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By IMP Awards / 2021 Movie Poster Gallery / Blue Bayou Poster (#2 of 2), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68197138

Blue Bayou - (2021)

Well, this was very heavy handed - it's a 'message movie' about an issue, and particularly emotionally manipulative, but if you're okay with all of that then you might enjoy it. Antonio LeBlanc (Justin Chon) was born in Korea, but adopted by an American family when he was three years old. Married, with a stepdaughter and biological daughter on the way, he desperately looks for work to supplement the income he and his wife are making (he's a tattoo artist.) He ends up crossing his partner's ex, who is a cop, and ends up in trouble - he has a criminal record and the authorities decide to deport him back to Korea, despite the fact he has an American family, accent, and doesn't even speak Korean or remember the place. You see, in the U.S. people who were adopted out as babies are being deported - ripped away from their families and sent to places that are foreign to them. It seem pretty silly, but it's happening. Anyway, really top notch film - very well directed and the actors are great. I recommend it - but afterwards you do get the feeling you've been hit about the head with a baseball bat with the film's message on it. It doesn't rely on subtlety, but it's pretty good.

7/10
I enjoyed it, but his first two films 'Gook' and 'Ms Purple' are much much better. He's a very talented guy and produced / directed the current AppleTV series 'Pachinko' which takes on similar themes of displacement and korean diaspora yet again. It's very good.



The Dirty Dolls (1973) Directed by Stu Segall. A criminal gets his sister and some other teenage girls to commit crimes, including a diamond robbery and taking hostages. This is better than you might think. Some sleazy shenanigans and some action sequences keep things moving along. It's fast paced and interesting enough to be entertaining. Watched on Arrow streaming.



I mainline Windex and horse tranquilizer
Everything Everywhere All At Once


Visually stunning, trippy, great action sequences. Michelle Yeoh really gets to explore her many skills and Ke Huy Quan was an unexpected delight. The whole cast is just excellent.



9/10
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The Killing -


This early Stanley Kubrick effort may be the best "best laid plans" noir I've seen. Its centerpiece is a horse track heist that is the brainchild of Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), a man who is as meticulous as the director himself. His plan about who on his team needs to do what and when could not be any more precise. If you assume that complications arise when Clay and company put their plan into action, you would be correct.

From his intimidating presence to his husky, staccato delivery of the hard-boiled dialogue - courtesy of legendary crime novelist Jim Thompson - Hayden could not have been better cast. I almost envy him for the lines he got to say and how he said them, my favorite being "you got a great big dollar sign there, where most women have a heart," which he tells Sherry (Marie Windsor), the opportunistic and not-so-loyal wife of George (Elisha Cook, Jr.), the team's biggest sad sack. Speaking of his teammates, none of their performers are slouches either, and in addition to veteran "that guys" like Cook, there are faces that may be familiar to Kubrick fans like Timothy Carey, who succeeds at making his wounded veteran and sharpshooter one loathsome guy. My favorite, though, is Kola Kwariani's wrestler and, appropriately, chess player Maurice, whose fight scene would make Tor Johnson blush. Besides the performances, there's something praiseworthy in each aspect of the filmmaking, particularly Gerald Fried's brassy score, which fittingly resembles Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring for how each heist preparation smacks of impending doom. I also approve of something Kubrick had to include against his wishes: the voiceover narration, which I believe enhances the movie's fatalistic atmosphere. You also have to love the nonlinear structure, which expectedly confused '50s audiences, but wouldn't be out of place today given that Tarantino, Soderbergh, etc. normalized it.

Just like Paths of Glory could be described as a "thinking person's war movie" and 2001: A Space Odyssey a "thinking person's science fiction movie," the descriptor also applies to this heist movie. Specifically, it demonstrates that Johnny, like the rest of us, can expect a clock to show 1:02 PM when it is indeed 1:02 PM, but you should not expect even the most loyal person - or not to spoil it too much, creature - to show up at that time when requested. In other words, Kubrick revealed his fascination with dehumanizing forces much earlier than you may have thought. It ends up being a noir that is bound to make fans of the genre even bigger fans, and for those who are lukewarm on it and are just in the mood for something Kubrickian, it is certainly that. With all that said, I would easily trade this movie in for a one-man play in which Sterling Hayden reads all of the parts.



Everything Everywhere All At Once


Visually stunning, trippy, great action sequences. Michelle Yeoh really gets to explore her many skills and Ke Huy Quan was an unexpected delight. The whole cast is just excellent.



9/10
Agreed, and it's also hilariously funny,
WARNING: spoilers below
especially the Racacoonie joke, which still makes me laugh whenever I think about it.



