Theatrical Film Releases that don't need their own thread

Aaah. That’s adorable. Some people are going to lose their stuff with that ending though; we’ll see if the animals overshadow it.

I was so worried watching this, almost the whole time!

On April 10, Terry Gilliam’s long-awaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote will release to 700 U.S. theaters as part of a special one-night theatrical event!

My youngest nephew loves these movies, especially 3 right now. Mommy an Daddy might be a little sick of it though.

“Hotel Transylvania 4” will be out December 22, 2021, just in time for Christmas

Enjoyed Fighting with My Family, written and directed by Stephen Merchant, based on a true story of a family of wrestlers. I knew The Rock was in this from the trailer, but I couldn’t quite place the actress who played the Mom. It bugged me throughout the whole movie. She looked SO familiar! Got home, looked it up on imdb… it’s Cersei Lannister.

Was curious how non-wrestling fans would take to Fighting with My Family. As a fan of such low-brow entertainment I thought it was “cute”. It was more wrestling focused than I imagined, but it’s probably still widely accessible.

I knew a documentary predated the movie but I only got motivated to watch it after I saw the fictionalized version. Probably better to watch the lesser fictional version first before the original doc: https://vimeo.com/205508370

And, as was covered in the 2020 thread, it’s got Florence Pugh in the lead role, so, ya know… That’s good.

We just saw this too. We do these $5 movies on Tuesdays so it gets us into movies we might not see otherwise. About 5 minutes in the GF turned to me and said, “What kind of movie did you bring me to?”

But she got into it. It is a good movie, made better because it’s based on a real story.

Cold Pursuit has to have the most misleading trailer I’ve ever seen. It’s clearly been edited as the most bland geriaction movie that one could imagine. And that’s what the movie pretends to be for maybe 10-15 minutes. Except something feels a little off in a couple of scenes. The oddities kind of start to add up, and eventually you realize that the audience has been slowly eased into a Coen Brothers movie.

It’s also absolutely brilliant, I can’t imagine it not making my top 3 for the year.

Yeah, I read somewhere that its more of a comedy than revenge thriller like Taken. Perhaps I need to give it a chance!

Just got around to Paddington 2 with the family… IT’S SO GOOD!!!

Saw Apollo 11 at the IMAX. That was incredible. I’m debating whether to see it again. I believe it’s in the IMAX this week only, until Captain Marvel takes over.

Space crabs!!

Did anyone else see this??

I watched Cold Case Hammarskjöld the other night, a two-hour documentary that on the surface is about the death of UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961 under what could easily be termed as mysterious circumstances. The investigations around Hammarskjöld have been (mostly) off and on over the years, with a variety of commissions dedicated to it, and the documentary features an independent investigator who provided a lot of evidence to a recent UN panel and genuinely unearthed quite a bit of information. The death itself also just happened to be depicted in a recent Netflix film, The Siege of Jadotville, which depicts his death as assassination by shoot down, though in wrongly depicts the event happening in daytime (among other things the film depicts the holy-shit crazy-wide assortment of WW2 and semi-modern weapons the UN Irish contingent deployed with).

Back to the docu–it’s directed by Mads Brügger, a somewhat controversial Danish filmmaker, in a chronologically unstable style narrated by Brügger and two African secretaries in two separate locations as they type out and discuss the major parts of the script as it progresses. It’s a completely odd and initially discombobulating style that you eventually get used to and I suppose it works, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else pulling it off.

Brügger and investigator Göran Björkdahl go through the events and evidence of the Hammarskjöld’s death (and life) and what was going on at the time of his intervention in the Katagna crisis. As the film progresses, it devolves into a massive conspiracy born from South Africa that turns out to be far more interesting and terrifying (even according to Brügger in the film) than an assassination of Hammarskjöld represented.

Connecting the dots from start to finish is not an easy task, but it essentially involves the formation of a white supremacist paramilitary organization in South Africa which during the last days of apartheid attempted to help spread HIV/AIDS throughout the black populations of Africa through medical experiments disguised as altruistic health clinics and such.

This in of itself is not entirely shocking. However the largest bits of the conspiracy require giant leaps of faith to really absorb. That the South African government basically supported the organization (under the acronym of SAIMR) is quote possible. However, medical experts question the scientific feasibility of such a venture (which is not to say they didn’t try). More claims are that SAIMR was supported by foreign intelligence agencies, including MI-6 and the CIA. Why these agencies would fund such a campaign that had no real scientific basis is a huge mystery, other than the keep the Africans down (there’s a side theory that the CIA was involved in Hammarskjöld’s death because when they found his body at the crash site, an Ace of Spades card was found stuck in a scarf around his neck, which they reported to be a CIA calling card, which sounds remarkably silly). The CIA did all kinds of crazy stuff in the 50s and 60s, so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility I suppose, it just doesn’t seem like something they’d really do.

The uncovering of SAIMR and several of its members is quite compelling, as well as one central figure in the organization, Keith Maxwell, and the guy who eventually spilled the beans on everything, Alexander Jones. However, it appears that the interview with Jones was the final interview, and that his story evolved as the multiple interviews progressed, until you got the final story (reported in the New York Times from what Brugger actually admitted happened). So… how truthful was he? It was amazing that he knew all of the various pieces that Brugger had uncovered throughout the film, random figures and information, but his wider claims just seem to be a bit too fantastic.

Anyway, I’d say it’s an interesting documentary, uniquely filmed and narrated (won at Sundance apparently), but maybe goes a little bit too far into fields of fancy.

— Alan

Booksmart is a really good movie in the vein of Blockers and Superbad. I accidentally thought it might be Lady Bird or Eighth Grade level. But Booksmart was directed by Olivia Wilde, not Greta Gerwig.

My crowd was made up of one elderly couple, and maybe 15 enthusiastic high school girls. So that was neat.

Whereas Eighth Grade could go either way, this is not one to see with your teenager.

I really liked Booksmart. It shares a lot of similarities with Superbad, but that’s a good thing IMO. Please do not go watch this with your kids, hehe.

I just saw an email in my inbox from Cinemark with the subject “See Rocketman 2 Days Early”. The excitement of a Rocketman 2 had me clicking quicker than I ever had before on a promo email! I had been missing Harland Williams something fierce.

Surely you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered the truth.

I will be very interested to hear what people who don’t live here think of **The Last Black Man In San Francisco **. It was pretty weird to step out of the movie’s idea of a dystopian hellscape into the real thing.

Living in a huge major urban area can definitely effect you mentally, and that was very much on display in this film. Been decades since I was in SF, so I cannot speak to the dystopian reality, though I do hear some not so good things about all those major West Coast cities.

I found the film interesting.

Saw The Nightingale yesterday from writer-director Jennifer Kent (of The Babadook fame). Incredibly brutal film about the damages of colonialism set in Tasmania in the 1820’s. There were times when I had to turn away from the screen, it was that grueling. There’s some tropey character beats in there and a few surreal diversions that seem to exist as an excuse for the filmmaker to go a over-the-top with technique that I could’ve done without, but it was a very powerful film overall. The depiction of how aboriginals were treated by the English is one of the most honorific things I’ve ever seen in the cinema.