Movie notes
Jun. 16th, 2021 10:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sasha_featherI visited my parents for about a week and a half and had a really nice time. My dad and I both love watching movies and we even went to the movie theater!
Dream Horse
Starring Toni Collette, Damien Lewis.
I loved this little film about a Welsh villager (Collette) who decides to form a syndicate to support a race horse. She and her husband are empty-nesters and she needs a project, so she researches and buys a retired race horse to breed. She recruits various villagers to help her and financially support the venture. This is based on a true story (BOATS) and is very sweet. The people feel like real people; many of them are older folks. There is not a lot of conflict and that's fine. A really enjoyable film.
Content note: One horse dies off-screen (from complications of giving birth). The race horse, Dream Alliance, lives and is fine.
In the Heights
This was fun; I don't have deep thoughts about it. Or rather I do, but I will defer to Latinx people writing about the subject. I would have appreciated captions for both this and the previous film.
Stowaway - Netflix
Starring Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, Shamier Anderson.
I really wanted to like this but it was just sad and slow. Three astronauts begin a mission to Mars; they find an accidental stowaway on board. He appears to be a engineer who somehow got stuck behind an access panel; it makes no sense. I could hand-wave that if this were a better story. Other implausible things happen: the CO2 scrubber breaks irreparably, and there is no back-up. The crew contemplates killing the stowaway character in order to preserve O2 for themselves, which was uncomfortable since he's the only Black character. He does end up living though; someone else sacrifices themself.
This made me realize that I prefer space stories where everyone lives. It's satisfying when there is a hard survival problem, and people put their heads together and come up with ideas, and they save everyone.
Windtalkers - 2002. This was on my parents' DVR.
How did Nicholas Cage ever become a movie star? He is terrible in this, and the movie is pretty bad all around. I'm very annoyed at it but it's not worth writing about all the ways it annoyed me. Adam Beach did a nice job as the Navajo wind talker; he deserved a better film.
Dream Horse
Starring Toni Collette, Damien Lewis.
I loved this little film about a Welsh villager (Collette) who decides to form a syndicate to support a race horse. She and her husband are empty-nesters and she needs a project, so she researches and buys a retired race horse to breed. She recruits various villagers to help her and financially support the venture. This is based on a true story (BOATS) and is very sweet. The people feel like real people; many of them are older folks. There is not a lot of conflict and that's fine. A really enjoyable film.
Content note: One horse dies off-screen (from complications of giving birth). The race horse, Dream Alliance, lives and is fine.
In the Heights
This was fun; I don't have deep thoughts about it. Or rather I do, but I will defer to Latinx people writing about the subject. I would have appreciated captions for both this and the previous film.
Stowaway - Netflix
Starring Toni Collette, Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, Shamier Anderson.
I really wanted to like this but it was just sad and slow. Three astronauts begin a mission to Mars; they find an accidental stowaway on board. He appears to be a engineer who somehow got stuck behind an access panel; it makes no sense. I could hand-wave that if this were a better story. Other implausible things happen: the CO2 scrubber breaks irreparably, and there is no back-up. The crew contemplates killing the stowaway character in order to preserve O2 for themselves, which was uncomfortable since he's the only Black character. He does end up living though; someone else sacrifices themself.
This made me realize that I prefer space stories where everyone lives. It's satisfying when there is a hard survival problem, and people put their heads together and come up with ideas, and they save everyone.
Windtalkers - 2002. This was on my parents' DVR.
How did Nicholas Cage ever become a movie star? He is terrible in this, and the movie is pretty bad all around. I'm very annoyed at it but it's not worth writing about all the ways it annoyed me. Adam Beach did a nice job as the Navajo wind talker; he deserved a better film.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-17 05:00 am (UTC)He is legitimately good in Raising Arizona (1987) and Moonstruck (1987), both of which were early in his career. Lately he seems to be more of a phenomenon than an actor and I'm never sure what to do with that.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-17 07:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-06-17 09:06 pm (UTC)Raising Arizona was my Cage introduction, and he was awesome in that role. It's a ridiculous caper movie by the Coen Bros with an epic chase scene.
I gave up after the "Misery in Vegas" movie which is so steeped in suicidal ideation that I'm not even gonna look up the title.
(I think Nic Cage was my generation's James Franco. Similar body type, takes themselves way too seriously.)
no subject
Date: 2021-06-17 09:14 pm (UTC)I remember seeing him in 90s action films and he was fine, but probably any actor would have been fine in those roles. Ha, the same is probably true of James Franco.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-17 09:13 pm (UTC)