You ready? You look ready.

Kiki's Delivery Service - (1998 dubbing)


I went out of my way, and paid out the nose, to find a new, unopened copy of the 2003 DVD so I could get this dubbing. I get why the changes were implemented in the 2010 reissue, but I don't care. This is the dubbing I grew up watching and I will admit that I'm coming at it from a purely emotional perspective; but dammit, I'm a millennial and I like my nostalgia unadulterated.

This is my favorite Studio Ghibli movie with Castle in the Sky and Ponyo as close seconds
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On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give this 5. Inbetween a really good movie (like Traffic) & a mediocre movie. Two hours long & I did finish it. Evangeline Lilly very good. Armie Hammer not the best actor around, but he did his best I would say.
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I mainline Windex and horse tranquilizer
Agreed, and it's also hilariously funny,
WARNING: spoilers below
especially the Racacoonie joke, which still makes me laugh whenever I think about it.

I couldn't believe that was the kid from The Goonies and Temple of Doom. He was great.



I couldn't believe that was the kid from The Goonies and Temple of Doom. He was great.
Indeed. Like, Oscar-worthy great.
It was nice seeing him in a movie again. It was like a visit from an old friend. I guess he's been in the industry all this time, working as a stunt coordinator and assistant director.

This is the first movie I watched in a theater since The Invisible Man way back in February of 2020 and I'm glad I returned with this one. It demands to be seen in one if you ask me.



Yeah, I rolled my eyes through this whole movie when it came out in the theater.
It's the movie that kinda made me lose respect for Pacino and not wanna see any more of his work.
It's really a classic example, to me, of how lost cinema was in the 90s. Not that there were no good films but the general mainstream product was arguably the poorest of any decade.
One of the most overrated movies ever...all the movies that Pacino made and they gave him the Oscar for this?



One of the most overrated movies ever...all the movies that Pacino made and they gave him the Oscar for this?
Which movie are you talking about?



The Girl from Pussycat This is the only film directed by Smythe David, which is likely a fake name. The director was likely too embarrassed to put his name on this film. The plot, if you can call it that, is about an all female gang of lesbian bank robbers. Honestly, the best parts of this film is the nudity, which there is quite a bit of. There is almost no story, the acting is weak and the writing is pretty poor.



Uncharted (2022) - frankly speaking, not the most interesting film in this genre. Somehow everything is monotonous, and very predictable. Somehow there is a certainty that in half a year I won't remember what exactly this movie is about. As for me, even Tomb Raider (2018) is a head higher. Maybe I'm wrong.



This is the first movie I watched in a theater since The Invisible Man way back in February of 2020 and I'm glad I returned with this one. It demands to be seen in one if you ask me.
Literally same, and totally agree.



The trick is not minding
Agreed, and it's also hilariously funny,
WARNING: spoilers below
especially the Racacoonie joke, which still makes me laugh whenever I think about it.
The scene with the rock/boulders was also a hilarious scene.





The Imitation Game, 2014

During WW2, Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is hired by the military to help break the German Enigma machine. Told in extended flashbacks, we see Turing's attempts to design a machine that can perform the computations to break the German cypher. Hiding his sexuality---to the extent that he enters an engagement of convenience with his co-worker Joan (Keira Knightley)--Turing must brave setbacks in his personal and professional life.

I enjoyed this film a lot more than I expected to, and almost in spite of what I often find really tiresome about prestige films and especially biographical ones.

The performances are all pretty solid, with the caveat that I don't know enough about Turing's life to judge one way or another how the people portrayed match up to their real counterparts. The friendship between Alan and Joan is especially enjoyable, as it serves both their interests to be seen as a couple.

In terms of the Enigma machine itself, well, I am a big math nerd and would have liked a more elaborate explanation of how it all worked and the nature of Alan's decoding machine. The movie gives a lot of "smart people" shorthands, but whatever.

Normally my biggest quibble with biographies is the underlying discomfort with knowing that events, words, and sometimes even people have been invented wholecloth for the purposes of the film. But in this case I actually didn't mind it. The film sets up a theme of deception (or, to be more accurate, imitation), and it plays out pretty well through the film. Obviously the literal reference is to the machines, but Alan is also imitating being a "normal" person, and beyond that imitating being a straight "normal" person. Through the film there are multiple people who pretend to be what they aren't. It nicely frames the absurdity of Alan having to hide being gay. I quite liked a sequence where Alan talks about machine intelligence with a police investigator, in which he questions what it means to be thinking, further questioning why we are so upset when people are wired differently.

As with many biographies, what we learn about Turing's life feels cursory and a bit shallow. But I enjoyed the sections they highlighted, and the performances are strong enough to keep you invested.

