Last movie you watched......

MoviePass can lead to some lousy movie selecting. If it looks mildly intriguing, I'm inclined to go.

That's how I found myself at Annihilation and Gringo this week. Annihilation was st least mildly enjoyable throughout, but ultimately meaningless. Whatever message it was trying to send did not transmit. Really nice to look at on the big screen, at least.

Gringo was just annoying. A couple funny scenes with David Oyelowo. Overall it wasn't very funny despite being billed as a dark comedy. Joel Edgerton once again shows up in a movie that looks like it has the goods, yet falls flat. Add it to his list along with Black Mass, Red Sparrow, Loving, and It Comes At Night. None gets much more than a meh from me.

Not a lot out until Avengers that intrigues me. Isle of Dogs and Thoroughbreds are about it.

 

I don't know what pissed me off more about the movie: the fact that they make some grand pronouncement to advance the plot only to abandon it in the very next scene or that they obviously opened a science textbook to some random page and used what they found to explain some bullshit deus ex machina.

 

Kill Bill is better than all of them.

 

All The President's Men. It's still a great story, and an engrossing movie. Especially for journalists, of course.

 

I wish to hell that there could be a Kill Bill 3, where Vernita Green's daughter shows up to kill The Bride.

Tarentino would need to have shot some stuff along with KB2 for backstory plot, and I doubt that Uma ever works with him again, so I guess that it's a pipe dream... but, man, what could have been.

 

I was a senior in high school in 1974, and the Watergate investigation was going on. My history teacher was the department head, and she got permission to focus our last quarter on it. We were reading all the news magazines week by week. We went back and read all the original Woodward and Bernstein reporting. She gave each of us one of the major players to dig into, then we all did little spot reports on them and put the pieces together. I got Maurice Stans, Finance Chairman for CREEP. "Follow the money...".

I was all over the book and the movie both. So well done.

Now I'm living through another crooked President, and to some degree doing the same thing all over. Life is funny.

 

I was younger when Watergate went on, but I nonetheless have vivid, even life-directing memories surrounding it. And, like you, I had a history teacher, in college, though, who used it to make a real impression on this student, who was just starting to think about journalism and become involved in the campus newspaper.

I always liked history, but I still have always considered Mr. Gonzales to have been one of the best teachers I ever had. I chose "All The President's Men" from a list of books on which we could do an in-depth report, and I absolutely loved it. So, of course, I gushed about it. As you said, it was so well done. It read like a true who-done-it, and I remember I could hardly put the book down. I also still even remember the (very helpful) listing of the cast of characters in the front of the book -- a must-have for reference as you got into the reading.

The professor, sensing my genuine interest and wanting to spur it further, then pointed me toward "The Final Days" book, a well-researched (but not as engrossing) follow-up to "All The President's Men," and I appreciated the nod he was giving to me by doing it.

Watergate, I think, was one of those truly "teachable-moment" type of real-life events that teachers must dream of and hope for with regard to their classes.

 

I wasn't particularly fond of that history teacher. She knew her stuff, but was pretty dry and stuffy. Not on this course. The material was fresh and interesting to her, as it was to us. We were really engaged... well, there were the usual couple of knobs in the class who didn't, but they wouldn't have no matter what she was teaching.

 

Saw Kingsman and the Golden Circle. It was kind of odd and all over the place, I get the sense that most of the "names" they got for the film (Channing Tatum, Halle Berry, Julianne Moore, Jeff Bridges and Elton John) shot their scenes in a couple of days and were done. I mean, you have four Oscar winners in a movie Two best Actors and Two best Actresses, (five when you count Elton's song win).

"The Hero" with Sam Elliott was a movie I wanted to like more than I did. Sam Elliott plays a less successful version of himself, but it could have and should have been better. The director - like a lot of indie directors - spends a lot of time just pointing the camera at the lead with no dialogue. It's repetitive and only slightly less irritating by the cliche'd scene of the old guy getting high, laughing and getting the munchies.
At this point, these 70 year olds were the same people getting high in college back in the 60s. I don't see why it's supposed to be hilarious.

 

My hope is that there's another Woodward & Bernstein ready to save our country once again.

 

Was watching "The Client" last night. And I disagree - I don't think Brad Renfro (rip) was that good in it. The movie wasn't that good either. No wonder they don't make Grisham books into movies anymore - the characters aren't believable.

 

Live By Night... Ben Affleck prohibition gangster flick. Not bad. Not great and if you don't think about it too hard, its not bad. It killed two hours of my time.