The Grand Tour

No, not the Top Gear sequel. It is a 1994 time travel movie with a different scenario than i have ever seen or read. That alone makes it worthwhile.  There is essence special effects. The science (other than time travel) is pretty good except the meteor collision as a byproduct of a meteor shower is wrong and the devastation is too localized.

There is a powerful story of paternal love as well. Language is pretty mild; sex is only implied; nothing too terrifying shown or even implied. 

200 Motels and Buckaroo Banzai in the Fifth Dimension Now Seem Rational and Normal

 Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022). The girlfriend who dragged me off to watch 200 Motels whispered in my confused ear part-way through, "It makes more sense if you take acid first." No, thank you. This movie might be similarly enhanced by LSD. Or perhaps permanent insanity lies that way. It was visually stunning. There is a almost incomprehensible plot involving travel between different universes. Amazing kung fu sequences, too. You will never watch Ratatouille (2007) the same way again.

A movie that I just watched and very much enjoyed was The Sheep Detectives (2026). If you liked Babe (1995), and Chicken Run (2000), you will like this. Not giving away much: shepherd reads murder mysteries to his flock in the evenings. After his murder, his flock uses what they have learned to find the killer.

If You Grew Up Watching the Roadrunner Cartoons

You will look forward to this movie: Coyote v. Acme in which Wile E. Coyote hires an ambulance chaser to sue Acme for all the  injuries.

Project Hail Mary

The most pleasure I have had in a movie theater in many years. Thought-provoking, often funny, clever dialog and evidence that playing opposite an actor made of rock can work well.

No foul language, no gratuitous violence (some nasty bacteria have a bad end), and nothing that would you would not want your children to see or hear 

2001 A Space Travesty

Someone decided that the idea of the Naked Gun comedies crossed with Men in Black and a 2001 would be funny.

I watched aboutx30 minutes and decided it was a tragic failure. Leslie Neilsen's deadpan delivery is awesome.  (If you arr sn antique you remember when he was known as a dramatic actor and a good one at that. 

Nielsen can not save this. It is vulgar in ways that make Airplane and Naked Gun seem subtle.  The sight gags are cute, but not enough of them to overcome the vulgarity 

Gravity

I am sorry I did not see this in a theater. It is an exciting adventure story where there are no bad guys, just heroic people trying to do the best they can in a bad situation. 

Never complain about your job ,or the commute, after watching this.

Keeping the Sabbath With Disaster Movies

I am trying to keep the Sabbath by not doing business or working. I turned on the TV and looked at what Google TV suggested. Somehow, I ended up in a disaster movie category. Some were familiar such as Armageddon.  Many are familiar plot ideas. London is flooding. Mom must escape with her child. 

Way too many involve one maverick professor or grad student trying to save the world from a disaster that has a several hour timeline. 

A few that I started such as 2012: Ice Age start with such horribly overdone dialog and "sciencey-sounding" phrases that i had no hope for something that would entertain me without making me cringe. It really is not that hard to write a sci-fi script that is actually somewhat based on real science.  Pretty clearly, it is very easy to raise money to make several million dollars movies with horrible scripts.

Del Toro's Frankenstein

I just watched this.  It is an amazing film at so many levels: technical; philosophical; theological; literary. If I manage to hit all of them before I run out of energy, I will be surprised. 

First of all, it deviates far from Mary Shelley's novel in many details.  A straightforward retelling of it would be worthwhile on its own although I think Kenneth Branagh's version a few years back did that well.  You have read it, right?  It is a Romantic reputation of Enlightenment confidence in scientific rationalism, arguing that there is more to living creatures than bags of chemical reactions.   I read it because while doing my MA in History, my wife was doing her MA in British Literature.  I read many of her assigned novels as she did.

The cinematography is gobsmacking.  Lots of interesting uses of color for various themes.  Awesome costumes and sets.  The Arctic which is the framing location in both book and film is marvelous. It is grisly in places.  As the Monster says at one point, "I was born of a charnel house."

It has been years since I read it but the Monster learnis to read in a Swiss cabin from Genesis and Paradise Lost and i do not think that was in the book.  This scene ends up with a profoundly Christian observation from the old blind guy in the house.  The entire set of ideas of Creation and the soul will cause some serious conversation and confusion in some audiences. 

