Da 5 Bloods. Pretty good Spike Lee Joint. I think he did a good job of weaving an adventure film with the polemics. It was also a well crafted and shot film. Something he is getting better at.
Da 5 Bloods. Pretty good Spike Lee Joint. I think he did a good job of weaving an adventure film with the polemics. It was also a well crafted and shot film. Something he is getting better at.
There came a time when the Old Gods died! The Brave died with the Cunning! The Noble perished locked in battle with unleashed Evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust!
The Hunt (2019) Solid B-Movie thriller with satirical overtones. This is the movie got pushed back after the president ( w/o seeing it) complained about it. Thing is, most of the satire is aimed at coastal liberal elites.
Agreed.
I will say one of the reasons I like Kubrick so much is the variety in his work. He does war, sci-fi, abstract, period drama, horror, film noir. Can I ask what type of movie you gravitate towards, to help recommend which one of his films I think will work best for you?
Christopher Nolan is an interesting one for me. He reminds me a lot of Martin Scorcese. He clearly loves cinema, like Scorcese. He's clearly skilled at what he does on a technical level, like Scorcese. But I don't feel much from his films... just... like... Scorcese.
Of his ten films that he's made:
GREAT
Insomnia (2002)
the Dark Knight (2008)
Inception (2010)
LIKE
Memento (2000)
Batman Begins (2005)
the Prestige (2006)
DISLIKE
the Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Interstellar (2014)
Dunkirk (2017)
NOT SEEN
Following (1998)
Sadly the patter for the future isn't great, from my perspective. I haven't liked a film by him in ten years.
It's a really good film. I'm not sure it's particularly relevant to the current climate, I'd say Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) is far more topical to the #blacklivesmatter movement.
"We are Shakespeare. We are Michelangelo. We are Tchaikovsky. We are Turing. We are Mercury. We are Wilde. We are Lincoln, Lorca, Leonardo da Vinci. We are Alexander the Great. We are Fredrick the Great. We are Rustin. We are Addams. We are Marsha! Marsha Marsha Marsha! We so generous, we DeGeneres. We are Ziggy Stardust hooked to the silver screen. Controversially we are Malcolm X. We are Plato. We are Aristotle. We are RuPaul, god dammit! And yes, we are Woolf."
A GUIDEBOOK TO KILLING YOUR EX (2016)--made in Hungary, written and directed by József Gallai, starring Balázs Szitás--is a low budget, found footage thriller. Szitás as the would-be killer John Doe puts in a performance that is somewhere in between Marty Feldman and Bruno S. It's quite creepy and at only 70 minutes that was about the right length for me. Any longer and I might have been too uncomfortable to stick with it, as the movie is all from his twisted perspective.
I lived for three months in Hungary, a couple years ago, so it was nice to return to the place. It's mainly in English and there's not a lot of spoken Hungarian (John Doe has provided English captions for his viewers), as Doe wants to be sure as many people as possible watch his helpful video. There is a nice feature of Hungarian that bookends the movie. The language is very economical--you can say a lot with few words--and you don't normally use pronouns--who did the action is understood from context. This allows the movie to end with a bit of mystery.
Eurovision. Fire Saga. On Netflix, sweet and funny.
There came a time when the Old Gods died! The Brave died with the Cunning! The Noble perished locked in battle with unleashed Evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust!
Hamilton on Disney+
It's technically a pro shot recording and if the live musical, but they're calling it the "Hamilfilm" so I guess it counts. It easily become one if my favorite Broadway shows, so to see the original cast in HD is an automatic 10/10 for me.
Watched it a couple of times. In all honesty, I did not understand the message of the movie. The main character was pretty badass, though!
I decided to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can say with confidence: I did not like it.
To elaborate: This was a movie that was meant to be experienced in the theatres. The scope and vision of the movie is immense. There are so many great things about this movie that I am amazed with. Something as simple as the velcro-like slippers for the flight attendants just goes to show how much thought and planning went into the making of the movie.
I just felt the movie dwelled too much on the technical wonders it came up with that it forgot it was a movie. I realize this was a movie made in the 60s and there may be more natural way to exposit the movie, but man...the part where the two crew members are eating while their interview is playing...please kill me! I have not felt a movie drag that badly since the hospital scene between MJ and Peter Parker in the first Spider-Man movie.
On top of all that, I did not understand what the actual movie was trying to say. I have no idea.
To answer your question, Kieran: I'm mainly into genre movies. I will definitely give dramas an honest shot and I love quite a few, but I'm more interested in the fantastic.
