We watched Coupling some years ago. It is hilarious!
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My daughter and I saw Dune last night in the theater. It was so good. We both agreed that it was nice to go the theater to see a movie that needed the big screen and the sound. There was a lot of CGI crowd stuff, but it actually served the plot because it really shows the scale of this religious fervor they are whipping up.
There was great costume design. I like how they’ve adapted what was in the book to the screen.
To me, it’s like what I want Star Wars to be. It has a lot of that feel of clunky old school machinery on a hard scrabble planet, but there’s a lot more internal motivation of the characters that creates good plot conflicts that seem to arise more from each character’s unique role than I find in Star Wars.
Timothee Chalomet is a great lead for this; he’s blank enough that he is an “insert self” character, which is definitely what the lead of Dune is supposed to be. You’re the hero saving the world! But he also pulls off all the action and smolders with gawky teenage musky attractiveness. He reminds me SO MUCH of my high school boyfriend, not that they looked alike, but just in personality and physicality. He definitely feels like a teenager even though I think he’s like close to 30 now.
There are way more women characters than in the first movie and they have more interesting, complex roles. I especially felt that Zendaya’s character had a much more interesting part in this movie.
I’m looking forward to Part 3. I know that’s not greenlit yet, but I can’t imagine they won’t make it.
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What is Wim Wenders watching?
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Surprised I never heard of this movie before. It’s a bit like Dangerous Minds + Dead Poet’s Society + Red Dawn all mixed together with mid-80’s style and music.
Some of the reviews mention Miami Vice, but I don’t really remember that show. Others label it as an action movie but, while there are a couple of really good action scenes, it’s mostly about a group of juvenile delinquents growing as individuals and learning to work together and become a force for good. With a teacher that has a few problems fitting into the system but really only cares about helping the kids. It’ll make you feel things.
It’s free on Youtube. Well worth a watch.
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After watching the first episode, three reactions (avoiding spoilers):
- A few actors are similar enough that I’m having trouble keeping track, though this could just be face blindness in action.
- It looks like they’ve recontextualized the “near future” of the novel to more present day. It’ll take more to know what I think of that, but it feels like they might need to spend time explaining some things that could have been lampshaded and then just gone with the setting. On the other hand, it looks like they’re avoiding explaining things like the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation to the viewers.
- Things feel… a little rushed? It’s like they’re trying to pack in added character information while still trying to compress the time scale, so important points are both coming quickly, but also sometimes being interrupted for no apparent reason.
And one (minor spoiler) thing that applies to both the show and novel:
Technically (and if you avoid metaphors), it’s a 4-body problem. Small detail, but one that keeps being ignored…
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Pyutin and Gazz.
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What a mess.
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One of my all-time faves! When I was about 10 years old I could be found glued to the TV every Saturday evening absorbing the latest episode, watching the Eagles crash.
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Two of my favorite channels on YouTube:
I don’t know what it is about this channel. I’ve been watching it since before the pandemic. I appreciate that there’s no dialogue but that’s true for a couple of channels. In this particular episode, he somehow manages to make it seem like he’s all alone, if you don’t count the audio. He somehow fills the time with all of these empty, liminal spaces.
I can’t tell if his channel is some sort of stealth marketing for inter-island travel inside Japan, or if he genuinely just loves to travel by ferry.
And then there’s his preoccupation with industrialized food.
This is another one of my favorites. These two guys are real craftsmen. The location is beautiful.
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I find that I’m ignoring the plots and just looking at it. It just looks so good.
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Up to episode 4, and it seems like a pretty faithful depiction of the wasteland so far. Although I know there was a lot of AI-generated angst about the trailers, the show itself seems fairly solid.
Though the “rule of thumb” thing has been debunked, it still gave me chills…
(from the comments on that video:
…yeah, that. )
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Stingray was better.
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This was a fun little lighthearted family road trip movie in the style of National Lampoon’s Vacation. The dysfunctional family takes a road trip full of mishaps to try to get their daughter to a children’s beauty pageant so she can live out her dream, which doesn’t turn out quite like anyone expected.
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I went to Tubi tonight to watch some classics. Someone had mentioned watching Rollerball (1975) and Logan’s Run (1976) as a double feature back in the day. And that’s what I was intending to do, and still intend to do, but I got distracted.
Tubi suggested a movie called “Horror High” with the description:
In a hypnotized town, a monster lurks near a high school and picks off tardy students one by one. Can an unlikely band of teen heroes end the terror?
So I tried to look it up, but apparently because that was already the name of a 1970s movie, on both IMDB and TMDB this new one is instead listed as “Tardy Terror”. Also according to them, it was made by some high school students and teachers with a $3,000 budget. No actors or anything like that. Just people who thought it’d be cool to be in a movie.
So I just had to watch this instead of what I was intending to watch. It was going to be really bad, right? The kind of so bad it’s good, maybe?
Well, no. It was actually pretty good. Not perfect, but it could certainly stand up to some of the recent big budget Hollywood movies. I think that’s pretty cool.
There were some things they could’ve done better, but I’m not gonna nitpick on a movie with a $3,000 budget and everybody just doing it because they thought it’d be fun.
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This is a legitimately great show. I enjoy Stingray because it speaks to my inner child. But this is as good as Mission Impossible, while being a little more fantastic.
Edited to add: This show also has diversity. Women play an substantial part, and then there is Lieutenant Green who is from Trinidad.
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We watched this based on a recommendation from the IHIBILI podcast. I can’t recommend this enough. Just find a way to see it. They have managed to capture the essence of the silent movie era (a la Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin), plus a fair amount of Looney Toons, for a reductive but effective comparison. One of the most remarkable things, to me, is that they stretch this concept out to nearly two hours and yet they never run out of jokes. Genuinely one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in years.
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