After the disappointment of "Out of Sight", to-night, I'm watching "Plane". This is an action thriller starring Gerard Butler, as a pilot whose plane is hit by lighting, and has to make an emergency landing.
The character must've been written for Butler. When speaking to his character's daughter he asks her to prepare "homemade haggis, neeps and tatties".
Then, when asked by the co-pilot if he was English, he replies "Hell no. I wouldn't lower myself to that. I'm Scottish." 😃
Just watched Oppenheimer. It felt like a three hour zoom meeting at work, only getting a bit of life thanks to the labrador getting into the picture (Albert Einstein) and a big bomb in the middle of the meeting. Otherwise rambling and ramblings by old men who I don't care about. This could have been an e-mail. #films
Ridley Scott's wildly uneven sociopolitical thriller/carnage porn is propelled purely by star wattage. Russell Crowe's Foghorn Leghorn accent is at least a diversion.
2024 marks the 45th anniversary of sci-fi horror masterpiece Alien, which was released May 25, 1979.
The first time I saw it I was pretty young, it was on TV and censored. We actually had it recorded on a VHS from TV, which is something my family did a lot. I only saw the full uncensored version years later! 😂
Happy birthday to the great Peter Cushing, who was born on this day in 1913. I'm sure a lot of my lifelong love of #horror came from late night viewings of many Hammer films with Peter and his good friend Christopher Lee, probably at an age when I was too young for them but didn't care, because I loved them.
Tonight's film club choice is Silent Running. When I bought it on DVD, the salesperson at Fopp said it was a classic and that I would like it, but I found it very boring and grim (and dated - there are no women other than in music / computer voices, bit like The Deadly Assassin).
7:30pm UK time, remote over Skype - DM me if you would like to attend (we don't publicise the URL widely now as we used to get Zoom-bombed)
This evening's viewing: a long-overdue revisit to Wings of Desire. First seen many years ago at my beloved Filmhouse, this was the #film that introduced me to Wim Wenders, who would become one of my favourite film-makers.
Achingly beautiful piece of cinema. How many amazing works did the Filmhouse introduce me to that I'd likely never have seen otherwise? So looking forward to its return later this year...
I knew that IMDb had been around a long time but TIL it predates the World Wide Web, as it was initially launched as Usenet group rec.arts.movies in 1990 and moved to the web in 1993. And it's been owned by Amazon since 1998, because of course it has 🙄
This evening's viewing: Modern Times. Been a long time since I last saw it, & while remembering the amazing & rightly famous sequence where Charlie is sucked into the cogs of the machine, I had totally forgotten about the equally amazing roller skate by the precipice scene, which still looks remarkable (the drop is in fact a glass matte painting, a clever bit of VFX for the era)
As I work today I'm listening to the soundtrack from the 1982 Conan the Barbarian film that was composed by Basil Poledouris. Things are feeling fairly barbaric at the moment here in the Arizona desert
Post-holiday Tuesday blues got you down?
Check out my latest blog post where I share some of my favorite stress-relief TV shows that have been absolute lifesavers for me. 📺
ps. Sending you virtual hugs friends! 🤗
And now, The High Note (2020), directed by Nisha Ganatra, starring Dakota Johnson, Tracee Ellis Ross, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Zoë Chao, Bill Pullman, Eddie Izzard, and Ice Cube. It's a #film about the music industry. Like most #films, it didn't make much box office during the pandemic, but I'm not going to hold that against it.
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