Recent Viewings, Part 2

[Rev. Powell]

GHOSTLIGHT (2024): A construction worker who's suffered a family tragedy finds participating in a community theater production of "Romeo and Juliet" therapeutic. Many people will find this deeply moving, although sometimes the script can be a bit clumsily in advancing us towards the characters' big acting moments. 3/5.

[lester1/2jr]

The Only Way Out (2021) - Serbian crime drama that was easy to watch but ultimately pretty disposable. A lady gradually recovers her memory regarding a horrible night. As one reviewer asked: Why would she lose her memory? Answer: because it let them slowly move the plot around piece by piece!

It's basically about as a good as an episode of Dateline or something. workmanlike

4/5

[pacman000]

Tom Sawyer

Early 70's musical version put out by Readers Digest. Songs by the Sherman Brothers; score by John Williams, so you know the music is good.

Moves some of the plot points around, but is overall a worthwhile adaptation.

[indianasmith]

Thanksgiving Double Feature:

TIME CUT (2024)  A high school senior from our time finds herself transported back to 2003, one week before her older sister is killed by an unknown slasher.  Will she try to save her sister, and in so doing change our timeline forever - and possibly erase her own existence?   Of course she will!  This was a pretty fun Netflix original. 3.5/5

PRIMAL RAGE (2018)  One of the better "Angry Bigfoot" movies I have seen in a while. A former convict, just released from prison, is picked up by his wife and then gets involved in a car accident. As they wander through the woods, they find themselves stalked by an angry, bow-wielding sasquatch and threatened by a hunting party of local rednecks.  This one was a repeat viewing but I enjoyed it just as much on the second outing!  4/5

[Trevor]

GHOSTLIGHT (2024): A construction worker who's suffered a family tragedy finds participating in a community theater production of "Romeo and Juliet" therapeutic. Many people will find this deeply moving, although sometimes the script can be a bit clumsily in advancing us towards the characters' big acting moments. 3/5.

That is one I will keep a eye out for, Rev 😊🐢

[Rev. Powell]

GHOSTLIGHT (2024): A construction worker who's suffered a family tragedy finds participating in a community theater production of "Romeo and Juliet" therapeutic. Many people will find this deeply moving, although sometimes the script can be a bit clumsily in advancing us towards the characters' big acting moments. 3/5.

That is one I will keep a eye out for, Rev 😊🐢

Let me know what you think if you do, I do think most people will like it more than me and not care about the script issues as much as I did.

[Trevor]

GHOSTLIGHT (2024): A construction worker who's suffered a family tragedy finds participating in a community theater production of "Romeo and Juliet" therapeutic. Many people will find this deeply moving, although sometimes the script can be a bit clumsily in advancing us towards the characters' big acting moments. 3/5.

That is one I will keep a eye out for, Rev 😊🐢

Let me know what you think if you do, I do think most people will like it more than me and not care about the script issues as much as I did.

Will do.

Regarding scripts, most of the films I assisted on seemed to have their scripts written on the back of a pack of cigarettes 😳😉😉

[Dr. Whom]

Eraserhead

I have put off watching this ever since my student days. I'm not a big fan of David Lynch, I find his gratuitous weirdness annoying. This one didn't change my mind, but I was pleasantly surprised that it is largely a silent move with a soundscape.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Moonraker" (1979)
In Roger Moore's biggest James Bond adventure yet, 007 travels to Italy, Brazil, and finally into outer space, where supervillain Hugo Drax plans to wipe out humanity from his own Death Star space station.
This obvious attempt to ride the coat tails of the late 70s  "Star Wars" craze is utterly ridiculous, but it's also a ton of silly, action packed fun. This one's always been a sentimental fave for me, as it was the first Bond movie I saw as a kid.

[Rev. Powell]

Eraserhead

Arguably my favorite film of all time. 

DAHOMEY: This documentary tracks the return of 26 stolen artifacts to Benin from France. Oddly structured, it's important and reverent, but even at just over an hour it has long dull patches; the best parts are a lively debate about the event's significance by college students, and the fanciful poetic dialogue the writer (Mati Diop) puts into the wooden mouth of one of the statues ("number 26"). 3/5

[indianasmith]

MALEVOLENT (2018) - I had watched this one before a few years back, but I had forgotten enough about it to be entertained a second time around.  A team of phony "ghost hunters" make good money by exorcising restless spirits (using some clever electronic effects to do so), but when they get called to a remote country orphanage where five girls were murdered by the son of the stern headmistress, they discover the haunting is very real - and the killer is still lurking about.   Pretty well done, some good jump scares, and an interesting conclusion.  4/5

[RCMerchant]

Eraserhead

I have put off watching this ever since my student days. I'm not a big fan of David Lynch, I find his gratuitous weirdness annoying. This one didn't change my mind, but I was pleasantly surprised that it is largely a silent move with a soundscape.

