davidh777

I keep seeing that one in sales but haven’t pulled the trigger. I should just watch it and stop wondering about it.

Gobear

It's been a month, but we have MeTV back on FIOS on channel 523.

JOE29

I don't think that it had good reviews. But that never swayed me either way. Wes Studi, Christian Bale, plus others, not a bad cast. I liked it.

shadokitty

Always loved Wes Studi. He was great as both Magua and Geronimo.

ororama

I watched The Hours and Times, a movie that I've been curious about since it was released, which is playing on the Criterion Channel through the end of the month. Pretty boring, a good performance by David Angus as Brian Epstein (I've probably seen one or two clips of Epstein, and had forgotten what he looked like, so he had the advantage of not portraying a familiar person) and a bad one by Ian Hart as John Lennon (voice and accent okay, looked nothing like him and it felt like he was playing Lennon in A Hard Days Night, without the charisma), and who cares whether Brian Epstein and John Lennon had sex during a weekend trip in 1963 (my sister probably does).

However, the more that I think about it, the more outraged I get. There is a scene where Lennon and Epstein are having dinner, and Lennon wonders whether Elvis had the wine from the vinyard and year that they are drinking, and Epstein quips probably, with a hamburger. Surprisingly, Lennon does not punch him in the face. This scene convincingly explains Lennon's (intelligent, but grew up poor) attraction to Epstein (rich and knowledgeable about things that Lennon is curious but uninformed about), but writer-director Christopher Munch does not consider that if Lennon is commenting on the wine, he has already learned everything that Epstein has to teach him.

They are also ridiculously casual about identifying themselves and about how they present themselves, considering that Epstein advised Lennon to conceal his marriage out of concern that it would affect his appeal to female fans and that homosexual acts were not decriminalized in the UK until 1967.

I think that Munch is not interested in Lennon, and probably not in Epstein either, but is interested in claiming Lennon as a sort of gay icon. The one thing that inclines me to give him the benefit of the doubt is a beautiful scene of Lennon and a woman he has picked up dancing to a Little Richard record that she picked up and he hasn't heard yet and wants. It seems to be the one point where Munch understands Lennon, while the rest of the movie presents him as a clone of Epstein (or Munch). Epstein's best scenes involve him talking about his sexual experiences, positive and negative. The movie looks great and is only 57 minutes. A reviewer on letterboxd accurately calls it gay Beatles fan fiction, so I guess that I'm making too much of its deficiencies. It just reminded me of Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zürich, in which Lenin surprisingly agrees with Solzhenitsyn's view that not only is the repressive state that Stalin creates after Lenin's death terrible, but that the actions that Lenin will begin taking in a few months when he comes to power to consolidate Communist rule are wrong.

Somehow, I'm more inspired to write about this than the many good westerns that I've been watching. I would strongly recommend Broken Arrow, Yellow Sky, and The Law and Jake Wade, which I watched before this challenge started, and Requiescant, a spaghetti western that is very different from just about anything that I've seen. I'm looking forward to more westerns.

shadokitty

I've been watching a lot of true crime lately, though I often wonder what draws me to it. But on the other side of the coin, even though I won't make Oshkosh this year because I took my vacation fund to pay vet bills, always about this time of year, my love of aviation comes to the forefront, so I've been watching a lot of aviation documentaries, including the first disc of a series I ordered from a second hand DVD site, Century Of Flight for only $5. Plus I watched a documentary that I bought when I went the year before the pandemic celebrating 50 years of the event.

JOE29

Yes. Both those movies are favorites of mine. He also had a small part in Dances with Wolves.

On a different subject, the movie Northman is due out on the 7th of June. I ordered the Blu-ray. So I'll be looking forward to that.

davidh777

Finally dipping my toe into Boardwalk Empire. I like it so far. There are a lot of qualifying HBO series that I’ve been meaning to watch.

Gobear

If you have HBO, I strongly recommend watching The Janes, a documentary about a group of Chicago-area women who provided safe abortions between 1968 and 1973 before Roe v Wade. It's a fascinating and horrifying look at a time when women had no agency over their own bodies, a time sadly becoming relevant again.

shadokitty

^ That’s interesting, because I only heard of them a couple weeks ago. A local clinic was firebombed and Janes took credit. I saw it on my local news.

Gobear

You're thinking of Jane's Revenge which has nothing to do wth the group of women in Chicago providing safe abortions from 1968 to 1973..

mrcellophane

It's the 50th anniversary of Watergate so I decided to watch a couple of movies about one of my least favorite US Presidents. This was the first time I watched Dick and absolutely loved it. The satirical takes on Nixon and his coterie of advisers is hilarious. Next, I watched Robert Altman's Secret Honor (R.I.P. Philip Baker Hall) which is a monologue in with a fictional Nixon spirals into paranoid insanity. I may have to suggest both movies to my uncle who recently turned to me and wistfully said, "I'd vote for Nixon if he were running today."

