70s hostage drama set in Scandinavia with our man Mr Connery playing the negotiator. He's not known for bothering to try accents, but he's not alone in this otherwise gritty thriller for not bothering to sound Swedish or Norwegian or anything - it makes it a bit confusing as the British are involved too, and you can only tell who is Scandi usually by their having blond hair.
I remember seeing this as a kid, and having seen a promo package of upcoming films on telly, thought it would segue into a care chase where the car runs up a lifting draw bridge (Tower Bridge maybe) and flew over the other side, and indeed cajoled my parents to let me stay up and watch it on that basis, but said car chase never happened and maybe they thought I'd told a porky.
Connery's star power is undeniable and the film has its moments, even if it is stuck in the 70s a bit, it lacks that credible edge when no one attempts an accent.
Lucy
Pure hokum as Scarlett Johansson goes on the rampage after drugs are put into her system, boosting her brain power to supernatural levels. This is a B movie with a superior sheen as Luc Besson directed it. Johnasson makes it watchable, she is brilliant, and I have to say, it shows how sexual politics has moved on. I can't imagine who would do this film in previous decades. It's great to see this star shoot up the bad guys, but in previous times it would have an undercurrent of a bloke's sexual impotence to see a woman with superpowers do this, it would come with a twist of humiliation or submission for the male viewer. If you had Darryl Hannah, or Marilyn Monroe or some such person, it just wouldn't be the same. The vibe would be, oh, but she'll go back to being dumb at some point. Geena Davis could have had a go at it maybe.
Scarlett is great but sometimes when she is looking around trying to process her new self she does look a bit like Rod Hull's Emu.
Like I say, this is really a B-movie like those sci-fi thrillers on the 50s where excess radiation gives someone new powers, Attack of the 50ft Woman for instance. Plotwise, it does make the heroine act in a dumb way when she is meant to be hypersmart - not killing all the bad guys when she gets the chance, for instance. But you do go with it and also, well, I do wonder when women watch Bond do they root for him like they are him? It's a first for me to watch the gal go about a shooting spree* and be rooting for her like you would a bloke in that situation...
*Ahem... morally justified shooting spree within the context of the film.
As usual it's impressive, but has mostly action and little story.
I find it worth noting that it features the location Preikestolen (first seen around 0:08). The best locations in Norway are being used up by other movies (MI, The Snowman, Downsizing, Transformers next year) while Bond keeps using Turkey, Italy and the Alps in movie after movie.
Watched "the post" this weekend, it's not as good as I thought it would be but Hanks and Streep are highly watchable.
I'll be checking out the mi6 trailer when I get home -{
Blade Runner 2049 4K Bluray, I'll say right away I am so glad I avoided any spoilers and promotional content for this film. This film is brilliant and the best compliment I can give it is it preserves the classic original. Blade Runner captured my imagination as a kid and I was obsessed with the film for its visual brilliance and themes. This sequel far exceeds my expectations, I won't go into spoilers though this film and many reviewers have said this, this film reminds me why I love cinema.
Assassin's Creed. I've never once played the video game on which this film is based, but if the movie is accurate the game is ugly to look at, incoherent, confusing, and no fun at all. Michael Fassbender not only starred in this but produced it, so he only has himself to blame for the result.
Vox clamantis in deserto
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 26,617Chief of Staff
Assassin's Creed. I've never once played the video game on which this film is based, but if the movie is accurate the game is ugly to look at, incoherent, confusing, and no fun at all. Michael Fassbender not only starred in this but produced it, so he only has himself to blame for the result.
I watched that last week...I was stunned that such good actors (Fassbender, Cotillard & Irons) would agree to do this
Assassin's Creed. I've never once played the video game on which this film is based, but if the movie is accurate the game is ugly to look at, incoherent, confusing, and no fun at all. Michael Fassbender not only starred in this but produced it, so he only has himself to blame for the result.
I watched that last week...I was stunned that such good actors (Fassbender, Cotillard & Irons) would agree to do this
I absolutely love the game series and love those three actors but it's gotta be one of the least memorable films i've seen. I only saw it a couple of months ago and I can't really remember a single thing about it.
November Man
I thought it was hella-good, dense and paranoid and morally ambiguous, the way a spy story oughta be.
Wikipedia tells me I'm a weirdo for liking it, so wutta I know?
