Movies

Fire in the Hole

In the early seasons of Justified this was Boyd Crowder’s favorite saying. It comes from an Elmore Leonard short story that served as the genesis for FX’s series Justified. I have watched all 6 seasons of the show a few times now and I also recently watched the new Justified: City Primeval. But this post really isn’t about that, it is more about the last couple of days where I have been sucked into an Elmore Leonard movie hole.

While stumbling around looking for something to watch on Peacock I saw the movie Out of Sight from 1998 and thought, “Ooh, I remember that. Might be fun.” How is i that Jennifer Lopez does look and any older after a quarter of a century, but George Clooney does?

I wondered if I could find some other of Mr. Leonard’s work. Nice, Get Shorty from 1995 is available on Max. This is a masterpiece of casting, all the actors totally inhabit their characters and the comedy tamps down the violence just the right amount.

There was a sequel of sorts 10 years later called Be Cool that had John Travolta’s character, Chilli Palmer breaking int the music business like he did the movie business in Get Shorty. I seem to recall that I did start to watch it on DVD back when it came out, but quit part way in because it was disappointing compared to the first flick. Hey, it is available on Max too, maybe I should try it again. Maybe.

I found the much newer Life of Crime on Frevee and once again I’ve seen it before, but is worth a watch again, if just for the big switch at the end. And Switch is the title of Elmore Leonard book that the movie is based on.

Another late 90s gem of an Elmore Leonard movie is Jackie Brown. A somewhat restrained Quentin Tarantino directed it, but it is only on Netflix and that is one of the streaming service I don’t subscribe to, so I can’t rewatch it.

Doing this research I discovered that Elmore is also responsible for 3:10 to Yuma. Wow, I have a digital copy of the 2007 version with Russel Crowe and Christian Bale. I have also seen the 5 decade older version with Glenn Ford and Van elfin. I’d rewatch the 1957 version if I didn’t have to pay $4 to rent it on Amazon.

And The Oscar Goes To…

We didn’t watch the Oscars on Sunday night. Haven’t in a long time either, they used to be a required viewing so that we could see if any of the movies we went to had won any of those shiny gender indistinct statuettes. But we haven’t actually been to the theater to see a movie in quite some time, 2012 is my last mention of that on this blog. And I bet that visit to an actual cineplex was a one off. I know we stopped going out for movies around the beginning of this century because I’ve got an old spreadsheet that lists the discs we rented on Netflix starting in late 1999.

Instead of watching the Oscars on Sunday we watched one of the ten movies nominated for Best Picture, The Holdovers, on Peacock. This was a near perfect movie for us, a quiet character driven movie that is set in and shot in the style of the 70’s. No explosions, no car chases, no bullet ridden bodies or computer generated space battles with hundreds of ships or soldiers.

I have also seen one of the other films of the ten that were nominated, the winner itself, Oppenheimer. It is also available on Peacock, but I didn’t think I could could get Donna to sit still for 3 hours for that. There is one other of the nominees that I could watch, Poor Things which is streaming on Hulu right now, but after watching the trailer, I’m not so sure I could get through the whole thing.

On a side note: Robert Downey Jr. won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in Oppenheimer. I don’t remember seeing him in the movie at all and I don’t know who he played, but I did recognize non-winner Emily Blunt though. This was probably just a testament to Mr. Downey’s acting ability and a case of my secret crush on Ms. Blunt.

Holiday Viewing

Did you know that Iron Man 3 is a holiday movie? I didn’t and I have watched it, albeit several years ago, and don’t remember any Christmasy stuff in it. Well, Plex remembers. When I open the app there on the home page was a section entitled “Home for the Holidays” and Iron Man 3 was right there.

I cued up the movie and watched it. Sure enough there are several scenes that have Christmas decor in the background. In my humble opinion there was not enough to push this to be classified as a holiday movie. I probably last watched it on DVD way back in 2013 when it first came out. Maybe I even got the DVD as a Christmas present that year…still not a Christmas movie.

There were 3 other titles, of the 150 or so movies I have digital copies of, in that “Home for the Holidays” category. And one of those is also a controversial pick, Die Hard. I say no, but the listing gave me an excuse to watch the movie again. Yippie-ki-yay.

