Random Movie Thoughts Thread

[The Cat]

Actor Gene Hackman, His Wife and Dog Found Dead in Santa Fe Home: Sheriff

The two-time Oscar winner and star of 'The French Connection' and 'Superman,' has died at 95 alongside his wife Betsy Arakawa

www.yahoo.com

Saw that this morning. All things considered, at least they went out peacefully and together, but holy crap. @_@

 

[Totenkindly]

Saw that this morning. All things considered, at least they went out peacefully and together, but holy crap. @_@

My first thought was carbon monoxide poisoning or something similar, but I guess we'll see...

 

[The Cat]

My first thought was carbon monoxide poisoning or something similar, but I guess we'll see...

yeah that's thee general assumption on reddit. Lots of reminders for people to get detectors and keep the batteries fresh. I hope we're all still in a position for that stuff to matter in 2026. Thankfully not a lot of conspiracy theories...yet. But I mean the time for that would have been if this had happened when Enemy of the State was still hot. Morbid jokes for my sanity in these trying times aside. I'll miss Gene Hackman as an actor. Birdcage, Hoosiers, The French Connection The Quick and the Dead, Crimson Tide, Heartbreakers, and being the best part of those awful superman movies(no offense to the cast of those movies, but I feel like Richard Donner hates superman or the audience, its hard to say...

But Gene Hackman will be missed. I was really hoping he was gonna be one of our 100 year humans.

 

[Totenkindly]

yeah that's thee general assumption on reddit. Lots of reminders for people to get detectors and keep the batteries fresh. I hope we're all still in a position for that stuff to matter in 2026. Thankfully not a lot of conspiracy theories...yet. But I mean the time for that would have been if this had happened when Enemy of the State was still hot. Morbid jokes for my sanity in these trying times aside. I'll miss Gene Hackman as an actor. Birdcage, Hoosiers, The French Connection The Quick and the Dead, Crimson Tide, Heartbreakers, and being the best part of those awful superman movies(no offense to the cast of those movies, but I feel like Richard Donner hates superman or the audience, its hard to say...

Well, the Donner cut was still better than the other version of the film. *shrug*

I mentioned this elsewhere but his performance in "The Firm" (despite not being one of his more acclaimed films, and it having other star-level cast) really has stuck with me over the years. Avery Tolar is Mitch's mentor and is this easy-going, relatable, unapologetic guy -- but there's this well of deep sadness in him filtering through whatever he does, and it really comes out that he loves his wife but despite his worldly success she seems to have lost interest in him (his words). You can't tell what grievances there are legitimate on her part, but he does seem to truly regret how things have gone and while he distracts himself with a host of things available to a man of his influence and wealth, he never seems happy. By the end Mitch's wife Abby refers to him as "decent... and corrupt .. and ruined... and so unhappy..." And Hackman pulls this off so beautifully. it could have been such a throwaway part in anyone else's hands, but he finds a vulnerability in the character and fearlessly goes there without becoming melodramatic about it, it's subtle and just a quiet sadness... it's quite lovely. Out of all the rotten people at the Firm of Bendini, Lambert, and Locke, he was actually one of the most decent despite his corruption, and you genuinely feel sad for him at the end.

he had a lot of skill in his performances... and edge, when it was required.

But Gene Hackman will be missed. I was really hoping he was gonna be one of our 100 year humans.

Yeah. That would have been nice. he's one of the few that managed to legitimately walk away from the business, and was never a red carpet guy. Nor a "pretty face" guy.

 

[SD45T-2]

I actually know a lot of these (I think)... but there's a few I can't quite place and don't feel like looking them up.