Wikipedia also tells me Brosnan himself has been developing this project ever since the Broccolis wished him best of luck in his future endeavours.
We've discussed before how the BrosnanBonds seem torn in two directions, like the scripts all started as dark twisty spy stories but by the time they got made, the committee rewrites turned them all into shallow "funny" big budget spectaculars.
And also that Brosnan would rather have played Bond as dark and tortured if they'da let him. Like it wasn't his idea to just be the prettyboy Bond. His performance does seem to follow logically from Dalton's, if you can parse it out from the Lewis Gilbert-style set-pieces that usually surrounded him.
So is this film the version of Bond he woulda made if he coulda had more creative control? if so, they should have given him the Executive Producer credit when they had him, instead of the current fellow. There are a couple of lines ("if you want a relationship, get a pet", and "you can either be a human or you can kill humans, you can't do both") that invoke Fleming's Bond, rather than movie-Bond.
Olga Kurylenko does play a very similar character to the one she played in Quantum... . I suspect casting her was a bit of an effyou to Brosnan's old bosses.
At 61 he has a bit of a Charade-era Cary Grant thing going on. Much more intimidating than that skinny guy we saw 20 years ago. Not that Olga is Audrey Hepburn. or that all these corpses piling up (and never noticed by the crowds of passersby) is anything like the witty fun of Charade. But he has aged well into his looks.
Finally got round to seeing this - on DVD. The whole Imax 3D thing put me off, give a man a choice, give him a dilemma...
I liked it, it took me out of myself. More a kind of sequel to the first Star Wars, or remake almost.
They cast a black hero at last in these films, and he gets bossed around by a posh white gal! It's how I felt turning up at Bristol University all those years ago. Still, John Boyega hold the film together in the early stages, as Daisy Ridley's acting is a bit iffy at first.
Domhnall Gleeson is very good as Prime Minister Theresa May as General Hux.
I'd have liked to see Harrison Ford being a bit cooler, it's dispiriting to see him as some kind of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses, still scavenging at his time of life. He does some action, but it's not convincing and his acting is a bit iffy too. Maybe they should have got Jeff Bridges in to do it. Carrie Fisher was very good, but the thing is, the whole movie moves fast, it's an action film even when there isn't any action, so it doesn't get a chance to slow down - it's all exposition as they have to explain a backstory to the audience. It's okay, but there is no chance for a quiet, restful, extended scene between them. I mean, the SW prequels did that kind of stuff, but they turned deathly dull when they did.
It's funny - all those space ships but no cell phones!
Sadly, too late to catch The Last Jedi on the Imax now.
Rewatched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
It was...fine. Divine. Sublime!
I loved it all the way.
If you haven't, this scene will sell you to it given the connection. https://youtu.be/IUR1jeJYX7Y
Will instantly think of that whenever I rewatch TLD.
The ol' Hardyboy actually had some free time on Friday and took in two--TWO!--films. First up was a matinee of Black Panther. It is indeed a good one--except for a segment in South Korea it takes place entirely in a fantasy world, an African kingdom that manages to mix both tribalism and futuristic technology. Still, the villain is motivated entirely by real-world concerns and this gives the film some true relevance. It also takes time to develop the characters, so it isn't just non-stop action. My only complaint is a fan-boyish one, involving Andy Serkis's character of Ulysses Klaue. The performance is a great one, but. . .
Serkis never changes into Klaue's alter-ego the supervillain Klaw. You expect him to--hell, casting Mr. Motion-Capture-Suit Serkis himself suggests that he will become a CG-rendered Klaw--but Klaue gets killed off. OK, maybe they'll bring him back for the sequel, but, still, there was no payoff here.
That niggle aside, this was a great film.
Later that night I put on the Netflix original The Cloverfield Paradox. The paradox is. . .what the hell does this have to do with the original Cloverfield? Um--did (and this isn't a big spoiler) crossing into a parallel universe somehow release the giant monsters? Whatevs. There are a few good scare scenes, but pretty well everything in the film has been done before. And done better.
Yes, a wonderful film magnificently directed by David Lean and with great performances all round- especially by Alec Guinness who more than deserved his Oscar.
There's a Bond type scene in it when William Holden meets the v English Q type character showing off military tricks. I think Q worked in the Bond films because he made Bond seem less English to American audiences. Americans could side with Bond against Q.
