I have recently watched:-
Kill Bill Vol.1 for the first time - going to watch No.2 soon
Independence Day - with my daughter for her first time
Capricorn One - for the 3rd time, but I just love it
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I like volume 2 better than 1. David Carradine’s speech about Superman is brilliant.
Capricorn One – great cult classic there.
But don’t expect as many action/fight scene’s as in the first one, because you don’t get it in Kill Bill2, you only get one (but that one is very good) and the end confrontation can be a disappointment. The Superman speech is brilliant indeed.
Went through the Harry Potter films again as I’m re-reading the books for the first time in probably 10-15 years. The films are wildly inconsistent in their quality, but do happily remove some of the unnecessary fluff like most of Quidditch shudder. I will say that the Fantastic Beasts movies are actually a refreshing change of pace.
I watched Vol. 2 and thought it was excellent, and together they make for a wonderful cinematic experience. There are some great speeches. I am going to learn the Superman one as a party trick, to go along with my Quint in Jaws speeches!
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Last year I finally got around to reading all the books, and I found them excellent. The movies suffer in comparison because so much needs to be cut out.
Yes, Quidditch was just padding, imho.
Bridge of Spies (2015) - excellent performance from Mark Rylance and also Tom Hanks was great, as usual
The Queen (2006) - watched this with my daughter as a history lesson
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KNIVES OUT - Huge fun!
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Last night I saw… NTTD!!
Well, not REALY ofcourse, but I was dreaming I watched it somehow at home.
Crazy dream, I have probably thinking and daydreaming of this a little too much and that was enough to have a dream like this.
I even dreamed of the gunbarrel, which somehow transformed into the headlights and front of the DB5 and the A.Martin chase begun and somewhere in this chase the car exploded and Bond -and I the viewer- was thinking Madeline is death and than sometime later in the movie he discovers she’s still alive and he feels betrayed. There was no villain and I didn’t really dream all of that in chronological order, but this was roughly what it came down to (as far as I can remember at least) and I … woke up in the middle of the story (what a shame), but still I feel like I’ve seen it.
Probably I had watched all the trailers, making off stuff and scene’s too much, so you get this kind of strange dreams, but nevertheless it was fun… well sort of… 
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Inception, apparently.
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THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974) – HBOMax
A favorite film from my teenage cinephile years–Pakula was a key director along with Coppola and Scorsese (sadly, I think he did decline as his career progressed, as much as I have sought an argument otherwise).
The first half of the film flows along on the poetry of paranoia. The allure of conspiracy combined with Gordon Willis’s cinematography carries a viewer from scene to scene. Narrative logic may be minimal, but not much missed. Richard Combs in a Sight and Sound review of ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN refers to Pakula’s style as a “succession of almost self-contained episodes, each striking with some unexpected shock against what had gone before.”
When we reach the midpoint of the film–with Joe Frady/Warren Beatty believed dead and about to become part of the Parallax Corporation–the film–rather than falling apart–begins to cohere too much. Suddenly there is narrative momentum–Frady begins to put the pieces of his story together, and the film begins to drag. Part of the problem may be that Pakula had to gesture in two opposite directions at once–Frady starting to figure things out (and preventing a plane being blown up mid-flight), and at the same time becoming part of a narrative he does not know he is being written into–postmortem, he will be (wrongly) identified as the lone shooter in a political assassination. Combs’ “unexpected shocks” diminish.
I enjoyed the film and recommend it, but more than 40 years after I first saw it, the pleasure is slightly lower (though the acting was as good as ever).
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I loved his Devil’s Own with Ford and Pitt.
So I watched Mulan
Yes, I paid $30 for it. I figured by the time I drove, paid for parking, the $20 Imax ticket, and whatever concessions I bought, pretty much $30. And I’m one person, no wife, children, or family. Still, it was worthwhile.
It was good, but could have been great. It was a little slow to start. The first 30 minutes sets up her family and culture. Amazing costumes and colors for this part. Then there’s the part where she leaves home and joins the army, hiding her gender. You learn to know and like the other soldiers. None of them are stereotypically judgmental, so there’s no preachiness to it. There’s an obvious Rocky inspirational moment. Then the first battle. It was good, but could have been great. Rather than outdo Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the fight scenes mimic it. Lost opportunity there. It’s not as inspiring as Wonder Woman, but better than Harley Quinn, and more family friendly. If I had a daughter that wanted to see it, I’d indulge her.
