TV/Movies Megathread

[The Larch]

...

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/aug/31/the-lord-of-the-rings-the-rings-of-power-review-so-astounding-it-makes-house-of-the-dragon-look-amateur

I've seen other reviews raving on the visual aspects of the show. It seems that the truckload of money they poured into it is on full display.

[The Larch]

Leonardo DiCaprio and Camila Morrone seem to have split.



She just turned 25 earlier this summer. 

[FunkMonk]

He has a type 

[Josquius]

Surely someone has done a Logans Run style sketch on this?
I just hope it was good.

[HVC]

what's the point of having money if you can't have a few eccentricities

[Syt]

From the ongoing series, "Sci-fi movies now technically set in the past."

[Sheilbh]

Doesn't sound like there's anything to rave about except looks.

I think that covers the first couple of paragraphs - after that it's going on about stuff other than looks.

[Sheilbh]

Leonardo DiCaprio and Camila Morrone seem to have split.

[...]

She just turned 25 earlier this summer. 

Liam Bright
@lastpositivist
Romcom about a woman who meets and falls in love with Leonardo di Caprio on the eve of her 25th birthday and has to engage in a series of increasingly wacky escapades to keep him from learning her age.

[Duque de Bragança]

From the ongoing series, "Sci-fi movies now technically set in the past."

Was this the previous one? 

[crazy canuck]

Poor Kelly must have known she was about to age out, but took the chance anyway.

[Sheilbh]

Official Competition - good comedy. Penelope Cruz, especially, is terrific. English trailer:

Edit: Also loved Cruz in the latest Almodovar and she's on the list of very suspicious ageless film stars. Up there with Paul Rudd.  She's just great

[Admiral Yi]

Edit: Also loved Cruz in the latest Almodovar and she's on the list of very suspicious ageless film stars. Up there with Paul Rudd.  She's just great

Catherine Deneuve.  Freak of nature.

[Admiral Yi]

Just watched Battle of Britain for the first time.  On Youtube, free with ads!  Lots of ads.

Was decent.  The blonde looked nice in her stockings.

[viper37]

Official Competition - good comedy. Penelope Cruz, especially, is terrific. English trailer:

Edit: Also loved Cruz in the latest Almodovar and she's on the list of very suspicious ageless film stars. Up there with Paul Rudd.  She's just great

1:16, when Antonio Banderas does his thing to ready himself, I once saw him describe a "famous actor" doing that very thing before shooting a scene in an interview and saying it was mildly disconcerting for him

[Sheilbh]

God I love a deserved one star hatchet job. I will possibly watch this film:

Blackbird review – Michael Flatley's fabulously bad spy tale is a classic of egosploitation cinema
In various rakishly-angled hats, the Riverdance star wrote, directed and stars in a jet-setting Bond knock-off that plays out like the unsexy bits of a mid-80s porn film
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Wed 31 Aug 2022 22.00 BST

Since this increasingly legendary film starring Michael Flatley was briefly aired at London's Raindance film festival in 2018 – a screening from which the media were barred – reports of it have been scattered, disjointed, unreliable. Like witnesses to a 10-bus pile-up on top of children coming out of a nursery school, those who saw it were traumatised and gibbering. The trailer which finally dropped online earlier this year was very disturbing, as it confirmed that the film really does exist.

Riverdance hoofer Flatley really has produced, written, directed and starred in his own film in which he plays Victor Blackley, a supercool secret agent codenamed "Blackbird", leader of an undercover special forces unit called "the Chieftains", like the folk band. Very often, Flatley has a secret half-smile with narrowed eyes; at other times his face is strangely blank and yet intent, like a tourist who has swum away from the other holiday-makers in the Mediterranean to secretly relieve himself in the sea.

When Victor failed to prevent his wife being killed by terrorists in some godless foreigner-jungle or other (the agonised flashbacks are not quite clear on the point) he was deeply upset. His wife's burial takes place in the grounds of Victor's spectacular home in the Irish Republic, filmed at Flatley's own mansion Castle Hyde House in County Cork. (Weirdly, however, his secret agent activities seem to be coordinated from Westminster, by a shadowy fixer played by Patrick Bergin.)

Victor wears a black hat at a rakish angle for the funeral service. He quits secret-agenting and saunters enigmatically off to run a luxury Caribbean hotel, nursing his broken heart and wearing a white tuxedo with a panama hat, also at a rakish angle, perhaps imagining himself to be a mix of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and Sean Connery as 007; he gives orders in a sub-Liam-Neeson growl. But when a sinister arms dealer played by Eric Roberts shows up as a hotel guest, and is engaged to his old friend Vivian (Nicole Evans) who has no idea of what a rotter he is, it is clear that Victor is going to have resume his secret agent vocation to destroy him.

In a way, it is amazing that Flatley is able to fulfil a 12-year-old boy's fantasy of being a secret agent, with a 12-year-old's idea of what a secret agent actually does. The acting and writing are like the non-sexy bits that come between the sexy bits in a porn film made in 1985. Flatley has loads of pouting women in bikinis everywhere, doing nothing. Everyone appears to have taken extra-strong OxyContin tablets before the cameras rolled. Each line is calculated to induce a nervous breakdown in the audience. When Michael Flatley actually has to hold up a sim card and say: "This holds the formula – it can kill millions of people!" I had to lie down on the floor while a team of paramedics gave me oxygen.

The big scene is when Flatley and Eric Roberts, both lavishly tuxed, play a game of high-stakes poker, a confrontation of alpha-male hombres which is clearly supposed to have the charge of 007 playing Le Chiffre at chemin de fer, but which actually has all the excitement of a nil-nil draw between Grimsby Town and Tranmere Rovers. And when Flatley punches out a henchman-baddie 10 times his size, it is a moment of unintentional comedy on a scale to rival the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games.

Really, I wanted Flatley to put his arms ramrod-straight down by his sides and then dance over the prostrate bodies of his enemies. Let's hope there will be dancealong screenings of Blackbird in which audiences can stand up in rows, link arms and express their complex feelings about this film in a choreography of their own.

Blackbird is released on 2 September in cinemas in the UK and Ireland.