MI-5 sported terrific casting – well a lot of our favorites from Jenny Agutter (Sister Julienne head honcho in Call the Midwife); to Nicola Walker (too many to mention, so we’ll leave it at Last Tango in Halifax); to real life couple Matthew Macfadyen and Keeley Hawes (Ripper Street, The Durells), and MI-5 head honcho Peter Firth who played the zampolit onboard the Red October who met his end on a “spilled glass of tea” that Sean Connery administered, and so on so forth . . .
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MI-5 sported terrific casting
Going on the list!
Yeah, it’s an wonderful collection of great actors. We watched the first 8 seasons and then did get a bit burned out. Need to finish up the last 2!
And my other three amazing stuck in the house during lockdown series were The Detectorists and the Swedish show, The Restaurant and speaking,of Nicola Walker, Unforgotten!
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Just finished as much as I could find of Unforgotten!
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Big Detectorist fans here. Of course, Toby Jones just finished a monster role in Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office, and Diana Rigg’s daughter Rachel Stirling starred in both versions Bletchley Circle.
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Kinds of Kindness (2024) - dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Everybody buckle up! Yorgos is going WEIRD again!
Not that the director has EVER been anything akin to ordinary, but Lanthimos’ last two critically acclaimed features, Poor Things, and The Favourite, were the first he’d done without his writing partner, Efthymis Filippou. And they were the first to be, well, if not exactly rays of sunshine, at least somewhat less misanthropic. Here, paired up once again for Kinds if Kindness, we get deeply unsettling world populated by people who are ANYTHING but kind.
In fact we get three of them. The film is an anthology of three unrelated 50-ish minute segments, populated by the same company of actors in different roles. That’s almost 3 hours of untrammeled WTF, but the stories each break off JUST at the right moment, so the time goes by quickly.
The acting ensemble is phenomenal, led by Jesse Plemmons, who has risen from “Fat Matt Damon” jokes to become an outstanding talent. Also along are Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, and Hong Chau (the eerily committed maitre’d from The Menu).
To say too much would be a disservice to the film. Better to go in blind and let the the strangeness wash over you. But be prepared for some rather open sexual politics and sexual violence, a not insignificant amount of regular old violence (in the disturbing sort of way, rather than a John Wick or slasher context) and some really intriguing questions about human nature illustrated by characters whose very oddness serves to pinpoint some weird quirks of humanity.
What does any of it mean? Boy, there’s gonna be a bunch of Film Studies papers on this one. The available avenues for picking this apart are infinite. I barely know where to start.
But if you’re a Lanthimos fan who’s been waiting for him to return to his Killing of a Sacred Deer form, you will be extremely pleased, and more than a little disturbed, which is, after all, the point.
I don’t think this will gather quite the plaudits of his last two, as it’s simply too mean, but special mention should go to Plemmons, who deserves a nomination for his work here, and to both Cinematographer Robby Ryan and music supervisor Anne Booty for absolutely outstanding results.
This one I’ll be looking for the deluxe Criterion edition blu ray when it becomes available.
Jesse Plemons is brilliant. Are any animals harmed or killed in the movie?
There is a scene where Emma Stone’s character deliberately cuts a dog’s leg in order to have an excuse to approach a veterinarian. It’s brief, doesn’t linger on the injury, and the disclaimer at the end is from the Humane Society that “No animals were harmed during those scenes.”
On another hand, I also went to see
A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) - dir. Michael Sarnoski
A prequel to the first two films about giant alien creatures that invade Earth and hunt via sound. A refreshing change from horror that seems to have taken a lot of the wrong lessons from the A24 “elevated” genre. It’s as if merely being a frightening good time isn’t a worthy goal, and movie has to be about more. Specifically, the monster becomes a thinly dressed metaphor for ‘trauma’ and we’re left with a lot of treacle that works against the whole point, which is to be SCARY.
Day One mostly avoids that, and lets the monsters just BE MONSTERS. They’re big and scary and there are some great attack and escape sequences that are tense, claustrophobic, and just what you want in a summer creature feature.
Lupita Nyong’o plays a character with that mysterious movie malady where she is days away from dying, frail and in pain, but is somehow still capable of extraordinary feats of physical endurance.
But the star of the show is Frodo the cat, who apparently has infinite lives, and at least some degree of omnipotence. He can be washed through a flooded subway tunnel and emerge unperturbed and towel-dried.
It’s a lot less brainpower required than Lanthimos, but is a perfectly fine way to kill a couple of hours in the A/C. If you liked either of the two previous entries of this series, this makes a worthy addition.
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Latest season of Unforgotten had a new female detective, but everyone else was the same.
Have you watched the Split? That’s a great show with Nicola Walker.
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We were hoping to see Day One at one of the iMax-like theaters in Berlin on a rainy day, but it didn’t shake out. The two multiplexes we have here suck, of course, but they may have to do. Really want to see that one, as I thought the first two were very well done. So tense!
Now I’m watching this
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I’d been ignoring the MI-5 discussion because I thought it was about the impossible mission franchise, and I’m an anti-TC fan, but when you mention Jenny Agutter and Nicola Walker, I had to look closer!
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Hah, yes I watched the original series but have never watched any of the movies and also do not care for TC. The show was called Spooks in England and ran for 10 seasons. Mi-5 (it’s name in US) is their FBI and it’s full of great actors and interesting storylines.
I have not, but I will check it out!
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Funeral Parade of Roses, directed by Toshio Matsumoto. Local repertory movie house showed this recently. In my opinion, it’s a completely bonkers masterpiece of new wave, avant garde and queer cinema. From 1969. Here’s the trailer in case you’re interested:
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Since this is a food board, Nicola Walker trivia: according to Wikipedia, Sue Perkins from first Great British Baking was assigned to be Walker’s upper classman “mother” at Oxford. Walker claimed the outcome was not pretty – there was a time when Perkins overindulged, took Walker’s bike never to be found (Perkins too) . . . No matter – to this day, we’ve been big fans of Sue and Mel.
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Warrior (2019) - created by Shannon Lee and Justin Lin (based on the writings of Bruce Lee)
Before his untimely death, Bruce Lee wrote a treatment for a series called Ah Sahm, set during the Tong wars in post Civil War San Francisco. Warner Bros passed on the series but later came out with the similarly themed Kung Fu, which they said was unrelated to Lee’s pitch. Additionally, the role went to Carradine, not Lee, due to Lee’s accent, rather than plain ol’ racism.
What bits of that are true is beyond my research (I.e. Wikipedia doesn’t mention it). What IS true is that I. 2019 Lee’s daughter Shannon made a deal with Cinemax to produce the original pitch. It lasted for two seasons on Cinemax before they channel stopped funding original content, when it moved to prentice company HBO/Max, where it got one more season before WB’s great cancellation wave.
Now, all three seasons are on Netflix and once again, you should watch them all to convince them to fund further seasons.
The show is a Chinese Western flavored Game of Thrones, thankfully without as much rape, but with a lot more (period appropriate) racism. We have rival Tongs (Chinese gangster families), the white San Fransisco elite, the working class Irish, all trying to climb to the top of the Barbary Coast heap. There’s political intrigue, family betrayals, and some really REALLY outstanding fight sequences.
3 seasons. 10 ep per season. 45-1hr per episode.
Really fun stuff.
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We’ve been watching DCI Banks.
Anyone catch Amazon Prime’s Daisy Jones and the Six series?
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I watched a couple episodes but it didn’t take. 
