So many movies you think you know what the bad guy's plan is only for it to turn out to be something different and often even better. Any fave examples?

For me, the gold standard is (no pun intended) "Goldfinger." Goldfinger does a big presentation to the gang bosses on robbing Fort Knox that Bond overhears. Bond matter-of-factly tells Goldfinger "I'm disappointed in you," as he lays out how it's physically impossible to move all that gold in anything less than a week and a half and Goldfinger only has two hours before the Army, Marines, National Guard, FBI and cops of four states are on top of him.

At which point, Goldfinger just replies, "Whoever mentioned removing it?"

It takes Bond a couple of moments to realize Goldfinger's real plan is to detonate a dirty bomb in Fort Knox, rendering the main gold supply of the U.S. unusable for 58 years, causing his own personal gold stocks to skyrocket over ten times in value. "I apologize. It's an inspired deal."

Any other faves like that?

Every Halloween I invite the neighbors over for a small fire and a movie in our driveway while we hand out candy. I use a projector with a couple of powered speakers with the garage door as the screen. Works great and everyone has fun.

Need something new to show. Has to be mostly kid friendly but lots of atmosphere or action. Movies like King Kong, Godzilla, and Universal don’t work because the monsters are barely in the movie. People will be chatting and moving around so dialog isn’t as important as visuals.

In the past I’ve done things like Ghostbusters and Young Frankenstein.

Any suggestions?

Every October I (probably like you) end up scrolling through the horror section of every streaming service for hours before giving up and rewatching something or just settling on something that ends up being pretty mid. So - as a certified movie critic - I put together a guide of all my MY favorite modern horror movies for each and every streaming service.

Full links for guides below and hope you enjoy!

Netflix: https://silverscreenriot.com/best-horror-movies-on-netflix/
HBO Max: https://silverscreenriot.com/best-horror-movies-on-hbo-max/
Amazon Prime: https://silverscreenriot.com/best-horror-movies-on-prime-video/
Hulu: https://silverscreenriot.com/best-horror-movies-on-hulu/
Shudder: https://silverscreenriot.com/best-horror-movies-on-shudder/
Paramount+: https://silverscreenriot.com/best-horror-movies-on-paramount-plus/
Tubi: https://silverscreenriot.com/best-free-horror-movies-on-tubi/
Peacock: https://silverscreenriot.com/best-horror-movies-on-peacock/
Kanopy: https://silverscreenriot.com/best-free-horror-movies-on-kanopy/

(And please tell me in the comments anything that I've totally neglected and I may edit to add in!)

NOTE: This is for US geography, as results differ by location.

Rewatching the Halloweentown movies, and Calabar kind of has a point. Besides ”evil triumphs over good” and the fact he wanted to rule over humans like they’re some subspecies. But why do the citizens of Halloweentown have to live there? Clearly to avoid persecution, and Marnie has plenty of backwards ideas about the different creatures there and her reactions to them are very typical to how most people would react to seeing a goblin or a ghoul. So it’s nice that they have their own town to feel safe and live their lives in peace. It is a nice town.

But the fact that people like Calabar exist in the first place shows there’s some brewing resentment with the whole idea. And the Cromwells seem to have some sort of generations long ruling on the laws that exist in Halloweentown. They have way too much say as to what happens socially and politically for what’s supposedly a democratic society. It’s no wonder their mother wanted to distance herself from that place and that dynamic entirely, and to just be “normal”.

Everyone should be able to exist in peace and harmony together! Humans and witches and ghosts and everyone mingling and having a good time. The fact that the movies exist in a segregation state gives me the heebie jeebies, and not in a Halloween sort of way.

What do you think?

To help us get in the mood for the holidays, LadyWired and I have a regular set of Christmas movies we watch. What's made your cut?

Ours: (in no particular order)

