Topic: Latest Movie You Watched

[6pairsofshoes]

The vampire as subject always seemed odd to me, since the mathematics just don't add up.  Once all the population is turned into vampires, there's nothing left to eat, so the undead have to change their source of food.  What do they eat, then?  Rats?  Then do the rats become vampires?  That's always been the flaw.  But the psychology underlying the appeal is also curious.  It has to be seated in some kind of collective fear of something -- contagion? atheism? Hard to say.  But you'd never go broke investing in the fictional vehicles that promulgate it.   Anne Rice has to be a millionaire several times over and that goofy Twilight series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc.  I read Stoker's Dracula once and it was compelling as a read, but I think Anne Rice surpassed it with her various iterations.   This looks like an opportunity to consume popcorn at a fast rate.

[goldshirt*9]

"The earliest known mention of vampires was in 1047 in an Old Russian text. The word used was "upir", which may have meant "the thing at the feast or sacrifice"

"One of the earliest works is 'Der Vampir' of Heinrich August Ossenfelder (1748), and the earliest vampires erupt into British literature with cameos in Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (1813) and Byron's 'The Giaour' (1813) and an intriguing suggestion of the vampiric in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Christabel' "
Interestingly we humans like to scare the poop out of ourselves 
Would image the writing stylr has change a lot .

[6pairsofshoes]

That's interesting, goldie.  It is curious that we do like to inflict fear via fiction on ourselves since the real world is scary enough.  It is a weird form of cannibalism.  Then there is the sacrament of the Eucharist that is celebrated throughout much of orthodox elements of Christianity.  But it's largely metaphorical in that bread and wine substitute for body and blood. 

I suspect there have been odd instances of cannibalism in other cultural contexts, like consuming parts of one's deceased relatives -- like in New Guinea where brains were consumed, serving as a vehicle for transmitting prions and related Kuru - similar to mad cow disease.  I don't think you can make them go away by cooking the meat.  There have been situations like shipwrecks where survivors resorted to cannibalism in order to prevent starvation, but other than being driven by necessity, the whole cannibal/vampire thing is kind of strange and our fascination with it inexplicable.

People are just weird.  Who'd have thought that so much money could be made by producing movies about people biting each other.

[goldshirt*9]

I don't watch or read horror movies normally, Hammer House of Horror scared me for life  . Don't mind a Zombie when done right or a Vampire.
Anything Ghosts or supernatural is a no no.   Luckily the Russel crow play a exorcist movie was more of a comedy so was ok, but Anthony Hopkins in The Rite was too much.

[goldshirt*9]

A couple of Tarantino flicks
Django and Inglorious Bastards. 

   

[goldshirt*9]

Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
A tad disappointed to be honest. Rushed, too much going on maybe.
If a Chapter 2 doesn't appear I wont mind

[6pairsofshoes]

From the extra weird dept:
Ace Attorney.  Japanese.  With real actors but adapted from the video game, and there's also an anime series.
Worth watching if only for the hair styles.  The sets are interesting, too.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1891974/

It's hard for me to imagine a video game based on court trials in Japanese.  Certainly it was novel and I felt like I learned something from watching it.

[6pairsofshoes]

Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run).
It's still really good, although it is not as compelling on a tv screen as it was when I first saw it in the theatre. 
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0130827/

[6pairsofshoes]

Pedro Almodóvar, All About My Mother.  Very enjoyable and highly dramatic as is typical of his style.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185125/

[6pairsofshoes]

I've been on a binge.
1)  Neruda:  Pablo Neruda, the Marxist poet and Senator, is hunted down for about 2 hours by a relentless cop.  He's not the most subtle of guys on the lam, but he's entertaining and people just love him.  The nascent Allende regime is taking a swift turn to the right.  Eh.  I've seen better.

2)  Tom of Finland.  Worth seeing.  Docudrama about gay illustrator.

3)  Sophie Scholl:  The Final Days.  Student activist who, along with her brother, is caught distributing anti Nazi leaflets in 1943.  She's interrogated by guys who seem to think that you get more results by yelling.  Compelling true story.  Nazis were, apparently, not flexible in their politics, nor were they very polite to their critics.  The leaflet in question attacked Hitler's campaign into Russia and it kind of reminds me of Putin's critics who would also be complaining about the stupidity of his attacking Ukraine.  Each would be about as well tolerated by the regime in charge.  At least with Germany, there was light at the end of the tunnel when the Allies came in.  Things have not changed for the better, sadly.

4)  The Princess Bride:  with a stellar cast and considerable wit, a delightful story about true love and its constancy through adversities.

[6pairsofshoes]

The Count of Monte Cristo
This is one of my favorite novels and the film does a reasonable job of condensing a long arc of a complex plot into 3 hours.  The film doesn't feel overly long, although I split it into two viewings.

The actors are very good.  Lots of plot cut out and some substantially changed but it still managed to hang together.  After that train wreck of the BBC War and Peace, this was a breath of fresh air.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26446278/

[6pairsofshoes]

That book led to one of my favourite wikipedia illustrations:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/CountOfMonteCristoRelations.svg

That's a great graphic and it does a good job of explaining the relationships between the various characters.  Since Tolstoy introduced over 500 characters in War and Peace, such a graphic would soon resemble a bowl of spaghetti.  The 2024 film really curtails a good deal of the revenge plot and leaves whole sections and characters out altogether. But I think it would be really difficult to do this book justice in a film.  I was surprised at how successful the recent film was, given the omissions and shifts in some of the interrelationships.

[6pairsofshoes]

The Men Who Stare at Goats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats_(film)
That's an hour and a half of my life I won't get back.  At least it gave the makeup people something to do.  So as an employer, it gave some Hollywood artists some work.  The rest of it is just a failed farce.  It wasn't funny and didn't really seem to go anywhere.  Jeff Bridges was better in The Big Lebowski, which is what his character reminds me of in this film.  I was bored.  Hoped it would get better and it never did.
My advice? Don't bother.