What have you watched lately?

[Diabolical]

Just finished "Unrivaled" on ESPN+, the story of the rivalry between the great Detroit Red Wings and punk ass Colorado Avalanche.
Fantastic documentary with interviews from both sides. Reliving many of those moments was exciting, despite knowing what happened.
And I may have gotten a little choked up with the Konstantinov stuff.

[Tom Foolery]

Really disappointed with the ending of James Bond. It started off like the best movie ever & wound up frustrating me to no end.

I took my 80 year old father to see it in theater. He’s been reading the books since they were released, and I had many fond memories of watching the 007 movies on network TV growing up with him. He didn’t say anything, but watching Bond finally die onscreen felt…wrong. And I doubt he’ll be around long enough for the next movie with a new actor come out.

It’s a bummer.

[jjreason]

Yep. Did not like & did not like woke, forced new 007 either. I wish I had stopped with Spectre.

[anarky]

Demolition Man: rewatched this with my 11-year-old while the ladies were out of town. It's every bit as great as it was originally, though the dates get more and more anachronistic as time goes by.

Porco Rosso: Another rewatch with my son. He likes it more than I do. I liked it more than the first time. But it's still... damned good movie, but it's Miyazaki, and he gave us Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. Porco is merely great; it doesn't redefine animation as we know it, which Miyazaki did multiple times over in other movies.

Currently decided to make up for two glaring holes in my viewing. Started Star Trek. I think I've seen maybe 1/4-1/3 of everything over the years (thought it was more until I dove in). I've finished the first season, and there's a notable shift in production quality with Season 2. I'll always go with Wars over Trek, but there is a reason this franchise is so pivotal. Even if there is a notable running theme through most episodes.

Also, since I've never actually seen a Bond movie all the way through, I started at the beginning. Dr. No. God damn, this movie is just fucking amazing, and Sean Connery is badass personified. And he gets all the pushy. All of it. He wakes up in the morning, mutters, "Pussy, please," and all the women in town immediately come to fuck him. Shit, lesbians and straight guys want to fuck him. This is the best one I've seen, since it doesn't really have most of the tropes yet and doesn't lean too hard into them.

(Also my phone autocorrected "pussy" to "pushy," but tell me that ain't perfect.)

From Russia With Love. Now we're getting some of the stuff associated with Bond mixed in, but it's still got the casual 60s hardcore spy feel. I said Dr. No was best, but, yeah, this one's best, too.

Goldfinger. "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die." Everyone knows the line. I saw it coming, and it still blew me away. Some of the tropes are starting to get goofy, but not in a bad way, like the intro with the drug cartel, and a woman fucking named "Pussy Galore." Speaking of pussy, Bond's constant fucking starts to really push the border of silly here. Not one, but two bad girls become heroines when Bond just literally walks up to them in the middle of their evildoery and says, "You. Fuck. Now." Maybe it should be The Man With the Golden Dick. Still not enough to detract.

Thunderball. Holy shit, that is the stupidest title ever. Something about Tom Jones singing a song with the title works, in that bizarre way Tom Jones always works. But this movie, while still solid, starts to drag. It's just a bit too long, and it's really tough to follow some of the action scenes, especially that final underwater battle that goes on for twice the movie's runtime and involves apparently six million combatants. The constant basically pranking back and forth during the over-long health club bit got old, and old Bond seemed to cross a line between having incredible sex appeal to just being rapey. And I was really thrown off by the dude who shows up out of nowhere to save Domino, and no one knows who he is, and then he vanishes and no one really cares. I did really love the first scene with SPECTRE and Blofeld stone cold murdering the embezzler, and huge mad props for Fiona calling out the "magic dick turns the bad girls good" trope.

[Tom Foolery]

Trivia tidbit as you watch the 007 movies. Thunderball was a screenplay first, then Fleming adapted it into the 7th book in the series. The screenwriter co-owned the story and he got in a beef with the Bond producers. Connery’s last Bond film; Never Say Never Again from the 80s is a straight up remake of Thunderball with a new title and an older Connery.
Have fun watching them all!!

[Ran]

My father made sure I saw the Sean Connery and Roger Moore Bond films when I was growing up. Connery was the best. Moore was okay. Pierce Bronson did 4 Bond films, which is more than I thought. The Daniel Craig Bond movies I saw were pretty good, but he isn't Sean Connery.

