The Whisper Man | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Creepy movie about child murderers. Michael Keaton plays a man who murdered five children. Robert De Niro is the cop who caught him 25 years ago. Adam Scott is De Niro's adult son. His kid has disappeared and he is understandably losing his mind. Owen Teague plays Keaton's adult son who is carrying on his father's tradition of killing kids. Hamish Linklater plays Norman Collins, an eccentric collector of murder memorabilia.
Once again the cop on the spot, Amanda Beck, decides to charge ahead into danger without waiting for backup, and once again, we have the villain sneaking up behind her to stick a knife into her.
Murder mystery. All the pieces are there, someone just has to pick them up.
Popeye Village is a purpose-built film set that has been converted into a small attraction fun park. It is located at Prajjet Bay/Anchor Bay, two miles from Mellieħa, Malta.
It was built as a film set for the production of the 1980 live-action musical feature film Popeye starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall. It is open to the public as an open-air museum and seaside resort.
Chief of Station | Official Trailer (HD) | Vertical
Vertical
Okay action thriller. Lots of fisticuffs, lots of gunfire. There is a story, but it's pretty thin. The only people we care about here are Aaron Eckhart as Ben Malloy and Olga Kurylenko as Krystyna Kowerski. There are also a bunch of villains to hate.
Directed by Tony Scott famous for any number of films but I'll just mention Top Gun. He is also the younger brother of Ridley Scott famous for Alien.
The story recounts Nathan (Robert Redford) and Tom's (Brad Pitt) history of working together as spooks for the CIA. Now Tom has tried to pull off a stunt to rescue his girlfriend and gotten himself in a terrible jam. The big-shots at the CIA aren't willing to try and save him because reasons, so Nathan uses his retirement fund to engineer an op to rescue him. It's probably going to land Nathan in hot water, but he's a spook, he'll elude his pursuers. And Tom and his girlfriend will owe him.
Can't tell who wrote it. It's a website with one review of this one movie. It uses the acronym MACV-SOG without defining it, so I asked Google:
MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group)
Espionage is a dirty business. Assets in the spy trade are people who can get the information about the enemy that the agents want. However, to spooks, assets aren't people, they are just objects to use to get what you want and as soon as they are no longer useful or you have gotten what you want, they get dropped. If they fall into a burning pile of shit, well too bad. Good agents are not going to waste any tears for them. No wonder the CIA is so popular.
Somewhere around the 1:10:00 mark, the Sheik catches a ride from Cyprus to Beirut, a distance of maybe 120 miles, in speedboat equipped with hydrofoils. Never seen the like. Google thinks it might be a Volga, a Soviet boat.
Enola Holmes 3 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Stupid bit of fluff, although we do get to visit Malta, and Khost gets mentioned, which can lead to a rathole from which there is no escape, at least not without getting half of your army killed and spending a king's fortune and bankrupting your country.
I give it three stars. The first hour was drivel, people whining about life. The dialog was crap.
After that, things picked up. Odysseus and his crew have a series of unfortunate encounters with a succession of vicious beasts and people. At every encounter Odysseus loses some men.
The wooden horse that the Greeks built was very impressive, but leaving it on the beach doesn't seem like a good idea. Seems more likely that the Trojans would just burn in in place. The scene with dozen or two of men packed inside this horse for some number of days was well done. But not too well done, we don't want to hear about all the shit accumulating in the bottom of the horse. Couldn't the Trojans have smelt it?
The cyclops was impressively grotesque. Circe was very talented and very nasty.
I don't ever recall hearing about ten foot tall armored soldiers in The Odyssey. Did the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica wander onto the wrong set?
There was one scene where something big was reaching down from somewhere above the ship and grabbing men from the boat. It eventually retreated into a cave high in a cliff overlooking the water. We never had a clear view of what it was.
The scene at the end where Odysseus takes on the courtyard full of courtiers looked like every action movie I've ever scene. Is he really going to kill 200 men all by his lonesome?
Great show about U-boat hunting in the Atlantic during WW2. The film is based on the 1955 novel The Good Shepherd by C. S. Forester. I've read at least a couple of his books, one was The Gun.
It was a fine movie, plenty of mystery, appealing heroes, detestable villains, lots of bad guys chasing our heroes. And aliens, which are fine if that's what you want to believe. There are plenty of unexplained phenomena, and maybe they are caused by aliens, but I tend to think they are hallucinations, and if they are not, then the aliens are so far out of our league as not be worth worrying about. On the other hand, all these weird things that people see might just be a glitch in the matrix. That would be a more serious worry, but I'm not gonna worry about it on account of I'm fat, dumb and happy in this world that is filled with cheeseburgers, beer and girls.
You don't suppose Trump's releasing the UFO files was done to promote this movie, do you? It sure looks suspicious to me. I think somebody should investigate, and then we can make a movie about the investigation.
There is one clever scene where the good guys are holed up in a warehouse and the good guys come in the front door. Our girl gets ahold of the alien device which expands her mental powers. She sends something to the bad guys, negative waves, alien radiation, something, that convinces them the warehouse is empty. But something is off, so they halt, and they can hear the good guys running for the exits.
