Talk About Movies: Part 4

Lol RBK rant...I love it

But, we seem to all agree that Emily Blunt is awesome!

not only is she awesome in her movies but in every interview I've seen her in she's always just been super intelligent and charming.

RBK rants are the best rants, especially now that Zeno has mellowed out in his dotage.

I agree. Regarding Duck Soup, I can't be sure if it's comedy or satire or both. The article linked below talks about both. I see it more as an absurdist comedy rather than satire, but I do find the article makes some good points.

https://silverscreenclassicsblog.wordpre...

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boat,

I should have included that I think you are 100% correct in that is ultimately the arc they wanted for her character so you were absolutely right in that regard my beef is just how they went about that and had her develop those uncertainties immediately with no provocation whatsoever.

if they had her start out on the mission totally gung ho and responding to threat on the bridge like a well trained elite counterterrorism agent would and only start developing her doubts as she became more exposed to del toro and brolins methods that would have been absolutely believable and well developed.

but they skipped all that and just had her instantly in a huge moral quandary immediately after accepting the mission which she volunteered for btw.

anyway just wanted to clear that up cuz realized it sounded as tho I was dismissing your take as stupid or whatever when it absolutely was not it was just the execution that was stupid so I apologize if I came off like a dick to you.

and with that I'll bring my thoughts on sicario to an end and fwiw we actually just watched it the other day for the upteenth time so this stuff was very fresh in my mind.

cheers.

I still hate the Irish! (And the Yankees).

I’ve been busy working on repairing my garage which is rotting away on its foundation.

I watched Character yesterday, a 1997 Dutch-Belgian movie that won the foreign language Oscar. Very good, and props to Amazon for steering me to it, hadn't even come close to hearing about it. Pretty dark or let's say somewhat grim, fairly accessible if you don't try to sift thru bankruptcy law intricacies etc. and just take some details on faith. Bottom line, it's about a kid growing up with very strange parents and trying to make his way in the cruel world. A bildungsroman!

You couldn't be more wrong about Margin Call. Very accurate about the different personality types, levels of employee power, how WallSt guys talk about money [I probably heard at least 3 of those Bettany monologues in my time at 3 different banks incl Lehman] firing people to CYA, dumb risk-taking and executive interactions.

The acting was pretty great as well. Irons gives a master-class on how to dominate a room/scene.

Best Original screenplay nominee. 7.1 imdb/87% RT.

In fact, The Big Short is much moreso a collection of vignettes - the group therapy scene, Ryan Gosling pitches the short to the world's angriest hedge fund, Brad Pitt and the garage HF, Bale telling his investors they're wrong, Bale telling GS they're wrong, trip to Florida, trip to Vegas, Carrell yells out 'Zero' scene, strippers, dinner with the CDO bundler, etc.

Not to mention the celebrity vignettes which are, actually, perfect for the tiktoks/etc.

Searching for Bobby Fischer.

Love that movie! But not sure that chess can be classified as a sport? It is definitely a competition so its close.

Watched few old 50's movies this week. Amazon Prime has a bunch of them and I felt like watching old stuff.

First I watched Run Silent, Run Deep I hadn't seen this in at least 50 years. Very good classic starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster as the CO and XO of a submarine back in WWII Japanese theater. Great action and performances. I was surprised to see Don Rickles in this one as one of the crewmen and also a young Jack Warden.

Then I watched a couple of Bogarts. Beat the Devil and In a Lonely Place. Both were very good and classic Bogart with his wiseguy dialog. Both were very enjoyable to watch.

I also watched The Key which i had never seen before. About tugboats in WWII out of England that towed torpedoed ships back to port. Great action and mostly good performances. Starred William Holden, Trevor Howard and Sophia Loren. Holden and Howard are great actors but Sophia? Not so much. She sure is hot though 😀 The key in the title is the key to an apartment where Sophia lives. Every tugboat captain that gets the key pretty much dies and they pass the key on. It was good but wasn't thrilled with the ending.

Last and definitety least was The Burglar. This was low level 50's schlock. I picture this one as the third billing in a triple feature. Bad plot, bad acting, over dramatic line delivery, over dramatic facial expressions, over dramitic musical score. This could be one of those so bad it's good movies. With a group of friends while drinking this movie could be hilarious 😀

Rewatched the 3.5 hour version of JFK, mostly for the 16 minute Donald Sutherland monologue in the middle.

This is a very well-made movie, but it's gotten a little clunky in the thirty years since it was released.

Costner, while great in the closing summation scene, is terribly miscast in the rest of the movie. His southern accent is laughable and his character way too earnest.
All the scenes with his home life and Sissy Spacek should've been cut. They're not interesting.

What is interesting is remembering how revolutionary the fast-paced editing was at the time...now, it just seems normal.

The huge cast is great, but when Sutherland is on the screen, you see what this could've been. He truly was a master.

Whether or not any of Garrison's beliefs regarding the assassination is true, I have no idea. But I've always believed there's no way Oswald acted alone.

reading up on him and learning he was a total crackpot who literally had no case nor evidence and was just trying to make a name for himself in the media really ruined the movie for me, which at first watching was a mind blowing experience

back and to the left, back and to the left

Lol...were now further in time from that Seinfeld episode than that episode was from the Kennedy assassination.

jfc

God, I hate that. Why is it always garages? Is it because nobody lives in them and stuff goes too far before it's noticed? Once a garage has one little wrong thing that's noticeable it becomes an enormous time sink. It's as though biggerboat were put in charge of all the world's garages...

