I think the first one is trash too. This one is no China Town but it’s passable to showcase the amazing action and visuals. It was good enough to get me choked up a couple times.
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Watched Weird on the Roku channel. I was grinning ear-to-ear and giggling constantly for the first half. Second half wasn’t as good, but overall it was still a fun, WEIRD movie.
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I often forget there’s a movie thread. This probably goes better here
Time for this annual debbie downer courtesy of TCM (in before some other famous people die who did not make the cut)
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I think someone here recommended Jexi, but now I can’t find it. Anyway, I ended up watching it and it’s legit one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen. The love story is quite possibly the worst in cinematic history and I hate Adam Devine (luckily they just rip on him most of the time), but I would rewatch a couple times just b/c Rose Byrne is so freakin’ hilarious.
Lots of F-bombs and strong language, so the movie carries an FK6 rating (only for kids aged 6+)
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Lol why the Devine hate??
I thought he was hilarious also in When We First Met with Alexandra Daddario. It’s another fun time traveling paradox butterfly effect story.
Watched this today. How emotionally drained would you say you are?
I thought it was really good, but I am mad about the donkey.
Banshees of Inisheren
Really feel like the hype on this one is just nostalgia for In Bruges. Less than the sum of it’s parts.
Exquisite acting. Beautiful cinematography. Well paced. Feels tough to classify this as a dark comedy though which makes a key part of the plot a bit ridiculous.
Still better than 95% of the over processed crap that is out there but I would definitely damp down the expectations.
Some good film criticism
On the technical disaster film
Contagion is a paradigmatic example of what I call the “technical disaster movie,” a genre that has grown in popularity with American viewers since the financial crisis of 2008. Unlike the schlockier disaster porn that precedes it, the technical disaster movie depicts a real or realistic catastrophe that is in principle avoidable. Their carnage and destruction are never existential horrors or acts of God; they are the consequences of human complacency, stupidity or resignation. The central disaster always entails two component emergencies: one material, the other epistemic. These emergencies share an origin but propagate through different media: one through flesh, concrete, money; the other through minds, language, knowledge.
Two other recent entries in this genre are found in J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call (2011) and the HBO series Chernobyl (2019), created by Craig Mazin.
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Is Spielberg a nepotism hire? How does a kid brand new to directing get a gig shooting the pilot of a pretty big name series
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His connection to JJ Abrams is kind of cool though.
Is it true that JJ Abrams once restored Steven Spielberg’s Super 8 movies?
The longer version as told by Kathleen Kennedy:
I understand you and J.J. go way back, almost thirty years. Tell me about how you first met him.
It was funny. I was working with Steven, and I got a phone call one day. And this man was living in a house up on Lookout Mountain [in Arizona]. He’d been down in his basement, and he found this box covered in dust. And he said to me, “These are all home movies, and I think they belong to Steven Spielberg.”
Now, my first cynical thought, unfortunately, was, you know, this is just somebody trying to get money. And so I’m going to not act overly excited about this. I just said, “Well, you know, great. If you don’t mind, we’re on the Universal lot. Maybe you could just swing by and drop the box off, and we’ll take a look and see if in fact they belong to Steven.”
So I hang up the phone. The first thing I say to Steven is, “Did you ever live on Lookout Mountain?”
He goes, “Yes, I did.”
Now I’m thinking, Okay, this guy’s not making this up. So I said, “Well, somebody thinks they found your home movies.” He goes, “Oh, my God, you’re kidding!” And he had just assumed all these early Super 8 films he had made when he was 15, 16 years old were long gone. He’d lost them; he didn’t know where they were.
So this man arrives. Here’s the box. He couldn’t have been sweeter, couldn’t have been nicer. Drops off this box. Sure enough, Steven’s beside himself because here are all his old movies that he made. So ironically, I had picked up the L.A. Times that morning and read about these two kids who had won this film award, and their movies were being shown at the Nuart Theatre [in Los Angeles].
And I said to Steven, “You know what would be really great? Why don’t you hire these two kids who just won this film award, who would probably give anything to meet you, and they could clean up your movies and transfer them to tape so that we never run the risk of these movies disappearing again?”
And those two kids were J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves.
It wasn’t until his uncredited rewrite work on Casper that JJ finally met Spielberg, which led to him getting asked to work on War of the Worlds. He said no because he was working on Lost, but Spielberg told Tom Cruise about JJ Abrams, and so Tom asked JJ to make his feature film directorial debut with Mission Impossible III.
Watched the Weird Al movie last night because it’s one of the best activities possible when I’m at my wife’s father’s house.
Very fun movie. I don’t think it quite stuck the landing, but I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who is even remotely a Weird Al fan.
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I didn’t make it past the first commercial break. I assume it got funny, but the Dad was awful, and beating up the accordion salesman was just gross to me.
The plaintiffs, Conor Woulfe of Maryland and Peter Michael Rosza of San Diego County, Calif., each paid $3.99 to rent “Yesterday” on Amazon Prime. They are seeking at least $5 million as representatives of a class of movie customers.
This is exceedingly dumb.
