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Befade
Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2020 1:56 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
I don’t favor Julia Roberts in anything. I think it’s her mouth or her laugh. When did she ever try to be ugly in anything? Charlize Theron did. Meg Ryan did. Jennifer Aniston did. My favorite actress of the moment is the German Nina Voss. Beautiful but not every minute. Just watched her in A Woman in Berlin.

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billyweeds
Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 9:56 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
bartist wrote:
Also good in Charlie Wilson's War.


I was bored silly by everything in that movie.
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billyweeds
Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 9:58 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
Befade wrote:
I don’t favor Julia Roberts in anything. I think it’s her mouth or her laugh. When did she ever try to be ugly in anything? Charlize Theron did. Meg Ryan did. Jennifer Aniston did. My favorite actress of the moment is the German Nina Voss. Beautiful but not every minute. Just watched her in A Woman in Berlin.


I don't think there's anything particularly wonderful about appearing ugly per se. I agree that Theron was great in Monster, but so was Roberts in Brockovich, where she didn't look ugly but did look mighty cheap sometimes.
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Befade
Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 1:40 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
Maybe it’s that we’re so used to good looking women in movies.....but that isn’t true of the general population. Maybe sometimes we want to see ourselves on screen. Meg Ryan, in the Cut. Jennifer Anniston, Cake. It’s a different story with men......

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Befade
Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 1:48 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
Border, the Swedish, Denmark film is an example of ugliness going too far....I had a lot of trouble watching this.

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bartist
Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2020 2:28 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
One kind of ugly movies rarely show is how someone's face looks after a fight. Most ridiculous example is Gina Carana in "Haywire" - gets in fights where she takes multiple crunching face punches and this is shown by a tiny brushstroke of mascara on one cheek or a demure dot of fake blood at the corner of her mouth. It's like Soderbergh is having a wink at us, taking us back to old westerns where handsome heroes just go to a washbasin and remove all injuries.

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carrobin
Posted: Sun Apr 19, 2020 4:14 am Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC
This reminds me of "Return of the Soldier," in which Alan Bates, shell-shocked in World War I, ignores his beautiful but shallow wife (Julie Christie) and becomes involved with his former love, Glenda Jackson (described as "a dowd" by Christie). It's a good movie but the one who should have been Oscar-nominated was Frank Finlay, who played Jackson's husband; his forlorn gaze as she'd rush off to meet her ex-love was almost painful to watch.
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Syd
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2020 10:28 am Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
Watched The Sea Around Us, Irwin Allen's rather sensational and very loose adaptation of Rachel Carson's book. (Carson hated it so much that she never allowed an adaptation of any of her other books.) That said, it's still absorbing watching, and inspired tons of nature documentaries such as Jacques Cousteau's and the Blue Planet. Also Megashark vs. Giant Octopus. It also has footage you'll not see in documentaries like "The Blue Planet," such as diatoms, and the killing of a whale from a whaling boat. It's really packed with interesting stuff and is only 62 minutes look. Oscar for Best Documentary, 1952.

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gromit
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2020 1:26 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9005 Location: Shanghai
Sounds interesting.

If you get a chance try to catch Jacques Cousteau's The Silent World (1956), his debut film, with a young Louis Malle doing some camerawork. Conservationism was nascent back then, and Cousteau's crew can be fairly brutal, as when they accidentally run over and kill a whale, but then compound that by deciding to bash the hell out of the numerous sharks that are just trying to eat the seakill. Or when they want to quantify the marine life in a lagoon, so they toss in a stick of dynamite and count all the dead creatures that float belly up. All of which is why the film has been buried and is hard to find. But it's an interesting film, and documents its time well.

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Befade
Posted: Sat Apr 25, 2020 2:18 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
Good grief😰. I’ve turned to nature films to avoid depressing subjects. (Watching Dark Waters is very depressing.). Last night I watched a PBS show featuring the lynx inhabiting Austrian mountains. Since I have a lynx point Siamese cat I was very interested. When mice started showing up Suki, my cat was watching intensely. She’s very smart and recently threw up a mouse she had found in my house. (I’ve never seen a mouse in my house before.)

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bartist
Posted: Tue May 05, 2020 10:14 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
Jojo Rabbit - sweet and darkly funny take on blind nationalism. It was hard to convince myself that this is NOT a Wes Anderson movie. If I were him, I'd be quite flattered. Or threatened. If it were a Wes Anderson movie, it would be in my top tier of WA movies. The director, who describes himself as a "Polynesian Jew" plays the imaginary Hitler who lives in the young boy's head, and gets fine performances from the whole cast. I imagine Mel Brooks would have liked this movie.

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gromit
Posted: Wed May 06, 2020 5:46 am Reply with quote
Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 9005 Location: Shanghai
I liked JoJo R. My review is about a page back in Current Film.

