Movies

Excellent.

Another good movie for studying intrigue: it's all double-crosses and deceptions.

Pensive and brooding and thoroughly French. The characters say little. Arguably, they do little, too, but enough things happen to comfortably say the movie has a plot, albeit a simple one.

Meh. Fifteen minutes in, I was bored and unimpressed, so I quit.

Oh yeah. Seeing Nicolas Cage slowly dance through the grocery store whistling to himself, with a cart full of alcohol, then show up to a fancy restaurant disheveled and staring like a weirdo -- good stuff.

This is great. Within five minutes this movie is ten times better than The Killer. We're watching Nic Cage's character drink himself to death in real time. That saxophone solo where Cage has his head back the whole time, glugging a bottle of what looks like Fireball.... perfection.

The 1956 version, not Hitchcock's 1934 original.

This is a phenomenal movie, full of first-rate intrigue, false identities and double-crossing. Cary Grant gives a excellent performance; we are never sure until the very end where his loyalties lie, or even who his character really is. An Audrey Hepburn gives a perfect portrayal of an uncertain yet brave woman who is not just a 21st-century "strong female character."

Both Alexis Smolensk (whose taste in films I trust completely) and Rob, one of my work customers, recommended this to me.

Have I seen this before? I'm getting deja vu... Oh yeah. As soon as we learn that mobster Yulian's little brother is the guy who got attacked on the bus, I recognized that I'd seen this once before, a long time ago.

Didn't take notes while watching, save this: when Hutch brings his wife and kids out of the basement, it's meaningful that they cover the young daughter's eyes, but the son, who's sixteen or so, gets to see the bodies and the blood.

This movie has cool skeletons in it, but its plot is unfortunately also a skeleton. There's little substance and no meaning to what's going on. The characters don't have names. The fishermen and the shadow fish are never explained. Having a character misquote the section of the Bible concerning Noah's Ark and the Flood does not magically lend your movie any meaning whatsoever, even if your movie's setting seems to be a world that has been flooded. (Also, take a drink for "Japanese media that attempts to use Christian themes without understanding them.") All in all, though this movie is pretty, it's not inventive and not worth your time.

I struggled with whether to give this a score of 2.5. I would recommend it but only barely, and I don't think I'd watch it again. I appreciated it as a whole and liked it in parts. It does make good use of its runtime to make you feel the baseball game stretching on and on, from morning into night.

It's fine. It even made me laugh a few times. But it could have been truly wacky and not just rehashed Nic Cage (as much as I like some of his movies.)

Okay, so it's a reboot. Normally that would send me running away screaming. But this is everything a remake should be. It captures the spirit and the charm of the original, and would be enjoyable by the same audiences. It doesn't shoehorn in political correctness. Even the running time of 80 minutes is a throwback to a simpler world where everyone knew that was plenty of space in which to tell a story. Movies today gobble up two and a half hours of your life, or three hours, or they get split into two entire movies, all for storylines that could have been told in 90 minutes if the editors had just found their fucking balls.

I had a hard time picking a 3.5 or a 4. I can't help but feel I should have like this movie more. It's got my name written all over it: beautiful wilderness, swashbuckling adventure, sympathetic portrayal of (historical) religion, a conflict between nations playing out at the ground level of individual personalities... I can't lay my finger on why I considered it good, but not great.

The procession at ~23 minutes in is superb; I've been meaning to show it to D&D players, including the more orderly, religious part of the procession a few shots later.

Later, after Mendoza has killed his brother, he drags all his equipment up the waterfall in a bag of netting. Nothing attached to his body, around his waist, or on his back. The bag contains his armor, his sword, and other articles that would be like a second skin to a warrior.

It's not bad. A slow-paced adventure story with a genteel misanthrope as unknowing villain.

This heist movie doesn't fall into the trap of making fun of its West Virginia setting or the characters that live there. Some characters are hugely country and, yes, simple, but they're not the butts of jokes. They just are who they are.

