Ma - 2019

 This was not bad but also… not what I expected. It was more a psychological drama than a horror movie. There are a couple of horror scenes, nothing too much, and a little bit of thriller, just a little bit. The rest was character study, childhood trauma, and idiot teenage behaviour.

It’s so sad that this world keeps teaching kids that to be “an adult” they need to drink alcohol and have sex. Why all this rush to be adults, kids? This is your only chance to be a kid!

So, this film here is the story of a woman who could never forget the horrible humiliation of her high school, when Ben invited her to the janitor’s closet  and Mercedes told her how to suck him, and so she did it, in the dark, without even saying much at all I guess, or she would have noticed the voice ,because when it was over and they got out, she found out it was another boy in there with her, while Ben was now outside with the whole school laughing at her. Horrible, really. They were all cruel, but girl… I know very well everyone wants to fit in and have friends, but is it really worth it if you have to change yourself, or do whatever they tell you? Is that friendship? No. Often teenagers kid themselves into saying that they’re doing what they want, trying out new things… but if you never had any interest in drinking or smoking and only start  doing it because they convince you, isn’t that changing who you are to please others? 

Open your eyes, because adults spent their lives regretting that they’re not kids anymore, when yes they had someone telling them when to be home and had homework to do and could not drive (well, here they can’t, in the US they can), but they also had no responsibilities, had someone else take care of their laundry, cook their meals and bring money home… 

Back to the plot, Erica comes back to her hometown after her divorce with a 16 year old daughter, Maggie. At school she’s approached by Haley and invited in her group, so Maggie finds herself outside a liquor store asking people if they’ll go in and buy alcohol for them. She doesn’t drink or smoke, but she wants to be friends with them. Of course everybodys says no, until she asks Sue Ann. 

Sue Ann buys them what they want and then secretly sends the police after them - and they never suspect her… who else could know who they were and where they were?

So the next time sh buys alcohol for them, she tells them to hang out in her basement, so sh’ll check that they’re ok… and so they start hanging out there, going to her house for parties, to drink and smoke, and they call it fun.

When Maggie and Haley sneak upstairs to use her bathroom, Sue Ann - they call her Ma, one of them did it once and they kept doing it, for some reason… - she scares Maggie, who doesn’t want to go there anymore.

Still, she does and drinks something strange… she wakes up at home without her earrings. Now she really doesn’t want to hang out with Ma anymore, but Ma sends her and the others tons of messages, and then tells them that she has cancer and needs some friends… Andy’s mom died of cancer, and she apeals to their sympathy. Haley thinks Ma is stealing stuff from them because of the bracelet she was wearing, and Haley herself doesn’t have her grandma’s ring anymore. So Haley and Maggie sneak into the house to search, and only find Genie, a girl Maggie saw in school in a wheelchair, but now she’s standing. Ma is her mother, and is now keeping her home, giving her who knows what medicine saying that she’s sick; when Ma comes back, Genie urges tehm to get out.

They saw many pictures of them in Ma’s room, attached to the pictures of their parents. Maggie finds Ma at her own home talking to Erica about their dog - Sue Ann works at a dog clinic - and when she finds the dog bleeding she tells her mom not to call Sue Ann and explains what happened. Erica of course is very angry.

Maggie owuld be ok with her mom’s order to never go there again, but Ma shows her that Andy - who is now Maggie’s boyfriend - is there with lots of other kids, drinking and dancing, so Maggie sneaks out, takes her mom’s car and goes there to confront him. Ma locks them in and chains them with collars.

Maggie is the only one not drugged, so she tried to get out from upstairs… the door wasn’t locked so she sneaked upstairs looking for Genie and instead she found Ben’s body on a bed, looking all bleed out, and then Ma finds her. 

Ma also killed Mercedes, ran her over, but nobody seems to have noticed yet…

At 7am Erica wakes up and when she realises that Maggie is not home she freaks out calls Stu her friend from work, and I guess also the police. All the kids in the basement are chained by the collar - how come there’s so few of them? There was a big party… she let everybody else go and kept only the kids she wanted? I guess so, they’re all related to those that more wronged her back then.

Ma uses her hot iron on a boy’s belly, he must be really out on drugs nnot to feel it. Then Ma sews Haley’s lips together, after hitting Ashley in the head with her iron, because the girl screamed and tried to run away. She paints Darrel’s face white, and then Andy wakes up and tries to play her… when she frees him from the chain and hugs him, he tells her he loves her and kisses her, but she calls him a liar and stabs him. 

A cop knocks at her door. He hears some noise made by Maggie but sees Genie in the wheelchair and is about to go away but then he hears Maggie screaming, so Ma shoots him dead.

Ma blames Genie for it, and forces her to help her drag the body inside. Ma goes back downstairs, takes some pictures with them, then hangs Maggie who can’t breathe. Genie screams to get her upstairs and then hits her and knocks her down, accidentally causing a fire - she knocked a candle.

Genie runs to free them from the chain, and they scream and bang on the basement door. Stu opens it and they all go out, but Ma got Genie. 

Genie calls for help but Erica keeps Maggie back. Sue Ann calls her weak, Erica apologises for what happened back then, for not stopping it.

