HELL OR HIGH WATER - Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges. Supposed to be midland Texas (actually New Mexico) where Chris & Ben's family ranchland is about to be forclosed by the bank. They decide to rob some banks to get back the homestead and Cop Jeff, weeks from retirement, must stop them. Bro Ben is a loose cannon and kills someone during one heist, while peaceful Chris just wants the farm back. Jeff must sort it out. Noticed not one cigarette smoked during whole film…. were producers sending a message? Very good getting 4 of 5 on the Moizmeter!

PARKER - Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez, Clifton Davis Jr., Nick Nolte. Jason gets into a fight with his gang of crooks and they leave him for dead. He slowly recovers and goes after them and like most of his films, lot's of fights and violence ensue. J-Lo almost funny as a not so good realtor. A 2 on the Moizmeter.

I recently saw “Dragon Dentist”. There seem to be only two episodes to this anime.
It's really hard to describe… But overall it seems to be a nice, arty short anime movie, about war, dentistry on dragons, fate, mortality, and self sacrifice.

It wasn't bad. Thematically it reminded me of a Studio Ghibli film.

GOOD GIRLS REVOLT, a 10-episode series from Amazon.
First episode is set in Manhattan 1969, at a magazine called (something like) The News This Week. It concerns the group of women, the “researchers,” who investigate the facts of a story, outline it, often write the article, and then pass it on to the male “reporter” with whom they're partnered, who edits it, or not, and then gets the byline.

By episode 2, the women are thinking that the system needs to change.

Stories that they've covered include the 1969 Altamont Festival, where the Hell's Angels were hired to provide security, the My Lai Massacre, and Hoover's surveillance of the Black Panthers. It's kind of a Newsroom-esque series, but with a groovy/free love versus the remains-of-mod versus the oh-so Betty Crocker component.

I'm diggin it.

I decided to switch over to anime so I am catching up on some old films. Finally saw Lensmen in English. I had only ever seen it in Japanese without subtitles. The original Vampire Hunter D which is still as great as I remembered. So atmospheric and the crude animation really accentuates that. The sequel Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlines is smooth and pretty in that early 1990s shadowy elongated style but really isn't the same.

And I had forgotten there were inside jokes and one-liners. Like one guy has three bimbos and one is obviously Kei from Dirty Pair.

REASONABLE DOUBT - Dominic Cooper, Samuel L. Jackson. Promising DA Cooper thinks he killed a man whilst driving drunk. SLJ gets arrested for the crime and Cooper must prosecute him, thinking he's innocent. But is he? Winnipeg stands in for Chicago. Gets a 2 on the Moizmeter.

USS INDIANAPOLIS - Nicholas Cage, Tom Sizemore. Cage is captain of the ship that delivered the 2 A bombs to the Philippine Island for later use. Once done ship heads back but is sunk by Japanese torpedo. 3/4's of crew lost, most while on flimsy life rafts while sharks have a feast. Finally rescued but somehow Nick is court-martialed for failing to zig-zag? Didn't totally understand the reasoning there. Of course based on true story. A 3 on the Moizmeter.

THE MOST HATED WOMAN IN AMERICA - Melissa Leo, Juno Temple, Josh Lucas, Adam Scott. Loosely based on true story of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, noted outspoken atheist from 63 to 95, when she was abducted by former employee Lucas, who thought she had access to millions. Film wanders back and forth with poor Melissa wearing tons of make-up and wigs. A generous 2 on the Moizmeter.

UNDER SUSPICION - Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Monica Belucci, Thomas Jane.
From 1999 but a good one I missed. Gene found a murdered girl and cop Freeman wants to clear up a few details, it'll only take 10 minutes. An hour and 3/4 later Gene is caught in one lie after another and he's sweating bullets! Time to confess. I liked it getting a 4 on the Moizmeter. Big twist ending folks!

Sounds like a good film. Freeman has gravitas, but Hackman is a super amazing actor… I imagine he's have a hard time not stealing the show.