I adore the kooky monsters and Egg the alchemist who flings exploding gems. While the movie gains depth from Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) being a fallible hero, I think that gets stretched a little too far for the fight in Lo Pan's wedding chamber. Everyone drank Egg's potion before the fight. It enabled Wang Chi to fly around doing wuxia, going head-to-head with one of the thunder sorcerers. Yet Jack could knock himself out with a falling rock and couldn't push the armored guardian off himself? I'm quibbling, though. This is a good movie.

I'm not a romcom person, but in the distant past I learned the hard way that you gotta watch your girlfriend's favorite movie, no matter what. Plus I'll almost always watch a movie I haven't seen before. The title, the plot structure, and the genre make it obvious that Harry and Sally end up together, but you don't watch this kind of movie to be surprised at the ending: you watch for how it all shakes out.

A war movie where the characters never shoot their guns, except at the sky in the penultimate scene? You'd think that's crazy, but it works: Jarhead is a war movie, but it's not about fighting. It's about all the other things that make up a war -- logistics, boredom, stress, discipline, terror -- and what happens to you when all those irresistible forces roll over you and lay you flat.

My favorite scene is the one where the soldiers struggle through the desert against a blacked-out sky, the only light thrown by pillars of flame from burning oil wells as liquid crude rains from the sky and turns the world to ink.

The process of training the titular "dirty dozen" into uncouth, unorthodox, but dependable soldiers would be a mere montage in a lesser movie. Here it's half the running time or more. As the soldiers interact with each other, rebel against discipline and take justice into their own hands, I am reminded of The Wages of Fear, which benefits from spending thirty minutes dwelling on the characteristics and attitudes of ordinary men who, in an utterly naturalistic way, become extraordinary.

A poignantly creepy thriller that leaves me wanting to discuss and debate. For instance, the men of Stepford are obviously crueler than men of today who get sucked in by AI girlfriend chat apps -- but are the Stepford husbands weaker than today's men? A Stepford wife at least offers the illusion of life, and is designed, however chauvinistically, to be part of a household, a family. An AI girlfriend is a method for a man to completely detach from love and romance; it offers a way to safely reject life outside one's self.

For the love of all that is good in this world, do not watch the 2000s remake.

I loved this movie. "Al Pacino plays an irascible, mercurial crackpot" is an easy sell for me even if the movie were about something else entirely.

One of Pacino's lines stuck with me for entirely personal reasons. Every straight guy has some trait he likes in women. My brain gets thrown back to the Stone Age by curly hair. The line I've been quoting over and over goes roughly like this:

"Women... who made 'em? God must have been a fucking genius. They say the hair is everything. Have you ever buried your nose in a mountain of curls and wanted to go to sleep forever?"

A rather pedestrian action movie. Its "message" about corruption and corporate capture of governance in Africa is made shabbily and with little nuance. Not worth watching once, much less again. I can't remember exactly why I picked it. I was bored, wanted a movie, arrived at the Wikipedia page somehow and said sure. Based on a novel by Frederick Forsyth, but if you've got time to kill, please just read his novel Day of the Jackal, which is much better entertainment.

A stirring action-romance in a pseudo-historical French setting, with sewer escapes, a headstrong young thief, cursed lovers, Rutger Hauer's preposterous double crossbow and solid shots of landscapes, medieval interiors and the villain's opulent digs. The one negative is the idiotic 80s synthesizer soundtrack, which feels equally out of place for a hermit's redoubt, crossing treacherous ice or a duel in a church.

As strong as the famous train-and-car chase is, for my money it's too hectic to be this movie's best scene. I prefer the foot chase where Detective "Popeye" Doyle tries and fails to catch Charnier, the stately criminal mastermind. The cinematography and the actors' movements make it; the steadily increasing tension of the score clinches it.

Nothing could possibly be drier than a movie about Japanese salarymen who work in banking, right?

Not so.

Shylock's Children is an intricate tale of fraud and counter-fraud, with a new level of deception appearing every time when you think the movie can't get any more complex. There's a lot packed into these two hours, and it's well worth your time.

