watched The Good Lord Bird on amazon over a few nights. I really enjoyed it. Ethan Hawke is good as John Brown, Daveed Diggs was terrific as Frederick Douglass, and the kid who played Onion was also really good. darkly comic. I'd give it an 8.5 or a 9 out of 10.
After watching Grease 2, how the f' do you get that Cool Rider song out of your head. Help me! Her dancing down the ladder pretty impressive though.
I Finally watched The Neighbors 10/10 it was perfect for the type of movie it was supposed to be, I especially liked the fact it did not wimp out and make everybody good friends and I appreciate the older guys won. The milking scene is very underrated, especially how he kept on joking. Not as great as 40 year old, but in that vein.
I just finished watching a documentary on Amazon Prime about the Marines at Belleau Wood in June of 1918, a truly excellent production by French television. A working class Frenchman who grew up in the area was given an assignment to write a history paper about WWI. He was 9 years old. Because he’d heard about Belleau Wood from the time that he was little, he chose to write about it, which sparked an interest in the battle and the Marines who fought there that became an obsession. The documentary is centered around him and how he not only dug into the history of the battle (literally, because after one hundred years there are still artifacts to be found there), but also how he discovered the personal history of several of the Marines, contacting their living relatives and exchanging information with them. It’s both fascinating and moving. The French haven’t forgotten what those men did for their country. Had the battle been lost, it very well could have lost the war. It was that close. Belleau Wood is only 50 miles from Paris. The French Army was about spent, and the Marines, newly arrived from the States, were told to take the Wood no matter what it cost. The cost was high. The Marines fought with such ferocity that the Germans called them “Dogs from Hell.” The Devil Dogs. Devil Dogs: Hero Marines of WWI 9/10
Los lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun) from 2002 with Javier Bardem. 6/10. Pretty funny with a somewhat sad ending. Set in Spain, the guys are shipyard workers who get laid-off and spend most of the movie in a bar.
A Brief History of Time Travel on Amazon Prime is worth the 75 minutes. I think the less you know going in the better. Its low budget and fun.
I'll second this. 9/10. Watched it tonight based on your recommendation. Didn't look at the run time before watching, it goes quick as it's only an hour long. Amazing there's still so much history to be uncovered 100 years later. The guy is right when he says the war becomes more real when you look at an individual's stories rather than a battle.
Judas and the Black Messiah on HBO - 10/10 this is the type of movie I can only watch once, and then never again tho
I Care A Lot on Netflix was good. The last 5 minutes seemed kind of bolted on and there was an addendum taped on at the very end for karma, but the ride was fun. Peter Dinkladge always manages to make me think he is an underrated actor, and Rosamind Pike was cold AF. Lots of bad guys screwing over other bad guys. Maybe give it a 7.5 just for the ride. Could have been higher with a better ending.
Tom & Jerry - (2021 - hbo max) Grade: C- Checked it out since it was a day-in release with the theatre; Positives: Chloë Moretz and Michael Peña were serviceable. Peña was technically an antagonist, even then he was still kinda likable. Animation is crisp. Blends nicely with the realistic backdrop. The human and tom&jerry interaction had some misses. Wholesome. Had a few lessons it tries to teach. Little cringe, but appreciated the effort since it was a kids movie. No musicals. Negatives: Plot is boring. It also didn't make lot of sense, even by kids movie standards. Movie pushes its soundtrack hard. I like hiphop but some of the lyrics about bling and women didn't fit with what was on the screen. Colin Jost has a side role. He's decent on SNL weekend desk; not great here. He reads his lines like he reads news jokes. More of a personal taste; slapstick animation never quite does it for me. But I was OK with it since it's faithful to the cartoon.
I don't know why I keep testing the Netflix original film well because they are so disappointing. Many I don't even bother watching cause they look bad and the ones I do, as hard as they try to be theater-grade material, they're better suited as made-for-tv schlock. There have been some good ones like The Old Guard and Extraction and the To All the Boys I've Loved Before movies (the first and the third anyways). Whatever Happened to Monday was decent. But the two recent ones I watched, Finding Ohana and See You Yesterday, bad, bad, bad. Finding Ohana is a Goonies ripoff that feels like a straight Disney Channel adventure. See You Yesterday had so much potential and was trying to be a time travel film with a social justice message. The problem is that it did neither well. The time travel aspects were completely child-like and non-sensical (even by time travel standards), the acting was average at best, and the main character was unlikeable. And it literally had no ending. I was straight up annoyed and frustrated watching this. Maybe the best part was the Michael J Fox cameo, but that almost felt sad to watch. On the flip side, we also watched Sonic this weekend, and it was loads of fun. Jim Carey channel his 90's humor perfectly. If you don't take it seriously, and it's not meant to be, then it's a perfect video game adaptation.