Movies 2026: Shame and Money

[MissThundercat]

Paris or Perez?

Paris. She plays Amber Sweet in the film.

 

[Kepler]

I had forgotten.

 

[mookie1995]

mookie watched 88 minutes.

 

[Kepler]

What did you expect? Pacino has sucked for > 30 years.

 

[Kepler]

There is a full length '70s TV movie called, deep breath... The Hardy Boys Meet Dracula. I'm saving it for a very special evening.

 

[Kepler]

"Documentary" (really, canned influencer content) called Skywalkers: A Love Story. Their shoots are spectacular. This isn't a real documentary like Free Solo. It's obviously a scripted, in-house production made by the influencers themselves to monetize. It has many cringe aspects. The classic "W-shaped" conflict arc is clear kayfabe. The entire relationship might be purely acting. There does not seem to be any spark of humanity in either person, and even less chemistry between them. You don't want them to fall... but it also would be no great loss.

Watch it for the acrobatic porn. And I may be a sucker, but I personally bought the footage of them evading authorities as legitimate, and that is drama enough.

B+

 

[ScoobyDoo]

TIL I have been mixing up Shelly Duvall and Talia Shire my whole life.

Turns out Talia is the nepo one and Shelly is the dead one. They look, sound, and act identically whiney to me.

I could not even tell you which one is in The Shining.

Shelly is in The Shining and Popeye. Talia was in Rocky.

 

[state of hockey]

With sister named Adrienne that confusion was never going to happen.

 

[Slap Shot]

Inspired by someone at GPL, I watched High and Low by Kurosawa

I'm going to borrow a review I read before I watched and I think this is a good summary. Can't recommend this film enough.

Leave it to Kurosawa to make an hour of listing evidence and clues exciting.

High and Low is tight, tense, and engaging, but what makes it so great for me is that Kurosawa (based on the book King's Ransom by Ed McBain) uses an almost Dante-like structuring of the three points of view by which this story is told. Each act is a discrete and self-contained plot with its own beginning, middle, and end, which make High and Low more of a crime anthology than an epic. Still, all the main characters appear (physically or vocally) in all three stories, tying them together and leaving room for an epilogue which unites the circuitous narrative. In addition, the class-warfare analogies really do make the original Japanese title of Heaven and Hell more apt (although the English title does lead to a plethora of puns based on elevation, drug use, social status, etc.).

 

[MissThundercat]

The 1994 Street Fighter is on Tubi.

32 years later, it's still delightfully bad.

 

[Kepler]

Inspired by someone at GPL, I watched High and Low by Kurosawa

Terrible admission that could cost me my snob card if it weren't already so well established: I find Kurosawa too slow. And I love slow.

I'll keep trying all my life, but Yojimbo and Rashoman are still the only ones I can get all the way through, and it's a slog. Seven Samurai is torture.

I am a derp.

 

[MissThundercat]

Kep, found La Cage Aux Folles on Tubi.

Liking it so far.

 

[Kepler]

I hope it gives you the joy it gave me.

While I hated the American remake (I detest Nathan Lane, and I think Williams -- who I love -- was ridiculous in what is a very nuanced role) I did enjoy Gene Hackman playing the heavy.

Someday I would love to see a production of the original Jean Poiret stage play. I don't believe anything contemporary could ever carry the groundbreaking impact when it hit in 1973, but plays are tighter, more suffocating, more intense, and more dramatic than films. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to be LGBTQ and see that play, but it must have been like a black person seeing Porgy in 1935.

Note we are still only 23 years since homosexuality was legalized everywhere in the US. We are only a generation from barbarism, and as we know we are not safe from a slide backwards. Dump has proven twice America is never more than one election from fascism.