Oh! This isn’t the John Huston movie from 1960 — it’s the Clint Eastwood movie from 1992!
(I bought a box set of western movies.)
I’m enjoying this — it’s quite odd? The plot is just weird. I mean, it’s probably just me: I wasn’t totally paying attention at the start so I didn’t quite catch while the … sheriff? (Gene Hackman) didn’t flog that knifing guy… which led to the hookers putting out a bounty on him.
Heh heh. Morgan Freeman and Eastwood’s got really good buddy chemistry going on.
I admit it, I was going to put this movie on and do some computer admin stuff here while this was running in the background, but … I can’t take my eyes off of the movie.
This is good stuff — the cinematography is nice, the actors are really having fun… it’s sad that Eastwood is totally deranged these days, but this is… shockingly good.
OK, now it sucks. This scene is all deep and stuff, and it’s risible. This movie only works when it’s slapstick.
Well! Eastwood nailed the ending. I expected every shot to end in the obvious “ironic” thing, and it didn’t.
So you’ve gotta give him some props for that. On the other hand, there were scenes that just didn’t work well… it’s… it’s a mixed movie? It’s a very strong ⚃? Let’s go with that.
The problem with buying films on DVD (and blu-ray) is that they just sit on the shelf until you finally make yourself watch them… if you want to or not.
So here we are.
I was drunk one night when I bought all the Branagh Shakespeare movies I hadn’t seen. My reasoning was that Henry V was spiffy (it was, wasn’t it? I haven’t seen it since it was released), so surely the other movies would also be good?
But then I remembered that Branagh got Hollywoodified — especially the Shakespeare things — and… my enthusiasm for the project dropped. So I got this in 2015, and I still haven’t watched it.
But the shelf is forever! And this is the oldest unseen movie there, so I gotta do what I gotta do.
I’m encouraged to see that the guy from Scream is playing a role.
(That’s a joke. Not a good one.)
Oh! It’s a musical! Now I’m intrigued!
None of these people can dance!
This is horrible. But it looks like they had fun while vamping?
Was this made for TV?
Huh. Did those $13M go to pay Alicia Silverstone and the guy from Scream?
And that gross seems to indicate that it wasn’t actually given a general cinema release, if it wasn’t made for TV?
Branagh cast the film without much regard for singing or dancing ability; as in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, the film was meant to highlight energy and enthusiasm rather than smooth competence.
But one of the delights of a good musical is watching really good dancers move around on the screen… Being a good dancer isn’t “competence”, and enthusiasm is a different axis altogether.
Love’s Labour’s Lost was not a box office success. It opened on 2 April 2000 in the United Kingdom, earning £143,649 in its run on 186 screens. It later opened on 11 June 2000 in the United States, playing on two screens and earning $24,496 on its opening weekend.
OK, unpause the movie.
Well, that’s $1M just there. I hope there aren’t any midges on that lake. Those lamps are gonna attract all the insects…
It’s fun watching Silverstone spouting these lines. She really leans into it…
There are scenes here that kinda work, and then there’s stuff like this, which is just inexcusable. It tries so hard to be zany, and fails.
But now I’ve kinda started enjoying this.
It’s like looking at children playing at being in a movie.
This movie isn’t as horrible as it seemed originally. There’s a few scenes here, where they let Shakespeare’s witty patter just play out, and it’s really amusing. (The whole thing is basically Shakespeare on autopilot.) There’s scenes that make me go “THIS IS THE BEST MOVIE EVER”.
But most of the musical numbers are just dire.
So it’s not an abject failure. I think about … one third of this is really entertaining? But the rest… oy vey…
Le petit soldat (transl. The Little Soldier) is a French film, written and directed by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard in 1960, but not released until 1963.
So is this his first movie? Hm… no his second.
This DVD transfer is absolutely horrendous. Hm… Oh! Criterion released a blu ray version of this last year… should I bail and get that one instead? Hm…
I kept on watching, but … I shouldn’t… I mean, I think I’ve really enjoyed all of Godard’s other films from the 60s? (This is the final one I haven’t seen.) And I’m just not connecting with this one? At all? It may be due to the DVD transfer. Or… not…
But the movie’s picking up now. The photoshoot scene with Anna Karina was great.
The scenes of torture aren’t a lot of fun to watch. And they’re like… very… didactic. “Here’s how you waterboard, here’s how you electrocute.”
