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The old movie thread seems to have disappeared, so herewith begins a new one ...

Take in Sergio Leone's epic, Once Upon a Time in America (1984) — not the abbreviated and butchered North American versions originally released, but the full version remastered in 2003 and available in a 2-DVD set (ISBN 0-7907-8912-4). It is immaculate and overwhelming and is Leone's swan song. Set aside 229 minutes (3:49) and then maybe another couple of hours to retrace your steps.
Starring Robert DeNiro, James Woods, Tuesday Weld, Elizabeth McGovern, Jennifer Connelly (screen debut at age 13), and many more.

Eames Aluminium Chair. Best seen at 1080p, full screen, on a fast connection. Stunning on the 27" iMac.

BRIDESMAIDS (2011), now out on DVD (with some great bonus features).
It's a goodie and raunchy, pretty much a sarcastic estrogen fest, brought to you by the folks who produced THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN.
The episode with the bride and bridesmaids at the dressmaker's just after a bad meal at a Brazilian restaurant in a bad part of town is one of the funniest I've ever seen; I was paralyzed with laughter for 5 minutes and had to 'rewind' to view the parts I missed.

Add to the list:

UNKNOWN (2011) with Liam Neeson, and pay close attention to the dialog and visuals from the first scene on (because it ain't goin' where you think it's goin').

HANNA (2011) with Saoirse Ronan (and Cate Blanchett); quite a performance for a (at the time) 15-year-old.

Hanna was a well-done movie, though it seemed to be missing something to me. I'm not sure what the missing ingredient was, but I definitely felt some kind of lack while I was watching it.

I really, really enjoyed the movie In Time, a science-fiction film set in a future where everyone stops aging at 24, but then must work in exchange for time; if the amount of time in your account goes to zero, you die instantly, on the spot. Some people have millions of years in their accounts; most people have a day or two, and so must constantly struggle to get another few hours added to the clock before it runs out.

That may have been on purpose, part of the director's plan. I watched it on the DVD, and Joe Wright commented on his use of "ellipsis" in filming many of the sequences. The viewer is invited to fill in the gaps.

I recommend "Temple Grandin" an HBO movie originally on television with Claire Danes in the title role. It's an amazing biographical film from a number of angles; the phenomenal things accomplished by an autistic individual against incredible odds; how much we still need to learn about the mind; our tendency to reject or ridicule those things we don't understand; insight into the processing of animals for food...et cetera.

And Claire Danes proves to be a wonderful actress.

Postscript: Temple Grandin was recently in our province speaking to a group in a farm community but, unfortunately, I was away. It certainly would have been interesting.

Indeed it is. And Temple Grandin herself has commented about how dead-on Claire Danes's depiction of her is. Check out the DVD extras.

Temple Grandin is an outstanding individual, what she herself calls a high-functioning autistic. But don't walk around behind her when she's giving a talk; she spooks like one of the cattle she's so in tune with (and she makes no bones about it). Any time you can see her in person or otherwise, it is a worthwhile experience. Read her books too.

Just for sake of argument and because I don't want to start a new thread for just one item (although I can be persuaded differently, if need be), here's a book you'll want to read ... it came out a while ago, but almost everybody I've recommended it to seems to have heard of it from a different source and finds it engrossing (at the very least). You be the judge.

The Art of Racing in the Rain : A Novel
by Garth Stein (321 pp)
HarperCollins, 2008; ISBN 978-1-55468-172-3
Harper Perennial (pbk ed), 2010; ISBN 978-1-44340-496-9

SUMMARY
Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television and by listening closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver.
On the night before his death, Enzo takes stock of his life, recalling all that he and his family have been through, hoping, in his next life, to return as a human.

It will make you cry.....

And you'll laugh. And you'll get mad. And you'll cheer.
And you'll do all those things over and over again.

The point - counterpoint of life and racing, in or out of the rain.
And I think that I finally understand the phrase, "What goes around, comes around."

"It's okay ... If you need to go, you can go."
"One more lap! Faster!"

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011). Wow!

This is a movie NOT to see:

The Tree of Life (written and directed, so to speak, by Terrence Malick)

With Brad Pitt, Sean Penn (non-speaking role), Jessica Chastain, and a host of uninspiring others.