See Spoilers for names and a few things they were in (but most were in a ton of stuff)


View attachment 32240

Row 1
William Fichtner - Heat, Contact
Bill Duke - Predator
? [Fake Matthew Fox]
David O’Hara - Braveheart, Harry Potter 5

Row 2
Michael Cudlitz - walking Dead
David Morse - The Crossing Guard, Contact
Keith David - Cloud Atlas
Peter Sarsgaard (?) - Knight & Day

Row 3
? [Fake Tim Allen]
Noel Gugliemi -- Training Day
Eric Roberts - Julia Roberts' brother, Emma Roberts' dad
Ciaran Hinds - Road to Perdition, GoT

Row 4
? [fake Zachari Levi]
Peter Stormare - American Gods, Minority Report, Fargo
? [fake Lee Byung-Hun?]
? no clue

Top center right is Vinnie Jones, second row right is Tom Sizemore, and I think bottom right is Kim Coates.

And just to keep it confusing, there's also a white character actor named David Keith.

 

[Totenkindly]

Flow just won Best Animated Picture oscar.

And Anora won for Best Original Screenplay, over The Brutalist and A Real Pain.
That's kind of a big flag. It might actually pull off Best Director and Best Picture.

But Conclave got Best Adapted.
That's kind of a shame for Nickel Boys.

EDIT: Anora just won Best Editing as well.

And Best Director.

And Best Actress.

It's going to win Best Picture.

Edit2: it did.

 

[Red Herring]

‘Standing up against the devil’: how the far right tried to co-opt Dietrich Bonhoeffer biopic

In the US, Todd Komarnicki’s biopic of the theologian murdered by the Nazis was marketed using Maga rhetoric. The film-maker explains the heartbreak this caused him

Since the rise of Donald Trump, nationalist ideologues have stepped up efforts to use the pacifist civil rights activist Bonhoeffer as an unlikely touchstone. In the 922-page rightwing governance roadmap Project 2025, a Bonhoeffer quotation, ripped out of context, appears on page 11 to argue for closing US borders to migrants.

The bizarre rewriting of history was spearheaded by Eric Metaxas, a Maga activist, who wrote a 2009 biography called Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy: A Righteous Gentile vs the Third Reich. In it, he argues that Bonhoeffer embodied a kind of Christian holy warrior against injustice.

But while Bonhoeffer agitated against a genocidal regime, Metaxas has equated figures such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden with Hitler and liberal policies with nazism. Opponents say he and his acolytes advance arguments using a perversion of Bonhoeffer’s message that could be interpreted to justify political violence such as the 6 January storming of the US Capitol or the bombing of abortion clinics.

Komarnicki said the “hijacking” of his movie, which portrays its protagonist as a Christ-like figure wrestling with the ultimate sacrifice, was “more along the lines of the narrative around Bonhoeffer and around the marketing of the film” by its US distributor.

Angel Studios, which is primarily known for Christian-themed films and television shows, opted for a title in the US echoing that of Metaxas’s book and used promotional images showing Bonhoeffer toting a pistol – something never shown in the movie.

“There’s no question using ‘assassin’ in the title and putting a gun in Dietrich’s hand in the poster – I was completely and utterly against that and to see that create such negativity was heartbreaking,” Komarnicki said.

The PR campaign also drew the ire of descendants of the Bonhoeffer family in Germany who wrote an open letter condemning any depiction of Dietrich as an evangelical Christian fighter. Bonhoeffer’s legacy, they wrote, is “increasingly being falsified and misused by rightwing extremist anti-democrats, xenophobes and religious zealots”.

Metaxas has refused to back down in the dispute, attacking “Bonhoeffer’s woke relatives” for their protest.

Controversy​

Bonhoeffer caused controversy before its release. In addition to numerous historical inaccuracies and misleading marketing, the film was accused of promoting viewpoints of the Christian right, including conspiracy theories.[19][20][21]

In the German weekly Die Zeit, experts on Bonhoeffer, including presidents of the International Bonhoeffer Society and the publishers of Bonhoeffer's work in German and English, accuse the movie of abusing Bonhoeffer's life in order to promote Christian nationalism.[20] The film's slogan "How far will you go to stand up for what's right?" is not a question Bonhoeffer asked, they write. On the same page of Die Zeit Bonhoeffer's grandnephew Tobias Korenke calls ads for the film that depict Bonhoeffer holding a pistol an outrageous reversal of history.[22][23]

Director, writer, and producer of the film, Todd Komarnicki, has asserted that the many accusations made against the film are false, and that the film is at its heart a distinctly anti-fascist film. [24]

The International Bonhoeffer Society released a statement in which several actors involved, including Jonas Dassler, August Diehl and David Jonsson, condemned the film's appropriation by Christian nationalists.[25] The signatories criticised the misuse of Bonhoeffer's life and legacy by right-wing extremists.[26]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonhoeffer_(film)

Has anybody here seen the film?

