I agree that MANY modern movies are huge action epics with less regard to script.
But we must remember movies such as Siccario, The theory of everything, Spotlight, The Witch, Eye in the sky, Carol, The nice guys, No country for old men, Hell or high water and High-Rise. And that's just me looking at my DVD-shelf.
I'm a fan of this series, and enjoyed the movie. My friends who saw it with me were less impressed, I have to say. My main complaint is that Jeff Goldblum was severely underused- his presence IMHO definitely benefits a movie.
Michael Caine presents this documentary which views the 60s from his own vantage point, so it's basically the Caine autobiography with talking heads thrown in namely David Bailey, Paul McCartney, Mary Quant and Lulu and so on. Except, they are not shown when they are interviewed or chatted to by Caine, so it's just talking, no heads. Except when they are shown being interviewed at the time, of course.
Some great colour footage of London at the time, and Caine does well to put things into context via the class system as it was until then. Great editing to show Caine back then and cut to doing something similar now, be it travelling in a lift or driving an Aston, as in The Italian Job.
But Caine, though normally a reliable interviewee, is less of a good interlocutor and presents as a rheumy-eyed, self-indulgent presence. It's like going through someone else's holiday snaps. Really, it comes across as 'I made it big in the 60s and got to hang out with my showbiz friends in London' it actually makes you less impressed by the people and the decade. Not sure what Joan Collins is being interviewed for, she's hardly a 60s icon is she, just one of Sir Michael's Brexit mates.
I suppose it does give more emphasis on fashion such as haircuts and the mini skirt than we are used to. Other than that it seems to be all The Who, Beatles and Stones, no other working class actors present though to be fair, most of them are dead now.
It made me laugh to think what the late Richard Harris would have made of it all - he hated Caine for being a self-important windbag.
The Three Musketeers (2011)
Brilliantly, silly over the top fun, basically it could be Kingsman in medieval Europe -{ with a fantastic cast including
Mads Mikkelsen , Christoph Waltz , Luke Evans , Matthew Macfadyen
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
I too regard the those 70s films as classics -{ Happily I'm a kid at heart and love a bit of Sci-fi, so
having airships having battles in the sky, with sword fighting and a bit of martial arts. All make a fun
couple of hours
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
I like steampunk, I just didn't like that movie.
It's a shame this is one of those important issues where we simply can't live with other people having different opinions )
I don't mind different opinions, .... simply wrong ones !
I spent £3.99 buying it today, I'd hate to think I was wrong ?
No, surely that could never be ? ...... Me wrong ? )
Another film I really like, although it was a big flop and many critics panned it. is
The Wild Wild west, love all that Victorian Tech {[]
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
I hadn't seen this movie since the 1990's, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the movie is as good as I remembered. This is still the best Jack Ryan movie and one of the "bescht" cold war techno thrillers.
I found some interesting trivia on IMDB:
-Klaus Maria Brandauer was origionally cast as Mark Ramius. When he couldn't take the role, he reccomended Sean Connery whom he knew from NSNA.
- In preperation for the role Connery "interned" in a USN submarine - with the temporary rank of Commander :007)
- When Ramius kills the Political Officer Putin (yes - Putin!) several Soviet government VIPs were visiting the set.
) I have a thing for the Victorian era and the emergence
Of science, as with the Sherlock Holmes films.
I love The hunt for red October, great cold war thriller and
Sir Sean looks amazing.
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
I actually dug that version of THE THREE MUSKETEERS as well. I was expecting the worst but ended up enjoying it, steampunk airships and all. It's not close to the awesomeness of the two 70s films (Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York, Christopher Lee, etc) but it's entertaining. I remember the Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of it, naming it one of his 10 favorite films of that year. He raised some eyebrows with that statement, I recall.
Fun fact ... Timothy Dalton was in line for D'Artagnan but turned it down (apparently)
I watched Rocky IV last night.
It is such a good film and has a fabulous soundtrack. My favourite 'Rocky' by far.
I watched From Hell again ,starring Mr Depp ,and our very own Robbie Coltrane , if you have not seen it , watch it , being a Freemason myself it's one of my fave films , the entered apprentice initiation scene is fairly accurate , I hear Sir Miles likes the film too ) )
I love The hunt for red October, great cold war thriller and
Sir Sean looks amazing.