Recently also re-watched:
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
The Descent
Tremors
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Watched THE COTTON CLUB (1984), directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Dig this cast: Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Gregory Hines, Maurice Hines, Lonette McKee, Bob Hoskins, James Remar, Nicolas Cage, Allen Garfield, Fred Gwynne, Gwen Verdon, Laurence Fishburne, Tom Waits, Jennifer Grey.
It's quite an ambitious movie but it never quite came together for me. Given it's Coppola, it falls below the level of his best work. It was a troubled production, Coppola wasn't supposed to direct, it went well over budget and in the end Coppola had to cut down the run time to satify distributors. Still, I think it was an ill-conceived movie to begin with. There are really two different movies--one about the Cotton Club and one about organized crime in Harlem. And the fictional characters played by Gere, Lane, Hines and McKee are supposed to hold these different stories together, but I never was that invested in them. The Cotton Club story, and all the black people involved at the club (the many famous acts that were featured there), takes a backseat to the real life gangster story, and all the white people that ran Harlem. Both of these stories deserved their own movie.
There are flashes of brilliance and I think that Coppola wanted to tell a highly stylized movie with old Hollywood musical conceits, but that never becomes a fully established motif in the movie. Even though the movie never fully paid off for me, I still think it deserved to do better than it did at the box office--being something of a bomb back then.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is one of the two Kubrick movies that I truly love. The other being DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB. As best as I can remember, I never saw 2001 in a theatre when it came out and probably first saw it on T.V. But I knew about the movie and seemed to be in love with it before I ever saw it. I was obsessed with space travel and science fiction as a kid.
And also the music for the movie grabbed me--I guess this was played on the radio, on the pop stations, even though it was classical music. I wanted this music and I went to Jack Cullen's record store at Brentwood Mall to find this music. I asked the people at the store for that Space Odyssey music, but they didn't know what I was talking about. Finally they handed me a 45 that they thought must be what I wanted. I bought the record and took it home, but this turned out to be "Space Oddity" by Davie Bowie--I was disappointed. That wasn't what I wanted at all and took the record back to the store to get my money back.
But eventually someone in my family must have figured out what I really wanted and I got the soundtrack album for the movie as a Christmas present. That album opened me up to classical music. I fell in love with the music of Strauss, Beethoven, Mozart as result. It literally changed my life. And I still hadn't seen the movie.
Our school library had the book, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY by Arthur C. Clarke. And being as I read a lot of science fiction, including Clarke, I was immediately drawn into that book. It's a great novel and gives you a much better understanding of the full story.
And then there was the Marvel comic--Jack Kirby adapting the movie. I bought the Treasury Edition and some of the regular issues.
I finally did see the movie. And while the movie lacked a lot of what the book had, I came around to liking the movie--because of all those other things that I had experienced before seeing the movie. I think it's important to understand that before JAWS and STAR WARS, movies were much slower paced and there was a strong influence from the European movies in the 1960s. 2001 isn't supposed to move fast. It's more about the imagery and meditating on the meaning.
2001 is simply one of the greatest pieces of cinema ever created.
There came a time when the Old Gods died! The Brave died with the Cunning! The Noble perished locked in battle with unleashed Evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust!
Miss Meadows -pretty good vigilante flick.
Da 5 bloods: Boring, I switched it off after 1:30
Paranormal Activity The Ghost Dimension: Not good, not bad. One or two scares that made me jump. Its okay that the series ended.
Man I thought the 5 Bloods was the shit. Delroy London did a great job with the outcomes of war. His character was among the funniest and I can see why he was tormented. I also learned how much Black contributed to the war. A great history lesson driven by strong acting and story. Anyway, I just saw Hustlers.
I was shocked how good this movie was from the acting to the pace to the characters. Lopez led the way but the other girls did their thing as they explained their actions in making it big. The pace kept the viewer hooked while I really cared for the two main characters. Oh and it was funny. Props to the director.
Watching it I saw its a mix between Bullock's Ocean 11 and Goodfellas. Lopez plays the lead in directing the girls into different heists while the other lead narrates the story of a rookie to the ending from her eyes.
Oh and I'm so happy they made their occupation the background and didn't go crazy with it. Buuuuuuuut Lopez look great. It's not a classic but it's a movie that could be rewatched.
I wonder if the cut that was released is the same as what was supposed to come out originally. I think if it had come out when it was supposed to, it would have landed better. Now, it feels off to have this hyperbolic parody when the culture war in the United States has become a hyperbolic parody of itself and hundreds of thousands of people are dead. It feels wrong to laugh at that (without bitter pangs in the belly).
Upon seeing Dennis Reynolds, I viewed the whole exercise as one over-extended episode of ALWAYS SUNNY. On that level it worked for me.