——–
I've been watching the anime Black Butler. It's a very, silly thing set in a weird bishe version of late Victorian England. There's supernatural themes, the butler is a demon and helps his young master solve all sorts of crimes and mysteries. But the most striking thing is how homoerotic the whole thing is.
This is an anime that was aimed at teen girls I think and I would bet money that is was created by a woman.

Not really my thing, but it does make a nice change from the male focussed animes, which get a bit tiring in their obviousness.

Black Butler is very weird.

I started rewatching Martian Successor Nadesco. I haven't seen it since the 1990s, when the video shop had the DVDs. Now I realise I never saw the whole thing. It's a great Scifi mecha anime, lots of spoofs on popular series! And it's nice to watch something that doesn't use bad 3D CGI all the time.

SOA :)

I've started watching AN HONOURABLE WOMAN with Maggie Gyllenhaal. After 3 episodes I'm having a hard time figuring out who's who and what's what.

@Moiz- That looks interesting. Maggie is a much better actor than her brother too.

luterjox wrote:
SOA :)

srrsly? XD
I found that series a bit barebones. It sort of skipped over all the interesting parts of the story. It's like an anime made up of only every 3rd episode- the other two in between are removed.

Still recovering I am still exploring YouTube. I got tired of the documentaries so saw some 1980s anime movies. Some of them for me the first time in English. Back in the 1980s there were no fansubs and dubbed would get butchered until it made no sense. So you sat with a script or even just a synopsis.

Then I saw “Reach for the Sky” the Douglas Bader story a film biography of the great legless RAF ace of World War II. Bristol Bulldogs, Avro 504K, Hurricanes and Spitfires! This movie would have a BIG influence on the great film Battle of Britain Some of the sequences were so prized they were re-staged in color for the latter film.

Then came A Yank in the RAF a 1941 Tyrone Power movie. The aerial sequences are excellent as they were done by second unit with one of the best photographers of the day Ronald Neame (who also did my favorite wartime movie One of Our Airplanes is Missing) Hudsons and Spitfires! I had totally forgotten the movie ends with Tyrone Power flying Spitfires over Dunkirk. Crazy silly model work with planes whirling all over the place but inter-spaced with great aerial sequences. Oh yeah, and there's an insipid love triangle subplot with Betty Grable. And some obvious bits to show off her legs. I'm not a leg man, but legs can be one of the finest and most beautiful things on a human.

Finished watching all 8 episodes of THE HONOURABLE WOMAN with Maggie and Stephen Rea (he was the best character). Series s/b called Don't Trust Anyone. Practically everyone ends up dead. Still not sure what the main story was, getting her kid back or the ad nauseum Palestine/Israel stuff, and if I never hear about that mess again it will be too soon. I give it a big 2 on the Moizmeter.

THE DISCOVERY - Rooney Mara, Jason Segel, Robert Redford, Jesse Plemons, Riley Keough, Mary Steenbergen. Scientist Redford claims to have proven the existence of an after-life. Millions start committing suicide to get there? Movie s/b called Dumber Than A Bagfull Of Door-Knobs. A generous 1 on the Moizmeter.

Hahaha, good description Moz!

Speaking of dumb films-
For some weird reason I started watching the awful American Pie franchise. Interestingly, while the second movie continues with the gross-out 90s/2000s reinvention of the traditional 80s sex comedy, the later films go back to the roots of 80s sex comedies and give us that same sort of experience, so of like how The Darkness was giving us an authentic 80s glam metal experience at the same time.

It was strange to watch them dicking around with land line telephones and older style mobile phones- everything in the films is quite up to date and modern apart from that.
Seeing that though it's shocking how fast technology developed in just the last few years. They even start off with CRT TVs and video tapes.

One big problem with the films I saw was a general lack of any real diversity, so much so that in the later films I literally had trouble telling the actors apart- all white guys with mousey brown hair…
And for some reason they celebrate the concept of the “douchebag bro”, who was normally the villain in older sex comedies.

