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From: Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-02-16 (Sunday)
Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2025 08:53:34 -0800
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On 2/17/2025 6:52 AM, shawn wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Feb 2025 05:51:56 -0800, "Ian J. Ball" <ijball@mac.invalid>
> wrote:
> 
>> On 2/17/25 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:
>>
>>> What did you watch?
>>
>> As expected, no movies. But I did get through most of the SNL 50 special.
>>
>> I watched:
>>
> 
> snipped text
> 
>> SNL 50 - I didn't see all of this - I saw the end of the first airing,
>> and the first 3(!)-hours of the second airing, so I maybe missed some of
>> the last 15-20 minutes of this.
>>     But, while it wasn't the show's best skits, I enjoyed the overall
>> nostalgia ("Coffee Talk" lady is back!), and most of the "celebrity
>> cameos" (not Baldwin!  >:/ ), in the special.
>>     One thing is for sure - a number of the old timers (I never did see
>> Chevy Chase or Jane Curtin) still have it, esp. Eddie Murphy! Get this
>> guy his own show!!
> 
> I didn't see Chase or Curtin live at the show so I'm not sure if they
> were there. Of course both got a good deal of air time in the clips
> from the past.
> 
>> What did you watch?
> 
> I watched much of the SNL 50th special.

Same.  I still have about an hour to go, but what I watched was good.


  Which was a nice addition to
> seeing the first SNL episode from 1975 on Saturday night. I thought
> Baldwin wasn't even going to show when there were clear places he
> would have fit, but then they brought him in towards the end. I was
> particularly touched by that last clip showing John Belushi as an old
> man visiting the graves of all his former cast mates.
> 
> I also finished up THE DIPLOMAT. 

I forgot about this show.  I still need to start season 2.


> What did you watch?


I watched:

Broken Arrow (blu-ray) 1996 movie directed by John Woo (I had *no* idea 
Woo directed this when I put the disc in) starring John Travolta as a US 
Air Force pilot who steals his plane's nuclear weapons during a training 
flight with Christian Slater as his determined copilot out to get the 
nukes back.  And hey it's Samantha Mathis from Super Mario Bros. as the 
love interest.  I don't think I've watched this since around the time of 
the original release.  It was better than I was expecting.  Although one 
annoyance was the way Travolta was constantly giving exposition to the 
guy who financed the operation.  I know movies need exposition, but if I 
was financing stealing a pair of nuclear weapons, you best believe I 
would have already been fully briefed on the plan and all contingencies 
well before it began!  Who are the co-conspirators, how are the bombs 
being transported, and transported to where, are really not the types of 
information you should be learning the day of!  LOL


Face/Off (4K disc) 1997 movie directed by John Woo starring John 
Travolta as an FBI agent who agrees to have his face surgically removed 
and replace it with the face of a criminal played by Nicolas Cage so 
Travolta can pretend to be Cage and trick Cage's brother into revealing 
the location of a bomb.  There has got to be easier ways to make someone 
talk!  I watched with an interesting commentary track.  The pair doing 
the commentary were all over the place, occasionally discussing the 
movie, but often just talking snark and trivia.  I don't know why I 
found it so funny but I couldn't stop laughing when one said Travolta 
was playing the character like an evil Danny Zuko and the other said 
Danny Zuko *was* evil.  One piece of trivia they mentioned was Nicholas 
Cage and Tomas Jane shared a scene together is that both men were 
married to Patricia Arquette.


Swordfish (blu-ray) 2001 movie starring Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) as a 
hacker who is recruited by Storm (Halle Berry) to hack into a bank for a 
patriotic terrorist played by John Travolta.  Rounding out the cast are 
War Machine (Don Cheadle) as an FBI agent trying to take them down and 
Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones) as one of Travolta's henchman.  I've been 
looking forward to revisiting this for a long time.  I'm glad I was 
finally able to watch it again.


Blackhat (4K disc) 2015 movie directed by Michael Mann starring Thor 
(Chris Hemsworth) as a hacker recruited from prison by the FBI to team 
up with Chinese law enforcement and track down the hackers who tried to 
melt down a U.S. nuclear power plant, and succeeded in melting down a 
Chinese power planet.  I *think* I maybe saw this in the theater, when 
it first came out, but I had no real memory of the movie.  There were 
three different versions of the movie available, U.S, international, and 
director's cut.  I went with the U.S. version simply because it was the 
longest version of the three, and I hate wondering, what did I miss, 
with shorter cuts.  In spite of the generally bad reviews this movie 
has, I liked it.  I'm not going to say the movie wasn't a mess, and 
maybe a shorter version would have been more coherent (I did after all 
turn to the Wikipedia page to figure out what was happening), but the 
movie held my interest.