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

The final battle of RE has some absolutely insane "stunts", jump to that if you want to have a laugh.

Also watched The Killer but the almost complete lack of plot soured me on it about halfway through. How we somehow turned hitmen into paragons of zen wisdom kinda baffles me, I guess there are no other professions men can aspire to that require dedication, absolute conviction, and singular focus?

Still, it was stylish though the green filter needed to be changed up more often. I lost the thread a few times for how or why he was hunting certain people and what a few working folks did to deserve death but not some others. Seems like The Killer brought it all on himself for . Still, it had its moments and it was nice to watch a film that wasn't relentlessly quippy.

Picked out Fingernails on AppleTV on the strength of second and third billing for Riz Ahmed and Jeremy Allen White.

High-concept romance that really depends on how much you accept the high concept. A machine is developed that confirms whether a couple are a love match if they tear off a fingernail for processing. It’s either 100% or 0% with the occasional 50% if only one partner is in love. You can only have one match. Eighty-seven percent of couples are 0%, and everyone accepts this at face value.

Lead joins the Love Institute to train couples for the best result and begins to question her positive result.

I don’t know. Fine acting and quiet but strong camera work, but there’s nothing solid to hold on to. The performances are so restrained when you desperately want to cheer for someone.

I feel like the problem is that the film operates on a very intellectual level when it needs to be felt on an emotional level. Which might be the point because it nicely mirrors the lead’s dilemma.

There’s a lot of symbolism in the use of blue and red, if you’re into that.

I watched two John Carpenter movies recently: The Thing and Prince of Darkness. POD had a weird story that got weirder, but was ultimately very good and entertaining. The one actor has a particularly unsettling role.

If you haven't seen The Thing and love it, you suck.

Prince of Darkness is a film concept I'm surprised we have not seen revisited. Both from an "ancient relic of evil" perspective or the much more fascinating "message from a hellscape future" time alteration one. My friends and I LOVED this film back in the day, mostly I think for that brutally unsettling end fate of the lead lady as well as the delayed credit sequence. We used "The radiologist with glasses?" as a catchphrase for years. I put it near the top of Carpenters filmography, which really, other than The Thing, is mostly hammy cheese (and BTiLC is the best manifestation of that imaginable) but oh so delightful until 'round Ghosts of Mars when he lost substantial mojo. Either a writing partner left or some aspect of movie making fundamentally changed on him, not sure what happened.

Would love to see him team up with Kurt Russell again, maybe not for another "Escape from..." tale but SOMETHING.

Oppenheimer - Just another cinematic masterpiece from Christopher Nolan. He came off as far more interesting than I'd assumed he was, having only known his name from the project. I expected to be half-browsing during this but ended up glued to my TV the whole movie.

Saw The Holdovers: dichotomouspurity.blogspot.com/2023/11/s...fyingly-cliched.html

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) is an amazing movie. It's like Terry Gilliam watched Being John Malkovich, The Joy Luck Club, and The Matrix, and then decided to make a Hong Kong action movie. Only it's not really any of those things and instead is something very new and different. I've been a Michelle Yeoh fan for a long time, ever since I saw her jump a motorcycle onto a moving train car in Supercop 2, a stunt that not even her co-star Jackie Chan has tried.

For her role in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Yeoh gets a frumpy makeunder and an unglamorous role as an aging small business co-owner who is getting audited by the IRS. The auditor is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who receives an even more extreme makeunder for her part. Minneapolis native James Hong (best known here as the villainous David Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China) plays her elderly father, though he is nearly old enough to play her grandfather. Hong has played over 600 roles in television and movies, so he adds something to his every scene while not stealing the show.

The movie is chaotic, violent, funny, and very strange. Near the end, I was overcome with a terrible joy that brought tears to my eyes and a smile to my face. I'm not going to spoil anything about the startling plot here, but the beating heart of this movie involves the classic and difficult relationship between a Chinese mother and her daughter.

That movie is so good, so unusual and strange, and nothing like what It expected.

Shellhead wrote: I've been a Michelle Yeoh fan for a long time, ever since I saw her jump a motorcycle onto a moving train car in Supercop 2, a stunt that not even her co-star Jackie Chan has tried.

That is one of the greatest stunts I've ever seen, and surely one of the greatest stunts ever filmed. I don't even remember the movie, but I sure remember that train stunt.

She has a shitty film called Silverhawk that has her doing a lot of motorcycle work as well, and you also get Michael Jai White. It's not a great movie but you also kind of need to see it if you like her.

Shellhead, thank you for mentioning EEAaO. Watched it last night and it was an enjoyable and unexpected experience. Girlfriend and I talked about it quite a bit afterwards.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is supposed to be, at one level, about having ADHD. It made me cry, and felt a little like going to the temple a little, almost religious.

My politically weird populist-authoritarian son who hangs out with academic conspiracy theorists on Discord despite having dropped out of college recommended Napoleon so I went into it cold, without reading any reviews, and watched it with my semi-Francophile wife in Imax.

What a bizarre movie. It was very much like Gladiator Ridley Scott and not Bladerunner Ridley Scott. My takeaway message was that Napoleon somehow got away with killing so many troops and was a huge a-hole. Josephine was that hot crazy girl you are drawn to against your will. The worst sex scenes in all of movie history.

The battle scenes were great, but the march to Moscow and back was about 20 minutes long.





In the Battle of Waterloo who attacked the flanks and routed Napoleon? This movie also foregrounded how historically illiterate I am.

Also, Marie Antoinette's head looked kind of fake.

Saw Godzilla Minus One and WOOOOOOOOOOOOOW was that a hell of a godzilla flick! He's (she?) back to being a city stomping menace, no "protect the humans" nonsense. They finally figured out a pretty nice human wrapper for the monster parts and borrowed heavily from the OG 50's film. Its full of japanese people acting to the extreme though, much like a lot of anime, so there are some awkward bits and the overall plot is a bit dubious, but for a reported 15 million budget (which just can not be true) it shoots monstrous holes through current hollywood budgets. The sound is fantastic, see this in imax if you can 'cause when that godzilla breath goes off its oppenheimer levels of sonic assault.

As a history buff its hard to generate much sympathy for WW2 era japan but this film does a good job. Highly recommended. Hope they make more like this between the lavish and excessive Legendary releases.

Godzilla was excellent.

I just watched Leave the World Behind (I think that's what it's called), the post apocalyptic Netflix film that just released today. Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Kevin Bacon... big stars, in other words...

The country suffers a cyber attack and our heroes find themselves forced to team up to try to figure out what is going on, get by, etc. I found this film very interesting, with great performances. Well worth your time if you have Netflix.