Saw a Takashi Miike picture called The Great Yokai War. "Yokai" is a Japanese term for monsters from folklore, as opposed to the more familiar kaiju. It's a kids' picture, about a young boy from Tokyo sent out to live in the countryside with his older sister and his intermittently senile grandfather. When a vengeful spirit appears, the boy gets caught up in a war between warring groups of yokai and must find his courage to become the "Kirin Rider", the hero who will set everything to rights. It's not a bad picture - nothing deep, but an amusing story. Some of the yokai are really trippy, Japanese folklore can get pretty "out there", apparently.
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PRINCE VALIANT (1954): I have been reading Prince Valiant lately (as some of you may have noticed) and decided it was time to revisit this film. First, it is very "Hollywood." It takes quite a few liberties with the source material (although certain scenes are reproduced verbatim), and as such is an interesting supplement to the original, but by no means a substitute for it. Besides which, Robert Wagner (in the title role) couldn't act his way out of a wet paper bag. I can't reccommend this to anyone unfamiliar with Hal Foster's version. For curiousity's sake only.
This past weekend we had a Sunday matinee re-watch of The Empire Strikes Back. It reminded me how much I love the original trilogy. It also brought home the disappointment in much of what has come since under the Star Wars banner.
My wife and I started on The Irishman, but didn't get very far. It seems like every other gangster movie Scorsese has done, only now all his favorite actors are way too old for this. The de-aging effects are a bit uncanny valley to me, since the faces are middle-aged, but the bodies look and move like those of 70-year-old men. Is there any reason we should continue? That is to say, is there a compelling reason to watch this if you've already seen, for example, Goodfellas?
We went ahead and watched the rest of it Saturday, just because we'd started it and it's Scorsese. But I agree with you 100%. It's a pretty good movie, but we've seen most of this before, and better (Goodfellas, Casino, etc.). It needed to be better than it was to justify not just its length, but its existence. It's just not a very compelling story, especially since Frank Sheeran's claims to have killed Hoffa are largely discredited. It ends because Sheeran gets old and dies. Yeah, he's a sad, lonely old manat the end, which I suppose is supposed to be poignant. But there are a lot of sad, lonely old men in the world, and he deserves it more than most. At least he died in bed, which is more than you can say about all those people he killed. I know it's heresy to speak ill of a Scorsese movie, but it gets a "so what" from me.
I was suprised to learn that Hoffa looked down on Italians, which is apparently true. I though he WAS Italian, since so many principals were. He did knock off a good line, albeit bigoted. "Who was at the meeting?" "Tony." "Tony, Tony, Tony and Tony, eh?"
We finally saw My Neighbour Totoro (1989). I've watched some anime, but not this famous family-friendly one. But a couple of years ago, when we needed to replace our second car, my wife found a good deal on a Toyota Matrix. It had a small Totoro sticker on the back windshield. She decided to keep it there.
We really enjoyed this one.
The Conclave (2024): well-acted fictional account of the behind-the-scenes at the Vatican after the Pope dies. It makes a good, if highly simplified mirror for how politics work and ideology gets shaped, even within a church.
The Minotaur (2006): a very loose adaptation of the story from Greek mythology as a horror/adventure/exploitation film. The setting makes no pretense of representing any actual historical period or place, but it's good to know they had diaphanous fabrics and contemporary make-up in the Bronze Age. Ingrid Pitt makes one of her final film appearances here, as a leperous witch character.
Rock'em Sock'em Geopolitical RumbleMania (2025): a disappointing ambush of an English-second-language world leader by an American president who thinks that politics is a reality show set in the schoolyard at recess. YMMV. It led European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas to declare that, “the free world needs a new leader." It works on a visceral level, but I'm a tad concerned about the inevitable sequels.
I’ve seen this several times. I guess it’s one of my favorites. The IMDB trivia page says:
In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre, Stephen King declared this to be the scariest movie of all time and that Alan Arkin's performance "may be the greatest evocation of screen villainy ever."
Every part is perfectly cast: Good, Bad, Psychopath.