How it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture this past season is unfathomable. The fact that it did is disturbing on many levels.

One reviewer (Wall Street Journal) opined: "Exquisite ... A work of art that defies categorization."
La Presse found it "Extraordinaire".
Jacket blurb touts it as "one of the year's most talked about films."

All of those comments are a polite way of saying that the 140-minute film is bizarre, incoherent, twisted, ....

The portions of the film which do not involve a peopled "story" are artistically and technically superb, albeit more often than not disrupted with voice-overs of words and phrases which are supposed to be significant (and somehow relevant to the peopled story) but which turn out to be just obfuscatory interjections.

Recommendation: Do not see this film unless you wish to regret 140 minutes which you'll never recoup.

Chimpanzee, which took 4 years to film, opens this Friday (April 20).
If you're planning on seeing it, do so the first week, since the proceeds (from the first week) go to the Jane Goodall Institute.

Check out Chimpanzee and Jane Goodall, conservationists hope 'Chimpanzee' will save chimps

Christian the Lion at World's End (2009, 97 min)

This is a digitally restored DVD of the 1976 movie which includes "The Reunion" (of YouTube fame). If you got 'em, watch it with your cats. This is the closest any of us will ever get to reintroducing lions to the wild. And watching George Adamson's rapport with the lions is an added benefit.

Life itself: Now out on DVD (2014, 120 min), Steve James's documentary based on Roger Ebert's memoir of the same name is superb and lives up to all the blurbs about it: enthralling, deeply moving, a joy, ....

Senna, 2010. Documentary.

Hollywood has just released a spate of movies with an AI theme: Chappie (by the same person who did District 9), Ex Machina, and Interstellar (not really a movie about AI, but several of the characters are AIs). Three radically different movies with three radically different takes on AI, all worth watching.

I am Ali, 2014, Documentary

Biography as told by his family and friends along with his own audio tapes and great archival footage. A facinating insight into what he accomplished and how humble someone so brilliant and talented could be.

Isn't Interstellar one of the few movies that involves AI assisting in space travel, where NONE of them are malevolent?

Everywhere else... the AIs are just plain out to get us. Wait no I can think of one more, Nikki in Supernova. Nikki let a crewman die, but at least she wasn't venting the crew out the airlocks.

Never trust a HAL 9000.

If you were around in 1968, you were likely too stoned to care.
During the fifth (?) viewing of the stargate sequence I couldn't feel my legs.

As racing movies have been selected, I have to recommend Rush, Ron Howard. This is as much excitement as you can stand without actually being in an F1 car.

However, even if you don't care for racing it's a good story about the two drivers racing for the championship in 1976 – James Hunt and Nikki Lauda. Two more different personalities there could never be. The film follows both in a very eventful season.

Film making at its best.

The AIs in Interstellar are interesting--they seem to be sentient and display things like initiative, humor, and very flexible cognitive processes, but they appear to lack any sort of survival drive or self-motivation. All in all, a really interesting take on AI.

The AI in Chappie is not malicious or hostile, but it has some badly skewed ideas about how to interact with people, probably owing to being "raised" by South African drug-dealing gangsters. Chappie is a very non-Hollywood movie, which is probably why the reviews are so polarized (folks seem to hate it or love it, with little in between).

Remember that CHAPPIE is brought to you by the same director, Neill Blomkamp, who gave us DISTRICT 9 (2009) and ELYSIUM (2013). Small wonder that it has a decidedly non-Hollywood feel to it.

Ok, so I said it in another string because this one had not resurrected itself yet...

"Atari: Game Over"

Can't say enough nice things about this romp to a dump in New Mexico, archeologists and all, to *maybe* find the burial place of a million Atari E.T Game Cartridges, referred to as "The Worst Video Game Ever"and deemed responsible for the demise of Atari. Was supposed to be the first episode of "Signal to Noise" and now I guess it is the only one.

Directed by Zack Penn, w/Howard Scott Warshaw, Atari Game Programmer, Seamus Blackley, Co-Founder, X-Box, and Ernest Cline and his DeLorean, "Anorak," for starters.

"Rush" keeps getting recommended to me and I forget to follow up on that. Thanks!

