Be Excellent To Each Other

A film! In space! With Tom Cruise!

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/202 ... ce-reports

Watched the Marx Brothers' A Night in Casablanca [1946] for the first time in about 20 years or so. It's still a deeply unsatisfying movie. Sure, this is the Brothers well past their prime and looking it, and likely only made because Chico needed to pay off gambling debts.

"Plot", such at it is, involves Nazis hiding in postwar Morocco enroute to South America. All that, however, feels like it's from a cheap TV drama with the Marxes' scenes randomly slotted in. Sig Ruman, a superb antagonist in the mighty Opera and the troubled Races, is just a hammy villain with plenty of malice (I mean, he is playing a Nazi) but none of the knowingness he displays in the films of a decade earlier. Despite 10 minutes or so of exposition of the start, interrupted only by two short but clever Harpo gags (one legendary), I never found myself caring much for the romantic leads and the "twist" in the final third is utterly underwhelming.

But we're not watching these things for the story, are we? It's the comedy that matters, and at least I can say they try. So much promising stuff is set up, then either fails to deliver, or just peters out. It's clear that certain sequences were inspired by earlier films and there's a variant of the stateroom scene from Opera, the mirror sequence from Duck Soup, and even the ice routine from Horse Feathers. Audiences at the time wouldn't have immediate access to these earlier films, and there's nothing wrong in acts adapting material for new projects but through either poor direction and editing or just lack of setup they just don't work.

For all that, though, glimpses of past glories shine through. Groucho's standout scene is his indignant refusal to give a couple called Smith a room, all because "Mr Smith" referred to him as clerk (20 years ago the entire routine was lost on me). When his one liners work, they work really well. It's also refreshing to see Chico get one over on Groucho in a brilliant payoff to an interrupted-romance sequence that misleadingly repeatedly fails to build or gather momentum until the final, fantastic and unexpected (or fantastic because it's unexpected) punchline. Even the Harpo-plays-Charades-to-a-confused-Chico-to-move-the-plot-along part that should be cringeworthy due to its overuse causes joy eventually. Musically, Chico gets a reasonably decent piano solo demonstrating his technique , and Harpo's bit includes some funky late-40s beats.

When watching it, I increasingly felt that perhaps it would work better as stage show. The Brothers clearly need energy to feed off, and feel cramped by the restraints of the direction. There's so much stuff in it that could work, and we know that in their younger days they would pull it off easily. But I don't walk away from it as annoyed as I do with Go West (all you need is the first sequence and the final one - the rest is instantly forgettable), and I can well imagine that an audience returning to the act after the five years of war between The Big Store and this would have been more appreciative than someone today. It's a reunion, not a reinvention.

Thanks, Kern. I should dig into super old comedy films more. You touch on how this film would have been better as a stage show, but I guess then we wouldn't have been able to see it (insert comment about how that might not be a great loss), and I think in this era, films were often little more than stage plays anyway. I've evidently not seen as many old films as you, but for every Gone With the Wind, you have how many Streetcar Named Desires or The Killerses.

I like the bit in "Gone with the Wind" where Atlanta burns. It's a very tricky film to watch through modern eyes, and I've never got through all of it, mostly because once I got over the problematic bits I realised that Scarlett was just far too irritating.

Not sure about the stagey comment. I felt that in "A Night in Casablanca" there was a sense of suffocation in the direction that reminded me of the earliest films. Of course, the Marxes always were a stage act, conquering vaudeville before taking Broadway by storm (oh, for a time machine!). Their first two films are just recreations of their last two hits, with the first ("The Cocoanuts") being one of the earliest talkies. I've only watched it once, on shonky VHS years ago although a recent Blu-Ray has a restored copy that I'm told removes most of the pain involved in viewing. Indeed, such was the state of the technology that all the paper is visibly soaking to avoid rustles. By the early 1930s these issues had been resolved and most films were more than just having a camera pointed at a sound stage. For the Marxes, their first original film (rather than an adaptation of their shows), third in the canon, and my personal favourite, Monkey Business [1931] seems to revel in the vastness of cinema and the freedom from the confines of the stage.

I can bore of hours recommending their stuff, and it all opened the doors to the silent wonders of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd (I was never really a Chaplin fan).

Got round to watching Ready Player One the other day.

It's alright but not a patch on the book. Would have been great to see it as a three movie set with one puzzle per film.

Disappointed that the first DnD based puzzle was switch to a race.

6/10

Grauniad of the galaxy: still great. Like to think it is all part of a coma dream Michael Rooker has after the NASCAR crash before waking up in the zombie apocalypse.

