This Week in Movie Nights

Two classics and a meh

The kids and Kate had Friday off, and my term is winding down to the last few classes, so it was a three-Movie-Night week in Chateau Steelypips:

The Fugitive:

The Pip and I scrolled through a bunch of services, and eventually landed on this classic from Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones. Structurally, this is a weird movie, since Ford is the title character and has the real emotional arc, but Jones is so entertaining as the constantly-pissed-off Marshal Sam Girard that it ends up feeling more like his movie. It’s very well put together, plot and pace wise, and the big train setpiece is terrific, but really, Jones is the reason to watch this, and it didn’t disappoint.

The Blues Brothers:

Friday night, after a bit of scrolling through recommendations, the Pip specifically asked to re-watch this, which I’ve already seen a thousand times, so of course I agreed. It remains a movie whose third screenwriting credit should be “A Pile of Cocaine,” and has a lot going on— there were at least two points where The Pip exclaimed “Oh, right, I forgot the Nazis were in this!” But the musical performances are just so much fun, and Aykroyd and Belushi are at their absolute peak.

Also, Aretha Franklin just blows everybody else off the screen.

Willow:

Part of our streamer-scrolling on Friday included a stop by Disney+, where they were promoting this as a lead-in to a new series based on the movie. I remember it being a theatrical bomb but pretty entertaining on cable tv, so I said “That’s probably worth a shot,” but The Pip wanted a re-watch so we put it off until Saturday.

This was a bit rough, mostly from an effects standpoint. There’s a lot of green-screen work that just doesn’t hold up at all on a modern HD screen. Especially having recently (re)watched the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy, which handles similar scale issues much more deftly. Val Kilmer is unhinged in a fun way, but it’s really hard to get past the cheesy VFX.

I can’t really figure what Disney is going to do with this property, or why they’re trying. But I guess we’ll find out.

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And that’s what we’ve been watching with the kids (actually, just The Pip as SteelyKid was volunteerting with local theater companies both Thursday and Friday, and tapped out of Willow pretty early). If you like this kind of thing, here’s a button:

And if you’d like to quote your favorite line from any of these (“Newman, what are you doing?” “Thinking.” “Well, think me up a cup of coffee, and one of them donuts with the chocolate frosting and the little sprinkles.”), the comments will be open: