General Della Rovere

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A con man is made to impersonate a hero and finds his conscience

CoyoteRambles, Mr. Otter and I met for the Saturday Zoom Movie, and it was Mr. Otter’s choice…he had been leaning heavily toward Italian postwar cinema, and this was no exception.

The plot is standard but well done: bad guy con man makes himself the go-between communicating with the Germans running the town on one side and the families of the Gestapo’s captives on the other, taking his own cut of whatever bribes and payments are passed back and forth. Then the Gestapo makes him pretend to be the shining light of the Resistance, Della Rovere, and go to prison with other freedom fighters, hoping to get information from them.

This was good, but pretty talky for a war/betrayal/resistance movie.

Hands Across the Table

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Two penniless gold diggers agree to help each other in pursuit of marrying someone rich, but fall for each other instead.

Aaaaand…that’s pretty much the whole movie. There’s more detail, of course, but it’s not so outstanding that that matters.

This was okay. William Powell and Carole Lombard were both good, and the storyline wasn’t awful, just not very memorable.

Man of the World

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William Powell is using a scandal sheet to blackmail men to pay him to keep stories about them unpublished…his schemes go awry when he meets Carole Lombard and promises to go straight…but of course it’s not that easy…

This was one of a boxed set of five Carole Lombard movies that Mr. Otter and I watched one week…this one was pretty good, although William Powell was less charming and more scummy than usual.

Not bad, but not memorable.

The Tomorrow War

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Aliens will kill most of Earth’s population in the future so soldiers are being drafted in the present and sent to the future to fight and die…until Chris Pratt takes care of business.

OMG. This is the reason that, as much as I love time travel movies, they really should be kept out of the hands of idiots. This movie had a lot of boom and whango, as we say Chez Otter, but very little about it made sense. There were so many plot holes related to time travel that I’m not even going to go there. Mr. Otter and I spent most of the movie yelling, Why are you doing this? at the screen, and pointing out the obvious paradoxes and inconsistencies.

And I really like Chris Pratt, but not here. Even he couldn’t save this dog.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

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From the short story Farewell to the Master by Harry Bates

An alien comes to earth with an ultimatum: abandon war, especially nuclear war, or the Earth will be destroyed by other alien races.

This is, of course, a legendary SF movie. My family always had the TV going on Sunday afternoons to watch whatever cheesy old SF and horror movies were playing (back in the days when you had to watch whatever the Television Gods decreed, rather than choosing for yourself.) This was a big favorite, and my sister had a huge crush on Michael Rennie, who I will admit is easy on the eye.

I saw bits and pieces of it, and of course Klaatu Barada Nicto is a famous catchphrase…but I really don’t remember ever having actually watched it all the way through, until Mr. Otter mentioned it and I said, I’ve never seen it. Well, that was a gap in my cultural literacy that got addressed pretty quickly!

For what it was, a preachy cold war movie about eschewing violence, it was pretty good. The special effects weren’t bad for the time, and the story, although pretty far-fetched (none of his abilities was ever explained, he could just do all this random stuff. And he was exactly like Earth humans…hm.) it all held together pretty well.

The story was interesting enough not to be draggy, and of course the ending, “The decision rests with you…” was great.

The Otter liked this classic and was happy not to be disappointed by it!

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

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Shang-Chi finds out that A) his father is a Bad Guy and B) he has to use the power of the Ten Rings to save his mother, who everyone thought was dead, and they must also defeat an evil dragon.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

It was actually much better than that description makes it sound. This was a compelling, beautifully made MCU movie (in one post-credits scene the heroes are taken to Kamer-Taj by Wong the Librarian) and very enjoyable…except for one small quibble: the evil dad, Wenwu, was a way more interesting and compelling character than Shang-Chi.

I mean, yes, the MCU is full of people like Captain America who are kind of vanilla; they’re unsalted good guys, probably okay for a snack but not what you are really craving. But to have such a contrast between the two stars of the same movie, and have the bad guy be the one I was really behind for the whole thing, evil or not, didn’t really work for me.

Yes, Loki is a bad guy that everyone likes…but he gets his comeuppance regularly, and bounces back for more. In this movie, the bad guy was just BAD. Until the very end, when he sacrifices himself and gives his kid his power source.

Hm.

I’m going to watch this one again before coming down too hard on it…I’m finding that the MCU movies are so full of stuff both from previous stories and their own that I usually like to see them twice before writing a review…and as I said, it was beautiful and I did get caught up in the story…so I’ll be kind to this one til then.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage

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Eddie Brock, the host of the symbiotic alien Venom, is trying to get his journalism career back and interviews a serial killer…who becomes the host for another Venom-class symbiote, and is out to get his super-powered lost girlfriend out of the slammer.

