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knox
Posted: Wed Jun 12, 2019 8:39 am Reply with quote
Joined: 18 Mar 2010 Posts: 1245 Location: St. Louis
Ghulam wrote:
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The British movie "The Souvenir" is probably the best movie this year so far. A young woman is passionately in love with the idea of movie-making and is applying herself diligently to that task while being in a relationship with a somewhat patronizing and exploitative young man. The young lady is played exquisitely by Honor Swinton Byrne. Her mother is played by her real-life mother Tilda Swinton. Joanna Hogg's direction is a veritable tour de force. The only word for it is 'perfection'.

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They're already shooting a sequel....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Souvenir_Part_II

Weirdly, it's released here in the US in May, but the UK won't see it until August. What part of "British movie" do the distributors not understand??
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Ghulam
Posted: Wed Jun 12, 2019 12:52 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 4742 Location: Upstate NY
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Shall look forward to seeing Part II.


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Ghulam
Posted: Sat Jun 15, 2019 3:29 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 4742 Location: Upstate NY
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Ava DuVernay's "When They See Us" on Netflix is a superb dramatization of the Central Park Five story of false incrimination of five black and Hispanic boys by New York City's authorities in 1989. It comes across as a gut-punch.

Two women responsible for the miscarriage of justice, one the Assistant District Attorney and the other the chief investigator, are now being shamed and have lost some of their important positions. A third culprit still goes unpunished. He spent $86000 putting full-page advertisements in newspapers demanding death penalties for these boys and he persisted in holding them guilty even after they were found to be innocent and released. Yes, that was our present President. But then he never gets punished for any of his misdeeds!


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Syd
Posted: Fri Jun 21, 2019 7:37 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
Dark Phoenix was pretty mediocre, but not deserving of the box office disaster which it is apparently becoming. I'm surprised Sophie Tucker is being praised for her performance when I thought she was about adequate. Michael Fassenbender was quite good as Magneto, but I liked Kodi Smit-McPhee (Nightcrawler) the best. Quicksilver (Evan Peters) was totally wasted.

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Syd
Posted: Fri Jun 21, 2019 9:52 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
Part of the problem here is that I'm not willing to admit that I saw every film I saw, such as Pokeman: Detective Pikachu, much less review it. But here goes: it's not a great film by any means, but compares favorably with some of the anime I've been obsessed with lately. I ran into the problem that since I've been totally immune to Pokemon until this, I had no idea about the conventions and tropes of this subgenre.

But anyways, we have a teenage detective (Justice Smith, who is not related to Will Smith) whose father has vanished, who finds himself in an Unlikely Partnership with his father's Pokemon (Pikachu=Ryan Reynolds, very good here), trying to keep the villain from merging the Pokemons with their ...partners, something that is calamatious for some reason or other? Some very nice (and unexpected) special effects, and the whole film has a nice artistic sense. Ultimately, not as good as the trailer, nowhere as near bad as I had any right to expect, but not good either.

If you have a kid who is into Pokemon, they may like this; I found it mosly harmless.

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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament
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Syd
Posted: Sat Jun 22, 2019 11:57 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
I don't think Toy Story 4 is quite as brilliant as the first three in the series, but is still very entertaining, and I did have tears on my cheeks at the end, as in the last installment, so bring your handkerchiefs.

Anyway, if you are wondering what happened to Bo Peep in the last installment, you get your very satisfying answer here, because she is not only a major character, but outshines Woody. Bonnie is now old enough to enter kindergarten, and I thought she was being awfully whiny about it until I realized she was five years old. Woody stows away in her backpack, and helps the sad Bonnie out by retrieving items from a trash can, which Bonnie assembles into Forky, consisting of a spork, pipe cleaners, some clay, and I'm not sure what else. Given the magic of the series, Forky comes alive, and knowing he was created from trash, immediately starts looking for the nearest trash receptacle. Bonnie immediately falls in love with Forky because she created him. Woody wants to educate Forky in the duties of being a toy, but the newly created Forky is pretty dense.

Anyway, Forky escapes, Woody retrieves him, but is distracted when he recognizes Bo's lamp in an antique shop window. (Bo and her sheep were detachable elements of the lamp.) Bo was actually the toy of Andy's sister Molly, who was afraid of the dark, and when Molly grew old enough, she didn't need a night lamp and gave Bo away to the antique shop. Woody, convinced that he might find his long-lost love, invades the antique shop with Forky, and promptly both of them are captured by Gabby Gabby and her henchmen. Gabby is a talking doll from the fifties who had a defective voice box, and has remained unadopted for 60 years, which can really give a complex to a doll. She is convinced that all she needs to be adopted is a non-defective voicebox, such as Woody's.

Meanwhile, Woody discovers Bo Peep is not in the antique shop, but is a local carnival, and very happily entertaining the children and uniting them with toys. (This is the flip side of the kindergarten in "Toy Story 3".) There's a big conflict here between Woody's devotion to Bonnie (who has understandably rejected him in favor of Jessie) and Bo Peep's devotion to freedom.