Harriet: Okay, but not as tense as it wants to be.

Aunt Viv is in it, though!

This was a confusing sentence.

I can imagine

Bloodshot stars Vin Diesel as Vin Diesel playing a piss poor version of Vin Diesel. It’s got a fairly interesting premise in a momento/Jason Borne/Deux Ex kinda way but, boy, it’s told and directed in the most generic fashion.

The action is shot too close and edited with a fucking butcher’s knife. But when you’re not staring at brief flashes of punching, you’re treated to glorious amounts of staring at computer screens and nonsense tech talk.

The cast is generic and, yes, there’s a genius hacker who has annoying traits (as is the norm) and who saves the day with his hacker skills. Still you’ve got Eiza González to ponder over, who is an exceptionally beautiful lady. Man, she has some nice face lines.

But it’s Vin that’s struggling to hold this together. The character is nothing, his acting is phoned in, his voice sounds “odd” throughout and I wasn’t interested in him or his plight.

The stand out set piece is this lift fight which does a decent job with the CG effects (the CG and practical are generally pretty good and there’s only a few crappy looking effects) but it’s not worth the price of admission. There’s just too much of the film where your eyes will glaze over like mine did and you’ll be wanting The Rock and Jason Statham to come to the rescue with some outrageous motor vehicle heist plan to get Vin out of there.

And the soundtrack is as generic as it gets too.

It’s just a bit crap/10

Redemption (UK name I think) or Hummingbird (USA).

Has quite simply, the most beautiful woman I think I have ever seen.

Good action romp, but a bit typical Statham. I give it 8/10, for the beautiful Polish woman.

I've just been reading a pile of the comics, so was intrigued to spot the film on Rakuten just the other day. But I might just leave it. Comics are pretty good, mind.

I didn’t realise until just now that the message of Palpatine beyond the grave from the opening crawl in Rise of Skywalker was only shown in... Fortnite.

Jesus. That film just sucks a whole load of hairy balls.

Yeah. Would’ve been better in PUBG

The.sequel!
Better than the first!
Absolutely brilliant. Merl gets a bigger funeral than someone else though.

I’m all about black power so I’ve watched:

Moonlight - I’ve been meaning to watch this for ages and didn’t actually know what it was about at all. Turns out it’s a pretty miserable story about being gay, black and poor in America. It follows the lead through three stages of his life, child, teen and adult. You get to the end and the only thing he enjoyed in his entire life was being tossed off by his mate in the moonlight. Quite difficult to watch this one.

Hidden Figures - is the story of three black female scientists working for NASA in the sixties. Based on true events apparently. They have to put up with the cruelties of segregation and racist coworkers while also trying to get a man into space. It’s a nice film that’s a bit too Disneyfied. It does manage to make math interesting though; more so than, say, The Martian or every film about “hacking”. Pharrell Williams does the soundtrack and puts his happiest generic bullshit music, y’know, Despicable Me rejects, into this for some reason... and they stand out like a sore thumb and just straight up ruin scenes. The film just ends up being a Sunday afternoon movie your mum would fall asleep watching. I still enjoyed it, mind.

I watched Zombieland: Double Tap. I enjoyed it, it's not as good as the first, but what sequel is? (Not Guardians of the Galaxy 2, for sure)

Empire strikes Back

Terminator 2

Aliens

Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps

Back to the Future 2, Evil Dead 2 and The Dark Knight.

The Platform

Did anyone mention this yet?

Anyway, it’s good fun. Actually, maybe fun is a bad word for it. It’s a Cube style thing where everyone is in a big tall prison, two people per floor. Each day a massive platform full of amazing food comes down from the top, passing through a massive hole in the middle of the floor. Good if you’re near the top, bad if you’re near the bottom.

Each month, if you’re still alive, you switch positions.

It’s all an allegory for society, but it’s quite clever, well acted, and has lots of neat touches you may not notice.

Definitely worth a look if you like that kind of thing. The ending is bit ‘meh’, as it always is with these things, but I really enjoyed it.

I keep hearing about this. My Ma said it was well worth watching, too, so I’m going to see if it’s on any of our streaming services.

Last night's choice was Fast & Furious: Hobbs and Shaw.
Total nonsense that in no way needed to be more than two hours long. Mildly entertaining but I won't worry about watching the inevitable sequel.

It appears to be a film adaptation of The Great Dalmuti

Now I want to watch it!

If the Great Dalmuti character doesn’t ask the lesser peon to eat his ice cream with the wrong end of the spoon, I’m not interested.

