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Befade
Posted: Mon May 03, 2021 3:11 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
The Father is unlike any dementia film you’ve ever seen. I’m so glad Anthony Hopkins won the Oscar. Brilliant❗️
Watching the rest of White Tiger any goofiness disappears. Basically it’s a class drama from the view of the servant. As a white tiger is so rare also is the man who can rise from the lower class to the upper class. Nothing goofy involved.

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billyweeds
Posted: Tue May 04, 2021 6:58 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 20618 Location: New York City
bartist wrote:
Thanks, I found and reread your pearls of wisdom (ha!) on UG.

A couple posts above, Billy puts it on his Best Films list, so it's a mileage may vary experience for sure.

We were going to go see The Father, but we had a week when we misplaced several household items and had weathered several fairly ridiculous chats about where they could be, and search missions involving pawing through laundry and shining flashlights under furniture, so we opted to skip a dementia film. Ultimately we dumped all blame on the cats. We will have to be sure and keep cats around as we get older, for this purpose.

What's funny is our searches usually turn up some missing object, but rarely the one we were seeking.
"Hey, I found that battery compartment cover on the travel clock that went missing last year! "


bartist--We may disagree on "Uncut Gems," but on the subject of "household searches" we were separated at birth.
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bartist
Posted: Wed May 19, 2021 2:36 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
The Woman in the Window is a disappointing effort at Hitchcockian suspense, overly supplied with hommages, and mostly a waste of its talent. Tracy Letts seemed to have an off day when writing the screenplay, yielding dialog that seemed stilted and, in places, arty in a distracting way -- as if he'd just gotten off the phone with David Mamet. And for pity's sake could we retire the cliche of pushing villains through old skylights?

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Syd
Posted: Wed May 19, 2021 5:57 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
So I'll stick with the Fritz Lang film of the same title.

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bartist
Posted: Thu May 20, 2021 11:23 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
A far better film, one of the best film noirs ever made really. The problems of TWitW (2021) include that it's an adaptation of a good psychological thriller that I don't think can be brought to film very well. The novel is somewhat influenced, not by the Lang classic, but by "Rear Window," and when you notice that lineage in the film version it just serves to make you aware how toweringly great RW was and how not great is what you're watching.


Is "toweringly" a real word? Starting to regret the usage.

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bartist
Posted: Fri May 21, 2021 10:15 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
Another Netflix film that fails to connect well with its original source is "Things Heard and Seen, " a spooky mystery with Amanda Seyfried, James Norton, and Antonio Salieri, oops, F. Murray Abraham.

While the novel All Things Cease to Appear is worth your time, the movie settles for what seemed like a banal remake of "What Lies Beneath," which wasn't all that great, either, much as I loved Michelle Pfeiffer in it.

The stuff about Swedenborgians is kind of interesting, though some may find the trope of odd cultish groups in small college towns a bit threadbare.

We (the spouse and I) are both tired of Netflix and its high crap ratio, so are switching streaming services.

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Befade
Posted: Sat May 22, 2021 4:32 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
What are you switching to? I refuse to invest in Amazon but I was at my granddaughters house yesterday and watched part of Borat when no one was around. (Dare to be really raunchy). I like Hulu for some things. They showed a lot of the Oscar nominees.

If you take movies seriously and like a wide range of selection try Criterian.

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Befade
Posted: Sat May 22, 2021 4:37 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
I read The Woman in the Window and it held my interest. The movie did not. It seemed like the living space of the woman should have been more tightly closed in. Not vast or interesting like it was. The book’s author is a strange character apparently.

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Syd
Posted: Sat May 22, 2021 10:49 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
I saw Raya and the Last Dragon today despite knowing nothing about it (except it was animated and was running well over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes), and liked it a lot despite some cutesiness. I'm obviously missing a lot of advertisements because the theater was mostly packed within Covid limits (with many people vaccinated).

I'm mostly happy. Really good worldbuilding, influenced by a number of Southeastern Asian cultures (though it takes place in another universe), a lot of wonderful animation, a strong and independent heroine who is, I suppose, a Disney princess, but not one who is waiting for any sort of a prince. Oddly, her nemesis (frenemy) is also the daughter of a monarch, so is also a Disney princess, if a punk one, and not waiting for any sort of a prince. I really liked both of them.

Essentially a kingdom in a magical world that contains dragons is attacked by a creeping chaos that turns people and dragons (and other animals, we discover) to stone. The dragons pool their magic together to create a dragonstone which banishes the evil, revives the petrified humans, but leaves all but the guardian (I get the impression the youngest dragon) dragons petrified. The kingdom is on the banks of a river shaped like a dragon, and splits into warring fifths named after their locations on the river: Fangs (head over heart), Heart (heart over head), Spine (strength), Talons (predatory merchants. i.e thieves) and Tail (don't know, though they seem to be heavily into building ships). The factions are all jealous over Heart possessing the Dragonstone.

