memfree

I try not to do it at all because when I do, it feels like every step is wearing away the fabric of my socks. It feels like I am making holes in them – especially the heel. Do not want.

I watch ‘em so you don’t have to. A bunch of movies about Native Americans in this mix (at end).

• Hanagatami (花筐) (2017): Gorgeous love-letter to director’s lost youth.
• The Naked Civil Servant (1975): John Hurt as Quentin Crisp. Recommended
• An Englishman in New York (2009): Hurt as Crisp again. Recommended
• Native Son (1951): Imperfect drama based on book with author as star on black chauffeur accidentally killing the boss’s daughter.
• St. Louis Blues (1958): 3rd movie with this title, this one is biopic of Will Handy with glorious black cast (Nat King Cole, Eartha Kitt, etc.).
• Catalina Caper (1967): Not worth waiting for Little Richard’s brief appearance.
• Chimes at Midnight (1965) : Orson Wells does Falstaff. Highly recommended
• Save the Green Planet! (지구를 지켜라!)(2003): Guy blames space aliens for losses, kidnaps and tortures CEO he suspects is their earth contact.

Native American movies:

• Bearing Witness, Native American Voices in Hollywood (2025): Documentary on roles Native Americans could get in Hollywood. Good information and worth a watch.
• Ramona (1928): silent, gorgeous - 1/2 native girl adopted by evil step mom is loved by son (badly remade in 1936), driven off by mom, suffers.
• Navajo (1952): Navajo boy rejects the white man’s school in semi-documentary style flick from white POV. Infuriating that white POV is presumed proper, so worth seeing.
• Devil’s Doorway (1950): U.S. veteran Indian tries to use the law to keep whites off his land. Recommended
• The Exiles (1961): Semi-documentary of a night with Native Americans and their struggles. Sad and dull.
• Powwow Highway (1989): Not perfect, but an interesting look at modern issues.
• Cheyenne Autumn (1964): so many stars and yet so tiresome

Lots of spooky movies.

• The Ugly Stepsister (2025) (Den stygge stesøsteren): Like Wicked, but for Cinderella. Dark and unsettling. Recommended.
• Late Night with the Devil (2024): Do tapes from 70s show demons? Skip.
• Dracula (1931): Bela Lugosi. Eminently rewatchable. Highly recommended
• Dracula’s Daughter (1936): Rather good follow-up where she is sent to a psych because they think she’s crazy, not undead. Recommended.
• The Bat (1959): Not great, but good unscrupulous characters (Vincent Price etc.).
• Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) (Matka Joanna od Aniołów): Like The Devils, but not raunchy. Probably source the material. Highly recommended .
  Minor ending spoiler
  

  At one point in film, we hear that the abbey bell calls out to the lost, and in the final scene, we see them toll yet only hear a nun sobbing. chef’s kiss
  

• Cure (1997) (キュア): Like Pontypool, but no zombies. People are commit murders without knowing why. Cops investigate.
• The Hypnotic Eye (1960) - Skippable B-movie.

Not spooky:

• Ganja & Hess (1973): Vampire movie, but much more. There are several cuts, but this was the restored version the director, Bill Gunn, intended. It is atmospheric and relates to: heritage of American black culture from Africa compared to the modern heritage of the Church, predation, class issues, and so on.
• Chang’an (2023) (长安三万里): Animated. Like Pocahontas in that it is supposed to be historical, but for Chinese general Gao Shi at Chang’an, explaining his lifelong friendship with famous poet while the enemy closes in. A bit too long, but it would have felt longer if not so light.
• Papa’s Delicate Condition (1963): Skippable. Jackie Gleason buys a circus.
• Southside 1-1000 (1950): Narration of Feds versus counterfeiter. Noir.
• All Night Long (1962): Othello, but jazz. Bad pacing but sweet tunes. Bits have Dave Brubeck on piano, Charles Mingus on bass, and many others.

I’m retired. I usually watch a movie around brunch-time and then another in the evening – and obviously sometimes I’ll watch a couple more, too.

If someone actually wanted to spend time watching movies, the trick is to watch stuff from other times and places because even the standard boy-meets-girl story has interesting details when set in, say, 1940s Italy versus 1970s Detroit.

I watched a set of Marcello Mastroianni movies. He’s been in over 100 flicks and a lot of them are pretty bad, so I tried to pick from the top rated ones I’d not yet seen.