One great sports movie is Bang the Drum Slowly.

https://youtu.be/BH6ri4yasfk?si=w_gN3BSs...

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It’s kinda like bang the drum slowly except the drums a chick

thanks brother feeling is mutual.

agree with pretty much all of this esp the part about needing to just get rid of all the family stuff.

I've done a TON of reading on the assassination and I'm not gonna derail this thread and turn it into a conspiracy theory tangent but there is some very interesting stuff and you can fall down a very deep rabbit hole.

good place to start is the 1976 HSCA (house select committee on assassinations) and then of course there are a million books on it, mark lane and gaeton fonzi have very interesting books on it (list is way too long to include everyone but there are def a ton of crackpots so have to really vet who you're reading).

fwiw tommy lee jones' character was revealed to indeed be a contract agent for the CIA and southerlands character was based on a former army special operations officer named L. Fletcher Prouty and opinions about him obv vary wildly.

one thing that is undebatable is the warren commission was fiction and at the very least the actions of the FBI and CIA following the assassination were incredibly suspicious.

you shouldn't just take as gospel everything you read.
he def had his issues but a bunch of the accusations about him were totally fictitious or extremely exaggerated and made by people with serious motives to discredit him.

at the very least like southerland says in that famous Washington meeting and what remains true to this day garrison is the only person to ever bring anyone to trial for the assassination of JFK and if it's such an obvious case of one lone gunman acting completely on his own why have all the files that were supposed to be declassified continue to be held from the public and protected so fiercely from declassification so many decades after the assassination?

on a totally different note one thing I always found interesting but apparently I'm the only one as I've never seen/read/heard anyone else even mention this but and maybe it's because my knowledge on this subject is lacking and there are tons of other examples of this but it seems to me that so often when someone is so radicalized and politically motivated to the point of carrying out an assassination of a major public figure or just a major act of political violence such as 9/11 or McVeighs OKC bombing etc when captured they don't ever protest their guilt or try and claim they didn't do it they just want to tell everyone why it had to be done and justify their actions.

but from the time oswald was arrested to the time he was so conveniently murdered he maintained his innocence quite adamantly he never once acted like most other people I can remember in history who we know to be absolutely guilty (not talking about other possible assassins who claimed to be framed and who were never conclusively found to have done it).

I'm guessing I must be wrong on this subject otherwise someone else would have brought it up but just seems like all of the debate about the assassination focused on physical evidence (and rightly so) and would have been interesting to get more into his mindset and motives (there has been some very cursory discussions nothing to the level I've seen for other suspected terrorists).

sorry for the wall of text this is a subject that really fascinates me and somehow I still haven't been completely convinced of anything other than there is very little likelihood that oswald acted alone (HSCA came to same conclusion) and at the very least the FBI and CIA acted aggressively after the assassination to hinder the investigation and keep a ton of facts from the public.

lol and all the "RBK is a looney dingbat" faction, you're welcome!

RBK, I don't think you're part of the faction. Years ago, NOVA did a great show on the physics of the assassination, the stuff about Oswald not being able to get off three shots, the gun sounds of a coming from different directions, etc, etc. Nothing to do with conspiracy theories.

A scientist who studied the limo for metals did a presentation in RI a number of years ago. He said there were only the metal from Oswald's but people kept asking the "what about?" Kinds of questions. He had no thoughts on a conspiracy.

If you haven't read it, Don DeLillo's novel Libra is terrific.

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I used to watch it with my dad on TV as a kid and it was clearly absurdist comedy.

The first time I saw it in a theater was on a college campus ~1970, and it was obviously anti-war political satire.

Now I'm back to watching it on TV again, and not only is it absurdist comedy, it's the pinnacle of absurdist comedy. So we can only assume that Groucho is all things to all men, and we all know where that line of thinking leads us.

But still I have to ask the question that I have always asked: How do they get away this ****.

ya actually libra is one of my best friends favorite books I have it on audiobook just haven't made it there quite yet but may just bump it to the top of the queue.

thanks!

Re: Duck Soup

Woody Allen uses it in Hannah and Her Sisters, saying that life is worth living because Duck Soup exists.

Preston Sturges ( he also subverted the censors) has a similar scene in Sullivan's Travels. Sullivan, a director who seeks to make a film with social importance, instead of the light comedies he had been making. He is arrested in put in prison near the end of the film. The men in the prison look worn and beaten down. However, on film night, the men watch a cartoon and laugh hysterically. Sullivan realizes the importance of comedy.

Certainly, Duck Soup is anarchic, but it's also damn funny. I have used his line, Don't leave in a huff, leave in a minute in a huff, a few times. I know a number of people who are too damn serious. They need a dose of comedy in their lives. For me, anyway, I need laughter and value friends who make me laugh. Maybe it's the Irish in me. Groucho's wordplay has been compared to James Joyce's. It's a valid comparison.

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