#ian and rufus

[jimhowickfan1]

[cantsayidont]

Some movies, considered chronologically:

THE FLAMINGO KID (1984): Nostalgia-burdened period piece, set in 1963, about working-class kid Jeffrey (Matt Dillon), who gets a summer job parking cars at an exclusive beach club called El Flamingo, starts dating a rich girl (Carole R. Davis), and becomes fascinated by her father (Richard Crenna), a self-made sports car dealer and local card sharp who thinks college is sucker's game. This alienates Jeffrey's own father (Hector Elizondo), a stalwart plumber who doesn't want to see Jeffrey squander his chances of bettering himself. The story is thus a sort of YA prototype of Oliver Stone's later WALL STREET �� a Reagan-era morality play about a young man caught between two father figures, one representing the Lure of Easy Money and the other a paragon of Honest Hard Work — badly undermined by its absurdly idealized longing for the alleged innocence of the Kennedy era (underlined by an obnoxious oldies soundtrack). It offers a meaty role for Crenna, but as a drama, it has less substance than FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF. Davis's character is such a nonentity that you keep forgetting she's there, and the way she ends up functioning as a proxy for Jeffrey's obsession with her dad is awkward. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Nope. VERDICT: A simple-minded story blinded by its rose-colored glasses.

THE JOY LUCK CLUB (1993): Sudsy but affecting episodic adaptation of Amy Tan's novel about four middle-aged Chinese women and their strained relationships with their Chinese-American daughters, starring Ming-Na Wen and nearly every other Chinese actress working in the U.S. at the time. The way the script segues between the characters' respective stories is clunky, and it often teeters on the brink of schmaltz, but there are moments of real dramatic power amongst the more superficial tearjerker moments, and you'd have to have a stonier heart than I to not sob at the bittersweet ending. Strong acting helps, with Tsai Chin particularly good as Auntie Lindo. CONTAINS LESBIANS? It seems like it should, but alas. VERDICT: Heavy-handed at times, but undeniably moving.

COLD COMFORT FARM (1996): Before she became an action star, Kate Beckinsale starred in this hilarious adaptation of Stella Gibbons' 1932 satiric novel about glib orphan Flora Poste, who makes it her project to fix all the problems of the titular farm and its eccentric denizens — distant cousins who feel obligated to Flora (whom they will only address as "Robert Poste's child") because of some unspecified wrong they once did her late father. Among the inmates of Cold Comfort are Cousin Judith (Eileen Atkins), a hysterically morose creature straight out of a gothic novel; Cousin Amos (Ian McKellen), a fire-and-brimstone preacher who warns his brethren, "There'll be no butter in Hell!"; Amos and Judith's oversexed son Seth (Rufus Sewell), a local stud who dreams of being in the talkies; and of course Aunt Ada Doom (Sheila Burrell), who rules the family with an iron fist and won't let anyone forget that she once saw something nasty in the woodshed. A delightfully silly spoof of a particular category of once-popular English literature, as the farm's assorted grim melodramas prove no match for the implacable (if somewhat snobbish) modern sensibilities of its plucky heroine. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Nope. VERDICT: Great fun throughout, although Stephen Fry irritates as a boorish "Laurentian person" who keeps hitting on Flora despite her obvious disinterest.

BREAKDOWN (1997): Competent but underwhelming Jonathan Mostow thriller starring Kurt Russell and Kathleen Quinlan as Jeff and Amy Taylor, a couple of Yuppies whose fancy Jeep breaks down on the highway on a trip from Massachusetts to California. A passing trucker (J.T. Walsh) gives Amy a ride into the nearest town to find them a tow truck, but when Jeff gets their Jeep running again and follows her into town, he finds that Amy has disappeared, and no one, including the trucker, will admit to having seen her. It has a great premise, and Russell is credible enough in the lead, but it's pretty ordinary, and, once you know what's going on (which is revealed a little over a half-hour in), pretty superficial — there's no psychological depth, and I kept waiting for some other story twist that never came. CONTAINS LESBIANS? It barely contains women (Amy is absent for 80 percent of the running time). VERDICT: Not bad, but nothing special, and you'll forget it 10 minutes after it ends.