- The George C Scott Christmas Carol. It's excellent, especially for a production that was a made-for-TV movie. Scott makes a really great Scrooge, David Warner is an excellent Bob Cratchit. (And Susannah York really does a lot with her limited role as Mrs. Cratchit.) Fond memories of watching this with my Grandmother every Christmas Eve for the last few years of her 103-yr-old life.
- A Christmas Story. We love how it's both "real" in that everyone in that family is flawed in real-seeming ways, yet told through the eyes of a 12(?) year old boy with a very vivid imagination. So many quotable lines and memorable scenes, and the entire cast is perfect; you can truly believe they are real people. (As real as a young boy would remember them.)
- Scrooged. We don't necessarily have this one on repeat, but Bill Murray's manic energy is awe-inspiring. It's not a flawless movie (Donner's direction leaves a bit to be desired), but the script is solid (lots of quotable lines!), and Karen Allen is great, and the side characters take every opportunity to borrow the spotlight.
- The Ref. This isn't super well-known, and it took years for a version other than a terrible DVD to be available (a "widescreen" version that only looked correct on non-widescreen TV's), but it's hilarious, if not family-friendly. (Dennis Leary is a cat burglar on the run, and he takes refuge with the worst married couple, Kevin Spacey (I know!) and Judy Davis.) The supporting cast (including J K Simmons, Glynis Johns, Christine Baranski, among others) is great. The script was clearly written for the cast, letting everyone play to type, and it all turns out very funny.
- Die Hard. Needs no further explanation. "Ho Ho Ho I Have A Machine Gun" It doesn't get more Christmas-y than that!
- ETA: Home Alone. Can't believe I forgot that one.
- ETA: Jim Carrey's The Grinch... kinda! This one was actually the first movie we watched together as our 3rd date. We saw it in the theater on her birthday, and I still have the stub. We don't think of this as a Christmas movie for us (though it obviously is one!)... it's more of an anniversary movie.
- ETA: We do watch the original animated Grinch once. Not my favorite, to be honest, but if we had kids, I'm sure they'd adore it. Certainly the script is great!
- ETA: Violent Night. This one hasn't been out long enough for me to necessarily call it "regular rotation", but we both love it, and are looking forward to the sequel this year.

I know a lot of people like Elf, and the Muppet Christmas Carol... not for us. And I'm sure there are plenty of other movies people adore that I haven't mentioned.

All Dogs Go To Heaven is my favorite Bluth film, its dark, yet heartwarming, it's afterlife scenarios are intense yet tied together with a theme of redemption. I even did a school paper / slide presentation on it... and yet... we don't have the full vision. The available edit is trimmed to remove the hell scene's most frightening bits, one use of the word damn and supposedly Charlie actually getting run over... which I do wonder if that actually exist due to the choppy edit in the final cut.

Is there ANY chance this exists? Is it long gone? A lost myth? Bluth's said it's gone, but isn't there an HD still? and the footage exist from a leaked teacher showcase of the hell clip?

Could it be remade with A.I and "re-edited back in"? I want the full cut of All Dogs, I'd do anything I could to get it.

Recently caught “Unstoppable” from 2010 with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine on TV. I feel like the movie is a popcorn flick which is all well and good. However, one thing is nagging at me. Throughout the movie our two main characters trade personal details and you find out that Chris Pine’s character is on the outs with his wife. A restraining order is mentioned but you kind of think oh ok there was probably some sort of misunderstanding.

But no. Near the end of the movie, he confides to Denzel Washington that his wife was texting someone that he thought was another man (it wasn’t) and he flew into a jealous rage and tried to grab her phone and “scared her” (his words) then drove to the man’s house and threatened him with a gun.

He goes on to lament that then he was served a restraining order:( and his wife “wouldn’t even look at him”. Which like??? They could have given so many reasons for marriage trouble but instead gave him a bunch of red flags for future abuse and potential murder? It seemed like such a bizarre choice to me.

Of course at the end of the movie, they’re happily back together. Hopefully she doesn’t text anybody!

So. What are your most memorable moments that have no impact on the main story you can think of with why the fuck would they have a character do that?

These are mine

1-Sound of the closing doors in Carrie 1976 before the prom massacre.

Its so beautifully menacing..

2-Spider-man thwip sound effect in Sam Raimi Movies

It's not like I hate the others but I just loved Sam Raimi's one more , maybe because of nostalgia

3-Bullet sounds in Saving Private Ryan

So what are your favorite ones?

It's a movie about dogs and it stars Willem Dafoe. I always put it off when it was on Disney Plus because I assumed it was just another slop title meant to fill the Disney Plus catalogue.

I saw the Fat Electrician's video about Togo and the film being removed from Disney Plus, I had no idea it was taken off! I went and watched it and oh, this film is wonderful! It's full of heart and the dogs are so adorable! Willem Dafoe is fantastic in the film and I really wish this was given a physical release of some kind, just because I really wish I could own a copy of it for myself.

Shame on companies that keep erasing great films just to get a tax break.

I'm a fan of dogs, specifically dogs... and dog movies, I'll talk about them more I am sure. But today's question I have is, whatever happened to the "A Dogs Purpose" franchise?

