What MOVIE(s) have you been....seeing? watching?

I watched Bob Roberts last night. Scary that what was parody 25 years ago is now reality.

Started and bailed on 2 new Netflix movies.

Killing Gunther - lame "comedy" about some assassins trying to kill Gunther, aka Arnold Schwarzenegger. Poorly written, I bailed after it became obvious that there is almost no Arnold in this film.

Last Days of American Crime - again, poorly written, badly acted, I gave this one even less time.

Blow the Man Down is a pretty good movie that is an Amazon Prime original. It's a crime drama that almost but not quite crosses over into dark comedy. I didn't recognize anybody in this movie, but the performances ranged from okay to good. The story feels very connected to its location in a small coastal town in Maine. The story feels like it could have been the result of a great game of Fiasco.

TRUE COLOR is good so far, I am about a third of the way in. Dystopish X-Men kind of thing with Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a recovering runaway returning home to try and get a handle on her powers.

Do you mean Fast Color? I liked it a bit but the world building was weak. I thought Freaks was a much better film with very similar themes. You can throw Brightburn in there as well though I didnt care for it as much, except for the horror justice league at the end.

But really, all these x-men style supers movies really show that folks with these powers DO become public dangers. What to do about them? Are they inherently dangerous or only because "normals" distrust and hunt them?

Hmmm, now I just wanna watch the OG Firestarter again because I think that was the beginning of that type of story. (school me if I am wrong)

I did mean FAST COLOR, my mistake. I haven't seen the rest of it, but I am digging it so far.

If you like this kind of thing, one of the best recent one's is MIDNIGHT SPECIAL. Fucking great. I also recommend LOOPER and CHRONICLE, though the latter is written/directed by some toxic folks.

I think the FIRESTARTER film is kind of bad. I liked the whole "push" thing her Dad does to the cab driver,&c., but a lot of that movie was disjointed and all over the place. The book is pretty good, like most early King.

Sometimes creative types look in the mirror for inspiration. For example, a majority of Stephen King stories feature a protagonist who is a writer. Philip Jose Farmer inserted himself into his Riverworld series as a recurring character. The movie Rushmore likely contained some autobiographical elements about Wes Anderson.

Speaking of Wes Anderson, he is a rare creator who seems to really understand kids. Most writer and directors seem to deal with children as little more than accessories or complications for main characters, or else view children in a highly idealized manner. Anderson does dabble a bit in the idealization, but I feel like he does a better job than most at remembering how focused and intense kids can get, when they're not bored and easily distracted.

Son of Rambow reminds me of Rushmore, in all the best ways, but it's also a more surprising and interesting movie. The lead kids are going through some really tough stuff, and this could have easily been a tragedy or drama. The first ten minutes or so had me feeling glum because the movie seemed poised to explore some tired cliches. But instead, the movie gets through those tough spots and just soars on top of the imagination and pluck of these kids. And there are even some scenes that deal with tweens in an equally realistic manner. Ultimately, Son of Rambow is a very good movie about kids making a very bad movie., because it's really a movie about life, people, hopes, dreams, and all the other important stuff.

36 years ago today, the album Purple Rain landed in record stores and changed my world. It was the soundtrack of my second year in college, played at every party every weekend at Indiana University. It was the music that lured me away from my fixation on classic rock, prog, and heavy metal. The songs that got me on my feet and dancing. The fact that both Prince and Husker Du were both in the Twin Cities helped me decide to move back to Minnesota a few years later. But I never saw the movie Purple Rain because I just assumed it would be some vapid vanity project.

I started watching Purple Rain last night, and got about halfway through before getting interrupted for a really long phone call. But I will definitely finish the movie tonight because it's so much better than I expected. The music is great, of course, but the real delight is discovering that Prince is the actual villain of the piece, while poor Apollonia is the plucky heroine. I suspect that the power of her love will redeem Prince by the end, but at mid-movie, he is a manipulative, violent bastard who treats women badly. Sure, he is the product of a dysfunctional family, but he still manages to make Morris Day look decent by comparison, and Day is practically playing a pimp. Anyway, I admire that Prince cast himself as a heel instead of hero, and he pulls it off with considerable elan.

