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What Have You Watched Recently?


Susano

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M3GAN has to have been the creepiest and most disturbing horror movie I've seen in years. The idea is a sort of variant on Frankenstein, in which a robotics engineer builds a robot designed to look and act human, and intended to protect her "primary user", in this case the engineer's new ward who was brought to her after her parents died. But, while the little girl adores the robot and sees her as a person, and the engineer's boss wants to start a M3GAN production line, M3GAN starts to transcend her boundaries, and gradually starts building a frightening demeanor, until finally she has no problem with killing even dogs and children if it serves her purpose.

 

Like the original Frankenstein, it poses questions. Is M#GAN a person, albeit an evil one? If she isn't, then who is culpable for her crimes?

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We finally got around to watching The Menu. It's very good, with plenty of tension from the menacing atmosphere that builds throughout the first and second acts. Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Nicholas Hoult do a great job, while the set design, props, and cinematography are all excellent. But it's not perfect. There are a couple of story bobbles, and the ending is a little hard to swallow (heh), but it's still well worth watching.

 

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I finally go around to watching Wakanda Forever. It was good. Not quite as good as Black Panther, but solid. The memorial scenes for Chadwick Boseman at the beginning and end of the film were a nice touch, quite tasteful.

 

Shuri's vision was a bit of a shock, to be sure. But it fit. 

 

And I had no problems whatsoever with Namor in his film. I found the character internally consistent, and the actor did a good job with him. All the sturm und drang that surrounded his appearance in WFstruck me as the same kind of tiresome, manufactured fanboi angst we've seen with other films (Captain Marvel, among others).

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: As mentioned upthread, this is a good watch, and a moving memorial for Chadwick Boseman. (Disney+)

 

The Six Million Dollar Man Season 1: The stories improve greatly after the three pilot movies, and are still very watchable. Making my way into season 2. (Peacock)

 

Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers: Pilot for a series that wasn't to be, with some generally interesting characters and a good setup. And it was fun to see G'kar played by Andreas Katsulas one last time. For fans of the show, it's a good watch. (DVD)

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: I was a proponent of recasting but the memorial was moving. The look of Namor was excellent and the whole style and look was done much better than Aquaman. 
 

Kolchak, The Night Stalker: This is an excellent show and both movies as well. It is a great set-up for a normals campaign and the show had too much potential to be so short lived. 

 

Avengers, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes: This cartoon is often overlooked even though it does a great job of diving into some Avengers history but with better pacing and voice acting than X-Men TAS. 
 

 

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Crown Court

Case 4 involves two activists brought to trial for a bomb explosion at a magazine's print room. Nobody was killed but evidence might link the pair to the explosion. Or they might know who did it but will not say anything to identify anyone else. This ties into the counter culture (as this is 1972). A night watchman who had previous contact with the accused says he saw them fleeing the scene. But is he biased ?

Case 5 involves whether two women sought to steal a dress from a Department store, one by causing a distraction and the other by hiding one dress under their coat. The women have separate Defence Counsels. Is the store detective who is new to the job correct in saying she saw the dress under the coat as one of the women drove away ? Why did it take the car so long to return to home where two police officers were waiting ? First time the jury definitely gets it wrong.

 

Curse of the Mummy's Tomb

The son of a pharaoh is murdered and mummified but the pharaoh curses the one responsible. And when the tomb is opened people start dying. I thought I had seen this Hammer Horror but I was wrong. It had a neat twist. Worth seeing for the twist alone. Also beware of waking the Mummy up as it might not do what you want.

 

The Kiss

A witch can only survive by passing down the bloodline of a certain family. When one sister tries to pass on the curse to her niece, then more people end up getting killed. I can see why this film did not get as much exposure as others did but it is not bad.

 

Cisco Pike

Oddly enough this has the titbit in the cast of saying 'introducing Kris Kristofferson'. Kris is a musician but of a double act who are currently split up. He is up on a drugs rap and the detective responsible forces him into selling marijuana so that the detective can make $10k. Kris has to negotiate selling the drugs over a two and half day period while keeping things quiet from his wife (Karen Black) and ex-partner (Harry Dean Stanton). He also has to avoid the slippery clutches of the detective played by Gene Hackman. I had not heard of this one before and it is an entertaining watch.

 

Kill Rommel

Italian made WW2 film set in the Deserts of North Africa. Has the distinction of having Anton Differing (German) playing the lead British officer. An American is assigned to his quasi Long Range Desert Group unit and this is where the fun begins. This includes the American trying to knock off Differing's wife without knowing it at the time. Not bad but bad dubbing.

