We had a quiet chrimbo in due to inclement weather and incipient sloth, watched a heady cocktail of cinematic gems 'n garbage, and braved the viral barrage-spreading zombie shopping hordes yesterday for a meal out at a famous deli chain.
Quiet here by comparison with Christmases past. Over to the in-laws on Christmas Day for food and booze. They are still reasonably chipper in their 80s plus had their son to help. Then they all came over to ours on Boxing Day. Our son and daughter were there too. Otherwise slothful with plenty of shit TV. Watched both the Knives Out movies back to back as they're on Netflix. Remembered half way through Knives Out that I'd already seen Daniel Craig returning the compliment to Dick Van Dyke accent-wise.
I thought he acquitted himself fairly well playing against type/Bond. As someone who grew up in the deep south, I didn't find the accent, though pastiche -y, off the charts weird. Ed Norton, OTOH was way too insipid as a supposed tech titan, someone more like DiCaprio (were he available & affordable) might have been a better choice.
Fair enough. I did hear the occasional line that came out entirely in BBC English. But no, in all honesty, I suppose he did avoid the "Stroyk a loyt Meery Poppins" mash-up of imaginary accents favoured by Mr Van D. I like Ed Norton as a villain, but he was a bit light-weight for such a colourful cast.
By the end of the second film (Glass Onion) I was too engrossed in my Christmas bottle of Palma gin to worry about either accents or casting.
Most of us got flu at various intervals so not much was done. I watched a film called DUNC that turned out to be an extended pilot episode for Dune, I'd have assumed a big-budget tv series by the pacing if I didn't know better. And Glass Onion which yeah, it's alright and quite fun.
We watched Villeneuve's Dune over xmas. Reasonably entertaining but meh, didn't really add anything to the Lynch version and in some ways (fx, surprisingly), inferior. E.g., the giant worms were dumb AF.
Yeah, that's the one I watched as well. I'm just being facetious over the stupid typography.
I liked the look of the thing, Deakins-esque sandy stuff at times and brutalist architecture and whatnot. I'm not sure about this whole 'take a single story and split it into multiple films' thing that they keep doing though, this one ends feeling very incomplete. Because it's only halfway through the first book!
I know nothing about Austin Butler who is stepping into the Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen role that Sting did in the Lynch version, but his IMDB bio, including the Elvis role, makes me worry that there's more TV pilot episode on the way.
The man who didn't fuck up Blade Runner 2049 has managed to do a passable version of DUNC. I've seen it at the cinema, in the comfort of my own home, and at my sister's on Christmas Eve, on their big telly with all the motion-smoothing turned on, and my 80-year-old mother watching utterly bewildered, and Meh, it's OK. I've managed to say nothing about the thopter crash makes a mockery of aerodynamics, UNTIL NOW. The thopter crash makes a mockery of aerodynamics.
I'll give him points for casting Charlotte Rampling as the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, though.
It kind of pissed me off. Villeneuve I expected to come up with a radically different take, or even a slightly different take, instead of mostly the same but less. I couldn't care less about the thopter thing (which I didn't even know the name of), it's just moar marvel universe bilge.