Blu-ray thumbs

[Johann]

Accurate.
This film is bad. It lacks coherence!

[Johann]

ROBIN HOOD (2018)



Directed by Otto Bathurst and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, this was a rousing tale.
Lots of action, with Taron Egerton in the lead role.
Jamie Foxx is fantastic as Little John and Ben Mendelsohn is deliciously wicked as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Thoroughly enjoyable new take on the Robin Hood legend- it may even be better than Ridley Scott's version. That's up to you to decide. I love both versions and recommend them.

[Chris Knipp]

I don't think I had heard of this but the cast looks good.
More something I enjoyed when I was 12 though.

[Johann]

It's an actioner for all ages. NO blood.
Lots of swash is buckled.

[Johann]

THE WOLFMAN (2010)




I can't believe that this was a box office bomb.
Loved it.
Joe Johnson directs Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins and Hugo Weaving in this gothic atmospheric film.
It won a well deserved Oscar for best makeup. The creature is rendered extremely well.
The movie really takes off after Benicio is attacked by the werewolf.
Two thumbs up!

[Chris Knipp]

Probably many enjoyed it and will do. But look at Metacritic (as I do) and you'll glimpse why critics didn't, finding it a "totally unnecessary remake", contains "little genuine human emotion," and off-puttingly "races through its opening scenes," despite good points such as makeup, for a score of 43% but ratings at the top of 75 and 63; nothing higher. It may also be though that the horror genre lacks caché despite its current appeal.

[Johann]

12 MONKEYS (1995)




I remember seeing this when it first came out, and then I had no clue about what it was about- couldn't make heads or tails of it.
Seeing it in 2023 with crystal clear clarity didn't help much.
What a weird, bizarre, and POINTLESS movie.
Terry Gilliam is widely regarded as a genius, and he is, but this is his turd. I don't know how this got green lit.
Brad Pitt was praised for his performance as a mental patient, but to me he was just stupid.
Bruce Willis is lost in oz here, ping-ponging between the present and the future.
The script is really bad.
What's baffling is that this was supposedly inspired by Chris Marker's La Jetee- I just don't see how or why.
Terrible movie in my opinion. A virus wipes out billions and the survivors go underground.
A gang or group called the 12 MONKEYS claims credit. Beyond that, I didn't care about the plot.
I don't like aimless, pointless movies. This was compared to Blade Runner, but they are two totally different films.

[Chris Knipp]

But is it really meaningless or just convoluted and nutty? I remember this title and the debt to La Jetée, but can't remember the details. Will have to look into it. Very widely reviewed. Ebert wrote: "What the movie is really about is its vision." That may be it.

[Johann]

It's meaningless. It has nothing to say about pandemics, time travel or human nature.
It just goes from one dumb scene to another.
Supposedly the LA JETEE influence is based on characters pre-seeing their deaths, but that's lost here. The first ten minutes made me think there was going to be visionary stuff happening, but the movie is just plain weird.

[Johann]

KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES (2016)



My friend John who's generously giving me access to his approx. 1000 blu-ray collection has a few groaner comedies, such as Sausage Party and Melissa McCarthy vehicles.
KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES is another.
Gal Gadot & Jon Hamm are an ultra-attractive couple who move into a nice cul-de-sac neighborhood but they aren't who they seem. They're actual spies, you see.
Zack Galifinakis and his wife are their hapless and plain-jane neighbors, who suspect something isn't right from the moment they move in.
Craziness ensues, and I can admit there are a few laughs. But overall it's a groaner.
Worth watching if you've got nothing to do.

[Chris Knipp]

I don't know what your taste in comedies is or whether it's anything like mine. I probably don't understand comedy very well, prefer simple classic movie comedy like the Marx brothers and Jacques Tati, whose MONSIEUR HULOT'S HOLIDAY I once thought the funniest of all. I have a sympathy for Zack G. from "Bored to Death," the short-lived 2009-2011 HBO comedy costarring Ted Danson and Jason Schwartzman. A NY friend's husband recently started watching it and pronounced it "stupid."

[Johann]

I'm not big on comedy in general.
I've never seen Tati's films but know they're great. They have a reputation.
My humour rests with stuff like THE BIG LEBOWSKI and BLAZING SADDLES, which I still find hilarious.
Comedy is hard to pull off. It usually has to have jokes that are totally absurd to work.

[Chris Knipp]

JACQUES TATI

Tati's films are classics, and they're all physical humor, though there is satire of modernity such as in MON ONCLE. They feature a seemingly goofy, befuddled character called Monsieur Hulot, played by the tall, gangly Tati himself. Tati is fanatical about detail and his films are very precisely constructed and have a sort of Rube Goldberg complexity. A study of the perversity of inanimate objects becomes a critique of the contemporary world. Here are glimpses of some of his more famous moments in a 4-minute YouTube video.

[Johann]

COBRA (1986)



If there was one movie I would say encapsulates the entire decade of the 80's it's Cobra.
Gourmet fromage here, laced with all the tackiness and excess the 80's had to offer.
Sly Stallone is "The Cobra", a police officer without a name.
He drives a black hot rod and chews on matchsticks. Oh yeah, and he's called in for "special assignments" when the streets get too hairy for regular cops. He's kinda like Batman, with no cape. I found myself smirking- A LOT.
None of it makes any sense, kinda like the cocaine-fuelled decade that spawned it.
The opening sequence had Cobra called in to deal with a bad hombre at a supermarket who's shooting people with a shotgun. The Cobra wears his shades indoors, and he gets on the intercom to warn the perp: "You're a lousy shot. I hate lousy shots"- completely putting the people at more risk. THe perp also has a bomb, and when he threatens to use it The Cobra sneers: "Go ahead. I don't shop here."

[Chris Knipp]

DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder )

We mentioned it here as a film noir classic. I'm watching it now. It makes me realize Patricia HIghsmith's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and Hitchcock's movie version owe something to the notion of an improvised murder of a hated spouse that goes wrong. It has Hitchcokian suspense in the crime itself. More coming but meanwhile here is what Pauline Kael said about it in a thumbnail comment for The New Yorker:

Double Indemnity

This shrewd, smoothly tawdry thriller, directed by Billy Wilder, is one of the high points of nineteen-forties films. Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson—a platinum blonde who wears tight white sweaters, an anklet, and sleazy-kinky shoes—is perhaps the best acted and the most fixating of all the slutty, cold-blooded femmes fatales of the film-noir genre. With her bold stare, her sneering, over-lipsticked, thick-looking mouth and her strategically displayed legs, she’s a living entrapment device. Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff, an insurance salesman, is the patsy she ensnares in a plot to kill her businessman husband and collect on the double-indemnity clause in his policy. And as Keyes, the claims investigator for the insurance company, Edward G. Robinson handles his sympathetic role with an easy mastery that gives the film some realistic underpinnings. It needs them, because the narration is often so gaudy and terse that it seems an emblem of period hardboiled attitudes. This defect may be integral to the film’s taut structure.

— Pauline Kael

"A living entrapment device" is great.