 

Harpur and Iles

This is a TV movie set in Wales where the force is being investigated by an officer from outside the locality. Meanwhile a protection racket war turns really nasty when the head of one side is injured and his men in retaliation kidnap the son of the other side. It does not end well. Particularly as the police are not wholly white hats. The Assistant Chief Constable is not above planting evidence while his wife is sleeping with one of his subordinates and the officer being investigated has been on the payroll of the racketeer whose son was kidnapped.

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I'm six episodes in on Poker Face, a mystery of the week created by RIan Johnson (Knives Out). It's about a woman with the ability to tell if someone is lying who uses her ability to unravel the murders. Much like Columbo, we see how the murder takes place before she picks up on clues and starts digging. It's quirky, and I'm really enjoying it. The next episode drops on the 16th (weekly), and I look forward to watching it. As an aside, the episode title cards look like throwbacks to the classic mystery wheel shows from the early 70s, complete with boldface yellow text and a copyright line underneath.

 

 

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We finished S1 of a couple of different HBOMax series last night.

 

Oh Hell: This German dark comedy is about a young woman whose life is unstable at least partly because she uses lies as her main method for building relationships with other people. It's funny and sad and hilarious and horrifying. I hope they make a season 2 for it.

 

Avenue 5: This comedy is set on a space cruise-ship that ends up having to take its vacationing passengers the long way around our solar system. It works pretty well at times as social commentary (sometimes light -- the big complainer is named Karen -- and sometimes more serious -- everyone in charge seems to be a fraud and the masses are being lied to constantly), but mostly it works really well as a straight-up comedy with some truly absurd (but somehow realistic) situations. I'm looking forward to starting season 2 next week.

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Crown Court

Case 6 involves whether or not a father and son tried to smuggle drugs from France to England. An anonymous tip off led Customs to find the drugs on a boat that the father owned but that the son had piloted. The QC (Queen's Counsel) who had previously been defending people was now the prosecution and went after one of the defendants with a vengeance. This one had people changing testimony which was a first.

 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I have not watched this in an age. A little dated as the ship the Cotapaxi was found in the 80s but not identified until January 2020. And Flight 19 ditched in the sea. The effects still hold up. But I watch Star Wars way more.

 

Beserk

Joan Crawford is the owner of a circus in England where people keep getting killed and this brings in more people. Judy Geeson is her daughter who has just been thrown out of school.

 

British Rock

This is a documentary looking at British groups and the British music scene in 1980. The only mis-step is looking at the Kinks who were not a factor at all in the years to come but it did feature The Police, Madness, The Selector, The Boomtown Rats and The Jam. Fascinating look at the period.

 

Animal Kingdom

This is an Australian film based on a real life criminal gang and the murder of two police officers by members of the gang.  Set in Melbourne a boy goes to live with his grandmother after his mother overdoses and dies. His uncles are all crooks, one especially is being hunted by the robbery squad who seem to be out of control and operating a shoot to kill policy. This is the fate that befalls one uncle and leads the most psychotic one to plan the murder of two police officers in return. Guy Pierce appears as one of the detectives in charge who tries to get the young boy to flip on his uncles. A low key but absorbing film.

 

Hawk the Slayer

I loved this film when it came out as it fed my D+D soul. The music now is a tad naff. I still like the film. Jack Palance is great as the bad guy and there are a lot of well known British faces in the supporting cast like Harry Andrews as the Abbot and Annette Crosbie as the Mother Superior. Even the small roles have well known faces like Roy Kinnear as a tavern owner and Maurice Colbourne as a tough. Repeating crossbows and Elven speed with a bow are still fun.

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Dead Reckoning

Film noir with Humphrey Bogart as a captain in the army brought back from wartime Europe after the conflict is over so that he and a sergeant can be awarded medals by the President. Except the NCO does not want to be photographed and goes AWOL once in the States. Bogart goes after him and finds out that maybe the sergeant killed someone before fleeing into the army. But did he ? Lizabeth Scott is the femme fatale.

 

King of the Zombies

A plane crashed on an island in the same area that an admiral disappeared the week before. The people on the plane take refuge with an eccentric doctor who had to flee Austria because of the war. However the man servant comes across zombies. Not flesh eaters but they obey no-one but a master. Bit what is going on and why ? Interesting little piece.

 

The Sadist

Made in the 60s only a couple of years after Starkweather went on the rampage, this has three teachers threatened by a psychotic teen and his compliant girlfriend. The cast is unknown so you don't know who is going to get in next and you don't know who will survive. At least the snakes had a good meal.