A step above what I expected.




Night and the City - My unintentional flurry of Jules Dassin movies continues. This is a really effective noir from 1950 and stars Richard Widmark as American expatriate Harry Fabian. He's a low level hustler living in London and working as a "club tout" for Philip Nosseross. He goes out and, using his network of cab drivers, doormen and bouncers, entices well to do targets into visiting his bosses nightclub. Fabian is kind of a pathetic schmuck and hustler always looking for the big score that will land him on Easy Street. He lives with his long suffering girlfriend Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney) who seemingly never tires of lending him money for his endless debts and get rich quick schemes.

WARNING: spoilers below
One night while at the wrestling matches he runs across Gregorius (Stanislaus Zbyszko), a battle-scarred and retired Greco-Roman wrestling champion. He's now managing and training an up and coming young wrestler named Nikolas. Gregorius is also ashamed of his own son Kristos (Herbert Lom), who controls all the wrestling venues throughout London. His father thinks that the glitzy, manufactured entertainment Kristos promotes is an affront to the tradition of classic Greco-Roman wrestling. Never one to let an opportunity pass by, Harry makes sure to meet and charm the old man into a partnership, which would also serve to shield him from Kristos' wrath when he finds out Harry is going into competition with him.

Having conned his way into the old man's graces Fabian next has to come up with the money needed to launch Harry Fabian Promotions. Enter Helen Nosseross (Googie Withers) Philip's rapacious, ambitious wife. She's married the corpulent and lovestruck Philip for his money and has been scheming to break free of him and open her own nightclub. She offers to put up the money on the sly if Harry can help her acquire a license for her new club. There are also intimations that she and Harry were once romantically involved.

There's something about Richard Widmark that just meshed with playing desperately wretched characters and he turns in an indelible performance as Harry Fabian. You can plainly sense that it won't (and will never) end well for the guy. But you still can't look away. It's a dark, moody and palpably angry motion picture and critics at the time were taken aback at the story. But with a deeper appreciation of noir this came into it's own to some extent. Recommended.

85/100

I too am a Dassin fan, at least as far as his films.. Widmark does some enjoyable intense scenery chewing in this one. Here's some commentary from me awhile back:


Night and the City (1950)

Produced at the peak of the classic film noir era, this picture is a lollapalooza of a noir, ticking so many boxes of classic noir's characteristics, that it risked coming close to being a send up.

It stars Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, and Brit star Googie Withers, with nice turns by Francis L. Sullivan, Herbert Lom, and Hugh Marlowe. Shot on location in London, it's wonderfully directed by Jules Dassin (Brute Force), with immensely impressive noir cinematography by Max Greene (So Evil My Love). The locations and studio sets are perfect.

Widmark moved away from being typecast as another psychopathic killer like Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947), but he gave 110% as a sleazeball get-rich-quick dreamer Harry Fabian, who would stop at nothing to try to scam his way into prominence and to claw away at elusive respect. It's almost exhausting watching his schemes, antics and emotional outbursts.

Tierney plays Fabian's sweet, honest but enabling girlfriend. Fabian continually lies to her and asks for money for his big final attempt to be a big shot by rising to prominence as London's biggest wrestling promoters. But Fabian goes too far and has burned too many bridges. The underworld kings eventually have enough of Fabian's scheming and lying.

Of particular interest is a long and authentic private grudge wrestling match between Mike Mazurki (Murder, My Sweet), "The Strangler", and Stanislaus Sbyszko (Madison Square Garden), "Gregorius the Great". Both men had been former championship wrestlers, and the realism in their contest makes it one of the best on film.

Dassin reported that Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck had requested that Tierney be cast in the film. She was having psychological problems at the time, and he felt that the work would help pull her out of them. She rose to the occasion in this memorable picture.

But it's the keen photography by Max Greene that sets this film apart. His set ups, locations, lighting and camera angles rival those of the great John Alton, and continue to the movie's uniqueness.

Available on YouTube.

Doc's rating: 7/10



The Killing -


This early Stanley Kubrick effort may be the best "best laid plans" noir I've seen. Its centerpiece is a horse track heist that is the brainchild of Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), a man who is as meticulous as the director himself. His plan about who on his team needs to do what and when could not be any more precise. If you assume that complications arise when Clay and company put their plan into action, you would be correct.
...
Nice review. One of the best crime noirs ever. No slouches in the cast. Everything clicked. I recall one of Hayden's lines: "Don't bone me, man!" That expression means something else today from what it did in 1956.. But Marie Windsor and Elisha Cook, Jr.? Who could ask for more???