The Boys from Brazil
produced by Lew Grade (its got the ITC logo), and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, who did the original Planet of the Apes.
With Laurence Olivier as a Simon Wiesenthal-type Nazi hunter, Gregory Peck as Joseph Mengele himself, and James Mason as Mengele's slightly more reasonable fellow Nazi.
Also features our man Walter Gotell (General Gogol!) as a lower ranking Nazi who questions his orders.
It's outrageous, a shocker!
At one point Mengele throttles Gogol with his bare hands in the middle of a crowded ballroom, decorated by huge Nazi flags and other such imagery, the crowd of aging respectable Nazis intervene and Gogol's wife looks at his throat and says "omigod, somebody get a doctor!!" and Mengele, fingers still convulsing in Gogol's direction, says (and I quote) "you idiot!! I am a doctor!"
The graphically gory ending involves eight or nine Dobermans.
I wonder if when Gogol was called back to do a second Bond film, he said "you know Cubby, I've just been working on this other film, that involves Brazil, Nazis, scientific labs, selective breeding, and Dobermans", and Cubby said "hmmm, those are all good ideas!"
But Corinne's death by Dobermans in Moonraker was kidstuff compared to what we see here.
Please do yourself a favour and see this movie! Overything in this movie is high quality: acting, story, cinemography, set design etc. A deeply human movie about love across conventional boundries made as a cold war fantacy movie. Don't stay at home because you don't the Pasific Rim movies or superhero movies. This is very different.
Saw The Nice Guys today.
Exceeded all expectations, I loved it.
Great movie. I went into it not knowing a single thing about it and throughly enjoyed it. Classic 70's crime/detective movie, some good laughs, a well written story that's nicely shot, great acting and really solid chemistry between Crowe and Gosling. Definitely recommend a watch -{
I too reccomend The Nice Guys, it's a very good film
"The Post" by Steven Spielberg
This movie is about the Washington Post and their decision to publishers the Pentagon Papers back in 1971.The Pentagon Papers was a secret studying of the Vietnam war ordered by Secretary of State MacNamerra. The Papers showed how the US had manipulatorarmen election in South Vietnam, and significantly to many - the fact that US decision makes had known for years that that war was unwinable. They sent thousand upon thousands of young men to their deaths simply because they didn't want to be the one to throw in the towel - pure vanity.
Tom Hanks plays the editor of the Post and Merry Streep plays the owner of the newspaper. The movie is tense , intelligent and unfortunately topical today (The US now have a president who sees the part of the press that critizises him are the enemy of the people). I hope the movie is about values we all share, mainly the freedom of press. While it is probably less controvetsial and unique, I think The Post can serve as a companies piece/prequel to All the President's Men.
Who are your favourites for tonight's Oscars?
I haven't seen all the major nominees, but I have favourites. I would like Dunkirk or "Shape of Water" to win best film. Gary Oldman is a strong contender for Best Male Actor for Darkest Hour.
Agatha Christie's Miss Marple: A Caribbean Mystery ( 1989)
Joan Hickson as Miss Marple in this bbc feature length TV film. Usual Great Agatha Christie story
and a fine cast including Donald Pleasence and T.P. McKenna. I remember reading this story
years ago in school for an English literature Project.
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
Comments
Great superhero movie, lots of action and plenty of laughs -{
70s hostage drama set in Scandinavia with our man Mr Connery playing the negotiator. He's not known for bothering to try accents, but he's not alone in this otherwise gritty thriller for not bothering to sound Swedish or Norwegian or anything - it makes it a bit confusing as the British are involved too, and you can only tell who is Scandi usually by their having blond hair.
I remember seeing this as a kid, and having seen a promo package of upcoming films on telly, thought it would segue into a care chase where the car runs up a lifting draw bridge (Tower Bridge maybe) and flew over the other side, and indeed cajoled my parents to let me stay up and watch it on that basis, but said car chase never happened and maybe they thought I'd told a porky.
Connery's star power is undeniable and the film has its moments, even if it is stuck in the 70s a bit, it lacks that credible edge when no one attempts an accent.
