That ended up in the so bad it's funny category for me, nowhere near as funny as The Snowman, but still funny enough.
Seems like just a way to earn nerd-creed to me. Can you connect the dots, audience!? Oh, look how smart we are for connecting everything. Our franchise is deep and creative, ja!?
One thing that I really like about The Forbin Project is that the AI truly is machine-like. In most movie that features an AI, there is some anthropomorphic element that makes them more relatable, some personifying aspect that gives them character. Like Ultron's humor. Or just putting a face on the AI such as in Skynet (both with the Terminators and the actual Kkynet in the later films). However, in Colossus, there is none of that. When the AI gets the upperhand on the protagonist in the ending, it's dialogue is chillingly cold, truly without a human element to it, just a machine following its rationale without any anthropomorphic drama added to it.
I sort of liked the very stark, brutal sense of violence in that film. Uncomfortable.
I watched
Sand Pebbles and
The Getaway. Never got around to watching
Angel Heart.
I really enjoyed
The Getaway but struggle to see why it would be some sort of ultimate Peckinpah/McQueen achievement. It's a taut, terse thriller. It had a lot of those Peckinpah quirks that give his movies that little extra when it comes to effectiveness. That really evocative editing, constantly shifting between disparate elements, allowing sounds to linger from one scene to another, the constant presence of children and civilians in shoots-out so to accentuate the "grit" (for lack of a better term) in the situation. That ending shootout in the hotel just shows that Peckinpah was a king of such scenes.
One funny thing I noticed. This movie's screenplay is written by Walter Hill. He actually re-used one of his tricks in this film later in
Driver (1978). In Getaway, the antagonist tells McQueen that he never uses a bulletproof-vest (and of course, when McQueen shoots him, he actually does, just having said so to fool him). While in Driver, the titular Driver tells his companions that he has a code of never carrying a gun. So when his assosiates double-cross him, he's actually wearing a gun and just said that to have them underestimate him.
The McQueen/MacGraw relationship was obviously the backbone of the film.
Yeah I... just don't see that level of self-awareness in his eyes man. He's angry at her for diddling the Head Honcho -- having done so to get him out of jail, since he told her to get him out through any means necessary. He just didn't expect that "any means" would entail hanky panky.
It seems more like he's angry that his cunning scheme unexpectedly wounded his ego. He ain't angry at himself for putting her in that situation, he's angry that the situation birthed such an unexpected humiliation. It's not so much an internalization of his failure towards her -- as it is frustration and vexation with the unexpected way things turned out.
In that scene near the end, when they are at the junkyard (great character scene by the way), MacGraw tells him "we've come a lot of miles but we're not close to anything." To me, it reads more like McQueen realizing how unfairly cold and unloving he has been to her. Through the narrative, she's practically fawning over him, while he's emotionally distant and introverted, due to how spiritually worn down he has become in jail (even before he realized that she fucked the Head Honcho). After that scene, he is loving and intimate with her.
I had to scratch my head a lot longer to figure out exactly what I thought about
Sand Pebbles. First some uncontested positives.
*This is really one of those movies with a thorough sense of time-and-place. Gunboat China with all its historical peculiarities. Really loved it.
*This is also one of those movies that uses sound, silence, and ambient noise expertly to conjure atmosphere. Looking through his IMDB page, I realized that the director, Robert Wise, was one of the early go-to boys for Val Lewton. I think that imprint may have stuck with him.
*The action manages to be jarring, realistic and hard-hitting -- while also being completely unglamorous. Really impressive. And Wise don't shy away from presenting a socially complicated situation, with even McQueen's crewmates wanting to see him dead to save their own hides.
Anyways, when I had initially finished
Sand Pebbles, I felt oddly on the fence about it. Sort of like something didn't jive, and that I should like it more than I did. The conflict laid with the two parts of the movie. The first one centers on McQueen and Mako, and their budding mentorship. In a lot of ways, the Sand Pebbles ship mirrors the social situation in China. You have the Westerners living grand and comfortable lives, the coolers doing the menial work and getting the short end of the stick, and a solid wall of estrangement between these two casts in society. McQueen and Lo Pan's friendship inevitable cause them to bump up against that cast society. However, that societal aspect sort of wanes in the second half, when the story focuses more on McQueen and his love interest. The transition jarred me, somehow, like if we jumped from one kind of a story into another kind of a story, though I still liked it.
However, as I mulled over the movie in my mind, it dawned on me what a seamless character arc this movie presented. McQueen's character is not at all as cool or mature as his usual roles are, Hollman is more in the "school-boy" stage of his life as the movie commenced. He begins as this guy who just wants to be left alone with his engine, allowing the navy to take care of everything else. Hence his emotional distance from Candice Bergen in the first half. However, his mentorship with Mako lulls him out of his shell. He is a loner -- but he finally manages to bond with another loner, through their work on the engine. Then Mako dies. The next time he meets Candice, he tells her that "the engine doesn't matter as much anymore".
The McQueen at the beginning of the film would never have jeopardized his standing with the navy or his engine. His relationship with Lo Pan changed that. He grew emotionally, learned the fulfillment of bonding with another human being. So when he meets Candice again, he is much more able to act on his budding romantic emotions. He knows that his job just isn't everything in his life anymore -- even though he obviously still highly values it, and can't just walk away from it without a lot of existential anxiety since it's such a big part of him. His character arc is the spinal tissue that connects the different parts of the film.
So yeah, Sand Pebbles was one of those movies that I initially held at arms-length, but found more cohesive and fulfilling the more I thought of it.
I didn't really like the Attenborough-Maily relationship though. It seemed like way to much of a caricature. It's conceptual stockness just looked bad in comparison to everything else.
Anyways, what else did I watch?
Wind River I really wanted to like but it just had some serious problems. It's one of those movies were everyone garishly states the themes of the movie outright -- instead of just allowing the situation presented to speak for itself. And the bad guys plans were just head-scratching (what excactly were they trying to accomplish by killing an FBI agent, it'll just bring even more heat on them).
Killing Them Softly sort of did the same thing, but much more successfully since it proposed the themes as conflict between characters and a result of the current socio-cultural climate of the USA.
The Lunchbox brought a lot of heartfelt, everyday pathos.
Mr Holmes was good in that it used the wizened Sherlock Holmes character to tell a story more about the importance of common humanism rather than Holmes superhuman detective skills.
Mannequin in Red was a striking proto-Mario Bava picture. No idea we made films as good as that in Sweden.
The Master is probably one of the best movies of the decade. And lastly, I watched
Spitfire with Katherine Hepburn, one of the movies that she purportedly campaigned hard for and made sure she earned her reputation as box-office poison in the pre-Philidelphia Story days. It was thoroughly mediocre.