Are you saying you don’t like to be lectured by strangers on how things are done PROPER-LIKE?
Huh. 
The Accountant (2016) - dir. Gavin O’Connor
Ben Affleck is Christian Wolff, an autistic savant who acts as a forensic accountant to major criminals, drug cartels, etc. As it happens, he was raised by a hardass miltary father who basically abused him into becoming one of those hyper-efficient killing machines that only seem to exist in movies. He is called on to find an embezzler in John Lithgow’s tech firm that makes advanced prosthetics. As he investigates (along with junior accountant Anna Kendrick), people start dying, mostly at the hand of Brax (Jon Bernthal) Cue the revelation that Christian keeps a major arsenal handy for just such occasions. Violence ensues.
What we have in all this is something like Rain Man meets any random Jason Statham movie. If you stop and think even a little about the plot, it all comes apart. Affleck tries to imbue Christian with some personality, but his ‘autistic’ flatness and robotic quality put up a wall.
There’s a sequel out now, almost a decade later, which is what prompted me and the missus to watch this one, as she has a great (and totally justified) affection for Bernthal, who has face and presence to make fantastic tough guys, as his work on Walking Dead and The Punisher series showed.
We might go see the sequel this weekend just for Bernthal. Poor Ben doesn’t look like he’s having any fun. Serious “Sad Affleck Meme” energy.
It’s currently on Prime, but I can’t recommend this for any reason other than background noise while you fold laundry.
2 out of 5 ceiling mounted chain guns that happen to be lying around.
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Started watching The Eternaut on Netflix, made it to episode 4. Pretty good so far, looks like there’s a new element being added to the story. I’ll most likely finish it tonight.
the new season of Poker Face just came out. hope to catch an episode tonight.
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We watched Black Bag with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbinder last night. Very well done — fun & twisty. As far as WhoDunnits go, this far more enjoyable and clever than The Glass Onion.
We also gave this one a try a few nights ago, but I forgot to post about it.
Started off promising, then I lost my patience over too much quirk.
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I’m stuck home sick, but Shudder just dropped a bunch of stuff. The Ugly Stepsister is now available as well as the absolute classic, Tremors
There also an interesting little slow burn of a movie called The Devil’s Business. Two hit men, and old experienced one and a young new rookie. But, while waiting for their target, they they find a disturbing black magic alter, and, well, nothing good ever happens after you find one of those. And at only 69 minutes it isn’t a commitment.
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The Ugly Stepsister is on our list. Have you watched it yet?
We watched The Luckiest Man in America last night, with Walton Goggins, David Strathairn 
& Paul Walter Houser, who was absolutely incredible in Blackbird.
Based on a true story about a guy who cons a game show out of a sizable amount of money in the early 80s. We liked it, but thought it ended rather abruptly, and strangely.
Yeah. I linked to my review above. TLDR: definitely worth watching, but kinda pales in comparison to The Substance, which treads similarly themed ground. That’s not the film’s fault, though.
It’s relatively up there on the wince inducing body horror.
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Beats wince inducing reality. Maybe we’ll check it oot tonight.
We watched it last night and greatly enjoyed it. There were some seriously cringey body horror things, and a highly surprising view of a fully erect dingdong as well as a fairly long focus on a woman’s behind & vulva .
The “rhinoplasty” scene was horrifying!
The lengths women still go through bc of patriarchal expectations is pretty depressing 
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Watch the first episode last night and it was good, but the amount of ads was really depressing. I don’t watch very much TV with ads in them anymore and I find them really annoying and distracting to the overall story. Not that motivated to continue.
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yeah, it’s a horrible trend. i am able to watch without commercials and would probably wait to watch it if i didn’t have this option.
the aggressive shift to force users into commercial tiers of service is going to alienate some users. i skip a lot of content now, unless i can get it without commercials. i have a little patience for television shows as long as it was designed to have commercials breaks, but won’t watch movies if they break it up in any way.
i wish i could say there would be backlash, but i understand that Netflix is making a killing off of its ad tier
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Mommy Dearest (1981) - dir. Frank Perry
We all have bits of culture that have somehow passed us by, while leaving a relatively sizable cultural impression. Maybe you just never liked Seinfeld, or had no interest in Titanic, so you didn’t bother and a thing happened and the world moved on. That was me and Mommy Dearest. While I certainly knew who Joan Crawford was, I was 9 when she died in ‘77, and had more important things like Star Wars to focus on. I was old enough to read the news and remember the fuss about Christina Crawford’s book, little more than a year after her mother’s death, but, again, it wasn’t a thing I would have interested in. Ditto when the film itself came out. I mean, there was Empire Strikes Back, so…
So I figured when my little theater put it on for Mother’s Day I figured I’d finally cross this off. I’d seen the clips, read a few stories. “Wire hangers” etc.
