Saturday, March 27, 2021

Weekend Open Thread

Don't forget to join us this Sunday for #FPatricksBirthday!

7 comments:

  1. Hey y'all, hope everyone's well and enjoying the weekend!

    So I watched a couple of 2020 movies this week (while still waiting for most of the major awards contenders to be released here). The Way Back was really good. It's nothing revolutionary, but a good old-fashioned sports drama with a good script and solid actors. Really liked it. An American Pickle, on the other hand, despite having some fun ideas, felt more like a bunch of ideas thrown together than an actual movie.

    I'm going through the Disney animated classics in order along with the Disniversity podcast, and watched Cinderella the other day. I know most of these early Disney films more through cultural osmosis than actually watching them a lot, and turns out I'd never seen Cinderella in its entirety before. I just thought I had, because I know the transformation scene so well, it having been included in a Disney Christmas special that airs on Finnish tv every Christmas Eve.

    Next up on my 38-movie Godzilla project: All Monsters Attack (1969). Boy, this is a weird one. The movie is a story about a young boy who gets bullied at school and travels in his imagination to Monster Island, where he befriends Godzilla's son, Minilla. On Monster Island, he also witnesses a lot of monster-on-monster fights, which would be great if most of them weren't reused scenes from previous movies. It's the worst movie in the series so far, but I guess has its place as kind of a weird curiosity.

    Oh yeah, and Zack Snyder's Justice League is a huge improvement over the theatrical version. Still not a particularly good movie.

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  2. Good weekend to everyone. Happy Birthday, Patrick!

    FOXES (1980, dir. Adrian Lyne) – My only movie for the week is this drama about four teenage girls growing up in Los Angeles. Though flawed and problematic, the film comes alive with the lively performances of the cast. A young Jodie Foster and Cherie Currie of the band The Runaways give the standout performances. Currie’s Annie is a sympathetic character whose downward spiral is all too believable. The 1970s Los Angeles ambiance is a major character throughout. I have not gotten the Donna Summers’ song “On The Radio” out my head all week.

    Much of my other viewing during the week was mountaineering documentaries on Youtube. I have a fascination for the flirtation with death that mountain climbing involves. Annapurna: The Hard Way is a classic mountaineering doc about an influential 1970 Himalayan expedition. The lengths the climbers pushed themselves to make you wonder if they were crazy. Everest The Hard Way follows the same group of climbers for a successful 1975 expedition. Lastly, K2: Triumph and Tragedy chronicles the deadly climbing season of 1986 that saw 13 people die on the mountain.

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  3. One of my recent birthday movies has been Lost Boys. Hence the new Avatar. I doubt you'll watch Lost Boys, but still, Thou Shall Not Kill

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    1. A DVD of The Lost Boys has been sitting in my room for at least four years. I have intended to finally watch it for October the past couple of years. I only remember seeing parts of the film on TV when I was kid.

      Have you seen Near Dark, another classic vampire film from 1987?

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    2. If you are a fan of genre films like The Lost Boys, James, there is a celebration of them on this website all of June. It is called Junesploitation. Every day there is a different theme with free days mixed in to watch whatever appeals to you.

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    3. We took our kids to see THE LOST BOYS at a drive-in last summer, and it is now one of our 8 year-olds favorite movies!

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    4. Every time someone mentions Lost Boys now, I take a second to reorient myself. There's a Finnish documentary movie thast came out last year called Lost Boys, about Finnish drug users. It caused quite a stir here because of its realistic and uncensored portrayal of heavy drug use.

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