Recently Watched Movies 2023

[CL82]

I haven't used Hoopla. How does it work? Vudu is essentially exactly what @nwhoopfan wanted. It streams everything just like a streaming version of what was Blockbuster. I can also find most things either free or for rent, on Prime.

It is an app that is provided by my library that allows me to download books. You are only allowed three downloads a month and each one last for 21 days. One of the things that suggested to me was a movie based upon a book I've read previously. I put it in my download list but I have yet to download it so I don't have any practical details about how it works.

By the way, the series that I am using it for currently is the "Body in the Marsh" series by Nick Louth. You may like them because it's a detective series like the Dresden Files, albeit without any supernatural element to it.

The premise of the first book is that a detective is assigned to a missing persons case and the missing person is his first love/high school girlfriend. So as he tries to figure out what happened he is revisiting the past, learning what's happened to her over her lifetime and working the case. I enjoyed it and I am now working my way through the series. I like it because the author relays enough details of the investigation that you can keep your own running list of suspects which not every mystery/detective writer does.

 

[CL82]

I stream stuff from both Hoopla and Kanopy. Find some good stuff on there sometimes.

Pass along any recommendations for hoopla. I've been meaning to try it, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

 

[nwhoopfan]

Hoopla lets you borrow 10 movies or albums per month. I think you get movies for 3 days, albums are for a week. Hoopla and Kanopy get quite a bit of the same material, but there are some titles that are only on 1 or the other. Hoopla occasionally gets a fairly new release. Kanopy is 5 borrows per month.

 

[nwhoopfan]

Well after all my kvetching, Netflix is offering me 3 months of streaming for free. As they say, free is a very good price.

 

[Palatine]

Polar. Nice little action movie starring Mads Mikkelsen. Hit man about to retire and his old boss wants his pension and sends a bunch of young hipster hitfolk to whack him. High body count. If you like this kind of thing -I do- it is a fun two hours. It received poor reviews but it is well made, on the stylish side and doesn't take itself too serious. Mikkelsen in the third grade classroom is pretty good stuff.

 

[HuskyHawk]

The Nun 2. Not as good as the first one. It's decent and continues to follow the demon that escaped in Romania and which is leaving a trail of horrors, finally ending up at a French school. Frenchie is the unknowing carrier of this evil. It's silly stuff and I have to assume there will be a Nun 3 when Frenchie finally ends up in Massachusetts. I'm just glad I won't be in that one, came close to being a part of that story so it's all odd to me watching these.

 

[Waquoit]

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar - If you are a fellow Wes Anderson fan you will enjoy this. It was delightful.

 

[HuskyHawk]

Occulus. Stars Karen Gillam. Brother and Sister are traumatized by an event as kids, involving a supernatural force and a mirror...or not. Brother was in a mental institution. He is released 10 years later and has moved on from believing there was supernatural involvement. The sister has not. The story unfolds by moving back and forth between present day and those horrible events of 10 years ago. You are left mostly unsure of whether there was or was not some supernatural element, was each sibling makes their case. Ultimately you see both the culmination of the past events and the current events at more or less the same time, and it becomes clear. Aside from an ending I did not like, this did a really good job of maintaining tension the whole time. Less horror than psychological thriller. Pretty good.

 

[HuskyBaggins]

Just saw John Wick Chapter Four. I must be getting old because I thought it was terrible. Upon review I loved the 1st one, liked the 2nd one and barely tolerated 3rd one. This 4th iteration confirms my recommendation to watch the first and forget all the sequels.

I figured I would re-watch the series before I watch part 4. Only through 1 and 2 so far. Still like #1 and #2 is pretty good as well. I do recall getting frustrated by #3, so I tend to expect to be in the same boat as you when all is said and done

 

[HuskyBaggins]

That's too bad. I was hoping they would get this one right. Kevin Smith raved about it, I guess he was just being a hype-man.

