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From: Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-06-01 (Saturday)
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2024 11:27:04 -0700
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On 6/2/2024 9:28 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:
> On 6/2/24 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:
> 
>> I watched:
>>
>> RIFFTRAX:
>> "Vengeance of the Dead". A man is haunted in his dreams by
>> the ghost of a beautiful young woman; after the woman reveals
>> she and her mother were murdered by a hooded gang, he begins
>> to hunt down the members of the gang while sleepwalking.
>> Apparently they're playing new movies. This one was bad.
> 
> *Always* a warning sign: When you look a movie up on IMDb, and *none* of 
> the cast have portrait pictures on IMDb.
> 
> This flick is basically an example of this.
> 
>> What did you watch?
> 
> I took it really easy yesterday. I only managed to get through a soap, 
> some golf, and two movies:
> 
> soaps: GH - Fri's ep. Sonny continues to lose it, and sends some thugs 
> to go after Jason, after Jason refuses to sell out of the coffee 
> business - hopefully, this finally sends Sonny to jail. Not much else 
> happened except that NuNuNuMolly continues to be a stress case, and asks 
> Carly about the wedding attack. Agent Jagger Cates and Jack Brennan have 
> an amusing "confrontation"/interrogation in Brennan's hospital room.
> 
> golf - Day 3 of the Canadian Open in Hamilton, Ont. saw Scotland's 
> Robert MacIntyre in the lead by four(!), followed by Canuck Mackenzie 
> Hughes, Kiki Ryan Fox and American Benjamin Griffin all four strokes 
> back. American Sam Burns and Brit Tommy Fleetwood are also in the hunt. 
> But it seems unlikely that MacIntyre will be caught.
> 
> Blumhouse's Fantasy Island (Hulu) - In glorious 4k!

Hulu has it in 4K?!?  The movie was released on disc only on blu-ray.  :-/

>     I think I liked this 2020 flick quite a bit more than Anim did. 
> Yeah, the ending was a little too all over the place, and "too cute". 
> And this was unfortunately "PG-13 horror" when I was expecting(/hoping 
> for) "hard R horror" out of this, 

Well...if you watched it on disc you could have watched the unrated 
version.  :-)

Here is a comparison of theatrical vs unrated cut:
https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=246728


which was disappointing, and which
> also made for a much *less dark* film that I was anticipating.
>     But, such as it was, this was an OK "twisty" take on "Fantasy Island".
>     And, hey - at least they got it right that Lucifer Hale is *pure 
> EVOL*!!1!11!!  ;)
>     It's a little annoying that Portia Doubleday's character also didn't 
> suffer a horrific fate.
> 
> Fun fact: Before I went to bed last night, LMN was playing 2009's 
> "Sorority Wars" starring... Lucifer Hale! 15 years ago, when Hale was 
> about... what? 19? (so this was pre-PLL (bitches!!)), she was adorable. 
> By 2020?... Not so much!  :p
> 
> Blacklight (Hulu) - Also in glorious 4k!
>     Honestly, it kind of blows me away that even relatively "low-budget" 
> flicks like this one (though, I guess USD$43 mil isn't exactly 
> "low-budget"...) are now getting 4k presentations on the streamers.
>     Anyway, this was just OK - it's kind of like "The Parallax View" but 
> without Warren Beatty, the pervasive 1970s pessimism, or the hopeless 
> ending.
>     Liam Neeson plays Travis Block - a man with a "particular set of 
> skills" - which in this flick involves getting deep-undercover FBI 
> agents out before they get into "too deep"!! The flick makes clear that 
> Block is not an actual FBI agent, but an independent contractor. He 
> works for the "head" of the FBI (Aidan Quinn - which means you just 
> *know* he's EVOL!!1!).
>     First problem, though, is that this was filmed in Australia (Neeson 
> and Quinn may be the only non-Aus actors in the cast), with Canberra and 
> Melbourne very, very unconvincingly standing in for Washington DC. (I've 
> only been through DC once, and even I could easily tell this was not 
> filmed in DC!).
>     Neeson has a perennially disappointed and slightly hostile adult 
> daughter (Aussie actress Claire van der Boom), and an adorable 6(?)-year 
> old granddaugther (one-time child actress Gabriella Sengos) whom Block 
> teaches all of his paranoia too!
>     Anyway, when one of the people Block pulls in from undercover 
> (Taylor John Smith) starts spouting conspiracy nonsense about the FBI 
> eliminating domestic political "agitators", you know the guy is actually 
> on to something. Eventually, a plucky guttersnipe reporter (Emmy 
> Raver-Lampman) is dragged into this.
>     This is nothing we haven't seen before, either more generally, or 
> specifically from Neeson, and a number of the other Neeson films in the 
> same vein are probably better than this one.
>     But "Blacklight" sure does look pretty in 4k!!  ;p
> 
> 

