What movie have you watched?

Recently I've been to see:

Reality - a fact-based film in which a young woman comes home from shopping to find two genial smiling FBI agents waiting to interrogate her. It's adapted from the stage play Is This A Room and is gripping and quite unnerving.

You Can Live Forever - two girls in an intensely religious community fall in love with each other, with all the ramifications you can imagine given the setting. Very well-acted and touching.

Barbie - the doll enters the real world to find out why she's having thoughts of death. Sounds daft, and it kind of is, but very enjoyable and good-humoured.

Got lots more screenings coming up at the local arts centre during Aug/Sep, including a couple of old ones next week. Meanwhile tonight we're off to Cromarty up at the tip of the Black Isle for a nice meal at Sutor Creek followed by a visit to the lovely little volunteer-run Cromarty Cinema to see the latest Mission Impossible.

Quote from Backdrifter

Meanwhile tonight we're off to Cromarty up at the tip of the Black Isle for a nice meal at Sutor Creek followed by a visit to the lovely little volunteer-run Cromarty Cinema to see the latest Mission Impossible.

The meal was outstanding. Their spicy sticky Korean fried chicken is unbelievably nice. As soon as I finished it, I wanted a whole other plate of it. The film was pretty good too, as daft and action-packed as you'd expect and very enjoyable.

Since then I've seen Oppenheimer, which was gripping and didn't feel like 3 hours. Cillian Murphy is as good as ever but for me the star was Robert Downey Jr who I don't think has ever been better. The fast-edit approach reminded me a bit of Oliver Stone's JFK. It's a style that can niggle but I didn't mind it in this, likewise to my surprise it didn't bother me too much that with the exception of a few moments here and there the incidental score was pretty much continuous. Normally that would really bug me.

Most recently I saw a climate documentary My Extinction in which the film-maker charts his transition from "well I recycle and stuff" to becoming an activist. At its core it covered the influence of the Tufton Street right-wing 'thinktank' cabal.

Next up I've got another documentary, this time about the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, then a screening of Arrival which I've seen many times and is one of my favourite films but this will be the first time I've seen it in a cinema since its release.

We watched Casino Royale yesterday. In the Venice scene I mis-heard Vesper saying to Bond "you go get supplies" as "you go get the pies". Obviously it seemed a very unlikely task for Bond to be despatched, particularly Craig's stone-faced interpretation. Might Roger Moore's more lighthearted comical 007 have been up for fetching some pies? He's the only one I could imagine embarking on a pastry-based mission.

Was there ever the possibility of a storyline involving an evil criminal genius trying to gain control of the world's pies?

Quote from Backdrifter

Was there ever the possibility of a storyline involving an evil criminal genius trying to gain control of the world's pies?

Of course there were: You Only Live Pies, Live and Let Pie, and No Time for Pie.

Quote from panopticom

Of course there were: You Only Live Pies, Live and Let Pie, and No Time for Pie.

I thought of the 2nd and 3rd of those plus Tomorrow Never Pies and Pie Another Day, but shrank from mentioning them. I kind of admire your putting your head above the parapet there.

I watched the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar last week. I thought it was great. Massive blockbuster special effects and dense, complicated story and themes. There's one particularly cool idea wherein people on a planet near a huge black hole experience 1 hour in the time 7 years passes on earth.

Watched the 4K restoration of Mean Streets. I forgot how visceral, powerful and uninhibited this movie was. A gut punch.

Killers of the Flower Moon.

Up there with Oppenheimer. Epic.

Great performance by Lily Gladstone.

I was thinking "I know these guys" in a couple of times and turned out Jack White and Jason Isbell were casted! Did not know that. Pleasant surprise.

I love how there isn't a "I'm gonna make the crowd cry" moment. It keeps you up, focused on the topic rather than trying to play on the viewer's emotions.

The Paw Patrol movie. The older one, not the new one. I've seen it approximately 18 times in the last three days, no exaggeration. I have to say, there are much worse things to be subjected to.

Napoleon.

Meh.

Quote from panopticom

Napoleon.

Meh.

I was going to see it, but realised it was mainly because from the trailers I thought Vanessa Kirby looked really nice, and was that enough of a reason to see it. I decided no it wasn't.

The Polar Express.

In a similar vein to the Paw Patrol movie above, I saw Polar Express approximately 16 times over the Christmas holidays. It's pretty good, although the songs getting stuck in my head would drive a person low-key insane.

I also tried watching Don't Look Up. I gave up halfway through, it was unbelievably annoying and smug. I'd rather watch Polar Express a 17th time.

Quote from thewatcher

I also tried watching Don't Look Up. I gave up halfway through, it was unbelievably annoying and smug.

Following on from my Napoleon comment above, I had wanted to see this for the similarly shallow reason that from the clips I'd seen I thought Jennifer Lawrence (of whom I'm a fan anyway) looked gorgeous. But I still haven't seen it. I probably still will give it a go.

Towards the end of 2023 I saw new films Killers Of The Flower Moon, The Bikeriders, Maestro, Wonka, and the outstanding ones would be How To Have Sex and The Killer. I also saw screenings of old films Galaxy Quest, A Matter Of Life & Death, and The Spy In Black.

