Wednesday, April 21, 2021

abbreviated movie reports

Both abbreviated, the movies and the reports.

=Quiet 19C Rural Movies=

News of the World
Ex-CSA officer, played by a grizzled Tom Hanks, is moseying around 1870s Texas (played by New Mexico, so it's more desert-like than the real thing) in a dilapidated wagon, accompanied by a ten-year-old girl he picked up from an abandoned somewhere. She doesn't speak English, so their conversations are lively to be sure. The pace picks up when they get in a gunfight, in which, true to real-life gunfights of the day, hardly anything ever gets hit.
Eventually, since nobody else wants the girl, Hanks adopts her. I know the ending because this is the only one of the four I finished watching.

First Cow
Setting not specified, but it seems to be the Oregon Country before the 1846 partition. I'm not sure if a reference to San Francisco is anachronistic. That was the name of the bay, the mission, and the presidio, but not at the time of the town.
Anyway, if you want to watch a man cooking breakfast, this is the movie for you.

=Action-packed Hugo Nominees=

I only watched these movies because they're Hugo finalists.

Birds of Prey
Fast-forwarded through the very long fight scenes. It was still overlong, tedious, and stupid. Doesn't Margot Robbie have anything better to do? Rating: F.

Tenet
Didn't Christopher Nolan make a couple really clever movies with freaky perceptual gimmicks? Not this one: not clever, I mean. It's a gratuitously over-built action thriller without the wit or energy of his previous movies or even the more simply-told Mission Impossible movies or the Daniel Craig James Bond movies, and it wore me out even faster than Birds of Prey did. I gave up at the backwards car chase, to find on checking that the movie was only half over. Rating: F-.

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