THE CONVERSATION! Yes

I too was underwhelmed by Spotlight. Also couldn't get into The Post. They're probably great, but particularly with The Post, I couldn't forget that I was watching A Very Important Movie.

The Post I thought suffered from that way more than Spotlight. It was literally just a Hanks and Streep swan song circle jerk.

I thought it told the story quite well. And Spotlight was incredible.

Yeah, it was a decent and fun movie. Interesting info : they hired a linguist from UBC, Vancouver, to create the native spoken language in the film, which would most likely the ancestral dialect from yore (she worked on it for a couple of years)

https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/20...years-ago.html

Heard my Halloween review link wasn't working, so I'll repost:

Halloween - 7/10 (Highly Enjoyable)

Free Solo (2018)

This doc tells the story of one of the greatest sports accomplishments of all time which occurred last year when Alex Honnald free climbed El Capitain.

This is the best climbing film ever made and among the best documentaries I’ve ever seen.

It’s hilarious, intellectual, thrilling, scary, and exhilarating. It contains amazing nature photography. Deep dives into to existential philosophy. Ethical discussions of the nature of being a documentarian.

Even if you have never climbed you will not breathe through huge swaths of this film.

Go see this on the big screen if you can.

Grade: A+

Saw the first Halloween for the first time this past weekend. I was surprised to find that it was great. I had lumped it in with every bad slasher copycat I was aware of, but I mean, the reason it had hundreds of copycats is because it's ****ing great. It also seems to be aware of some of the stuff Scream would make fun of it for 20 years later (like the not-quite-dead villain). Stellar ending.

Scream I last saw a couple of years ago and it's also great.

I liked the Costner Robin Hood a lot as a kid, partly for the soundtrack, and partly because I loved the scene where he falls from a burning rope. I re-enacted that as much as I could with a bed and pillows.

Yes this is also excellent, I have a 2016 post here about it.

I've read that if the writer is specific about the race/sex of characters it will be much more likely to stay that way.

I agree with this, and Hanks is especially pathetic when compared to Robards playing the same character, but I still liked The Post a lot.

Funnily enough I enjoyed it too, but there was no hiding the Oscar bait in it.

I just scored tickets to a late night showing of Mandy next week. Pretty pumped. I love where I live!

Netflix has Welles's The Other Side of the Wind now!

nice!

Ever wanted a screen-cap of a particular shot or scene from a movie but had no real way of finding it online?

Well, now you do.

Movie Screencaps.com

This is amazing.

Nice, but limited. Fortunately, it includes Lawrence of Arabia.

Bohemian Rhapsody, Bryan Singer, 2018

This is really two movies, not one. The first movie is a by-the-numbers bio-pic that checks all the boxes: parental disapproval, band estrangements, awakening sexuality, evil hangers-on trying to break up the band, excess drugs and promiscuousness, and a final, noble battle with a deadly disease.

None of which is all that interesting, to be honest. It's all just the in-between parts while we wait for the music.

One thing that pissed me off was that they played fast and loose with the timeline and when Queen music came out. The first song we see Freddie Mercury play with the other boys in a run-down club is "Keep Yourself Alive."

Really? One of their biggest hits is the very first song Freddie plays with the other band members?

But okay, I can handle a little narrative license. But that's not all. We hear music from Jazz before A Night of the Opera Comes out. We hear "Crazy Little Thing called Love" before a scene of them working on "We Will Rock You."

Speaking of the latter song, we see words flash across the scene that says 1980 and then we see the band working on "We Will rock You."

What? That song's from News Of The World in 1977. The Game came out in 1980.

We do see John Deacon introducing the band to the famous bass line of "Another One Bites The Dust," which is cool, but man, the messed up timeline is annoying. And I'm not even a huge Queen fan, so if it bothers me, I can't imagine what it might do to Queen fanatics.

On to the second movie, which is awesome:

When the film sticks with Queen making music, writing songs, playing with different genres of music, confusing record executives, and - then - playing live shoes - Bohemian Rhapsody soars.

