Now Watching 2022

[kidsmoke]

Thanks for these reviews! I loved "Knives Out".

[u2roolz]

44 minutes ago, kidsmoke said:

Thanks for these reviews! I loved "Knives Out".

Same here! I am looking forward to the sequel. The one thing that bothers me about watching it at home on Netflix is that there is no real barometer to measure it’s success. I know that they can tell who’s watching it. And a lot of their original films seem to have no real momentum. 
 

Beltmann, I have Pearl & Barbarian on my watch list. Maybe this weekend. 
 

edited for clarity: I felt the need to define success. I’m more interested in how many people are watching, as opposed to looking at box office receipts and counting the $$$. I feel that Netflix sends all of that stuff for a loop. I remember lots of people talking about Don’t Look Up during the Xmas break and then no one seems to be talking about it anymore. That’s what I was talking about when I meant they lack momentum. Then you look at something like Top Gun: Maverick and I can’t believe how many people have watched it and how it still has strong legs 4 months later. 

[Oil Can Boyd]

I saw the David Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream, the other night.  I'm really glad I saw it but wasn't crazy about it.  The live footage was incredible but, for me, the overall experience was sort of frenetic and monotonous.  I knew it wasn't a standard biopic but I would have liked hearing from someone other than clips of Bowie in interviews.      

[chuckrh]

1 hour ago, Oil Can Boyd said:

I saw the David Bowie documentary, Moonage Daydream, the other night.  I'm really glad I saw it but wasn't crazy about it.  The live footage was incredible but, for me, the overall experience was sort of frenetic and monotonous.  I knew it wasn't a standard biopic but I would have liked hearing from someone other than clips of Bowie in interviews.      

I'm going to wait to watch it home. I've got a good enough sound system to enjoy it. The movies have gotten way too expensive since reopening after the pandemic.

[brownie]

1 hour ago, chuckrh said:

I'm going to wait to watch it home. I've got a good enough sound system to enjoy it. The movies have gotten way too expensive since reopening after the pandemic.

Compared to what has happened to the price of concert tickets??  I am on the verge of being priced out of live music, but tomorrow I will see two movies at AMC for $5 each on Discount Tuesday.

[chuckrh]

40 minutes ago, brownie said:

Compared to what has happened to the price of concert tickets??  I am on the verge of being priced out of live music, but tomorrow I will see two movies at AMC for $5 each on Discount Tuesday.

I was looking at the IMAX of the Bowie movie. It was $25 in these parts. One of the things I really liked about the NIN tour was Trent has made an effort to keep things fan friendly. The shows were GA, $100. He could play much bigger venues & charge way more money. Even the merch was fan friendly. High quality t-shirts were $30 (really nice long sleeve $40). In comparison I went to Roger Waters Saturday (great show, not quite as good as the Us+Them tour. expensive though). He was charging $50 for a regular t-shirt. I let him keep mine. Trent is also taper friendly although not officially due to some contract stuff. He told the guy who runs ninlive.com that he would never make him take down the archive. I'm listening to a stunning tape of the second show I went to in Bend. Amazing performance & recording.

[kidsmoke]

22 hours ago, Beltmann said:

Ti West’s “Pearl" exists in the same universe as March’s “X,” but provides a wildly different experience. This time around, the horror is built by re-shuffling colorful parts taken from Douglas Sirk, Busby Berkeley, “The Wizard of Oz,” and more. It also gives Mia Goth a ripe opportunity to expand an original character from “X” through a show-stopping performance that, if it existed in any other genre, might generate some awards buzz.
 

 

 

That's one intense trailer! Wow.

 

[chuckrh]

Crowded House rescheduled for next spring. Hate waiting that long for shows!

[Beltmann]

On 9/18/2022 at 10:15 PM, u2roolz said:

See How They Run has the look & feel of an unproduced Woody Allen script directed by Wes Anderson. It has a dynamic visual flair and witty dialog. It’s also an homage to Agatha Christie. 

