drama – Page 24 – Yesterday's Movies

D.O.A.

August 2, 2013temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

How often can a murder victim solve their own murder (aside from ghost stories)? The idea doesn’t seem quite as unusual as it’s hyped up to be for this film, but probably more of that is from 60+ years of speculative fiction covering the territory than from promotional overhyping.

Doctors tell the man there’s no antidote for the poison he took, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the investigation into the crime leads him to one. I’ll be interested in seeing how the film handles the process of his dying. I picture a poisoning victim as someone too ill to run around town questioning people.

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MASH

July 4, 2013July 4, 2013temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I’ve seen a handful of episodes of the series, but I couldn’t say I know it very well. As I understand it, the book this is based on is intensely serious, the movie is a dark comedy, and the series started out almost at Hogan’s Heroes-level hilarity before getting even more morose than the movie (perhaps because the series lasted so long the war was longer for them than in reality).

So I guess what I’m expecting here is a cynical but amusing picture of the Korean War. I don’t know what characters from the series are there, and which are played by different actors, but I don’t know half of them anyway. There’s probably going to be a lot more money on the screen than a television sitcom can afford.

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1776

June 27, 2013June 28, 2013temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

Grill some hamburgers, butter some corn, …load some muskets? warm up your singing voice? A brief look and page turn at your calendar will point out that next week is Independence Day. And what better movie to mark the event with than 1776? Okay, there are better choices, but I’d seen most of the ones that came to mind and/or couldn’t get them on short notice.

I can see the potential for the War for Independence to be a musical epic, but no individual major events really suggest songs to me. The writing and signing of the Declaration will probably have centerpiece song(s), but beyond that, I have no idea.

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Camelot

May 16, 2013May 17, 2013temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

The more I dig around the edges to get a bearing on what to expect, the more excited I get. This is described on the box as a very witty and literate show, and while I don’t think I’ve heard any of the songs before, the titles I’ve come across sound lovely.

I’m not sure if Vanessa Redgrave had a career renaissance recently or if it’s one of those cases where I just didn’t start noticing her until I noticed her. Still, it’s going to be rather different to see her as a young lady and a love interest, and I don’t think I’ve heard her sing before either. I know Richard Harris both as a singer and an actor. I think. He’s still muddled in my mind with Richard Attenborough, but I’m fairly certain I’ve now got them straight.

For the most part, I’m ready to be swept away, but there’s a voice in the back of my mind going “on second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. Tis a very silly place.”

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Harry In Your Pocket

March 22, 2013temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

What interested me in this movie was James Coburn. I think it was automatically recommended to me when I selected Bank Shot. I’m curious as to how a movie about building a pickpocketing ring can build tension, aside from the inner tension when the group doesn’t want to work together anymore.

From this poster, it looks more exploitative than I expected. But then, it was the early 70s, and I mainly know James Coburn from Our Man Flint and its sequel, a pair of somewhat exploitative James Bond spoofs.

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Fatal Attraction

February 14, 2013February 14, 2013temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

I’ve gotten the idea that this movie is kind of horror-drama about a stalker. Glenn Close’s character is obsessed with Michael Douglas and ruining his life in the name of “love”. The greatest insight I’ve seen into it is an episode of Family Matters where a character sees that Steve Urkel’s girlfriend’s bedroom is wallpapered with pictures of Steve and comments “You should rent Fatal Attraction. It’s about you.”

My description makes it sound more like Misery, but that’s all about a fan keeping an author captive, while I don’t think there’s captivity here, except maybe using the man’s family as hostages or something. This might have an element of action, which Misery wouldn’t.

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The Final Countdown

February 7, 2013February 8, 2013temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

So this is about a modern aircraft carrier dropped in the Pacific before Pearl Harbor. It appeals to me because I’m interested to see how modern military mixes with time travel, how they handle the realization, and how they get home. I don’t think I’ve seen accidental time travel done with large groups that didn’t use space-warping transportation daily and have practical “should you find yourself in the wrong time” procedures.

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The Shining

January 4, 2013January 4, 2013temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

Well, we’re out of a stealth theme month. First person to send their guess as to what December’s theme was to me via Astral Projection wins a genuine No-Prize.

Here’s another selection from the “how did you miss that one?” files. As I think I’ve discussed previously, I avoided horror movies for years because I didn’t like being scared, and then when I started catching up on them in my 20s, I found myself at best unaffected, and at worst cringing at the cheese. This one seems to be mostly psychological horror, so it should be better than the classic slashers I saw previously.

Thanks to pop cultural osmosis, I know more about the movie than I’d prefer to be going in with, but that’s usually the case when The Simpsons parodies a movie wholesale.

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The Godfather

November 30, 2012November 30, 2012temporalparadoxLeave a comment

Before watching the movie:

Everything I know about this movie comes down to atmosphere and a few lines that get parodied frequently. I don’t even remember the plot of The Godson or the tribute episode of Quantum Leap, so I’m not sure if I’ve come across anything more substantial about this movie than Marlon Brando’s mushmouthed Italian and the wedding day favors. It probably concerns a rival family, tensions within the family, or both. I think I can expect Don Corleone to die by the end of this, because he’s clearly not in the sequels.

This movie is probably to organized crime what Wall Street is to ~~disorganized legal crime~~ stock trading, though I think I’ve heard that Italian-American mobsters often don’t like what it’s done to their image.

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Titanic

November 16, 2012temporalparadox1 Comment

Before watching the movie:

My impression of this movie is that in many respects, it got out of hand. The intent was to deliver a realistic example of what traveling on the Titanic would have been like, but the detail got out of hand. Also it’s impossible to get people to sit in the theater for over three hours of beauty passes over grand staircases, so a generic love story had to be dropped in, which also got out of hand.

Finally, Neil Degrasse Tyson got out of hand. I have a lot of respect for the docent astrophysicist, but even though I’ve heard the argument for fixing the sky to have accurate stars several times, I don’t buy it. Yes, there was a lot of detail lavished on the ship and costumes that would go overlooked by most people, but that detail has a lot more chance to impart valuable information about the setting than the positions of points of light in the sky. I like to be complete, but there’s a point where returns on detail diminish. Nobody was looking at the stars before Tyson complained.

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