Sean’s movie thoughts

The original Bad News Bears from 1976 holds up. I have not seen this in years and I re-watched it because I was thinking of watching the 2005 remake and wanted to be able to compare it with the original.  Walter Mathau starts as a former minor league baseball player, Buttermaker, who becomes the manager of a little baseball team. This is a team of misfits and the team was added to the league after a lawsuit and there are comments about how those type of lawsuits will ruin America. Buttermaker drinks too much.  Things don’t start well for the team. The first game ends in a forfeit. Buttermaker recruits a female pitcher named Amanda (a young Tatum O’Neil) and a delinquent to the team. The team starts to play better but competition brings out the worse in Buttermaker and the manager of another team. This is good. It was fun to see the team get better. Maybe a few of the players aren’t given a lot of  screen time, you get a sense of the team. The movie does not romanticize baseball and eve

 The new rumor on the James Bond movie No Time to Die is that MGM wanted $600,000,000 to sell the movie to a streaming service. No streaming service could make money off of that deal unless they got a massive amount of new subscribers. MGM says they don't comment on rumors. Now there is a rumor that the producers of the film killed the deal.  I am not sure why the producers would have the power to do that (the studio spent the money to make the film). The rumor is that the producers felt the reputation of the franchise would suffer if the movie did not play in theaters. There were also some licensing and distribution deals that complicated "selling" the film to a streaming service. I guess this is slightly more fun to talk about than what movie is being pushed back into 2021 this week.

Extraction is not bad. (Yes, I came to this movie a little late.) This is a Netflix thriller with Chris Hemsworth as a mercenary hired to rescue a kidnaped boy. Things are more complicated then they first appear. I liked this and might want to watch it again.  I had Total Recall, the original, on order for a 4K blu-ray but then I saw the film was on Netflix. I watched a little and I remembered it being a lot better. I stopped watching the film and then I canceled the pre-order.    Three movies I re-watched and discovered I did not like as much as I once did Total Recall (original) Gremlins 2 the New Batch Robocop (original) It was not like I hated any of the above movies on re-watch but I think I will never re-watch any of them. 

 There is a rumor that streaming services (Apple Plus and Netflix) are trying to get the new James Bond movie. I think internet film critic and former podcaster Drew McWeeny broke that news first.(I miss the podcast Eighties Allover that he and Scott Weinberg did together.) MGM has said the film is not for sale and they plan for it to go to theaters.  We will see what happens. A James Bond movie skipping theaters, even if only in North America, would be odd.  The other recent James Bond rumor is that the next James Bond has not been picked yet. There was a report that Tom Hardy would be the next James Bond. So one of these rumors/reports has to be wrong. I wonder which one is wrong. 

I have seen American Pie Presents Girls Rules. It really exists, which no longer surprises me. It is on Netflix and it is not terrible. Some jokes don’t work (possibly more than do work) but the actors are better than this movie probably deserves.  It seems hard to believe that one of the actors is named Lizzie Broadway. That seems too corny to be her real name. She is pretty good. She plays Stefanie Stifler (where Stefanie falls on Stifler family tree is unclear). (So far, I have not seen a Stifler family tree but I assume someone made one.) In the original American Pie, the guys were not competing for a girl. They were all unhappy with their love lives for various reasons and they wanted to change things. The girls in this one are in a similar situation.  In this one the girls are competing over a guy before other love interests emerge. Maybe it would have been nice for the girls not to compete over a guy. Just once in a movie if a character says “don’t worry we won’t see him (or her

I re-watched this film last weekend. I am not sure why, I just put it on.  It is good. The young cast was good (and they would get better as the series continued) and the movie is a lot of fun. I liked the first act before Harry gets to Hogwarts a lot. The first meeting of Harry and Ron was fun and their first meeting with Hermione was fun too. It takes a while for the plot to develop or to kick in. I liked that and it was fun to see the school and meet some of the teachers. I think this movie needed a bit more time to set the stage or introduce its world than most other movies. The filmmakers didn’t want us to like Draco Malloy but maybe that was true in the book too.  Draco did not have a huge role in this film but he is at least a secondary villain.  I think this is as good a first film in a franchise as any from the last twenty years. 

 Scott Adkins and Mario Van Peebles stars in this thriller. Adkins plays a former British special agent forced by a Mexican drug lord to kill his enemies. I had not seen Van Peoples in a movie in a long time, so it was nice to see him again.  He was born in Mexico, which I either forgot or did not know. I guess he is not the least likely actor to be cast as a Mexican drug lord. This is not top tier Adkins but it is enjoyable. It is under ninety minutes. I did like the sequence when he had his hands tied behind his back and had to fight without his hands. I think this film needed a top notch henchman for an epic fight scene. I liked seeing Van Peebles again. I think it might be time to re-watch some of his films. This is maybe a bit better than Legacy of Lies but not as good as the Debt Collector or Debt Collectors. Legacy of Lies is not bad though

The Batman:Death in the Family Blu-ray is interactive. You make a choice and then the movie continues and then you make another choice. It is not bad for a change. I am not sure if I would like to see this done too often but maybe it might be nice to have another interactive movie from DC sometime. It was interesting. This is a retelling of the Death in the Family storyline from the 1980s, the infamous story where Jason Todd, the second Robin died. (There are several differences between this and the original story.) It would make an interesting double bill with Under the Red Hood animated movie.  Bruce Greenwood returns as the voice of Batman.  This movie also features a short movie with the Phantom Stranger. I liked that one a lot. Death, Adam Strange, and Sgt.Rock also have short movies and I liked them all. I might have liked the Phantom Stranger one the most.   

Michael Jai White stars as ex-CIA named Payne agent in this thriller. His brother is killed and Payne goes to find out why. Randy Couture stars as the CIA station chief. It has been a while since I've seen Couture in a film, so I was surprised how good he was. Luke Goss co-stars as another CIA agent. This is decent. The fight scenes were good and I think there were enough of them. The last fight is the best, which I guess is the right thing for the movie. Michael Jai White is good. He has his own one-liner that he uses a few different times.  The villain is not that much of a surprise. The movie does not treat it like a huge surprise though.

 Antonio Banderas stars as a lawyer whose family is killed in this thriller. He missed a school talent show because of his work but they were killed after the talent show. He leaves his law firm and searches for who killed them. He starts to train himself in a martial art and takes a vow of silence. He becomes inspired by a book by Marcus Aurelius.  I liked it. I liked the training sequences and I liked the opening sequence. It is not great and I guess I should have figured out who the killer was earlier by applying one of Roger Ebert's rules. I think the inspiration from the book could have come across as silly or pretentious but I bought it. Robert Forster has one scene as a grieving father in law. It was nice to see him.    This is another movie that features an underground/illegal fight arena. I have seen a lot of these over the years. Has there ever been a real life example of this?  This could be worth seeing again.