What movies have you seen recently?

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Last night I watched:

The Terror [1963]
<=>"No One Will Be Admitted While The Coffin Is Being Opened!"



Mostly the movie is on Jack Nicholson...who is ~26 so the trailer and credits focus on ~76 Boris Karloff. Though, to be fair, Karloff was a significant part of the film.

Also to be fair, the movie is so-so.

Predator.

The Schwarzenegger original is still the best.

John and the Hole. Strange teenager traps his family in an incompleted prepper bunker. Another one of those movies trying to be artistic that doesn't really have much of a story, but some degree of suspence, and then the usual anticlimactic open ended "wtf did I just watch?" ending.

Snow White
streamed on Disney last night

I enjoyed it.
Gal Gadot was so convincing as an evil queen I had to remind myself "This is also Wonder Woman."
Rachel Zegler was wonderful as a good hearted princess.

I'm going to watch it again this morning. Is it my favorite film? Maybe not, but I've seen bad films with bad scripts, bad actors, bad directors, and this does not even come close.

I started watching the 2015 Cinderella after Snow White, but I was feeling very tired with 44 minutes to go. I think I saw Cinderella in the theater.

Three hours later...
I still enjoyed the movie. Rachel has an earnest look she brings back several times, and that gets on my nerves, but I know that's just me. It is not enough to trash the whole film. I wonder what Park Eun-bin could have brought to the role?

I am curious how this version of Snow White fairs with all the other versions? There are a lot of them, animated and live action.

Watching it a second time was not a waste of time.

Cinderella (2015)

Lily James is Cinderella and is perpetually sweet, good, and forgiving.
Cate Blanchett is the stepmother and she is perpetually uncaring to her stepdaughter, selfish, conniving, and maybe a hint of evil.

I remember seeing this at the theater in 2015. It is delightful. The background music swoons when it is called for. The prince and Cinderella are, as one reviewer wrote, "toothachingly sweet."

Granted, I will bet there are people that would cite all of the things I see as positives as negatives. Plus, in the original story, the stepsisters mutilated their feet attempting to get the glass slipper to fit. Here, they just look foolish. To each his own. I enjoyed it. I believe I enjoyed it ten years ago as well. It is more about good and evil at its core.

Did I find Snow White delightful? That was a question I asked myself. No, but I enjoyed it. I don't think Snow White was made with being delightful in mind. I still enjoyed it.

The Phoenician Scheme.

Meh. I think Wes Anderson has said everything he had to say. Rushmore remains way up there for me, one of my top 10 movies ever, but his output over the last decade hasn't been good imo.

Like Astroid City and The French Dispatch, The Phoenician Scheme goes hard on Anderson's signature visual style (which has become such a joke lately I was going he'd ease off on it a bit), has a great cast of highly capable actors and somehow fails to be interesting at all.

There's no humanity to these characters. You don't care about them in the slightest. No one behaves like a real person. There's zero emotional investment and zero payoff once the convoluted plot has played out.

I'm just not sure what the point is of these movies anymore.

Deadstream.

Found footage horror comedy in which a disgraced Youtube star, who had made a career of doing stupidly dangerous stunts, tries to breathe life back into his career by spending the night in a haunted house. Soon, he discovers a "fan" has snuck into the house to appear with him on his live streaming. But is she who she says she is?
Doesn't start out as anything to write home about, but gets better as it goes.

^^^

12 Hour Shift.

Take a drug addict nurse supplying organs to her airheaded cousin-by-marriage for violent criminals, then add a situation where said organs (a kidney in this case) gets lost, and you have a wonderfully gruesome horror comedy.
Great movie that deserves much more attention than it got.

Shoot 'Em Up. Very fun action flick.

Trainspotting.

Scottish heroin addict, Renton, has to go through the horrors of withdraw, then realizes he has to rid himself of his "so called mates" who rope him into a drug sale.
Always a great movie to see.

Wargames (1983)
I enjoyed in 1983.
I enjoyed less in the 2000s.
I enjoyed it more today. Not as much as in 1983, but I found it more enjoyable than twenty years ago.

My only actual gripe is the code for the nuclear missiles. It could/should be better, but by 1983 standards it was probably considered impenetrable. CPE1704TKS