 

[Totenkindly]

I haven't heard of it, although I of course know who Bonhoeffer was. The film never surfaced in the film groups I'm part of, nor did I notice any marketing for it.

I see August Diehl was in it. He was so great in Malick's "A Hidden Life" (2019).

---

And the Award for Laziest Oscars Take Goes to …

Everyone’s comparisons of the Oscars to The Substance misunderstand both the Oscars and The Substance.

slate.com

 

[Totenkindly]

Watched Smile 2. Bizarrely, I found the "cringe" moments of the film worse than scary moments, although there are definitely a few of the latter. I actually watched the whole "speech" sequence through my fingers -- so freaking cringe and embarrassing, it was more overpowering than the "fear" reflex for me. (Still, that whole middle section where she's beset by a mob in her apartment -- chef's kiss!)

Naomi Scott is great. I didn't expect anything less, she was the only decent part of the Aladdin remake as well.

I think this film works as well as it does because Skye's backstory/history intersects with the experiences she is going through now -- whether it is just riffing off it or because it has made her more vulnerable psychologically. I think the only scene that I was indifferent to was the very last one, as it leaves the outcome feeling inevitable and doesn't nearly evoke as much as the moments she admits how she actually feels about herself.

I'd say the two Smile films are similar in concept to the Sinister films (an inevitable evil slowly possesses the lead, leaving everything in ruin and kicking the curse down the road), except more convincing and powerful. The lead slowly falling into madness, and especially in Smile 2, intersecting with the lead's flaws and insecurities as a person, provide a richer palette to work from.

 

[SensEye]

I watched Flow due to the Oscar buzz. I was also intrigued to see if the whole no-dialog thing would make for an interesting movie.

In my opinion, not really. The movie was fairly impressive for being made on a shoestring budget by a bunch neophytes, but that is a relative scale. It's not particularly impressive over all. The story itself is pedestrian, it is just above the bar where I found I could watch it to the end. I'd give it a 6 out of 10.

 

[Totenkindly]

Sooo... Heretic (2024).

Two points: (1) Hugh Grant really owns the film. I really like that he's spent the latter part of his career breaking outside of his early rom-com roots that I think he has expressed displeasure of being stuck in at that time. (2) This is like the anti-"God Is Not Dead" film but then stretches beyond it, it's actually rational and cerebral even as the approach leveraged feels disturbing to viewers. The disturbance is because Grant is breaking social norms and adding an element of depravity we expect from serial killer / sadist thrillers (although he doesn't often seem to impose a physical threat, except in a few moments), but it is also because his ideas threaten the neatly packaged little worlds that religion often offers and leave the viewers realizing how large the abyss is underneath us and how, like Wile E Coyote, we manage to avoid the anxiety by not looking down and instead just pretending to ourselves that we are still flying.

If this was just a form of proselytizing for anti-religion, the film would suffer for it... but my personal perception in the last 10 minutes of the film is that it goes BEYOND that ... and that's where it really sticks its landing. Some of this is tied to the meaning to the film's title, "Heretic" -- as in who the actual heretic is (spoiler of end of film):

Mr. Reed (Grant) is the obvious choice through much of the film because the Mormon women are believers, while he is the one challenging them and in effect forcing them to move beyond their faith. He is the one proposing ideas antithetical to their religious beliefs and religion in general.

