Makes me love the movie even more
Follows a fishing boat captain who is approached by his ex-wife to murder her abusive new husband.
I saw this when it first came out and like most critics thought the twist was beyond awful. I remembered really liking the first half of the movie though. Terrific setup and good performances. This time the twist didnāt bother me nearly as much.
About to see long legs, pretty stoked
Caught Longlegs this evening. Loved it. Great atmosphere, legit creepy.
Same here. It wasnāt until I started reading up on and watching documentaries about Stanley Kubrick that I realized how great she was in The Shining. He was perhaps the most demanding director of his era, if not all time. Listen to any actor talk about having worked with him, and it comes up again and again. Matthew Modine discussed it at length.
The point being: virtually nothing you see in any of Kubrickās films is there by accident. He micromanaged every aspect of his movies, so if Duvall was projecting ādumb uneducated helpless broadā onscreen, itās because Kubrick wanted it that way.
But I do still wonder how much of her character was Kubrick and how much came from Kingās source material. I have never read the Shining book so i honestly donāt know. I did read Doctor Sleep, and she appears in that, but didnāt come across in the least as a dumb, helpless damsel. But in that book her character manifests itself through Dannyās memories, many from childhood, so maybe he wasnāt a reliable narrator? And it is well-known that a lot of what we saw in the movie had nothing to do with Kingās plot line (he famously hated the movie and disavowed it).
Wendy in the book was a hot blonde with a lot more agency. Just a totally different thing. Kubrick changed a ton in the movie. Book was a lot less supernatural as well; focused a lot more on cabin fever and alcoholism.
Pretty key difference in the ending as well: Dick Halloran comes back and plays the conquering hero to save Wendy and Danny, rather than Kubrickās alternate take of him getting axed to death the second he arrives.
Kingās hate for that movie is perfectly understandable to me even though I absolutely love the movie.
Well duh derp, Iāll be damned. This is why you donāt read books out of sequence lol.
This also explains why Dick shows up in Doctor Sleep well after the events of the movieā¦I have been wondering how this dead guy managed to be a part of Dannyās life (in very specific, plot-driving ways) post-Overlook. I mean, Danny sees dead people obviously, but that didnāt explain how Wendy was able to see and interact with Dick
Speaking of Baldwin: it needs to be said that the otherwise perfect Baldwin monologue is hampered by the cringe-inducing ābrass ballsā moment that Iām sure a bunch of people think is so cool.
I mean, featuring it on the cover of the Blu-ray? Shoot me.
I think his performance in that is one of two things in his career heād like to do over (probably).
that whole monologue (and the character) were added for the movie, but that line in particular sounds like it was spliced in after the fact, thereās a weird cut before and after that line. Itās pretty subtle but if youāve seen it 300 times it sticks out.
You may well be right.
For anyone who hasnāt seen the movie, itās basically the first proper scene of it (I think after Jack Lemmon makes a quick payphone call), so itās not a spoiler to watch:
Sometimes rewatching works. Sometimes it shows you the error of your ways and allows you to see the good in a movie you didnāt on a previous attempt.
And sometimes you rewatch Minority Report. Still a very underwhelming movie that people are very nice to. Within the Spielberg catalog: weaker than The Terminal. Weaker than War Horse. (Still better than Hook.)
I think the biggest problem with this stage of Spielbergās career is that he had no idea how to end a movie anymore, or he kept taking on movies with endings that didnāt know how to end. That was really Minority Reportās problem in addition to being aggressively mediocre in a lot of other ways including forced product placement for whatever reason. Some of it was still good, though, but underwhelming is the best description of it.
That was the hottest mix of any movie I had anything to do with. I have no idea how it ever made it through QC. It was pinned like 90 percent of it and I still had to act like that was ok. And they delivered in the wrong frame rate and no one fixed it lol.
Yes, being unable to simply end the movie was definitely one issue with it. No reason for that movie to be 2.5 hours long. I also just struggled from the beginning to really care about Tom Cruiseās character, no matter how objectively sympathetic the characterās back story was. Thereās interesting stuff to mine from the movie, but overall it really does surprise me that itās generally such a well-rated film.
I hadnāt necessarily chalked it up to being a product of that era of his career. He released Catch Me If You Can that same year, and although itās been decades since Iāve watched it, I remember that one being quite entertaining.
I never saw Catch Me If You Can, despite doing an HBO First Look for it and having a poster on my wall in my house next to the poster for Black Mass (ha ha get it?). That seems like it had a more built in ending and maybe helped him through that part of his career.