Movie number three was definitely a Christmas movie, Elf and this movie is a yearly watch. And we watched it on Thanksgiving weekend when Donna’s brother and family were here.

The last of the four, but not least, was Bad Santa. And I didn’t watch this one this year.

What was conspicuously missing from that list, it even has the word Christmas in the title, was A Moody Christmas. There are two possible reasons for its non-inclusion in the “Home for the Holidays” list. IMDB lists its title as The Moodys without the C word. But probably it is because it is an Australian TV series and TV is already home viewing. This is also a yearly must watch for me during the holidays. There are just six half hour shows with each one covering a dysfunctional family’s annual Christmas lunch in 6 consecutive years.

James Vs His Future Self

As I’ve mentioned here several times before, “I’m a sucker for any time travel related media, books, TV and movies.” So, when I saw this title on Amazon Prime and watched the trailer, I just knew I had to watch it.

First let’s talk about the title, why is versus in the title on Prime Video abbreviated Vs instead of vs. or just vs like in the movie poster? It’s weird.

Great casting with Daniel Stern the the future self, his manic schtick is just right, but… It is lousy casting in that he looks too dissimilar to the present James. He is several inches taller than his current self, but the kicker for me was the pronounced hook on Mr. Stern’s nose was nothing like Jonas Chernick’s smaller and straighter probiscis.

The actors don’t have to look exactly alike, but they could have tried a little harder. I just rewatched Moneyball starring Brad Pitt. There are flashbacks to the younger Billy Beane and the actor who plays the younger version, Reed Thompson, has a very similar facial structure. So if they really wanted Daniel Stern why not find an actor with a bit more of a likeness? The young James is played by Jonas Chernick who co-wrote the movie, so why not get someone with more of a resemblance to him?

Somewhere around the 20 minute mark they even tried to explain the different sizes of the two Jameses. Present James tells future James he doesn’t believe who he is because he is bigger. Future James tells him time travel physically stretches him. Height and just the bridge of the nose? At this point I stepped off the time travel bus.

Jurassic Overload

We sign up to get Peacock so we can watch the Tour de France and Vuelta a Espana bicycle races. We even opt to spend the ten bucks a month to have the no commercials option.1 One of the big banners that show up at the top when you open the Peacock app is for the new Jurassic Park movie – Jurassic World: Dominion.

Hey, what the heck, I enjoyed the first movie way back when and its free, so I thought I’d check it out. I lasted 15 minutes before turning it off, Chris Pratt on a horse roping dinosaurs like a wild west cowboy… So this past Monday while the Vuelta cyclists were on a rest day, I talked Donna into watching the 1993 original movie.

Wow, amazing how much you forget in 30 years. Not the main bits that have become pop culture touchstones, the water class vibrations as the T-Rex approaches or the lawyer in the out house, etc, but the acting. Jeff Goldblum’s over the top smarminess, Lora Dern’s poorly acted wide-eyed innocence, Sam Neil’s character arc of kid hating to kid loving and Wayne Knight’s whatever.2 I did forget that Samuel L. Jackson was in it though and I kept waiting for him to drop a Mofo, but alas I was disappointed.

Anyway, turned out the first movie wasn’t as great as I remembered it was, so I thought I’d give to new movie one more try. This time I made it to right around the hour mark when the movie sort of morphed into the Star Wars cantina scene and then flipped immediately into a Jason Bourne movie which where it lost me…again.

Along with the latest Jurassic World: Dominion, the first 3 Jurassic movies are available for watching on Peacock right now, but The Lost World & The Lost World: Fallen Kingdom aren’t for some reason. I have a copy of The Lost World that someone gave me and I probably watched it back in 2015, but I can’t remember anything about it. I have seen the third movie, Jurassic Park III, and I seem to remember thinking it was OK, but that was 20 years ago.

That left the second movie, The Lost World. Jurassic Park, left to see on Peacock. Guess what? This one is another steaming pile a dino droppings. I made it about 45 minutes before hitting the stop button. The only thing remotely noteworthy about this movie was there was a young guy that plays a photographer that goes to the island with our core group of Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore and Richard Schiff that sounded a lot like Vince Vaughn. I had to stop the movie and check IMDB. Holy Crap! It was a 27-year old Vince Vaughn.

