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Last Movie You Watched


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Posted (edited)
20 minutes ago, Kevin Christensen said:

haven't watched American Gods, based on a Gaiman books, nor Sandman.

I watched some of Sandman.  Had to skip the darker episodes.  I can’t handle shows where I am not supposed to like anyone.  It was well done.  Haven’t finished it.

Edited by Calm
Posted
22 minutes ago, Kevin Christensen said:

a blend of P. G. Wodehouse and Roger Zelazny

That is kind of perfect.  Will have to get.

Zelazny’s Amber is where I retreated after I finished exploring Lord of the Rings.

Posted
6 hours ago, Calm said:

Princess Bride is probably the best book adaptation to movie I am aware of (I missed a lot of the commentary Goldman gives about the ‘original book’, but it wouldn’t have worked and it’s absence didn’t change anything).  Stardust I had some issues with, but nothing that prevented me from watching it like happened with the Lord of the Rings movies.

Good Omens is another NG I would highly recommend.

I read Princess Bride and didn't like the book much, though I do love the movie.  I can't remember what exactly I didn't like about it but I feel like it had something to do with a zoo and the evil prince hunting and killing gorillas.

Posted
24 minutes ago, bluebell said:

I read Princess Bride and didn't like the book much, though I do love the movie.  I can't remember what exactly I didn't like about it but I feel like it had something to do with a zoo and the evil prince hunting and killing gorillas.

Yes, it did have that. 
 

Did you see the movie first?  I think that would make a difference because the book was more adult oriented. I would not call it kid friendly, even with me reading it aloud. 

Posted
12 hours ago, Calm said:

Yes, it did have that. 
 

Did you see the movie first?  I think that would make a difference because the book was more adult oriented. I would not call it kid friendly, even with me reading it aloud. 

I did, and I've noticed that does tend to make a difference, though usually things go better if I see the movie first and then read the book.  Then I can like both of them.  If I read the book first it's almost guaranteed that I'm going to think the movie is bad.  To much expectation.

Posted (edited)
On 10/11/2024 at 5:03 PM, Calm said:

That is kind of perfect.  Will have to get.

Zelazny’s Amber is where I retreated after I finished exploring Lord of the Rings.

I've read nearly everything Zelazny wrote. All but some poetry.  All the novels and short stories.   Someone recommended Nine Princes in Amber to me in 1975-6 ish time, after I got back from England.  Read 300 SF novels that year.  But I've read and re-read the 10 Amber novels several times.  And Lord of Light, Jack of Shadows, Creatures of Light and Darkness, and have the six volume complete short stories.  Met him at a signing in San Jose at one point I think early late 80s, or early 90s.   For Lord of the Rings, I was in 7th grade, and my sister's English class decided to read Fellowship.  But she started with The Hobbit, which passed from her to a brother to another brother and then to me.  The business of having to wait for my turn for each successive book slowed down my reading,  and I had a long walk to South Davis Junior high with Autumn darkening to Winter bleak and cold, and in my head, I always associated that with the trek to Mordor.    I also got very fond of Ray Bradbury around that time.  Later, Dune and Dune Messiah.  But I fell out of the books halfway through Children of Dune.  It seemed to me that the characters had lost an argument with the author about where the book was supposed to go.   I also remain very fond of Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East series, the related Swords series, and the Berserker stories, which I also discovered in 1975. (Saberhagen and Zelazny were close friends, as were Zelazny and Gaiman.)   And also admire Jack Vance, whose Dying Earth stories were an influence on Zelazny's Jack of Shadows.  Vance, like Bradbury and Zelazny was a distinctive stylist, the flavor of their prose being instantly recognizable and unique.   Saberhagen's prose was not as distinctive, but his best stories just worked, especially The Black Mountains and Changling Earth, the Berserker stories.   I also met Bradbury and Saberhagen at different times.   And Scott Card a few times over the years.  I originally read "Ender's Game" as a novelette in Analog, when it was first published.  I remain very fond of Seventh Son, and Ender's Game, and many of his short stories.  Especially "The Bully and the Beast".