"Senna" spans from the 80's to the 90's, when you pretty much had to be insane to drive an F1. Instead, he transcended the sport. There is some footage you can hunt down from NatGeo explaining why just millimeters! of tolerance; the temperature of the tires and the resulting slight air pressure drop inside them, caused an irrecoverable loss of control. TopGear has an interesting episode summing up some the changes in technology and driving technique from then until now.

My Dad, an Aeronautical Engineer, once said there should have been a double feature of that and "Fantasia" for the stoners...

A thoughtful man ... but stoners would never have been able to follow through.
Thanks for reminding me to transfer my VHS tape of Fantasia to DVD (before my VHS player packs it in).

Is that Fantasia or Fantasia 2000? I love both but I will have to admit to a prefereence for the one I saw as a youngster -- Fantasia with Leopold Stokowski at the podium.

There was a story that I don't think Kubrick ever confirmed but his wife gave it a wink and a nod. Supposedly, while he was filming 2001, he was also filming a staged Moon landing for NASA, to be used in the event of a worst case scenario in 1969. (It was during the Cold War and any failure would have to be concealed.) There are quirky references to the Apollo Mission in Space Odyssey, but there are also some errors about gravity and astronomy, possibly intentional while more accurate footage was assembled for NASA. In 1980, The Shining references backward to Apollo 11, such as Danny's sweater in one scene. I have heard some conspiracy theorists use these cues as evidence that the Apollo 11 landing was a hoax.

I availed myself of 50th anniversary "meticulously restored version of the original" Walt Disney's Masterpiece FANTASIA which was released in 1991 ($26.99 SRP) — with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Thanks, Freelance. Feed my need for speed!

"The Zen of Bennett"

('nuff said.)

Rats!! Even though the VHS tape is mine, I can't transfer it to DVD because it contains copyrighted material.
On the plus side the VHS tape seems to have weathered the past quarter century unscathed; it played back flawlessly — not single dropout in 120 minutes.

"format shifting" has been judged legal for quite awhile. (though the content marketers fought quite a bloody battle trying to block it)

No good movies lately?

"1408"
Stephen King thriller from 2007. To avoid a spoiler here, watch the YouTube video of how it was made afterwards. Pinewood Studios is amazing.

ps: Director's cut has better ending.

Being Canadian, "an epic quest of apologetic proportions", by (and about) Robert Cohen (2014, 89 min) — available on DVD and streaming on Netflix (I believe).

An enjoyable romp overall and enlightening for those who know zip about Canada. It did miss pointing out that the Bloody Caesar originated in Canada. (According to Google-san: To commemorate the inauguration of an Italian restaurant in 1969, Calgary bartender Walter Chell created Bloody Caesar.)

Aside: If Tromp were to become US President, it might not be out of line to re-enact what Canada did to the White House in the War of 1812 (and how we did it).

If you liked Fargo, the 1996 movie, you'll probably gush* over Fargo the FX TV series: Season 1 (2014) and Season 2 (2015), each about 9 hours of viewing. The DVD presentations have a great deal of "bonus" material; 4 DVDs per set. Both seasons shot in Alberta.
(You may in fact have followed the movie's advice and gotten a chipper to get rid of pesky neighborhood problems. )

Be aware: Season 2 is actually a "prequel" to Season 1, with the former (2) taking place in 1979 and the latter (1) in 2006. So you may wish to view them in reverse order. (I had to re-watch Season 1 after I viewed Season 2, and I enjoyed it both times.)

EDIT: * Until now I have never used this word, and yet it popped into my head as I was typing that line. As Arte Johnson (in his Laugh In persona as a German foot soldier) used to say: Verrry interrresting.

"My Beautiful Broken Brain"
http://decider.com/2016/03/25/why-you-should-watch-my-beautiful-broken-brain/

ALGORITHM THE HACKER might interest computer users. It is somewhat disturbing considering what could and possibly is happening now. jaybass

Look Who's Back Er ist wieder da

Netflix has just released the movie (2015 Constantin Film production of Timur Vermes's 2012 satiric novel) globally.

Here is a whole whack of trailers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtW1Lq5c04E
including the scene where Hitler is being assisted in trying to come to terms with a computer and mouse and in setting up an email account.

From an interview (which just aired on pri.cbc.ca) with Oliver Masucci, the actor who plays Hitler:
When he was traveling around Germany during the filming, he stayed in character ("Why are you dressed like Hitler?" "I am Hitler.") and apparently people started accepting that.
Talk about life imitating art!