Kevin Smith has become a parody of himself at this point. He and Howard Stern could be brothers. Started out thumbing their nose at he mainstream and are now desperate to be loved by the mainstream

 

[nwhoopfan]

It's been out for a while, but I finally watched "The Luckiest Girl Alive" on Netflix. It's a tough watch. Well done. Good performances by Mila Kunis and Chiara Aurelia, who played the younger version of the same character in flashback scenes. It took me about halfway thru the film to figure out one of the other students from the high school flashbacks was played by Thomas Barbusca. SO different from anything else I've seen from him, usually a total goofball.

Has Jennifer Beals aged a day in the last 15-20 years?

 

[superjohn]

Has Jennifer Beals aged a day in the last 15-20 years?

Most attractive woman I've ever seen.

 

[AreBee1969]

Reptile on Netflix was a pretty good cop flick. It stars Benicio Del Toro, Justin Timberlake and Alicia Silverstone.

 

[Palatine]

Reptile on Netflix was a pretty good cop flick. It stars Benicio Del Toro, Justin Timberlake and Alicia Silverstone.

It's a well done for a formula film. Variation on a theme. More mystery than action.

 

[HuskyHawk]

Totally Killer. New movie on Prime. Watched on the plane. Kind of like Scream meets Back to the Future. Stars Kiernan Shipka. It’s funny in spots and generally entertaining. As usual, the depiction of 1997 misses the mark in many ways, but they do a good job of showing the reactions of a modern teen to those times and much of the humor comes from that.

 

[nelsonmuntz]

Fair Play (2023 - Netflix) starts promising and is good until about 30 minutes left, and then starts to spiral. The ending is terrible, and makes me regret having watched it. Then I read a couple of interviews of the director, Chloe Domont, and I really hate the movie.

Spoiler

The Director states in interviews that she is making a feminist statement, but she resorts to a major sexist trope in the buildup, implying that the fiance character Luke is less of a man because he makes less money than the main character, Emily. Emily's efforts to help him in his career are awkward and clumsy, and unsuccessful because Luke just isn't good enough. That story is interesting. Where the wheels come off is the last 30 minutes leading to the end when he tells her he just wants to go his own way and start fresh, she completely loses her mind. So what's the message? Is it that she needs someone to be dependent on her? Fine, but that is not what the Director said in her interviews about the movie.

The last few scenes are disturbing. Emily destroys Luke's reputation permanently to her boss by denying there was ever a relationship with her and Luke. Then Emily smashes a glass on Luke's head in front of his friends and family, primarily to humiliate him. Then they go into a bathroom, start a sexual encounter that she is at least 50% initiating after verbally demeaning and humiliating him, and then in a huge leap for the Luke character, it turns into a sexual assault. The use of a sexual assault in the plot felt gratuitous, and a gimmick to demonize Luke and justify Emily's behavior in the final scene, where Luke tries to leave the relationship and she stabs him twice and makes him beg for her, at which point she tells him to get lost. Without the sexual assault, which comes out of nowhere (Luke spends much of the movie turning down sex with Emily), Luke is actually a sympathetic character. The Director's comments in the interview blame all of the gaslighting by Emily and her violence on Luke. Because male egos are fragile.

 

[nwhoopfan]

Fair Play (2023 - Netflix) starts promising and is good until about 30 minutes left, and then starts to spiral. The ending is terrible, and makes me regret having watched it. Then I read a couple of interviews of the director, Chloe Domont, and I really hate the movie.

Thanks for that. I had it on my list, and then removed it.

 

[nwhoopfan]

"See You On Venus" is newly added to Kanopy. A bit simple and maybe a bit Hallmark-esque, which I usually try to avoid. But I enjoyed it. A young woman who just aged out of the foster care system and a young man who was the driver in a serious car accident that might've paralyzed his best friend and killed another teenager have a bit of a contrived meeting and then go on a contrived trip to Spain together to look for her mom. I'm becoming a fan of Virginia Gardner, seen her in a few things lately. Not the greatest actress, but she has some charm. Spain looked lovely as well.


As an aside, the age old dis in movie reviews "like a 12 year old wrote the script" has now been replaced by "seems like AI wrote the script." I've been seeing that A LOT on imdb lately.