Nowadays, I don't read nearly as much fiction.  But I read whatever Jasper Fforde (especially the Thursday Next series) and Jonathon Stroud (Bartimaeus and Lockwood and Co) produce.  And I miss Terry Pratchett.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

Edited by Kevin Christensen
Posted (edited)

You and I have read almost all the same things except Ray Bradbury. One of his stories was required reading in 6th or 7th grade and it gave me nightmares so I avoided him. Can’t remember which one though as it’s gotten messed up in my head with another nightmare producing story, The Midnight Sun by Rod Serling.  That was not a good year for me, lol.  English classes destroyed a few genres and authors for me by exposing me too soon to less than pleasant stores.  

The modern stuff sci fi stuff I haven’t read. I was working my way through the classic authors, but then I got more into fantasy and manor mysteries the older I got.  It seemed like everything new in  sci fi that I picked up to try was heavy in conflict and I needed less thought provoking, more humor, lighter stuff at the time to lift my moods. 

I think the last Dune book I read was Chapterhouse.  It was too depressing what he was doing to the women. The first two books were definitely the best. 

Edited by Calm
Posted

Just watched His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell from 1939.  I have seen it many times before, but this time was renewed by being a new release in blu ray 3D.   The fellow who produced the new blu ray  doesn't expect to sell many copies, but is just a fan of 3D.  It actually works very well, with the depth adding to the newsroom scenes, with all the desks and people and phones and typewriters.  I find that the 3D draws my eyes to the backgrounds, and makes me much more aware of the setting.  It felt new again.  There are at least three other versions of the story, an earlier one with the original title, The Front Page, and one with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and then another with Katherine Turner and Burt Reynolds which fell flat.  The incandescent spark that sets His Girl Friday apart began when the director (Howard Hawks) had a script girl reading the part which Pat 0'Brian had played in the original, and realized that it was better that way.  Rosalind Russell's Hildy Johnson blew everyone away, though she was not the first, second or third choice.   And of course, His Girl Friday is stuffed with amazing character actors, everyone shining brightly and stealing scenes.   No one is there just to take up space.  Sparkling dialogue and brilliant deliveries.

I still love Ray Bradbury.  Every time October comes around, I think of the little passage at the start of his The October Country collection, about the sounds the Autumn people make when walking through the leaves.  The seventh grade teachers may have had you read The Veldt, about children having a deadly playroom.  Not his scariest story.  When I was at the University 18th branch, an apartment full of female students told me that the scariest thing most of them had read was a chapter in Dandelion Wine, which they encountered all unawares that such a nostalgiac and lovely book would have such a tense chapter inside.   When they all announced that they did not stoop to reading science fiction, I read them a Zelazny story, "Divine Madness" from the The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of his Mouth collection and dazzled them all.

Posted
1 hour ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Just watched His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell from 1939.  I have seen it many times before, but this time was renewed by being a new release in blu ray 3D.   The fellow who produced the new blu ray  doesn't expect to sell many copies, but is just a fan of 3D.  It actually works very well, with the depth adding to the newsroom scenes, with all the desks and people and phones and typewriters.  I find that the 3D draws my eyes to the backgrounds, and makes me much more aware of the setting.  It felt new again.  There are at least three other versions of the story, an earlier one with the original title, The Front Page, and one with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and then another with Katherine Turner and Burt Reynolds which fell flat.  The incandescent spark that sets His Girl Friday apart began when the director (Howard Hawks) had a script girl reading the part which Pat 0'Brian had played in the original, and realized that it was better that way.  Rosalind Russell's Hildy Johnson blew everyone away, though she was not the first, second or third choice.   And of course, His Girl Friday is stuffed with amazing character actors, everyone shining brightly and stealing scenes.   No one is there just to take up space.  Sparkling dialogue and brilliant deliveries.

