‘Brief Encounter’ Blu Ray top notch weepie and one of the finest films ever. That was Christmas Eve lined up for the New Year ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ in 4K UHD
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Another film I have never seen all the way through. Needed to pause a couple of times to swot up on the history but thoroughly enjoyed it. Lovely cinematography of course.
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I had never seen it and an acceptable price Criterion turned up on e-bay.
I shall call him shiftless.JN wanders through life,ignoring his God given skill,taking advantage of women and trying not so hard to get his life on a track he cannot even see.As a period image I knew a whole album full of these characters. Might even be me on page 28.
The extras are interesting though placing this film within its context. Breaking away from the Hollywood traditions and looking else where for inspiration.
Print grainy. Sound lacking. But you have to work with the stock available.
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Not so well today so shall bore you all.
HH’s father sells her and daughter off to a New Zealand farmer who refuses to remove her precious piano from the shore where it was landed.
HK to the rescue. He will help get the piano to the farmhouse if she will offer lessons. Ah! But lessons in what.
Beautifully photographed and characters in which you invest your hopes that life can rise a little above the dire.
Holly Hunter’s character is a mute so that squeaky little voice is not evident.
Director Campion was an advocate of sexual equality during naked scenes so Harvey Keitel has his bits showing. Doesn’t bother me but some folk are strange.
Bluray for me.
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“One battle after another” 2025
I love some of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies. Some of them are masterpeices (There will be blood, Phantom thread). Some of his movies have great elements, but fail to come together as a whole (Magnolia, Inherent vice).
“One battle after another” falls into the second camp for me. It has really good scenes and tension. But, when it was all over, I did not feel I had watched a great movie.
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The Hunt for Red October
Excellent.
M
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A bit different from the run of the mill Netflix offerings. Colin ‘eyebrows’ Farrell in Ballad of a Small Player. Literally a hungry ghost story set in glitzy Macau.
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Yes, I love this film.
My original private copy was a (commercial) VHS. Later replaced by DVD.
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A very reluctant evacuee from Stepney Green jumps train trying to return to his mother and grandad.
Although I was hoping for something a little more ‘spikey’ it is a warm tale of family life, with some racial tension,in the EastEnd of London during the Blitz.
Saoirse makes a fine mother. Grandad played by Paul Weller. The lad is a natural and Roddy Ho one of the villains.
Sir Steve McQueen directs.
Nosferatu
Despite being brilliantly shot and acted, I couldn’t make myself love it half as much as the more deeply flawed 1993 effort from Francis Ford Copola that had poor casting and poor acting.
The deviations from the Bram Stoker narrative seemed pointless (essentially the same story but set in Germany and all the characters are basically there with different names) and I found it hard to form any empathetic attachments to the characters.
The end result is odd. I enjoyed it and thought it was good but my appreciation for how well Bram Stoker’s Dracula was shot up considerably. Both are ultimately in that rare category of big budget art movie but Copola’s was infused with real visual magic and poetry in a way that Nosferatu wasn’t.
Next, Pitch Black
It shouldn’t be good but it is. A clear ripoff of half a dozen other movies with a big helping of Alien, and yet it got the Criterion Collection treatment just a couple years after release of which I’ve had on my shelf for over 20 years. So clearly I qasn’t the only one who recognised something special here. Keep the premise dead simple. Don’t ask anything taxing from your group of B list actors. Then chop ‘em up. Classic B movie formula. But Twohy executes it all very well. While it isn’t winning awards for anything, it’s tight, well made, and well paced.
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My wife and I watched this last evening and found ourselfs laughing quite a bit. A lovely satire and at times felt pretty close to the truth after reading newspapers and watching the news over several decades. It was streaming on HBO here in the USA.
Oppenheimer
I have watched two great films in the last couple of months. The first was The Trial a Nuremberg, the second was Oppenheimer.
Nuremberg was a film about explosive and incendiary events set in a dusty courtroom.
The second was the potentially dry story about the creation of an explosive and incendiary bomb.
Both had the ability to be sleep inducing, but both had superb scripts, direction and acting; in the service of a narrative that speaks directly to the human condition.
I had bought Oppenheimer over a year ago, as a potential for Christmas 2024, no one was up for it; and it then gathered dust. Having kicked my posterior and started it and found it compelling.
Nolan’s script chooses to illuminate Oppenheimer’s university career, personal life and peccadilloes, and the political and personal fallout caused by his Manhattan leadership, and the ‘fallout’ (sic) from their success. He wraps this in a slowly unfolding mystery about how and why he lost his security clearance.
I loved the ending exchange, both in what was said and in how people often interpret events through their own self-centered prism.
M
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I absolutely love a classic epic at this time of year and Ben Hur is just one of the greats. The chariot race remains one of the great cinematic moments. You can keep your CGI/Avatar type nonsense - nothing beats actual live action.
It also has the great Stephen Boyd ( born William Millar in N Ireland) - a great actor who died horribly young at 45 from a massive heart attack). Gore Vidal revealed that the director, William Wyler, told Boyd that for the scene at the beginning when Messala and Ben Hur are reunited after many years, Boyd should act as though they had had a gay relationship when younger. Chuck Heston wasn’t party to this for obvious reasons. It’s believed that Boyd had a fling with Brigitte Bardot
Writing this makes me realise how much I miss @TheKevster contributions to the forum. You ok Kev?
Bonus point - what’s the link between Ben Hur and Dads Army?
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I agree, superb film, one I tend to watch at Easter.
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Luc Besson turns his attention to ‘D’, this one passed me by last year and was oddly less expensive to buy than to rent. Told not as a horror story and more a tale of lost love. Nice visuals and Christoph Waltz plays the role of Christoph Waltz well. There are more interesting vampire films available.
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