• The Friend (2024): Many women talk about the dead guy and the live dog. It does a good job of handling conflicting feelings during a time of loss. Recommended.
• Joyland (جوائے لینڈ) (2022): Quiet film of a patriarchal family whose youngest son joins a burlesque show and falls for a strong-willed transgender woman, further complicating family relations, especially with his wife.
• Green Book (2018): A bouncer drives African-American classical pianist Dr. Donald Shirley through the South. Great acting from Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen. Forgive it for being “remarkably conventional and shallow in its treatment of racism” as it is based off real-life stories the driver told his son, who has a writing credit for the movie. Their NYC-Italian POV is valid, if shallow.
• The Big Gay Musical (2009): While working on an off-broadway show, the lives of two men mirror the characters they are playing. Skip it.
• A Petal (1996) (꽃잎): A fictionalized tale of how a girl reacted to the trauma of the 1980 Gwangju massacre. This film spurred the Korean public to demand the truth behind the incident, and their government eventually opened previously classified files on the massacre. I have issues with the film, but felt the need to watch.
• A Taxi Driver (택시운전사) 2017 : Lighter than the previous. Based on a real-life story, the film follows a taxi driver from Seoul who unintentionally becomes involved in the events of the Gwangju Uprising in 1980. It draws on the experiences of German journalist Jürgen Hinzpeter and his interactions with driver Kim Man-seob. All of Man-seob’s details are fictional because no one could find him until his son saw the movie and realized it was about his dad.
• Chamber of Horrors (1966): I guess it is Halloween season. Meh.
• Manichitrathazhu (1993) (മണിച്ചിത്രത്താഴ്): Hailing from a family that follows tradition and superstitions, Thampi objects to his nephew’s idea of moving into a haunted mansion. The warning ignored, things get spooky. Recommended.
• I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997): skip.
• Stalker (1979) (Сталкер): THIS IS STILL THE BEST MOVIE! Filled with despair.

Mastroianni movies:

• The Organizer (1963) (I compagni): Former teacher-turned-unionist (Mastroianni) tries to organize workers laboring with inhuman conditions at a textile factory. Tense and true. Highly Recommended.
• Big Deal on Madonna Street (1958) (I soliti ignoti): fun heist flick
• Ginger and Fred (1986): Old dance partners rejoin for TV special and comment on aging, societal change, the entertainment industry and more.
• Le Notti Bianche (1957) (White Nights): A middle-aged man meets a young woman who is waiting on for her lover’s return after a year apart. Will he sway her? Will the lover return? Highly Recommended.
• 8½ (1963) : Not my favorite Fellini, but others rate it highly.
• Divorce Italian Style (1961) (Divorzio all’italiana) : Comedy about a husband who falls for sexy niece, but since Catholics can’t divorce, the only option is murder.

Thank you! I get that you liked all 6, but I also appreciate having a way to narrow down which to make sure to fit in.

I love watching movies based off a unifying element (actor/director/theme/etc.). I’ve seen a couple films he was in, but not the ones you mention. Of those 6, could you recommend two worth watching (possibly for historical interest or acting even if the movie isn’t great) and two to skip?

• Killers of the Flower Moon (2023): Native Americans, especially the women, get murdered, but the movie is about white guys stealing native wealth.
• The Substance (2024): Y’all had me hoping there’d be more to this than body horror. It isn’t allegory, it’s cartoons. See Sunset Boulevard instead.
• Revenge (2018): Sexy chick has to fight. Sexy blood & gore. Not empowering.
• Poetry (시) (2010): Director Lee Chang-dong. Working grandma is sliding into dementia when grandson in her care does bad. She joins a poetry class as she tries to resolve issues while she still can. Highly Recommended.
• Peppermint Candy (박하사탕) (2000): Director Lee Chang-dong moves us backwards through a man’s life to see how he evolved, going back through and before the Gwangju Uprising of 1980. Highly Recommended.
• To Live (活着) Huo zhe (1994): Director Yimou Zhang tracks married couple and the art of their shadow puppets through revolutionary times from landowner to peasantry and beyond. Recommended.

I also went on a Jacques Tourneur binge because Cat People was airing on TV and I love Out of the Past and Berlin Express, so I watched a bunch of his early stuff. They are generally well paced, well shot, and easy to watch without needing much search for hidden meanings. Before I list what I watched of his, here’s a bit on the man:

Tourneur began work as an editor and assistant director. He made his debut as a director on the French film Tout ça ne vaut pas l’amour [fr] in 1931. In 1934, Tourneur went to Hollywood, where MGM Studios put him under contract.

He was hired to run the second unit for David O. Selznick’s A Tale of Two Cities (1935), where he first met Val Lewton. In 1942, when Lewton was named to head the new horror unit at RKO, he asked Tourneur to be his first director. The result was the highly artistic (and commercially successful) Cat People (1942). Tourneur went on to direct masterpieces in many different genres, all showing a great command of mood and atmosphere.