Genie cries for Maggie’s help, so she grabs a knife and runs to stab Ma, freeing her. The house is burning, they all get out but not Ma, she goes upstairs to lie next to Ben on the bed, and stays there.

We see the firefighters are on their way, but the house is really burning, and not likely she’ll make it out alive.

That’s the end.

I think it was a mistake saying it’s a horror movie, because it’s not… well, not what I think of horror movies. It’s a psychological trauma film. But I guess it has to be labelled a horror movie since there’s fear and torture and deaths…

Sue Ann is Octavia Spencer

Maggie is Diana Silvers

Dr Brown is Allison Janney

Ben is Luke Evans

Mercedes is Missi Pyle

Stu is Dominic Burgess

Young Mercedes is Nicole Carpenter

 

Money monster - 2016

 It’s a bitter movie, of course, what else could it be when there’s money, greed and poverty involved?

Lee Gates, host of tv show Money Monster, talks about money and investments and stuff. Apparently an investment app had a glitch and many people lost money. 

It’s a live show, and who they thought was a delivery guy enters th stage with a gun pointed at Lee and has him wear a bomb jacket. He yells that it’s all rigged to steal people’s money, he blames Lee because he said the Ibis investment was the safest, really a safe bet, and the guy lost 60.000$, a lot for him, everything.

Globally, he says that the glitch, whatever it means, cost 800 millions.

Diane Lester should have appeared on the show, but when she heard that the guy was complaining about Ibis, she ran. She’s with Ibis too, but the boss Walt is flying somewhere.

The poor guy is Kyle (Lee’s face :lol: he knew the name already because Patti had already told him since the directs the show from  inside the studio, but he said “you don’t have to tell me your real nname, just how I can call you” and the guy: “call me Kyle” …)

Lee sends Ron there and Diana talks to Kyle. Money’s not enough now, he wants answers, an explanation, but she doesn’t know what caused the glitch. They’re all angry and not satisfied by her answers, she’s just a CCO or something  like that, like a pr person, but now she goes to find the answers.

Lee and Patti know they’re watched everywhere now, millions of people, so he tells everyone to buy Ibis so that its value will rise.

But he said “what’s my life worth?” because by doing it, they’d save him, and the price goes down…

The police brings Kyle’s pregnant girlfriend to talk to him, she should calm him down, but instead Moll starts swearing and yelling and insulting him, because he lost all their money, because he can’t use a screwdriver at home and now he built a bomb…

Diane finds the Korean guy who designed the program, which is all Maths, and he says that “it means there is no way that this algorithm could lose 800 millions in one afternoon, it is literally a mathematical impossibility”.

Whatever happened, it was human. Of course.

Walt the Ibis boss, has landed, and he lied to Diane about where he was. Walt tells her he’ll have to make a statement, and Diane calls Patti, even lets her know he was not in Geneva but in South Africa.

Whe they realize the police wants to shoot Lee to deactivate the bomb (wow) she tells Lee to move, and then he takes Kyle and a cameraman and tells him they’re going to get answers. While they’re walking on the street, Kyle reveals that it’s just clay, not a bomb, he wanted attention, not to kill everyone.

Yes he had a real gun, but he shot in the air and that’s it.

Well, he injures poor Ron working for them, but he didn’t want to.

Kyle and Lee get to talk to Walt, reveal the games he was playing, trying to corrupt a good man in South Africa who refused, thus making him lose money. Somehow.

Anyway, Kyle has him admit that it was  wrong thing to do, and then he takes his finger off the detonator, and the police shoot him. He knew it could happen, and he died.

Lenny the cameraman is interviewd like a hero, Patti and Lee are alive and still working together, and there will be “an investigation” on Ibis… and we know how those things usually go, right?

Rich people never really lose.

Lee Gates is George Clooney

Patty Fenn is Julia Roberts

Kyle Budwell is Jack O’Connell

Walt Camby is Dominic West

Diane Lester is Caitriona Balfe

Captain Powell is Giancarlo Esposito

Lenny is Lenny Venito

Molly is Emily Meade

ITA L’altra faccia del denaro

John Wick chapter 4 - 2023

I’ve seen and liked all the Wick movies, although the first was my fav, of course. This one wants to leave us with a bang, and the ending left me rather bitter for a moment… until I thought of John Wick and then I could see that this was the only freedom he could get, the only way he can be free and at peace. And he won. Which matters.

John wants his ring, his freedom. The Marquis has received by the 12 members of the Table full power to close Winston’s hotel. Meaning, the hotel is evacuated, then blown up. The Marquis says Winston has failed so he’s now excommunicated. And he kills his concierge Charon right in front of him. 

All this after John went to kill the Elder. Now John goes to the Osaka Continental because the Director is a friend. Koji and his daugter Akira run it. He puts friendship and his rules above the Table, and his hotel is excommunicated as well. He fights them, but a lot more of them arrive. All the hotel staff joins the fight, including Akira and John. They’re looking for him.

There’s also Caine, a blind assassin who tried to refuse but he has a daughter, Mia, so e accepts to protect her. He was friends with John once, but now they have to fight.

John escapes but Caine kills Koji. Now Mr Nobody and his dog are hired as well to kill John. Winston tells John about the Marquis and John wants to kill him,  but Winston says the right way is to challenge him officially and force him to free him. To be able to challenge him, he needs to be a part of a family again. Pyotr waas killed too because of what John did, so now John has to kill the man that killed Pyotr first. This big man is very hard to kill but once it’s done he’s again part of his Belarus family. 