Lucy
Pure hokum as Scarlett Johansson goes on the rampage after drugs are put into her system, boosting her brain power to supernatural levels. This is a B movie with a superior sheen as Luc Besson directed it. Johnasson makes it watchable, she is brilliant, and I have to say, it shows how sexual politics has moved on. I can't imagine who would do this film in previous decades. It's great to see this star shoot up the bad guys, but in previous times it would have an undercurrent of a bloke's sexual impotence to see a woman with superpowers do this, it would come with a twist of humiliation or submission for the male viewer. If you had Darryl Hannah, or Marilyn Monroe or some such person, it just wouldn't be the same. The vibe would be, oh, but she'll go back to being dumb at some point. Geena Davis could have had a go at it maybe.
Scarlett is great but sometimes when she is looking around trying to process her new self she does look a bit like Rod Hull's Emu.
Like I say, this is really a B-movie like those sci-fi thrillers on the 50s where excess radiation gives someone new powers, Attack of the 50ft Woman for instance. Plotwise, it does make the heroine act in a dumb way when she is meant to be hypersmart - not killing all the bad guys when she gets the chance, for instance. But you do go with it and also, well, I do wonder when women watch Bond do they root for him like they are him? It's a first for me to watch the gal go about a shooting spree* and be rooting for her like you would a bloke in that situation...
*Ahem... morally justified shooting spree within the context of the film.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lN8gR0gp074
As usual it's impressive, but has mostly action and little story.
I find it worth noting that it features the location Preikestolen (first seen around 0:08). The best locations in Norway are being used up by other movies (MI, The Snowman, Downsizing, Transformers next year) while Bond keeps using Turkey, Italy and the Alps in movie after movie.
This is a behind the scenes photo from MI:6
It
#andHimToo
The sword fight between him and Basil Rathbone is fantastic.
I'll be checking out the mi6 trailer when I get home -{
...... Skyscraper !
https://youtu.be/t9QePUT-Yt8
It was ok, bit of a Heat take off in some places and Gerard Butler's cop was a little extreme but it's worth a watch
I watched that last week...I was stunned that such good actors (Fassbender, Cotillard & Irons) would agree to do this
I absolutely love the game series and love those three actors but it's gotta be one of the least memorable films i've seen. I only saw it a couple of months ago and I can't really remember a single thing about it.
I thought it was hella-good, dense and paranoid and morally ambiguous, the way a spy story oughta be.
Wikipedia tells me I'm a weirdo for liking it, so wutta I know?
Wikipedia also tells me Brosnan himself has been developing this project ever since the Broccolis wished him best of luck in his future endeavours.
We've discussed before how the BrosnanBonds seem torn in two directions, like the scripts all started as dark twisty spy stories but by the time they got made, the committee rewrites turned them all into shallow "funny" big budget spectaculars.
And also that Brosnan would rather have played Bond as dark and tortured if they'da let him. Like it wasn't his idea to just be the prettyboy Bond. His performance does seem to follow logically from Dalton's, if you can parse it out from the Lewis Gilbert-style set-pieces that usually surrounded him.
So is this film the version of Bond he woulda made if he coulda had more creative control? if so, they should have given him the Executive Producer credit when they had him, instead of the current fellow. There are a couple of lines ("if you want a relationship, get a pet", and "you can either be a human or you can kill humans, you can't do both") that invoke Fleming's Bond, rather than movie-Bond.
Olga Kurylenko does play a very similar character to the one she played in Quantum... . I suspect casting her was a bit of an effyou to Brosnan's old bosses.
At 61 he has a bit of a Charade-era Cary Grant thing going on. Much more intimidating than that skinny guy we saw 20 years ago. Not that Olga is Audrey Hepburn. or that all these corpses piling up (and never noticed by the crowds of passersby) is anything like the witty fun of Charade. But he has aged well into his looks.
Star Wars: A Force Awakens
Finally got round to seeing this - on DVD. The whole Imax 3D thing put me off, give a man a choice, give him a dilemma...
I liked it, it took me out of myself. More a kind of sequel to the first Star Wars, or remake almost.
They cast a black hero at last in these films, and he gets bossed around by a posh white gal! It's how I felt turning up at Bristol University all those years ago. Still, John Boyega hold the film together in the early stages, as Daisy Ridley's acting is a bit iffy at first.
Domhnall Gleeson is very good as Prime Minister Theresa May as General Hux.
