddenly died before her. Very sad. The ending was kind of surprising. I thought she had the shotgun shells beneath the floorboard.

 

The original "Rollerball." Had not watched it in years. Didn't remember how dark the plot is. That and the photography reminded me of some Kubrick films.

 

Yes, if you read the play it is more strongly implied, although still never directly stated.
Great play, and a great movie.
And Liz is a definite smoke show.

 

Black Panther proved that honkies don’t have a monopoly on boring superhero movies. My daughter and I agreed to bail after a half hour.

 

"Stronger" - the story of Boston Marathon bombing victim Jeff Bauman's recovery from his injuries was better than I imagined. Jake Gyllenhaal is good in almost everything and this could have been a "movie of the week" kind of thing, but it has a lot more depth. I remember how "good" it made me feel to see him out in public after the bombing - it wasn't as easy as he made it appear. Gyllenhaal kind of frustrates me because I think he's probably the best actor of anyone in his age bracket, and could probably have at least one Oscar by now. But he's had only one movie top $100m, only two others north of $80m.

 

Finally saw 'Lady Bird.' Have wanted to see it for a while.
That is a good movie.

 

Off the top of my head, late 30ish/early 40ish male actors better than Gyllenhaal:
Tom Hardy, Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, James McAvoy, Fassbender, ... and that's without getting into guys like Bale and DiCaprio who are six or seven years older.

Gyllenhaal's a good actor (I loved his performance in "Nightcrawler"), but I don't think he's a top-5 actor even in his age bracket. After Brokeback (in which he was overshadowed by Ledger), he had strong roles such as Jarhead and Zodiac and still wasn't able to break through as one of Hollywood's best. I don't think he has the acting chops to match up with the above mentioned actors, and he doesn't have the star power of guys like the Chris-es (Hemsworth, Pratt, Evans, Pine) or the Ryans (Reynolds, Gosling).

 

Of all the mid-1970s "dystopian future" sci-fi movies, Rollerball is probably the one for me that came closest to predicting the future. Although the fact that a company that makes food calls itself Soylent is more than unnerving.

Soylent.com — Let us take a few things off your plate.

It's not that big a leap to place someone like Tom Brady in the James Caan role and cast Roger Goodall as John Houseman. (Or use the NCAA, FIFA or the Olympics as other examples.) The growth of mass media, the corporate ownership of sports by a handful of rich men, the glamorization of violence, the ignorance of the long-term ramifications on the human body ... William Harrison, the author of the short story that became the screenplay, really nailed it.

 

Well said, maumann, well said. Another thing I took away from my recent viewing of "Rollerball" was how much "The Energy Corporation" tried to suppress individual success, even by the sport's superstar.