BRAVO you need to watch this: Daimidaler: Prince vs. Penguin Empire
It reminds me of your comic stories… The sillier ones.
A funy, ecchi anime. I can't explain it without spoiling it. Basically it's stupid and pervy, but fun.

THE LIGHT BETWEEN OCEANS - Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Rachel Weisz, Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson. Michael is WW1 vet recovering as a light-house keeper for the solitude. He meets Alicia, they marry but she's unable to have children. One day a dingy floats ashore with a live baby and dead father. Do they report it or keep the baby as theirs. They keep it and bury poor daddy…who's to know eh? We'll see about that, not bad getting a 3 on the Moizmeter and I've now got a case of Alicia Vikanderitis…wow is she attractive! Beautiful scenery of New Zealand to boot!

Alicia Vikander and Emily Blunt: separated at birth?

SHEPHERDS AND BUTCHERS - Andrea (be still my heart) Riseborough, Steve Coogan, Garion Dowds. Pretoria, S.A. late eighties. Young prison guard Garion goes nuts and kills 7 men. Steve must defend him somehow. Apparently this young guard took part in the executions of approx 164 prisoners in less than 2 years, and Steve uses this as the excuse for his temporary insanity. My heartthrob Andrea is the prosecutor. Pretty good but the execution scenes are brutal. A big 4 on the Moizmeter.

ANTIBIRTH - Chloe Sevigny, Meg Tilly and another very unattractive woman. Quite possibly the worst and most disgusting movie I've ever seen. Haven't seen Meg Tilly for quite awhile so that's why I toughed it out, she must've lost a bet. A big goose egg on the Moizmeter.

DENIAL - Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott. Based on Holocaust denial trial. Spall, sues Rachel for libel. Her legal team must show Spall's denial theory is deliberately incorrect, at least I think that was their case. Oh well, they know more than me I guess. Many scenes totally unnecessary and what was that thing Tom picked up at Auschwitz? Gets a 2 on the Moizmeter.

You own this thread Moiz.

————

One long anime series I've recently gone through was Gintama.
It was only the 50 episodes of the 2015 series on though. I can't find dubs of the earlier 300 or so episodes.

It's an interesting series. The world is modern day Japan but customs and clothing are all based on the Edo era.
The chief protagonist is a drunk, lazy semi-retired samurai with white hair (he's probably only in his late 20s though), and his small group of cohorts: a small woman dressed in Chinese style who's amazingly strong and from another planet, her huge dog which she rides, and dorky assistant with glasses who's very prim and shocked by everything.
They're known as “odd-jobs” because that's how that make their living.

Then there are a group of authoritarian police who're also samurai, and the final main group are the Joi-rebels… who're samurai. They're all sort of in conflict.

The show has obviously had a LOT of development prior to the 2015 series but that's a strength when coming in late because the characters obviously have a lot of history and at this stage it's been around long enough they they're brave enough to do wacky things with the format.

The very first episode is amazing- The odd-jobs crew discover a strange clock that stops time and proceed to give the audience a bit of a tour through the workings of their world, playing around, messing things up and ripping the fourth wall to pieces.

As the show goes on there are a lot of wacky episodes and the occasional super serious one that's interspersed into it for some reason, usually they're all done in 3 episode arcs.
My faves were the one where aliens reverse the sex of every single person in the district (That was hilarious), and another where a character pretends she's really sick so her friends would be guilted into caring for her but she can't find a good time to come clean and so the farce keeps on escalating and escalating till she has to pretend that she's dead during a massive state funeral held in her honour!

Unfortunately the find arc goes in the opposite direction to the wackyiness and lays on he drama MASSIVELY heavily. There's still a lot of comedy interspersed, but the drama is that sort of brutal brother against brother / self sacrifice, honour preserving BULLSHIT that the Japanese LOVE and I absolutely hate, and it ramps up and up and up to farcical levels almost as some sort of Po-faced meta joke. I have the final two episodes to watch now and I'm not really looking forward to them.

