Rope. Alfred Hitchcock. 1948.

I started watching this on the plane from San Francisco, but I didn’t finish it.

Let’s watch the last half.

I really like Hitchcock, of course, but while watching this on the plane, I was kinda… er… bored? Is that the word? Bored? Is it?

I think it is. The movie seemed to me more like a sophomoric exercise than a… movie? Perhaps the problem is the less than riveting performances by the two murderers?

I know, I know, blah blah no cuts blah blah. But it’s just a showcase for scenery chewing, and watching the last half of the movie doesn’t convince me otherwise.

Perhaps the documentary footage on this bluray will be enlightening.

The screenwriter explains the problems translating the original play into American:

The trouble was, when you translated the English dialogue, it became very homosexual. Unintentionally.

Or…

Oh, right! The Stewart part was supposed to be done by Cary Grant! That would have made more sense. But Grant turned it down because of obvious reasons.

Oh oh oh! The writer didn’t write the scene with the initial murder! So the tension in the movie would be whether there was a body in that damned chest or not! That sounds like a much better movie!

Replicas. Jeffrey Nachmanoff. 2018.

Hey! I haven’t seen a proper movie in a while.

Jamie Zawinski summed this up as:

Replicas: Oh Keanu. Why. Things were going so well. Why. Why. Why did you make this.

So I had to see it.

It’s about Keanu, doing his best to play a scientist transferring dead brains to artificial bodies. And then his wife dies. Guess what Keanu tries to do!

It’s not a good movie.

I briefly wondered whether this was a zero-budget movie, all made from plywood and good will, but it can’t be: There’s some expensive-looking computer graphics, and, well, there’s Keanu. And according to imdb, it cost $30M to make, which just seems… unlikely. There’s hours and hours of this movie happening inside small static sets with a small cast, and it’s hard to see where they spent that money.

Unless it’s all on those computer graphics. And Keanu.

I guess… from one point of view, the plot kinda makes sense. I mean, saving the family and all. But keeping it all a secret from them is deeply creepy and doomed to fail, so it’s… a bit… WTF.

Everything about this movie is just a bit skeezy. I mean, even the details. So many “manager” apps. And I want that on my phone: Make the rest seem a bit out of focus when I get a message.

I did finish this movie, but it was a hard slog. There’s like no redeeming qualities: The cinematography is… there, the acting is bad, the story is ridiculous, there’s no humour, the twists are obvious.

49th Parallel. Michael Powell. 1941.

Oops. I bought a box set of Powell/Pressburger movies, and now I guess I have to watch them…

I thought it was a 2K set, but this is DVD.

Wow, this is a proper anti-German propaganda piece. I like it!

Oh! It’s Laurence Olivier playing that trapper with the bad French accent! I couldn’t quite place him but now that I know I don’t understand why I didn’t see that immediately. Weird.

It’s pretty unusual in that we follow the Germans (who are, with one exception) horrible people, escaping through the Canadian countryside, so whenever one of them is killed, the audience would presumably cheer.

The meeting with the Utopian Christian settlement is also… odd.

I like bits of this movie (like the great shots of the wheat fields), and it’s not dull or anything, but it’s not a good movie.

The way it ends with a flagrant violation of international law concerning refugees as the “RAH RAH YEAH *punches air*” moment is fascinating, but then again, we’re talking about literal Nazis here, so whatevs.