Replies
PRINCE VALIANT (1954): I have been reading Prince Valiant lately (as some of you may have noticed) and decided it was time to revisit this film. First, it is very "Hollywood." It takes quite a few liberties with the source material (although certain scenes are reproduced verbatim), and as such is an interesting supplement to the original, but by no means a substitute for it. Besides which, Robert Wagner (in the title role) couldn't act his way out of a wet paper bag. I can't reccommend this to anyone unfamiliar with Hal Foster's version. For curiousity's sake only.
This past weekend we had a Sunday matinee re-watch of The Empire Strikes Back. It reminded me how much I love the original trilogy. It also brought home the disappointment in much of what has come since under the Star Wars banner.
My wife and I started on The Irishman, but didn't get very far. It seems like every other gangster movie Scorsese has done, only now all his favorite actors are way too old for this. The de-aging effects are a bit uncanny valley to me, since the faces are middle-aged, but the bodies look and move like those of 70-year-old men. Is there any reason we should continue? That is to say, is there a compelling reason to watch this if you've already seen, for example, Goodfellas?
The de-aging effects are a bit uncanny valley to me, since the faces are middle-aged, but the bodies look and move like those of 70-year-old men.
Holy crap, this is what I told my friends when I saw the movie.
Is there any reason we should continue? That is to say, is there a compelling reason to watch this if you've already seen, for example, Goodfellas?
I did sit through the nearly 3 1/2 hour movie, and not in my opinion. It is good, but at that run time, it better be freaking great, and it isn't.
We went ahead and watched the rest of it Saturday, just because we'd started it and it's Scorsese. But I agree with you 100%. It's a pretty good movie, but we've seen most of this before, and better (Goodfellas, Casino, etc.). It needed to be better than it was to justify not just its length, but its existence. It's just not a very compelling story, especially since Frank Sheeran's claims to have killed Hoffa are largely discredited. It ends because Sheeran gets old and dies. Yeah, he's a sad, lonely old manat the end, which I suppose is supposed to be poignant. But there are a lot of sad, lonely old men in the world, and he deserves it more than most. At least he died in bed, which is more than you can say about all those people he killed. I know it's heresy to speak ill of a Scorsese movie, but it gets a "so what" from me.
I was suprised to learn that Hoffa looked down on Italians, which is apparently true. I though he WAS Italian, since so many principals were. He did knock off a good line, albeit bigoted. "Who was at the meeting?" "Tony." "Tony, Tony, Tony and Tony, eh?"
We finally saw My Neighbour Totoro (1989). I've watched some anime, but not this famous family-friendly one. But a couple of years ago, when we needed to replace our second car, my wife found a good deal on a Toyota Matrix. It had a small Totoro sticker on the back windshield. She decided to keep it there.
We really enjoyed this one.
The Conclave (2024): well-acted fictional account of the behind-the-scenes at the Vatican after the Pope dies. It makes a good, if highly simplified mirror for how politics work and ideology gets shaped, even within a church.
The Minotaur (2006): a very loose adaptation of the story from Greek mythology as a horror/adventure/exploitation film. The setting makes no pretense of representing any actual historical period or place, but it's good to know they had diaphanous fabrics and contemporary make-up in the Bronze Age. Ingrid Pitt makes one of her final film appearances here, as a leperous witch character.
Rock'em Sock'em Geopolitical RumbleMania (2025): a disappointing ambush of an English-second-language world leader by an American president who thinks that politics is a reality show set in the schoolyard at recess. YMMV. It led European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas to declare that, “the free world needs a new leader." It works on a visceral level, but I'm a tad concerned about the inevitable sequels.
You neglected to mention that the last one was a TV show. One that horrified me first thing yesterday.
Wait Until Dark (1967)
I’ve seen this several times. I guess it’s one of my favorites. The IMDB trivia page says:
In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre, Stephen King declared this to be the scariest movie of all time and that Alan Arkin's performance "may be the greatest evocation of screen villainy ever."
Every part is perfectly cast: Good, Bad, Psychopath.
TRAILER
While I personally wouldn't call it the scariest, it's an excellent film which I've watched a couple of times now.
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