 

My 14-year-old enjoyed See How They Run so much that I'm going to show him Knives Out soon, hopefully in time to take him to see The Glass Onion when it arrives. It's nice to see a throwback entertainment meant to be light yet still well-crafted and eager to please. Twenty years ago, this kind of original movie was a regular item on the menu; these days, it feels like welcome nourishment after weeks spent in the desert. I've also been baffled by the studio's treatment of Confess, Fletch as an afterthought. The original Chevy Chase movie was formative for both my wife and me, so we planned to see the new movie this weekend, but it has already fled our area. This is hardly surprising, given how the marketing strategy amounted to, "let's not."

We currently live in a dire time of flux, with studios, distributors, theaters, and streamers all trying to figure out the best way to position movies in the evolving entertainment marketplace. Nobody knows anything right now, so we have a bewildering mix of experiments and strategies that most of the time feel like huge mistakes, with generic product being overproduced and actual movies too often being wounded or strangled in the process. It's not good for filmmakers or audiences, and I don't know how or when we will resolve this limbo, or whether we'll come out the other side in a better place.

[Analogman]

What about Fletch Lives (1989)?

 

I recently watched the entire run of Gotham (not really my thing - but I was down with the virus).

 

I am now watching The Lorenskog Disappearance. Which is really the sort of thing I watch on there. I also watched for the 4th time Criminal UK. Which I still think is the best of all those (France, Spain, and Germany). Although I did like them all.

 

Also - the CCR documentary is on Netflix now. I have to say it is not much. If you already know about the band - it is nothing new. But we do get to see some new concert footage. I prefer the Oakland and Woodstock concerts myself.

 

There is a Dio documentary out. Which I guess is going to play in theaters. I don't know why they just did not do a deal with Netflix. I would like to see it, But I have not been to the movies in years. And I do not have a desire to go now.

 

[Oil Can Boyd]

I enjoyed the new version of A League of Their Own.  

[Beltmann]

I've spent the last few months diving deep into Criterion's 15-disc Agnès Varda box set, rewatching many old favorites and taking in all of the bonus features and essays. There are also a handful of features that are new to me and man, I was really sleeping on Kung-Fu Master!, a knockout starring Jane Birkin that I should have seen years ago. It might be Varda's most underrated feature.
 

 

[Beltmann]

Kicked off October, my usual month for nonstop horror, by watching the movie that has horrified the Twittersphere.

 

There are deep divides inside of Andrew Dominik's Blonde, a movie that is not about Marilyn Monroe or Norma Jeane Mortenson, but rather "Marilyn," a fictional, cracked-mirror imagination of Monroe. The movie, not unlike Dominik's earlier portrait of Jesse James, uses this invented avatar to examine the duality of being both a person and a celebrity, expanding into a larger, impressionistic meditation on how the spotlight has the power to shine and to burn, whether it is "Marilyn," who was loved and unloved and who we may only think we understand, or any other individual both blessed and cursed by fame.

 

The question of the moment, of course, is whether any of this is fair to the real-life Marilyn Monroe. The accusations of exploitation have been thoroughly aired, so I won't recount them here. But having seen and contemplated the artistic ambitions of Blonde, I'm struck by how, in another divide, I'm both sympathetic to and unconvinced by those accusations.

 

My mind simultaneously holds these two thoughts: 1. The arguments against Blonde are largely rooted in valid ideological assumptions about Monroe, gender, and exploitation that in a broad sense I share and support; and 2. Those assumptions and arguments, in a particular sense, do not easily apply to Blonde, which does not purport to be a rounded telling of a person's life and vibrantly operates instead on a plane where such arguments are rendered beside the point.

In other words, those who resent Blonde and those who defend Blonde aren't having the same conversation, and that's yet another divide that intrigues me.

Everyone seems to agree, at least, that Blonde is visually spectacular. Dominik rapidly switches between lighting strategies, color, black-and-white, cutting methods, and aspect ratios to recreate many of the most iconic Monroe photographs and build entire scenes around their vintage look. I can understand why, for some viewers, that might play as overly precious, but for me it was both breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly affecting. From start to finish, I was emotionally invested.
 

