Be Excellent To Each Other

The Untouchables is great, although not because of Costner it has to be said.

Was Prince of Thieves the one with Alan Rickman? "Why a spoon?", "Because it's DULL, you twit. It'll hurt more!"

I rewatched The Untouchables not long ago. It hasn't aged well. The most striking thing was Costner's unmoving face and emotionless voice. De Niro was wasted in it.

Yep! A yawnsome film in spite of Rickman. TBF, if they'd edited it down to a lean 90 minutes, it would be excellent.

Sean Connery’s accent is hilariously bad - a clear .75 Van Dykes.

I think it would have worked a lot better without all the manufactured peril for the spaceship group, there was plenty enough for Clooney's journey and I really thought it weakened the overall narrative structure to have two sets of strife happening simultaneously. (And a pain in the arse to keep cutting between them.)

So have Clooney's story told largely as it was (and perhaps expand on it a bit, for example I wanted to see stuff of him getting into his final destination and seeing more of what that looked like), but just have the spaceship group coming back and simply build on the characters and their stories, and don't have all the DANGER IN SPACE nonsense - I think there enough tension inherent in their story and situation as it is.

Definitely it brought it all together for a very effective final half hour though.

Overall I liked it, 624/1000

I have watched this approx 100 times over Christmas after my daughter spotted it on the SkyQ home screen. I tried very hard to deter her but I was actually pleasantly surprised once I'd seen it. It's got a good soundtrack so I don't mind that it seems to be playing on repeat.

We are currently watching The Snowman. Well, Darwin is watching it. I am ignoring it because I know as soon as those guys start flying is going to make me cry.

I watched Tenet at the weekend. I'd say at a guess, I had no idea what was going on for around 75% of the movie, and for the other 25% my confidence in understanding the plot was fluctuating wildly. I quite enjoyed it though and will probably watch it again to see how it is on second viewing with a better understanding of what was going on.

Dragon Soldiers. Amusingly terrible. Mostly terrible.

Best quote: "I don't *think* at all!".

Spree: cabbie livestreams murders for views as he wants to be as internet famous as Curio. Has that funny looking fella from stranger things in it who worked at the ice cream shop. Decent take on being insta famous, and worth a watch and at 90 mins or so, the proper length for a film. On netflix.

We've just watched 'Now you see me 2'.

It may as well have been in Japanese because I understood nothing that happened in it. Nothing at all. It was double cross after double cross after switch after switch. Rubbish.

Labyrinth - In your heart of hearts, you know it's a 2/10 at best. Just called my parents to say "sorry I nagged you so much you took me to the cinema to see this".

I'd give it more than that, but agree, it's a poor film.

I still love this film. When he opens the door out of the oubliette and it’s a broom closet I love it. The rocks aligning to Bowie’s face, the invisible seam in the wall near the worm, Luuuuuudooooooo, David Bowie fiddling with his balls. It’s great.

Giphy "jareth":
https://media4.giphy.com/media/7bVRxNQHN34Va/giphy-loop.mp4

Mali smell baaaaad

Labyrinth is fucking great you freaks.

That’s what I was trying to say!

Yes, and I agree with all of the above.

I wrote this over in the books thread:

And now I've watched Doctor Sleep: The Movie. It's the sequel to The Shining. It's not as good as The Shining, but that's hardly damning, not a lot is. It was nice to go back into that world, and entertaining enough. Some pretty big departures from the book, some which made sense, some which, well, didn't. Certainly captured the style of the first film, though.

A Hard Day's Night (BBC Iplayer)

Rewatched this for the first time in about 15 years. It's just fun and engaging as I remember, and seldom drops its pace or lags.

It's clear that the scriptwriters wanted Wilfrid Brambell as Paul's (very clean) grandfather to provide weight to the film but the boys are capable enough of delivering lines and moving things forward. He doesn't seem out of place and most of the best sequences involve him in some way. One or two lines made me cringe with hindsight (especially the scene with schoolgirls on the train) but can be forgiven because a) they're still young men thrust into an alien environment and b) it's the Beatles.

The sequence of Ringo walking alone with the camera is almost perfect and the highlight of the film.

I did spend maybe too much time recognising various parts of Marylebone station, but I've not taken a train in over a year now.

"Young Adult" BBC iPlayer.

Charlize Theron as a writer of Young Adult books, who was the hated/popular girl at school who left her hick town for the big city lights of Minneapolis, had a failed marriage and decides to steal her old boyfriend from his wife.



There's no closure. The end leaves everything hanging, but not in the way you'd expect there to be a sequal.

Mrs. W and I were left wondering what we'd just watched.

The founder: Michael Keaton pops into Nick Offerman's burger place to sell him a milkshake machine and does a deal.

Absolutely brilliant film about McDonald's, Keaton is superb.