 

[meyers7]

Watched Arrival (2016) last week with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. Not sure how I missed that the first time around, I really enjoyed the storyline. I don't think Amy Adams is the best actress in the world, but she was fine here. The twist and overall "a ha" of it all was really well done. I found myself thinking about the movie for a couple days afterwards which is always a good indicator for me.

If you want to see what she can really do, check out the mini-series, Sharp Objects. She ended up with a Golden Glove nomination for it.

 

[meyers7]

The Burial - Odd pairing of Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones (along with Alan Ruck) . Decent court room drama. Interesting that it was based on a real suit and the characters were real people.

Nothing spectacular, but it was good. Kept my attention.

 

[storrsroars]

Watched "National Champions" (Netflix) last night. It's a mixed bag - a football movie with no football action. It's extremely relevant, well-acted, suspenseful, and fast-moving, while at the same time often having trite dialogue, plot twists that seem gratuitous, and an unsatisfying ending. I recommend it because I think college sports fans will be engrossed with the message, details and presentation, as well as the behind the scenes stuff. It feels true, even though it's based on a stage play and ultimately comes off as unrealistic. But it is engaging and entertaining.

I'd never heard of it, and no wonder - it only lasted two weeks at the box office, was a small budget film ($8 mil) and didn't even make $500K. But I think it'll do well on streaming as its audience will find it.

 

[superjohn]

Parasite- I remember hearing it was really good and I just learned it won best picture. It feels like I haven't seen anything really good in several years and some of these movies with 98% ratings recently have been awful so it was nice this lived up to the hype. Excellent movie.

 

[nwhoopfan]

"Jumping from High Places." Italian movie on Netflix. A lot happening for a 90 minute run time. Young woman in her mid 20s in a scenic coastal village. She's struggled with anxiety all her life, trying to deal with it. Two years before the events of the movie her best friend died, still dealing with that too. I thought it was well done. Interesting characters, well paced.

 

[nelsonmuntz]

Medieval (Hulu-2022) - I will watch almost any historical drama if I recognize anyone in the cast, so I gave this one a shot. It is a Czech movie with Ben Foster, Michael Caine, Matthew Goode and some recognizable Europeans, based on part of the life of Jan Ziska, a Czech hero from the late middle ages. It has a 72% fan rating but the critics don't like it at all. It isn't as bad as the critics reviews, but it has some problems. The middle of the movie is really hard to follow. The characters seem to just be walking around the woods killing people, but clearly the plot is moving along, I am just not sure how.

On the plus side, Foster and Goode are excellent as they always are. Roland Moller is good as Goode's henchman. I like that it was a movie on a subject I had never heard of. It was original, at least to Americans, and interesting. The fight scenes were pretty good for the most part. There is even a lion in the movie.

My biggest complaint is the lead actress, Sophie Lowe. I can't even figure out what reaction she is trying to give in most scenes. Her character is really important in the plot, but Lowe's acting is so bad that I am not even sure what the character is doing much of the time.

 

[storrsroars]

I had no idea there was a movie out there with Bill Burr both starring and directing. But there it was on Netflix, just released on Friday. If you're a fan of Burr's, odds are you'll really enjoy "Old Dads", as a lot of the same themes of Burr's standup material find their way into a movie script. That said, while there are true laugh out loud moments, some of the scenes and characters that Burr rages against are so ridiculously contrived as to be cringey. It's a fairly uneven directorial debut and Burr kinda played it safe by trying to not totally piss off everyone - both the out of touch GenX dads and the soft, weak-kneed millennial PC adherents variously make points and also look like idiots. Burr does this schtick better in "F is for Family", but this movie still delivers some good laughs in a mostly predictable storyline.

While the movie centers around the three dads, there are some great cameos. Paul Walter Hauser plays a vaping motel owner annoyed at Burr's smoking on the balcony (and the neighbor across the courtyard delivers a classic fart scene). Bruce Dern is an Uber driver whom Burr recognizes as the man he'll become in old age if he doesn't change. And Rachel Harris, who played the devil's shrink in "Lucifer" plays an over-the-top ultra-PC head of a progressive private school.

While not perfect, this movie was a nice surprise to find on a miserable wet and cold Friday night.