There were times where I truly wish I could have seen this on a big screen. Expansive horizons and hills would have been so much more impressive on a 70 foot screen as opposed to 70 inches. Still, superb cinematography. The soundtrack score tried, but fell short. Gong Li plays the villaness, and she takes the show. Her motives are a little bit telegraphed, but fitting in a post #metoo world. And an impressive cast here–Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Jason Scott Lee, Ming Na Wen in an uncredited cameo. Lieu Yifei plays the lead Mulan in an understated way, but fitting for the time period.
Is it worth $30? Not if you’re not already interested (it will be “free” on Disney+ come December 4th.) But if you do plunk down $30, you can watch it unlimited until then. Is it worth checking out then? Yes.
Would I spend $30 for Tenet or No Time to Die? Without a doubt.
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I wish they’d go this route for more movies. Hopefully Disney does well enough with it to get other studios to think about it.
Sony, if you’re listening, I’d seriously consider dropping a sizeable chunk of change to see Ghostbusters. Just putting that out there.
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Nice idea about the gun barrels turning into car headlights. They should use it.
Probably the last good film Harrison Ford made. Either that or Air Force One or What Lies Beneath. The moment he passed into this century, the quality of his films fell off a cliff.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)
Zac Efron, Lily Collins
Dir. Joe Berlinger
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is an adaptation of Elizabeth Kendall’s memoir The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy. On the whole, Extremely Wicked isn’t a tremendously great film, although it does have its moments, but what it does feature are some outstanding performances.
Zac Efron stars as Bundy and, it must be said, he is fantastic in the role. He strikes an uncanny resemblance to Bundy and carries the kind of charisma that made so many look past the accusations against Bundy back in the day. With this film, I think Efron has probably fully shed the heartthrob reputation that has followed him and kept him from really being taken seriously as an actor. He’s outstanding here and is one of the two actors who is forced to carry the film across the finish line.
The other actor who carries this film is Lily Collins as Bundy’s girlfriend Liz. I hadn’t seen Collins in much before this film and didn’t really have any particularly high expectations for her, but she is magnificent in this part. As the emotional center of the film, one can’t help but feel for her as her life is slowly torn apart by her association with Bundy. Collins handles all of the emotions that would run through a person in her position with ease, like Efron, fully inhabiting her character and giving the audience their window into the events of he film. Collins is definitely an actress to keep one’s eye on moving forward based off of this performance.
The rest of the cast is littered with recognizable faces, from John Malkovich to Kaya Scodelario to even Haley Joel Osment. All of the actors in the film do good work, but Efron and especially Collins are the standouts to be sure.
Where Extremely Wicked falters a bit is everywhere else. It is really a film more about Bundy’s charm and his relationships than it is about his crimes. While in some respects, this does play to the film’s advantage (nobody really wants to see the murders portrayed on screen and, thankfully, they’re not), it could potentially lead a viewer who doesn’t know much about Bundy to get duped into believing Bundy’s lies throughout the film. To a degree, I think that’s an intentional choice by the filmmakers, but in the instances that this is done in a way that it doesn’t involve Bundy’s girlfriend to be the audience’s vessel into the proceedings, which happens more and more as the film goes on, it doesn’t work as well.
If you’re coming to this film to see a gripping recounting of Ted Bundy’s murder rampage or anything like that, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s not really about that, nor does the film do a particularly good job of most of its material that doesn’t involve the relationship between Bundy and Liz. That relationship builds to a truly chilling and heartbreaking climax that Efron and Collins knock out of the park. It’s this relationship, the acting of Efron and Collins, that you come to Extremely Wicked for. These are two standout performances that elevate the film into something much more than what is written on the page.
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Street People (1976), starring Roger Moore and Stacy Keach.
Not available on Blu-Ray until last year, it’s one of the more obscure items in Sir Roger’s filmography. He plays a half-Sicilian(!!) consigliere to his mafia uncle in California. Stacy Keach has the role Roger’s odd job man, and their trans-Atlantic cross-class system banter/chemistry is reminiscent of Moore and Tony Curtis in The Persuaders . Being an Italian-made 70s crime film, Street People is stylishly directed and garishly costumed, but the plot gets lost two-thirds of the way through. By then I didn’t mind, because the film is set in my home town of San Francisco (and, aside from a couple of Sicilian interludes, genuinely filmed there), so I was delighted to watch Moore and Keach gallivant across the '70s cityscape, venture into Sausalito, and experience a car chase in the Marin headlands. If you’re a Roger Moore fan, have some experience of the bay area, and are prepared to take ambience over story, you will enjoy Street People.
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It has that hilarious sequence in which Keach poses as someone who wants to test drive a car and completely wrecks it. His line before he gets out of the car is superb.
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