I still love Ray Bradbury.  Every time October comes around, I think of the little passage at the start of his The October Country collection, about the sounds the Autumn people make when walking through the leaves.  The seventh grade teachers may have had you read The Veldt, about children having a deadly playroom.  Not his scariest story.  When I was at the University 18th branch, an apartment full of female students told me that the scariest thing most of them had read was a chapter in Dandelion Wine, which they encountered all unawares that such a nostalgiac and lovely book would have such a tense chapter inside.   When they all announced that they did not stoop to reading science fiction, I read them a Zelazny story, "Divine Madness" from the The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of his Mouth collection and dazzled them all.

I just picked up a book written by his daughter of Cary Grant.

Posted (edited)
On 10/14/2024 at 5:08 PM, Tacenda said:

I just picked up a book written by his daughter of Cary Grant.

Shauna and I bonded over Cary Grant movies like Bringing up Baby and The Awful Truth, and My Favorite Wife.  Much earlier, when I was a little boy, and Gunga Din came on, it was when Cary Grant's character and Gunga Din were trapped in the Thugee temple, that for the first time in my life, I came to understand exactly what courage and sacrifice and true heroism really meant, acting for the greater good despite fear, rather than being apparently fearless, when Grant's character began singing and strode into the center of the crowd so as to provide a distraction so Gunga Din could get help and warn the Colonel.  I think I will always be grateful for that.  A few years later, we chanced upon Arsenic and Old Lace, blissfully ignorant of what was coming, and I learned that something could be both terrifying and very funny.

Edited by Kevin Christensen
Posted
On 10/12/2024 at 4:56 PM, bluebell said:

I did, and I've noticed that does tend to make a difference, though usually things go better if I see the movie first and then read the book.  Then I can like both of them.  If I read the book first it's almost guaranteed that I'm going to think the movie is bad.  To much expectation.

I had a bad experience with this. After I read the Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October the film wasn't too bad, so I was happy. And then they made films out of Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. Oh my gosh, horrifying. I hear they made a film out of The Sum of All Fears, but I didn't dare watch it. My favorite Clancy novel is Without Remorse, and I hope they never do that one.

I saw the first Jack Reacher film (with Tom Cruise) and I really liked it. This was before I even knew that the Jack Reacher character was the protagonist of a novel series, and this was before I met my wife. She is a Jack Reacher fanatic and has read every novel. She utterly hates the Tom Cruise films. This is because Tom Cruise doesn't resemble Jack Reacher in the slightest. He doesn't meet her vision of Reacher. Not one bit. And then they got that Alan Richson dude to portray Reacher in the new Amazon Prime series, and they did the first novel, Killing Floor. Now, I read Killing Floor after I married her, and I disliked it because there were just too many breaks of suspension of disbelief -- mainly because author Lee Child is a Brit who didn't understand American culture very well at the time, and some of the things he has Reacher say are just wrong, and then he made some serious firearms glitches. Like the semi-automatic 10 gauge shotguns his bad guys were carting around, and the way he completely inaccurately portrayed the lethality of the guns. My British wife wouldn't have noticed any of that. Fortunately, the Amazon Prime show corrected the stupidities and that portrayal of the novel was a huge improvement over the book.

One of my favorite SF authors is Robert A. Heinlein. And my favorite novel of his is Starship Troopers. I've re-read it multiple times. And then they made a film out of it. It stank to high heaven. "Based on..." my foot. The director, Paul Verhoeven, took a some concepts and characters out of the novel and created a total mess. If I hadn't ever read the novel, the film wouldn't have been too bad, but as I understand it, Verhoeven never read the novel -- or didn't quite finish the first chapter because it bored him. The word on the street is that Verhoeven has a grudge against the US, and it shows. I could write a full-length article about how he completely misrepresented the novel. And the politics of the film were just absolutely horrible. One of the bigger idiotic things in the film was a portrayal of a colony of "Mormon extremists" called "Port Joe Smith," complete with a temple. Something not in the novel, of course. Heinlein himself was not unfriendly towards the Church, and mentions "Mormons" positively a few times in his novels.

