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tilbageidanmark · 2 years

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Movies I watched this Week - #84

Huell Babineaux X 2:

🍿“Many people are saying” that Better Call Saul is a better show than “Breaking Bad’. I loved BB, which I saw 2-3 times already, and I waited until Saul is done to start watching it. So this week I started bingeing, and in one swoop go, watched the first 4 seasons (40 out of 64 episodes).

Maybe because it’s too much for one seating, I did not find it as compelling as advertised. Jimmy’s arc from a fast-talking conman to a sleazy corner-cutting ‘criminal’ lawyer was uninteresting, and his relationships to his brother Chuck and to his lover Kim Wexler felt flat for me. At his core all he was was a bullshit artist salesman. Walter White, the cancer-stricken chemistry teacher who was looking for a way to pay his medical bills was much more real. But like the name of S3E3, I had already committed significant ‘Sunk Costs’ so I kept on going on.

There were many good moments there, f. ex. the opening scene of “Fifi” (S2 E8) done in a single shot.

I may come back to seasons 5 and 6 soon or later. (Photo Above).

🍿 Comedy for 13-year-olds Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates, only because of my crush on Anna Kendrick. But it also had Huell, the TSA agent from ‘We’re The Millers’ and naked Kumail Nanjiani as a tantric masseur with a foot-long ponytail.

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The Housemaid (2010), a ‘sexy’ Korean soap opera about a live-in maid who gets impregnated by the very upper-class master of the household. A subtle critique of extreme wealth that doesn’t really work. With Youn Yuh-jung, the grandma from ‘Minari’. 4/10.

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“Make America Great Again”: A Night in the Garden is a bone-chilling short documentary from 2017 about the Nazi rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden.

More than 20,000 people attended the proudly-fascist, pro-"Americanism" rally on February 20, 1939. Swastikas, pro-Hitler demagoguery, the savage beating of a protester and defiant anti-Jewish creed in broad daylight. Just like today.

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Zelig, Woody Allen’s 1983 masterful mockumentary about a “human chameleon”, an ego-less man who needs to be liked so much, that he transforms his physical appearance to conform with his surroundings. A seamless blending of genuine 1920′s newsreel footage with vintage look love story. Fantastic cinematography by Gordon Willis. With terrific cameos by Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other intellectuals of the time. Re-watch. 9/10 🍿

Another completely random pick that I never heard of beforehand, and for which I’m happy for: The Girl By The Lake (2007). Starring the always excellent Toni Servillo, and based on a Norwegian crime mystery by Karin Fossum. It’s about a stoic police inspector who is called to investigate the disappearance of a little girl in a small but beautiful Alpine town.

Directorial debut of a Andrea Molaioli, it was the Italian movie awarded with the highest number of David di Donatello (10 out of 15 nominations). Molaioli’s framing and edit of soundtrack was fresh and unusual, and the score which seemed arbitrary, added tremendous meaning to the moody images.

Best discovery of the week.

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I also never heard of Jim Abraham’s Jane Austen's Mafia! (1998) before. A light spoof of ‘The Godfather’ (as well as ‘Casino’ and other Scorsese’s gangster sagas), in the exact style of all the other Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker’s slapstick comedies. Lloyd Bridges’s last role in a Leslie Nielsen-type Brando parody. Not 'Airplane!’ level, but with some gags and jokes that work. 4/10.

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Sylvia Sidney X 2:

🍿Sabotage, a 1936 Hitchcock spy story about a woman whose husband is a terrorist. Includes a long, suspenseful plot of a boy carrying a bomb on a public bus and the fact that the innocent boy, Sidney’s brother, dies on the bus explosion together with all the other passengers. Also, she kills her husband and gets away with it. It also includes (and credits) an early Disney Silly Symphony cartoon as part of the story.

🍿“Welcome to Earth..” Her last role in Tim Burton’s bizarre Mars Attack. Also with Tom Jones, Jack Black and Pam Grier. First watch. 3/10. “Ack ack! Ack! Ack ack ack!...”

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George Clooney’s political thriller The Ides of March, with a screenplay by Beau Willimon just before he made 'House of cards’. It's similar to other “Election Campaign Race” for The Nomination, ‘The Candidate’ and ‘Primary colors’, etc. (And it’s always the Democratic nomination, right?), and it’s fast, and well-built. Everybody in the whole film whispers all their lines. Just 10 years later, it seems anachronistic. 7/10.

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RIP, Olivia Newton-John / RIP, Anne Heche -

🍿First watch: High-school musical for high-schoolers Grease. Horny teenagers played by 24-years-old Scientologist John Travolta, 30-year-old Olivia Newton-John, and 33-year-old Stockard Channing as Rizzo. 50's fantasy of white nostalgia, also with Sid Caesar and Frankie Avalon. The dancing numbers were great though, especially ‘You're the One That I Want’.

🍿Birth, my second by Jonathan Glazer (after ‘Under the skin’), and co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière. A one trick, inexplicable and nearly-good story about eternal love. Elegant widow Nicole Kidman is convinced that a 10-year-old neighbor boy is her dead husband. It has 2 beautiful scenes: A concert shot (at 26:00) that holds its gaze on her face for 4 minutes, and the final, sad scene on the beach. Lauren Bacall and Ann Heche play small roles. 4/10.

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Geri's Game, the first Pixar film to feature a human being as its main character, about an old man who competes with himself in a game of chess. Winner of the 1998 Oscar for Best Short.

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Throw-back to the art project:

Adora with Huell Babineaux Laying On Top Of $80M Stash.

Mars Attack Adora.

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(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

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