Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-12-27 (Friday)

On 12/28/2024 6:25 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

Warning: I am unlikely to be able to start WDYW? threads for the next several days, so someone else will likely need to start them.
 Yesterday, we mostly watched the SNL Vault channel on Peacock yesterday.
 

The last new episode with Martin Short was really good.

I also got through a couple of episodes of this week's DOOL, which aren't worth commenting on.
 What did you watch?
 

I watched:
La Femme Nikita (4K disc)  1990 action movie written and directed by Luc Besson.  Anne Parillaud stars as Nikita, a junkie who reaches a point of no return in her criminal life after she murders a cop during a robbery.   The French government then fakes her death and retrains her as an assassin, as well as how to behave more ladylike.  For her first assignment they send her into a restaurant to assassinate someone, but intentionally sabotage the hit to see how she reacts to the situation.  From there she falls in love while working as a highly trained government assassin and struggles to live her new life with her new love.  Jean Reno costars as a "cleaner."
Léon: The Professional (4K disc) 1994 action movie written and directed by Luc Besson.  Jean Reno stars as Léon a "cleaner" or um, hitman.  A young Natalie Portman also stars as a young girl who sees her entire family murdered in front of her.  She then shacks up with Léon who trains her to be a "cleaner."  This is a movie full of cool scenes, but one of the stand outs has to be when Portman makes an unsuccessful attempt to kill the man (Gary Oldman) responsible for her family's death.  Oldman happens to be a crooked cop.  Being a young girl Portman is able to easily walk into the police station; but Oldman is on to her before she can make her move.  Léon on the other hand has to now rescue her.  Léon pulls up in front of the police station in a cab, tells the driver to wait because he won't be long.  Walks in, puts a bullet in a few crooked cops, grabs Portman and casually walks out of the police station to the waiting cab and drives off.  Turns out he was right, it didn't take long.  Then of course, there's the final shoot out at the end with Léon vs. pretty much the entire New York city police force. The movie holds up great.
Colombiana (blu-ray) 2011 action movie written by Luc Besson and starring Zoe Saldana as a woman who when she was a young girl saw her entire family murdered in front of her by a drug cartel.  She then gets her uncle to train her to become a killer.  Since her uncle is a killer himself, it's not much of a hard ask and he agrees without much persuasion.  Although he does convince her to also go to school since she's a little girl.  Flashforward to present day and Zoe is a professional hit woman out for revenge.  If I didn't know any better, I'd swear Luc wrote this to be a sequel to Léon: The Professional, with Zoe essentially playing a grown-up Natalie Portman's character.  Anyway, it's a very solid revenge action flick with Zoe laying waste to anyone who gets in her way as she's out for revenge against the cartel who murdered her parents all those years ago.
Anna (4K disc)  2019 action movie written and directed by Luc Besson. Sasha Luss (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) stars as a junkie who reaches a point of no return in her criminal life after people die during a robbery.  The Russian government then retrains her as an assassin, as well as how to behave more ladylike.  For her first assignment they send her into a restaurant to assassinate someone, but intentionally sabotage the hit to see how reacts to the situation.  From there she falls in love while working as a highly trained government assassin and struggles to live her new life with her new love.  I could have sworn I once saw a different movie written and directed by Luc Besson with a similar plot, but I'm sure he wouldn't recycle his own ideas over and over again.  Anyway, as movies written and directed by Luc Besson about a junkie the government recruits and retrains to be an assassin go, this is a pretty good one.
How many of the movies directed by Luc Besson in my collection should I watch this week?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74BzSTQCl_c
What If...? (Disney+) - "What If... the Emergence Destroyed the Earth?" They are dropping a new one every day.  I watched this one the other day.  It wasn't bad, but how exactly was there still an Earth seeing as how the emergence destroyed it?  I guess we're not supposed to ask obvious questions like that.
"What If... 1872?" - So they do a Shang-Chi episode set in the 1800s and don't let him use the rings?!?  Then what was the point?