Recently Watched Movies 2021

[Kolumbo]

Speaking of Pierce Brosnan, he's had the chops for light comedy since he first hit it big in Remington Steele. He can certainly play the debonair leading man. But, his later career comedic role choices have been pretty danged good, even in smaller roles like Eurovision, Mamma Mia and The World's End. But my all time favorite Brosnan role is The Matador, where he went completely against type as the foulest, rudest, crudest, sloppy drunk hitman to ever hit the big screen. The plot is basically a businessman (Greg Kinnear) needs to make a sale to save his company. He meets a hitman (Brosnan), they get drunk and a plan hatches to eliminate the competition. The movie has its flaws (and Greg Kinnear is most of them as I found him less than convincing with his moral dilemma), but I still highly recommend it for Brosnan's over-the-top performance (one of his two Golden Globe nominations).

More Pierce
I'll have to rewatch The Matador.
The Thomas Crown Affair was a fun movie. No Escape with Owen Wilson and Lake Bell was an intriguing movie with Pierce playing a good role.

 

[nwhoopfan]

If you haven't seen it already, add "The Foreigner" to your list of Pierce Brosnan movies. Stars opposite Jackie Chan. No humor at all, deadly cat and mouse game between two men who are more than they initially appear.

 

[Dove]

Sicario (2015) - Finally saw this movie for the first time. Why are drug cartel movies so gripping?

Emily Blunt is excellent. Benicio Del Toro is a stealth, emotionless machine. I kept looking for a funny scene with Pierce Brosnan but it never came.

Great movie.

 

[dbmill]

The First Texan (1956) - What a boring night for me as I spruce up some cover letters.

Jack McCrae stars as Sam Houston who leads a rag tag group of Texans against Mexican armed forces.

It appears there are many historical inaccuracies. A slow burn but still kind of an interesting watch. Was on True Grit. The killer was commercial time seemed to equal movie time.

And some actress named Felicia Farr. Never heard of but WOWZA!!!!!!!!!

I looked her up. She was in 3:10 to Yuma which I saw a long time ago but I don't remember it. Of course I just looked up that movie and I guess I saw the modern version with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale.

The original "3:10 to Yuma", starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin is one of my favorite westerns. I've seen it a bunch of times, and to me it is a must see movie. In the original "3:10 to Yuma" Felicia Farr plays a bartender who attracts the attention of outlaw Ford, and she does quite well with that role, no question about it. Like Ben Wade, the character Glenn Ford plays, you take notice of her.

The remake with Russell Crowe is a good film, but to me it is not in the same class of the original. The remake tries to flesh out a story that really doesn't need fleshing out. The original movie is a spare bare bones story that is very to the point.

 

[storrsroars]

Sicario (2015) - Finally saw this movie for the first time. Why are drug cartel movies so gripping?

Emily Blunt is excellent. Benicio Del Toro is a stealth, emotionless machine. I kept looking for a funny scene with Pierce Brosnan but it never came.

Great movie.

Please let this be an attempt to start a "funny scene with Pierce Brosnan" meme and not you mistaking Josh Brolin for Brosnan.

Unfortunately, the followup, "SIcario: Day of the Soldado", wasn't nearly as gripping, and was even less humorless.

 

[dbmill]

The original "3:10 to Yuma", starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin is one of my favorite westerns. I've seen it a bunch of times, and to me it is a must see movie. In the original "3:10 to Yuma" Felicia Farr plays a bartender who attracts the attention of outlaw Ford, and she does quite well with that role, no question about it. Like Ben Wade, the character Glenn Ford plays, you take notice of her.

The remake with Russell Crowe is a good film, but to me it is not in the same class of the original. The remake tries to flesh out a story that really doesn't need fleshing out. The original movie is a spare bare bones story that is very to the point.

Thinking about it, the original "3:10 to Yuma" may be my favorite western that was not directed by John Ford, Howard Hawks, or Sergio Leone.

 

[Waquoit]

Logan Lucky - I do love a good heist flick and this fit the bill, not sure why it took me so long to get around to it. My only issue is that Soderbergh has this surgical precision to his filmmaking that at once seems like a perfect fit for the heist films he seems to enjoy making while also ironically taking some of the suspense and tension out of them. The stakes never seemed in doubt, which makes it feel like the FBI agent postscript wrinkle was glaringly tacked on just so everything wasn't so neat and tidy.

That's a sharp write-up, and I agree that the "stakes never seemed in doubt". But I was rooting for the good guys so much I didn't mind.

