Bernardo wrote: Mon Feb 02, 2026 7:34 pm Send Help - I was hoping for something much better. Gotta stop believing internet ratings.

This looked suspect from the ads. I do like Rachel McAdams, though.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You was good, Rose Byrne and Conan O'Brien are great. The only thing that bothered me is that for whatever reason I had trouble believing that the child was a girl. I've never met a young girl who behaved that way but plenty of young boys who have.

Finally saw Eddington. I only heard interviews with Air Aster on the movie, but I actually didn't know what it was about or who was in it. Holy fuck, is it the blackest of black comedies, or a drama? I can't tell. I like the idea of it as a comedy, I was laughing at a lot of the scenes. Just everyone in it is confused, stressed out, unaware of the real world. I'm still processing the ending, which I think is a good metaphor for where we are politically. It's such a raw, honest look at the current state of affairs and how we've allowed the internet to infect every aspect of our lives and distort reality as we know it. I found myself reaching for my phone at difficult times, only to remind me of how real the plot in the movie is. Just fascinating. A hard pill to swallow.

The ballad of Wallis Island

A sweet English comedy in the vein of the Detectorists series and with the themes of “Once”. Slow and wry and enjoyable- gets a bit whimsical sometimes but doesn’t let it on too thickly…

I recommend

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HTi-e20yVNs

To Live and Die in LA. Pretty damn good, but the bizarre and often poor editing choices keep it from being great. Great performances throughout, and while the quick shooting schedule probably prevented Robby Muller from doing his best work, it still frequently looks amazing.

I liked how William Petersen’s character was almost a spin on Dirty Harry. He’s cocky and violent, but he’s also inept, and he leaves a trail of destruction when he goes rogue. John Turturro’s character kicks his ass because Petersen’s is too arrogant and impulsive to recognize his own blind spots. It reminded me a bit of the Safdie brothers’ movie Good Time.

enframed wrote: Fri Feb 06, 2026 10:51 am If I Had Legs I'd Kick You was good, Rose Byrne and Conan O'Brien are great. The only thing that bothered me is that for whatever reason I had trouble believing that the child was a girl. I've never met a young girl who behaved that way but plenty of young boys who have.

I thought this was good too, an interesting psychological portrayal of motherhood. I liked how they didn't show the child's face throughout most of the movie. The hamster scene had me laughing.

zircona1 wrote: Sun Feb 08, 2026 11:29 am

enframed wrote: Fri Feb 06, 2026 10:51 am If I Had Legs I'd Kick You was good, Rose Byrne and Conan O'Brien are great. The only thing that bothered me is that for whatever reason I had trouble believing that the child was a girl. I've never met a young girl who behaved that way but plenty of young boys who have.

I thought this was good too, an interesting psychological portrayal of motherhood. I liked how they didn't show the child's face throughout most of the movie. The hamster scene had me laughing.

Pretty much hated every second of that film. I watched it with my wife and kinda kept my mouth shut (I've never been a mom, nor have I experienced a billionth of the bullshit the lead character did in that film), and about an hour in my wife said, "I think I hate this film." Glad I wasn't alone.

Maybe a nearly pointless film.

Today we watched An Angel At My Table, and older Jane Campion film. Fucking made me cry like ten times. Gorgeous. A child actor in the first third who was actually good, too. Cannot rec it highly enough.

rsmurphy wrote: Sun Dec 21, 2025 12:44 pm Rose Byrne is fantastic in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You - the best film about motherhood since The Babadook, and Mother!.

Ike be illin'!

The other night I watched The Narrow Margin, a fifties RKO picture directed by Richard Fleischer. It's a pretty damn good black and white cat-and-mouse sort of thing that mostly takes place on a train. Fleischer had a long and winding career that included 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Red Sonja, which I saw as a kid, as well as a Conan the Barbarian sequel which I can't remember if I've seen. We watched Tora, Tora, Tora in a social studies class, though the details are hazy. He also did Soylent Green, Mandingo, and The Boston Strangler movie starring Tony Curtis, from which The Stranglers got their name. I haven't seen these last few, but I've heard of them.

Anyway, what got me to check out The Narrow Margin was seeing Armored Car Robbery around Christmas. This is another RKO joint Fleischer did with screenwriter Earl Felton. The general consensus seems to be that Armored Car Robbery, while a good movie, isn't quite as good as The Narrow Margin. I'm gonna hafta break rank and position Amored Car Robbery as the superior movie, not that it matters too much. It is narrative economy personified, not that The Narrow Margin isn't fairly taught and lacking in bullshit itself. But Armored Car Robbery is one of those old movies, like Curtiz's The Breaking Point or Ray's In a Lonely Place or something, that I couldn't imagine a lot of people struggling to sit through. I like the female love interest more, on a sensual level; as a character she's far less sympathetic than the one in The Narrow Margin. The criminals are suitably awful, amoral people, and the coppers don't fuck around. Some say it was an influence on parts of Heat and I can definitely see that. It hits all of the stops in barely over an hour. The movie SAILS with narrative momentum.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You This movie was like a modern day Eraserhead. There's so much packed in this movie, it's hard to say where to begin. On the surface, this is a movie about a woman struggling as a pseudo single mother. Her husband has a job that makes him never present, their daughter is sick with some unknown illness, their's a big flood in their apartment due to a gaping hole in the ceiling. She's unable to get her daughter to do the things that she needs to to get better. Her landlord won't fix the hole. The contractor won't listen to her. She fights with the doctor, her therapist, her own patients (she's a therapist, too). However, every character in the movie is always asking something of her, which just piles on the expectations. This hit home a little too hard for my wife and what I read online, for a lot of women who are mothers. There's some decisions made in this movie that are interesting, like the fact that you don't ever see her daughter's face. I read an interview from the director that this was a decision to show that she saw her daughter as an obligation, not a human being. It's hard to know what was a dream and what was reality, or if any of it actually was partially a dream. There's clearly a lot of trauma being dealt with in the movie. The ending is like an exorcism. I really enjoyed the idea of the ocean rejecting her. The hole in the ceiling is where things get psychedelic like Eraserhead (also the movie gives off the same negative vibes).

I read a comment about how this movie is really an allegory about the failure of the American labor movement. I mentioned that to my wife, who immediately agreed.

I would probably never watch it again. This isn't to say I didn't like it, I did. It was very good, but hard to watch. Like Eraserhead.