We’ve just watched it. Honestly, it’s not a film for people that feel queasy looking at chicken breasts, but it is good.

Russell did say at the end that it was as if they had this really amazing concept but didn’t know how to resolve it. I think I chose to believe an outcome, though.

This is always the first thing that comes into my head! Such an amazing moment in time.

Thunder Road (2018). The year seems to be needed because it grew from a short of 2016. It's quite odd, focussing pretty much entirely on Jim Cummings' (also writer and director) character as he goes through grief and closes on a breakdown. But I thought it stayed *just* the right side of cringey, and was darkly comic. Worth sticking with after a very strange opening.

Yeah, the ending is always going to be a tricky one there, and I do think it is one where you can choose for it to mean whatever you want to.

I read some of the IMDB reviews afterwards, and found a fair few things I didn’t pick up on whilst watching it.

Movie I watched with my eyes: Dirty Harry.

Stands up today. Clint Eastwood was awesome.

For the first ever I’ve just noticed that the soundtrack for the film was sampled by the unlikely lads of NWA for “Approach to Danger” from their final album EFIL4ZAGGIN.

It is a stone cold classic regardless of its politics. And Lalo Schifrin is an awesome composer.

One of my favourite films ever. I got caught in the hype when someone called it "a $200m Rick and Morty episode", and I get what they mean, to an extent.

But yeah, the feels. I cry every time I watch that film.

Alita: Battle Angel.

Really good, once you get over Alita's creepy eyes.

Age of Ultron: More of a getting to know the Avengers with a not too great a baddie. Still a very good film. Internal tensions tee Civil War up an absolute treat. Olsen's boots wonderful.

What a time to be alive.

Age of Ultron is when Hawkeye stopped being shit and gained some awesome.

"Nobody would know... Nobody would know."

I love the way he then sort of hobbles away. I said to MrsA that a Hawkeye film could be brilliant. She didn't agree.

I want Paul Bettany, Nikolai Waldau , James McAVoy and Kirsten Dunst to make a shot by shot remake of Wimbledon but as Vision, Jaime Lannister, Charlie Xavier and Liz Lisbon.

Someone has worked out a chronological viewing of the MCU based on individual scenes

https://twitter.com/tonygoldmark/status ... 8717437954

Well nerds, I fuckin' did it.

Took me a global pandemic and a damn quarantine, but I did it.

I figured out the precise chronological order of all the MCU movies (so far) BY SCENE.

I'm out of my Goddamn mind. You're welcome. pic.twitter.com/3VXjqk4kjQ

— crisp lettuce and tomato on the cool cool side (@tonygoldmark) May 27, 2020

Huh, I'm surprised nothing goes into the future.

AntMan: super enjoyable crazy heist film. Michael Peña great.

Now edit it into one megamovie

As there are accurate times it should be fairly painless to get a computer to do it for you.

Someone in the twitter replies was working on this, although that seems like an easy thing to start and a much trickier thing to finish.

Edit - ah, they did it, in fact

https://twitter.com/timleftwich/status/ ... 4564802563

You want it? Come get it.https://t.co/BNGf0sCMhA

— Tim Leftwich (@timleftwich) May 29, 2020

I was watching The Raid 2 the other night, yesterday night, in fact. My best recollection was that I enjoyed it but the action was nowhere near as good as the original and the camera was a bit annoying. Oh and the blind woman assassin and her friend were a bit crap compared to the nutter from the OG.

Turns out my memory was about right. I got bored long before the end and turned it off vowing to watching the predecessor again instead. The camera movements annoyed me a great deal, I just wanted to watch the people fight without shaky cam and the camera shooting about.

BUT y’know what annoyed me the most? How fucking noticeable it was that the action had been sped up. Some of it was incredible: people just moving with inhuman speed. People moving normal and then all of a sudden defying gravity as they fall around like someone set gravity to strong. It kinda ruined it for me. This isn’t unusual for modern cinema of course but when you start noticing it all of a sudden it’s difficult to stop noticing it. I certainly can’t remember it being like this the first time I watched it but I can’t for the life of me remember if the first was as bad either so I’m going to take another look at it.

Captain America: Civil War - two and a half hours is a big film (almost two films) to fill and, by and large it does it well. It still could do with a bit of a trim, though. It also underlines quite how much Black Widow does keeping the Avengers all together for little to no thanks. The airport fight scene is great.

The plot doesn't really make sense, but the action scenes are good.

(Tony was right tho.)

#teamironman