Oh my goodness, America gets to watch the 4k restoration of HARD BOILED in cinemas! Wish they’d do it for us in the UK.
Hard Boiled, aka the greatest action movie of all time, just the best. Nothing is cooler than jumping through the air firing two pistols in slo-mo.
I missed it on the big screen recently (film festival; sold out), sadly. Been a long time since I’ve seen it! I’m not convinced I’d like it as much as I did when I was younger (changing tastes and all), but I still wish I’d managed to get tickets.
I’m blazing through Attack on Titan. I don’t really watch that much anime but I really like it so far.
It starts strong.
We watched The Shuffle which is a short documentary about the 1985 Chicago Bears’ hit The Superbowl Shuffle. It’s 40 minutes, which is about the right length to tell the totally ridiculous story. My one complaint is that it doesn’t include the whole video in one go. It can’t be a rights issue, the whole thing is in it, just not as the video. Worth watching if mid 80s pop culture is meaningful to you.
I also watched Starfleet Academy.
I mostly persuaded myself to watch it because Holly Hunter and Robert Picardo were in it but it turned out to be not as horrible as I imagined.
Yes it is a bit too much High School the Musical without the singing in places and I disliked the design of the USS Athena quite a bit as well as the very stupid separated nacelles established in the dreadful Discovery.
However, unlike Picard, Discovery and Strange New Worlds I did not loathe it.
We have reached Episode 837 of One Piece, an unexpectedly spoilerific flashback episode in which Semla buns are eaten in …. terrifying amounts. As they aren’t a common occurrence here we have never tried them which according to my partner needs to be remedied.
However the very best recent episodes we saw must have been 832 and 833 which present the ludicrous results of Luffy‘s short gathering excursion into the forest before the wedding. That moment when the horde of Luffys breaks out of the giant wedding cake was only rivaled by Jinbei being immune to Big Mom’s power. This is why I am watching the show. Straight out of your average slightly unhinged rpg group playbook.
Another recent fave was the Ninja episode on Zou island and the reveals that were made about the One Piece in that run of episodes
I just went to see “Return to Silent Hill”, which my partner is in!
Their big scene was mostly cut but they still got some lines and looked spooky. We were sat with a load of the cast and some post production folks, and the movie is gorgeous. The cast also jumped at the right places!
The last two films we watched at home were Sinners and Tron Ares.
Sinners is visually stunning, the music is great, and totally sucked me in. Highly recommended for anyone who hasn’t watched it yet. It’s up for a bunch of Oscars.
Tron Ares was good, but not epic. Too much time spent on exposition justifying why Sam Flynn and Quarra weren’t in the movie, which meant the characters who appeared were short changed. I enjoyed Jared Leto’s performance, and the story was not what I expected, which was a good thing.
My daughter made me sit through Return of the Jedi last night. I’ll spare you my thoughts on the movie, except to say it reminded me of one thing I hate about movies made in the last couple decades. The sound mixing in modern stuff sucks. Everything is too loud for the level they put the dialog at, so you can’t hear the dialog, unless you have the sound stupidly loud. The loud stuff in RotJ is loud and boomy enough, and you can still understand the dialog at a sound level that you can’t hear from a mile away.
Which reminds me. “Everybody knows” that The Jazz Singer is the “first talkie”. But I think Lights of New York has a better claim—it’s the first feature with dialogue all the way through—and it’s sheer melodramatic fun. On YouTube and presumably other places.
Released later than the Jazz Singer and I think one of the issues may be its length (57 minutes) which doesn’t really qualify it as a feature film by some definitions.
I think you are correct however about the dialogue all the way through. I always thought that The Jazz Singer should have been disqualified as the first talky because it lacked that.
@Lordof1 and I talked about this at length on Ribbon of Memes; in short, TJS is feature-length and has both synchronised recorded music and live-synchronised speed and singing, but all of that had been done in short subjects earlier. The reason I argue for LoNY is (a) because I think it’s a bit silly to enshrine one specific film as the monent when everything changed, but if you are going to do that “speech all the way through” is a better criterion than “feature length including two very short speaking scenes”, and (b) frankly I think TJS is trying too hard to be Serious Drama (while utterly missing the point of the original play, by presenting the big decision but then letting him have it all anyway) while LoNY has a sense of fun which I think is helped by making a picture about bootleggers and gangsters while Prohibition was still happening and everyone in the audience could be assumed to know how it all worked.
Obviously not the first talkie, but the best early talkie is clearly ‘The Dancing Cavalier,’ starring Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont.
I think you have a point that everything was changing but as with all change something has to come first. Yes, parts of TJS are painfully laboured. Jolson could sing but that didn’t mean he could act.
Watched Totoro live in Covent Garden. It was great!
I heard they’ll do Spirited Away this year so I’ll keep watch on that one
What he could really do, by all accounts, was absolutely engage with a live audience. He was dynamic on stage, dashing around, reaching out to the audience, and belting out the songs so that the people at the back could be sure of hearing everything. He must have felt horribly constrained by the limitations of film sound recording at the time and the need to tone down his performance.
Okay with episode 3 this crashed and burned.