I really liked the first Venom movie with Tom Hardy, and had been looking forward to the next in the franchise…but of course 2020. So when it actually did get released, I was on the road with my friend Craiggers, driving halfway across the US. We were in Albuquerque, and had a free evening, so we went to see this.

And it was…okay. Way too much ‘this symbiote is now inhabiting this body’ for me, even for a comic book story that was kind of silly. Much less character development than the first one. But okay.

The teaser has Eddie Brock and Venom transported to a hotel room in the Spider-Man universe, so we’ll see what happens there…

The Suicide Squad (2021)

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A reboot of the DC Comics bad-guys squad, they are sent to the island of Corto Maltese to stop evil scientists from what? Oh yeah, TAKING OVER THE WORLD.

I liked the 2016 Suicide Squad movie (Margot Robbie and Viola Davis are, I think, the only two holdovers from that. There are a few other characters who are the same…but there are a lot of new ones, or remakes of the old ones: Idris Elba’s Bloodsport vs Will Smith’s Deadshot, King Shark instead of Killer Croc, you get the picture.) and was really looking forward to seeing a sequel…except this isn’t, it’s kind of a reboot; the same thing has happened, with evil boss Viola Davis putting bombs in supervillains’ heads and telling them to get out there and do a job for her or she’ll kill them. That was the only similarity.

SPOILERS ahead, nothing huge, just fyi.

So this was a big ol’ mishmosh of a movie; the team is put together, they interact in very dysfunctional ways (they put the fun in dysfunction!) and then decide they need to GET IT DONE. Most of them are killed on landing, and then we find out that there’s a second team that was sent in to do the same job three days earlier, and the team from the beginning of the movie was just a distraction…but what’s distracting is the number of people with weird powers running around, killing whoever is a target, exchanging witty (or not) repartee, and maybe solving the problem?

This was just too full of stuff. If they had crammed any more plot or characters into this movie it would have exploded like one of its own special effects.

Klute

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The best friend of a murdered man talks a PI into trying to solve the case, working with a prostitute who may be the next victim.

This is a movie I’ve heard about since it came out (and since I was 12 at the time, of course I wasn’t allowed to see it, lol!). It wasn’t the greatest whodunit ever, especially since the audience knows very well who the bad guy is; he’s shown listening to tapes he made of the victims’ sexual encounters several times, so duh. The low-key but intense interaction between Sutherland and Fonda is good, and so is Roy Schieder as the pimp of all three murdered girls.

Not exciting, but a good psychological suspense movie.

Jungle Cruise

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A botanist and her brother hire the captain of a cruise boat to take them up the Amazon in search of a magical tree. Hijinks ensue.

Okay, Disney. You listen up here: just because you took a chance with Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl and ended up making a franchise, a worldwide phenomenon, and billions of dollars, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to keep throwing the same concept at the wall to see if it sticks. That’s what caused Haunted Mansion. And Tomorrowland. And now…this.

I’ve been going to Disneyland (in Anaheim) since I was a very young Otter;, waaay before Eisner got his hands on it and trashed all my childhood memories. I’ve been on the Jungle Cruise ride a ton of times, and always enjoyed the stupid eye-rolling puns and the Benji-peril.

I do have to say, I like Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock. He’s good-looking, and his on-screen persona is kind of low key and a little self-deprecating, both good things. In this, he tells a ton of ‘dad jokes’ because they’re riffing on the experience of the actual ride; I think every bad joke I’ve ever heard on that ride was incorporated into this movie somewhere, to groans from the audience, and Johnson was the perfect person in this role.

Having said that, the movie was awful. This was a serious mishmosh of well-known movie tropes: girl and brother off to find a magical item? The Mummy. Taking a boat up a river in search of something the Conquistadors found? Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Two people fighting like cats and dogs on a boat trip but ending up smooching? The African Queen. And on and on and on. I don’t think there was an original idea or scene in the whole movie, truthfully.

I was rolling my eyes by the end of this thing, and not at the jokes; even for an action/magical events kind of movie, this was ridiculous. Every time someone thought the journey was over or the bad guys would win, they raised the ante on idiotic coincidental things that would happen, look great on film, save the day and make no sense, culminating with the huge waterfalls at the end.

Disney, give up. Be happy with one success and stop trying to make every damn ride in the theme park into a blockbuster movie…

This is a good choice for an evening when you have literally nothing else to do, but only if you enjoy dad jokes and promise to remove your brain first.