But an interesting thing happens in the film's endgame, where the most fervent and intellectually shallow of the two believers ends up rising to the challenge, engaging her brain, showing courage in stepping out on her rational sense... but most importantly in the very last room, where Reed asserts (his entire point) that religion frameworks are a system of social control that manipulate the believers to the benefit of the few powerful in the faith, Sister Paxton moves beyond it. In the room of caged women, she tries to care for them, giving one her coat. She admits prayer doesn't really make a difference, but she thinks it's beautiful to think of others besides herself even if there no material payoff.

And when she escapes, as the music crescendos magnificently and the snow swirls gracefully, she looks down and sees a butterfly flexing on her hand. (Earlier in the film, she said if she ever came back after death, she would like to be a butterfly who alights on someone's hand -- not a different part of the body but specifically the hand.)

Then the music immediately stops, just leaving the howl of the winter wind and the cold show, and the butterfly is gone as she stares at her hand. (After all, how could a butterfly exist in the winter season + storm?)

But she has moved past dogma now. She admitted she believes the way she does because of choice, because she wants to see the world that way, and really the truest service she performed was not the door-to-door witnessing, trying to indoctrinate others, but when she gave her coat away to a shaking woman in a cage. In the eyes of her church, she is now a heretic.

It's not a surprise that former Mormons appreciated the depiction of the two missionary young women, while the actual church totally sidestepped the film's message and instead attacked it for abuse of women and basically undermining its doctrine.

I think for those expecting conventional horror, the run-time of 1:52 could be a drag; but engaged with what was happening and trying to figure things out, I thought the film passed quickly.

 

[Totenkindly]

The Electric State. It's kind of embarrassing this is another Russo brothers and McFeeling/Whassinname -- yeah, the same crew that did Infinity War and Endgame, which are SO much memorably than this prechewed rather thoughtless POC.

Big split on critic/audience (15%/80%). In this case, it's the audience used to shitty films that seem to be in the wrong. For an actual score, I'd give it 2 stars / 5. There's a lot of stuff that is just glossed over logistically in the film, and it feels written at way too high a level (overgeneralized), plus being a rehash of 5-6 better films. Even Ready Player One (which this reminds me of a bit) was better. There's references to the lead character's brother as a "little boy" but the guy they cast is taller than her in at least one scene (the actor is 15) and his voice has already deepened into teenage boy, even past cracking -- WTF? I thought he was in his late teens; that's not a "little boy." There's a regular flow of small details like this not adding up. Or how a robot army got conveniently across 1300 miles of USA without being noticed (the film cuts over it). Or whatever else.

One of the issues is tone. It seems to want to be everything but not quite anything at once. I was laughing really hard at probably the first half hour because I couldn't tell whether the humor was intentional (in terms of how bad it was), so then the whole thing was even funnier, like a teacher having a one-to-one with a student about her family dying in a car crash as the rest of the class (forgotten by the script) is sitting around. And then some really funny shit, like casting Jason Alexander as a deadbeat pompous foster dad in a stained sleeveless T-shirt getting his ass kicked by a robot -- I mean, don't hire Alexander if you want subtlety, and there's no nuance to this, he just swings for the fences. But then the film seems to want to also feel melodramatic, while at other times be taken dramatically seriously.

Every good actor in this film just seems to be playing a cliche of a far better role they've done in the past. Chris Pratt is totally channeling Star-Lord, but that's not his fault because the same writers who did the two mentioned Avengers films wrote this script too -- they totally were like "Yeah, just do Star-Lord." Just not quite as good as the actual Star-Lord. Millie Brown takes flak and she's not naturally at the very top of her tier (nor will probably ever be), but she's generally a very solid/respectable actress regardless and capable, and she carries this film just fine -- it's just hard for her to rise above the meh screenplay.

All of which is not bad. There have been a ton of forgettable action or scifi films in American cinema over the decades. Except this one cost $320 million to make. And it doesn't show any of that. You know it got dumped into doing CGI for all the robots, but the writing and story is just not strong enough to justify that cost. Just compare this to a film like "The Creator" -- which is an $80 million dollar film that looks and feels like it cost $200-300 million -- and this film is the opposite. it feels small and kind of thin, and sketchy. This happened to the Russos too with "The Grey Man," their "thriller" vehicle with de Armas and Gosling two years back, a $200 million film that feels like $70-80 million and is a flat humorless cold film with a lack of memorable moments.

