What Have You Watched Recently?

[Bazza]

Margot Robbie’s big break came from an 3 year-ish role on a famous Aussie soap. 

[Dr. MID-Nite]

On 6/30/2020 at 1:30 PM, Pariah said:

I've begun watching The Umbrella Academy again. Those guys are even more screwed up than I remembered. Luther and Diego, each in their own way, is trying so hard to be a hero that each has failed to actually do so. Allison is like a bird hopping between two wires, unable to settle down on either one. Klaus is a hot mess, but at least he's entertaining. Number Five is the only one of the group that has a damn bit of sense. And Vanya? Ooo, where do you even start with Vanya?

 

I just started watching this (two episodes in). They make a VERY large point of pointing out how ordinary Vanya is...which probably means she'll end up being more powerful than all of them put together. LOL

[Dr. MID-Nite]

On 7/3/2020 at 2:37 PM, Dr. MID-Nite said:

 

I just started watching this (two episodes in). They make a VERY large point of pointing out how ordinary Vanya is...which probably means she'll end up being more powerful than all of them put together. LOL

 

And...got through the first season. No real spoilers, but for the most part I thought it was nicely done. Ellen Page is excellent. I thought the "Time Bureau" stuff was kind of pointless and didn't really add much beyond filling out the run time and some things go completely unexplained...like Pogo and the why The Professor seems to be light years ahead of the world in technology, the "other children", and the significance of the spontaneous birth on the same day. That said...man does this compare favorably to the X-Men movies. Well executed. Again...props to Page who really sells it.

[Greywind]

Avengers: The Death of Tony Stark
Spider-Man: Peter Mourns for Tony Stark

Peter Gunn s1 (Seriously, what happened to TV shows having a 38 episode season?) I'm on the third of 4 discs. S2 and 3 waiting in the wings.

[Greywind]

 

[Starlord]

Hamilton on Disney Plus:  Solid B.  Good play, well done with only a few nitpicks, such as it was ALL musical...as in it never stopped singing...I like the occasional regular dialogue but nobody ever stopped singing.  Also, there were never any really great, signature songs IMO.  It was all just...good, not great.

 

Characters who stole the show:  King George, Thomas Jefferson

[Scott Ruggels]

Watched "Brand New Animal" on Netflix.

 

It's... Furry. very furry.

 

Interesting fight scenes, if short, tho...

[Ternaugh]

Disney's Tarzan: If I had seen this one, it was a long time ago. The animation's interesting, and the music and story are good. (Disney+)

 

Tangled: A favorite of mine, and one that I was lucky to share with my Mom before she passed. Personality-wise, the Mother Gothel character was very much like my Grand-Mere (her mother). Thankfully, Mom wasn't. (Disney+)

 

Modern TImes: The last "Little Tramp" movie by Charlie Chaplin. Worth a watch. (Kanopy)

[Lord Liaden]

18 hours ago, Greywind said:

 

 

As one comment for that YouTube video put it: "You could stick a quarter in her back pocket and see the date it was made."

 

From the days when sexy was style and attitude instead of just skin. And Ann-Margret was only 19-20 in 1961.

[Pariah]

If a musical features all singing with no spoken dialogue, doesn't that make it an opera?

[Michael Hopcroft]

1 minute ago, Pariah said:

If a musical features all singing with no spoken dialogue, doesn't that make it an opera?

That was what my mother referred to it as. It could be described as a hip-hopera since most of it is rapped, but the point stands.

 

Despite the musical style, which would normally not be to her taste -- Mom loved Hamilton. She found it very intense.

[Ternaugh]

The Mask: Jim Carrey finds a magic item that turns him into a living Tex Avery cartoon character. Still a good watch. (Hulu)

 

2001: A Space Odyssey: The Sci-Fi classic, it looks gorgeous in 4K. (4K UHD)

 

Fant4stic: It couldn't decide if it wanted to be a comic book movie or body horror, and doesn't really commit to either. I watched it so you don't have to. (Disney+)

 

My Cousin Vinny: Two yutes from Brooklyn are accused of murder in a small Alabama town, and are defended by Vinny, who has just passed the New York Bar after 6 tries. Great movie that holds up very well. (Hulu)

 

Race to Witch Mountain: A muddled story mars this apparent reboot attempt of the Witch Mountain movies. This one's not that good. (Disney+)

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

8 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

2001: A Space Odyssey: The Sci-Fi classic, it looks gorgeous in 4K. (4K UHD)

 

It looks even better on a theater screen. While I didn't catch its original theatrical release, I did see it in a repertory theater many years later.

