Films
Watched: Spider-Man: Brand New Day 🎥
This was great! I think it’s the best of the Tom Holland Spideys. Marvel movies seem to be back.
Watched: Babylon 5: The Road Home 🎥
This animated sequel-of-sorts to the wonderful Babylon 5 TV series was released a few years ago, and I somehow missed out on the news. Heard about it a few months ago and was reminded again yesterday.
It’s good enough, but mainly for the chance to spend some more time with beloved characters. It doesn’t add anything to the overall story, nor detract from it. One for the fans.
Watched: Billion Dollar Brain 🎥.
The third Harry Palmer film, and considerably more bizarre and confusing than the the first or second. Also a Ken Russell film, so that’s probably why. A mad Texan oil billionaire with a private army tries to trigger a third world war, basically
Watched: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 🎥.
I was sure I hadn’t seen it before, but I remembered some scenes as they happened. I have a vague memory of a DVD in a holiday house, perhaps. Partial falling asleep may have been involved.
It’s daft but fun in places.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 🎥 is a lot funnier and also more compact than I remembered.
More compact, because in my memory the business of trying to decode ‘POE’/‘OPE’ etc, went on for much longer than the few seconds it actually takes. And trying to get through to the President on the phone: that just happened offstage, no messing about with underlings.
An aside: there’s a line, ‘He made a payphone call to the Pentagon’, in the Clash’s ‘Ivan Meets GI Joe’, which I realised is almost certainly a reference to this.
There was also far less of the titular doctor and his attempts to suppress his Nazi instincts than I recalled.
In contrast, I thought the final scene of the bomber on its fatal flight went on a bit too long. But who am I to judge?
If you haven’t seen this film, you owe it to yourself to watch it.
We watched North by Northwest 🎥 a week or two ago. Somehow I’d never seen it before.
Let’s discuss the famous, poster-worthy, famous scene. Clearly if you believe someone is a government agent about to bust your soviet spy ring, you have to assassinate them. And what better way to do that than trick them into catching a bus to a bus stop on the open prairie, miles from anywhere; and then chase them with a crop-spraying plane and try to shoot them from it?
Many better ways. Many, many better ways.
I didn’t realise Hitchcock was making a farce. Well, maybe that’s unfair. It’s a kind-of spy story, it’s kind of a romance, it’s pretty funny in places. In fact, its main flaw may be that it doesn’t really know what it wants to be. And that it spells things out too much. We, the viewer, can work some things out: have a little more respect for us, Alfred.
All that said, I enjoyed it quite a lot.
Watched Top Secret! 🎥 a couple of nights ago. A 1984 film by the makers of Airplane, I have to wonder why on Earth I haven’t seen it till now. It’s pretty funny. A rock star visits a weird East Germany, which is just as oppressed as the real one, but the authorities are still the Nazis. Wehrmacht and SS uniforms abound.
Our hero gets caught up in a plot to rescue an imprisoned scientist — the resistance are all french, of course — and falls for the scientist’s daughter.
It’s about as silly as it sounds. An early part for Val Kilmer, and he does a pretty decent job as the singer, which can’t have hurt when he was cast as Jim Morrison in The Doors.
We watched The Man in the Hat 🎥 a few nights ago. An odd, gentle little British/French road movie from 2020. It’s almost silent, at least as far as the main character goes. Others have dialogue, but not a lot. A man goes on the run across France, after seeing what appears to be gangsters disposing of a body. He meets lots of strangers — mostly strange in more than one sense — along the way.
Watched: The Eagle Has Landed 🎥
if you’d have asked me I’d have said I thought I’d seen this back in the day. But no. Very much not. It’s a very odd film.
I thought it was going to be about some allied mission into or over Germany during WW2. It was actually the opposite: a secret German mission to kidnap Churchill from Norfolk. Including an IRA member helping them, and a traitorous English villager providing them with information.
it’s so totally not what I expected, but it’s pretty good.
Watched early in the new year: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 🎥
This is fine, a perfectly acceptable addition to the Spider-Man films. Though I have to say, a few weeks later, I remember little of it. And I blame that partly on its incompleteness: the fact it’s part one of two. Frustrating.
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 Me 🎥
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.
The Godfather 🎥
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.