Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-03-21 (Thursday)

On 3/22/2024 6:42 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

On 3/22/24 6:04 AM, shawn wrote:
 

On Fri, 22 Mar 2024 05:33:38 -0700, "Ian J. Ball" <ijball@mac.invalid>
wrote:
>

What did you watch?

>
The other thing I watched was a movie called THE EXPATRIATE about a
guy who was hired for a temporary job breaking security devices for a
company, but it turns out it was all a fake as all of the employees
are killed once they break enough devices. The setup was to enable
someone to break into a CIA black vault and steal some documents.
Documents that it turns out prove a company was shipping military
weapons to rebels in Africa when the ship carrying the weapons went
down. It was just watchable and not a movie I would seek out.

 There's no movie with that actual title, though apparently this is an "alt title" for the 2012 film "Erased" with Aaron Exkhart – Is that this movie you're talking about?
 If it is, I stumbled across it... let's say about 5 years ago, and it ended up being more engrossing than I was expecting (though I believe I didn't watch the whole movie, having missed the beginning).
 And it co-stars Olga K!!
 

I founded "Erased" on a few of the streaming services I never use.  I'd be more likely to watch this is I could just stick on my DVR at least that way I won't have to "remember" the movie exists, it'll just be there.
I watched:
Halo (Paramount+) - "Halo" - Season 2 finale.  Well, something finally happened. Big fight between humanity and the aliens with Master Chief willing to sacrifice all of humanity for love or whatever nonsense. They try to make the military out to be the bad guys for being to sacrifice soldiers, even their entire fleet to stop the aliens.  But as the top brass repeatedly and expressly say if the aliens get the Halo, then it's game over.  No counter attack or second chance all of humanity everywhere is just snuffed out. Under those conditions I really don't have a problem with the military stopping that from happening by any means necessary.
3 Body Problem (Netflix) - "Countdown" - I have been eagerly waiting on this.  It's a miniseries based on a Chinese book.  I never read the book, and very much intentionally for the last few years I've been avoiding any and all plot descriptions/spoilers.  So technically, I don't know what it's about.  Just that it involves presumably aliens and maybe the end of the world.  Mild spoilers for the first episode.
The first episode which jumps around in time between 1960s China and modern day London.  In 60s China the story focuses on a physicist who is arrested by the government for being a counter revolutionary, like her father, who was publicly executed in front of her.  The science she and her father believes in is considered counterrevolutionary because it is based on Western ideas. But her position is a fact is a fact and she won't say otherwise or rat out other scientists even to save her own life.  She is later recruited for a secret government project that needs scientist with her level of knowledge, which has basically been outlawed.
The present day story mostly takes place in modern day London. Governments all over the world are concerned because science/laws of physics don't seem to be behaving properly and no one can explain why science seems to be broken.  In addition, scientists have begun to mysteriously die or commit suicide.  They all seem to have this vision of a countdown clock in their eyes they can't get rid of.  Except for those scientists who stop work on their potentially world changing projects those scientists stop seeing the countdown and live.  One of the main characters in the first episode is a scientist named "Augie" (Eiza González) who is seeing the countdown clock and was friends with a scientist who also saw the clock until she killed herself.  She meets a mysterious woman who seems to know what's going on who tells her to shut down her project before the clock hits zero.  To back up her threat she also tells Augie to go outside at midnight and look up and she will see the universe "blink."  She does and the universe does in fact "blink." The whole world sees it too.  Benedict Wong also stars as a British government operative assigned to figure out why scientists are seeing the countdown and why science isn't working.
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (theatrical) Latest Ghostbusters movie which once again brings back the original cast to bust ghosts with a younger generation.  They must stop an evil ghost determined to freeze the world if he can first escape from his magical prison.  Overall I liked this one.  I went in aware that the movie had been getting some negative reviews, but those reviews seem to be complaints about the movie relying too much on nostalgia.  I really didn't have a problem with that.  I loved all the cameos and callbacks to the earlier movies.  This movie is made for fans of Ghostbusters and on that level it worked great.  By the end of the movie I had a huge smile on my face.  What more can you ask for?  I did have one gripe in that I'm pretty sure a good chunk of the movie was edited out, perhaps even a whole subplot.  I can't know for sure what I didn't see, but I have definitely been getting that feeling a lot lately when I go to moves that huge chunks were filmed then removed, and I definitely felt that in this one.  Maybe there will be a longer director's cut to look forward to watching.