Watched just before Christmas: The Shop Around the Corner 🎥
James Stewart, a Christmas movie, and not that one? Not specifically a Christmas movie, but part of it happens then, so why not?
Two shop workers hate each other, but fall in love with their mysterious pen pals. Guess what?
Not bad.
Watched: Hamnet 🎥
This is a fabulous film. It’s about motherhood and magic, and grief and how a genius can turn it toward one of the world’s great works of literature. And also about the special bond between twins.
But mostly it’s about grief. It is heartbreaking, yet also deeply life-affirming.
Watched: Now You See Us 🎥
I believe the third of these recently came out, but we hadn’t seen any of them at the start of the month and year when we watched this. A group of stage magicians — so good they seem that they might have real powers — do heists. Or do they?
A decent romp.
Watched: Office Space 🎥
Some of my work colleagues recommended this to me. I was vaguely aware of its existence before that, since it’s been around since 1999.
It’s a comedy about office workers — amusingly enough, they’re specifically software developers working to prevent the year-2000 two-digit date problem, or ‘Y2K Bug’, as it was usually called. Amusing, because I did some of that myself. Or at least tested the system I worked on at the time to make sure it didn’t have the problem (it didn’t).
As to the amusement value of the film itself: it was fine. Not that great, but not a total waste of time. Probably two and a half stars, if M.b had stars like Letterboxd.
Watched: Mrs. Dalloway 🎥
I still haven’t caught up with posting about the movies we watched over Christmas & New Year, but never mind. Watched this yesterday. I read the book about seven years ago, and would have thought it close to impossible to film. Far from it. This actually worked pretty well. It’s not as rich as the book, of course, but it hits many of the points the book makes. The shellshocked veteran of the First World War, Septimus, I though was particularly well played, by Rupert Graves. Who, I learn, played LeStrade in Sherlock.
Watched: Towards Zero Season 1 🎥
Or season ‘only’, as it is. An adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel, and quite a fun one. Where ‘fun’ includes murder, as it tends to with the Queen of Crime, of course.
Can’t remember if we watched this on Christmas Day or Boxing Day, but it turns out to be a Christmas movie itself. At least in part, and as much as Die Hard is. Or maybe not quite. The point is it does have a scene — quite an important one — at Christmas.
Anyway. I thought I had seen this before. I mean I had, I watched it. But I couldn’t remember anything of the story after the famous horse’s head scene. Maybe that’s because I watched it on my own, so didn’t talk about it afterwards? I don’t know.
It is, of course, very good. There are some strange missed or dropped elements. Michael marries a woman while he’s in hiding in Sicily. She is assassinated by a car bomb, and never mentioned again. Not even as part of his motivation for revenge on the other Mafia families.
I don’t doubt, though, that if (when) I watch it again, I’ll find many parts I missed or have forgotten. That may be the mark of a great film, you can keep going back to it. Or, I don’t know, maybe the mark of a bad one, that you don’t remember it! (I don’t really think that.)
Watched: Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl 🎥
Another one we watched over Christmas. Rewatched, actually, as we saw it when it came out last year.
Tons of fun, of course. Four stars.
Watched: A Few Good Men 🎥
I’m trying the Micro.blog films feature, for more control than the Letterboxd RSS feed.
We introduced our daughter to The West Wing over the last few months, and needed more Sorkin. Also RIP Rob Reiner. It’s a great film. I’d give it four stars if this had them.
Watched: Bowie: The Final Act 🎥
Very good documentary about Bowie, starting approximately with Young Americans and moving forward — though moving back and forward in time. A lot of focus on the years in which he (hushed tones) wasn’t cool!
Interviews with Reeves Gabrels of Tin Machine, Earl Slick, Tony Visconti and others. Well worth a watch.
When I was a little kid my family used to go on holiday to Millport, on the Isle of Cumbrae, in the Firth of Clyde.
We didn’t go to the cinema often, if ever, back then. But Millport had a small cinema, and we always went once or twice when on holiday.
I don't recall any of the films we saw in the four years we holidayed there. What I do remember is the film posters, because they were always there, so I saw them year after year. And unusually, they were round the walls inside the auditorium. So while you waited for the lights to go down, you saw adverts for films that once shown there.
It's where I first heard of the Dollars trilogy. Only the first two then, in a double poster for A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. When Eight Bells Toll. I think Ice Station Zebra.
And one called Matt Helm Gets it in Denmark. I eventually saw all the others, but not that one. As I got a bit older, if ever the name came back to me, I wondered what kind of ‘getting it’ the title referred to. I probably kind of looked like an adventure film, so it was probably more likely to be a threat to his life, than any other interpretation. But the entendre was clearly double.
I recently found that our Roku has a strangely-named channel called ‘Movieland Tv’ [sic as far as the lowercase ‘v’ goes]. I had a poke around, and it seems to specialise in old movies from the 60s and 70s that are not what might now be called classics. Though there are a couple of Bond films: Thunderball (the first Bond film I ever saw) and Diamonds are Forever.