MY TWO HUSBANDS (2024): Okay Lifetime thriller about a young woman named Eliza (Isabelle Almoyan), still reeling from the recent murder of her mother (Joanie Geiger), who becomes deeply suspicious of her father's young new wife, a flight attendant named Brooke (Kabby Borders) who's no older than Eliza — and, as the title alludes, is secretly married to another man (Britton Webb, who looks like a lesser Baldwin brother) and up to no good. Despite the cheesy title (which is really also a spoiler) and awkward marketing (which misleadingly suggests a comedy-drama with Brooke rather than Eliza as the main character), it has a surprisingly decent, reasonably credible script, hamstrung by very weak performances. The story is still interesting enough to make it a not-bad little thriller, although it would have been better with a stronger cast and less somnabulistic direction. CONTAINS LESBIANS: It sometimes seems like Eliza's friend Star (Kristen Grace Gonzalez) might be her girlfriend, but the script is noncommittal on this point. VERDICT: A B+ script burdened with D+ acting and C- direction.

[sparklingmusicofstars]

My next life as a villainess all routes lead to doom : the Amo cafe by the cute chibis

So cute !!!!!!

[radioprinz]

Hey guys I'm doing gifs by request. So if you would like me to do some particular gif about the actors, characters or shows I tagged here just let me know and I'll do my best.

[ginge1962]

Rufus Dayglo tribute for the late Ian Gibson from the rear of a recent 2000AD Prog.

[brokehorrorfan]

Scream Factory has revealed the specs for its Bless the Child Blu-ray, which releases on April 25 via Scream Factory. The 2000 supernatural thriller is directed by Chuck Russell (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, The Blob, The Mask).

Ellen Green & Clifford Green (The Seventh Sign) and Thomas Rickman (Coal Miner’s Daughter) wrote the script, based on the 1993 novel by Cathy Cash Spellman. Kim Basinger stars with Jimmy Smits, Rufus Sewell, Ian Holm, Angela Bettis, and Christina Ricci.

Bless the Child is presented in high definition from an existing transfer with 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by director Chuck Russell and visual effects supervisor Joel Hynek

Bless the Child – A Look Inside with Cast and Crew Interviews

Kim Basinger stars as Maggie O’Connor, a single woman whose life revolves around her career – until the surprise appearance of her sister Jenna (Angela Bettis) and Jenna’s newborn baby, Cody. When Jenna suddenly disappears, Maggie is left to raise Cody by herself. But years later, when Jenna returns with a mysterious cult leader (Rufus Sewell), Maggie discovers that the child possesses extraordinary powers... powers that the forces of evil have waited centuries to control.

Pre-order Bless the Child.

[tparadox]

Movies of my Yesterdays: Dark City

Dark City. Mystery Clock Cinema 1998.

[cinemacentral666]

Dark City (1998)

Movie #1,049 • WATCHLIST WEDNESDAYS

Having recently review Knowing for my Nicolas Cage series, I was weary heading into this Alex Proyas joint. But I am pleased to report that this is totally worth a watch and earns its status as a cult classic. For a movie called Dark City, let this be a lesson for contemporary filmmakers in how to LIGHT a film, if nothing else.

The plot is somewhat convoluted (but never that confusing). If you can hang tight through the opening act, which is just an onslaught of information, then you'll be fine. Because it's in that onslaught — some of the most creative and interesting visual storytelling I've come across — where the rewards lie.

SCORE: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[downthetubes]

Rebellion Releases: Best of 2000AD rounds off in June, new 2000AD continues new Judge Dredd epic

This week's 2000AD sees the finales of both "The Devil’s Railroad" and "Feral & Foe", and includes a tribute by Karl Stock to "Nikolai Dante" and "The Order" artist John M. Burns

[spryfilm]

Blu-ray review: “The Pillars of the Earth” (2010)

“The Pillars of the Earth” (2010) Drama Eight Episodes Written by: John Pielmeier based on the book by Ken Follett Directed by: Sergio Mimica-Gezzan Featuring: Ian McShane, Rufus Sewell, Matthew Macfayden, Eddie Redmayne, Hayley Atwell and Sarah Parish Lord Stephen: “There’s Gloucester.” Archbishop: “The king’s bastard? He will never inherit.” Lord Stephen: “There’s the king’s legitimate…

[abs0luteb4stard]

W A T C H I N G

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Dark City (1998)

Dark City (1998)

Rated R for violent images and some sexuality

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2023/04/review-dark-city-1998.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

Dark City is a film that failed at the box office in its time and, despite a critical reevaluation as one of the hidden science fiction gems of the '90s, still gets overlooked quite often nowadays, for one simple reason: despite its mind-bending plot and creative visual design homaging classic '40s/'50s film noir, it had the misfortune of coming out just a year before The Matrix, a sci-fi masterpiece with very similar themes about what we think of as reality being just an illusion designed to control us. This film was a much more cerebral thriller whose effects shots, while no less visually impressive, were a lot less punchy and action-packed, instead feeling like if the first half-hour of The Matrix got stretched to feature length, given a retro gloss, and focused mainly on Keanu Reeves slowly peeling away the layers of his world, saving the big action sequence for the very end. It's a moody, foreboding film that built up to a great reveal while slowly imbuing the viewer with a paranoid suspicion that their own world may not be "right", and while the finale wrapped things up a bit too neatly and conventionally for my tastes with a rather silly-looking confrontation, the meat of the film was still a slick and highly effective tale that I won't forget anytime soon -- ironic, given what the villains here like to do to people.

