What Movies Have You Seen Lately?

Color Purple:



I rate it relatively high.

It's a tear-jerker.



Good to show how women rose above adversity, after 1900.

Even though Slavery ended, many women were considered slaves.

I was watching a weird Japanese movie about people living in pits in sand last night. They kept their village alive by tricking people passing through to climb down and spend the night. Then they took the ladder away and trapped them there. I haven't finished watching it yet, so not sure if there's something more than that going on. You have to regularly dig and remove sand or you might get buried in sand.

The movie ‘Notorious’ (1946) came up on the schedule of Turner Classic Movies the other day, a movie I thought I had seen way back in the 50s. I thought about the date, ‘46, and realized this was pretty unlikely. Sure enough, I hadn’t seen it, and I’ve seen a lot of Hitchcock. It has some plot holes, but a good film, a classic.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038787/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_4_tt_5_nm_2_q_notorious

The movie blurb said it was about catching Nazis in South America, and I expected to find it to be a story concerning the capture of escaped war criminals so they could be prosecuted. Instead it was about the fear that Germany was going to be able to rise again, creating a Nazi 4th Reich, and South America providing the means to germinate this.

I was surprised to think that this was all that real of a concern at the time, I had a notion that the concern had turned immediately to Cold War matters and that the West only viewed [West] Germany as a needed ally for which the Marshall Plan was needed and put in place to get it and other countries up and running. Naturally, I started looking things up. Turns out Churchill made his Iron Curtain speech in 1946, while much of the movie was made in 1945. Furthermore, Churchill’s speech was not necessarily well received immediately, and the Cold War isn’t considered to have started until 1947. The Marshall Plan? 1948. When you think about it, it would have been natural to only be concerned with whether Germany was going to continue to be the enemy rather than a new ally, and no doubt the public and the various powers were going to be focused on that, unable to see the future and how our thinking was going to be wrenched.

Quite coincidentally, I came across a youtube video covering this exact history. It confirms that immediately after the war, the concern was all about Nazis and new Nazi movements and uprisings.

From Mark Felton, who is very good

Not sure what scene it was, but I was blown away when Ingrid Bergman walks into the room dressed to the 9s. I thought Grace Kelly looked pretty stunning in "Rear Window" but I think Bergman topped that even.

I watched a movie called Roadhouse on Netflix this week. What a horrible movie. I think it is a spinoff of an older movie but I would not recommend it to anyone.

Quote: DRich

I watched a movie called Roadhouse on Netflix this week. What a horrible movie. I think it is a spinoff of an older movie but I would not recommend it to anyone.

It's kind of a classic. I thought it was solid, not the greatest movie of all time, but pretty enjoyable. I have not seen it in many years though, but it was an interesting concept. I also tend to like Patrick Swayze and think he is underrated.

Quote: Gandler

It's kind of a classic. I thought it was solid, not the greatest movie of all time, but pretty enjoyable. I have not seen it in many years though, but it was an interesting concept. I also tend to like Patrick Swayze and think he is underrated.

It probably is at the top of genre of plots, where quiet guy has to take on a group of thugs that run the town. He usually prevails at the end.

Speaking of bad movies, if you joined Amazon Prime, the app for TV has all the bad movies you'd ever want to see. Amazon seems to have decided they can't have too much selection and just went crazy getting an amazing number. Naturally, the ones they don't charge for, showing them with ads or even ad-free, these they got cheap. They also have some top movies and you pay for those. You, maybe, not me, they charge plenty.

Naturally the cheap movies have something wrong with them, and they are out there in droves. It's an exercise in marveling to watch how they manage to put in such a huge effort and a huge amount of money, then go on to ruin the movie. In particular, they tend to ruin the endings, making it something maddening or just plain awful.

And then there's the incredible mistakes they make. I'm trying to watch 'The Lost City of Z' now, I really liked the book. I just watched where they are finding the source of the so-and-so river, and they do it by taking a raft and floating it, yes, just going along with the current, to the source! I'm not making that up. Meanwhile the effort they are making in every other regard is almost worthy of awe, just tons of effort and money. Amazing.

As I suspected the newer Godzilla x Kong is not very good.

Commentary on the monster acting and story skills by "The Atlantic" reviewer.

Quote:

Maybe creatures like him could do more than merely stomp around and roar a bunch.

IMO, you could take the most boring subject in the world and make a good story if you have skilled people in the arts. FX is not supposed to be the main attraction.

Quote: Gandler

It's kind of a classic. I thought it was solid, not the greatest movie of all time, but pretty enjoyable. I have not seen it in many years though, but it was an interesting concept. I also tend to like Patrick Swayze and think he is underrated.

The one I watched just came out in 2024.