He was the voice of the computer.
I guess that’s not a spoiler. There’s a computer and it sounds like Kevin Spacey 
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Speaking of Rockwell, I’m looking forward to The Best of Enemies with he and Taraji P. Henson.
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Joining the chorus of 
. He stars in another favorite of mine, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
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yeah, i loved Moon, too – and didn’t realize Spacey was the voice of the computer, either. heh. Jones’ “Source Code” is also supposed to be really good, but i haven’t seen it. and his recent Netflix movie, “Mute” is a fun sci-fi movie which features Paul Rudd in a scene-chewing role.
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I saw Source Code. It is very strong science fiction – that is, accept the hypothetical premise and enjoy working through it. It was less strong in some of the character arcs.
Although now that you’ve mentioned it I want to see it again.
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Moon is good.
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I guess I shall have to visit the Moon.
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I saw “Get Carter” over the weekend. It’s another variation of the “Red Harvest” theme. In this go-around, Carter, played by Michael Caine, takes the amoral energy he has spent throughout his life reinforcing criminal organizations, and decides to direct it against these same organizations to avenge his brother’s death.
I could possibly like this movie except for one big problem. It’s misogynistic.
Personally, I think that term has been applied a little too casually in the past couple of years. It should be reserved for something like Get Carter, where every woman is treated almost-literally like garbage. By the time Geraldine Moffat was locked in the trunk of her own car, I was over movie. I could see what they were going to do, and they did.
I did like the cinematography, however. And the ending did come as a surprise.
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Well it was true to the book and Carter is not a nice guy. Also I believe Geraldine was one of the people who helped with the drugging of his niece in the porn so that was not going to end well.
edit add spoiler tag.
Also one of the best movie themes ever.
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Yup.
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Just watched Pokémon Detective. The flora and fauna were ok but the lead has got to be the wettest blanket ever written. He is constantly being pulled by Pikachu to any action. If you watch any recent Pixar movie, the villain is no surprise. My grand-kid loved it but agreed with me about the sadness.
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I just saw a Cagney movie I hadn’t seen before from 1933 called “Picture Snatcher.” This was one of the quickly-made, non-prestige type movies that the major studios turned-out rapidly in the early depression years. And, in my opinion, Warner Brothers turned them out better than anybody. If a studio had a star, they kept his or her face of the screen as much as possible. Cagney made five movies in 1933, and this was one of them.
Not a spectacular piece of cinema art, but it gave Cagney 72 minutes to be Cagney, and sometimes that’s all you need.
In this film, James Cagney is a crime boss just getting out of Sing Sing after three years. At a welcome-home party he tells his gang that he has decided to give up his life of crime and will instead take a job at the City’s sleaziest newspaper, the Graphic News. Today, he would be called a paparazzo, in the parlance of the time he is a “picture snatcher.” He’s issued a shiny new Leica II, and he proceeds to use his assertive attitude to make a success of his new career.
Ralph Bellamy is very young and surprisingly thin in this movie. He’s the editor of the Graphic News and quickly becomes Cagney’s best friend. He hates the newspaper due to its unethical standards, and deals with the constant pressure by succumbing to alcoholism. He also has a key to Alice White’s apartment.
Alice White is the bad-girl who literally throws herself at Cagney on more than one occasion. Her character is also apparently a talented newspaper writer, but there isn’t time to develop this storyline. White’s brief career was on the decline by this point. She even gets fourth billing below Patricia Ellis.
Patricia Ellis is the good girl journalism student who is also the daughter of Robert Emmett O’Connor. She and Cagney fall for each-other.
Robert Emmett O’Connor is an Irish cop. It was he that shot Cagney six times and sent him up the river to Sing Sing three years earlier.
Ralf Harolde plays Cagney’s former second in command, Jerry the Mug, who takes over the gang. His testimony helped get Cagney convicted. You may know the actor as Dr. Sonderborg from “Murder, My Sweet,” where he was a whiz with the hypo.
This all leads to a rather fantastic shoot-out at the end, where you can tell that for some of the footage live rounds were used. Warner Brothers did this at the time because it saved time and money. It’s genuinely shocking to see Jerry the Mug’s apartment literally getting torn to pieces by machine gun fire.
Although the movie maintains a fast-paced, punchy attitude for most of its runtime, it does slowdown a occasionally for some appropriately serious moments. Such as, when Cagney steals a wedding photo from distraught fireman. Or when he goes back up to Sing Sing to witness an execution and we see another of the reporters vomiting on the floor.
All this and typically solid direction from Lloyd Bacon, great cinematography from Sol Polito and a music score conducted by Leo F. Forbstein.
With Leica II. He uses this camera throughout the movie, but never once extends the collapsable lens.
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Never saw it, but reputed homage The Limey is pretty good. Terence Stamp is one scary old man.
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the MOVIES network showed a great noir the other day, Born To Kill. A big, handsome linebacker of a male lead and the female lead looked enough like Rita Hayworth that I needed to see a close-up to tell it wasn’t her.
I came in a minute or two late and didn’t know what I was watching until it came up onscreen after the first commercial break: Born to Kill with Lawrence Tierney.
Holy Smokes, that handsome young man is shriveled-up Old Joe from Reservoir Dogs! Also Elaine Benes’s dad from that one episode of Seinfeld. If he was so handsome and this good of an actor, how was he not a huge star? His wiki heavily inferrs why even before it explicitly spells it out toward the bottom: alcohol; but also, he was acculturated to having to be the toughest guy in the room at all times. A particularly volitile combination.
A bit shocking even today, Tierney plays an outright sociopath whose only concessions to normalcy are faking it to get ahead. Almost immediately, he brutally murders two people for nothing more than a percieved slight. Interestingly, the people he is lying in wait for are blasting some hot, big-band jazz on the radio, which becomes the soundtrack to their gruesome deaths; it is impossible for a modern audience to not recall Mr. Blonde disfiguring the cop to “Stuck in the Middle With You” in the aforementioned film of Tierney’s twilight years.
The other wrinkle to the story is that the female lead is also a sociopath. Without the type of build to fight anyone and win like Tierney, she relies on calculated manipulation to get what she wants. The actress is brilliant at “turning on” her public, social persona from her shrewd, private side.
So, between the two leads, the movie is all kinds of depraved.
Add to that the great filmmaking. Visually, it’s a perfect noir from RKO, and it is tantalizingly of the “show, don’t tell” school of storytelling.
Would recommend.
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An early Robert Wise.
Do you mean Claire Trevor? She was always great. Have you seen “Key Largo?”
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yes, Trevor. She’s blonde in her wiki page but a brunette in BTK, from afar I thought it was Hayworth at first. but no, I need to see Key Largo.
re: Wise, the BTK wiki noted his involvement heavily but I’m otherwise unfamiliar with him, either.
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Claire Trevor is pretty amazing in everything I’ve seen her in. She could do comedy too. But Key Largo is one of her best performances.
And from my experience, you can’t go wrong with a Robert Wise film.
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One noir I particularly remember is Where the Sidewalk Ends, which is (ha ha) nothing like the kids’ book. As I recall, the HERO is a dirty cop who is in deep shit for beating one too many witnesses to death. I don’t even remember the plot, really, except that it’s resolved at the end in a manner consistent with the Hays Code.
One thing about industry self-censorship was it did create a certain kind of structure to the art form.
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And lots of creativity in dancing around those constraints, like that Jimmy Cagney one where the family gets a phone call he’s “coming home” and the brother opens the door, only to have Cagney’s body, wrapped in a death shroud, fall through the doorway.
Because the Hays Code said bad guys always had to be punished.
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