Been rewatching Boston Legal. Favorite TV show of all time. Seasons 1-3 feature the finest dialogue David E Kelley has ever written IMO. Made me a massive fan of James Spader. Fuck, I even forgave him for Stargate.
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Steve Jobs
Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle are a pretty formidable writer/director combo. I thought this was an interesting story that was done very well. It’s 2 hrs long but almost felt too short; I wanted more at the end.
Fassbender, Rogen, Winslett, and Daniels all gave impressive performances. 8/10
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I’m thrilled that you can watch classic NBA games on Amazon Prime now.
I just got done with Game 5 of the 1991 NBA Finals. I won’t spoil the ending in case you haven’t seen it, but it’s a great game of basketball. Great performances from Magic, Jordan, Pippen and Jack Nicholson.
10/10
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Interstellar
Watched it again. This is still one of my favorite movie scenes ever.
9/10
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Europa Report
This movie uses the found footage trope to tell the story of a group of astronauts that go to Europa (moon of Jupiter) in the attempt to find life there. It proceeds very predictably, but the format adds enough mystery to make it interesting.
Acting was pretty good. Special effects were a little low-rent but not distractingly so.
Worth a watch if you like the genre. 6.5/10
I love that movie. McConaughey and Chastain (and the little girl Murph) are amazing. It would be a 10/10 for me without Anne Hathaway’s cringe-inducing “love” monologue. 9.8/10
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At the daughters’ insistence, I reluctantly watched The Marvelous Mrs. Mazel on Amazon Prime.
It’s definitely a chick show, annoyingly liberal, and a bit blue for my Orthodox taste.
But it was worth it to understand The Borscht Belt/Catskill Resorts (e.g., Dirty Dancing), which is a major part of American Jewish (and really anyone American) history/life, whether one knows it or not. Not something we had or appreciated in Israel.
I watched 1917 on Memorial Day. I thought it was a great technical achievement and it was interesting to see the trenches and no-man’s land brought to life.
My only real qualm is the forced diversity in a historical film. I’d watch a film about The First Battle of Ypres where an Indian soldier was awarded the Victoria Cross even if it featured no white actors. It was real, it happened. Why put a token black and token Indian soldier in a setting where they wouldn’t have been, even if it is still fiction? There is no shortage of actual events showcasing the diverse makeup of soldiers in WWI without forcing diversity in film. I don’t understand how anyone benefits from giving people the impression that the UK fielded mixed-race units in WWI. People across the world were racist as fuck back then. Portray that, if anything.
Otherwise it was a great WWI movie that at least scratched the surface of the horrors of that particular war, which I believe is an under-represented event in modern film with modern production techniques.
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130k Indians served on the Western front in WW1. By 1917 dismounted cavalry brigades of the Indian Army in Flanders not relocated to Egypt for the offensive against the Ottomans were used to fill the gaps between front line British regiments, so it’s very plausible that they would intermix.
My bigger objection in that scene is the liberal employment of trucks.
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In units, at that time, as depicted in the film? Is it plausible that any WWI army unit would have a single Indian soldier and a single black soldier serving in it? Maybe it is, I’ve only read a few books on WWI.
I’m well aware of non-whites serving under all kinds of flags, so why not accurately depict that somehow if a diversity quote of some kind needed to be hit? Perhaps there could have been an Indian cavalry regiment up the line from the Devonshires? This is crossing into PWI territory, but I can’t help but speculate that the filmmakers were concerned about some kind of backlash if the film did not fulfill whatever arbitrary diversity quota was settled on. I just don’t see how it helps anyone to depict that.
I forgot to mention the trucks as troop transports, but that raised an eyebrow too. Where were all of the horses? I suppose I can’t nitpick too much, as not many films go to any lengths to depict the logistics of war in any era. There’s a reason we get miniseries about Dick Winters types but the contributions of the company S4 are barely given any screen time.
While the filmmaker’s motives were probably PC, the depictions are not inaccurate.
Black men living the British Isles would serve in regular British Army regiments mixed with white soldiers.