 

The Woman in Question

A fortune teller has been murdered but who did it and why ? The police question the last people to see her in order to find the culprit. One of Dirk Bogarde's earliest films.

 

Fixed Bayonets

Richard Basehart is a corporal who really does not want to give people orders. Set during the Korean War the Americans leave a rearguard as the main group retreats. The reargiard have to convince the Chinese that there are more of them than there are. Not bad.

 

The Boogie Man Will Get You

Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre star in this comedy horror. Karloff is forced to sell up his home due to debts but is allowed to stay in the cellar to finish his experiments. These are to do with making a superman now that the country is at war again. The woman who buys the place is being pursued by her ex who is due to join up bujt suspects the locals of exploiting her. He forcibly tries to stop them and Karloff and Lorre set out to stop him. You watch this for both the horror legends.

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Andor: I wish the Star Wars franchise wasn't so uneven.  I'd heard that this series was good, but I put it off after Boba Fett, Obi-Wan, and, well, the entire sequel trilogy.  But Andor is phenomenal.  The writing, the performances, the sets, the architecture--all top notch.  It's better than Rogue One.  It gets a little slow in places, and it suffers from the lack of an ending, but I wish I hadn't waited so long to watch it.

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Is watching the French documentary "Super-Vilains: l'Enquête" worthwhile? It sounds interesting: "Comic book writers discuss how they make the villains who take on the superheroes." But it's rated 5.4/10 on IMDB and there are no written reviews. HBOMax has it, so I guess I should just give it a go, but I wondered if anyone on here had taken a look?

 

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The Superbowl

This year Kansas vs Pittsburgh and what an entertaining game it was. Both teams first possessions ended in scores. Then the Eagles are ahead and the Chiefs made a comeback. As someone else pointed out the end was a bit of a disappointment but good use of managing the clock. Rhianna was on her own for the half time show but it looked to me like she was pregnant and what do you know ? After the show it was confirmed she was. Overall this was one of the best Superbowls I have seen.

 

Images

This is a Robert Altman film with Susannah York as a children's author married to Rene Auberjonois's photographer. She starts seeing and hearing things so is she going mad ? One of the things she sees is her ex-lover who died three years previous. Played by the guy who Gene Hackman shoots after the car/train chase in the French Connection, this is a tad disturbing. I mean I see the guy as a tough not a lover. York goes off the deep end with this. Worth a look.

 

Underwater

Kirstin Stewart works on a mining rig deep underwater. And then there is an accident and people have to run for the escape hatches. Only her group has to cross the ocean bed. And there is something else down there with them ..... This is ideal Cthulhu territory. So I enjoyed it.

 

Wheels of Terror

I have the Sven Hassel books and this is the only film based on the characters. It is toned down for a film and looks less at Sven than at Tiny, Porta, the Legionnaire and The Old Man (the sergeant). Michael Carradine and Oliver Reed play German officers. Worth a look. But Cross of Iron is better.

 

Pendulum

George Peppard is a police captain going to work for a Senate committee. But a man he arrested and beat up to get him to confess is about to be taken off death row and released due to breach of Miranda rules. As the film came out at the end of the 60s this fits the timeframe. George finds out his wife is having an affair with an ex-lover. He plans to pop back and surprise them while sitting in for a senator at a speech said politician was going to give. He gets drunk instead. But someone goes to his house and kills his wife and her lover. But who and why ?

 

Infinite

Mark Wahlberg and Chiwetel Ejiofor are humans who are reborn after they die but they retain skills they learned before hand. The latter has now become a nihilist and wants to destroy all human life but Wahlberg's previous life stole the doomsday device and hid it. The question is where ? This was quite an entertaining idea and lots of mayhem

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Trying to watch Blonde, but it's so very, very bad. Ana de Armas was wasted in this. 

 

Finished up seasons 4 through 7 of Fear the Walking Dead. Apparently, the showrunners changed after Season 3. Seasons 4, 5 and 7 were pretty bad, occasionally rising to moments of mediocrity, though season 6 was better. 

 

Started watching some new sitcoms, Shrinking (Apple TV)(more of a dramedy, from the Ted Lasso folks), Animal Control, and Not Dead Yet. All three of those were pretty entertaining. Tried a couple episodes of That 90s Show, but was only mildly entertained, and mostly by the cameos. Verdict's out on whether we'll continue watching that one. 