The film takes place in an unnamed city with vaguely mid-20th-century technology, aesthetics, and feel, specifically the kind lifted out of a Raymond Chandler novel, a place where the streets are always cloaked in shadows even during what feels like it should be the daytime -- and hey, while you may have childhood memories of sunny days, when's the last time you saw the sun, anyway? We start with a man who wakes up in a hotel room with no memory, only figuring out that his name is John Murdoch from the ID in his wallet, surrounded by the corpses of dead prostitutes that he probably killed, which is not a situation that most of us would want to stick around for so they can calmly explain everything to the police. On the run from the law and searching for both Emma, a cabaret singer who he finds out was his wife, and Dr. Daniel Schreber, who he finds out used to be his psychiatrist, John gets pulled into a twisted web as he's pursued by the Strangers, mysterious, inhumanly pale-skinned men in hats and trenchcoats who he soon finds aren't entirely human, and who seem to control the city from the shadows and regard him as a threat to their plans. Meanwhile, Inspector Frank Bumstead sets out hot on the tail of the suspected murderer, not knowing exactly what he's getting himself into.

I can't really go into much more detail about the plot. Like a lot of old-fashioned mysteries, this is a movie where part of the fun is piecing the puzzle together yourself and then the film revealing how close you came to the truth, albeit one that puts a sci-fi twist on the usual noir story. I can, however, speak to the production values and writer/director Alex Proyas' sense of style, and on that front, I was at once pulled into the film's world and wondering what awful truths lay outside it. The city is the kind of seedy place you'd set a hardboiled detective story, exaggerated to the point where it feels like a warped parody thereof and creating an unsettling feel that this place should not be. Some of the supporting cast members having spotty American accents (this was shot in Australia), something I'd normally ding a film for, only lent to the uncanny valley feel of the city, as did countless other little quirks that made the place feel like somebody trying to draw a picture of a mid-century East Coast metropolis without any reference points as to what that would look like beyond old movies. And that's before you get to the Strangers who are after John, who wear conspicuous trenchcoats and have names like "Mr. Book", "Mr. Hand", and "Mr. Sleep" that sound like somebody tried to come up with ordinary-sounding "John Smith" names to blend in and... didn't pull it off, on top of their general weirdness and stilted manner of speaking calling to mind the G-Man from Half-Life. While it takes a while to get to the "why" of the titular dark city, the film lets you know rather quickly that this is not a normal city, and even before we get to the big special effects shots, Proyas did a great job right off the bat heightening its artifice and pale imitation of humanity. More than anything, it felt like I was watching the darkest possible film adaptation of The Sims, predating the first game by a couple of years but otherwise, without spoiling anything, taking some of the series' central concepts and playing them for paranoid horror.

The cast also did great in making this world feel just the right mix of real and artificial. Rufus Sewell as John, Jennifer Connelly as Emma, and William Hurt as Bumstead all felt like they could've been lifted out of a real 1940s film noir, while Kiefer Sutherland played Schreber as a character wholly unlike the take-charge heroes he's been coded as since 24, a dweebish doctor who serves as the main characters' bridge between the world they know and what's really going on through his exposition. The special effects were not the focus, but they were astonishing to watch for a fairly low-budgeted '90s film, especially a key sequence where we witness the city's buildings shifting around as the Strangers' true power over the city is made clear. Only at the very end did it feel like Proyas ran out of ideas, as John's final confrontation with the Strangers after unlocking his true power ended with them shooting beams of light at each other with their minds while buildings crumbled around them. It all felt pretty goofy, like they needed to find a way to wrap this up and have the hero prevail, even though if I was writing this, there are some seriously dark directions I could've taken the story. The ending, I feel, underlines the big reason why The Matrix was the big late '90s sci-fi movie about reality being a lie that everybody remembers; when it did similar battles between the good guys and bad guys, they came in the form of epic shootouts and martial arts sequences straight out of Hong Kong.

