sholio | Entries tagged with movies:misc

Orion watched this movie without me, and then having it on 48-hour rental from Amazon, immediately wanted to watch it again to figure out the plot, so this was sufficiently intriguing that I watched it with him - and yeah, okay, wow, that was definitely a movie that takes some unraveling afterwards.

It's kind of hard to even talk about without at least *some* spoilers, since the protagonist (whose name we never learn) doesn't know what's happening in the beginning either. It's an actiony, bombastic, very Bond-esque movie. I really liked it.

( Slightly spoilery basic premise and what's fun about it )

( Now with all the spoilers )

Catching up on some things I watched/read earlier this year and never posted about: Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick! This was probably back in March or April.

(tl;dr - I really liked them.)

So it turned out that both Orion and I, in spite of growing up in the 80s, had never seen the original Top Gun. I think we were exactly the wrong age - we were too young for R-rated movies when it came out, and it didn't really fit the politics of either of our parents, so while I'm sure our dads probably watched it once, it wasn't a movie we were likely to see in our house on TV. And then once we were old enough that we were picking our own movies, the cultural gestalt of the early-to-mid 90s in our friends group was things like Evil Dead and Full Metal Jacket, so an optimistically gung-ho military movie from the mid-80s was exactly the kind of earnest patriotism that we wouldn't have been interested in.

But as it turns out, watching both movies back to back, I was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed them! The original Top Gun is actually kind of an "underdog sports team" movie, without really having an overt bad guy (Orion, when I said this out loud while we were watching the movie: It's the Russians. The Russians are the bad guys), and even the character who is essentially playing the role of the movie's Jock Bully is actually a genuinely likable guy who makes good points. (I came out of it seeing why people ship Iceman/Maverick, for sure.) The action scenes have aged really well. I would like to say that the music is just the right amount of nostalgia distance to sound good, but let's be real, I've always loved pop/rock soundtracks in movies, and it's interesting and also delightful for me how this was a big thing in the 80s and then went totally out for a while and came back in the 2010s.

So yeah, I liked this a lot, and then watching the sequel the next day was a trip. Honestly, I *really* liked how the sequel captures the Feel of being older and watching the world you knew and your own youth slip away, watching The Youth come up behind you, and dealing with your own complex feelings about it all. I really loved the romance in this one; it was really nicely done, and I liked how she had her own life and past, too, and her own things she was good at that weren't Maverick things, but were compatible enough with Maverick things that you could see them being happy together. I loved finding out that Tom Cruise is really flying his own plane in the small-plane sequence, and the fighter jet shots were shot in real fighter jets that the actors had to work up to flying in. (Reading about this was actually the first time I understood that you can train yourself out of motion sickness, and the actors did in fact go through this training so they could film the scenes. Here's one of the articles on it - non-graphic mention of bodily fluids.)

This is what I loved best, though:

( Spoilers for Top Gun: Maverick )

I watched this movie on Netflix tonight, as people who follow me on Tumblr will have noticed by the sudden, brief gif flurry. I could tell from the previews that this movie was going to absolutely nail one of my rather specific character relationship tropes, which is reluctant parent figure + plucky orphan girl, and it does indeed do that, along with very pretty scenery and some cute/fun/sweet scenes with the monsters.

I liked most of it, on the whole it's a really entertaining Power of Friendship animated movie, but I am unfortunately way too cynical for the ending of this movie.

( Details follow )

I'll round out 2021 with a short little write-up of this sweet, occasionally funny, and often heartbreaking WWI movie -

philomytha, you might want to add this to your WWI watch list, because it's very good! I watched it as part of my Watch All The Daniel Brühl Things project, but it's entirely worth watching for reasons that have nothing to do with Daniel Brühl (though he is excellent in it).

Joyeux Noël is a fictionalized retelling of the Christmas Truce of 1914. The movie follows several different characters representing three different nationalities (Scottish, French, and German). Brühl plays the Jewish-German lieutenant in charge of the German side at this particular section of the war front, and is characteristically adorable. The other primary characters are a Scottish soldier who enlisted to join his brother and then lost him to the war, writing letters home to his mother that pretend they're both still alive; a chaplain who followed his parishioners to the front; a French lieutenant deeply worried about his pregnant wife, who is in the German-occupied part of France; and a pair of separated German lovers, a drafted opera singer and his girlfriend.

