Thighs Wide Shut

that time Michael Jackson visited the set of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade

[TINP]

Ready Player One
Props Culture
Official Site | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 140 min

At the close of last year, I bemoaned that The Post was material not worthy of Spielberg’s talents.  He’s a great history teacher, but I prefer him as a science(-fiction) professor.  Take his Lincoln, his Bore Horse, his Bridge of Thighs (two of which were good movies), and erase his names off of them.  Let someone else direct those movies.  Give me more of his The Adventures of Tintin.  Did you see that movie?  It was STUNNING.  I wanted him to make 239239239 more of them.  He didn’t, but hey, my post-Post prayers have been answered in his big screen version of Ernest Cline‘s Ready Player One book (which I sadly didn’t read, but now maybe should have).  THIS is the kind of movie Spielbergo needs to direct.  This material isn’t beneath him, nor above him – it suits and fits him perfectly like a Power Glove

Spielberg made his mark in the 80s.  Ready Player One is a movie/book love letter to that time, and even to the movies he made and produced (Back To The Future!  Jurassic Park).  And it feels like a Spielberg extension of the leap he took when he finished Kubrick’s A.I..  A.I. was his love letter to Kubrick, and it didn’t feel like a Spielberg movie whatsoever, and that’s part of what makes it such an incredible undertaking and end result.  I mean, look at this!

And with RPO, Spielberg is free of Kubrick’s ghost and essentially makes his own A.I.

Now I’m not going to say that RPO is perfect – it’s not – it does better with the virtual gamer sh!t than it does with the reality real world stuff, and the ending was kind of a meh drop off, but it’s one fcuking hell of a visual ride that must be taken on the big screen.  My jaw was dropping endlessly, and my eyes kept popping out, not believing the unbelievable things it was seeing (spoiler alert – The Shining stuff alone is worth the price of admission).  It’s like a Tintin adventure for the modern and future-modern times.  Most importantly – it just works.  It works, where other films like it should have worked but just didn’t, like Speed Racer, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, Tron: Legacy, Sucker Punch, and even Back To The Future II

And what really worked for me was that it’s a movie that takes place in 2044, but it feels like an 80s movie.  The good guy is our Marty McFly-type (Tye Sheridan, who made his debut with Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, a visual feast as well), the bad guy is straight out of any 80s movie evil corporate boardroom (Ben Mendelsohn, who should be in EVERYTHING), and the ghost hanging over the whole affair (not Kubrick) is a cross between Steve Jobs and Louis Tully (Mark Rylance, nailing the nerdy awkwardness, kinda like he was Mitch from Real Genius).  Not sure how 80s Olivia Cooke‘s character was, but I love her and her eyes, and it had to be said

Spielbergo, I’m ready for more, player.  So why are you bothering with remaking West Side Story?  Are you too close to George Lucas to touch a Star Wars movie?  You wanna remake something?  REMAKE THE PREQUELS!!!

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

Player One is Ready for you today at a theater near jews and white nationalists

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Bridge of Spies
Spies Like Them
Official Website | Trailers & Mo
PG-13 | 141 min

Steven Spielberg knows history!  And how to turn histories into movies!!  And he knows how to direct Tom Hanks!!!  These things all come together (again) in the serviceably good enough Bridge of Spies, the duo’s fourth pairing, and probably the lesser of the four (Saving Private Ryan / Catch Me If You Can and yes, even less so than The Terminal, which is amazingly awesomely horribly cheesy awesome!!)

What do you know of Cold War spies?  Me, I knew the name  Francis Gary Powers (not to be confused with Gary US Bonds) and that he was in a U-2 spyplane, and there was an incident – it got shot down over the USSR, and boy he didn’t know how unlucky he was… to be back in the US, back in the US, back in the USSR!!!  Oh, and that the band U2 got their name from this plane!  Oh, and czech this – Bono’s daughter – Eve Hewson – is in the movie!!!!  It’s like U2 jr meets U-2 senior!!!

What I didn’t know is that we wanted to swap a Soviet spy caught in America (Rudolf Abel by way of chameleon Mark Rylance, who is also the best part of the movie) for FG Powers and that the trade couldn’t be administered directly by the US government, and so someone had to do it.  TOM HANKS!!!!  as James B Donovan!!!  HE DID IT!!!  Spoiler alert.  Ooops, history spoils everything, and to the victors go the spoils!!!  We won the Cold War!!  The trade of spies was like a tie, but Tom Hanks won our hearts!!!

Will you miss out if you skip out on this movie?  Probably not.  A nice 30 minute show on the incident should suffice.  + this is no Munich, which is the kinda history movies Señor Spielbergo should be making, instead of a warm and fuzzy cold war pic, or something wooden and predictable like Lincoln, which I forgot all about until I had write a review of Steven’s latest

Verdictgo: Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Spies Bridges the Cold War knowledge gap at a theater near jews tomorrow

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…