Because I watched Jaws, my tv channels have been recommending other aquatic thrillers. I was moderately pleased with 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, an awkwardly named sequel to a movie that I never noticed, because it had a novel idea or at least a fresh combination of ideas. It's more or less Jaws meets The Descent, but it turns out that bikini-clad divers being chased by a blind shark in the ruins of a sunken city is a solid concept for a horror movie. The underwater cinematography is quite good, and the underwater sets are good enough. The shark is much scarier than in Jaws because we get to see it underwater everytime, not sketchily represented by a yellow, plastic barrel like in Jaws. Ultimately, the story feels stretched to get to the 90 minute mark, because the novel setup has limited depth.

Last night, I gave Into the Blue a try, primarily because I have always liked Jessica Alba. But I gave up halfway through the movie because I didn't like the characters. They were reckless fools who kept putting themselves into terribly dangerous situations. Jessica Alba and Paul Walker are supposed to be the sympathetic protagonists, but they are playing that annoying couple that is constantly engaging in awkward displays of public affection. They lost my sympathy early on when they started making out while Walker is driving, and their vehicle drifts across the center line into traffic moving the opposite direction. And while it's entirely understandable that a movie about underwater diving would feature a scene where a character runs out of air, it strained credibility when it happened in three different scenes in the first half of the movie.

I regret watching Tear the Roof Off: the Untold Story of Parliament Funkadelic. It was a decent documentary, and clocked in at a brisk 59 minutes, so it never dragged. But I will never think of George Clinton the same way again. He apparently shamelessly ripped off everybody that worked with him, and at one point was paying performers with drugs instead of money. Eventually, he got in too deep with his Columbian dealer and signed over the rights to some of the Parliament/Funkadelic catalogue to his dealer. At the end, the documentary ran through the names of the various performers who had died, and quite a few of them died relatively young of either cancer or a drug overdose.

I ripped and watched the first 90 minutes of BARRY LYNDON, Kubrick's historical drama of some Irish doofus in the times of the Seven Years War. I am honestly impressed at the performance by Ryan O'Neal. Kubrick's penchant for sucking every ounce of ham out of leading men pays off. It was getting late, so I appreciated the intermission. I'll finish it up today or tomorrow. The camerawork is insane. Literally candle-lit.

It’s an incredible film, so oddly underrated. Of all his films, I think it’s the closest to A Clockwork Orange.

I think it just didn’t play well to folks because of the leading man being an absolute parasitic cad and ne’er do well. It’s about a complete fuck up that has no redeeming qualities except for an eye for the main chance that hits the jackpot- a parable for our times, really. It’s also slow moving, about a time period nobody really cares about, and it is very theatrical in the way ACO was- he directs a lot of scenes almost like the scenes between the Droogs in ACO.

John Alcott’s photography is so painterly and exquisite it should almost be X-rated given the amount of lovemaking between image and light that is on screen. I think it is one of the monoliths of the cinematographer craft.

It definitely evokes BEING THERE, FORREST GUMP and other pictures where some doofus stumbles through history. He's incapable of not fucking things up and still getting away with it (so far! no spoilers). As a protagonist, he's so bizarre. Basically every other character is more interesting and fleshed out, and I think there's something deep there. We're the stars of our own stories, but it's the story that's interesting. Not us. We're just schlubs.

Kubrick really hated people, basically. It's the thread that really ties together his life's work.

Little Women (2019) - Never read the book or seen any other adaptations. In fact I went in knowing very little beyond the a-list cast, director, and where/when it takes place. It's a beautiful film and despite having more time-shifts than season one of The Witcher I could follow the story well.

Barry Lyndon? Man, what a boring slog. I'm a Kubrick fan but that was one of the worst movies I've sat through. It ain't slow, it's glacial. Made all the worst by having intertitles that tell you what's going to happen, and then taking 25 minutes to slowly show you.

The only praise I can give, is that it's an interesting idea -- a period film VERY heavily influenced by paintings of the era. So much so that at many points you'll feel as though you're watching still images rather than, you know, a "motion" picture.