This is apparently the last of the Toy Story franchise, which announcement I take with a grain of salt since Toy Story 3 was also a satisfying conclusion and I was never expecting a fourth installment. So here we have an unnecessary sequel which still is worth watching, because the new Bo Peep is a wonder to behold.


Last edited by Syd on Sun Jun 23, 2019 1:17 am; edited 2 times in total

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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament
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Syd
Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2019 12:14 am Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
The biggest disappointment to me was we didn't have a Pixar short before the movie. What were they thinking?

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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament
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carrobin
Posted: Sun Jun 23, 2019 12:25 am Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC
Love the Toy Stories, and will definitely see #4.

Tonight PBS showed Ron Howard's Beatles documentary, "Eight Days a Week," and it was great--not much that was really new, but such a kick to see and hear them at concert venues again, including Shea Stadium. Hard to believe that was more than 50 years ago, four years before I moved to New York. The bits about the release of "A Hard Day's Night" reminded me of when my sister came home in tears, devastated because the audience was screaming so loud throughout that she couldn't hear a word of the movie, much less the music. I thought they were silly. How times change.
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Befade
Posted: Tue Jun 25, 2019 12:08 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
I am a Jim Jarmusch fan. I really enjoyed his The Dead Don’t Die. A zombie movie that is amusing, deadpan and the opposite of a horror film like US. Adam Driver and Bill Murray are a pair of cops who fumble through their uneventful life in small town New York. It’s got that comfortable Twin Peaks feel......until the zombies start to appear. They are flesh eating and their chewed up victims inspire a “Yuk!” from one of the cops. Just a lot of low key humor and fun.

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Syd
Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2019 8:50 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
Pavarotti is an affectionate documentary of the great tenor with interviews with his family and friends, including Placido Domingo and José Carreras, a protegee/secretary/companion who I think he had an affair with, mostly still friendly toward him, including his first wife whom he cheated on in what became a public scandal. There are hints that he could be a trial to work with, but don't go in looking for a biography of a suffering artist; he seems to have been mostly happy. And there is a lot of stage and concert footage which is what you came in for in the first place. If you remember the man with affection, you'll probably enjoy this.

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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament
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gromit
Posted: Sat Jul 20, 2019 4:09 am Reply with quote
Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9005 Location: Shanghai
The Best of Enemies.
This is basically a companion piece to Black Klansman.
A black elementary school mostly burns down in 1971 Durham NC, forcing the issue of integration front and center. Black community organizers and the Klan rally their sides. Under court order, a 2-week community process is undertaken to decide what to do. Which gets the local head of the Klan and a large civil rights black woman working together.

The focus is primarily on Sam Rockwell's Klan leader and his transformation. All based on a true though unlikely story. It's tense at times, uplifting, etc. A fairly solid film, even if it's a little obvious and sentimental at times.
If anyone's interested: here's a transcript of Studs Terkel's interview with the ex-Klan leader turned liberal white. It gets at some of the reasons poor/working-class Whites dislike minorities and support Trump and such.

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gromit
Posted: Mon Jul 22, 2019 3:53 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9005 Location: Shanghai
Stockholm is based on a 1973 bank robbery/hostage situation, from which the term Stockholm Syndrome was derived. Ethan Hawke is entertaining, but the film never really figures out its purpose. It mostly stays light and amusing despite serious doings. Sometimes it nods towards Dog Day Afternoon territory, then shuffles away. There's a lot of Bob Dylan music for some reason, maybe a wink towards his noble Prize(?)
Basically, this would make a decent diversion when it comes on cable Tv.

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Syd
Posted: Thu Jul 25, 2019 9:59 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
The Art of Self-Defense: very dark comedy. In fact, there were points at which I wondered if it was a comedy at all, despite some funny moments. In any case, Jesse Eisenberg plays an accountant who lives with his dachshund and who is assaulted by motorcyclists one night while he is getting dogfood. He decides at this point he needs self-defense, so first tries to buy a gun, but while he is going through the waiting period, discovers a karate studio and quickly gets addicted. The day classes are addictive (particularly the children's class taught by Imogen Poots), but the night classes take us into the Twilight Zone and the dark side of martial arts, including when our protagonist is called on to commit crimes by his mentor.

I didn't think this was successful, though Eisenberg and the dachshund (and often Poots) are well cast, but it loses its way during the second half. It runs into the problem of plausibility like how these missing people being missing escapes attention. So I can't recommend it, though it's certainly watchable.

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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament
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billyweeds
Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2019 8:43 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood is not only Tarantino's best by far, it's on my all-time top-ten films list already. Seeing it for the second time tonight, with a guaranteed third visit in the book. This is a hugely entertaining epic with an endless array of great performances, headed by Brad Pitt in his screen peak and Leonardo DiCaprio close. Their on-screen bromantic chemistry is unprecedented. The movie is...perfect.
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bartist
Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2019 10:50 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
Don't believe a word he says!

(hi, BW!)

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