But I came across one called The Silencers. The blurb described it as ‘The first Matt Helm movie’. Well! Here was the mysterious figure from my childhood. If not getting it in Denmark, then at least in danger of being silenced. The blurb also told us he was an agent who’d got out of the game and his superiors wanted him back.
Fair enough, sounds like it could be OK, and I fancied something like a spy film tonight.
The first surprise was the star: Dean Martin. Now, that poster back in Millport might have shown his name in large type, and if it did you’d think the collision of his last name with my first would have stuck with me. But if so, that fact is lost in the mists of memory.
After an opening where four hit men are given bullets with ‘Matt Helm’ written on them, it starts with a woman dancing. And, basically, stripping. It’s obviously trying to be like a Bond opening scene, but, way sub-even-that-standard.
And then another woman starts singing, and the credits include original songs by Elmer Bernstein, and a choreographer. Is this a musical?
Well, no, but if you’ve got Dean Martin in the studio, you’d be daft not to get him to sing a bit. Which he doesn’t do in character, but does in a couple of scenes in voiceover, in effect. Oh and there’s a joke with Sinatra coming on the radio and Helm saying, ‘Turn that off, I can’t stand his voice.’ They retune, and a Dean Martin song comes on, and he says. ‘Now this guy can sing.’
I know, it’s not much of a joke.
It's a daft spy romp, and from Helm’s amorous adventures, I think it's now clear which kind of ‘getting it’ will be happing in Denmark. Though probably a bit of both.
I'm giving it one star for making me laugh several times, though mainly at the ridiculousness. And half a star for the fantastic mobile bed. Why move to answer the phone when you can flick a switch and have your bed rotate you to where it is? And when you want to have a bath, just let your bed take you there and drop you in.
Honestly, that bit wouldn’t have been out of place on Tracy Island.
Other than that, it’s complete mince.
Martin McDonagh’s latest is sad, hilarious, tragic, and true. Or feels like it could be true, even if some of the decisions characters make are baffling, to say nothing of gruesome.
On a rugged, beautiful island off the coast of Ireland in 1923, with the civil war going on on the mainland, two friends fall out. Or rather, one says he doesn’t like the other any more. A whole sequence of events flow out from this simple, almost child-like choice.
The funniest part happens when one of them goes to confession.But that’s only to be expected: confession’s a pretty funny kind of thing, when you think about it.
(Updated 2022-12-11 at 18:47:58)
There's a lot to like here if you're already a fan — or at least, have some interest. Probably not too much if neither of those apply.
It has interviews with those who are still with us (or who were when it was made). Not just John Cale, Moe Tucker, Doug Yule, but members of Andy Warhol's Factory crew (the 'Superstars'), like Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga.
I'd like to have heard more of the songs, especially the less well-known ones, and seen more footage of them, such as there is. It uses the documentary style that just films people speaking and edits those interviews together. That has a certain power, but I feel it might have helped to have a narrative, a voiceover elaborating on the story.
Recommended, though.
Long time since I saw this, so all I remembered really were the quotable bits ('We've gone on holiday by accident!')
The high dinginess and run-down state of Britain as the sixties ran down is skilfully evoked. It's very male, though. The only female character is the woman in the tearoom who refuses to serve our heroes. If that's the right word.
It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but it has aged surprisingly well.
A documentary about the prison-industrial complex, this is a tough watch. The title comes from the 13th amendment to the US Constitution. While abolishing slavery, that amendment also allowed for slavery to continue — at least for those incarcerated for a crime.
Tough, as I say, but it should be seen.
We’ve been enjoying the more recent work of Reece Witherspoon lately, in The Morning Show and Big Little Lies, so it was interesting to go back to see her in her younger days.
It’s a fun enough film. There were no surprises, in part because I’ve seen the live musical, but mainly because it’s not the kind of film that offers surprises.
The scenery is bleak, and the setup is sad, but in the end this movie is neither. Frances McDormand's character may have lost her home, job, and even town — she comes from a company town called Empire, which is closed down when the business fails — but she finds companionship along the road.
Sometimes that companionship is herself: she is someone who is happy in their own company, and that's okay. She lives in her van. She's not homeless, 'just houseless,' as she says.
I spent parts of this film wondering if something terrible was going to happen, but it's not that kind of story at all. The worst thing happened before the start, and all the rest is — just life. There's no plot to speak of, but that's okay too.
And though the scenery is bleak, it's also beautiful.
Fun, if bleak, satire about the end of the world. Two astronomers try to get people — though mainly a Trump-esque US administration — to believe that a civilisation-ending comet is on course for Earth. With predictable results.
Fun sequel to a Disney classic. Good songs, and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Probably not as memorable as the original.
Pretty good follow-on from the earlier Spider-Man films. My daughter tells me ‘All the fan theories were right.’ I wasn’t aware of them, so I hope that’s not a spoiler for anyone.
Turned out Doctor Strange (long my favourite Marvel character) wasn’t being quite as idiotic as I’d thought from the trailer, so that was good. Sets things up nicely for his next film.