 

[Palatine]

The original "3:10 to Yuma", starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin is one of my favorite westerns. I've seen it a bunch of times, and to me it is a must see movie. In the original "3:10 to Yuma" Felicia Farr plays a bartender who attracts the attention of outlaw Ford, and she does quite well with that role, no question about it. Like Ben Wade, the character Glenn Ford plays, you take notice of her.

The remake with Russell Crowe is a good film, but to me it is not in the same class of the original. The remake tries to flesh out a story that really doesn't need fleshing out. The original movie is a spare bare bones story that is very to the point.

Originally, Mangold wanted to cast Kid Rock as the unredeemable bad guy played by Ben Foster. I think that might have been interesting. I enjoyed both versions.

 

[Dove]

Wander (2020) - Wow. I'm thinking Eckhart is Oscar worthy here. What a mind-blowing performance. See HuskyHawk's write-up on this one. My wife checked out on it, tho. But not me.

Crazy end-of-movie realty twisting going on.

 

[nwhoopfan]

I think I saw "Firefox" when it was first released (1977), but I would've been fairly young. I've seen it once or twice since then, but it's been a long time. Holds up fairly well considering how old it is. Clint Eastwood stars and directs. He's a hotshot Vietnam War pilot suffering from PTSD. Recruited on an intelligence mission to steal a new state of the art fighter jet from Russia. Fairly tense throughout. Just getting to the plane was long odds with a lot of people putting their life on the line, and then it was really just starting. It's probably worth revisiting one a decade or so.


edit--what the heck, I swear I saw 1977 somewhere, but it came out in 1982. That makes a lot more sense, it would've been more age appropriate for me to see it in theaters at that time.

 

[CL82]

I think I saw "Firefox" when it was first released (1977), but I would've been fairly young. I've seen it once or twice since then, but it's been a long time. Holds up fairly well considering how old it is. Clint Eastwood stars and directs. He's a hotshot Vietnam War pilot suffering from PTSD. Recruited on an intelligence mission to steal a new state of the art fighter jet from Russia. Fairly tense throughout. Just getting to the plane was long odds with a lot of people putting their life on the line, and then it was really just starting. It's probably worth revisiting one a decade or so.

I saw it back in the day as well. I remember it being pretty so so. The soundtrack while Eastwood is in the plane is notably bad, if I recall correctly.

 

[HuskyHawk]

The Little Things. (2021). Thank you HBO Max for giving me new release movies at no charge. This one stars Denzel Washington and Rami Malek. Jared Leto is good in a supporting role. Denzel is a sheriff‘s deputy out near Bakersfield CA. Malek is a homicide investigator in LA county. Denzel is sent back to his old squad in LA on an evidence run and meets Malek, the new guy doing what he used to do. There is some tension initially and they ask Denzel to accompany them to a crime scene. Things unfold from there as Denzel sees connections with an old case, the one that drove him out. It’s good. Acting is solid all around. Tension holds throughout. I’d give this a solid 3/4 stars.

Radium Girls (2020). Rented for $5. My wife read the book, loved it. She did not like the movie. The core story is true, and compelling. Young women painting watch dials with radium and getting radiation poisoning, and American Radium knew. Read the book. The movie tells that story, sort of. It’s annoyingly supplemented with lots of things not in the book, including, yay, communism, isn’t it wonderful! Yay, black and white people working together against a corrupt government in the 1920s, in New Jersey! Ooh, the Tulsa massacre, let’s bring that in too, if only we were all communists, those kind of atrocities would never happen. And certainly communists never let people become irradiated and cover it up. Should have been a good movie, but instead became a platform for propaganda. The story itself deserves better. 1.5/4 stars.

 

[Palatine]

Rapture-palooza - awful, almost unwatchable, the reason they invented fast forward, zero stars.

 

[HuskyHawk]

Rapture-palooza - awful, almost unwatchable, the reason they invented fast forward, zero stars.

She‘s so cute though. Something about her.

 

[Kolumbo]

Rapture-palooza - awful, almost unwatchable, the reason they invented fast forward, zero stars.

At least it has Anna Kendrick. I remember her from The Accountant.

 

[Palatine]

At least it has Anna Kendrick. I remember her from The Accountant.

I thought the Accountant was a pretty good film. Ben Affleck was actually good in it.

 

[nelsonmuntz]

Barbarians at the Gate (1993) - True story about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco starring James Garner as RJR CEO Ross Johnson and Jonathan Pryce as LBO legend Henry Kravis. It is a really well-done and entertaining morality play that may have gotten the hero and villain backwards, and to the movie's credit, it is not sure itself. It is set in an era of excess that in some ways seems quaint by today's standards, such as Johnson's severance between only $53 million, and seems ridiculously over the top in other ways, such as the RJR "Air Force" of company jets that were frequently used for executives' personal travel.

