Last movie you watched......

Watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind on Netflix the other night. First time I've seen it in about 35 years. Really enjoyed it, including the special effects that I suppose were advanced for 1977.

 

The new Coen Bros thing on Netflix started out OK but the last hour I found to be a slog.

 

I saw this a few weeks ago and am STILL thinking about it. The soundtrack was one hundo though.

 

"Downsizing" took a really interesting premise and made a muddled mess of it. It tries to be humorous, a cool futuristic technology piece and a "message" movie all the same time, and fails miserably, despite Matt Damon and Hong Chau's best efforts to salvage a lousy script. Is it supposed to be one man's search for his true calling? A satire on modern-day Gulliver's travels? A heavy-handed treatise on climate change? Everybody -- large and small -- is going to die at the end, except maybe the Shrinky Dinks in the cave of wonders. I kept waiting for more juxtaposition between the bigs and smalls, like maybe a kid who rampages through Leisureland or Paul's ongoing relationship with a wife who stays big. Instead, it's like a different scriptwriter took over halfway through. I wanted to like it, and there are some good scenes between Damon and Chau, but what's the point of having the characters shrink if the plot doesn't really change the outcome?

 

Rewatched "Pleasantville" over the holiday weekend. It's really a movie that requires at least a second viewing, to get past thinking about the technology required for each frame of the movie to think more about the subtle (and not so subtle) changes to the characters that echo a number of real events in our history at the time when television switched from black-and-white to color and we were forced to confront racism and inequality. It's a movie that could easily have become a caricature but the actors play the roles so convincingly that it never seems forced when they evolve from two-dimensional characters to three-dimensional sentient beings. At the time the movie was filmed, Big Bob might have been a parallel to a George Wallace-type politician, but viewing it now changes the whole dynamic in the "us vs. them" storyline. We've come a long way since 1965 but we've still got a long way still to travel.

 

Depending upon my frame of mind when you ask, this is my favorite all-time movie.

 

I, too, went in with low expectations. The critics were off by a mile on this. I thought it was great. Brought my 10-year-old daughter and she loved it, too. I had read somewhere that they made only passing reference to his sexuality. I have to find that inane take and send that person a very strongly worded letter.

 

Critics didn't think it was subversive and transgressive enough. That's the long and short of it. The movie was more of an audience-pleaser and that bothered critics.

You're about to see it with a movie called The Favourite which, while a pretty good movie, is getting the acclaim it is because it has a lot of morally rotten behavior in it, and also some sex.

I probably sound like a prude, and I don't mean to. I mean to say critics are - and they're doing this in TV, too - equating quality art to art concurrent with their views of the world, too.

 

Watched “The Christmas Chronicles” from
Netflix. It was a great concept aka a satire of hallmark/Christmas movies, but unfortunately it fell flat too often. I still felt like I was watching a Hallmark movie despite a great performance by Kurt Russell portraying Santa as rough around the edges. He wears a dirty leather coat, hates that he is predicted as obese in media, and has a darkly cunning edge to him. Yet, he is magical in that he knows every person he meets, every street he has ever been on and speaks any language with ease. In a little throw away line, you learn that elven is the language he speaks at home. The film also does an extended sequence of how santa’s bag functions and how the sleigh works that was wonderfully done.

Still, not going to be a Christmas classic or one that requires repeat viewings. The “spunky kids” show some signs of life early, and then become cardboard hallmark characters the rest of the way. The satire falls flat when they tack on a saccharine ending.

 

The Terminal. Great acting by Tom Hanks. Funny but with a good story.

 

The Green Book; a heartfelt friendship movie IMHO. Very emotional with two very believable performance from Messrs. Ali and Mortenson. I loved it.

 

Can't wait to watch A Christmas Story again this year!