I don't think I've heard of this one.  Is Neeson in the Bruce Willis 
phase of his career where he's cranking out low budget direct to video 
movies faster than people have time to watch?


I watched:


Doctor Who (Disney+) - 	"Dot and Bubble" - The Doctor and Ruby land on a 
planet with a small colony of spoiled rich kids who are so self-absorbed 
they can't be bothered to leave their social bubble, both literally and 
figuratively.  Their refusal to see the world as it really is will lead 
to their deaths unless they listen to the Doctor.  Unfortunately for 
them the Doctor isn't in their social bubble.


Confess, Fletch (Showtime) 2022 movie (which has been sitting on my DVR 
since 2022) starring John Hamm as "Fletch," who gets caught up in a 
convoluted plot involving a stolen painting and a murder.  Beyond that I 
really didn't follow the plot of this movie at all.  I've been working 
my way through this for the past few days and finally finished it.  The 
movie was just sort of on as I watched Fletch make wise cracks and annoy 
the police.  Maybe fans of the character will like it more, but I was 
just waiting for it to be over.


I also watched some  M. Night Shyamalan movies. There *will* be 
spoilers!  Stop reading now if you don't want to know the twists...

SPOILER SPACE
P
O
I
L
E
R

S
P
A
C
E

Unbreakable (4K disc) 2000 movie written and directed by M. Night 
Shyamalan.  Bruce Willis stars as a security guard who survives a train 
crash that killed every other passenger on board without a scratch on 
him.  He soon after meets a comic books obsessed Samuel L. Jackson who 
suggests he may be a superhero and begins to groom him to become one. 
Jackson has a condition which causes his bones to be brittle and easily 
break.  Jackson explains that he thinks comics are a glimpse of a true 
higher reality and if there is someone as brittle as himself in the 
world there must be an unbreakable opposite also out there.  They soon 
discover that one of Willis' powers is when he touches an evil person he 
can see their evil plans.  And at movie's end Jackson shakes Willis' 
hand revealing Jackson was behind the train crash and many other 
disasters resulting in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people as 
Jackson searched for his opposite.  The movie has grown on me over the 
years and I think I like it a bit better now than I did when it first 
came out.


Split (4K disc) 2016 movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. 
James McAvoy stars a a man with split personalities several of which 
decided to kidnap three teenage girls including Anya Taylor-Joy.  Anya 
has to outwit McAvoy's personalities to escape but one of the 
personalities seems to have super human abilities.  The movie ends with 
Anya rescued but McAvoy still free.  The final scene takes place in a 
diner with people talking about the events and commenting about how 
there hasn't been anything like this since the psycho who intentionally 
derailed a train was caught.  Then Bruce Willis stands revealing himself 
to be the same character from "Unbreakable" who has now embraced being a 
hero and his latest target is James McAvoy.


Glass (4K disc) 2019 movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. 
This serves as a sequel to both "Unbreakable" and "Split" with the cast 
of both movies returning for this one.  The movie opens with Willis's 
vigilante superhero with help from his son (the actor from the first 
movie reprising the role) tracking down James McAvoy.  Willis is now 
known as "The Overseer" and McAvoy goes by "The Horde."  The two are 
both super-powered and fight to a standstill when they are both 
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