And then, the YouTube personality Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin), did a review of just the politics of the film ("The Politics of Starship Troopers") that turned me around a bit, surprisingly. It was a video about as long as the film, and at first I watched with some trepidation, but was impressed by how he re-interpreted the message of the film. I recommend that those who have an opinion about the novel and the film watch the video. Benjamin is quite the thinker, actually. 

Sorry, bluebell, your comment hit me in just the right place to trigger a torrent of words. 🙂 

 

Posted
1 hour ago, Stargazer said:

And then, the YouTube personality Sargon of Akkad (Carl Benjamin), did a review of just the politics of the film ("The Politics of Starship Troopers") that turned me around a bit, surprisingly. It was a video about as long as the film, and at first I watched with some trepidation, but was impressed by how he re-interpreted the message of the film. I recommend that those who have an opinion about the novel and the film watch the video. Benjamin is quite the thinker, actually. 

@bluebell I forgot to mention that in his video Sargon showed that although Verhoeven was visibly trying to portray Heinlein's ideas as fascist, the film entirely failed to show any fascism.

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted
On 10/14/2024 at 10:24 AM, Kevin Christensen said:

I've read nearly everything Zelazny wrote. All but some poetry.  All the novels and short stories.   Someone recommended Nine Princes in Amber to me in 1975-6 ish time, after I got back from England.  Read 300 SF novels that year.  But I've read and re-read the 10 Amber novels several times.  And Lord of Light, Jack of Shadows, Creatures of Light and Darkness, and have the six volume complete short stories.  Met him at a signing in San Jose at one point I think early late 80s, or early 90s.   For Lord of the Rings, I was in 7th grade, and my sister's English class decided to read Fellowship.  But she started with The Hobbit, which passed from her to a brother to another brother and then to me.  The business of having to wait for my turn for each successive book slowed down my reading,  and I had a long walk to South Davis Junior high with Autumn darkening to Winter bleak and cold, and in my head, I always associated that with the trek to Mordor.    I also got very fond of Ray Bradbury around that time.  Later, Dune and Dune Messiah.  But I fell out of the books halfway through Children of Dune.  It seemed to me that the characters had lost an argument with the author about where the book was supposed to go.   I also remain very fond of Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East series, the related Swords series, and the Berserker stories, which I also discovered in 1975. (Saberhagen and Zelazny were close friends, as were Zelazny and Gaiman.)   And also admire Jack Vance, whose Dying Earth stories were an influence on Zelazny's Jack of Shadows.  Vance, like Bradbury and Zelazny was a distinctive stylist, the flavor of their prose being instantly recognizable and unique.   Saberhagen's prose was not as distinctive, but his best stories just worked, especially The Black Mountains and Changling Earth, the Berserker stories.   I also met Bradbury and Saberhagen at different times.   And Scott Card a few times over the years.  I originally read "Ender's Game" as a novelette in Analog, when it was first published.  I remain very fond of Seventh Son, and Ender's Game, and many of his short stories.  Especially "The Bully and the Beast".

Nowadays, I don't read nearly as much fiction.  But I read whatever Jasper Fforde (especially the Thursday Next series) and Jonathon Stroud (Bartimaeus and Lockwood and Co) produce.  And I miss Terry Pratchett.

FWIW,

Kevin Christensen

Canonsburg, PA

I also love the Bartimaeus series. Sometimes, I wish he would write one more in that series. I have not read Lockwood. 

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

We watched two movies over the last few days that were pretty entertaining.

First was The Fall Guy. It’s kind of action adventure/romantic comedy that came out this summer. It has Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt as the main characters. It’s entertaining and goofy and has a lot of heart. PG-13 rating, but nothing shocking.

Then last night we watched Fall. It wasn’t released in theaters, I don’t think. It’s more an indie movie. It has a very limited cast and for most of the movie it’s just the two main actresses. It’s about two best friends who decide to climb an abandoned radio tower and then accidentally get stuck on top and nobody knows where they are and there’s no way for them to get down. It came out a while ago, but I thought it looked kind of boring (because movies that only have two characters that are stuck in one situation for almost the entire movie sometimes are) but I was pleasantly surprised. It was very entertaining, and if heights bug you then this movie will make your hands sweat.  