Alec Baldwin was being interviewed, and said (I'm paraphrasing) that on being told Sir Sean would be his co-star he thought "That's okay, he's old & bald and I'm young & handsome- everyone will be looking at me and not him". First day on set, Sir Sean walks in looking like this
and Baldwin thought "I'm dead. It's his movie."
Red October was of course based on the novel by Tom Clancy, part of the Jack Ryan series. It was planned that if it was a success, as it was, there would be a sequel Patriot Games. The story goes (and I'm not vouching for its accuracy) that Baldwin asked for such a large sum to play Ryan again that the producer thought "Stuff this, for that kind of money I could get Harrison Ford"... so he did.
Saw Jurassic World:Fallen Kingdom this past weekend. I thought most of it was just a rehashed homage to a lot of what has already been done. There was one heartbreaking scene involving a Brachiosaurus where I was the closest to tearing up in a theater since Interstellar though.
I know I've been MIA from AJB for the last couple of weeks, but there isn't anything to worry about, I'm just lonely/bored/binge-watching TV shows I didn't have the chance to watch due to my lack of free-time.
Anyway, I just finished watching "Ex-Machina", a film I always wanted to see but never got around to, with it being moved up and down from my list™.
It is as much an exercise in story-telling as it is in interior design.
The film's stunning in many different ways I can't put my finger on.
If there was a movie that could be a living interpretation of the trusting game, seen/told by the eyes of our protagonist.
The sort of film that takes a bit of time to set up all the pieces of the puzzle, but when it finally shows its hand, one could call it simplistic in the way it is all realised (part of the fun of watching a movie, seeing where this all leads) but the way it was presented and managed to capture my attention on its well balanced runtime left me to believe that the way the story was told was better than the story presented. Don't let me be misunderstood, I enjoyed the movie...but perhaps for the wrong reasons.
Just got back from Ant-Man and The Wasp. If superhero movies of late have been like Grand Opera, this one is more Gilbert and Sullivan. . .light, fast-paced, fun, and funny. See it and have a blast!
What's New Pussycat
stars Peter O'Toole as a sex addict who requires psychiatric help ("you should have such problems")
Also stars Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and Ursula Andress (is that cast looking familiar?)
music by Burt Bacharach (hmm, a pattern forms...)
produced by Charles Feldman … yes that right, it's the immediate predecessor to the "funny" version of Casino Royale!
and, coming from another angle, famous title toon sung by Tom Jones. He's one of ours. The song is one of his definitive classics alongside It's Not Unusual.
Andress enters just before the final sequence, descending by parachute directly into O'Toole's passenger seat. She is at first dressed in a onepiece snakeskin catsuit (which she unzips, from neck to navel), then just in skimpy underwear for her final scenes. Sellers introduces her to his wife as a "close personal friend of James Bond". (Damn! is the original BondGirl ever a magnificent specimen!)
the film is marginally funnier than Casino Royale. This was Woody Allen's first script, before he began directing himself, and the dialog has his speech rhythms, and of course all the stuff with the psychiatrist foreshadows Allen's vintage work. And though his early films did have lots of slapstick, Wikipedia tells me this script was heavily rewritten by the others, and it shows.
Much of this film is Benny Hill level farce. But with mid60s psychedelic aesthetic.
_____________________________________________________
EDIT: remembered Bacharach. there's probably other Casino Royale connections to be found.
since I am re-editing this post:
which tier should this film be assigned to in our James Bond Canon?
Sellers does identify Andress as a close personal friend of James Bond, within the dialog. And Feldman is the legitimate rights-holder to one of Fleming's books, giving this seeming gag line official legitimacy.
So could this be a cross-over? a spin-off? a prequel?
Andress's character is identified as Rita, but she sure acts like a superspy in her own right. So the name Rita is probably an alias. Perhaps Rita is Honey Rider, three years later? or maybe she's Vesper Lynn, two years before the events of Casino Royale?
(though Evelyn Tremble does not recognise her in that film, so either Sellers is playing a different character, or that's a continuity error. I don't think Jimmy Bond meets Vesper.)
This is of cource the sequel to the earlier Ocean's movies, but this time with a female cast. I enjoyed it. The movies in the series were getting tired, and this was just the shot in the arm that was needed. Ocean's 8 has the style, music, twists and chararcters one expects.
