Last movie you watched......

Maybe it was posted on this board, but I remember recently reading a tweet about how Hollywood uses murder as the center of a plot, to a degree that makes the death of a person mundane but glamorizes killing. It was even more upsetting to the writer when so often these fictional murders are men killing women, frequently with a sexual aspect. That's the spirit of the tweet, but it was much more eloquently and succinctly written.

I had similar thoughts from watching shows like CSI and especially Criminal Minds, which seems to relish gory sex related murders.

 

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Serial Killers

 

I've got no problem with great actors who made great films but were seriously underpaid, cashing in with dreck - but Diane Keaton is approaching DeNiro level whiffs. You would think a movie that could afford to pay Keaton what she is worth, would have a decent script.

Diane Keaton

 

The Italian Job (2003). Very entertaining heist film with plot holes yes, but it keeps your interest throughout. Had a couple of nice plot twists and a satisfying good guys won ending. Edward Norton is masterful. Jason Statham is workmanlike as usual. The underrated Mos Def shines. There was a huge Samoan rapper who plays Skinny Pete, that was a treat.

 

The Highwaymen on Netflix. Thought it was well done. Hadn’t seen Costner in awhile. And Woody is good, as usual.

 

The next rock bio film really needs to hire a cinematographer who can give the picture a "70s feel".People "know" these musicians due to all of the footage of rockers from the 70s and the 80s out there that when you shoot these movies in HD digital and lose that fuzzy washed out look it really loses something. That said - I think it's pretty badass for Taron Egerton to be doing his own singing and not trying too hard to sound like Elton in Rocket Man.

 

Late to this, but two things come to mind. People liked how Dany's massacre in Game of Thrones was told from the point of view of the victims. The burned corpses of the parent and child (with the toy horse) were an important flip on the usual way these stories are told—from the POV of the perpetrator, not the poor woman who was asleep in her bed when Ted Bundy decided to kill her.

I also saw a clip recently with Bill Hader, talking about the killing in Barry (which is the best show on TV). There's a murder in season one where he chokes a guy to death surrounded by children's toys, and someone on set said it was a little brutal, and Bill Hader was like, that's what murder is. It's brutal. I don't know what effect watching this stuff has on people, but murder has been sanitized in a weird way.

I can see what the person you're referencing was thinking, in other words.

 

One of the reasons Goodfellas is superior to Casino is because of the Spider character. We know Spider just well enough - and he's innocent enough - for us to know that, when Tommy kills him, it's a grievous wrong, and we are focused on the victim. (Spider is essentially what young Henry was, remember.) So even though Tommy dies for the Batts murder in the plot itself, he dies for the Spider murder existentially. We're ready to see Tommy die by that point. He's earned that. Our feelings about Tommy's death are juxtaposed to Jimmy's blubbering, and we judge Jimmy, too, for that.

Casino compensates for the lack of a innocent - maybe it's old lady but we don't know her well enough - by giving the Pesci character a particularly gruesome death. It just seems gratuitous, how Nicky dies, more than anything else. (And Nicky's worse than Tommy.)

Police serials (CSIs, Law & Order) invariably give us quite little on victims, so, yes, the focus is on the cat and mouse game with the murderer.

 

The new John Wick is the best of the three and perfectly sets up a fourth.

 

Long Shot, like story and themes explored; especially story w Ice Cube’s son. Theron never looked better wow.

 

Which has already been announced for 2021.