 

 

 

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Mission: Impossible ('66) The original TV show (on Pluto) is such an amazing time capsule. First off, everybody smokes. Second, seeing some of these faces that I did not expect is wild. Eartha Kitt as a member of the team for one episode! Joan Collins was a double agent in another. Many other familiar faces, like Larry "Major Burns" Linville, John "Dean Wormer" Vernon, and so many that make you go "Oh, it's that guy!" Several actors also appeared in multiple episodes though in different roles.

 

And the technology! This was spycraft at its weirdest. Most of it is very plausible which I appreciate, but some was just ridiculous. More than once Barney (the tech genius) operated a car with a remote control that only had switches marked left and right. One has to remember what wasn't available at the time. FREX, almost no computers, and the ones that did exist had printouts instead of monitors. 

 

And that's the entire show. It's either very clever, or just ridiculous. Often in the same episode. What really struck me was what isn't seen. Many missions could have been solved easily with a bullet, but they never shoot anyone unless it's self-defense. A far cry from spy fiction of today. In one episode, they go to absurd lengths to fake a gunshot that came from across the street and misses someone, then put a guy up there to get caught as if he had fired the shot. Just taking the shot would have been ten times easier. Also, they never name a foreign country. Some are obviously intended to be Soviet, Germany, South American, etc. but the names and maps are just pastiche, never specific and real. I guess that passed for diplomacy. Good thing everybody speaks English. 

 

Interrogation always consists of asking questions harder if they refuse to talk. And louder! "Answer me! Answer the question! It's no use, take him away." One persuasion technique consisted of playing very loud noise, and the interrogator acted like it was the equivalent of water boarding. That was kind of weird.  I guess torture, even implied, was strictly forbidden.

 

As to the acting, it's a mixed bag. Martin Landau is clearly the star, and deservingly so. Peter Graves, though, I have come to realize, is not very good. But he's better than the first guy that he replaced, Steven Hill. Leonard Nimoy and his sideburns came in later, and he's fun, but I just can't shake the whole Spock thing. It's odd. Barbara Bain is uneven. Sometimes perfect, sometimes clearly out of her element. Lesley (Ann) Warren doesn't fit in my opinion. Maybe it's the character she's being asked to portray, not sure. Greg Morris as Barney is always great, the real anchor of the show. Poor Peter Lupus as Willy is wood. He didn't get the job for his acting. 

 

It's a fun watch, though sometimes my eyes threaten to roll all the way out of my head. When it hits, it hits. When it misses, it's well, baffling. 

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MI was at its heart a caper show. You didn't really watch it for the characters, you watched it to see what inventive and elaborate scheme they'd come up with to undo the villain of the week. And of course they didn't just shoot the enemy, they were the Good Guys! ;)

 

A tidbit about Leonard Nimoy: I remember an interview with him in which he said a big reason he took the role of Paris on MI was because his character would be playing a different role in every episode. He had some concern about being typecast as Spock in future (no kidding), but he said it's hard to typecast a chameleon.

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48 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

MI was at its heart a caper show. You didn't really watch it for the characters, you watched it to see what inventive and elaborate scheme they'd come up with to undo the villain of the week. And of course they didn't just shoot the enemy, they were the Good Guys! ;)

 

A tidbit about Leonard Nimoy: I remember an interview with him in which he said a big reason he took the role of Paris on MI was because his character would be playing a different role in every episode. He had some concern about being typecast as Spock in future (no kidding), but he said it's hard to typecast a chameleon.

This. The thing was they were masters of mind games. After all, why shoot a dictator when you can drive him mad and provoke a leadership crisis in his country? An assassination would have been like killing Putin in a very obvious way that points to you, and exponentially increases the chances of getting caught and facing a firing squad or worse.

 

The movies turned the concept into action thrillers with stuntwork and fight scenes replacing the true focus of the series on deception and ingenious planning and execution. It would be like Lupin III, which would be difficult to capture in a live-action film unless you truly understood the character and the world he lives in.

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Greg Morris as Barney, Don Mitchell as Mark Sanger in Ironside and Nichelle Nichols as Lt Uhura were the first black faces I saw on TV. They were all portrayed with skill and they were treated as if they belonged. I grew up with positive role models. No-one in the family ever said anything about it so I had no negativity.

 

The first two seasons of Mission Impossible were screened on one of the channels a while back. So I saw Steven Hill as the guy in charge but I remember Peter Graves from repeats in the 70s. Someone postulated that it was the CIA which bearing in mind they were working abroad quite often makes sense. And the point about using subterfuge rather than a bullet to win makes perfect sense as the Iron Curtain was supposed to use that tactic rather than subtlety.

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