Good fun
Caine is still hanging on in there isn't he? Kudos to that. Seems odd that Sir Sean hasn't done a film in over a decade, but mentally I don't think he's been at the top of his game for a while, not that it's any of our business any more of course. Not now he's retired.
Layer Cake on Netflix to the wee hours of this morning
Still a great film with a superb cast and goes to show you don't need to have loads of CGI to tell a good story (how they made it all for £4m is pretty impressive).
Hope that once Danny Boy hangs up his Walther they'll think about making the squeal.
Alien3 Special edition and Alien Resurrection 2003 Special edition. Have not seen either film for years. Thought A3 was better than I remembered and I think the extended film made it more enjoyable. Resurrection is still poor and also very weird.
First of all this film wins the award for most misleading trailer ever !!
Genuinely thought I would be watching a comedy. The trailer shows all the funny bits and highlights the involvement of Kristen Wiig and Jason Sudeikis who in reality are in the film for 2 minutes.
Anyway, the film didn't know what it wanted to be. An enviromental message? A love story ? A look at the future?
All very bizarre and left me feeling really cheated at the end.
Comments
But we must remember movies such as Siccario, The theory of everything, Spotlight, The Witch, Eye in the sky, Carol, The nice guys, No country for old men, Hell or high water and High-Rise. And that's just me looking at my DVD-shelf.
I'm a fan of this series, and enjoyed the movie. My friends who saw it with me were less impressed, I have to say. My main complaint is that Jeff Goldblum was severely underused- his presence IMHO definitely benefits a movie.
Michael Caine presents this documentary which views the 60s from his own vantage point, so it's basically the Caine autobiography with talking heads thrown in namely David Bailey, Paul McCartney, Mary Quant and Lulu and so on. Except, they are not shown when they are interviewed or chatted to by Caine, so it's just talking, no heads. Except when they are shown being interviewed at the time, of course.
Some great colour footage of London at the time, and Caine does well to put things into context via the class system as it was until then. Great editing to show Caine back then and cut to doing something similar now, be it travelling in a lift or driving an Aston, as in The Italian Job.
But Caine, though normally a reliable interviewee, is less of a good interlocutor and presents as a rheumy-eyed, self-indulgent presence. It's like going through someone else's holiday snaps. Really, it comes across as 'I made it big in the 60s and got to hang out with my showbiz friends in London' it actually makes you less impressed by the people and the decade. Not sure what Joan Collins is being interviewed for, she's hardly a 60s icon is she, just one of Sir Michael's Brexit mates.
I suppose it does give more emphasis on fashion such as haircuts and the mini skirt than we are used to. Other than that it seems to be all The Who, Beatles and Stones, no other working class actors present though to be fair, most of them are dead now.
It made me laugh to think what the late Richard Harris would have made of it all - he hated Caine for being a self-important windbag.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Brilliantly, silly over the top fun, basically it could be Kingsman in medieval Europe -{ with a fantastic cast including
Mads Mikkelsen , Christoph Waltz , Luke Evans , Matthew Macfadyen
having airships having battles in the sky, with sword fighting and a bit of martial arts. All make a fun
couple of hours
It's a shame this is one of those important issues where we simply can't live with other people having different opinions
I spent £3.99 buying it today, I'd hate to think I was wrong ?
No, surely that could never be ? ...... Me wrong ?
Another film I really like, although it was a big flop and many critics panned it. is
The Wild Wild west, love all that Victorian Tech {[]
I hadn't seen this movie since the 1990's, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the movie is as good as I remembered. This is still the best Jack Ryan movie and one of the "bescht" cold war techno thrillers.
I found some interesting trivia on IMDB:
-Klaus Maria Brandauer was origionally cast as Mark Ramius. When he couldn't take the role, he reccomended Sean Connery whom he knew from NSNA.
- In preperation for the role Connery "interned" in a USN submarine - with the temporary rank of Commander :007)
- When Ramius kills the Political Officer Putin (yes - Putin!) several Soviet government VIPs were visiting the set.
Of science, as with the Sherlock Holmes films.
I love The hunt for red October, great cold war thriller and
Sir Sean looks amazing.
Fun fact ... Timothy Dalton was in line for D'Artagnan but turned it down (apparently)
I watched Rocky IV last night.
It is such a good film and has a fabulous soundtrack. My favourite 'Rocky' by far.