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_(2022_film)

Posted
1 hour ago, bluebell said:

We watched two movies over the last few days that were pretty entertaining.

First was The Fall Guy. It’s kind of action adventure/romantic comedy that came out this summer. It has Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt as the main characters. It’s entertaining and goofy and has a lot of heart. PG-13 rating, but nothing shocking.

Then last night we watched Fall. It wasn’t released in theaters, I don’t think. It’s more an indie movie. It has a very limited cast and for most of the movie it’s just the two main actresses. It’s about two best friends who decide to climb an abandoned radio tower and then accidentally get stuck on top and nobody knows where they are and there’s no way for them to get down. It came out a while ago, but I thought it looked kind of boring (because movies that only have two characters that are stuck in one situation for almost the entire movie sometimes are) but I was pleasantly surprised. It was very entertaining, and if heights bug you then this movie will make your hands sweat.  

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_(2022_film)

Saw both of those and had the same reaction...liked both of them and was pleasantly surprised with both. 

Posted
2 hours ago, Tacenda said:

Saw both of those and had the same reaction...liked both of them and was pleasantly surprised with both. 

It's always nice to be pleasantly surprised.  With most movies these days I'm unpleasantly surprised by how dumb it was or how much I didn't like it.

Posted (edited)

Loved Wicked! Very good musical to screen adaption. (Hated the book though) I love the musical and was worried but it is wonderful. I already have tickets for round 2. 

Edited by bsjkki
Posted
1 hour ago, bsjkki said:

Loved Wicked! Very good musical to screen adaption. (Hated the book though) I love the musical and was worried but it is wonderful already have tickets for round 2. 

The book was horrible.

Posted
6 hours ago, Calm said:

The book was horrible.

Great Broadway play that I was so excited to see in Salt Lake City! I was hoping the movie would be just as good! Going to have to go now.

Posted
7 hours ago, Calm said:

The book was horrible.

 

9 hours ago, bsjkki said:

Loved Wicked! Very good musical to screen adaption. (Hated the book though)

It’s the worst. 

Posted
8 hours ago, Calm said:

The book was horrible.

Truly horrible. I had a similar experience with the movie Stardust. Loved the movie but found the book not to be as good. It wasn’t horrible but not as captivating as the movie. 

Posted
4 hours ago, bsjkki said:

Truly horrible. I had a similar experience with the movie Stardust. Loved the movie but found the book not to be as good. It wasn’t horrible but not as captivating as the movie. 

It was the reverse for Stardust for me. I read the book first, so that probably had something to do with it.  I like Neil Gaimen’s style a lot. 

Also I don’t get into the humor of burly men dressing up in women’s clothing. It felt forced, trying too hard to say the least.  Like they wanted to be sensitive sort of, but still slipped into lampooning.

Posted
48 minutes ago, Calm said:

It was the reverse for Stardust for me. I read the book first, so that probably had something to do with it.  I like Neil Gaimen’s style a lot. 

Also I don’t get into the humor of burly men dressing up in women’s clothing. It felt forced, trying too hard to say the least.  Like they wanted to be sensitive sort of, but still slipped into lampooning.

I think because I saw the movie first, the book would be more like it. Much depends on which is read/seen first. 
 

 

Posted
8 hours ago, bsjkki said:

Truly horrible. I had a similar experience with the movie Stardust. Loved the movie but found the book not to be as good. It wasn’t horrible but not as captivating as the movie. 

I bought the book after really loving the movie but I haven't managed to read it yet.  It was kind of weird.

Posted

Watched Deadpool and Wolverine on TV. Can not recommend.

1. 30 minutes too long.

2. Too many fight scenes.

3. Unnecessary ugly language.

4. Very little humor.

I liked the first Deadpool but this one is a perfect example of massive amounts of money ruining the production values. Obviously I am in the minority on this if judged by the box office receipts. 

 

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