the remake is like if James Hurley was the main character of Parasite Eve. It’s amazing
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old movie nights have taken a festive turn for the holiday season
Scrooge / A Christmas Carol
still the same general story but with a few changes to drive home the morals: Ebenezer is the younger brother of Fan & is shunned by his father after his mother died giving birth to him, and some very in-character backstory for Scrooge & Marley’s company
good, grim, some very creepy scenes with the ghosts of other spirits who have lost their powers
It’s a Wonderful Life
never seen it before. the intro was too long, Violet was too sexy. did Capra put an Italian extra into every film
We’re No Angels
three convicts escape from prison in French Guiana, and set up in a shop to hide out, rob it, and murder the family who run it first chance they get. but it’s Christmas Eve, and the owner is soon arriving to make the staff’s lives hell
obviously an adaptation of a French comedy play. so many jokes and lines where I laughed and no one else did “true, that wasn’t funny”. Peter Ustinov looks 20 in this film, “who’s this prat, oh he’s good”
sappy (not too much), the ending is dumb, the violence all threatened or off-camera, still managed to maintain the audiences’ attention. though I did get a chorus of complaints as the opening credits listed the composers for two songs “not another musical, what are you doing to your poor family”
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“It’s a devil ship I tells ya, leading us right into a trap”
Do they even make movies like this anymore where things just happen. Holy shit this is good.
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watched the Netflix thriller Carry On. Some writer thought that the age difference between the antagonist and the loser protagonist was worth drawing attention to with lots of “you millenials are always on your phones.”
Anyway, it’s kind of not that great for a lot, but the low action moments are the best. Felt sort of iike a direct to video version of M Night Shyamalan’s Trap, except in an airport instead of a pop concert. And I mean that in the best possible way.
Finished watching those really shitty looking scans of Empire and Jedi.
Empire is still great! I kept wondering why my memory of Jedi is so spotty from childhood, and I think I must have watched up til the sail barge blows and left it at that.
You can say the Ewok stuff is childish or immature or unbelievable or whatever, but its greatest sin is that it’s just super fucking boring and never ends. You gotta watch those miserable little things pantomime and throw rocks and shit right to the last second.
Some good dogfights and the whole final fight just bogged down with that stuff. It’s a shame.
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Ewoks are fucked. Not like Jawas. Jawas were awesome.
Ootini!!!
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I’m an rotj hater because it feels like two unrelated movies smashed together and one of those movies is bad.
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I know people have dragged the Ewoks into a fine pulp over the last 40 years, but it’s the higher level “we’re supposed to believe the galactic empire is at its peak threat capability and they get done in by some little guerilla Furbies” and the more matter of fact “they’re not funny or cute and they grossly overstay their welcome they didn’t have in the first place.”
I’ll go along with Luke’s harebrained intricate clockwork jailbreak scheme! That’s fine! I cannot abide these miserable little doofuses though.
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I think rotj is the way it is because Lucas had just watched Coppola go insane making apocalypse now and he was like “how do I do a much, much tamer Vietnam allegory”
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it’s also cribbing heavily from ursula le guin’s the word for world is forest, which is itself both a vietnam allegory and her worst work.
(james cameron’s avatar also obviously cribbed from this novella)
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I already said it like 6 years ago but there are 3 good star wars movies and they are 4 5 and 8
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Queer has some arguably overindulgent qualities, but it was ultimately very beautiful and a worthwhile attempt at depicting extreme loneliness. And it was cool for me as a Burroughs fan.
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I love ewoks.
Not taking any questions at this time.
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Ewoks are great but the Ewok stuff isn’t even really staged well… like even if they wanted to do a big “the indigenous repel the invaders” story, the scope and the scale of the Endor scenes are completely wrong.
I did just read a book about apocalypse now that included a line about Lucas saying to Coppola “you should’ve just gone there with like 5 actors for a 3 week shoot and filled in the rest with grainy footage of the Philippine army” so I think there’s an argument that he sort of deliberately half assed it
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ahem
and Rogue One, you mean?
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the ewok movies are better than the ewok parts of return of the jedi but i still really like the tempted by sexy evil stuff in jedi
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the toy commercial and lead-in tacked on to the end of the movie knock it into bad territory
i always forget there’s the vader scene at his lava castle where he says “don’t choke on your aspirations” that part is getting cut in my personal copy too
incidentally i hope they don’t ruin andor season 2 with fanservice
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fair game, but otoh when compared to 7,8,9, it looks like a proper movie and since they didn’t have to consider franchise-continuity, they could implement some gravity to … some decisions.
Rogue One has some of the worst character writing in any of the movies. It’s very nearly a dramatic session of playing with your own toys, except the characters even fail at playing archetypes.
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