Initially I thought the nickname JoJo Rabbit was kind of goofy/awkward, but later upon reflection starting liking it as a mocking of bad, goofy German humor.

I just rewatched Juno, and there's a fair degree of Wes Anderson tweeness (think the animation, and especially the gold and red clad track team that passes by frequently).

What I like most about Juno is the late payoff. The perfect couple kept worrying about Juno changing her mind, but then they turn out to be unreliable. Juno had bonded with the husband and didn't feel terribly close to the wife. But realizes that the husband bonding with a 16 year old isn't a great sign afterall, and the wife is really a rock solid future mom.

It certainly glosses over that Juno doesn't have too many other good options (could give the child to an adoption agency, but then she wouldn't know the fate). And a single working Mom raising a child isn't ideal, especially as she has to deal with the emotional fallout as her marriage collapses (my reaction on first and 2nd viewings). But it's still nice how Juno trusts Vanessa and the hastily written note is nice.

I still have no idea why rebel Juno has a best friend who is a cheerleader, and a boyfriend who is a milquetoast runner. In my experience, the disaffected and rebellious weren't really in with the joiners and school spirit types. Also, if she likes Iggy Pop and Punk so much, how come she plays twee songs with her boyfriend. (it would have been easy to slip in some brief dialogue where the husband/father-to-be asks Juno if her band plays punk, and she sheepishly admits they play twee pop songs because that's what her boyfriend/guitarist likes).

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carrobin
Posted: Tue May 12, 2020 2:39 am Reply with quote
Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 7795 Location: NYC
TCM has been showing musicals all day, and I had to stop and watch "Stormy Weather." I've seen clips from it--the Fats Domino "Ain't Misbehavin'" and Lena Horne's "Stormy Weather" are familiar segments, as is the phenomenal performance of the Nicholas Brothers near the end--but I didn't realize it was a fictionalized biography of the star, Bill Robinson. (No relation.) And it was a delight to watch. Years ago I saw Lena Horne's one-woman show, and saw Cab Calloway as Horace Vandergelder in "Hello Dolly." I miss the theater....
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billyweeds
Posted: Sat May 16, 2020 6:03 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
Screened two not-great but very interesting movies in the genre of psychological horror, which were remarkably similar. One is "The Lodge," streaming on Hulu, in which a man's intended bride (suffering a severe case of PTSD) spends a few days in a snowbound retreat with her fiance's two children and resentments lead to chaos in disturbing ways. Extremely well acted by the amazing teen actor Jaeden Martell (aka Jaeden Lieberher) and Riley Keough (formerly known as Lisa Marie Presley's daughter but now getting better known as a terrific actor), it gets on your nerves in good and bad ways. It's annoyingly uneven in tone, and plot-wise it's hard to believe--but the photography, the music, and the acting combine to be rather effectively unnerving.

"I See You" (on Amazon Prime) relies less on acting (though it's okay there too) and more on twisty plotting. Like "The Lodge," it's a story of familial dysfunction and generational disconnect. A woman's husband can't forgive her for having cheated on him, and her son's resentment is at the boiling point. The husband is a policeman investigating the kidnapping of a pre-teen boy, the latest in a series, some of which led to murder. More than that I can't say without spoiler alerts. It's superficial and contrived, but keeps you on the edge of your seat. And Helen Hunt makes an increasingly infrequent screen appearance as the wife.

Normally, I might say skip these non-essential flicks. But during a lockdown, c'mon. Give 'em a shot.
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bartist
Posted: Sat May 16, 2020 11:06 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
I've seen three not-great movies recently...

Dark Places, a poor adaptation of a Gillian Flynn novel, which removes most of what I like about Flynn - wit, caustic humor, shrewd insight into human condition. Charlize Theron gets some good lines, that's about it.

The Call - true junk, chock full of tiresome abduction/serial killer cliches, with a nasty stupid ending. Halle Berry is, as often happens, overrated in this, and the film earned more than it deserved. It could, by mere similarity, tarnish the fine Danish film "The Guilty. " Happy to find the films are entirely unrelated. I see now Jake G is on board with a remake of TG, which I hope does it some justice.

Enemy - Denis Villeneuve makes good movies. This is not one of those. Jake G plays a college professor and his doppelganger, who is either a darker region of his own subconscious or a twin brother separated at birth (who, oddly, has a chest scar identical to his own). There are spiders, which mean something. Possibly the professor's anxieties about women? There's a mysterious club with some Eyes Wide Shut nonsense involving masturbating women in masks and tormenting tarantulas. The International League of Misogynists should screen this film at their conferences.
The ending is Kafkaesque (well, most of the film is, but especially the end) and I really haven't been able to decipher a point if any exists.

I would really only recommend that last film, of the three, which was at least interesting and perhaps someone here will understand the spiders.

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