Alec Baldwin was being interviewed, and said (I'm paraphrasing) that on being told Sir Sean would be his co-star he thought "That's okay, he's old & bald and I'm young & handsome- everyone will be looking at me and not him". First day on set, Sir Sean walks in looking like this
and Baldwin thought "I'm dead. It's his movie."
Red October was of course based on the novel by Tom Clancy, part of the Jack Ryan series. It was planned that if it was a success, as it was, there would be a sequel Patriot Games. The story goes (and I'm not vouching for its accuracy) that Baldwin asked for such a large sum to play Ryan again that the producer thought "Stuff this, for that kind of money I could get Harrison Ford"... so he did.
Anyway, I just finished watching "Ex-Machina", a film I always wanted to see but never got around to, with it being moved up and down from my list™.
It is as much an exercise in story-telling as it is in interior design.
The film's stunning in many different ways I can't put my finger on.
If there was a movie that could be a living interpretation of the trusting game, seen/told by the eyes of our protagonist.
The sort of film that takes a bit of time to set up all the pieces of the puzzle, but when it finally shows its hand, one could call it simplistic in the way it is all realised (part of the fun of watching a movie, seeing where this all leads) but the way it was presented and managed to capture my attention on its well balanced runtime left me to believe that the way the story was told was better than the story presented. Don't let me be misunderstood, I enjoyed the movie...but perhaps for the wrong reasons.
stars Peter O'Toole as a sex addict who requires psychiatric help ("you should have such problems")
Also stars Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and Ursula Andress (is that cast looking familiar?)
music by Burt Bacharach (hmm, a pattern forms...)
produced by Charles Feldman … yes that right, it's the immediate predecessor to the "funny" version of Casino Royale!
and, coming from another angle, famous title toon sung by Tom Jones. He's one of ours. The song is one of his definitive classics alongside It's Not Unusual.
Andress enters just before the final sequence, descending by parachute directly into O'Toole's passenger seat. She is at first dressed in a onepiece snakeskin catsuit (which she unzips, from neck to navel), then just in skimpy underwear for her final scenes. Sellers introduces her to his wife as a "close personal friend of James Bond". (Damn! is the original BondGirl ever a magnificent specimen!)
the film is marginally funnier than Casino Royale. This was Woody Allen's first script, before he began directing himself, and the dialog has his speech rhythms, and of course all the stuff with the psychiatrist foreshadows Allen's vintage work. And though his early films did have lots of slapstick, Wikipedia tells me this script was heavily rewritten by the others, and it shows.
Much of this film is Benny Hill level farce. But with mid60s psychedelic aesthetic.
_____________________________________________________
EDIT: remembered Bacharach. there's probably other Casino Royale connections to be found.
since I am re-editing this post:
which tier should this film be assigned to in our James Bond Canon?
Sellers does identify Andress as a close personal friend of James Bond, within the dialog. And Feldman is the legitimate rights-holder to one of Fleming's books, giving this seeming gag line official legitimacy.
So could this be a cross-over? a spin-off? a prequel?
Andress's character is identified as Rita, but she sure acts like a superspy in her own right. So the name Rita is probably an alias. Perhaps Rita is Honey Rider, three years later? or maybe she's Vesper Lynn, two years before the events of Casino Royale?
(though Evelyn Tremble does not recognise her in that film, so either Sellers is playing a different character, or that's a continuity error. I don't think Jimmy Bond meets Vesper.)
This is of cource the sequel to the earlier Ocean's movies, but this time with a female cast. I enjoyed it. The movies in the series were getting tired, and this was just the shot in the arm that was needed. Ocean's 8 has the style, music, twists and chararcters one expects.
Good fun
Three old guys (Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin) rob a bank. Pleasant and fairly predictable.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Still a great film with a superb cast and goes to show you don't need to have loads of CGI to tell a good story (how they made it all for £4m is pretty impressive).
Hope that once Danny Boy hangs up his Walther they'll think about making the squeal.
First of all this film wins the award for most misleading trailer ever !!
Genuinely thought I would be watching a comedy. The trailer shows all the funny bits and highlights the involvement of Kristen Wiig and Jason Sudeikis who in reality are in the film for 2 minutes.
Anyway, the film didn't know what it wanted to be. An enviromental message? A love story ? A look at the future?
All very bizarre and left me feeling really cheated at the end.
I would not recommend it.