Blasphemer!

[M.10rda]

Eraserhead

Arguably my favorite film of all time. 

It's close to my Top 5... what do we know, though?
Actually I was going to include it in the Top 25 Horror Movie list, too... then balked. I mean, it's not really a Horror movie. But then again, if ERASERHEAD isn't a terrifying nightmare, what is?

[FatFreddysCat]

"Cannonball!" (1976)
A $100,000 prize awaits the first driver to make it from Southern California to New York City in an underground, unsanctioned cross-country road rally that leads to lots of cars getting chased, crashed, and blown up real good.
Director Paul Bartel also made "Death Race 2000," and he re-unites some of that movie's cast (David Carradine, Mary Woronov, and even an uncredited cameo by Stallone) with a bunch of newcomers in an action flick with virtually no plot but lots of mayhem. 
A silly, but watchable B-movie that's allegedly based on a real, secret auto race that also inspired Burt Reynolds' "Cannonball Run" films.

[M.10rda]

BLINK TWICE (2024):
When I walked in on Madame watching what looked like deleted scenes from the Marilyn Manson porno loop-slash-snuff film from the end of LOST HIGHWAY, "Blink Twice" were not among the first words I expected out of her mouth in reply to the question "What the heck are you watching?" All I'd heard about this late summer release was that it had been discussed in relation to the running cultural joke IT ENDS WITH US and that it starred Channing Tatum, and neither detail had placed it on my personal watchlist. But there was Tatum, leering over a weeping female victim, so - life is full of surprises, huh? "Kyle MacLachlan is in this," added Madame. My head began to swim a little. Unprompted, she rebooted the stream and played it from the beginning, and I sat there.

Wow, this is an angry and surprisingly GUH-RISLY rape/revenge film that careens into Horror territory for the last 30 or so minutes. There's a respectable amount of bloody mayhem at the end and there is more onscreen abuse (of all manner) of women than I expect to see in an expensive film starring a lot of respectable, Name actors. Also it's directed and co-written not by Lars von Trier or Darren Aronofski but by Zoe Kravitz... who did, fwiw, appear in the similarly themed MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, so I guess that's a relevant credential of some kind. Kravitz appears to have designed the film around lead actress Naomi Ackie, who memorably played the crying housekeeper in GET OUT and gets to recreate that same repressed suffering here for 100 minutes. Tatum is the chief bad guy - uh, SPOILERS?  - and to his credit he does deliver the goods as a pathologically loathsome alpha maniac.

BLINK TWICE is stiff tea but my somewhat mild-mannered wife watched it (essentially) twice of her own volition in spite of proclaiming that it was "disturbing", thus that must speak to its, errr, broad appeal? I did have a fairly sizable issue w/ this film, but it was related to storytelling, not exploitation. The Rohypnol-like substance which empowers Tatum and company seems like it should function solely as a McGuffin, but eventually it takes over the entire narrative, in conjunction w/ an assortment of antidotes and other counteractive agents. By the end the film becomes a roulette of "Who's been dosed?", and both Tatum's final monologue and the final twist (which in and of itself one might debate the logic of) enshrines the drugs as thematically central to the entire proceedings. I suppose this entire element distinguishes BLINK TWICE from a glossy update on I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE but, I dunno, it all seemed like a rather labored means to vent justifiable spleen on s****y dudes.

Stylistically, though, Kravitz has it going on. The earlier allusion to Lynch is defensible. BLINK TWICE is only liminal realism to begin with and when it descends into nightmare terrain, it's ferocious and dizzying. Also starring Adria Arjona (in the "fun" role, sort of); Christian Slater, perfectly typecast; Haley Joel Osment, well-cast against type; Alia Shawkat, always welcome but underutilized as usual; Geena Davis, also underutilized but also probably very miscast; a bunch of people I didn't know; and Kyle MacLachlan, mostly staying above the fray in an intermittent cameo.

Hard to say I enjoyed it but I will be interested in Kravtiz' next project,
3.5/5

Mme.10rda, who pays much more attention to this stuff, tells me that Kravitz and Tatum were a couple during production and then broke up before the film's release. UHHHH....... yes. Yes, I too would have a hard time staying w/ Channing Tatum after this movie.