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What Have You Watched Recently?


Susano

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Onward: Good fantasy from Pixar, worth watching. (Disney+)

 

Blazing Saddles: Hedy Lamarr and his band of ruffians menace the town of Rock Ridge. (Hulu)

 

The Living Daylights: Decent James Bond film starring Timothy Dalton. (Amazon Prime)

 

Licence to Kill: The other James Bond film starring Timothy Dalton. Not nearly as good. (Amazon Prime)

 

Batman: The 30th anniversary edition of the Tim Burton film, this one's been upgraded to 4K and Dolby ATMOS. The sound mix is *LOUD*, but very clear, and the picture quality is better than I remember seeing in the theater. (UHD Blu-ray)

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Looking for Sophia

This was a documentary looking at the life and career of Sophia Loren made by Italian Television. It came out in 2004 to mark Loren's 70th birthday. It features clips from numerous films including the one that got her the Best Actress Oscar. It had interviews with some of her co-stars and film staff. It does not shy away from the fact that she spent time in jail for tax evasion. And you could claim it is a hagiography. I like Loren so this was very good.

 

Flight to Mars

This is about the first manned flight to Mars. It was made in 1951. The ship crashes on Mars and meet Martians who are keen to help them return to Earth except the planet is running out of its minerals and they intend to duplicate the ship and invade Earth. Dated.

 

Inferno

This was one of Dario Argento's Three Mothers films about three witches. A student in Rome receives a letter from his sister in New York saying she has read a book about three witches and is concerned that the building she is living in may be the lair of one of them. This has bright colours and like other Italian films I have seen an overabundance of stabbing. It is still original and worth a look. Made in 1980.

 

Armchair Theatre: The Creditors

This is an updating of Strinberg's play to 1950s Sweden. It was made in the early 70s and is a three hander. An artist is made to question his work and his life with his wife by his new friend. What he does not know is the friend is the ex-husband of his wife and he is manipulating him. This would still work today.

 

Armchair Theatre: A Bit of a Lift

A man checks into the hotel his wedding reception was held in in order to commit suicide. Another wedding reception is being held there and two of the guests have arranged an assignation but the man after having a bath cannot remember the room number and comes into the room where the potential suicide is staying. Interesting.

 

Armchair Theatre: Office Party

The manager of a bank is retiring and a party is held to say goodbye. The play by Fay Weldon is very dated in how both sexes treat the other. There are faces familiar to a British audience.

 

Giri/Haji

This translates as Duty/Shame and was an eight part BBC series. Good news it is on Netflix and if you can catch it do so.

The story can be a bit complicated so I'll try and provide a brief guide. Throughout the series you have flashbacks for various of the characters.

At its core is the story of a Japanese police officer who goes to London to try and find his brother who supposedly died a few years previously. The brother has now killed the nephew of a Yakuza boss in London with the clan blade of his old Yakuza boss. The police and the Yakuza want the inspector to find him and return him to answer for what he has done.

Then come the complications. Brother is working for a London gangster who has a fascination with Japan and has a way with words. His chief enforcer, a black woman, is assigned to persuade or kill the police officer.

The Brother displaced an adviser to the London gang and he wants back in. The adviser is played by Justin Long doing a nice line in desperation. He is now involved with Albanian gangsters.

Brother also had to flee Japan in the first place as he made his bosses's daughter pregnant and he has a child. He is supposed to have originally perished in a car 'accident'.

The police man is supposed to be at a police conference as cover as the Japanese police and the Yakuza do not want the Metropolitan police to know the real reason he is in London for. As such he becomes acquainted with the lecturer played by Kelly Macdonald  She is running the course as she informed on her lover another police officer after he had hit her and she found evidence of him being corrupt. Consequently she is personna non grata with her colleagues.

The Japanese police officer also runs into a hustler who is half Japanese and can thus get him into Japanese places in London where his brother might be hiding or be frequenting. The hustler is also affected by the recent suicide of his lover.

still with me ? Good.

The police officer's father is dying of cancer but both his sons are in London. His daughter decides to find her father and thus flees to London. She becomes close to the hustler.

And one of the British police officers is sent to Japan as part of a swap with the Japanese officer in London.

See this, it is brilliant. Yes you do have subtitles because the Japanese talk Japanese to each other and have to translate in a couple of cases to the non-Japanese around them.

Events lead to a gun fight between the Albanians and the London gang and a Yakuza war in Tokyo.

Each episode is about 55 minutes long with no advert breaks.

 

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Been finally watching season 1 of Spy Wars with Damian Lewis. Using real life accounts and police/unlocked documents to talk about various major events in spydom. Excellent so far and really interesting. I was amazed at how many of the actual participants they have been able to get interviews with.