Watched Election last night (currently on BBC Iplayer)

Reese Witherspoon is the high achieving high school girl whilst Matthew Broderick is the young civics teacher who really tries not to hit on her. The next achivement on Witherspoon's list is becoming student president. As with adult campaigns, it's never clear exactly why she wants the position other than that she knows she's entitled to it. I kept on thinking of it as "Lesley Knope - the early years" although it predates Parks & Rec by over a decade. She knows what she wants, and she's determined to get it.

Not laugh a minute but has some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments and some great visual gags. Allowing the characters to monologue over the action helps us understand them and their motivations better. The epilogue ties things for all the characters up nicely too.

Added to the list solely based on that!

I don’t think I’ve seen a bad performance from him in his entire career.

Sure, some of the movies he’s been in have been absolute dogs, but never because of him.

Another Round. Mads Mikkelsen and friends test out the idea that always having a blood alcohol level of 0.5% will enhance your life. With a sense of dread hanging over it, of course it isn't that simple. But it's bittersweet, and has two or three of the best "look at this, drinking is fun!" scenes I've seen. For a long time it seems like it's going to go Scandi-sad on you, but it ends as a life affirmer.

Not often you hear of someone ripping off Mitchell & Webb for a film idea. S'normally the other way around.

Ha! I didn't think of that, but you're right. If I watch it again, I'll imagine anything purple as Glucozade Port.

I'll have a Cointreau enema, please.

We watched The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things, and it was good. Sweetly funny, with a few tears. It’s like a mixture of 10 Things I Hate About You and Groundhog Day.

The male lead even looks like Young Heath Ledger, I thought.

The Eurovision film (netflix)! It's a million times better than you might think it would ever be and fucking brilliant to boot.

I that the Will Pherrell one?

Yes

I watch films and summarise them:

A Star is Born: Brilliant character drama that I’ve only got a couple of quibbles with. There’s a bit of mumbling that’s hard to discern from Bradley Cooper but it’s otherwise it’s top stuff.

Weathering with You: Have you ever watched that amazing anime Your Name? Same bloke does this. The animation is utterly beautiful, just, muuuuwaaaaaah. Just gorgeous stuff. The story is more straightforward than Your Name this time around; kinda Ghibli-esq. There’s not an English version knocking about yet so it’s all subtitles and the version I watched were just the worse. Spelling mistakes galore. Might be worth waiting for it to be localised.

One Punch Man: not a film but I watched season 1 again because it’s ace. Still waiting for the English dub of season 2. Hurry the fuck up people who do that thing.

Akira: I’ve got the 4K special edition. Weirdly, I couldn’t tell that this was in 4K. I fancied a bit of a reading binge to find out about the full story after the film so I then ordered the box set of the original manga for £115 quid from blackstones. A week later they cancelled my order without any reason and thereafter jacked the price up to £175... so they can fuck off then.

I watched "Birds of Prey: The unfeasbly long title that ends with one Harley Quinn". I really liked it, but it's a Harley movie, with the formation of the titular group as background. Viewed through that lens it was great and Ewan McGregor was amazing as the Black Mask.

I thought he wasn't particularly very good in it, and kept thinking that David Tennant would have been much better. The film I thought was okay, started poorly, but got better.

A solid six.

FILM REVIEW! Nightstalker: a man becomes one of those first on scene camera people and begins to sell his footage. He's really good at it, too.

Superb performances all around and well worth your time.

We watched this tonight on your recommendation. The title alone would have normally made it an automatic skip for me, so thank you! It was a perfect little film for a quiet valentine's Day.

Oh, I am so glad you enjoyed it. It’s low effort, and it hits all the right feelings, some laughs, and isn’t ‘too much’. I think it’s just right for this moment in time.

Also, the title is what made me take a look at it

Thanks for this. Watched it last night and laughed my head off. Yes, it's fundamentally stupid and Father Ted did the plot in a quarter of the time but so what? Sometimes I want fun.
Also, the other acts on the Eurovision stage were genuinely believable as proper entries.

I watched some older movies over the weekend:

Next: Nicky Cage over-acts and it's not very good. 4/10

True Romance: Christian Slater kills someone for no real reason, and things go wrong. It's okay, drags on a bit.
6/10

Fully agree, really bad film, very few redeeming features.



Don't agree, this is one of my favourite films of the 90s, certainly top 10, it's Slater's best film, and I just love it.

Is True Romance the one where Christian Slater kills someone in the middle of the road, or is that something else? A really dark comedy, iirc?

You might be thinking about Very Bad Things with Cameron Diaz

I rather like Next, but then I tend to like silly sci-fi stuff like this. See also: Deja Vu, Paycheck and Source Code.

No,

according to a very quick web search, that film is

Very Bad Things (1998)

Never heard of it

I'm not reading the someone else has posted nonsense that delayed me posting 3 times! What do you think I am?

Oh I think that's Very Bad Things with Cameron Diaz.