James Garner was perfect for the role of Ross Johnson, a charismatic and charming is a bit tone deaf CEO nearing the end of an era, like a dinosaur who doesn't see the asteroid is about to hit. In fact, all the casting was perfect. I particularly liked Peter Riegert's portrayal of the Lehman investment banker Peter Cohen who was in over his head and refuses to admit it.

I have two relatively minor complaints. One is that the character of Charles Hugel, played by Tom Adredge (Carmelo's father in the Sopranos), was a really important character in the actual LBO whose motives are very unclear even to this day, and the movie makes him somewhat one-dimensional cranky grandpa. Secondly, the name of the book "Barbarians at the Gate" was actually a quote by Kravis' rival Teddy Forstmann, and the movie never really explains what is meant by it. I know what is meant by it, but to a casual viewer, it might seem like a throwaway line that is used as the name of the movie because it sounds cool. In fact, the Forstmann character just yells a lot in his limited screen time.

Overall, I recommend it.

This movie is available for free on Youtube.

 

[Waquoit]

Barbarians at the Gate (1993) - ...

I remember seeing this first-run. Garner was terrific! Looking back, it's about the start of vaping!

 

[Waquoit]

Set It Up - A made-for-Netflix rom-com that did not suck. This is one to keep in your back pocket for when the SO wants to watch something easy.

 

[Mano]

Set It Up - A made-for-Netflix rom-com that did not suck. This is one to keep in your back pocket for when the SO wants to watch something easy.

Yup, agreed. It wasn't entirely terrible. Perfectly cromulent.

 

[crazyUCfan23]

I actually watched a movie last weekend because of memes. I'm not the demographic for "Easy A" and from the description I felt it would be rather stupid, so avoided it for years. But as more and more memes with Emma Stone holding up various messages kept appearing in sites I visit, I finally succumbed.

It was stupid, although Stone was good and it had its moments. The adult cast (Tucci, Clarkson, Haden-Church, Kudrow) played their ridiculous stereotypical parts with aplomb.

I taught the scarlet letter for the first time in a few years back in the fall, so I watched Easy A. Going into it, I wanted to see if there were any clips I could show to my class lol it was very cringe, but it was still pretty funny.

 

[nelsonmuntz]

Lady Bird (2017) - I did not like it. It felt like a mud hut of serious teen movie gimmicks and cliches, and never really decided what it was trying to say. Is this movie about Lady Bird developing into a young woman? She does not seem to change much from the beginning to the end of the movie. Is it about her relationship with her crazy mother? The mother was an interesting character, but they were like two marbles bouncing off each other in the movie.

Spoiler: Spoiler

I thought the letters at the end felt like a gimmick to show that mom and daughter were really close, even though at no point during the movie did they seem particularly close. She was actually closer with her dad. The mom is basically emotionally abusive to her entire family.

I thought the two boyfriend characters, both of whom were interesting, were wasted. What did she learn from either relationship? The Timothee Chalamet never pretended to be anything other than what he was, and Lady Bird is the one that freaks out on him irrationally. Did Lady Bird regret going after the shallow, hot guy? I don't know. The movie just moved on from him. The other boyfriend's character surprise was interesting, but then the movie doesn't do anything with it. She just moved on from him too.

Even her relationship with her friends was off. I get that Julie was her best friend and they would remain best friends forever, but she treats Julie badly and Julie doesn't seem to care. What is the basis of the friendship? Jenna was not that bad, yet Lady Bird lies to her, and then essentially dumps her as a friend even though Jenna has forgiven Lady Bird and been nothing but nice to Lady Bird the whole time they were friends.

I end up really disliking the Lady Bird character by the end of the movie. She is a shallow brat who is mean and manipulative to her friends, family and teachers, treats men as objects, and never has to face any consequences for her actions. The ending is trite, and basically is just Lady Bird homesick at the end of the movie because she is not as daring or adventurous as she thinks she is, and realizes that she is over her head in New York and should return to Sacramento.

Acting was great by everyone, as you would expect from this cast. Laurie Metcalf should have gotten an Oscar. I think it was particularly impressive acting considering the script's problems and that there was a lot of weirdness in the Directing. For example, there are a lot of scenes where characters have their backs to the camera or are walking away from the camera. There is limited connection between one scene and the next, and the characters are all a little too quirky. Greta Gerwig doesn't even get the basics right as a director, and this movie is really overrated.