As his second, Winston delivers the challenge to the Marquis. John and the Marquis meet to talk about it, about the rules. At dawn, with duel guns, to the death.

The Marquis names Caine to fight for him, threatening his daughter quite clearly. He also raises the reward for John’shead to 26 millions, if they kill him before dawn.

So, before dawn, he gets run over something like 4 times, he crashes his car, he’s hit and he jumps off a window, he’s shot at…  and of course he kills quite a lot of them. 

Mr Nobody raises his price to 40 millions, and so does the reward. 

Whey they get inside a building it starts looking like a videogame, clear one room then the next… and I was waiting for one scene and I got it. He fought Mr Nobody and was about to kill him but he saw that the Marquis’ man was about to kill the dog (Nobody’s dog), so instead John shot the man to save the dog and went away. Leaving Mr Nobody there with wide eyes.

The last two minutes, Caine helps him, and Mr Nobody too, briefly. At dawn, all three are there. John and Caine shoot twice, injuring each other, then the third shot. Caine shoots, John doesn’t, but he falls down. Badly hurt but alive, so the Marquis wants to finish him off. John has yet to shoot though, so he shoots the Marquis in the head. The Member of the Table that is present states that John is now free, that both Caine and his daughter are free, and Winston is good again and will have his hotel back.

John tellls Caine “you owe me one” and then he asks Winston “will  you take me home?”.

He’s really too badly hurt this time. After a few steps, he stops, sits, thinks of his wife and falls down.

The next scene, Winston is in front of his grave, the Bowery King is there with his dog (John’s dog). 

“Never thtought I’d see the day” he says.

John is buried next to his wife, with the words “loving husband” that he himself had chosen and told them both so.

John Wick is Keanu Reeves

the Bowerey King is Laurence Fishburne

Charon is Lance Reddick

Winston is Ian McShane

The Marquis is Bill Skarsgard

Caine is Donnie Yen

After the credits, Caine is finally going to his daughter, who he’s now finally free to approach, but Akira is walking towards him to kill him, since John didn’t. 

We don’t know how it goes… (but seeing things like this, she’ll kill him and walk away)

It also says: “in memory of Lance Reddick

The Thursday murder club - 2025

I liked this a lot, even if it was rather sad at times. The characters were all interesting, as was the story. The ending felt rather abrupt, a bit disconnected, rushed, but all in all it was a good film, and I’d watch more if they have the same cast. Very British. I liked it.

I must say that the solutions were a bit rushed, not really satisfying, but I liked that is starts with one but there are actually four murders with four different culprits.

I also didn’t appreciate Joyce’s vehement and rather rude phone call to her daughter to enlist her help. 

Basically they meet in the ‘puzzle room’ to work on cold cases… for fun, Id say, since they’re all old and retired. Elizabeth starts mysterious but it’s clear she worked in the spy business, and it turns out she was MI6. Ron was a Union leader, Ibrahim was a psychiatrist, and they live in this rich village for retired rich people. The three of them try to solve a cold case a week. They start on the case of poor Angela who was killed in the 70s, when cop Penny was young. All the male cops believed Angela’s boyfriend but Penny didn’t, and yet she always refused to work on that case while she was part of the club. She isn’t anymore because she’s in a coma.

They ask Joyce’s help, because she was once a nurse and can therefore provide medical knowledge.

This case will be sort of put on hold, though, because other two murders happen.

Short version: Ian and Tony owns the property. Ian now wants to send them all away and make apartments for rich people to make money. Tony doesn’t agree because his aunt resides there too.

Tonny is found dead in his own home, Joyce is thrilled to have a new case, to be actually involved in an ongoing investigation, so they manage to have their friend Donna, a cop they recently met, very much bored here because she used to work in London but here they have her fetch their coffee and nothing more. Elizabeth plots with her friends to have her working the case. 

At first the obvious suspect is Ian, because without Tony he could push forward his project, but Ron’s son is also a suspect for a little while. Ex boxer and now tv celebrity, Jason figured in a pictured with the victim but he has an alibi, he was with Ian’s wife and has pictures on his phone to prove it.

When Ian comes to confront the residents’ protest, he’s killed with an injection. 

Elizabeth talks to Bogdan, a man who would do almost anything to be able to send money to his old mother in Poland, and they’re quite friendly.

They also find out that Bobby Tanner, the third owner of the property and famous criminal, is still alive.

Bogdan calls Elizabeth when he finds a body on a grave… it clearly shouldn’t have been there, and it will be IDed as Angela’s boyfriend. 

Elizabeth and Donna find out that Tony and Bobby were together in their crimes: human trafficking, they bring immigrants in but then they take their passport away to own them in their power. 

It’s now clear that Bogdan killed Tony, and the first to know this is Stephen, Elizabeth’s husband who is slowly losing his mind, but still has good days, or good moments, and while alone with Bogdan he reveals that he knows, and Bogdan confesses that he did it, but accidentally, he never wanted to kill anyone, he only wanted to go back home because his mother is ill. 

