Started Special Ops: Lioness last night.
One can definitely feel and see the auteurship / formula this one. The music scoring is a similar style to Yellowstone, and the female lead played by Zoe Saldaña is a similar type of character to Beth in Yellowstone. There’s a similar use of.menacing characters and violence. Also the use of hazing or breaking new employees (Farm hands and ranchers in Yellowstone, the new Ops recruit in thjskbe). Then, plenty of Us vs Them, Us vs Other People’s Greed.
The other female lead, Laysla de Oliveira, is from Toronto, and attended a local public hugh school for the arts, one from which my friend’s daughter recently graduated.
Apparently she worked at Terroni, a small chain of Italian restaurants, a restaurant known for its arugula and mushroom salad, for refusing to serve Diet Coke and for refusing to let people put Parmesan on seafood pastas.
If you’d like to see another absolutely fantastic non-Tom-Cruise-y Tom Cruise performance, I highly recommend Michael Mann’s Collateral, where he plays a hit man. Jamie Foxx is a cab driver caught up in his game…
A fantastic thriller all shot in Mann’s smeared-digital-color Los Angeles night.
In one of the final scenes: visiting Henry Gibson in prison, is that a threat that he will die, not via death penalty, but by
~ vigilante justice/ revenge/hired hit for killing Grace?
In the interest of completeness, and because the partner loves Timothy Olyphant in a cowboy hat, we are rewatching Justified starting at season 1, and working our way through the original again before we get into the new "“Limited Series” (remember when they were just called “miniseries”?) Justified: City Primeval. So great is her affection for Mr. Olyphant and his chappeau that we just call the series Hat!
She also was a big fan of Deadwood, for a multitude of reasons. If you ever wanted to hear what Shakespeare would have sounded like if he swore like a sailor and was popular in the Wild West era, you would do well to watch this. It’s up there with The Wire and Mad Men as some of the best television ever produced. Three seasons and a movie. The movie is especially heartbreaking because David Milch (show creator and principal writer) was diagnosed w/ Alzheimer’s just as he began working on the script, and he finished it before the disease robbed him of his ability to do so. The influence in the story is quite clear.
Deadwood is brilliant. Like your and your partner’s “hat” reference, we used to refer to his role in that show as Sheriff Clench. Swearengen’s blowjobologues were instant classics.
I miss that old review site TWOP from which I may have stolen both the ‘clench’ as well as the BJ references. They had some absolutely hilarious recaps of many shows at the time.
I just checked out the Doc Martin, Series 10 from my library. Good for a few chuckles. I came upon the series by accident a few years ago and got hooked.
Quick roundup of some of the things I have watched recently.
Five Star Chef (netflix) - Michel Roux Jr finding a new head chef for a hotel restaurant in London. Haven’t watched these types of shows for a while but enjoyed this one, perhaps as it’s UK based.
The Lincoln Lawyer and The Night Agent (netflix) - nothing special but both are entertaining. Just what I need after a long day of work.
Barry season 4 (hbo) - they literally lost the plot imho, very weak ending of a good series. Stopped watching after a few episodes into the last season.
Euphoria (hbo) - second season stronger than the first one, and of course the series is in the news as one of the stars died recently. Excellent music throughout.
Some 90s action movies on disney+ - Enemy of the State, Face/Off, Sneakers, The Rock. All good and still entertaining after multiple views!
Now enjoying the last few episodes of Hijack, and then thereafer I’ll be checking out Young Royals I think.
I watched the 5 star chef show and enjoyed. Stuff like that is my wind down while getting ready for bed catnip. Right now watching Great America Bake show with Prue and Paul on Roku channel. It’s all Americans but they shoot it in the tent in England.
Loving this season of the AfterParty. Each episode is presented in a different film style like film noir, Wes Anderson twee, Jane Austen/Bridgerton etc. also started up with the new season of Only Murders in the Building, finished Lincoln Lawyer, finished second season of Reservation Dogs which is excellent and enjoying the new season of What we do in the Shadows.
Talk to Me (2023 - dir Danny and Michael Phillipou)
Out of Australia comes a good old fashioned SCARY MOVIE. And I do mean scary. We meet Mia, a nice High School senior who’s lost her mother, has adopted her best friend Jade’s family as a second one, and is, generally, still having some issues. Suddenly, one of the kids at school comes across a magic hand, supposedly the mummified hand of a psychic, that allows one to speak to the dead.
As is the way of these things, rules are broken, proper care is not taken, and unfortunate incidents occur.
If you’re looking for a genuinely frightening horror movie, this is the one you’ve been waiting for. After the awful misfires of the recent Halloween sequels and the middling fare of Boogeyman, Talk to Me might be the scariest film I’ve seen in a good long while, and certainly nothing has left an impression on me like this since the one two punch of X and Pearl. There’s creepy atmosphere, a couple of skillfully deployed jump scares, and violence that is NOT for the faint of heart. (Sisu, which featured cartoonish levels of blood and gore, was a romp. The violence here is the kind you watch through your fingers, wincing.)