I really enjoyed it.

USS Indianapolis

Movie starring Nicholas Cage made i fo not know when.  Interesting, well-written.  If you do not what this ship was: it was a eavy cruiser that traveled without escort to deliver Fat Man to Tinian for delivery to Hiroshima.   On the way home, a Japanese submarine sank it, causing enormous loss of life.  Sharks.  Lots of them. 

I knew a little about it, partly because of Jaws and partly because an uncle served on a ship that sank during WW2.  Most of his fellow sailors were either eaten, or killed my Japanese sailors also from sunk ships doing their best to keep killing Americans.

Battle of Lexington 250th Anniversary

Two documentaries I really enjoyed. 

1. If you have access to History Hits channel, Dan Snow did a nice one hour piece about the events of April 19.

2. A pleasantly un-preachy PBS documentary Revolutionary War Weapons mostly a technical discussion. 

Top Secret!

Val Kilmer passed.  His debut film, Top Secret! remains a reminder of what a skilled comic actor he was, and what skilled filmmakers Abraham's, Zucker, ans Abraham's were.  The opening sequence with the song Skeet Surfin' is so utterly unexpected.

After watching it again,  I realized that if you are under 50, many of the cultural references and movies may be incomprehensible gags: The Blue Lagoon, exploding Pintos, Casablanca, all World War Ii movies, the East German Women's Olympic Team (which were fiercely hormonal abused men, or severely roided up women).

Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972)

My wife going through classes at Northwest Nazarene University towards ordination.  Because one of her current classes is church history,  we are watching a bit more church history documentaries at the moment.  Tonight we watched Franco Zefferelli's 1972 film about St. Francis of Assisi.

The 1970s, along with disco, was the Zefferelli decade.  Romeo & Juliet, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and the Jesus of Nazareth miniseries.   

Every one of them is visually stunning and musically fascinating.  The theme from Jesus of Nazareth is incredibly powerful.  Donovan (remember him?) wrote and sang many of the songs.   I still have yet to see a version of Jesus' life than Jesus of Nazareth more emotionally and spiritually affecting.   If you were too young to have watched it, do so now.   I was not a Christian at the time but it hit hard.

These films were all lavishly produced.  The scene where St. Francis seeks Pope Innocent III's blessing caused my wife to say. "3/4 of the budget must have been costumes."

M. Night Shymalan

He made a bunch of really brilliant scary movies: the Sixth Sense, Signs, the Village. And then, he started making movies that were disappointingly stupid: lady in the Water and just watched Split.  This was so dumb that it was hard to care enough to follow it closely.   What a sad ending to a filmmaker who seemed so promising 20 years ago.  The same might be said for me, I suppose. 

Death Wish (the Bruce Willia Remake)

It showed up as free on YouTube so I watched it.  In many respects it is faithful to the spirit of the original with a few minor changes that do no real harm to the story.  Walther Bite is in my experience but Glock Bite?   No.

The gun store Jolly Rogers is a somewhat stereotyped view of gun stores and how they advertise their wares.  At least the clerk behind the counter is a cute young lady not a stereotyped gun guy.

The M16 in the closing scene is utterly absurd.  It is Illinois.  I know that no gun store could do a class 3 transfer in one day.  The hired assassins with machine guns are utterly absurd for a low level scumbag to hire.

One definite gain over the Charles Bronson version is the opening home invasion is far less graphic in its portrayal of the rape, which is more implied than explicit.   While perhaps needed to give Kersey the required motivation in 1974, this version accomplishes that end in a more subtle way.

If you are way younger than me, you have no idea what a shocker Death Wish was in 1974.  The idea of an ordinary person carrying a gun for self-defense even if slightly entrapped self-defense caused the heads of all the right people to explode.  The audiences in New York City cheering it just caused more psychic pain than any liberal of the time could handle. 

Michael York Playing John the Baptist

If you are, like me, ready for the scrap heap, you may remember Franco Zefferelli's miniseries Jesus of Nazareth.  This was presented on national TV so long ago thst it needed no trigger warnings or transvestite apostles.  We started watching it again.

