Last movie you watched......

The Outfit, currently on Amazon Prime, was very good. Crime thriller and suspenseful.

 

Rewatched The Last Waltz... again. A wonderful film.

Still - and this isn't a new observation - it's weird to see a mostly Canadian band play Southern rock with such passion. I guess there's a redneck fighting to get out of every white guy.

 

Saw it this afternoon. I fully agree. Overall I enjoyed it.

 

Vengeance; BJ Novak film
Could have been the best written film in the past 30 yrs I’ve seen. The very opposite of thin caricatures of characters. The depth of their stories was great. I found Ashton Kutcher to have given an Oscar worthy Supporting Actor nomination performance; seriously. I was mesmerized by his delivery. Four star movie.

 

Clerks III:

• Not as funny as II, but nowhere near as gross either. Some lower key laughs.
• Predictable for the most part with a couple of shocking/heartbreaking surprises
• Seemingly slams the door on the franchise, but given Smith's embrace of the comic/sci fi tropes of alternative universes, resurrections, retcons and reboots, who knows what he may spring in the future.

 

Did you rent/buy or is it streaming somewhere?

 

It’s $14.99 to buy on Prime.

For as much as I love the first Clerks, I have zero interest in this one.

 

I have zero interest in paying for it. But I'll watch it for free somewhere.

 

Trip to Paradise, a fun time.

 

In an insomnia-induced need to inwardly scream at the current state of things, I went backwards in time for this stupid o'clock double feature:
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of National Lampoon and For Madmen Only: The Stories of Del Close.

The NatLamp docu was uneven and geared toward a specific audience. They almost completely skipped over the brilliant cartoonists who often made the magazine more than worth the cover price. Two things stood out, though: How talented John Belushi was. The friendship between Chevy Chase and Doug Kenney made me see them both in a different light (for better and worse.)

The Del Close bio had a dirty, ragged feel to it. Having been fed Viola Spolin like a damned goose in drama school, I always found it curious that Close elicited little more than embarrassed coughs, sometimes from people who's spent time at Second City. The breakdown of how Charna Halpern moved his theories into something that worked as a frame for cohesive theatrical performance was one of the better segments. James Urbaniak as Close was good.

 

La Belle Noiseuse.

Very hard to find. A four-hour French film about what it means to make art. An absolute masterpiece.

It's streaming at Tubi: The Beautiful Troublemaker (1991)

 

No question. It is not a *good* film - neither was Joy - but David O Russell has never made a movie I wouldn't watch and enjoy on some level.