Random Little Library

Back in the days of sunny skies and breathable we were on a walk around the neighborhood when just a couple blocks from home we stumbled on a couple boxes of books on the front wall with a sign that read “Free. Take Some.”

It was a varied assortment of kids to young adult books. Donna picked through and selected several books that she thought were appropriate to send along to the nieces and nephew in Washington and I selfishly picked out three books, that spanned 3 centuries in publication dates, I might like to read. All of them were made into movies, only one of which I have seen, so maybe I’ll read the books, then watch the movies, just to compare them.

Published in 2010 was I Am Number Four by Pittacus Lore and all I knew of this book was that it had been made into a movie. A not very successful one if I recall correctly. It was fairly entertaining book about an alien race that looks just like us living on earth until they can return to their home planet and reclaim it. But it turns into teen romance with monsters and hero aliens. Because it turns out to be the first book in a series of seven it doesn’t so much as conclude, buts just stops. The movie is available on IMDB for free (with adds), but after I watched the trailer, I won’t watch the movie because I’m not a teenager any more.

Published in 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Phillip K. Dick, AKA Bladerunner, was the source material for one of my favorite movies of all-time, but I have never read the book on which it was based. I am a voracious sci-fi reader and have actually never read anything by PKD. Though I have seen more than a half dozen or so of the movies or TV shows based on his writings. While the book is different from the movie in many ways, the core plot is the same and I can see where the cinematic choices made for a better movie.

First published in French in 1864 A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne wasn’t translated into English for publication in 1871. According to IMDB there are three movie versions, 1959, 1988 & 2008 to go along with numerous TV series, TV mini-series, TV movies and a video game based on this material. I have seen none of them and I have also not read the book. Now is my chance. Wow. I couldn’t read it. The language was, well, different. Was it the translation, was it the language of the time, was it a combination of the two? I don’t know, but I couldn’t finish through the second chapter.

But as I was hungry, I sallied forth to the dining room, where I took up my usual quarters. Out of politeness I waited three minutes, but no sign of my uncle, the Professor. I was surprised. He was not usually so blind to the pleasure of a good dinner. It was the acme of German luxury- parsley soup, a ham omelette with sorrel trimmings, an oyster of veal stewed with prunes, delicious fruit, and sparkling Moselle. For the sake of poring over this musty old piece of parchment, my uncle forbore to share our meal. To satisfy my conscience, I ate for both.

The old cook and housekeeper was nearly out of her mind. After taking so much trouble, to find her master not appear at dinner was to her a sad disappointment-which, as she occasionally watched the havoc I was making on the viands, became also alarm. If my uncle were to come to table after all?

Probably not going to watch this movie either. The 2008 movie with Brendan Faser is three bucks to rent on Amazon and the 1959 movie with James Mason & Pat Boone is a dollar more at $4. The 1988 version is free on Amazon, it has 3 one-star ratings only because they couldn’t give it a zero. But to top it off, here is a quote from the listed director, Rusty Lemorande: “Only the first eight minutes of this film were directed by me. The rest of it is the sequel to the Kathy Ireland vehicle Alien from L.A. (1988) directed by Albert Pyun, which was tacked on by the producers and renamed “Journey to the Center of the Earth” in order to fulfill contracts with foreign distributors.”

She Looks Familiar

On Saturday when I finally gave up on watching Californication with mere minutes to go in the Season 5’s final episode. I once again tried on Hulu for something worth watching and received the same results (what is that quote about trying the same thing over and over again?) My best option now was to open up Plex and pick a movie I own digitally because if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have a copy of it. Ooh, here is one I love and haven’t watched in a while, Ronin. Foreign locales, international intrigue, gun fire and car chases.

Natascha McElhone in Ronin

Early on when the team of mercenaries is gathering a bar in Paris, in walks a woman who is going to be the leader their mission. Hey, she looks familiar. I’ve seen her in something I’ve watched recently.

Natascha McElhone in Californication

I hit pause and open up IMDB page for Ronin, dang, no wonder I thought I recognized her, she is the same actor who plays David Duchovny’s girlfriend/soul mate/baby mamma in Californication, Natascha McElhone.