Elizabeth runs home with her heart in her throat, terrified that Bogdan might kill Stephen too, but no, Bogdan didn’t put anything in his glass (or cup, whatever). He is arrested because Stephen always records everything, hehas a recorder with him and she knows it but Bogdan didn’t.

And now, Elizabeth walks into Penny’s room to talk to her husband because now she knows: Penny knew that Angela had been killed by her boyfriend, and also knew that he would get away with it, so she killed him. Her husband can’t do anything for her now that she’s in a coma, but he could try to protect her, so he wanted to stop Ian because Ian wanted to destroy the graveyard (there’s got to be a better word but I can’t think of what it is now) and the body would have come up. He didn’t know that Ian had told Bogdan to start working by himself while he kept the residents occupied in their protest, so that he could later say that the project had indeed started.

Now the poor man feels very down because he feels he failed at protect her, and it is clear that there’s only one remaining way to protect Penny. Elizabeth undestands but leaves, allowing him to inject both Penny and himself with the same thing he used on Ian.

The film ends wih the three friendds officially welcoming Joyce into their club by giving her the TMC necklace that used to be Penny’s. Then they suggests to Joyce’s daughter that she might buy the property so that nobody will be able to send them away, ever.

Helen Mirren is Elizabeth

Pierce Brosnan is Ron

Ben Kingsley is Ibrahim

Celia Imre is Joyce

David Tennant is Ian

Jonathan Pryce is Stephen

Richard E. Grant is Bobby Tanner

Naomi Ackie is Donna

ITA il club dei delitti del giovedì

Spectral - 2016

A sort of soldiers vs bad ghosts movie, made like a war movie,, and with a scientific explanation for everything happening and likewise scientific method to deal with it.

Not a bad film, but I didn’t care much for the finale. As it often happens with this kind of movies, the ending was a bit disappointing. 

I also didn’t much care for the female lead character, well, she was the only female unless you count the young girl they meet. It strongly feels like she’s in the movie only because they needed their female quota and nothing else, she doesn’t do anything really, what she says could be said by anyone… and of course she gets stuck with them even if she’s not a field agent or whatever, so she’s always there… well, she’s useful because she seems to be the only one who can understand the local language, there’s that at least.

There’s also the fact that it’s so simple for them to make whatever they need on the spot, like McGiver or the A-Team, but on a much bigger scale.  It really felt like too much.

So, there’s soldiers in some European Country, I think Moldova or Chech Republic or something (did they say it clearly? I don’t remember it), and some of them start dying in a weird way, and their special high-tech glasses show what appears to be ghost-like entities that attack the soldiers living him dead instantly, half frozen and half melted like with acid, or something like that.

The engineer who designed the glasses is Mark, and he’s called on the field to explain what it is. He can only see that they have human-like shapes, but to know more he has to do more research, mounting a camera on a tank - or whatever it was - and studying them more.

What the girl Fran says appears immediately to be absurd. Not sure on what ground she’s there, but anyway, she says the enemy is wearing some high-tech camouflage armory and she wants to retrieve one of those, which is nonesense if the men have died as they say they did.

Mark goes with a team. Only the soldiers go actually out, Mark stays in the car/tank/what-was-it as does Fran and a few others. Almost all the soldiers are killed by the almost-ghosts while Fran insists they should retrieve the new technology… one man survived the almost-ghosts the first time by hiding under a bathtub, but they take him away and he won’t survive the next attack.

The soldiers insist on shooting at those entities, but it’s clear it’s not doing anything, and so most of the soldiers die, and the remaining ones run to hide in a factory where they find two refugees, two children who are still alive because their father warded the place against the almost-ghosts using iron that they can’t trespass. 

They make huge bullets/bombs filled with iron to stop the almost-ghosts, and together they all walk out to reach a point where they might be rescued, but the base where they come from has been compromised so they go to another place, a safe-bunker or something, and join other soldiers and survivors there.

Some of their group die before getting there, included one of the two children, the young boy.

Mark had already modified his big high-tech camera so that everyone could see these entities without wearing glasses, so they could fight back, and then he talks to the young girl and asks her about his father, who had to know something if he knew about iron stopping them.

He figures out the science behind these things, something about the Bose-Einstein theory, so they all go towards the power plant that Mark is sure is at the head of everything that is happening. 

Now it’s the A-Team moment: somehow they have everything they need, how fortunate, and Mark is able to make them all big weapons designed against these spectrals. Really, in no time at all he has everything ready, just like that. 

They move and when they get to the power plant, there’s many many more spectrals there, and while the soldiers try to stop them, Mark and Fran go inside to look around and find out what happened.

They do find it, the big lab where scientists were creating these spectrals. They were studying some people (a lot of people) making perfect replicas of these people only in that ‘spectral substance’ , and they also linked these spectral so some part of those people… I mean, it ought to be the brain, but when Mark sconnects the machine, itjust goes poof, like a colored dust… 

Mark and Fran see that there are many more spectrals there that never got loose (they shouldn’t have been out and about, they were because some ‘cells’ were broken) and there is the very real threat that they might be soon, so they study a way to stop it, and quite conveniently Fran tells him what he needs to do, quite easily… 

Anyway, as soon as Mark manages to switch them all off, they all stop immediately, it’s over. Fran thinks for a moment that it might be interesting to study all that, but when Mark sees what remained of those people he had no doubt and proceeded to stop those machines right away - well, we see only a few, but we can guess that he moved along and deactivated every single one. Although there’s little doubt that they’ll want to study it all, but not Mark, he’s done with it all.