The Electric State is the same. There's nothing that really is memeworthy in this film, nothing that makes it resonate past its shelf-life, which would be about two weeks in a theater and probably will linger on Netflix for about three weeks before its forgotten.

It gives me a lot of concern about the Russos coming back for Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars, with mostly the same writing team. Yes, they totally nailed Infinity Wars and Endgame (and also The Winter Solider), but don't ask me WTF they've been smoking since because their output has been pretty lousy in comparison ever since.

 

[The Cat]

In Starship Troopers Johnny says "Don't you die on me..." Then rips the bug leg out killing them...They would have seriously been better off leaving it in there and pulling it out during surgury on the ship..., now they just bleed out.

 

[Totenkindly]

Finished "A Different Man," which basically has Sebastian Stan playing a man (Edward) with neurofibromitosis, which can end up being very disfiguring. We watch his life in the early part of the film and how stifled this illness makes him; but through a medical treatment, his skin marvelously rejuvenates and the tumors fall off. But this is where the film gets interesting, in terms of how his life and his self-concept changes (or doesn't change) with his cure.

I am so so so reminded of Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns," and his portrayal of Two-Face. As most of us are familiar with, Harvey Dent's face was badly scarred, leading to him becoming an arch-criminal. But at some point after being captured, a famous surgeon manages to restore Harvey's face so both halves look as handsome as they originally did -- and Harvey seems to adjust to this... but later we discover he has never adjusted. He goes on yet another crime spree. After Batman captures him once again, and talks to him, he discovers that when Harvey looks in a mirror, instead of seeing both pristine halves, he now sees two badly damaged halves. His body was changed but his mind remains scarred.

Edward might be physically healed, but emotionally and psychologically he still has much baggage. And he can't cope necessarily with how easily he can now move through life. the woman who he knew before his change writes a play about him, and of course she doesn't recognize him as his new self, so he manages to get himself cast in it -- until another guy with neurofibromitosis comes along who actually seems to have been successful and beloved by others (with a positive mental attitude) with the exact same illness and appearance. Edwards is now thrown for a loop as he tries to deal with what this mean...

I also finished A Real Pain, which Kiernan Culkin manages to win a best supporting role for. And he's pretty decent in this film - of two cousins going to visit a previous home in Poland of a grandmother who just recently died. Eisenberg's script got an oscar nom, and I think it's because of the juxtaposition of the two cousins -- Benji who is entirely forthright, never filters anything even when it would be beneficial, and whose life is a hot chaos mess, vs David who is raising a daughter and married, and much more controlled and anxious and reserved -- as well as the sheer honesty of a few moments in the film as David wrestles with love and resentment for his cousin who is far more irresponsible than himself and yet who both seems to be pitied and beloved by others. There's a sequence from the Majdanek concentration camp where the Chopin piano music cuts out and it's devastating to watch -- one of the shots from that sequence is almost like a hoof kick to the chest, it just left me reeling, just a steady shot visual that lasts a few seconds.

 

[The Cat]

"...Hell is the impossibility of reason..."​

 

[Totenkindly]

I dunno. I enjoyed the last 90 seconds more than the prolonged arctic bit, but then again, there's no context for the sequences there.
For the first part, Krypto's a cool-looking dog, but that schtick doesn't really do much for me to hold my interest...

I read Superman comics from the 70's as a kid but was kind of indifferent to most of them.

 

[Totenkindly]

 

[Totenkindly]

 

[The Cat]

It's Time for Another Good Idea, Bad Idea
(Hollywood edition)
Good Idea: Seeing Will Smith punched in the face for talking about someone's wife in a movie.
Bad Idea: Seeing Will Smith punch someone in the face for talking about his wife, at an award show.
The End.​

 

[Totenkindly]

Lionsgate just released a beautiful 4K pack for Basic Instinct (1992), which I got yesterday. I haven’t seen this movie for probably 25 years. I’m not sure why people hated on this film or downplayed it when it came out. The transfer is absolutely gorgeous, the music/orchestration is perfectly shaped and suited to support the emotional narrative of the film (I see now Jerry Goldsmith did it, he’s got a long professional career), and the editing even got an Oscar nod.

