The basu! Guide to the Movies

#WonderWoman1984 So, a wish that gives you everything you want in the short term with a bunch of unintended consequences destroying everything you love in the longterm…but enough about the Warner straight-to-streaming release strategy, let's talk about the movie🤣! Fun old-school romance/action-adventure…with a tiny side of comic-book superhero-CU IP-world-building fate-of-the-future-of-cinema-hanging-in-the-balance. Nice work, again, by Jenkins by focusing on the human elements of the story, and for letting the DP give us such wonderful, bright, saturated colours. It's always a relief nowadays to see something not colour-graded to within an inch of its digital life. Nice work, too, by Wiig, fun as a tongue-in-cheek super-villain, and Pascal making up for all that non-emoting he has to do in #TheMandalorian by doing *all* the emoting. But, yeah, the day is saved, again, by that tremendous chemistry between Gadot and Pine😍. Boy, if I had a Dreamstone I'd wish...

#TheFlightAttendant (#HBOMax) Good, clean, ahem, airport-read fun! So, ahem, addictive, once you start you just can't stop…until the final episode(okay, fiiiine, I'll stop). I mean, how many tones can you pack into one show👏?! Fabulous stuff from Neely, who's propulsive(🤗), wall-to-wall score keeps things *speeding* along. And, my goodness, Cuoco is a revelation here. I mean, I must be the only person on e(/E?)arth who hasn't seen #TheBigBangTheory(😧), but d*mn, dude, not only is she sensational in front of the camera, but this could be the first step in a Reese Witherspoon-esque behind-the-camera empire. Look, it's a teeming cast *full* of un, on-point performances, but gotta say that Gomez, Mamet(fantastic!), & especially, the great Perez(give her *all* the #Emmys now!) steal the show. It's not, uh, streaming, it's HBO…Max? Okay, gotta work on that… PS. Sooooo, umm, beneath all that giddy whodunit fun, was the show actually about add...

RIP #JohnLeCarre Sadly, I'm not much of a book reader(TBH's the reader in the family, an *un*stoppable force of literary nature😳!), with my days of Enid Blyton, Alistair MacLean, Franklin W. Dixon(he's real, right?!), Michael Crichton, Stephen King, Ruskin Bond long behind me…but I gotta say the few times I did make the effort I almost always turned to the great le Carré. Look, we always heard about him growing up, especially from Pipi(naturally!), and when I finally picked up The Spy Who Came in from the Cold…man, I had to re-read it as an adult because it was so…at that age I wasn't quite ready for a non-#RogerMoore spy. But even then, the effect it had on me…😲 C'mon, a nondescript man walks up to a telephone booth in the dead of foggy night and whispers a seemingly innocuous question and receives a seemingly innocuous answer and…bang!…we're off! His books were incredible, but I suspect what kept his name in the limelight were also the film a...

#Mank Finally, the definitive answer to the most pressing question of our time: who truly created the Best Movie, Ever![Tied], the wunderkind polymathic genius who changed cinema as we know it, or the washed-up intermittently successful nobly-self-destructively-alcoholic(is there any other kind?) screenwriter and his 300(😳!)-page first draft! E(I?)nquiring minds want to know…and they shall, over the course of two-and-a-half luxuriously black-and-white-d hours! G*d bless Fincher, and his exacting standards for this whirlwind-yet-deliberative exhausti-ve/ng *in*side-baseball tour of Hollywood history… so many names, so many faces, so *much* history, so much chutzpah, I mean, it's like if someone decided to make the definitive movie about Raging Bull and instead of focusing on, oh, I dunno, Scorsese and/or De Niro, they decided to make the whole thing about…Mardik Martin(which, come to think of it, I would *totally* watch - what an incredible character he was!). G*d bless Fi...

#FBF so how about a #Flashback Movie? 😁 #CitizenKane (1941) Best Movie, Ever! [Tied]* Gosh, *all* those years ago, my first film class(can you imagine, *study*ing cinema, what a Western concept😂!), and we had all those classics: Singin' in the Rain(my sister was right all along, wha?!), Soylent Green(slept through the 2nd half so I missed the…ya know…😲!), Day for Night(Truffaut!), Nashville(Altman!), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(I was waiting all term for this, promptly fell asleep, and then when I finally made it to film school[a school for cinema, what a parent-heart-attack-inducing concept🙂!], promptly fell asleep again🙄), and so *many* others (including some non-US/Euro films right? Let's just say they showed us #SatyajitRay & #Kurosawa🤗), like Night and Fog(just…my g*d…even now when I think of that first experience watching it…and…yeah…)… …including, right off the bat, the big kahuna, the one whispered in our collective unconsciousness since birth, the...

#HillbillyElegy The much-awaited peel-back-the-curtain all-is-revealed look-at-how-the-other-half-live deep-dive into the scourge of Appalachian opioid addiction…in Ohio?! Wha?! 😲 Okay, so that was unexpected, as was the fact that movie isn't quite the crime against cinema that all those snooty movie reviewers would have you believe. It's a well-made, never-boring film that manages to come up with a happy ending…basically a Ron Howard 😃 Great work by the cinematographer(all those nicely saturated, natural-looking daylight cinematography…what a novel concept!), and, of course, Close and Adams, who turn in #Oscars-attention-worthy work(again), and sadly will be snubbed(again!). But, gotta say, Bennett stole the whole show, even if she was given the least to do out of the quartet. Kid was a much-touted prospect coming out of the "minors" but it seems like she hasn't been given too many high-profile at-bats in the "big" leagues, but has been st...

#Antebellum Good, clean #Westworld-Meets-#TheVillage fun. Oodles of slick craftsmanship by the young directors on *display* (right from the opening moments), and it's just a matter of time before Hollywood hands them the key to a franchise. Massive kudos to the DP & colour-grader, I usually whinge about digital cinematography but Luque does an incredible, saturated job here. Nice assist, too, from the epic-style composers, and the great Zophres's costumes(especially the, uh, middle-section[no spoilers😬!*] ones, Monae pulls them off with smashing confidence). Malone's great, hopefully she's not getting typecast, and Sidibe's a lot of fun, the kid really should be getting more higher profile work. So, yeah, don't think too long and hard about it(the filmmakers certainly don't), just go along with the expertly-crafted crowd(sigh…☹️)-pleasing thriller ride. * Speaking of spoilers, look marketing is a tough gig these ...

#Roadkill (#PBS) To paraphrase the great Tony Reali, Stop me if you've heard this before: a charismatic politician scrambles to deal with his many shady dealings coming out in the open all the while aspiring to higher office. Delicious stuff from Hare, so much interweaving plot threads, so much behind-the-scenes politicking, so much bureaucracy, so much wicked bon mots ("Justice is not a notion, it's a department of state, a badly-run one at that" 🤣😳), so much humanity of the everyday people actually affected by all the wheeling and dealing. So much fun! The cast has that one glorious recognisable name at the center of it all, acting his proverbial a** off, and dude, does Laurie deliver, I mean, give the man *all* the #Emmy's! But, don't forget all those other, less recognisable faces who do such a great job, hopefully they'll start getting higher profile stuff on this side of the proverbial pond: Brady, Bennett-Warner, Torrens…so much ensemble!...