As soon as possible, he takes his stuff and goes back home.

General Orland - Bruce Greenwood

Mark - James Badge Dale

Fran - Emily Mortimer

 

I know what you did last summer - 1997

It’s not bad, if you take it for what it is, one of those movies where car windows are easily broken and pieces of glass don’t hurt, but most importantly where the villain can teleport, he can go everywhere and never be seen, he can enter female dorms, carry dead bodies around, walk around armed, deliver messages by hand, and nobody ever sees him or hears him.

That kind of story.

Plot:

Helen is elected Croaker Queen, they go the the beach to party. Helen plans to go to New York and become an actress and then marry Barry and live happily ever after. Julie will go to college in Boston, but hopes her relationship with Ray will survive the distance. Barry drinks a lot, he’s totally drunk so they don’t let him drive.Ray does, but Barry just can’t stop being an idiot and starts moving, being obnoxious, and he drops his bottle of whiskey making Ray lose his focus on the road. When they hit something, they stop and find a man covered in blood. Ray checks his pulse and thinks he’s dead, so Barry yells and yells until they stop talking about calling the police and start agreeing with his plan to get rid of the body so nobody will know and their lives will not be ruined. The boys carry him but Ray can’t bring himself to throw him into the water so Helen helps Barry. The man now moves and grabs Helen’s crown/tiara so Barry swims to get it back, and sees the man open his eyes. Still, he goes out, says nothing, and they act like the man’s dead and promise never to speak about it again. 

One year later, things are not as they had hoped before the ‘accident’. Helen is working in her family’s shop, run by her sister Elsa. Julie is at College but not doing well and Ray is a fisherman. Julie comes home to find a hand-delivered letter: “I know what you did last summer”.

She hurries to talk to Helen, and together they go to Barry’s house. He’s not any better than he ever was, no. Barry thinks it must be Max because that night he drove that way and saw them there. So Barry confronts him and leaves. The Fisherman with the hook kills Max (for whatever reason…) then he enters Helen’s house and cuts her hair during the night. And yet in the morning (after telling the other guys about it) she appears at the Parade with a new haircut, perfect as always.

Julie finds Max’s body and lots of alive crabs in the trunk of her car, but it’s all gone when Barry and Helen come to see. 

He was very quick in cleaning it all up…

Next, Barry is killed and Helen starts screaming because she saw it, but since there’s no body when the cop takes a look (no big body, no, but he didn’t notice the dripping blood… what a brilliant cop…) he does not believe her. He puts her in the police car and drives away, but stops for a man who appears to have trouble with his car. It’s the Fisherman, of course, and he kills the cop. 

Helen breaks the window with her feet, exits the car and runs. She reaches her shop and Elsa lets her in, but they’re very slow in closeing the back door, so he’s already inside and he kills Elsa. There’s a bit of escaping and running, but eventually he kills her too.

Julie at first thought that the Fisherman was David Egan, so she talked to his sister to find out if someone connected to him might be seeking revenge, but when she goes back to talk to Melissa, she realises that she was wrong. The Fisherman is Susie’s father. 

She died in a car accident and David felt responsible. Melissa thinks he killed himself because of it, but it’s almost certain that he was killed by Susie’s father too.

Now Julie tries to warn the others, but can’t find helen (of course not) so she goes to Ray. 

Ray never told them that he had gone to meet Melissa months ago, and now when Julie discovers it she gets the stupid idea that it’s all Ray’s doing, so she runs away and Ray goes after her. A man stops him and  tells her to go on his boat… and she does!!! 

Can you believe that???

She does!!!

And of course she finds pictures and newspaper bits that prove he’s the Fisherman. The boat is moving an it’s dark, yes, but she can see Ray and she has a murderer on the same boat, wouldn’t it be better to jump off the boat and swim away, as much underwater as possible, since she’s still close?

No, she stays on the boat, and Ray will join her, and it’s a long long battle. She also finds Barry and Helen’s bodies in the ice. But at the end Ray and Julie come out of it alive, talk to each other and resume their relationship, much lighter now that they know they never killed anybody (… still… oh well)

The police searches the boat but can only find his severed hand and the hook, but no bodies. So it’s no surprise that a year later she finds a message on her shower: “I still know” and then ‘someone’ attacks her.

It ends there, no more details, so it’s a very open ending, it could mean anything. 

Maybe he entered the girls dorm unnoticed or maybe she’s allucinating after such a traumatic experience, especially since the letter had already brought it all back… who knows…

Well, if you’ve watched the next movie, you know :-p

Characters - actors

Julie James is Jennifer Love Hewitt

Helen Shivers is Sarah Michelle Gellar

Barry Cox is Ryan Philippe

Ray Bronson is Freddie Prinze Jr

Max is Johnny Galecki

Benjmin Willis/Fisherman is Muse Watson

Elsa Shivers is Bridgette Wilson

Melissa Egan is Anne Heche

ITA So cosa hai fatto

Secret window - 2004

 First, I haven’t read the book, so I’ve no idea how it compares. Having sad that, the movie was not bad, the acting was good, but it lacked something…The revelation was too sudden, it was forced, in a way. I’ll explain better at the end.