Doc Moonlight

I revisited Hercules (1958) which I hadn't seen since it's original release as a young lad. There's a nice letterboxed print on TUBI, but the image is kind of soft. It's a longer version than I remember, and some of the lines were translated differently. Parts of it are cheesy (the Minotaur), but it's still really enjoyable.

BobO'Link

I just finished a first time viewing of True Grit (1969) and its remake, True Grit (2010). Even though I'd never seen the original I knew it's regarded as a classic and, when it was announced, wondered why they were bothering with a remake.

So... I enjoyed both films for different reasons, which surprised me as I fully expected to enjoy the original and think the remake was a poor imitation. They tell *exactly* the same story, hitting exactly the same points, with only minor differences in dialog and pacing. In the remake the original opening setup scenes were told in voice over, which seemed to help pacing, and probably another 10% or so of the story was told just a bit differently with scenes removed/changed/added.

What I didn't miss in the remake was the horrible acting job from Glen Campbell in the original. Even Campbell felt he did a poor job, saying at one point "I'd never acted in a movie before, and every time I see 'True Grit', I think my record's still clean!" I've read Elvis Presley was considered for the Campbell role but Col. Parker turned them down. Good? Bad? I'm not much of an Elvis fan when he played non-musical type roles (i.e. mostly played himself on screen) so would say "Good" in spite of Campbell's rather wooden character portrayal. Matt Damon is OK in the remake, certainly better than Campbell, but the character is rather weak and feels somewhat superfluous in both films, mainly existing to lend support for specific scenes needing a 2nd adult type to work properly.

I liked Hailee Steinfeld, who played Mattie in the remake, better than Kim Darby, who I've never much cared for, in the original - as much as anything because she looked to be closer to the age of the character and was dressed and made up (mainly the hair) more in keeping with the years depicted in the film. For the original, Wayne had promised the role to his daughter, but the director refused to hire her. By this time, John Wayne pretty much was John Wayne in anything in which he appeared. He does a good job here but I give the nod to Jeff Bridges as too much "John Wayne" came through in Wayne's portrayal (yet I really like him playing the same character in Rooster Cogburn). I also liked the ending of the remake better than the original.

In the end, I have a very slight preference for the remake but would watch either if asked.

Travis McClain

I dug them both enough I tracked down the original novel and ended up digging that, too. It's kinda wild to imagine Elvis in a movie with John Wayne. I'm pretty sure that would have made the '69 True Grit the official film of the South and the West.

pagefrance

I just finished watching the two seasons of ROME (2005-2007) and DAMN, that series was good! It was even better than I remember from watching it when it originally aired. A high water mark for a television series that did not overstay its welcome... I'm looking at you LOST and GAME OF THRONES.

BobO'Link

I had an unintended actor syncing in 3 movies I watched today...

First up, El Dorado, starring John Wayne and Robert Mitchum. That was followed by Rio Bravo with John Wayne and Dean Martin. Finally was 5 Card Stud with Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum. Mitchum and Martin played essentially the "same" role (alcoholic lawman) in Hawks' Rio Bravo and it's quasi remake (though Hawks always denied this) El Dorado.

davidh777

Currently watching American Underdog, the Kurt Warner movie with Zachary Levi.

So much qualifying HBO! I watched a season of Rome for this challenge previously and need to finish it off.

I finished season 1 of Boardwalk Empire but didn’t realize it lasted five years. I like it but there are a lot of characters to keep track of. I broke it up with a couple episodes of The Knick (Cinemax but on HBO MAX). Good but dark.

BobO'Link

I really enjoyed Rome when I watched it a few years back.

I'd not say GoT "overstayed its welcome" but rather that the showrunners were not up to the task of writing/plotting the series once they ran out of books to adapt (roughly in season 6) and are guilty of putting in too much "fan service" crap in those later seasons.

Doc Moonlight

But Leila Gorstein (Goldie Fisher, et al) has left the show. She will definitely be missed.

Giles

I really like this Challenge the most and I did watch stuff, I just did not do a good job keeping up adding them to my list ... (sad face).

JOE29

Finished up this challenge. It was tough watching movies during the week due to my work schedule so I lost a lot of time there. But what can you do? At the end I kind of got hooked on F Troop. So I used that for my ending. I did work in a few new titles this year which I haven't done in the past few years. It's always been the same titles mostly. . So I wish that I could of done better, but I did what I could.