Last movie you watched......

That good, huh? People have gone nuts over the series.

 

I guess. I hadn't read any reviews, of either this film, or any of the new ones, before I happened to catch this on a late-night showing. I hadn't planned on watching it, but it ended up being good enough to keep me interested, and then, actually invested. And yes, I was a little surprised, given how I'd seen all the old "Planet of the Apes" movies and always thought they were OK but hadn't loved them.

It wasn't until after, when I realized how much I had liked Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, that I looked up some reviews, and saw that the new iterations had been quite well-received.

 

Watched "Be Kind Rewind" last night with the wife.
Not quite what I was expecting. I thought the plot would focus a lot more on the goofy self-made movies that they had to make since, you know, that's the bulk of every plot summary I'd ever read about it. Except they do most of those in montages where it's hard to tell what movies they're spoofing. Then it took a weird right turn away from that, almost without explanation, and became a movie that tried to pull the heartstrings about coming together as a community even though there's another major twist right at the end that they gloss over with a dropped line.
It wasn't a terrible movie, but it wasn't a very good one either. The plot is a pretty muddled mess, and by the halfway point I didn't really care about either Jack Black or Mos Def's characters. Both of them were pretty annoying, and Danny Glover's character was kind of an asshole.
I'm not sure why people rave about this one so much.

 

"The Dirt." Liked it. Douglas Booth really good as Nikki Sixx.

 

Zombieland: Double Tap was enjoyable. Lea Thompson's daughter was hilarious.

 

The Vast of Space; not a good payoff IMHO.

 

Rocketman

Good but not great. A little too self serving and I would have liked to have the songs be in line to where he was in life.

How does Taupin go from the lyrics of Your Song or Yellow Brick Road to We Built This City or dreck sung by Heart?

 

The Spy Who Dumped Me - some surprisingly good stunt work - but the movie is about what you'd expect.
Can You Ever Forgive Me? - McCarthy and Grant are great as advertised, but the plot and the characters don't exactly warm the cockles.

 

We stared Argo last night but only got about halfway before the SO fell asleep. I haven't seen it since 2012, but it still holds up.

 

My mother-in-law seems to see just about everything that comes out. Thanks to the pandemic, she seems to be catching up on some of the few things she missed. She recommended The Killing of a Sacred Deer to my wife, who asked me to watch it with her.

I love my mother-in-law, but I swear she trolls the family with some of her movie suggestions. This was one of them. Seriously, don't watch it. I hesitate to mention where I found it, because I know some folks like to watch movies other people thought were shit.

That's the thing. I know the director, who also co-wrote it, was going for a bleak and disturbing look at the way humans will act when bad things happen. I can appreciate stories like that if they were well made. This one isn't. The movie begins with just music in the background and a blank screen for at least 10 seconds. Then we get to stare at a beating heart exposed for surgery for a while. After the surgery is done and the main character, the surgeon, removes his gear, we get to stare at it in the garbage for over 10 seconds. By this point, I already knew we were in for two hours of the director trying to show us how brilliant he is and failing miserably.

The use of music is erratic, annoying and distracting. The characters are played as ridiculously unemotional aside from brief outbursts of anger or rage. This actually works for the teenage antagonist, but it makes little sense with the other characters. There are moments that are clear attempts at dark humor that fall flat. The director also clearly has a fetish for finger sucking. I'll just leave that bit there.

I really like the two adult leads, Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman. The latter still looks amazing and they both certainly dive into their roles. They just had shit to work with in this one.

I honestly don't remember any trailers for this movie, which was released in theaters in 2017. It made about $6 million. I'm just glad I saw it for free rather than contributing to that total, which is at the same time paltry and more than the movie deserves.

The only real laugh I got from the movie was listening when my wife called her mother the next day.

 

My guess is he was counting the money - underneath the bar.

Martin Page, Dennis Lambert and (the other) Peter Wolf also got their hands dirty on We Built This City (that song is like if Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Erskine Caldwell and Faulkner got together and wrote the script to Porky's).

 

The Favourite is such an interesting movie. Once you realize it's not one of those stuffy period pieces - you realize it's even shot very unusually - almost entirely with natural light. Some handheld shots, fisheye lenses and other camera pans that give the film that "off-balance" feeling you probably should be feeling with the script.