I'd have liked to see Harrison Ford being a bit cooler, it's dispiriting to see him as some kind of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses, still scavenging at his time of life. He does some action, but it's not convincing and his acting is a bit iffy too. Maybe they should have got Jeff Bridges in to do it. Carrie Fisher was very good, but the thing is, the whole movie moves fast, it's an action film even when there isn't any action, so it doesn't get a chance to slow down - it's all exposition as they have to explain a backstory to the audience. It's okay, but there is no chance for a quiet, restful, extended scene between them. I mean, the SW prequels did that kind of stuff, but they turned deathly dull when they did.
It's funny - all those space ships but no cell phones!
Sadly, too late to catch The Last Jedi on the Imax now.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
It was...fine. Divine. Sublime!
I loved it all the way.
If you haven't, this scene will sell you to it given the connection.
https://youtu.be/IUR1jeJYX7Y
Will instantly think of that whenever I rewatch TLD.
Low budget horror, a cross between Hostle and Saw. Leading to one
Disappointment.
Later that night I put on the Netflix original The Cloverfield Paradox. The paradox is. . .what the hell does this have to do with the original Cloverfield? Um--did (and this isn't a big spoiler) crossing into a parallel universe somehow release the giant monsters? Whatevs. There are a few good scare scenes, but pretty well everything in the film has been done before. And done better.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
produced by Lew Grade (its got the ITC logo), and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, who did the original Planet of the Apes.
With Laurence Olivier as a Simon Wiesenthal-type Nazi hunter, Gregory Peck as Joseph Mengele himself, and James Mason as Mengele's slightly more reasonable fellow Nazi.
Also features our man Walter Gotell (General Gogol!) as a lower ranking Nazi who questions his orders.
It's outrageous, a shocker!
At one point Mengele throttles Gogol with his bare hands in the middle of a crowded ballroom, decorated by huge Nazi flags and other such imagery, the crowd of aging respectable Nazis intervene and Gogol's wife looks at his throat and says "omigod, somebody get a doctor!!" and Mengele, fingers still convulsing in Gogol's direction, says (and I quote) "you idiot!! I am a doctor!"
The graphically gory ending involves eight or nine Dobermans.
I wonder if when Gogol was called back to do a second Bond film, he said "you know Cubby, I've just been working on this other film, that involves Brazil, Nazis, scientific labs, selective breeding, and Dobermans", and Cubby said "hmmm, those are all good ideas!"
But Corinne's death by Dobermans in Moonraker was kidstuff compared to what we see here.
Great 70s Hammer Horror, with a touch of Bond like villainy thrown in.
I also loved The Boys from Brazil -{
Please do yourself a favour and see this movie! Overything in this movie is high quality: acting, story, cinemography, set design etc. A deeply human movie about love across conventional boundries made as a cold war fantacy movie. Don't stay at home because you don't the Pasific Rim movies or superhero movies. This is very different.
Exceeded all expectations, I loved it.
Great movie. I went into it not knowing a single thing about it and throughly enjoyed it. Classic 70's crime/detective movie, some good laughs, a well written story that's nicely shot, great acting and really solid chemistry between Crowe and Gosling. Definitely recommend a watch -{
"The Post" by Steven Spielberg
This movie is about the Washington Post and their decision to publishers the Pentagon Papers back in 1971.The Pentagon Papers was a secret studying of the Vietnam war ordered by Secretary of State MacNamerra. The Papers showed how the US had manipulatorarmen election in South Vietnam, and significantly to many - the fact that US decision makes had known for years that that war was unwinable. They sent thousand upon thousands of young men to their deaths simply because they didn't want to be the one to throw in the towel - pure vanity.
Tom Hanks plays the editor of the Post and Merry Streep plays the owner of the newspaper. The movie is tense , intelligent and unfortunately topical today (The US now have a president who sees the part of the press that critizises him are the enemy of the people). I hope the movie is about values we all share, mainly the freedom of press. While it is probably less controvetsial and unique, I think The Post can serve as a companies piece/prequel to All the President's Men.
I haven't seen all the major nominees, but I have favourites. I would like Dunkirk or "Shape of Water" to win best film. Gary Oldman is a strong contender for Best Male Actor for Darkest Hour.
Joan Hickson as Miss Marple in this bbc feature length TV film. Usual Great Agatha Christie story
and a fine cast including Donald Pleasence and T.P. McKenna. I remember reading this story
years ago in school for an English literature Project.