Lots of prominent actors of the time were in it: Christopher Plummer, Peter Ustinov, Olivia Hussey, James Earl Jones.  Michael York's portrayal of John the Baptist as passionate,  wild-eyed berator of immorality and hypocrisy is just astonishing to watch.  Robert Powell's Jesus is also excellent but York's performance stands out among an impressive collection of actors.

The greatest catastrophe of movies about Jesus must be 1963's The Greatest Story Ever Told where John Wayne delivers: "Surely, this must have been, the Son of God," in one of the least persuasive lines ever recorded.

Sea Hunt

If you as ancient as me, you may recall this black & white TV series playing in syndication in the 1960s.  As I looked back on my memories of it, I asked myself what sort of stories could have made Lloyd Bridges scuba driving worth watching.   I just watched S1E1 on YouTube and it was really pretty good except for an aircraft company rep watching a military test flight from a private boat with a sailor aboard.  Still an exciting story of underwater rescue  

Things to Come (1936)

This is the movie adaptation of H.G.Wells' novel.  Considering it was made in 1936, the special effects are pretty amazing.   The city of the future is what the most optimistic futurists could imagine.

That single stage rockets could not reach escape velocity seems to have been within Wells' knowledge (and this does not surprise me).  Instead the expedition around the Moon relied on a Space Gun.  The first gun puts the second gun in motion,  which launches the next gun.  Each stage adds a bit more velocity much like a multistage rocket. 

Parts of it are prescient: WW2 starts in 1940 with bombing raids on British cities.   What was thankfully wrong was poison gas bombing.  (Wells was not the only thinker of the age convinced the horrors of gas warfare of the previous generation were inevitable. )

The politics are pretty restrained but we are reminded that competition was one of the evils of the prewar era.  There is a segment of massive exploitation of Earth's resources and technocratic-directed industrial development that is a vision that would horrify every environmentalist today.  The lack of understanding costs and allocation of resources horrifies me.

This is free on Amazon Prime.

The colorized version is not impressive in color or resolution  

Their notion of a helicopter is surprisingly thoughtful.  The main rotor only goes up and down.  A tail propeller gives motion forward instead of pivoting the main rotor.

Their launch gantry for the Space Gun would be easy to imagine as the modern thing.

Metropolis (1927)

Fritz Lang's pioneering silent film is available on YouTube colorized.  If you are not familiarav3  with it,  it is a dystopia with a small population of capitalist overlords and vast numbers of proletarian industrial works.  While not quite at the Eloi and Morlock level of The Time Machine, it is still a dark vision of a future that has only been approached by a few nations committed to ending capitalism. It is unique and advanced in its filmmaking technique. 

The often Olympian sets art-deco of course, and the miniatures of the city of thr future with airplanes flying between buildings and swarms of industrial workers marching up ramps must have seemed pretty astonishing in 1927.

There are some very stylized sequences with workers in front of a,machine that eventually reveals itself as Moloch with workers moving in a way that reminds you that humans in service to the machine are like parts of the machine. 

The makeup and exaggerated acting style are partly a leftover from traditional stage acting where everything was a bit over the top to make sure you get in the back rows and the limits of expressing emotion without audio.

Pork Pie

New Zealand comedy.  Not appropriate for young children (language, sex, drug use) but one the most hilarious comedies I have seen since The God's Must Be Crazy.  Great setup lines: "My car is overheating  '  "This is me, coming to see you."  "A body in search of a brain cell."

The Chosen

This is a very successfully crowd-funded project.  The idea was not yet another film faithfully following the Gispel but more exploring possible back stories of jesus' Disciples.  It is very engaging dramatically.   It is largely a Middle Eastern cast (except of course for the Romans).

They wanted a plausible set of buildings, not thrown together sets, so they built structures in the Utah desert.

There are some occasionally intentional anachronisms to add some humor.  As they are seeking a place for the Sermon on the Mount,  they approach one field with a sign in Hebrew: "No trespassing.  Violators will be th.'  There  often a very light touch for ,the purpose of lightening what whst is obviously a  heavy reverential subject 

My wife and I are enjoying it.  It is no substitute for a more serious film like Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazarerh.  But it is fun and makes you think about the time a bit differently. 

This is on Amazon.