Last movie you watched......

Spotlight, All the President's Men, etc. are all great but they are to journalism like volcanic eruptions are to geology. The Paper is the only journalism film I've seen that captures the lunacy of day-to-day newspaper operations. Keaton, Tomei, Quaid, Duvall etc. are damn excellent. For my money, it's the best.

 

Signed up for Sinemia. Will be my MoviePass replacement. $8.99/month for three movies per month. They were selling gift cards for 30% off, so I bought a $100 one for $70. You can pay a whole year at once, so $107.88 total; I paid $77.88 for it. I believe there are fees of a buck or so for buying tix online, but still a good deal. Will practically pay for itself just on the superhero movies I go to with friends.

 

The Paper takes place over 24 hours and it is far from a standard day. You have the metro editor taking a job interview at a more respected rival paper, then ruining his chances for that job by stealing information about a big story from the managing editor's desk. At the same time, his wife is pregnant and giving him crap about his hours, which is pretty standard, but she happens to need an emergency C-section that same day. Also that same day, a pissed-off government official shows up at a bar where the employees go to threaten a reporter with a gun, then fires a shot that hits the managing editor in the leg. All of this while they cover a big story which everybody nearly got wrong, leading to the metro editor fighting with the managing editor (pre-shooting) to stop the presses after they have started running off editions that got the big story wrong.

They do a great job of capturing some of the day-to-day drama of newspaper operations, but it's not really a normal day.

 

I’m looking forward to “Glass” in a few weeks.

 

The Shipping News, starring the now-disgraced Kevin Spacey, was a fairly decent picture of a threadbare small town daily, although the workings of the paper were about the C-plot in the storyline.

 

The timeline of the ending also seems wonky. It has to be at least an hour from the time Glenn Close and Randy Quaid head to the bar, and the time Glenn Close finally gets through to the press room at the hospital telling them to stop the presses. If their press run is, say, 300,000, then how many papers got off the press and onto the street in that time? There are still going to be thousands of copies out there with the wrong story in it.

 

Saw the movie today. You're spot on with your assessment. They tried to do too much and it wasn't clear what their overarching point was. Was he power hungry? Was he trying to expand the scope of the president? Was it showing the price our country pays for complacency? Was it a warning about Trump? Over all not a bad movie but the lack of focus was distracting.

 

The Holy Grail is on Netflix now. I knew every joke, but it was still great to watch.

 

The Favourite. Excellent.

 

Skyscraper. Passable Die Hard rip-off.

 

IMHO the direct line from Nixon to GWB to Trump was his point and that Cheney was a big part of that.

Well done but sobering story of what happened and why we’re where we are now.

 

I’m old enough to remember what Bullock used to look like and seeing her in Bird Box like this just ruins the movie for me. It’s like going to the orchestra but the guy down the street is conducting.

She’s 54. She was a beautiful woman. I’m sure she would still be a beautiful woman today if she didn’t have all that surgery.

People who get plastic surgery always seem to get at least one too many.

With Sam Jackson turning young in Captain Marvel, I’m wondering if this will be the new norm in 10 years.