The author's book was adapted to the screen in 2017, with a film that from my own neighborhood I could tell was popular, EVERYONE'S DOG was named Bailey... lol it felt like at least. and for the films cheesy confusing plot, it's still got a dog, and that makes me smile.

Then in 2018 Sony did "A Dog's Way Home" another book from him, with a movie... I love...

and finally in 2019 the sequel to Purpose, "A Dog's Journey" which I also love and think is a darker film then the first with some of the subject matter, tho still has problems and follows the same basic beats of dog dies, new life, etc.

But since then nothing... until apparently 5 days ago when Netflix posted a trailer for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L18ih13Bf-U "A Dog's Perfect Christmas" also by the same author. and I just saw this and it made me want to ask... "where's the third A Dog's Purpose?" I'm gonna guess it's one of the following:

A. Box office failure of the sequel- tho I ask how much did the sequel costs / lose?

B. Animal Abuse Allegations of the first leading to bad PR? But then... why did the first do so well?

I'm just confused and sad, because I'd love to see the story's "continuation", "Conclusion?" whatever it is, I want the final chapter. But it's not been made yet. :( Anyone got insights?

I decided to watch this movie for the first time, and I found it truly heartbreaking to witness the struggles of a couple trying to repair their marriage. It was emotional to see two people fighting to save their relationship while dealing with the problems that had driven them apart.

I believe Dean has the potential to become a better man and a better husband. It's clear that he loves and cares for his daughter, Frankie, but his drinking habits are holding him back from becoming the person he could be. It's heartbreaking to see how his personal struggles and poor choices take a toll on his marriage and family, especially when there is still so much at stake.

This is one of the reasons why I have always been against drinking and rarely drink alcohol myself. I believe excessive drinking can contribute to negative behaviour, poor decision-making, and domestic problems that can damage relationships and hurt the people we love. To me, a healthy relationship requires mutual respect, understanding, communication, and a willingness to take responsibility for our actions. Sometimes, saving a marriage means confronting our personal struggles before they destroy the very things that matter most in life.

After waiting a year for HOPE to come out, I finally saw it last night and loved it, then did my usual thing of checking out what other people are saying on Reddit and the like—and I am a bit appalled. This, as they say, is why we can't have nice things. People keep making ridiculous suggestions that the film is a parody of the action genre (it's not, though it is a subversion of it), or that the story is "all over the place" (pfft), etc. Nonsense. This is not one of those dumb action films somebody started without a script because such-and-such was only available through May. It's a smart movie, made by someone with a track record of making smart movies, and worth engaging with.

So let's do a breakdown of what this film's about and some of the elements I enjoyed about it. As a note, I'm not Korean, but I spent a couple years in Korea, so I probably got more out of it than a lot of international viewers and a lot less than native ones. It is of course possible that I have misinterpreted some of its points. That said, I am a professionally published writer myself, albeit nobody important, meaning I at least know what themes and motifs are and I don't misuse the term "plot hole." I've also watched all of Na's stuff and a fair number of other Korean movies, so I recognize some Korean cinema tropes.

I'm gonna bang out this breakdown by subject and go until I get tired. Tally ho (or "돌격하라"!)

THE STORY:

INFILTRATION: When the movie opens, we find ourselves to be in a village close to the North Korean border. Signs everywhere warn residents to watch for infiltrators from the North and report anyone suspicious. If such signs were shown just once (or Na was less of a deliberate artist) we might brush them aside as scene-setting, but they pop up multiple times, so we know they matter. This is a movie about our fear of others.

THE HUNTERS: But who are the others? North Korean spies are the first others that get mentioned, but the first ones that we actually see are the hunters. I lack the ear and vocabulary to recognize the differences in how they speak, but even the English subtitles point out that at least some of these Koreans are not from South Korea. One of the hunters mentions that it doesn't matter if the chief of police gets mad at him because he's getting "back on the boat" soon, which probably means he's one of the ethnic Koreans from Northeast China. Na Hong-Jin has made a movie about the plight of some of these people (THE YELLOW SEA, 2010); they come to South Korea by boat to work illegally. If they're caught, they are presumably deported. Why they're being employed here as hunters, I have no idea, but I don't guess it really matters. The point is that we see a theme emerging pretty quickly: This is a movie about foreigners in our land and our attitude toward them.

THE ALIENS: Of course, the star infiltrators of the movie are the aliens. The first alien is depicted as a vicious monster rampaging through town before we find out that it was just looking for its child and was murdered for its trouble. Did the alien even initiate the "attack" on the village or did the residents just start shooting because it was big and scary? We never learn, but it's clear enough from the aliens' later dialogue that they're intelligent and emotional creatures who could well have just been defending themselves from the outset. This motivation even explains the chase sequences; if you're being hunted relentlessly by these bloodthirsty inhabitants and a few of them retreat after failing to kill you and your family, you might understandably pursue them to keep them from going for reinforcements.