I was not prepared for the 129 minutes of absolute insanity I was about to experience.
HO! LEE! SHIT!
This is jaw-dropping cinema the same way that John Waters overlaps with… David Lynch and Kabuki theatre? Nicolas Cage in a Douglas Sirk melodrama? I don’t have the right words to describe the absolute EXCESS of this film. Every set is meticulously dressed like a glossy magazine shoot. Every shot lingers just a bit too long. Every musical cue grabs you the throat to make sure you’re getting the right mood. The gravity and commitment Dunaway gives to the line “I can handle… the SOCKS!” feels like it’s from a general about to charge into battle.
It’s impossible to say if this is a good film. Divorced from its “real life” context, it is a SPECTACULARLY entertaining one. This gets us into the whole discussion of ‘camp’, of which Mommy Dearest is considered “the Citizen-fucking-Kane”. I can’t disagree.
I could blather on about camp, the impact this had on the perception of. Crawford, it’s embrace by drag culture, and so forth, but this video does a far better job.
What I will say is that I am in AWE of Dunaway’s performance. Whether it fascinates or repulses you (it can do two things!) it is impossible to ignore. It might be the MOST performance. It’s kinda breathtaking.
If you’ve seen it, well, you know. If you haven’t, oh, you really must.
5 out of 5 bathrobes with shoulder pads plus 5 out of 5 hedge clippers plus 5 out of 5 tall glasses of vodka plus…
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I vividly remember my mom taking me to watch this one at the movie theater soon after it came out, so I would’ve still been a pre-teen. I can’t say what motivated her… to show me it could be worse? #LOLSOB, but I found it to be pretty traumatizing — the scene where Christina plays with her mom’s brush & the aftermath of it is burnt into my memory forever, even though there’s much worse, of course, like when she drags her out of bed in the middle of the night to clean her room 
I could not fathom how a mother could treat her daughter this way. Absolutely horrifying.
It’s hard to recognize camp as a child, which is also why I didn’t recognize the camp & humor of AWIL, which I also watched at a younger age than I should’ve.
I’ve not seen Mommy Dearest since, but will check out the video you posted. Time and distance is everything.
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We tried watching Nonnas last night, although I pretty much already figured it would be awful. Despite the collection of Sopranos alums and the generically likable Vince Vaughn, it was bad. Like, really, really, really bad.
Bad dialog, cookie-cutter everything, and the fact that VV could not pronounce the word NONNAS correctly just ONCE in the 40 minutes we suffered through almost made me chop up our laptop & drown the whole mess in some “gravy.” Yikes.
We had to turn it off. I doubt it gets better. Watch at your own risk, or after a few bottles of cheap red wine 
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Oh my god . I cannot IMAGINE trying to process that as a child. That must have been absolutely traumatizing.
AWIL
What are you referring to here?
As far as I can tell, while most every scene in the film was based on some incident in the book, they were HIGHLY exaggerated. Christina has stated that she was never beaten with a hangar, there was never any chopping down a tree with an axe. Still awful, of course, but not the cartoonish grotesque of the film.
By all accounts, Dunaway and at least some of production really did want to make a serious film about the horrors of child abuse and how it’s hidden away from public view, but others had an image of “glamour, fantasy, and tragedy” in mind. The result was, was this… thing. In all its unhinged magnificence.
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The peacock ad placement for this show was bizarre. The second half had ads interrupting the story every 5 minutes. Plot was a convoluted to begin with but this made it doubly hard to stay with the story. I noticed that there is a more expensive peacock premium plus membership but that still comes with ads in some shows.
Oops, that should’ve been AAWIL, i.e. An American Werewolf in London, which aged pretty well — including the famous transformation scene.
As a 12yr old I had trouble finding Jack’s increasingly rotten corpse funny. Instead, I had nightmares about Dave’s hospital nightmare (also still pretty terrifying IYAM ).
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Not a fan of Vince Vaughn fan, or Italian stereotypes. Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
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I’m struggling to get through season two of The Last of Us, just watched episode 5. Only a few brief moments of suspenseful action, the rest is a bunch of drivel.