The plot, so it’s clear what I mean:

We meet writer Mort Raney. Six months ago he caught his wife in a motel room with another man, Ted. Now they’re in the middle of a divorce. It’s not over yet only because he hasn’t signed the papers yet. 

He livesin an isolated house, and a man named Shooter comes to accuse him of having stolen his story, but changing the ending. The manuscript he leaves actually is pretty much word for word as his story Secret Window, about a man killing his wife who didn’t love him. Mort talks to the sheriff, then he hires Ken to investigate the matter. He’s scared of this man, and rightly so. Shooter killed his dog after all. Mort is sure he wrote that story and published it first, in a magazine, but to prove it he’d have to get the magazine from Amy’s house (where they used to live together). He drives there and we see that Amy’s going out and doesn’t see him. Next, he’s at home and Amy calls him to tell him that the house has been burned down. Mort now thinks that it’s all Ted’s plan against him, that he probably hired Shooter to harass him. So when Ted goes to him to demand that he signs the divorce papers, he refuses. 

Shooter wants to meet, but once there Mort sees that both Ken and Tom, a local man who saw  him talking to Shooter, have been killed. Mort faints, and then wakes up to Shooter saying that he did it with Mort’s screwdriver, so Mort gets rid of the bodies by pushing the car into the water. 

Now that the copy of the magazine at his old house has been destroyed, he has a new one delivered to him. He goes in town to get it, avoiding the sheriff, but at home he sees that his own story, and only his, has been ripped off the magazine. He thinks Shooter did it, but then he wonders how could he have done it, and he starts talking to himself, actually seeing himself, and then even Shooter appears out of thin air, saying that Mort created him. Now Mort remembers a time when he bough that hat and imagined a man from Mississippi wearing it. 

Tired of waitiing for him to sign those papers, Amy drives to his house to confront him, but when she arrives the house is a mess, and there’s the word Shooter everywhere, even carved on the walls, and then Mort reveals himself behind a door and she reads ‘shoot her’ behind him. He’s wearing that hat, and speaks like Shooter, and tells her that Mort is not here, he took the coward way out. Amy is scared now, he tries to grab her by the hair, and when she tries to run he stabs her leg.

Ted followed her, and now arrives in time to be killed by Mort under Amy’s eyes. She’s next.

Some time passes, and the sheriff pays him a visit to say that they all know what he did but can’t prove it, and he should at least stop going into town because people are not comfortable with him around…

We see thata the little ‘secret garden’ outside his ‘secret window’ there is now a small corn field - which explains all the cobs he has in his house now, eating it all the time. The camera starts to go under it so we can be sure that Amy and Ted’s bodies are buried there.

Mort now appears calmer and healthier than he was before, and replies that this ending is perfect.

Because of that ‘Mort is not here’ line we understand that Shooter is another personality of Mort, the one that deals with the killiings (the dog, Ken, Tom who of course saw Mort talking alone since Shooter was not real, plus Amy and Ted). 

The last line in Shooter’s book, saying that in time the wife’s death will be a mystery even to him, probably means that his mind will deal with it, maybe remove it from his consciousness. 

Intriguing story, yes.

The problem is how he found out, that scene of him talkiing to himself was boring, it should have been more involving, like: Mort2 trying to force him to accept the truth and Mort1 desperately denying it until Shooter’s arrival to confirm it all. That would have made the whole thing better.

From Secret window, secret garden by Stephen King

Mort Raney - Johnny Depp

Shooter - John Turturro

Amy - Maria Bello

Ted - Timothy Hutton

Ken - Charles S. Dutton

Sherriff Dave - Len Cariou

Advantageous - 2015

 This was weird. And the ending credits caught me by surprise, it didn’t seem finished at all… although after a bit I made peace with the surprise because yeah, it was over alright. What follows is normal everyday life, them trying to move on…

What I didn’t get was the emphasis they put on the ‘truth’ of the procedure… well, let’s start from the beginning.

Basically it’s a futuristic world, a city with huge skyscrapers, but also a lot of desperate women. Gwen does marketing for a company, but gets fired now because too old. Gwen has a daughter, Jules, and is desperate to get her a good chance in a world that doesn’t have jobs for women, especially after a certain age. So desperate she calls her mom for help but she refuses to ask her father, her mom asks him anyway, and he says no. So desperate, that after 13 years of distance she goes to her cousin Lily’s restaurant. She once slept with Han, Lily’s husband, and that’s why she stayed away all this time, but now she asks for help. Of course it’s such a bomb they need to think about it for a little while.

With no long-term prospects, needing money not only to live and eat but also for Jules’ education, she approaches her old company offering herself as human test. The last project she was working on: instead of invasive plastic surgery, the idea is to transfer her brain into another, younger body. With electrodes and stuff, not by opening the head as in Nightmare before Christmas. 

It’s never been done on a person, and Dave who cares for her tells her the truth, in a place where they can’t be overheard. The reality of this procedure is that it is not transferred, it is copied into another, empty brain, and once that’s done, the young brain will recover from the shock, the older brain won’t. Gwen will die, Gwen 2.0 will be just a copy. 