THE CONFLICT: The humanization (what a term, in this context) of the aliens in this movie results in an unusual emotional conflict during the movie's (really cool) action sequences. We get a lot of heroic moments in the action-movie tradition, but our natural fist-pumping response is (hopefully) undercut by the fact that by the time most of them occur, we know what's really happening in this story: The aliens are a bunch of refugees just trying to survive and they're being remorselessly (except by the police chief) slaughtered as if they're a bunch of xenomorphs from the ALIEN franchise. How cool Sung-ki looks... blowing up those desperate immigrants.

"HOPE": At the movie's end, we start getting translations of the aliens' dialogue, and a new plot seems to come out of nowhere regarding the death of the aliens' emperor and the need to find their prince. A lot of people are reading this conclusion as sequel bait—and I think Na has confused matters by saying he does actually want to do one—but it should be understood that the finale works in its own right. By now the movie has completed a transition from depicting the aliens as monsters starring in a creature feature to full protagonists of their own story. The film ends with them expressing hope in the future, despite the odds being against them. In short, the movie gets its name from their perspective of their awful situation, rather than the humans'.

CONCLUSION: What we have here is a film about our fear of the other, particularly immigrants, and the awful things we do to them rather than understand them or reach out a helping hand. I wouldn't call it an anti-Trump movie because it's a Korean's movie, but East Asian countries like South Korea have plenty of issues with xenophobia as well. Not only is it a relevant theme but again, it's one Na has hit on before.

OK, that's the meaning I got. Now let's talk real quick about some of the...

TROPES AND CHARACTERS

THE UNKILLABLE MAN: The hunter Ko Sung-ki appears to be immortal; every time he receives a blow that is likely to kill him, he gets up again, like he's that guy who fell out of an airplane and survived except that he can do the trick repeatedly. The unkillable character is a joke Na has made before in another movie (I won't spoil which one), but it's been a very long time since he's made the joke and this movie had a far larger potential audience, so I understand why he wanted to do it again. I feel like it's the equivalent of that hilarious storyline in LOVE, ACTUALLY, where an English tourist books a ticket to Wisconsin (of all places) because he thinks any guy with an English accent can have sex with beautiful women anywhere in America—and even though the audience keeps waiting for reality to assert itself and dash his dreams throughout the movie, it never does. He just turns out to be completely right. Sung-ki's continuous survival is the same kind of humor, meant to elicit an "Are you serious?" response with every outlandish extension of his life. I think it's great. Your mileage may vary (depending on how fun a person you are).

THE UNEXPECTED BAD-ASS: There's not much commentary to offer here, except that one occasional trope of Korean cinema I keep seeing, which I personally find endearing and funny when I only see it occasionally, is to make one of the most competent characters someone you would not expect. Officer Yim—young, earnest, pretty, undoubtedly new-ish to the job—arrives on the scene in action-movie bad-ass mode, striking the first serious blow against an alien after it's devastated the town. This is fun. You see a similar note of the same humor in the volunteer retirees' appearance, absolutely armed to the teeth with old army gear, weapons, and snacks.

THE SHERIFF: Again, I just vibe with this kind of humor, but Hwang Jung-min (pbuh) plays Ko as a police chief who likes to throw his weight around a bit (see how he makes a hunter hold his sunglasses). However, his idea of himself as "the tough sheriff in town" gets repeatedly undercut by others' ability to make a fool of him, his own (quite human) fear, and the reality of the resources he has available to him. He's not a complex portrait of a character but he's a fun, human protagonist; if this were Arnold Schwarzenegger he'd just be a two-dimensional tough guy beloved by the locals (cf. THE LAST STAND, 2013). And of course Ko's the only one whose moral conscience is sparked by the possibility that these monsters are people, the one whose perspective our own should track with. At the end of the movie he says he "feels weird" (in the English subtitles, which aren't word-for-word translations of the Korean). We should, too.

Alright, I should really go do something productive. Thanks for reading the whole post if you got to here.

I saw that it is free on YouTube. So, to kill some time, I watched it. Didn't have much expectation since most free movies are either very old or plain suck. But this one did exceed my expectations. It's actually pretty good. Anton Yelchin is a good actor. It's a shame that he died so young. 😔

I give this movie an 8/10.