People would probably cry “PC gone mad” had the film shown a black man wearing a kilt in a Scottish regiment in WW1:
It’s not as a bad as the railway carriage scenes in Dunkirk, but pretty bad nevertheless.
They’re showing British trucks carrying infantry driving into no man’s land like they’re US recon troops in 1944-45 in Western Europe.
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I just started watching this show after your and a friend’s recommendation. It is damn good and Spader is terrific.
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Some notable stuff we’ve seen the last month or two:
Haunting of Hill House - TV series based on the classic story (one season only). Thought it was phenomenal. There was one episode that literally gave my wife nightmares, and there were two or three moments throughout the season where I legitimately said “I did not see that coming.” It bounces back and forth between timelines, so we see the same characters as kids and adults. Some of the kid actors gave better performances than some of the adults.
Hunters - Got through one and a half episodes, couldn’t get into it. Set in NY in the 1970s, Jewish resistance fighters hunt down escaped WW2 nazis. It just couldn’t find the right tone. Felt like part Marvel movie assembling a ragtag team of good guys, part torture porn portraying the nazis as supervillain masterminds who enacted overly complicated torture games on WW2 prisoners. Al Pacino plays a Holocaust survivor, over-the-top accent and all.
I Googled the ending of the show out of curiosity and, seeing one of the two big plot twists, I groaned out loud and would’ve been so disappointed to have sat through for that payoff.
Mr. Right - Fun enough. Sam Rockwell is a hitman who starts going out with civilian Anna Kendrick, shenanigans ensue. Anna Kendrick is her Anna Kendrickiest. RZA also has a pretty good role.
Hotel Artemis - Tried capitalizing on the John Wick “assassin universe with its own rules and community”, but failed. Jodie Foster runs a hospital for criminals, bad guys show up, they’re not supposed to fight when they’re there… but of course they do. Sofia Boutella, Charlie Day, Bautista, Sterling K. Brown, and Jeff Goldblum.
Bushwick - Was on a Bautista kick because I don’t think he’s that terrible an actor, all things considered. Brittany Snow was terrible. This was basically Red Dawn if the bad guys invaded Brooklyn instead of the the Midwest. Really great camera work, almost entirely shoulder-mounted/not steady cam and lots of very long takes.
Highlights include: Good guy asks captured bad guy, “Why’d you invade Bushwick?” Bad guy says, “Intel said there wouldn’t be resistance because guns are illegal here, plans changed when the neighborhood started shooting at us.”
Clue - Because there’s never a bad time to watch Clue.
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Fuck, this was good. Disappointing that other seasons will likely have other casts, which is what I’ve heard, but it also speaks to the importance of a well-established story arc - there is a clear beginning and an end, not just a milk-the-story-for-as-long-as-we-can never-ending storyline that descends further into madness every season in a desperate attempt at keeping your attention. I’m lookin’ at you, Lost.
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I tapped out 15 minutes into the first episode. It’s basically The Man in the High Castle if it was written and directed by Michael Bay and the Nazis had still lost The War.
0/10
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That’s about how long I lasted. It looks like some sort of revenge porn mixed with a victim complex. The thing is there were actually real Nazi hunters and they have some actual good stories. Making it into some type of superhero genre manages to achieve the impressive task of simultaneously belittling and aggrandizing the subject.
Bandits (2001)
I watched Bandits again. It’s a wonderful, magical little movie from Barry Levinson(Rain Man). I’m such a fan boy of this movie I’m gonna go as far as to say it features the best performances of Billy Bob Thornton’s and Bruce Willis’s careers. 8.5/10
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I finally watched the first episode of Mr Robot. It’s not bad.
My wife and I watched JoJo Rabbit on our last date night. I really liked it, my wife, not so much, too dark for her. She enjoyed most of it I should say, but one death in particular turned her off. The guy playing Hitler was getting annoying by the end. I would recommend it.
Saw once upon a time in Hollywood a few months ago. I also liked this one more than my wife. She had no idea who Sharon Tate was or what happened to her, and since I didn’t want to spoil anything, I didn’t tell her. In hindsight, if she knew I think she would have liked it more. I only wish more of the family had shown up for the festivities.
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