Compare this to Booksmart, another coming of age movie about teenage girls that also starred Beanie Feldstein. Booksmart went for more of the comedy angle, and nailed it, but at the same time I thought it had more of an emotional connection to its lead characters and the plot actually made sense.

 

[8893]

Lady Bird (2017) - I did not like it. It felt like a mud hut of serious teen movie gimmicks and cliches, and never really decided what it was trying to say. Is this movie about Lady Bird developing into a young woman? She does not seem to change much from the beginning to the end of the movie. Is it about her relationship with her crazy mother? The mother was an interesting character, but they were like two marbles bouncing off each other in the movie.

Spoiler: Spoiler

I thought the letters at the end felt like a gimmick to show that mom and daughter were really close, even though at no point during the movie did they seem particularly close. She was actually closer with her dad. The mom is basically emotionally abusive to her entire family.

I thought the two boyfriend characters, both of whom were interesting, were wasted. What did she learn from either relationship? The Timothee Chalamet never pretended to be anything other than what he was, and Lady Bird is the one that freaks out on him irrationally. Did Lady Bird regret going after the shallow, hot guy? I don't know. The movie just moved on from him. The other boyfriend's character surprise was interesting, but then the movie doesn't do anything with it. She just moved on from him too.

Even her relationship with her friends was off. I get that Julie was her best friend and they would remain best friends forever, but she treats Julie badly and Julie doesn't seem to care. What is the basis of the friendship? Jenna was not that bad, yet Lady Bird lies to her, and then essentially dumps her as a friend even though Jenna has forgiven Lady Bird and been nothing but nice to Lady Bird the whole time they were friends.

I end up really disliking the Lady Bird character by the end of the movie. She is a shallow brat who is mean and manipulative to her friends, family and teachers, treats men as objects, and never has to face any consequences for her actions. The ending is trite, and basically is just Lady Bird homesick at the end of the movie because she is not as daring or adventurous as she thinks she is, and realizes that she is over her head in New York and should return to Sacramento.

Acting was great by everyone, as you would expect from this cast. Laurie Metcalf should have gotten an Oscar. I think it was particularly impressive acting considering the script's problems and that there was a lot of weirdness in the Directing. For example, there are a lot of scenes where characters have their backs to the camera or are walking away from the camera. There is limited connection between one scene and the next, and the characters are all a little too quirky. Greta Gerwig doesn't even get the basics right as a director, and this movie is really overrated.

Compare this to Booksmart, another coming of age movie about teenage girls that also starred Beanie Feldstein. Booksmart went for more of the comedy angle, and nailed it, but at the same time I thought it had more of an emotional connection to its lead characters and the plot actually made sense.

I really liked Lady Bird, and especially Ronan's performance.

I obviously disagree with your take, which appears to contradict itself. How can it both be trite and not make sense? I don't think either is true.

I think you missed one of the central themes, i.e., whether attention is the same as caring.

I don't remember your child situation or ages, but having had two daughters already go through high school and one who is currently a high school freshman, I think it very accurately captures the essence of a lot of what many of them go through. One of mine in particular was/is more similar to the Lady Bird character, including the frequently dysfunctional relationship with her mother, and the frustratingly ambiguous, sometimes toxic, and almost always confusing relationships with friends of both genders (and all points in between).

I have watched it twice and probably picked up more on the second viewing. I would definitely watch it again.

 

[Dove]

Up In Smoke (1978) - Cheech and Chong's debut in the movies and each of their performances are epically funny. We were lol-ing a ton. The scene at the beginning where Cheech picks up Chong...Jesus!! And the pot made of Maui Wowie and Labrador. :O

Then the scene with the Borax girl. Kills me!!

 

[dbmill]

I really liked Lady Bird, and especially Ronan's performance.

I obviously disagree with your take, which appears to contradict itself. How can it both be trite and not make sense? I don't think either is true.

I think you missed one of the central themes, i.e., whether attention is the same as caring.

I don't remember your child situation or ages, but having had two daughters already go through high school and one who is currently a high school freshman, I think it very accurately captures the essence of a lot of what many of them go through. One of mine in particular was/is more similar to the Lady Bird character, including the frequently dysfunctional relationship with her mother, and the frustratingly ambiguous, sometimes toxic, and almost always confusing relationships with friends of both genders (and all points in between).

I have watched it twice and probably picked up more on the second viewing. I would definitely watch it again.

I saw Lady Bird once a few years ago, and I recall giving it a very positive mention on one of these movie threads. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing it again sometime, as I thought it was very good. I recall it was a film that really grew on me as I was watching it.