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I bought the BBC show The Fades and watched the first episode last night. Very stylishly shot and creepy, though the visible low budget for sets and such makes the global apocalyptic themes a bit difficult to buy into given that we're only seeing a local situation with a small handful of actors involved. Notable in that it's early work by Daniel Kaluuya, Iain De Caestecker, and Tom Ellis.

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6 hours ago, Matt the Bruins said:

I bought the BBC show The Fades and watched the first episode last night. Very stylishly shot and creepy, though the visible low budget for sets and such makes the global apocalyptic themes a bit difficult to buy into given that we're only seeing a local situation with a small handful of actors involved. Notable in that it's early work by Daniel Kaluuya, Iain De Caestecker, and Tom Ellis.

 

I watched it on BBC America. 

I thought it was a great show in a field of remakes and copies.

I was disappointed when it was not continued.

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10 hours ago, csyphrett said:

I have been watching Bofuri. Two schoolgirls join a virtual reality DnD type game. The one decides to dump all of her points in vitality which makes her an unstoppable force. Then she eats a hydra and gets an attack. And that's when she starts earning a reputation as a monster.

CES 

I've been watching this too.  Good show.

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Just finished watching This Island Earth on YouTube,  the first time since I was a kid. One of the classier sci-fi movies of the 1950s, it features an intelligent script, solid cast and capable direction. It's a bit of a slow burn, unfolding like a mystery over the majority of its run time, before shifting to an action-filled climax. Most of its special effects are saved for the last half-hour, but are impressive for their day and look grand in Technicolor.

 

While I found the ending rather rushed -- they could have easily added another ten to fifteen minutes to the story -- it's still an exceptional example of the genre from its era.

 

 

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On 4/7/2020 at 8:08 PM, tkdguy said:

I find modern classical music, including modern opera, hit or miss. I went to another of Adams' opera's Girls of the Golden West (not to be confused with Puccini's opera), and it was pretty disappointing. I haven't seen Nixon in China, so I may look for it.

You would need to find a good production. In a smaller theater Nixon in China would look silly. But I've become slightly obsessed with the work, especially the Nixon/Mao meeting scene that shows why neither was capable of trusting -- well, pretty much anybody. The audience knows the history. They know the horrors Mao inflicted on China and North Korea. As the people of China repeat his vacuous philosophies in the prologue, I feel the air of menace ratchet up tighter and tighter.

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YouTube has a lot of past sporting events available in full. Today I watched the 1985 Chicago Bears (of the National Football League) demolish the Montana-led San Francisco 49ers by a score of 26-10. The Niners did themselves in with penalty after penalty, but the Bears also forced three turnovers, two of which led to field goals.

 

Folk hero William "Refrigerator" Perry made a few brief appearances in this game. Mike Ditka had hatched the idea of using the mammoth defensive tackle as a short-yardage runner  Problem was that Walter Payton (in his finale season) was eager to take that role and much better at it. And other than being really big the Fridge had no other elements of a solid football player. On return coverage duties, he would hit whatever random people he could catch up to, seemingly without any purpose in mind -- when he could catch anyone at all. His conditioning was very poor and running a longer distance than about thirty yards was almost impossible for him. For most purposes, the Fridge was a horrible football player  Colorful, yes. But not at all good at actually playing the game of football. He was also one of many NFL players of his era who died early. Many of those deaths were the results of undiagnosed CTE, but in Perry's case it was probably his lifestyle (even after his football career came to a mnerciful end, he still ate and drank way too much) that did him in.

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I just finished watching Tron: Legacy again. What an underrated film. Visually striking, really loved the casting aside from "uncanny valley" version of Jeff Bridges. Action scenes were cool as Hell (the Rinzler game fight was especially incredible). Just when you think "no way could a movie this visually impressive have a soundtrack that..."

 

And Daft Punk says "hold my beer".

 

Really nice transition from the cultural expression in the original with the Zen/ Eastern philosophy too. The Dude apparently abides on the Grid as well. 

 

Love that movie. 

 

 

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The Spy Who Loved Me: 10th in the James Bond series, the plot involves submarines, a very special supertanker, and nuclear missiles. (4K via Amazon Prime)

 

For Your Eyes Only: 12th in the James Bond series, the plot involves trying to recover a special communications encoder that sunk with a spy ship. (Amazon Prime)

 

Octopussy: 13th in the James Bond series, this one's about a plot to destabilize NATO. (4K via Amazon Prime)

 

A View to a Kill: 14th in the James Bond series, this one's about destroying Silicon Valley. (4K via Amazon Prime)

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