Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-01-27 (Monday)
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2025 17:30:57 -0800
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 70
Message-ID: <vnc0ch$22r0t$1@dont-email.me>
References: <UBI20250127@dont-email.me>
 <890117855.759763904.735875.anim8rfsk-cox.net@news.easynews.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2025 02:30:59 +0100 (CET)
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="7ccd259b2c2bed1b1d35a41e18e1157d";
	logging-data="2190365"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+rOBtly3xHTQAvTAn4jvy2SQ5hJmmsDUo="
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird
Cancel-Lock: sha1:NzM1ZwDuPYhj62j4HS6UjQf8/ww=
In-Reply-To: <890117855.759763904.735875.anim8rfsk-cox.net@news.easynews.com>
Content-Language: en-US
X-Antivirus-Status: Clean
X-Antivirus: Norton (VPS 250128-8, 1/28/2025), Outbound message
Bytes: 4728

On 1/28/2025 5:33 AM, anim8rfsk wrote:
> Ubiquitous <weberm@polaris.net> wrote:
>> I watched:
>>
>>
>> What did you watch?
> 
> Hey, thanks for asking!
> 
> THE TRANSPORTER
> 
> It was all I could find on STARZ
> 
> 
> 


Thunderbird pretty much died on me today.  It's been limping along for a 
while now.  But it suddenly came back to life.  I don't know how this 
will last.  Anyway, I watched:


Southland Tales (blu-ray) 2006 sci-fi movie written and directed by 
Richard Kelly.  The movie stars Dwayne Johnson as a movie star who is at 
the heart of a blackmail scheme by a group of anarchists trying to take 
down a fascist police state in Texas following a nuclear bomb being 
detonated a few years earlier.  The movie is wall to wall famous people. 
  Too many to list.  I have no idea why they all signed up to be in it.

I watched the longer "Cannes cut" yesterday.  It was an incoherent mess! 
  None of it made sense.  Yesterday, I watched the theatrical cut with 
the director's commentary.  This is a totally different edit of the 
movie with scenes in a different order.  Randomizing the order the 
scenes came in really didn't matter much.  Though, in some ways this 
made it harder to follow because I had just watched the movie the night 
before and now, I'm watching it again but it's all different.

But some things were cleared up in the theatrical cut thanks to the 
commentary.  Two things that came out early in the commentary was both 
Dwayne Johnson's character and Seann William Scott's character were time 
travelers from the future, but had amnesia because of the time travel. 
This detail was vague at best in Cannes cut, and not explicitly shown 
for either character until the very end of the movie.  But even in the 
theatrical cut knowing they are amnesiac doppelgangers from the future 
didn't clear much up.  On the commentary the director kept going on and 
on about "reading" "chapters" and at one point he straight up said, 
"Read the graphic novels, it's all there."  And I'm thinking if you have 
to read some outside source material for your movie to make sense, then 
you've failed as a director.  The director mentioned Sarah Michelle 
Gellar's character having psychic abilities.  That was news to me, I 
must completely missed that detail in the Cannes cut.  And it wasn't 
entirely clear in the theatrical cut either.  If he hadn't explicitly 
said it, I wouldn't have known.  He admitted on the commentary that he 
intentionally made the movie confusing so no one could figure it out in 
one viewing because that's just the type of movie he likes to make.  I 
probably should have stopped the movie at that point, but I stuck with 
it.  My having to watch this mess twice in order to make any sort of 
sense of was intentional!  :-/


Don't Blink (Amazon Streaming) 2024 thriller directed by Zoë Kravitz and 
starring Naomi Ackie as a waitress who along with her friend are invited 
by a billionaire (Channing Tatum) to his private island.  But things get 
weird as she and her friend have trouble remembering past events and 
eventually people forget the friend was ever there.  I've been looking 
forward to watching this for a while.  Mainly because I couldn't figure 
out the plot from the trailers.  Although I had some good guesses, and 
my guesses were more or less accurate.  What happens in the trailer is 
what happens in the movie.  The rest are spoilers.  It's worth checking out.