Got to be birds flying higher

I crossed another 90s movie off my watch list recently. I was either too young, too old or too poor to watch a lot of movies when I was younger, so there's a lot to catch up on!

The downside of watching a movie like The Craft when you're old is knowing how much you would have appreciated it when you were younger ;-D Seriously, younger me would have been OOOOH and running off to the library to read about witchcraft. However, I was surprised by how much edge and darkness it had for a teen movie of the time. Basically, friendship goes from magic to tragic as the four main characters fail to respect the power of the spells they create. At first they work, and work a little too well as the girls discover the consequences of their actions. In some ways the movie is close to Mean Girls.

There's some cringey stuff in The Craft that also raised my old lady eyebrows, such as an attempted sexual assault and one of the girls pretending to be another girl in order to seduce her old boyfriend. That was especially icky. Overall the movie has some jumbled pacing and too many characters, but if you have nostalgia for it, you would probably enjoy it quite a lot :-) A sequel actually came out in 2020, but I have no desire to watch it.

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I haven't watched Blade in years and never saw the sequels, so it was a treat to watch these two back to back. I just have to track down Blade: Trinity and I'm done!

It amazes me what solid comic book movies both are before the MCU took off. And only now I realize how much Blade and The Matrix have in common, and thanks to the Internet, I'm not alone in noticing similarities. The "world is not real!" angle isn't as pronounced in Blade but it is there.

Blade II, directed by Guillermo del Toro right as his career was taking off, is an excellent sequel, taking the action abroad to Prague. This movie had a huge video game feel, particularly the sewer scenes.

It's unfortunate that Wesley Snipes' career was derailed by his tax problems. His career as an action star was on a fantastic trajectory and then...dang!

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I'm catching up on scary movies this month, and I barely recall seeing ads for Deep Blue Sea in the 90s. The only big names are LL Cool J and Samuel L. Jackson, but it's still a pretty entertaining, suspenseful shark attack thriller. I bet it was rad on the big screen!

The premise was popular enough for two sequels, but I think it would be hard to improve on the original. Samuel L. Jackson plays a businessman who sinks millions into a special project involving shark brains to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease. As you can imagine, science goes awry in the search for a cure and the sharks turn on their human masters, rawr!

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We watched F9 tonight in anticipation of seeing Fast X in a theatre soon. The movie was made for big screens and I wish I could have watched it in a theatre.

I must say, it's not my most favourite Fast & Furious movie at a sprawling 2.5 hours. It seemed like one of those movies that's advancing the plot for the next movie. There were some great stunts, but also a lot of hand waving.

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Note to self to watch this! We only watched part of it in a South Asian restaurant once.

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge has been playing constantly for decades at one theatre--it's so popular!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/ddlj-bollywood-film-enduring-love-story-1.6751022

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Alfred Hitchcock's narrative of Marnie is a chuckler. I enjoyed the movie, but parts of it seem cringey by today's standards--plenty of animal motifs feed into the idea that women are feral and must be tamed--but the reveal of Marnie's problems at the end is worth the suspenseful wait.

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LOL, this weekend's movie for Monday's class is a breeze--Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 movie The Birds. I watched it as a child but don't remember much. I may have gotten bored and switched the channel too. It is very loosely based on Daphne du Maurier's book which is more about the Cold War compared to the movie. The movie still makes a great case for the supernatural and eeriness created by something that isn't there. It's never overtly said (except by one panicked citizen) why the birds are there, but one can surmise it has to do with Melanie Daniels' arrival to Bodega Bay. Dun-dun-dun!

The movie is very slow paced and silent, which would have created a lot of tension. I wasn't feeling that tension, but I bet in a dark theatre full of people it would have. A modern version would have a blizzards of birds and brooding power meows. I'm surprised it hasn't been remade.

My birds were piqued by the opening scene, but unruffled otherwise btw.

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I'm way behind on posting movie and TV logs and I found some thoughts on Tom Hardy's 2015 movie Legend in which he plays both of the notorious Kray Twins, British gangsters that ruled London in the 1960s.

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I love a good gangster movie, but this is not one of them. Upon re-watching the trailer, I'm reminded of what a fast-paced, action-packed movie was promised, but it's actually 132 sluggish minutes where the movie never turns the corner.

Is it supposed to be romantic? Emily Browning plays Reggie Kray's first wife, who only seems to tolerate him instead of being in love with him.

Is it supposed to be a heist movie? Nope, because despite the money dumping scene, there aren't any heists.

Is it supposed to be about the esthetics of violence? No, because even the fight scenes are nothing special.

Is it supposed to be historical? Kinda--the sets, costumes and props are actually the best part of the movie.

Is it supposed to be about a detective who busts up the brothers' criminal empire? Maybe? I forgot who the lead detective supposed to be :-D The movie does this so often--introducing and then tossing out characters.

The movie certainly wasn't lacking for talent, music or anything else. It just didn't know what story it wanted to, or was trying to, to tell. It's just a bunch of beautifully designed scenes tied together with Frances' voice over explaining what's happening.

If you wait long enough and patiently enough, everything ends up on YouTube, including King Kong Vs Godzilla, a 1962 movie starring the titular heroes. It's funny because Godzilla 2000 was the first movie hubs and I watched together in a theatre and here we are 21 years later watching another Godzilla movie. The pacing is a little slow and the sculpt of King Kong's face questionable (ugh, see a dentist, man!), but it was entertaining all the same.

Like many Japanese shows over the years such as Power Rangers and Voltron, this film has been cut up, dubbed and extra footage added from the original. Hubs found the original Japanese version on YouTube (since set to private, darn) and he said it made a lot more sense than what we watched.

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We're now into the "Men of Action" part of the Clint Eastwood collection and another movie I probably wouldn't have been too interested in watching. Eastwood gets top billing in this interesting movie about a World War Two bank heist that may have been based on reality.

The movie signals right away that this isn't an ordinary war movie by the juxtaposition of an action sequence with the bright and cheerful theme song, "Burning Bridges":

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It really took us by surprise! The song plays again at the end as the heroes leave with a truck load of gold. The caper is the brainchild of Kelly, a former lieutenant, who discovers that a stash of Nazi gold is hidden in a town. He works out a plan and convinces his colleagues to join him and go AWOL during their break to get the gold. There's definitely a weird and anti-establishment streak in this movie. There's too much comedy to make it a straight up war film like Where Eagles Dare but not enough of it to be completely obvious like Catch-22. The absurdities of war are well shown as the heroes encounter friendly fire and Kelly's captain steals a yacht. Ranting and raving two star General Colt would be perfectly at home in Dr. Strangelove. There's even an homage to Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns with soundalike music.

However, the movie couldn't quite decide if it was a movie or an extended TV episode. It might have been the casting which to viewers of a certain age, will be familiar. Carroll O'Connor, Gavin Macleod, Don Rickles and Telly Savalas along with other character actors round out the cast. Donald Sutherland plays Oddball, the proto-hippie leader of a tank corp who waxes on in a Yogi Bear-like voice about positive waves. Kelly's disgust at the undisciplined and free-spirited tank corp camp is pretty real--no acting there!

Now, this movie is long and I lost a bit of interest during the French town scene to read IMDb. It's 144 minutes and that's after about 20 minutes was cut from the film. The pacing could have been picked up here and there and today it would have moved along quite swiftly. The ending is strange--of course they get the gold--but it seems oddly out of place, which almost makes it feel like the ending is the fever dream of someone's dying brain or that the whole movie is someone's head canon to escape the drudgery of war.

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