Remember (2015)

I'm not a big fan of Atom Egoyan's movies, although Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Chloe (2009) stood out.

However, Remember starring Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau — and who doesn't love those two, here for the first time together — may just put him into the directors' pantheon.
I may be slow on the pick-up, but I never saw it (the climax) coming.

I saw Exotica when it came out in the theater. Hadn't intended to see it; a friend of mine and I went to the movies and arrived too late to see what we'd wanted to see, and it was the only film that hadn't started yet. I quite liked it, and even bought it in VHS.

One of my girlfriends and I just saw Eye in the Sky in the theaters. It's Alan Rickman's last movie, and follows a drone strike on a suspected terrorist cell in Kenya. It's emotionally gutwrenching and offers an interesting insight on the conduct of war in the modern era. Highly recommended.

I could not agree more, grelber! In fact, for TV series, Season 1 of Fargo is the best I have seen. Some of my other favorites are Breaking Bad, The Americans, Fargo Season 2, Better Call Saul, The People V. O. J. Simpson (highest rated series recently, in terms of viewership, and VERY well done!), and House of Cards. Be aware, though, that Better Call Saul is "kind of" a prequel to Breaking Bad. And, of course, Bob Odenkirk figures prominently in Better Call Saul, appears quite a lot in some "latter" seasons of Breaking Bad, and also was the "new" sheriff (after the original one got knocked off in Episode 1) in Fargo Season 1.

BTW, there is going to be a Season 3 of Fargo:

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/01/16/fargo-season-3

From what I recently read, it should come out next year. In fact, here is a quote about that:

"There's no exact date for the Fargo season 3 premiere just yet. We do know that fans will have to wait for Hawley’s “selfie.” He confirmed that Fargo won’t be back until spring 2017, due to the show’s winter setting. Shooting is set to begin in November 2016."

Too bad Lester (Martin Freeman) and Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton) were "eliminated" near the end of Season 1. I would have liked to see them again.

One of my favorite topics, movies! Great thread.

Some of my favorites are:

Moneyball (super performances by Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill)

Schindler's List

Murder In The First (does not get the recognition it deserves. Excellent performances by Christian Slater and Kevin Bacon)

Awakenings (another one that does not get the recognition it deserves. Super performances by Robert De Niro and Robin Williams)

My Beautiful Broken Brain
mybeautifulbrokenbrain.com/

The Lady in the Van (2015, 104 min)

Another outstanding performance by Maggie Smith, who 'reprises' her role in the stage play (which ran for 9 months) based on Alex Bennett's memoir of the title's Miss Mary Shepherd, who lived in various vans in his Gloucester driveway for 15 years until her death in 1989.
Truly superb.

Did she truly live in "vans", or were they RVs?

Vans, a series of them, which she always painted (with a brush and/or soft pot scrubber) a saffron yellow — and sometimes the paint job was lumpy due to bits of cake.
The problem for the movie's producers was actually locating such vintage vehicles (many of which are now expensive collector's items) and then essentially trashing them; very expensive for the producers.

There's a blue plaque on Alex Bennett's (former) abode where this all took place and where the movie was shot stating:
"The Lady in the Van lived here 1974-1989".

If you watch the movie on DVD, make sure to check out the bonus features, in particular "The Making of The Lady in the Van" and "Visual Effects" — preferably before watching the movie to gain some quite useful information which will enhance your appreciation of the flick.

"Fight Club" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" watched back to back. I read a dark theory that Cameron Frye may imagine the Ferris Bueller character just like Edward Norton's character imagines Tyler Burden. An outlet for repressed feelings. Ok, I'm ready for the attacks over this one...

I realize this is a "Movies" thread, but there was some TV series mentioned. Just want folks to know that on AMC, they have been showing the BBC produced series "The Night Manager". It is very, very good. Has only 6 episodes, and already the first 5 have been shown on AMC (Episode 5 aired last night). I would recommend it.

I concur. "The Night Manager" is good TV (if that is not an oxymoron). And for all of you fans of the TV series "House", Hugh Laurie is back. He plays the bad guy in "The Night Manager" (that is not a spoiler), complete with his native/normal accent.

Yeah, he is definitely good in that part!