[Tom Foolery]

My son paid for Amazon Prime, so I’m piggy backing on his account, since he uses our Netflix, Hulu, and D+

Watched Porky’s and Porky’s II for the first time in…40 years? Good god. I’m old.

Anyway, there was almost more dick in the movies than there was boobs and bush. Trivia from imdb said Porky’s was the top movie for several weeks when it came out, and then was in the #2 spot for for like six months,only behind E.T. It made more money that year than Star Trek II, Poltergeist, First Blood and Conan the Barbarian.

[anarky]

Adventures in Babysitting. My wife decided our son was old enough for the Playboy subplot, so the kids got to see the REAL Thor. (And it fucking blew their minds when I told him it was tte MCU's Kingpin.) It mostly holds up as a fun, goofy comedy, though a big thing about ecognizing people who were famous ("Holy shit! The blues musician is fucking Albert Motherfucking Collins!") or would be famous ("Holy shit! The asshole boyfriend is a very young Bradley Whitford!")

Only complaint is it appears to only be on Disney+, and is the severely edited TV version, with pretty much no profanity (which ruins a few jokes, most notably "Don't fuck with the babysitter!").

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension With a Bag of Chips and Extra Fries and I Think There's Another Two Paragraphs of Title. Somehow never saw this one, and it's fucking bizarre. Not a great movie, but a fun one, and, again, fucking bizarre. Also one of the greatest ensemble casts ever.

[Diabolical]

Finished up session three of The Boys last night.
Batshit crazy fun.
I'm not sure how a series can be so different, yet so faithful at the same time.

Also, if you haven't seen it, in the first episode of season three, they do their take on the "Thanus" theory and it is fucked up and hilarious.

[Ran]

Buckaroo Banzai was one of the movies they played for us in elementary or middle school at the end of the school year. Condorman being the other.

I watched parts of Batman and Batman Returns with Michael Keyton over the weekend. Its funny how technology has changed since 1989. The video camera was huge, but voice activated self driving cars are actually real now. Some article I read recently had Batman Returns as one of the better Batman movies. I think it is a bit overrated.


...and whoever wrote the movie doesn't understand how storm drains/sewer systems work.

[Tom Foolery]

I always thought it was weird he had like three or four videocams in that ONE room that hardly anyone was actually going to be in. Overkill much, Bruce?

[Tom Foolery]

The Gray Man. There were just enough quips and action sequences to make it not suck, but it was kinda dull. And while I liked Ryan Gosling and Ana De Armas, I didn’t care enough about Billy Bob Thornton and his niece to be invested in whether Six and Miranda would succeed. Didn’t care about the microchip macguffin part of the story at all. Chris Evans is entertaining, but he was miscast. He never felt dangerous as a villain. Honestly, mostly I was just thinking about which characters Gosling and DeArmas will play when they inevitably join the MCU. He’s been hinting at wanting to play Johnny Blaze for awhile, and Fiege would be dumb not to lock rising star DeArmas down.

[Ran]

Cowboys & Aliens. I had no desire to see it when it came out. But then last week, I read an article saying it was kind of underrated and that the guys making The Mandalorian worked on it. The day after I read the article, it happened to be on tv. It wasn't bad. Harrison Ford had a smaller role than I expected.

[Diabolical]

Cowboys & Aliens. I had no desire to see it when it came out. But then last week, I read an article saying it was kind of underrated and that the guys making The Mandalorian worked on it. The day after I read the article, it happened to be on tv. It wasn't bad. Harrison Ford had a smaller role than I expected.

I saw it, even bought it.
Can't remember any of it.

[Ran]

Cowboys & Aliens. I had no desire to see it when it came out. But then last week, I read an article saying it was kind of underrated and that the guys making The Mandalorian worked on it. The day after I read the article, it happened to be on tv. It wasn't bad. Harrison Ford had a smaller role than I expected.

I saw it, even bought it.
Can't remember any of it.

Basically, its a western version of Independence Day. Cowboy James Bond wakes up with a alien bracelet on his arm and no memory of what happened. He has a run in with grumpy cowboy Indiana Jones. Then, proceeds to round up a posse to fight some aliens and rescue the townsfolk.