Creed II - An absolute must if you're a Rocky IV fan or a Creed fan. It fumbles around with a lot of the setup in my opinion, many questionable story choices and motivations that don't quite work, but it does ultimately succeed once the fight starts.
The fight itself was better than I expected, better than the previous movie (not as good as Balboa or 1).
Dolph Lundgren is excellent, all of that is handled far better than you'd expect it should be (especially if you haven't seen Rocky IV in a long time and are making the mistake I made of assuming it was bad).
Goosebumps were had at times.
A boy of around 12 was near me with (presumably) his dad and mom. I first watched the Rocky movies with my dad at around that age. Did the combination of seeing them, along with the father/son elements of the film, along with my father's death last year get me a little misty-eyed? Perhaps.
Shampoo (1975, Hal Ashby) - Warren Beatty stars as a hairstylist who gets around. It's genuinely funny at times, especially in one stellar party scene. The scene reminded me of about what I would expect from something like a Neil Simon play, with well-scripted chaos as relationships entangle and people jab at each other.
I would normally see a movie being play-like and too clever with its words as a bad thing.
But this avoids that entirely because it largely substitutes excellent acting and facial expressions for the verbal stuff.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dominic
Wow, that's cool...why aren't you a billionaire?
This was like 20 years later, he was no longer on Wall St.
Quote:
Originally Posted by biggerboat
I've been thinking the exact same thing(s).
I haven't been wowed the first time with many Coen movies. Blood Simple and No Country are the only two I can think of. I had to watch Big Lebowski about 5 times before I saw the light.
I had the same thoughts with Hail Caesar and it still didn't quite get there when I saw it the second time. Lebowski I have seen 3-5 times and have not "seen the light" yet. For a non-Coen example, I've often repeated that Blade Runner took me multiple formats and decades before it hit.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (wrote some on it earlier) fits perfectly with what I discussed with a friend just last week. He asked me who my #1 living filmmaker is other than Lynch, and I said it's gotta be the Coens - they're who I'd be most excited for a new movie from* [other than Lynch], even though for me their filmography is pretty uneven. A couple are in my overall top 5 (NCFOM) to 10 (Burn After Reading) ever, a few I just don't get but really want to give the benefit of the doubt, and a bunch are at different levels in-between.
The 6 short films in Scruggs are like a microcosm of that. I'd put ~2 of them as literally some of the best Westerns ever, a couple that I "want to believe" in, and a couple in between.
*Oddly, this was with me not even realizing the new Coens movie was coming out that same week.