The TV series, though, differs from the book, as detailed here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Manager_(miniseries)

With the ending being "somewhat" drastically different than the book (I have not seen Episode 6 yet, although I have it), one would think that there could possibly be a season 2. Here are a couple of pro and con links about that:

Con: http://www.theweek.co.uk/69776/tom-hiddleston-rules-out-second-series-of-the-night-manager

Pro: http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/hit-bbc-drama-night-manager-7546325

The other excellent series on now is Season 4 of "The Americans". In fact, Episode 10 aired last night, with only 3 more episodes to go. The last 3 episodes have been super interesting! I'll bet we'll be left "hanging" after Episode 13 airs in 3 weeks, and then we'll have to wait for the start of Season 5 (most likely back in March or April) to get a resolution. To me, just after season 1 of Fargo, and tied with Breaking Bad, it is up there as another excellent series. Definitely good TV!

Thanks, honestone. "The Night Manager" is great, but Episode 6 not on Amazon.

"Neurotypical"

A facinating view of how functional autistic teenagers and adults view "neurotypicals," their classification for those people who are not autistic. The systems they use to succeed and please others while maintaining their own individual worlds.

A triumph over the stigma of the label of autistic.

BBC series "Life Story"

The Life Story team spent 1900 days filming the series, in 29 countries across six continents. They traveled a total of 1,850,798 miles – the equivalent of circling the globe 78 times. They recorded a total of 1800 hours of footage – that’s 300 terabytes of data, or the equivalent of 64,000 DVD’s.

"Deep Web"

Story of Ross William Ulbrich and the Silk Road TOR network.

In the long-form documentary "Requiem for the American Dream" (73 minutes, now available on DVD) Noam Chomsky "exposes with searing clarity the forces and policies behind the coordinated campaign to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a select few" [from package blurb].
He defines and dissects democracy, especially as it has become wholly perverted within the American context (with the same only slightly differing and lagging in the Canadian context). The outrageous and dispiriting demise of the once and future dream in Chomsky's soliloquies is countered in his succinct, hopeful coda.

The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power
1. Reduce democracy
2. Shape ideology
3. Redesign the economy
4. Shift the burden
5. Attack solidarity
6. Run the regulators
7. Engineer elections
8. Keep the rabble in line
9. Manufacture consent
10. Marginalize the population

The majority (70%) of the population has no way of influencing public policy and it knows it.
"What it's led to is a population that's angry, frustrated, hates institutions. It's not acting constructively to try to respond to this. There is popular mobilization and activism, but in very self-destructive directions. It's taking the form of unfocused anger, attacks on one another, and on vulnerable targets. That's what happens in cases like this. It is corrosive of social relations, but that's the point. The point is to make people hate and fear each other, and look out only for themselves, and don't do anything for anyone else."

For a conservative/right-wing take on the same subject, check out Frank Buckley's The Way Back : Restoring the Promise of America or a short-form version in Hillsdale College's Imprimis titled "Restoring America's Economic Mobility" (Sept 2016, Vol 45, No 9), where it can also be downloaded in PDF format (142KB).

It's uncanny how close Buckley and Chomsky in their analyses of the American Dream. (I love the term "right-wing Marxist".)

It doesn't hurt that Buckley also uses Canada as the example to follow in recouping the loss.

Yeah, you're gonna cry ... maybe a lot ...

"The Art of Racing in the Rain" is in theaters and now out on DVD (and probably streaming somewhere).

Excellent. Now I'm going to have to reread the book.

Just a reminder:

The Art of Racing in the Rain : A Novel
by Garth Stein (321 pp)
HarperCollins, 2008; ISBN 978-1-55468-172-3
Harper Perennial (pbk ed), 2010; ISBN 978-1-44340-496-9

SUMMARY
Enzo knows he is different from other dogs: a philosopher with a nearly human soul (and an obsession with opposable thumbs), he has educated himself by watching television and by listening closely to the words of his master, Denny Swift, an up-and-coming race car driver.
On the night before his death, Enzo takes stock of his life, recalling all that he and his family have been through, hoping, in his next life, to return as a human.

Of interest:
The film was shot primarily in Vancouver, BC (standing in for Seattle) and the racing scenes were filmed in Toronto (except for the finale at a track in Seattle).