 

[u2roolz]

I loved God’s Country. It was a lyrical mood piece set in a small Montana town that focused on racism, sexism, abuse, authority, respect and privileges without hitting you over the head with them. Everything flowed organically. Thandiwe Newton plays a college Speech professor that is going through a recent loss and dealing with her grief, while 2 white men decide to use her private property to park their pickup truck to go up the mountain and hunt deer. This sets off a chain reaction of escalating events that results in one hell of an ending. 3 really well written scenes really stood out to me: one in a church between Newton and one of the men, another happens in the hallway of the college that feels very of the moment without feeling contrived and the other takes place at the Christmas party where Newton finally reveals her past to the local cop. Newton wears a lot of her expressions internally amongst beautiful shots of the expansive Montana landscape, but she is very close to breaking and this leads us to the satisfying climax. (Scheduled to hit Video On Demand this Tuesday.)

 

I also loved Emily The Criminal which featured another terrific performance of one Aubrey Plaza. Plaza plays a woman who is trying to pay off her student loan and has to answer for her past criminal mistake in job interviews. This leads her into the world of credit card fraud which is where the film really takes off in the form of a breathtaking thriller. Lots of high stakes situations that she finds herself in. I was a bit surprised at the rather abrupt ending, but I think it was just fine. Plaza & Gina Gershon share a terrific scene in a job interview that turns into a generation gap showdown. (Available on Video On Demand or RedBox.)

[u2roolz]

On 9/25/2022 at 2:40 PM, Beltmann said:

 

My 14-year-old enjoyed See How They Run so much that I'm going to show him Knives Out soon, hopefully in time to take him to see The Glass Onion when it arrives. It's nice to see a throwback entertainment meant to be light yet still well-crafted and eager to please. Twenty years ago, this kind of original movie was a regular item on the menu; these days, it feels like welcome nourishment after weeks spent in the desert. I've also been baffled by the studio's treatment of Confess, Fletch as an afterthought. The original Chevy Chase movie was formative for both my wife and me, so we planned to see the new movie this weekend, but it has already fled our area. This is hardly surprising, given how the marketing strategy amounted to, "let's not."

We currently live in a dire time of flux, with studios, distributors, theaters, and streamers all trying to figure out the best way to position movies in the evolving entertainment marketplace. Nobody knows anything right now, so we have a bewildering mix of experiments and strategies that most of the time feel like huge mistakes, with generic product being overproduced and actual movies too often being wounded or strangled in the process. It's not good for filmmakers or audiences, and I don't know how or when we will resolve this limbo, or whether we'll come out the other side in a better place.

I agree with a lot of what you brought up here. I was also stunned by the dumping of Confess, Fletch. It only lasted a week over here too. I wonder how it did on demand. 
 

A friend of mine made a point that I thought of before he mentioned it to me. The past 2 (2021/2022) summer movie seasons have felt like the old summer movie seasons last seen in the early 80s. The release strategy of letting one big blockbuster have the weekend to itself with little to no competition in new releases because almost all of the counter programming is headed to streamers. Lots of weekends this past summer I wasn’t headed to the theaters because the lone new release was a franchise that I had zero emotional investment in. However, there were a few weekends that broke that rule and they all followed a weekend in which one blockbuster opened. There was that weekend in May after Doctor Strange 2 where that horrid Firestarter remake came out. And the other weekend was the one right after Top Gun: Maverick came out. It’s the weekend that Cronenberg’s latest had a rather wide release.
 

But, for the most part, it felt like one big new movie per weekend. And go figure that it has completely flipped the other way, once people traditionally stop going to theaters in the summertime right around that second weekend in August. Since that weekend, it has felt like studios are dumping anything to keep theaters afloat. There are like 3 or 4 movies coming out every weekend and attendance has dropped dramatically compared to the summer. I don’t get it. Why not release several of these films against the big blockbusters? Something like Top Gun sells out and you’re already at the theater. I guess they want to keep theaters full of new movies during the slower parts of the year: August, September and October. And I imagine Covid has still caused a domino effect of delays, etc.