Raya's father wants to unite the tribes (unifying the dragon, as it were), and Raya befriends the daughter of the queen of Fangs and betrays the location of the Dragonstone, after which everybody invades the sanctuary. In the process of protecting the stone, the father is shot in the leg by a crossbow and drops the stone, shattering it. Each tribe grabs a piece of the stone, but with it shattered, it doesn't have the full power of deflecting evil, and the creeping chaos returns. Raya's father is one of those petrified, but he figures out at the last moment that the creeping chaos is repelled by water and throws Raya into the river with his kingdom's piece of stone.

Go five years into the future, and Raya is in Tail, gets a second piece of the stone, and uses it to revive the guardian (who seems a juvenile herself). Raya's quest is to reunite the five pieces of stone and dispell the creeping chaos, which is easier than you might expect, until she has to convince her frenemy to help save the world.

Enjoyable movie which gets a little too much into swordsplay, but at its best reminds me of "Kubo and the Two Strings" (which is a problem because Kubo is a much better movie). It gets very moving. Our heroine, after all, is the princess of Heart.

An aside: This movie was hit by a critic who will remain nameless on an idiotic charge of political correctness because it doesn't contain enough Southeast Asian (or Southeast Asian-American) Actors. The lead actress is Vietnamese-American as is the child who voices the child thief; the kid who saves Raya on a boat is Laotian-American (that's three of the five major heroes, excluding the dragon and the animal sidekick, who don't actually need an ethnicity when you think about it), and most of the rest of the cast is Chinese-American or Korean-American . (If you didn't know, a lot of the merchant class in Southeast Asian are ethnically Chinese.) The main theme is sung by a Filipena. The main white American, Alan Tudyk, voices Raya's pet/sidekick, who has been described as a pillbug crossed with an armadillo, but which I think of as a giant hedgehog (I believe described as that at one point) with a shell instead of spines. It doesn't speak--Tudyk must have been doing sound effects--and is the the best and most useful Disney sidekick I've seen in a long time.

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bartist
Posted: Sun May 23, 2021 10:06 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
Befade wrote:
What are you switching to? I refuse to invest in Amazon but I was at my granddaughters house yesterday and watched part of Borat when no one was around. (Dare to be really raunchy). I like Hulu for some things. They showed a lot of the Oscar nominees.

If you take movies seriously and like a wide range of selection try Criterian.


Thanks, the local library buys DVDs from the Criterion collection so am less inclined to add them. But their "context" material might be worth it, will check that out.

We're going with Amazon, because it has films we wanted to see, like One Night in Miami, Invisible Life, French Exit, Let Him Go, and Judas and the Black Messiah. And yes, Borat II. Oh, and that ape movie with Josh Weedon or Bill Whedon, something like that.

When it comes to online streaming, I admit I don't always look too hard at whoever the gatekeeper is. Are there good reasons not to give Amazon my money, aside from their monopolistic tendencies?

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Befade
Posted: Sun May 23, 2021 9:50 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
I don’t like Amazon because: it’s cornered too many markets. Put bookstores out of business. Employees are pushed for the quick deliveries. Bezos has too much money. And his goal is to go into space. I’d really rather support Criterion and keep it in business. I also like what Kino has to offer.

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grace
Posted: Mon May 24, 2021 8:37 am Reply with quote
Joined: 11 Nov 2005 Posts: 3210
I purchased Criterion for its inaugural year; maybe we didn't work it correctly, but I thought it was much more sizzle than steak. It was difficult to access anything that wasn't featured in a given month. I wasn't always excited about every month's feature, so it went largely unused after some frustrating experiences. I wanted to love it, but it just didn't work out for our house.
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bartist
Posted: Mon May 24, 2021 11:37 am Reply with quote
Joined: 27 Apr 2010 Posts: 6941 Location: Black Hills
Hi, Grace. Thanks, that's helpful. The message I get from a lot of streaming services is that smoke and broken gears will start blowing out of their servers if they put all their titles on them. Which does then trap you in whatever's on the menu that month.

Befade, I don't like Amazon either, and you've reminded me of several reasons why. And my sigboth weighed in on the downside of services that track your usage and then try to feed you what their algorithm has decided you like.

So I beat a retreat to the PL and found they had most of our missed titles (listed in my previous post) on order. So we could play a waiting game on films like Judas atBM, et al.

Except, sadly, for Psycho Ape!, which apparently only is served up by Amazon. I think I can order PA, without having to join Prime.

I guess if Bezos does make it into space, and doesn't come back, I'd be okay with that.

I'm still kinda impressed that a company named for a fierce tribe of female warriors that killed all their male children at birth has prospered!

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Befade
Posted: Tue May 25, 2021 9:50 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
Grace.....Criterion has everything now. Except new releases. Every month there are films that leave. For a while I found a lot of films from the 30’s that I really liked. Every month there are new special features. Great directors from India, Japan, France, Germany. One actor : Gena Rowland’s, Joan Crawford. More than I can keep up with. Try it again.

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Befade
Posted: Tue May 25, 2021 9:54 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
My son has Amazon, Disney, everything. We share Hulu and HBO. Our tastes are very different. The last time I visited I completed the Transparent series. And the next time I visit I’ll watch everything you mentioned.

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