I loved Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It came out in 1977 which is like 50 years ago, and I've seen a lot of movies since then, so there wasn't anything really new in this movie. For someone who hasn't watched a zillion films, it will probably be pretty cool.
It's a Quentin Tarantino movie so it's looney toons with il y a beaucoup de gunfights, shootouts and general mayhem. Wikipedia calls it a "romantic crime drama film" and I guess that covers it pretty well. Clarence generally seems fairly normal, but as the show goes on you find he's got a couple of quirks. Pretty great movie all around.
The cast is over the top, though some have only minimal roles. Val Kilmer, for instance, plays Elvis Presley in Clarence's imagination. We never actually see his face, and Samuel L. Jackson only appears long enough to get shot.
The movie starts with Clarence and Alabama going to see a triple feature at the local theater. The movies all star Sonny Chiba. They are:
The Vought F4U Corsair is an American fighter aircraft that saw service primarily in World War II and the Korean War. Designed and initially manufactured by Chance Vought, the Corsair was soon in great demand; additional production contracts were given to Goodyear, whose Corsairs were designated FG, and Brewster, designated F3A.
The Corsair was designed and principally operated as a carrier-based aircraft, and entered service in large numbers with the U.S. Navy and Marines in World War II. It quickly became one of the most capable carrier-based fighter-bombers of the war. Some Japanese pilots regarded it as the most formidable American fighter, and U.S. naval aviators' claims suggested an 11:1 kill ratio. Early problems with carrier landings and logistics led to it being eclipsed as the dominant carrier-based fighter by the Grumman F6F Hellcat, powered by the same Double Wasp engine first flown on the Corsair's initial prototype in 1940. The Corsair's early deployment was to land-based squadrons of the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy.
The Corsair served almost exclusively as a fighter-bomber throughout the Korean War and during the French colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. In addition to its use by the U.S. and British, the Corsair was also used by the Royal New Zealand Air Force, French Naval Aviation, and other air forces until the 1960s.
From the prototype delivery to the U.S. Navy in 1940, to final delivery in 1953 to the French, 12,571 F4U Corsairs were manufactured in 16 separate models. Its 1942–1953 production run was the longest of any U.S. piston-engined fighter.
Apparently we didn't get our quota of repression from binge watching Tehran so now we're in Taiwan watching another repressive regime in action. The story starts slowly but after laying out the ground work it picks up speed and becomes engrossing. The epilog makes it look like it is a true story, but I found nothing on the net to confirm this.
Netflix summary:
After losing her brother to a government execution, a young girl takes a dangerous journey to reclaim his body and raise the money for a proper burial.
A Foggy Tale is set during the period of White Terror—a nearly four-decade era of martial law, political repression, and authoritarian rule by the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek—and, for most of its runtime, Chen Yu-hsun films those oppressive years as though they were distant memories recalled decades later. The result is a mostly detached and unsentimental tale told with the observational restraint of a documentary. Through the eyes of a young Taiwanese girl named Yue (Caitlin Fang), Yu-hsun captures the ordinary lives of citizens living during the White Terror. By keeping a child at the center, Yu-hsun refuses to sugarcoat her proximity to physical harm and dangers posed by predatory men and the police officers. After arriving in Taipei from Chiayi, Yue is abducted by a child trafficker, and when she angrily accuses a cop of killing her brother, another officer kicks her and violently beats her. Yet when Yue blames the police for her brother's death, she isn't accusing a single individual so much as the entire repressive system.
A Foggy Tale opens with Yue and her brother, Yun (Tseng Jing-hua), discussing what they hope to become in the future. From there, Yu-hsun cuts to one year later and takes us to the moment when the news of Yun's execution by firing squad arrives at Yue's residence. The implication is clear: under oppressive rule, dreams, ambitions, and futures are abruptly cut short by a regressive, close-minded system. There are other sentimental touches, like Yue finding a brother-from-another-mother in Chao Kung-tao (Will Or) and reuniting with her elder sister, Hsu (9m88), who was given up for adoption years earlier. Yet Yu-hsun never exploits these moments for melodramatic effect. He remains curiously level-headed throughout. Scenes that might have turned cloying or excessively brutal in the hands of a lesser filmmaker are presented in a matter-of-fact manner.
When Yue is taken to a room at Paradise Funeral Home to identify her brother's body, what stands out in the foreground is the employee's casual lack of empathy in the face of her discomfort. Even then, Yu-hsun shows little interest in launching direct attacks against any particular person. Cruelty is not sensationalized, and acts of kindness arrive without sentimental fanfare. Such a style of filmmaking often results in impersonal work, yet there is something about A Foggy Tale that prevents you from dismissing Yu-hsun's efforts. He casually introduces elements like a Robin Hood-style figure or Kung-tao making a deal to murder someone in ways that initially leave you taken aback. Is Yu-hsun assembling different varieties of vignettes to depict a particular moment in history? Does the key to the puzzle lie in the titular tale that Hsu tells her sister?
The ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth was launched in 1938. She entered service in March 1940 as a troopship in the WW2, and did not make her first commercial voyage as an ocean liner until October 1946. The ship was retired after her final crossing to New York, in December 1968. In 1972, while she was undergoing refurbishment in Hong Kong harbor, a fire broke out and the vessel capsized.
Saw Project Hail Mary for the second time yesterday afternoon, this time at the Fox Tower theater. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I missed (or forgot) from the first time. It's still great.
Ninety minutes of Charlize Theron performing death defying stunts while being chased by a cannibalistic serial killer. She climbs unclimbable vertical rock walls, kayaks down rampaging rivers and bounces off rocks. Is she trying to outdo Tom Cruise? Or maybe, like her character, she is an adrenalin junky. It's terrifying.
Went to the theater yesterday afternoon to see this movie with my daughter. I read the book a few years ago, I recall it as entertaining but not that engrossing. The film, though, was pretty great. It bounces around from comedy to super serious to fantasy physics to mostly realistic spaceflight, not to mention the terrifying action sequences. Ok, maybe not terrifying, but certainly tension inducing.
The premise is totally contrived, but it makes for a good story. Our boy is shanghaied, drugged, stuffed in a rocket and sent to Tau Ceti. He wakes up after being in a coma for months (years?) and finds he's the only one left alive. The other two crew members (volunteers) died in their sleep. And what does he find at Tau Ceti? An alien spaceship with a single alien crewmember! What an outstanding coincidence! The alien is kind of cool, looks like a giant spider made of rocks. He is very talented at making things out of glass-like and metal-like materials. Xenon is apparently his favorite element for fabrication. Chemistry is wonderful. No, it's not, it's black magic.Whatever, it's a movie, and it's pretty great.
It's supposed to be a one way mission, there are no plans for any of the crew to return to earth, but we're in a movie, there must be a way back, and thanks to some help from Rocky (the alien), our boy figures it out. But then sometime after he takes off for Earth he realizes that Rocky is going to be in trouble so he alters course and goes to rescue Rocky. Me being me, I wondered how he could possibly have done that, being that Eridani, Rocky's home planet lies about nintey degrees from the direction of Earth. It would be pretty tough with the way rockets and space work. So I go rooting around on the net. I didn't find an answer, but I found a couple of cool things.
I Recreated Project Hail Mary in KSP! | Mission to Adrian & Kau Ceti
Bogue
"Kau Ceti" is a Kerbal Space Program (KSP) adaptation of the real-life Tau Ceti star system, frequently featured in player-created interstellar missions and mods. - Google
I never cared much for Formula 1 and this movie did nothing to make me care about it. Near as I can tell it is all about the adulation of the crowds, and I've never cared much for crowds.
The film stars Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a race car driver, and Javier Bardem as Rubén Cervantes, the APXGP team owner. Javier is famous (to me) as the cold-blooded killer sent to recover the missing loot in No Country for Old Men. I don't know if I can list all the Brad Pitt films I have seen, but here's a couple.
Race cars, in my book, are made in some guy's garage and taken to the track on weekends. Formula 1 race cars are made by NASA-like bureaucracies, full of political scheming and arcane rules. I would like to see a race with fewer rules, something like run what you brung, no refueling and no tire changes. If you run out of gas or wear out your tires, that's your own damn fault.
The racing on screen as compared to real-life racing was like boxing in the movies compared to real-life boxing, i.e. very fake. I dunno, maybe that's what non-car people need to see. There were an awful lot crashes. I was curious if that was real, so I asked Google, but all Google can tell me is that there were dozen's of crashes last year. Much of the racing strategy revolved around taking advantage of these crashes.
One of the best things about motor sports is hearing these high powered, high-revving engines scream as they go flying by. There wasn't any of that in this movie, or at least not enough for me to notice. Still, the film won an Oscar for sound. Weird.
One thing new-to-me is the sparks you see coming from under the cars.
There is a wooden plank along with some titanium blocks bolted to the bottom of F1 cars. The thickness of the plank is measured before and after the race and if the plank has lost more than one millimeter of thickness, the car is disqualified. The titanium blocks are there to insure that the plank does not get worn down. The sparks come from the titanium blocks hitting the track. Nuts, like just about everything else in Formula 1.
Stupid action movie. Bunch of cops with guns being tough guy assholes, getting in fistfights with other cops. Bunch of gunfire, might have been gunfights if anybody ever aimed at anything. There were a couple of hits, but for every hit there were like a thousand rounds sent wild.
The only redeeming feature of this movie is it illustrates a big problem caused by making narcotics illegal, i.e. the huge amount of money involved makes corruption inevitable.
Also, they have a dog trained to sniff out money. WTF? The money is not the problem, the law is the problem here.
Yes, some people's lives are ruined by their addictions, but the War On Drugs hasn't made a change there. The problem is that the American drug lords are opposed to making drugs illegal. If drugs were legalized their profits would go down. On the other hand, it drugs were legalized, they could be taxed and generate a considerable revenue stream for the government. On the gripping hand, do we really want the government to have more revenue? They can't seem to manage what they've got. I suspect all that would happen is that the corruption would move from the gangsters to the politicians. Gangsters at least seem to know how to deal with corruption. Or so Hollywood tells us.
