What movies have you seen recently?

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Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)

2011. It seems like yesterday when I saw this in the theater. I just watched it on Blu-Ray. For me it is an emotional movie to watch.

One thing I thought about was how good Max von Sydow is in the film, and how generous actors are allowing us to see them at various points in their lives essentially doing their job. We don't get to know them, but we get to see their their work, them pretending to be other people. I first saw Max in Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring when I was a teenager. He was 31 years old. In Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, he was 82. His performance is almost pantomime because he never talks in the film.

The film is full of great performances.

Perhaps ADHD predisposes you to enjoy the movie, but ADHD is not a prerequisite for enjoying it.
>- My bride is ADHD and I am not.
>- I am on the Autism Spectrum and she is not.
And we both enjoyed the film.

But...does the film especially appeal to neurodiverse folk???

Exactly.
I have read opinions from people who have not liked the movie, and I always wonder why? I'm always curious why people like or don't like something. It is purely subjective, which is why I can't say something is bad just because I don't like it, or if it is something I like, I feel I need to provide some insight why I like it. With Everything Everywhere All at Once, the film lives up to the title, depicting layers of reality, some totally foreign to the reality we know. At times it is like Phil Spector's Wall of Sound or maybe Backstreets from Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run which at times becomes beautiful chaotic orchestrated noise. I knew a person who did not like that album because he said is was over produced. Maybe it is because I am on the spectrum and have ADHD. Or maybe it's because I "over think things." The psychiatrist that diagnosed me said that. In the end, I enjoyed the movie. I like liked the idea behind it. Does it reflect a reality with string theory and a multidimensional universe? I don't know. I think the movie is a metaphor for we think we know.

When things (people) use to get too much for me at work and I wanted to scream in frustration or pound my head against the wall, I would put on my headphones and blare Backstreets. It has that one verse of chaotic desperation that did the trick and then it unwinds. Definitely not good for the hearing, but it always evened me out.

Sorry, this isn't the right thread for such talk. I have another movie to watch, after I finish listening to Backstreets.

I'm going to watch Room (2015) on Blu-Ray

Room (2015)

Watched in from Blu-Ray

No actor who will play The Grinch in the future will ever be just as good or better than Boris Karloff.

Thumbs up.
Boris Karloff's acting and voice elevated the any movie he was in.

The Woman in Black (2012)

Watched it from Blu-Ray. The film effectively uses audible jump scares, but the visuals alone give me goosebumps, lots and lots of goosebumps.

When I saw in the movie theater years a decade ago, I thought it was one of the best haunted house/ghost films I'd seen in a long time.

Trivia - the actor Jessica Raine plays the nanny. The role is non speaking, or maybe minimal dialogue. The next project she worked on was Doctor Who: Hide. The story also involves a ghost. Following that she play Verity Lambert in An Adventure in Time and Space, a movie about the making of Doctor Who in 1963.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

An Ingmar Bergman film, written and directed, where a knight and his squire return from the crusades. The knight tries to find meaning and evidence in the existence of God. He famously plays a game of chess with Death to extend his life so he may perform one meaningful act in his life. Parts of the movie are quite funny.

This was watched from a DVD.



The YouTube video does not do the photography justice.

None sadly.

It looks good. I work with a neurodiverse woman and she loved it.

Last night we watched:

Dracula's Daughter [1936]
<=>"She gives you that weird feeling!"



The movie is OK but I don't think I'd recommend it unless you were an informed fan of the genre who really wanted to see it.

I'm not exactly sure what that "weird" feeling is that is mentioned in the tagline. I suspect it is actually a mixture of more than one feeling...including boredom.

Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)

This is the 1936 version from DVD starring the master of melodrama, Tod Slaughter. I find Mr. Slaughter very enjoyable to watch, very entertaining.

What is your opinion?

Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

I like the Tod Slaughter film for Tod Slaughter.
I like this film for the music, the color and visual textures, the acting, and the story. It's a very satisfying story.

Plus it has Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Helena Bonham Carter, and Jamie Campbell Bower. It's a Harry Potter get-together. Seriously, everyone is great in this film.

Dracula's Daughter (1936)

The first time I saw this was in the 1970s on Doctor San Guinary's Creature Feature. At the time, I honestly thought it was boring. Where was the monster? I wanted monsters in monster makeup!

This is the story of Dracula's Daughter, played by Gloria Holden. It picks up where Dracula left off. Van Helsing has driving the stake through the Count's chest and is leaving the Count's resting when he is arrested. The police put the body in evidence (smell???). Later, the Countess Marya Zaleska, Dracula's daughter, steals the body and destroys it, hoping it will break the vampire's curse. That is what the movie is half about. The other half is about her inability to break the curse and Van Helsing's friend, an ex-student, a man of science, being convinced that vampires are real. There is a fair about of comic bickering between Van Helsing's friend and his assistant.

Unlike Dracula, the camera moves around and there is music. Dracula famously had no music except for Swan Lake during the opening credits.

Edward Van Sloan plays Van Helsing. His hair does not have as much body/lift as it did in 1931. That was a little distracting.

The character Sandor, played by Iving Pichel, is the Countess' assistant. His hair and makeup was the thing I remember most from the 1970s. Creepy.

I've noticed theme in vampire movies and and some TV shows. The vampire's assistant is always frustrated by the Master's promise to give them eternal life, but never seems to get around to it. It was true with Renfield. It was true with Sandor. It is true with Guillermo from What We Do in the Shadows. It's sort of funny. It is something I now look for.

It sounds simple, but there is more to it. I thought the acting was good. The sets were classic Universal sets from the '30s and '40s. Great fog and shadows. The story was by John Bladerston, who I remembered from was Dracula.