 

It's a tribute to the sheer artistry of the film, that modern CGI could scarcely make it look any more believable or impressive.

[mattingly]

9 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

The Mask: Jim Carrey finds a magic item that turns him into a living Tex Avery cartoon character. Still a good watch. (Hulu)

 

My Cousin Vinny: Two yutes from Brooklyn are accused of murder in a small Alabama town, and are defended by Vinny, who has just passed the New York Bar after 6 tries. Great movie that holds up very well. (Hulu)

 

 

Still favorites.

 

[Starlord]

The Boys:  A twisted and graphically violent, yet well done take on superheroes, as well as the power of corporations.  B+

[Sociotard]

A Whisker Away. Anime about a girl that uses a mask to turn into a cat. I think it was a metaphor for suicide.

[slikmar]

18 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

Fant4stic: It couldn't decide if it wanted to be a comic book movie or body horror, and doesn't really commit to either. I watched it so you don't have to. (Disney+

Agreed could have been better, even more if the studio making these would stop thinking Doom is the only adversary the FF have. If they had left the Doom character out completely or only in flashbacks, really let Reed design a device to go to negative universe, as he seemed to be doing and made the villain be Blastaar with a hint of Annihilus pulling strings in the background, would have been so much better and they could have set themselves up for future stuff. Someday, someone will make a "family adventures in the unknown with powers" FF movie. Having said that, I thought the 4 playing the FF were decent and could have carried it on with better writing.

[Greywind]

32 minutes ago, slikmar said:

Agreed could have been better, even more if the studio making these would stop thinking Doom is the only adversary the FF have. If they had left the Doom character out completely or only in flashbacks, really let Reed design a device to go to negative universe, as he seemed to be doing and made the villain be Blastaar with a hint of Annihilus pulling strings in the background, would have been so much better and they could have set themselves up for future stuff. Someday, someone will make a "family adventures in the unknown with powers" FF movie. Having said that, I thought the 4 playing the FF were decent and could have carried it on with better writing.

 

Except they took their inspiration from Ultimate FF and not the 616 stories.

[Pariah]

I fully anticipate calls for me to surrender my geek card, but I found 2001: A Space Odyssey almost unbearably tedious. It took me three sittings to get through it all. Yeah, the effects were cool, but to me it started really, really slow and then never accelerated. 

 

Rossini is reported to have said that Wagner's music "has great moments, but bad quarter-hours". I suppose that would be my assessment of this movie as well.

[Ternaugh]

41 minutes ago, Pariah said:

I fully anticipate calls for me to surrender my geek card, but I found 2001: A Space Odyssey almost unbearably tedious. It took me three sittings to get through it all. Yeah, the effects were cool, but to me it started really, really slow and then never accelerated. 

 

Rossini is reported to have said that Wagner's music "has great moments, but bad quarter-hours". I suppose that would be my assessment of this movie as well.

 

At lunch the other day, my boss, co-worker, and I were talking about 2001. The co-worker is very excited to see it*, but both my boss and I counseled him that it is a slow movie that takes its time, and he may end up not liking it. It's okay if he doesn't.

 

 

*I had shown him part of the stargate sequence. It's a hell of a drug.

[slikmar]

Was watching the end of Spiderman 3. They did such a great job with Sandman, why did they have to ruin the movie with Venom? If they had done Hydroman working with him or even a Mysterio manipulating him, would have been so much better.