The Bottom Line

Dark City is a film that doesn't get talked up nearly enough, even if I can't really say much more in a non-spoiler review. Ending aside, it makes a great companion to The Matrix as a more cerebral and noir-tinged take on very similar concepts, one that will, at the very least, make it very difficult for you to play The Sims the same way again. A big thank you to Popcorn Frights for screening it last week. Check it out.

[cricketchirp]

Lake Living magazine, Fall/Winter 2023

It takes us several months to toss ideas around, set up and conduct interviews, and then let the writing process play out. The latter is among my favorite activities because it takes work to figure out how to present the topic and because people are passionate about their subject and share a lot more in an interview than we need, as writers we have to get to the gist of it and then hone, and…

[purpleyearning]

Patricia’s ability to attract the attention of older men with bad decisions… they saw an easy victim. If this was Pretty Little Liars, she would’ve married Jason or Rufus.

[radioprinz]

The eyes of my fave actors 😍 Can you tell who is who? 👀

[adamwatchesmovies]

Bless the Child (2000)

While I didn't enjoy this film, that doesn't mean you won't. No matter what I say, the people involved in this project did it: they actually made a movie. That's something to be applauded. With that established...

Although Bless the Child initially appears to be yet another one of those “bad seed” Omen knock-offs, it’s trying something different. The results are often unintentionally silly, the film is never even remotely frightening and large chunks of it are badly written but at least it gets some points for originality.

Maggie O’Connor (Kim Basinger) adopts her newborn niece, Cody (Holliston Coleman) after she is abandoned by her mother (Angela Battis). At six, Cody displays severe autism and also the miraculous ability to heal others with a touch. Meanwhile, a cult has begun kidnapping and killing children in ritual murders. When former priest-turned-FBI agent John Travis (Jimmy Smits) realizes all the victims share a birthday with Cody, he believes the girl is in danger.

I tried to think of a way this story could work. Maybe if we stripped away all of the supernatural stuff and Maggie was an ultra-religious woman whose beliefs verged on the obsessive, then this story might work. Although he isn’t introduced immediately, the film’s villain is a former celebrity turned religious guru and addiction therapist, Eric (Rufus Sewell). He shows up out of nowhere one day with Cody’s mother as his new wife, demanding custody of the kid. If this was a smart movie, his malice would be subtle or up for interpretation. The conflict might come from Maggie desperately trying to convince everyone that her “daughter” is in danger. I know, I know. At this point, we’re watching a completely different movie. I tried. The fact is, this plot just doesn’t work. At all.

Let’s begin with the villain, Eric. He’s a hardcore Satanist whose followers (basically thinly-veiled stand-ins for Scientologists) have been going around, looking for a child born on a specific date in one of the biggest cities in the world. They've butchered five kids and still, nothing. Their mission? Convince Cody that God is no good and that she should join their club instead. If they do it before “the Black Easter”… something bad will happen. The problem with this scenario is that we have a grown man hamming it up like there’s no tomorrow trying to play head games with a six-year-old who can barely string together proper sentences… and failing. I won’t say what the film’s ending is like (this is, in theory, a horror movie so it could go either way) but seeing him fumble even one attempt to turn Cody makes him seem completely ineffective. You can’t take any of this story seriously.

Bless the Child is packed full of spooky shots of gargoyles leering at our heroine and moments that should petrify you in terror but instead make you wonder what dimension this story is set in. This is the kind of movie where someone will get decapitated and their severed head will get placed back on the body just so their friend can touch gasp in horror as the noggin tumbles to the ground at the exact right time. The cult is already looking pretty sad considering when you realize they put off finding the child and are now running out of time - they have less than a week before the big day - but their methods of silencing the heroes aren’t just ineffective, they’re so poorly thought-out no one would attempt them.

As soon as we meet FBI agent Travis, it should become obvious to everyone watching that this is a stinker. If you hold onto hope, just wait until the demonic visions and instances of divine intervention. Director Chuck Russell has never heard the word “subtle”. Or maybe it just doesn’t exist in German. I mean, I know Eric is the leader of a cult that kidnaps children so they can chop them into pieces and use their blood to write strange symbols on walls but he’s so obviously evil it’s hard to believe a body of evidence has to be built against him. With his wild-looking eyes and slimy demeanor, it would take exactly zero seconds for any jury to return with a guilty verdict - regardless of what crime he’d be accused of.

I obtained Bless the Child as part of a two-pack with Jade, a lame 1995 sex thriller that may be the better of the two, which is saying something. A horror film doesn’t have to generate screams to be good but it doesn't hurt. Bless the Child never even approaches the realm of terror; it’s only good for some unintentional laughs and even then, not many. (On DVD, April 14, 2020)