Still, she feels she has no choice since she can’t find a job. She warns Jules and does it. Gwen 2.0 has a lot of pain, as they said, and has to inject herself with medicine every day. She resumes her marketing job and secures a school for Jules, but she is not the Gwen she once was, and Jules can feel that. 

Gwen 2.0 doesn’t remember talking to Dave and doesn’t know about Gwen’s death until Dave explains it to her; this because Gwen 2.0 was about to distance herself from Jules, feeling like  Jules hated her, and Dave didn’t want it to be all in vain.

What Gwen did, all for Jules.

Jules guesses about Gwen’s deatah by herself, and they talk, and Gwen 2.0 also explains it to Lily and Han, who want to help. Lily cries for her cousin, but then decide they’ll be a part of their lilfe from now on. And that’s how it ends, with Lily, Han and their whole family - they have three boys - meeting Jules and Gwen 2.0 in a park. Gwen 2.0 goes on living because it’s what she can do, what she has to do, this is her life now. Jules lives with her because she’s the closest thing to her dear mother, a copy of her but it’s all that’s left, and it was Gwen’s choice, so Gwen 2.0 has no fault.

There’s talk of attacks from people protesting against this ‘progress’, we see like bombs in the distance, but it never gets more than that.

This life is making women sterile, and it’s also moving towards leaving all women at home, not working. 

The movie moves very slowly, because it’s not about actions, it’s about the women Jules hears crying, both the one in the apartment upstairs and the one downstairs, and eventually the one in her own home.

I want to note that Dave asked Gwen not to do it, that’s why he explained the truth to her, but she saw no other choice.

I liked the fact that Lily never hated Gwen. Gwen thought she would, because she slept with her husband, but Lily replies that he slept with her, meaning she’s not the only one to blame, not the only one at fault, and even if neither Lily or Han knew about the daughter, Lily knew about the two of them, and if her love could forgive Han, it could also forgive Gwen. I loved this bit because too often women are set against one another, but when there is an affair, it always involves two people, not just one.

Well, I understand that a copy is not the same as a transfer, because it’s like she’s not ‘all there’, a copy can miss something, but the fact that Gwen would die, that was pretty obvious, no revelation at all, of course she would if they put her brain elsewhere, that was obvious. Still, a copy not a tranfer, so what doesn’t get copied well is lost. 

I’d say Gwen’s daetah is more surprising because of the copy detail. A transfer would leave the first body with nothing, but a copy… why exactly does Gwen die? What is that her brain can’t cope with, since it’s all still there? Well, not really important. It’d be more important to know where does the young body come from. But I don’t know if they ever answer this…

Jacqueline Kim is Gwen Koh

Freya Adams is Gwen 2.0

Ken Yeong is Han

Jennifer Ehle is Isa Cryer

Jennifer Ikeda is Lily

James Urbaniak is Fisher

Last holiday - 2005

It’s a nice movie, although totally absurd an unrealistic, whre not only everything goes right but everybody loves her because she’s such a good person, so so true, and everyone is charmed by her… well, I see it as absurd now that I’ve known people and stuff, but I would have loved it when I was a teen and still thought everything was possible and that people were mostly nice and that good always wins and all that stuff.

It’s still nice after all, because she’s not just beautiful but her character is lovely. 

Georgia works in a store owned by a Mr Kragen, selling cookware; she’s in love with Sean who works there as well but doesn’t have the courage to tell him so she keeps buying stuff to talk to him. 

She loves cooking but then she gives all the stuff she makes to her kid neighbour. One day she hits her head at work, really badly, so Sean carries her unconscious body to the doctor who insists on a scan. The result is that she has a very rare tumor in her brain, and three weeks to live, four if lucky.

Of course she cries and despairs, thinks of all the things she denied herself, all the things she never did, and then she makes a choice. She quits her job, takes all her money and flies to a rich hotel where chef Didier works; she takes the Presidential Suite, like 3 or 4000 a night, buys  new clothes to fit in - of course, otherwise it wouldn’t work, nobody would talk to her, would even look at her if she looked poor.

And then, without effort, she attracts people to her: first she saw the senator in the lobby and understands now why he didn’t show at their church as he was supposed to. This generates a rumour that she knows him. Then she orders everything on the menu to miss nothing of what Didier created for the night. This makes him like her immediately. 

She defends the woman doing massages from the harsh words of Kragen’s lady friend, which makes all  the workers like her.

Incredibly, the girl doesn’t resent her for saying that her neck pain is due to her servicing Kragen, instead she starts talking and pouring her soul out, and of course Georgia has to point out that the man will  not leave his wife, because greedy men never do, they just want everything for themselves.

Georgia enjoys the luxuries, tries all kinds of massages, throws herself off the dam, chats with Didier like old friends, and everybody loves her.

They all went out gambling together, and she won a lot of money, like 100.000 or more, whatever, by playing the same number 17 again and again. So at the end she will still have money… then there’s Sean back home that forces Dr Gumpta to tell him about her, and then Georgia’s kid neighbour shows him her ‘book of possibilities’ which included their marriage, so he takes a plane and hurries to her.

Not even the snow blocking his taxi stops him, he keeps going on foot. 