• Cat People (1942): First solo U.S. film by director Jacques Tourneur. Serbian émigré thinks a curse will turn her into a cat if she’s intimate/impure.
• The Leopard Man (1943): Tourneur was told to make a sequel. Escaped leopard blamed for deaths, but is it?
• Curse of the Cat People (1944): NOT Tourneur, but Gunther von Fritsch takes most the original Cat People cast and does an actual sequel. Lovely.
• Days of Glory (1944): Tourney has Gregory Peck as lead Russian in guerrilla cell fighting Nazis.
• Experiment Perilous (1944): (Tourneur) Mixed up bags give a man insight into a family’s dysfunction as he falls for the wife.
• Easy Living (1949) : Doctors tell football star to ease up or die. His wife wants fame, so what to do? (Trigger warning: domestic violence – and it is excused).
• Stars in My Crown (1950): Nostalgic look at a small town and its pastor from the POV of the orphan who loves him.
• Great Day in the Morning (1956): Southern drifter wins Denver hotel in card game at start of Civil War. He’d rather make money than pick sides, and the women love him. This time the orphan is the fault of the lead. Worst of the Tourneur set.

This was a heavy Brit week for me with a few from India thrown in.

• Wicked (2024): Half of a musical needing its ‘part 2’.
• The Life of Chuck (2024): Thanks to y’a’ll for recommending this. Poignant.
• Sita Sings the Blues (2008): Animated. Indian tale of Sita, wife to Ramayana, as told by modern people trying to remember the details and interspersed with the 1920s Annette Hanshaw singing.
• Good Bye, Lenin! (2003): German. East German mom wakes from coma after Berlin wall falls, so son pretends they’re still divided.
• Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (1970) Zhi qu wei hu shan (智取威虎山): Recommended for historical reasons. Details here.
• Pyaasa (1957) प्यासा (aka Thirst): Indian. Highly Recommended. Director Guru Dutt also stars in his own most-celebrated film (see also Paper Flowers).
• Don (1978) डॉन : Bollywood singing/dancing crime thriller with Pauper/Prince motif except with a crime lord instead of a prince. Pretty good for what it is.
• He Ran All the Way (1951): beautifully shot, tense, but so much melodrama.
• Any Wednesday (1966): Flick about cheating exec tries for funny but is cringe.
• Crooks and Coronets (1969) aka Sophie’s Place: Telly Savalas is a crook who likes the Brits he’s supposed to rob. Okay, but skippable.
• Inside Out (1975): Skippable Comedy/Thriller where crooks try to steal Nazi gold. Telly Savalas, Robert Culp, James Mason, and so on. Yawn.
• From Beyond the Grave (1974): Brit ghost-y shorts tied together by Peter Cushing’s curio shop. Good for its (now-dated) type.
• Die! Die! My Darling! (1965): Brit thriller/camp fave. Tallulah Bankhead is a strict religious crone grieving her dead son and so she takes his once-fiancee captive.
• When The Wind Blows (1986): Animated. Elderly British couple chat and prepare their cottage as nuclear war begins. Well done. Mildly recommended.

3 kids and stressed out mom.

Answer: Law enforcement itself doesn’t have anything in place, but they call people who care.

Baby monkeys are hard, but:

Fischer, contact list at the ready, quickly found the babies a temporary placement at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, which had staff and facilities to do both the quarantine and the baby care. “They were immediately able to jump into action, call that agent back and start communicating,” says Fischer. The park staff even made the six-hour round-trip drive to pick up and triage the babies. “They were rock stars.”

Yay zoo!

For others. If I’m staying home, I dress like I’m homeless in whatever grungy dirty things that already need washing. If I’m going out, my hair is combed, my threads are fresh and I’m not getting denied entrance to the restaurant. The movie Blast from the Past was pretty stupid, but it did teach me (remind me?) that you dress nice as a courtesy to your friends.

They want options. They don’t want to leave now , but maybe later. Maybe when you pull out the vacuum cleaner or when the TV gets too loud. Mostly, it’s nice to have another escape route.

Alone at night off blu-ray with 5.1 sound (I only have 6 speakers, not 8) and a big screen. The disc appears to be a legitimate import but who knows? I’d link you to the store, but its page now says they’re sold out.

Nope, the dumbest people I know have no idea how to find plain ChatGPT. They can get to Gemni, but can only imagine asking it questions.

Thank you for the spoiler tag. I’m not reading that part because now I have to watch the film.