 

I made it a point to see See How They Run on opening weekend because I figured it’d be gone after a week. It turns out that that film has outlasted all of the other new releases this weekend at this particular theater that I go to. The Woman King and Pearl are no longer playing there. I can’t believe it! The Woman King was #1 2 weeks ago. I was planning on seeing both of those this weekend, so I wound up seeing Barbarian instead. 
 

And I’ll spare the trouble of elaborating on trying to keep to track of which streamers have deals in place with which studios. Or how long their theatrical window is. It all gets very confusing. And I tend to start noticing weird trends because I’m waiting to catch one at home. I noticed that films that came out in late August hit On Demand before films that came out the first two weeks of August. It’s not very consistent and can be tedious by spending some time visiting social media pages to find out pertinent info for digital releases. 

[Beltmann]

And so began the Cheese Touch Frenzy. Friend turning on friend. Brother turning on sister. It was madness.

 

 

[kidsmoke]

1 hour ago, Beltmann said:

And so began the Cheese Touch Frenzy. Friend turning on friend. Brother turning on sister. It was madness.

 

 

 

This trailer alone is enough to give me nightmares! 

[Albert Tatlock]

Latest couple of 1 hour Stewart Lee specials on BBC.

 

Someone has captured the audio (still quite brilliant without the deadpan visuals)

 

 

Edit: Then chilled to Whitehouse and Mortimer: Gone Fishing last night.

 

 

 

[Beltmann]

This morning I revisited Halloween Kills (2021) as a refresher prior to Halloween Ends, and I responded much more favorably, largely because this time I was better able to separate the movie's minor achievements from its major ambitions. David Gordon Green's approach to the franchise has obvious merits--smart casting, superior performances, skillful mise-en-scene--that have made Michael Myers genuinely scary for the first time since 1978. (For me, Rob Zombie's Michael was interesting, but not scary.)

 

Yet Green also asks his entries to be judged by a loftier measure than whether it outpaces, say, Halloween: Resurrection, which explains why Halloween Kills is finally so exasperating. Green has Statements to Make, but the characters stop being smart, violating everything we've been told about them, and worse, the metaphors stop being metaphors, turning everything into thematic mush. Still, for this viewing I was prepared for that maddening who's-the-real-monster haze, which made it easier to simply concentrate on the slasher mechanics, and on that nuts-and-bolts level, there's a lot to admire. There are moments here that leave a mark, and that's not nothing.
 

 

[Beltmann]

Rob Zombie's spin on The Munsters is far more watchable than its noxious trailer. He aims for a quirky brew of satire, cracked-mirror sitcom, and affectionate pastiche that takes a while to coagulate. I’m not sure it ever reaches “good,” but there’s no doubt it’s a personal, peculiar work that sometimes feels like the best possible movie adaptation of your neighbor's cheesiest Halloween yard decorations.
 

 

[Beltmann]

Clerks III feels like an artist lost inside his own preoccupations; these days, the only subject that seems to interest Kevin Smith is his own past as a filmmaker. How many layers of meta can Smith stack into one movie? That’s probably a question for his therapist, especially given how Clerks III expresses how losing your edge to nostalgia, and converting your youthful cynicism into middle-aged generosity, betrays a deep-seated fear of mortality. The movie is by a wide margin the softest, most heartfelt entry in the series and perhaps the entire View Askew universe, which is not to say it’s a mature work. It’s not. But after spending 28 years with these characters, I’d be lying if I said Clerks III didn’t work me over at times.
 

 

[calvino]

We watched The Greatest Beer Run Ever last night. A great story - depressing. Wish they would have done another 5 minutes of the story after he got back from Vietnam. The ending seemed a bit rush, but I guess the main story is the actual beer run. 

[uncool2pillow]

Ramy season 3 on Hulu is fantastic. At least the first 2 episodes. The 2nd has some of the most compelling political drama and satire I've seen on television.

[Analogman]

The Search for One-Eye Jimmy (1994)

 

 

[brownie]

I was stuck in the house yesterday, and binge-watched the entire first season of The White Lotus.

 

OMG, I loved it!
 

I can’t imagine a second season with an entirely new cast.  I am invested in these characters!, the best of whom is dead!