[Dr. MID-Nite]

3 hours ago, slikmar said:

Agreed could have been better, even more if the studio making these would stop thinking Doom is the only adversary the FF have. If they had left the Doom character out completely or only in flashbacks, really let Reed design a device to go to negative universe, as he seemed to be doing and made the villain be Blastaar with a hint of Annihilus pulling strings in the background, would have been so much better and they could have set themselves up for future stuff. Someday, someone will make a "family adventures in the unknown with powers" FF movie. Having said that, I thought the 4 playing the FF were decent and could have carried it on with better writing.

 

All I know is that three tries and they can't get Doom right. Even sadder is the cheap 90's version is probably the closest....

 

[Lord Liaden]

Marvel Studios has the property now. I have faith that whenever and however they eventually use it, it will be a vast improvement over previous efforts.

[Cancer]

11 hours ago, Pariah said:

I fully anticipate calls for me to surrender my geek card, but I found 2001: A Space Odyssey almost unbearably tedious. It took me three sittings to get through it all. Yeah, the effects were cool, but to me it started really, really slow and then never accelerated. 

 

Rossini is reported to have said that Wagner's music "has great moments, but bad quarter-hours". I suppose that would be my assessment of this movie as well.

 

10 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

 

At lunch the other day, my boss, co-worker, and I were talking about 2001. The co-worker is very excited to see it*, but both my boss and I counseled him that it is a slow movie that takes its time, and he may end up not liking it. It's okay if he doesn't.

 

 

*I had shown him part of the stargate sequence. It's a hell of a drug.

 

I saw 2001 in "first" run back in 8th grade, I think.  I say "first" because it was in a US military base theater in Europe, and at the time at least there was a significant delay in movies getting into those.  I read the book first, because the base library got the book before the film got to our location, so I already had the book's version of the story in my head while watching the film.  (I had started reading science fiction voraciously about a year before, so I'd read some of Clarke's other writing already also, and without thinking about in these terms, I was aware of some of the themes Clarke was interested in pursuing in his stories.)  Since I had read the book, and I had already seen some comments in newspapers and magazines about divergence between book and film, I kinda knew what was going to happen, but the visual experience was something else, of course.  Also influencing my thinking about the film ... the way one thinks of movies when in 8th grade is ... different ... from how one thinks of movies at other stages of life, of course.

 

Ten or so years later (early grad school, and I think it was a ten-year retrospective) I read in the campus paper the most spot-on review of the film I've ever seen, in terms of reflecting my own perspective.  The writer had also seen it in first run and had been significantly younger than he was when he wrote the review, but the key line in the review was, "... We didn't understand a single thing that was going on, but we knew it was cool as s--t."   Italics in original, and the full expletive was in it too.

[death tribble]

Harley Quinn animated series This is fun but lacks a little something. Too much gratuitous death I think.

 

Van Der Valk season 2. Only 7 episodes but they changed the opening titles so that you could tell it was a different season. A number of different stories and not all had a happy ending but it was good. and again you have the theme tune.

 

The Battle of Britain. Three days to Save the Nation. This looked at three specific days. August 15th when the Germans launched Eagle Day trying to catch the RAF on the ground. August 30th when the Germans tried to swamp the RAF and September 15th when they tried mass attacks on London and ran into the Big Wings. The programme used interviews with family members of ground crew and pilots and their log books, photographs, letters and diaries which they were not supposed to keep. Sadly the pilots they covered were killed either in the battle or shortly thereafter. They also had an interview with a member of the ground crew, an armourer, who died before the programme was screened but he was nearly 100 years old.

 

Nate and Hayes Tommy Lee Jones stars in a swashbuckler set in the Pacific. Jenny Seagrove is the woman involved. The Germans want to set up an anchorage in the South Pacific and try to use Ponape which means they need to offer a sacrifice i.e. Jenny. Tommy and Jenny's husband to the rescue. It was fun.

 

Hanger 18. After a shuttle has an encounter with a UFO, the returning astronauts are grounded while scientists try to work on the downed UFO. And certain government people try to keep the things quiet. May have inspired Chris Carter for the X-Files.

 

Hacksaw Ridge  The conscientious objector who served as a medic in WW2 and saved the lives of over 50 men in his unit on the aforenamed ridge. The fighting scenes are savage. Well worth seeing.