Great movie poster! So much better than every movie poster made today where it’s just the faces of the lead actors.
1 Like
It really should just be Matthau and Shaw standing back to back, smirking with “oh you!” side-eye looks at each other. One can have arms crossed, the other a gun.
1 Like
Just saw a documentary on Hulu about The Dana Carvey show called Too Funny to Fail. I was vaguely aware of the implosion at the time, but, looking back, it’s pretty wild to watch a comedy show with one of the most popular comedians at the time plus Stephen Colbert, Steve Carrell, Robert Smigel, Louis C.K., and Charlie Kauffman just crash and burn while the network looks on in horror.
1 Like
Must be a short film.
I love the French, but couldn’t resist. I’ll show myself out.
Wasnt the network the big problem with that show? They less looked on in horror and more drove the show into the ground
The way it comes off in the movie is that there was a sort of fundamental disconnect between the show ABC thought it was getting and the show the creatives wanted to make. ABC wanted a nice mainstream sketch comedy show that could hold the audience lead in from Home Improvement and the creatives wanted most of the freedom they would’ve gotten at HBO while getting a network paycheck.
Eta: they tell a story in the doc about how there had been some internal debate about what sketch should open the first show. They went with the more controversial option. Cut to minute by minute ratings where the show LOST 6 million viewers in the first 5 minutes.
Was that the “Bill Clinton lactates for puppies” sketch?
1 Like
Lol, yep
How does My Cousin Vinny simultaneously trade off of southern and Italian American stereotypes and have the first 20 minutes straight be comic misunderstandings that run on for minutes at a time?
Edit: I’ve never seen anyone eat a chicken drumstick like that
Day 1 Quarantine
The Eternals
6/10
Like it’s not as bad as people were making it out to be. I actually like the concept. Hidden history, superheroes having to kill God. All interesting things, but the scriptwriting just tanks it with long boring exposition. The two main love interests having the chemistry of a wet paper bag, and just odd goofy stuff that felt like they needed some quirky thing said but didn’t have that skill to even pull quirkiness off.
Angelina Jolie is just there in the movie. She was space madness so like doesn’t do anything. I know Chapo made fun of Kumail Nanjiani, and I mean they’re not wrong. He’s in this movie for about 10 minutes, and the final battle he just peaces out and doesn’t show up. Also you could never tell that he bulked out for this movie.
Shout out to Lauren Ridloff who plays Makarri. She was in Sound of Metal as well and just has a lot of charisma which actually shows off. Shout out to Barry Keoghan for emoting as well.
Judas and the Black Messiah
8/10
Daniel Kaluuya gives an absolutely amazing performance as Fred Hampton. Like so good the movie makes it very easy to see the appeal of the Black Panthers. Like the movie is worth it just to see his performance. LaKeith Stanfield from Sorry to Bother You plays the turncoat. He does a good job but the Black Panthers ambience and Kaluuya’s performance is what makes this stand out.
Capote
9/10
Philip Seymour Hoffman deserved the Academy Award for the movie. He’s brilliant in it. Honestly Robert Blake as one of the murders should have won something too. My only complaint is that Robert Blake is giving a soliloquy and right when the climax was happening they cut to showing the violence he was describing, which did highlight how gruesome their crime was, but kind of undercut Blake’s scene.
My Cousin Vinny
8/10
I hated the first 30 minutes of this movie and was ready to hate watch the rest of it, but against all odds I turned out liking it a lot. Joe Pesci won me over and there were some great moments in it. I mostly watched this because I heard it was Marisa Tomei’s coming out movie and she doesn’t disappoint. Her and Pesci have great chemistry that really pays off at the end
Le Samouraï
7/10
It would be dumb to say that this is a Tarantino before Tarantino because obviously he just did a pastiche of his influences. The anti hero is a cypher, the cops crooked, the women beautiful. It does have some oddly funny scenes that I can’t tell are how the French did things or just used to heighten drama, but are way different than American ways of doing things. After the assassinations they round up suspects, but they round up like 40 people. It’s like an auditorium full of fedora, trench coat wearing men and they the sit the witnesses in the first row and have a parade of men with the witness going no, yes, no, etc.
La Leyenda Negra
3/10
I couldn’t make it through the first 30 minutes. It’s just poorly acted all around. I give them points because it wasn’t like a straight to video B movie terrible, but I wasn’t interested
4 Likes
Macbeth
6/10
The atmosphere of the movie was great. The Scottish Highlands look like a place full of witches and a rough life. Translating that atmosphere into a compelling movie is harder. With Fassbender and Marion Cotillard seems like it’d be amazing, but clocking under 2 hours and the first 20 minutes or so are all slow mo battle scenes it felt really condensed. They don’t really explain the important characters, which for people who aren’t read up on Shakespeare like me made the movie a bit confusing of who was who and why would I care.
Pretty sure they didn’t try to go for realism but only for what would be best atmospherically. The scene you mention is when the cop switches delon’s hat with another guy’s and witness is like “hmm I only saw the man briefly and I have a bad memory but out of these 40 ppl… it looked like this guy with this one’s hat” right ? That was a cool one. Also love that there is not a word of dialogue in the trailer.
(And this seems like a nice way to spend quarantine, have fun !)
I liked the Fassbender Macbeth.
Why do the “birthing farm” or “human farm” scenes look better in the 1999 movie than they do in the 2022 movie? How is that even possible? It looks less real.
Priscilla Page’s top movies of 2021
Read the Stanislaw Lem story Solaris (it’s very good!), it put me in the mind to re-watch the movie. One of the things I like about Solaris is the lived-in feel of all the sets; the future world feels convincing and gritty in a way that later sci-fi movies like Alien and Star Wars would master. It’s long and challenging to follow, I think reading the story first really enhances the experience much like it does for 2001. Would recommend if you like psychedelic 60’s-70’s sci-fi movies with a dash of arthouse bullshit.
i hope you watched tarkovsky, and not clooney. although i think the remake was supposed to be aight, not horrible.
Yeah, but I actually did see the Clooney version many, many years ago. All I really remember from it was that while I was watching it I was drinking some bootleg absinthe my buddy hooked me up with. The remake was actually pretty good, though?
Basically I think that Solaris is a lot like 2001 in that it’s a brilliant cerebral sci-fi movie but also I get why many people become frustrated with it. In both cases, reading the book ahead of the film really helps. The era of 60’s-70’s psychedelic sci-fi is my favorite jam, so ymmv.