DEEPWATER HORIZON - Mark Wahlberg, Kurt Russell, Kate Hudson, John Malkovich, Gina Rodriguez. Based on 2010 oil rig disaster. Mark and Kurt are inspectors worried about short-cuts on safety regulations, whilst oil co. executives want to get pumping going so they can make lots of money. Suddenly, BOOM! Thar she blows! Worst contamination of the ocean ever! Amazingly only 11 dead. Confrontational scenes added for drama. A 2 1/2 on the Moizmeter.

Glen or Glenda directed by Ed Wood….“Pull the string!” Enuff said! ( anyone know where ‘enuff said’ comes from in the silver age comic world?

IN THE SHADOW OF IRIS - Romain Duris, Charlotte Le Bon, Jalil Lespert. In French but sub-titles not too bad. Baffling mystery made even more baffling as scenes not shown in chronological order! Poor me was left trying to piece it all together and I'm not too sure yet. Another watch may help. Rich banker's wife gets kidnapped and ransom demanded. Bodies getting moved around really confusing. I think I'm close to figuring it out and maybe the last scene wasn't the last scene? An almost 3 on the Moizmeter.

Mo, I suggest watching it in second century Dutch, plot lines are much clearer…

Zaptoid56 wrote:
Mo, I suggest watching it in second century Dutch, plot lines are much clearer…

I have enuf trouble with 21st century English.

2nd century Dutch was probably old German… I'm sure you can understand that :D

Seaking of hard to understand:
“Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere”
This anime is fooking impenetrable!

The only good episode so far was the first one where a bunch of classmates wearing cool scifi uniforms and with cool scfi powers have a race to see who can land a hit on their teacher- which will win them 5 absences from school.
There are witches on broomsticks, huge robots, a giant knight, an incubus, all sorts of scifi babes… It's a really cool bunch.

Unfortunately the rest of the episodes are all about the broader story arc and there's NOTHING in the show to help you understand it. None of it is relatable. The story setup is just WAY too bloody weird for a start so being dropped into the middle of it makes it impossible to understand events.

The premise of the back story is that 200 years ago humans went into space, were forced back to earth, the earth was uninhabitable except for Japan so the Japanese got to live there while everyone else had to live in “pocket dimensions”. And for SOME reason they all had to relive ancient history in order to find out where we went wrong so they can get back to space… (UGH, deep breath…)
The pocket dimensions later invaded Japan and now the Japanese all live on a flying ship called “Musashi”. There are other people on flying ships too… They're all watched over by the authority that checks to see whether people are reliving history properly…
(Make sense yet? Not to ME it bloody doesn't!)
Musashi is governed by the students at the schools- school president etc… I have no idea why or how.

All that is just backstory and does not illuminate what's happening in the main story of the show at all.

With garbage like this you don't need exposition to explain things, what you need is scenes and actions that are understandable and make you care, a few GOOD characters to stick with who you can discover the world through.
This show has none of that. It's a great example of how to do things badly.

Now for 2 masked horror thrillers:
WHITE SETTLERS (alternate title: The Bloodlands) Pollyanna McIntosh, Lee Williams. Married London couple move to isolated house in Scotland, evidently the location of an old battle betwixt Scots & Brits. Soon things start to go bump in the night. Pig-masked men terrorize the couple, all leading to a puzzling ending leaving me saying, so now what? A 2 on the Swine-O-Meter.

PRESERVATION - Wrenn Schmidt, Aaron Staton, Pablo Schreiber, Cody Saintgnue.
Married couple and brother head into the woods for a hunting weekend. Both men jerks and soon enuf, things go bump in the night again! 3 masked men are stalking them and murder is their game. Looks bad, who will win? So many faults here but don't ask questions, just watch. A 2 1/2 on the Moizmeter.

note: I find masks scary, even funny ones…there's just something about them that gives me the creeps.