My first films of 2024 have been Fallen Leaves (excellent) and Priscilla, which was good.

One Life. Take some tissues with you!

Anthony Hopkins is still on top form.

This last week I saw two very contrasting films, both good in their own very different ways. One was the aforementioned One Life which I too found extremely moving. For anyone who doesn't know, it's based on the actions of London-based banker Nicholas Winton in the run-up to the nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. Seeing news of the displaced families he felt he couldn't just sit there watching it happen, so went to Prague and orchestrated the rescue of hundreds of children. In terms of those lives, and the ones made possible by their rescue, he and his associates made a huge difference. It's humbling to think of people with such selfless motivation. It is indeed another terrific performance by Anthony Hopkins, also great work by Johnny Flynn as the young Winton, and from Romola Garai and Helena Bonham Carter. Plus it was good to see Jonathan Pryce in a small but significant role, someone whose work I've admired throughout his career.

The other film was Poor Things. From the trailers I'd seen, I approached it warily as they made it seem possibly too wilfully "oh look how frightfully weird and kooky this all is!" But I'd enjoyed The Favourite by the same director, and I like Mark Ruffalo and Emma Stone who star in it, and I know only too well how trailers can be very misleading so I chanced it. I'm glad I did as it was much more enjoyable than I expected. It's a fantastical scenario in which a scientist who creates macabre animal hybrids outdoes himself by bringing a dead woman back to life. On being reanimated she's childlike and has to essentially learn and 'grow up' again. The bulk of the film is about her releasing herself from the scientist's custody. At times it's not an easy watch and has some pretty grotesque imagery but is also quite funny and at times even touching.

The other day I went to see The Holdovers. It's about a cynical teacher at a New England boarding school who to his irritation is given the task of looking after the small group of boys who are unable to rejoin their families at christmas so must stay on campus during the holidays. I enjoyed it very much.

In the last month I've been to see (and enjoyed all these in their very different ways):

The End We Start From: A couple are forced from their London home when relentless rain causes floods. The wife is pregnant and gives birth in a struggling besieged hospital and they manage to get to the husband's parents house in an unflooded area as society starts to break down around them. It's kind of an enactment of that notion that we are only three missed meals away from anarchy. There's a scene involving a character played by Mark Strong that is horrifying and has haunted me since. It's not graphic and we don't see anything as such but it's implied which makes it even more upsetting. The film is grim, but actually does have uplifting moments and some superb acting.

Argylle: really daft espionage adventure, cartoonish and very entertaining. I'll watch pretty much anything with either Sam Rockwell or Bryce Dallas Howard in, and they're both in this.

The Zone Of Interest: this is quite simply a depiction of a day-to-day family life. That's it... except the family happens to be that of the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, and their house borders the camp, separated only by a high wall. We only see the family's life, we don't see anything of the camp. But as they play in the lovely sunny garden with their kids, splashing in the pool, eating dinner and settling into bed at night, we hear things off-screen, distant and muffled. It's one of the most chillingly disturbing films I've ever seen.

Wicked Little Letters: in a quaint post-WWI english village, a very straitlaced religious woman is receiving letters full of threats and insults in vicious swearing language. She and her parents suspect the uncouth young woman next door, who denies it's her. We gradually begin to find out more about what's going on and who is sending the letters. It's played as a comedy-drama and is also quite touching at times. Timothy Spall is brilliantly horrible as the bitter snarling father of the recipient.

Four films seen this last week over two double-header cinema trips.

American Fiction: a black author is frustrated when told his work doesn't sell well because it's "not black enough". He reaches tipping point, adopts a false identity and churns out a novel that's as "black" as he can make it to the point of caricature. You can probably predict what then happens but it's very entertaining and at times hilarious.

Out Of Darkness: essentially a sort of horror thriller, but with the distinction of being set in the paleolithic era, with all the dialogue spoken in a concocted 'ancient' language. Grim but quite compelling, and a bold idea.

Mondays - See You 'This' Week: a team of office colleagues gradually realise they're stuck in a time loop that lasts 1 week, and try to work out how they can break free of it. Really enjoyable and amusing.

Drive Away Dolls: Set in 1999, it features two young women who decide they need to get away from their routine and take a long road trip to Florida. Due to a misunderstanding they accidentally end up in possession of a briefcase and a box and in trouble when the men responsible for the contents set out after them. It was a bit irritating and overdone at first but I felt it settled down and became more engaging, with some very funny moments.

An additional thought - all these were under 2 hours long, three of them were under 100 minutes. We need more of that, too many films are way too long.

I sometimes drop into the films on the GREAT! action and GREAT! movies channels as they're often hilariously bad disaster films which all seem to have been made between about 2007 and 2018. They frequently involve the Earth spinning out of orbit or shifting on its axis, with catastrophic results which usually involve badly realised lightning and the occasional crappily cgi'd car flying through the air and crashing to the ground.

I'm currently watching Polar Opposites, in which "a nuclear test sets off a doomsday scenario".

Usually these films involve the incineration/vapourisation/other form of total destruction specifically of New Zealand. I'm now awaiting that although no sign of it yet. In fact the maverick English scientist said something bad might happen to Hawaii so maybe NZ is off the hook.