The acting by the leads is solid. I mean, Douglas has played lots of roles like this in his career, so he could probably do it in his sleep, but it’s still very solid and he captures the kind of double-mindedness involved when he feels like he is being seduced, and then slowly stops caring because Catherine speaks to and awakens something deep inside of him, that lets him throw off caution and expectation and just get caught up in how alive he feels with her.

Stone is just mesmerizing, she dominates the whole film – and creates the same kind of atmosphere as her character, she feels dangerous and untrustworthy except that you want to trust her and accept her innocence even if you still think she might have committed all of these crimes. I mean, pop culture might have made her character here a cliché, but that does a real injustice to her performance. One also can't help but be reminded of Greta Scacchi's performance as Carolyn Polhemus from Presumed Innocent which was filmed two years prior, but whereas Carolyn is a more traditional femme fatale (she's more blatantly an ambitious woman with disregard for her conquests, leading to her untimely end that opens that film), Catherine is a different matter and manages to paint herself both as manipulative and dangerous while also perhaps just misunderstood and vulnerable, with her guilt never quite certain. She is guilty of not playing the role of a conventional woman and instead possessing strong self-autonomy, but a killer? Unclear.

As far as the truth behind all of the crimes, the film manages to string you along until the end legitimately, within the context of noir at least. Also, there’s this weird fadeout at the very end.

Right before the fadeout, Catherine rolls back towards Nick with nothing in her hands (despite the crazy music) and they begin to make love, crisis averted.

But then comes a second or two of blackness, before the film jumps back in and then does the infamous pan below the bed. But the ice pick seen there doesn’t match the similar picks earlier in the film.

Is this an alternate ending? The film does wonderfully in setting up two narratives at once, that Beth is the killer or that Catherine is the killer. Or maybe even a third narrative, that each is responsible for different killings in the film, whereas Nick was trying to erroneously connect them all. There's some strong support and yet strong discrepancy to each of the film theories, and it's almost like the film doesn't WANT to resolve which is the “most true.” The strongest evidence against Catherine is the parts of her novels describing crimes that have occurred and and the first draft dropping from her printer describing a detective running up to floor 4 to save his partner, which happens only a few hours later, along with the potential for her to plant evidence against Beth, makes her a viable suspect; and yet Beth's story contains motives for the film's death and she has also effectively been unmasked by Nielson, who then dies before he can spill anything.

The thing the film really does do, however, is take Catherine Trammel and instead of punishing her for being a femme fatale instead arranges things so that after dominating and controlling the behaviors of many people in the film (almost every character’s bad behavior stems from her, whether it is Nick, or Roxy, or Beth), instead of being punished (i.e., driven into exile, killed, arrested like most noir films) or instead of having her fate dictated, she gets what she wants. Nick fills her capacity for danger, himself having killed and lived on the edge... and also succumbing to her wiles, she's capable of keeping him ultimately under her thumb. And at the very end, it sounds like Nick wants to go for a conventional life where Catherine would be expected to pump out kids and be a mother, leading to the huge musical buildup as she starts reaching down alongside the bed… until Nick lets all that go and lets Catherine be whoever she wants to be and drops the kid thing… he will ultimately give her what she wants ... and whether or not she is the killer, instead of rebuffing, murdering, or fleeing him, she accepts that and embraces him. She’s reached her “happy ending” and retains her autonomy.

I did crack up regarding the nefarious crotch shot. I’m not sure what was visible in the original large-screen theater, and the early home “Unrated” versions was muddy enough in terms of quality that you just did not get enough detail to really make out much... but this 4K Unrated version leaves nothing to doubt. You get a full (though very quick) shot of everything in perfect distinct detail. Like, holy shit.