Hard-hearetd Gunther accepts Kragen’s money to find out who she really is, so she looks through all her stuff, but when she finds Georgia’s farewell letter and realises she’s dying, she melts and is all for her now. She even gives Kragen his money back. Although I think she does mention that she works for him, so he makes inquiries on his own and finds out the truth.

He stands up during a dinner when they’re all together and says it in front of everybody. Of course she admits it, but she never intended to trick anyone, and also reveals the dying bit, explaining everything, so they’re all on her side and leave him alone at his table. 

Even his girl leaves him. 

But when she hears that he’s outside the window drinking, maybe thinking of jumping off, she goes to him, to talk.

During all this, Dr Gumpta happened to make more scans with that machine, and they came out all alike, so he realized that the machine wasn’ woking, it’s broken. He asked the kid where she might be and he tells him… in this case it’s a good thing, but this ki has no filter, he goes on telling everybody whatever they ask about her, and even what they don’t ask, like when he showed Sean the book.

The doctor sends a fax to the hotel explaining the truth.

Georgia talks to Kragen and then Sean arrives with a love speech, and then Gunther arrives with the fax, making everyone happy with the news that she’ll live.

Of course Sean and Georogia are together now, but after this experience she goes after her dream and opens a restaurant, and at the opening lots of people are there, including a tv chef she wanted to meet, and Didier and the senator, and her sister with her family, and they’re all there to cheer for her and support her.

During the credits, we see what happens to some of the characters, like: the doctor and Kragen both become monks, meditating. Her old boss dies in a car accident or something.

Georgia will marry Sean and they will parachute out a plane in their wedding outfits, or something like that. 

All in all a nice film, as unreal as a Disney movie, but pleasant to watch, just like a Disney movie.

Queen Latifah isGeorgia Byrd

LL Cool J is Sean Matthews

Timothy Hutton is Mattew Kragen

Gincarlo Esposito is Senator Dillings

Alicia Witt is Ms Burns

Gérard Depardieu is Chef Didier

Susan Kellerman is Ms Gunther

Ranjit Chowdhry is Dr Gumpta

ITA L’ultima vacanza

Colombo - Murder, smoke and shadows

One of the episodes I like less, it’s rather boring and I don’t like Alex at all. Of course he’s the murderer, the bad guy, but he’s also very much not interesting and unpleasant.

Alex is a director famous for his special effects. His old friend Leonard comes to meet him with a tape: their other friend who died gave it to him. It shows Leonard’s sister right before her death. Leonard knew she fell from a motorbike and died alone, but the tape shows that she was actually doing a stunt for Alex when she fell, Alex went to her and saw the blood on her head, told his friend to stop recording and we can guess that they got the hell out of there without calling for help. 

Why?

I mean, it was an accident, how could an accident ruin his career, ruin his chances?

Leonard now wants to ruin him and show the tape to everybody - and yet he informed Alex that nobody else had seen it yet because he wanted to confront Alex first… not a smart move…

So Alex quickly forms a plan: he tells Leonard the tape has been forged, that he wasn’t really there with her, andthen he tells his people to wet a whole street of his set, and he attaches some cables to an iron gate, so when he takes Leonard there, he scares him until he backs up and touches the gate; Leonard gets electrocuted and dies. Alex puts his body in his car and dumps it at a beach or something. He took away all documents and smashed his face - we don’t see it of course, this show is never splatter - so that it would be impossible to identify him.

He’s quite surprised when Colombo shows up at his place. Fact is, when he dumped the body, Alx’s book with his phone number fell out of his pocket or something, and Colombo found it. He’s even more surprised when Colombo comes back saying they IDed the body, because his belt has a hidden compartment where he kept a cheque.

Colombo hears Alex’s secretary complain about some people charging them with the water truck to wet the street, which nobody told her anything about, and it also makes no sense to her because the weather was bad already.

When Colombo tells him the victim was Leonard, Alex calls him a dear friend, that he hasn’t seen in three years. He cries recalling the girl’s death: Jenny. Alex goes to sleep while Colombo whistles and makes himself an ice-cream soda - like Alex made for Leonard - and takes a chance to snoop while drinking it. 

Colombo goes to talk to him while he works, and asks him about the wet street. He looks around and finds the cable and then the gate. Colombo keeps coming back to him of course, even if he’s working. Alex talks a lot, and his speeches of shadows and stuff are quite boring.

One of the body’s shoes is missing its heel, and Colombo found it near the iron gate. 

A taxi driver says he drove Leonard to the studios. 

Alex has some actors talk near Colombo to make him believe that Leonard was here to buy cocaine or something. Rose the secretary knows Leonard called, and uses it to keep her job and get a bonus cruise… but it was another staged scene, this time Colombo’s idea. The fact that he bribed Rose is a kind of admission, and everyone working at the restaurant during their lunch had a part in it, so they can testify. 

Colombo arrests him with great pleasure.

He got in contact with the police from Albany where Leonard lived, and got the original tape. He shows it to Alex, and that’s a motive. There’s also the weather report Rose always  gets for him, and the shoe heel… but most of all there’s Leonard’s ticket to the studio tour used as a bookmark inside a book in Alex’s house. Proof he was there.

Fisher Stevens as Alex Brady

Molly Hagan as Ruth Jernigan