The characters in this movie about con men are hard to like, all of them, especially the main character's stupid, narcissistic wife. Certainly that means the director and the screenwriter did their jobs well! But even so, I was almost ready to give up on the film two-thirds of the way through. However, I'm glad I persevered. The payoff, in which yet another con is revealed, made the whole thing worth it.

This animated French movie is just awful. The plot is nonsense: the villain is only defeated because, for absolutely no reason, he choose to not just command but cause the protagonist to pass into the future in suspended animation, and be restored at a time when the villain is weaker and less able to defend himself. All of that takes up a third of the movie. The bad guy's soldiers (robots with a Nazi-inspired color scheme) plod monotonously through landscape. The animation is merely acceptable: at one point the protagonist slips off a log and the movements are so stiff they might as well be a cheap flipbook.

God, this movie is absolute fabulous.

I was initially interested because it had Robert Redford and Paul Newman co-starring; having just watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the first time, I was eager for more from that pair. I didn't feel so strongly about Butch Cassidy that I wanted to follow its director to this film, but then my decision was clinched when I saw on Wikipedia that The Sting's plot took inspiration from David Maurer's book The Big Con, which I read just a few months ago.

My test for the quality of a comedy is simple. Does it make me laugh out loud? If so, how many times?

Revenge of the Nerds drew at least two genuine laughs. The first was when Lewis emerges in the smoking jacket: the gag caught me so off guard that I had to grope for the keyboard, laughing hard, to pause the movie until I was ready to resume. My other big laugh was at the ridiculousness of the beer-fueled tricycle race; this was partially because the antics of Takashi (Brian Tochi) reminded me so much of internet prankster Filthy Frank. Honorable mention goes to the reveal of the nerds' elaborate musical number near the end of the film.

My initial interest in watching this came from the costars: I figured I couldn't go wrong with Robert Redford and Paul Newman together. But I also watched it because the university movie theater in my new town (Madison, WI) is going to be playing a bunch of classic movies over the next few months, including Sam Peckinpah Westerns. In their online blurb for Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, the movie theater people explicitly contrasted that movie's blood and grit with Butch Cassidy's freeze-frame, doomed-but-heroic ending. They further suggested that anyone who hadn't seen Butch Cassidy should watch it to get an idea of what "ordinary" Westerns were like in 1969, to more properly appreciate the contrast presented by a revisionist Western like The Wild Bunch that came out the same year.

I watched this on a whim; it was better than I expected, and contained more intrigue than I expected as well. A complete surprise, and a welcome one. You can't get more 90s than Keanu Reeves whooping and hollering as he learns not to suck at surfing.

An excellent movie, full of pathos. At the climax, there's a fantastic moment where the camera lingers on Paul Hunham (Paul Gimatti) as he realizes, in an instant, that if he sacrifices everything he's worked for, he can accomplish something momentous. This reminded me of nothing so much as the end of Bridge on the River Kwai, where Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) has the same flash of realization before trying to blow up the bridge.

By far inferior to that early hallmark of film noir, The Maltese Falcon. Marlowe is too much of a hero in this one, and the plot is needlessly tangled with insufficient payoff.

I watched this as part of my "curriculum" for movies featuring intrigue. Although I've given this a star rating, as with previous entries this is less a review and more an analysis of character interactions to improve my D&D Dungeon Mastering skills.

The idea of watching movies to study intrigue was inspired by this Tao of D&D post, and subsequent discussion on Alexis Smolensk's Patreon. As always, if you care about the cutting edge of roleplaying games, you need to read Alexis's blog. Once you see how much you can learn from the millions of words he's given away for free, you'll understand why I send him some cold hard cash each month to get just a little extra.

My first reaction after finishing Quiller was that it moved too slowly, but upon reflection, I can overlook that: it was like a one-act play.

I'll be honest: part of me spent the whole movie waiting for Joubert's (Max von Sydow) line in the penultimate scene which begins, "It will happen this way." It's the perfect description of an assassination, uttered by a consummate assassin.