The movie is brutally, unrepentantly anti-war, as it should be. It opens and closes with wartime propaganda that the other side is Just Not Like Us, while the central core of the movie is pointing out that the primary thing dividing them is an arbitrary front and their superiors' orders to kill each other. It's not an ideological war; it's a war being fought over political issues that none of these characters have anything to do with. And when that barrier is temporarily removed, they cautiously and then more genuinely get along fine, and even start to forge tentative friendships, until the war comes crashing back down on them.

Totally requesting this for Chocolate Box, because I desperately crave postwar fic that gives them all the happy ending they deserve.

Crossposts: https://sholio.livejournal.com/1046754.html

A couple of days ago, I watched the first episode of Knight Rider on Netflix for nostalgia value/cheesy entertainment, after noticing that it was streaming. If you grew up in the US (or US-adjacent) in the 80s, you almost can't not know about this show, in which David Hasselhoff is consistently upstaged by a talking car; I was head over heels for it when I was about 8.

It is definitely everything I expected based on my hazy childhood memories - "awesome" is not one of these things, but "ridiculous" and "hilarious, although not necessarily in the intended ways" certainly apply.

One thing that has become much funnier with the passage of time and the development of David Hasselhoff into a cornball pop icon is the reactions of everyone in the show to David Hasselhoff's face. So basically, he's played by a different actor at the very beginning, then gets shot in the face and experimental plastic surgery turns him into David Hasselhoff. As it does. This means that you get a "IS THIS ... MY FACE???" scene which is everything you would expect of a BUT MY FACE!!!!! scene played by David Hasselhoff. (I have to say that if experimental plastic surgery turned me into David Hasselhoff, I would also be upset about it.)

The mood whiplash between a guy losing everything and everyone he cares about, getting his face shot off, being presumed dead, and having PTSD about it vs. wacky hijinks with a talking car is certainly a thing. Also, a car that talks and drives itself was highly futuristic in the 80s and is much less so now. However, I was sufficiently entertained that I may watch more of it. I seem to remember a) the first episode is probably as close as the show gets to competently written, and b) there is later h/c with the car and also an episode in which David Hasselhoff plays his evil twin with a mustache.

In further mood whiplash, I continued my intermittent "watch all the Daniel Brühl things" based on the extremely scientific method of observing which movies he appears to be hottest and/or most adorable in, based on Tumblr gifsets, and then watching those. Woman in Gold (2015) appears to score quite highly on the Daniel Brühl Hotness Scale (exhibit A) and he is indeed very hot in this movie, and also very adorable, as his character is extremely sweet, although sadly not in it very much. The actual plot - based on real events - concerns the deeply odd team-up of Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds as, respectively, an elderly Jewish woman trying to reclaim art that was stolen by Nazis in WWII, and a family friend who is a lawyer and is helping her. The core friendship between the two of them is very sweet, although it's very weird seeing Ryan Reynolds in a dramatic role, made even weirder because every now and then he slips into campy Ryan Reynolds mode, which is extremely tonally jarring in a movie about the Holocaust. Tatiana Maslany plays a surprisingly convincing young Helen Mirren. It feels Very American in some ways (e.g. everyone speaking English in most of the Austria scenes, though they do have subtitled flashbacks), but I liked it.

Crossposts: https://sholio.livejournal.com/1043869.html

I still really like it! Though I don't remember Toby Maguire making me think quite this much of a concussed baby deer the last time around.

- "I accidentally fused myself with evil sentient octopus arms" is still one of the most hilarious villain origin stories I have ever seen.

- And yet somehow he manages to be incredibly sympathetic and tragic for all of that. Also still hot.

- I cannot believe the arms are not CGI but were actually built for the movie. They're incredible.

- I also really love how much of a presence the ordinary people in the city have. There are a bunch of very human little moments with various regular people, and also a recurring theme of people doing their best to save themselves. One of my favorite things along those lines was Spider-Man trying to rescue a toddler (like 2 or 3) from a fire, and when he falls through the fire-weakened floor and tosses her up to safety, she tries to help him back up with her tiny little haaaaands. ;____; MY HEART.

I don't anticipate being stolen away from my Falcon & Winter Soldier happy place by any future Spider-Man developments, but we shall see.