Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-02-16 (Sunday)

On 2/17/2025 6:52 AM, shawn wrote:

On Mon, 17 Feb 2025 05:51:56 -0800, "Ian J. Ball" <ijball@mac.invalid>
wrote:
 

On 2/17/25 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:
>

What did you watch?

>
As expected, no movies. But I did get through most of the SNL 50 special.
>
I watched:
>

 snipped text
 

SNL 50 - I didn't see all of this - I saw the end of the first airing,
and the first 3(!)-hours of the second airing, so I maybe missed some of
the last 15-20 minutes of this.
    But, while it wasn't the show's best skits, I enjoyed the overall
nostalgia ("Coffee Talk" lady is back!), and most of the "celebrity
cameos" (not Baldwin!  >:/ ), in the special.
    One thing is for sure - a number of the old timers (I never did see
Chevy Chase or Jane Curtin) still have it, esp. Eddie Murphy! Get this
guy his own show!!

 I didn't see Chase or Curtin live at the show so I'm not sure if they
were there. Of course both got a good deal of air time in the clips
from the past.
 

What did you watch?

 I watched much of the SNL 50th special.

Same.  I still have about an hour to go, but what I watched was good.
  Which was a nice addition to

seeing the first SNL episode from 1975 on Saturday night. I thought
Baldwin wasn't even going to show when there were clear places he
would have fit, but then they brought him in towards the end. I was
particularly touched by that last clip showing John Belushi as an old
man visiting the graves of all his former cast mates.
 I also finished up THE DIPLOMAT.

I forgot about this show.  I still need to start season 2.

What did you watch?

I watched:
Broken Arrow (blu-ray) 1996 movie directed by John Woo (I had *no* idea Woo directed this when I put the disc in) starring John Travolta as a US Air Force pilot who steals his plane's nuclear weapons during a training flight with Christian Slater as his determined copilot out to get the nukes back.  And hey it's Samantha Mathis from Super Mario Bros. as the love interest.  I don't think I've watched this since around the time of the original release.  It was better than I was expecting.  Although one annoyance was the way Travolta was constantly giving exposition to the guy who financed the operation.  I know movies need exposition, but if I was financing stealing a pair of nuclear weapons, you best believe I would have already been fully briefed on the plan and all contingencies well before it began!  Who are the co-conspirators, how are the bombs being transported, and transported to where, are really not the types of information you should be learning the day of!  LOL
Face/Off (4K disc) 1997 movie directed by John Woo starring John Travolta as an FBI agent who agrees to have his face surgically removed and replace it with the face of a criminal played by Nicolas Cage so Travolta can pretend to be Cage and trick Cage's brother into revealing the location of a bomb.  There has got to be easier ways to make someone talk!  I watched with an interesting commentary track.  The pair doing the commentary were all over the place, occasionally discussing the movie, but often just talking snark and trivia.  I don't know why I found it so funny but I couldn't stop laughing when one said Travolta was playing the character like an evil Danny Zuko and the other said Danny Zuko *was* evil.  One piece of trivia they mentioned was Nicholas Cage and Tomas Jane shared a scene together is that both men were married to Patricia Arquette.
Swordfish (blu-ray) 2001 movie starring Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) as a hacker who is recruited by Storm (Halle Berry) to hack into a bank for a patriotic terrorist played by John Travolta.  Rounding out the cast are War Machine (Don Cheadle) as an FBI agent trying to take them down and Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones) as one of Travolta's henchman.  I've been looking forward to revisiting this for a long time.  I'm glad I was finally able to watch it again.
Blackhat (4K disc) 2015 movie directed by Michael Mann starring Thor (Chris Hemsworth) as a hacker recruited from prison by the FBI to team up with Chinese law enforcement and track down the hackers who tried to melt down a U.S. nuclear power plant, and succeeded in melting down a Chinese power planet.  I *think* I maybe saw this in the theater, when it first came out, but I had no real memory of the movie.  There were three different versions of the movie available, U.S, international, and director's cut.  I went with the U.S. version simply because it was the longest version of the three, and I hate wondering, what did I miss, with shorter cuts.  In spite of the generally bad reviews this movie has, I liked it.  I'm not going to say the movie wasn't a mess, and maybe a shorter version would have been more coherent (I did after all turn to the Wikipedia page to figure out what was happening), but the movie held my interest.