It was a scattered week, but I actually saw a current movie! I’ve mostly stopped doing that because I’d rather wait for stuff to stream.

• One Battle After Another (2025): recommended. Illuminati-esque and military battle revolutionaries and immigrant activists. Despite being a salacious cash-grab, the story is more interesting and realistic than most – especially compared to super heroes. Everyone is an over the top caricature but that works for what is essentially an action movie.
• Megalopolis (2024): recommended with caveats. Must-see for visual beauty. The good part of this mess is Coppola showing us what it feels like to be a director. The bad part is that by making Our Hero an architect designing a Utopia for the ungrateful masses, it rings of Fountainhead and gives credit to the falsehood that rich geniuses know better than the people under their rule.
  Digression
  

  At least the film points out that rich and connected charismatic leaders who DO associate with the common man should be eyed with suspicion, but one could interpret that to mean ‘trust the rich unless they appeal to the poors’, which is an even worse message than ‘trust the rich’. It would have felt less cringey if instead of all the Roman Empire, the stakes were a Hospital or the studio of a marble sculptor where one dictator had to order others about, but he was irrelevant to most people until his shining creation was made – with questions about his methods and supporters getting a chance to say, ‘He struggled to afford supplies and cast out those who called him a fool. Yes, he worked his supporters like dogs, but all he asked was that he have the chance to complete his work without interference from the outside."
  

• Save the Children (1973): So much good source material of concert footage but they clipped the songs, which diluted the quality. Still good, and there’s nice oration by Rev. Jesse Jackson in there.
• Once Were Brothers (2019) - Doc about the Band and getting booed for being Dylan’s electric band (rather than acoustic), made their own way, found heroin, then played with Dylan again in addition to playing as themselves.
• Happy as Lazzaro (2018): recommended. Naïve and honest Lazzaro makes the people around him better, but he can’t cure the world.
• Nocturna (2007) - fanciful imagery and charming characters make for a light little film despite a vacuous plot with both kind and questionable messages.
• Skin Game (1971): James Garner scams slave owners by repeatedly selling Louis Gossett Jr. then helping him escape. It’s better than I expected.
• The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) Die Mörder sind unter uns – Germany! This was the first film made & exhibited in West Germany after WWII. Director Staudte, who stayed through the war, said the film is about his shame of being used for/by Hitler. This initiated the sub-genre ‘trümmerfilme’ (rubble films).
  Digression
  

  It starts with bold text: Berlin 1945 DER STADT HAT KAPITULIERT… (ellipsis included) translated, this is ‘The city has capitulated…’, but seeing it spelled out and then immediately followed by the camera showing a grave amid rubble, reminds one of the nearness of ‘kapit-’ to ‘’kaputt” (broken/destroyed) – and if one has ever heard the Ton Steine Scherben song of the same name, one may imagine the refrain overlaying the film, Macht kaputt, was euch kaputt macht (destroy that which destroys you). Surely Rossellini knew this film before he made Germany, Year Zero, and there’s much to compare between them; the choice of endings, in particular, because they each take something of a cop-out as was need for the times. TOTAL SPOILER FOLLOWS: Because the Allies wanted to tamp down any vigilantism and impose rule of law, the ending here doesn’t give us the satisfaction of a justifiable homicide and the repercussions of such. Instead, there’s an implied future that resolves in more proper justice maybe being done in the future. Rossellini used a different cop out.
  

• Berlin Express (1948): not first film, but first Hollywood film of post-war Germany (the 2nd was Wilder’s Foreign Affair). Frankfort and Berlin are ruined backdrops to quite a thriller with lots of Pro-UN type politics.
• One Last Fling (1949) : missable romance
• Tarzan the Ape Man (1932): Animals WERE harmed in the making of this film. This is worth watching for a view into a past time, but there’s lots of imperialist whiteness to complain about. Filmed in California with some footage from the 1931 movie Trader Horn. The not-pygmy-dwarves are white people in black face.
• Tarzan and His Mate (1934): Similar, but this has a lovely scene of swimming where Tarzan and Jane slip beautifully through the deeps.
• Tarzan Escapes (1936): More of the same, but the first two were pre-code (technically in place for the 2nd, but not adhered to for that pic) and by ’36 they couldn’t show so much sexy skin so they had to have more plot.

Years ago a friend was in a horrible car wreck and came out mostly paralyzed and with no memory of the last few years. She didn’t remember her college friends and clung to her newly found relgious support group. She was never religious before. Her personality was completely different in numerous ways. She was effectively a different person and we no longer had anything in common. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but I mourned the loss of a friend.

I think you’re asking for someone to say a particular thing so I take the bait and say: The Leftovers.