Rami Malek is astonishing as Freddie Mercury. By the end of the movie, he is Freddie, and I forgot what the real Mercury looked like! Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon are played by their twins, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, and Joseph Mazzello. They are incredible. But just like in the real Queen, they naturally take a back seat to Freddie (Malek).

When they play Rio and break the record for biggest paid concert ever, we are there. When they play Bohemian Rhapsody for the first time in concert, it's electrifying.

But Singer holds his cards to his vest for most of the movie, until the end: the famous Queen performance at Live Aid, before 100,000 screaming fans at Wembley and two billion people around the world.

There's an old adage in film and theater: leave them with a WOW and the audience won't care what came before.

Well, Singer gives a wow times ten. We see the entirety of Queen's Live Aid performance, performed by this fake band. At Wembley. In front of 100,000 people.

I'm sure the crowd was a lot of CGI, but damn if it didn't look like they were there.

Singer begins the concert with a bird's eye view of the stadium, many hundreds of feet above, and SWOOPS down into Wembley, over and through the audience, onto the stage while the band comes on, and finishes with a close-up of Freddie's face as he sits at the piano and begins playing "Rhapsody." All in one shot. It is bravura filmmaking.

And Malek just owns Mercury during this, especially the Radio Ga-Ga bit where the entire crowd is doing the music video hand-claps in unison, and when he does his "note heard 'round the world " a cappella.

It's one helluva way to end a movie.
20 minutes of Queen in concert.
Very wise.

So, two movies. The first one gets a C-. The second one gets an A.

Guess that makes it a B-!

*******

One thing the movie did was reaffirm what an amazing, unique talent Mercury was.

A long-ish rumination on metaphor and movies.



Ironically he mentions things that "looking for the hidden clues" type of videos would go gaga for like the tattoo appearing on different people. I didn't notice that when I watched the movie.

New Ronnie Coleman documentary on netflix is very good. One of the better ones i have seen on bodybuilding, pretty sad how he is doing these days though. But that aspect of the documentary is pretty unique and is what makes this really good.

Heard this morning that they're filming a biopic about Mr. Rogers starring Tom Hanks. Sounds interesting.

Your pony is very slow. It’s been out for months.

Regarding Queen, I don't think them playing KYA was a stretch. It was the first song on their first album. It was their first single, and failed to make the charts. Probably the first song they played together was really a cover, but I'm not surprised they wouldn't show that.

The late 70s timeline mix up would mess with me though. They went through a noted change in style which shouldn't have been messed with.

Netflix's efforts to finish The Other Side of the Wind are well worth it. Watch it and the documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, which explains the history of the film. John Huston is perfect playing a director, who is Welles/not Welles, trying to gain financing to finish his film (the film-within-the-film) and celebrating his birthday with assorted guests played by the likes of Henry Jaglom, Claude Chabrol, Paul Mazursky, and Dennis Hopper. The film-within-the-film features Welles's paramour Oja Kodar and her ass mostly, and it seems to be a parody of Zabriske Point (the party was filmed in a house next to the house Antonioni blew up for his film). Peter Bogdanovich plays a New Hollywood director who has some sort of Oedipal relationship with Huston's Old Hollywood director. Others play versions of real life personalities, such as Pauline Kael and Marlene Dietrich, and the film also includes Mercedes McCambridge from Touch of Evil and Paul Stewart from Citizen Kane.

I think Welles envisioned this as a sort of fictional documentary, and it does share a resemblance to F For Fake. Of course, we can only speculate what this would have looked like if Welles had been able to edit the film himself. Nevertheless, I was intrigued.

I will be watching that soon, John. Any chance to see new footage of Huston should be well worth it.

Err my pony is dumb. I was thinking of the doc not narrative film. Lol

Movie night tonight with daughter and granddaughter. Usually, it's more like Paddington Bear rather than The Other Side of the Wind.

Shuffle, check out Kanopy.

Movie night was Coco, with Grandpa and granddaughter singing "Wishin' and Hopin" during dinner break.