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FBG Movie Club: We're Getting the Band Back Together: Metallica vs Nina Simone Movie Docs (8 Viewers)

I currently have

  • Netflix

    Votes: 9 90.0%

  • Amazon Prime

    Votes: 9 90.0%

  • HBO Max

    Votes: 8 80.0%

  • Hulu

    Votes: 8 80.0%

  • Disney+

    Votes: 6 60.0%

  • Criterion

    Votes: 1 10.0%

  • TCM Chanel

    Votes: 6 60.0%
  • Total voters
    10
Don Quixote said:
My view of Field of Dreams is probably better suited to the “hot takes” thread.
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and we cant have anything like that in the Movie Club. we must tread carefully in avoidance of anything interesting occuring in this forum, especially out of respect for sacred rituals such as Having a Catch with the Dead or the possibility that one of the 509,143 movies one might address could be a FBGMC selection sometime in the future and skew reaction

 
Don Quixote said:
My view of Field of Dreams is probably better suited to the “hot takes” thread.
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Here's my 'hot take' on Field of Dreams:

I've seen this film many times, but the one time that stands out to me most was when I watched it with one of my sons when he was about 5 or 6.  I was working graveyard shifts at the time so my sleep schedule was all fouled up and I know I drifted in and out while we were watching it, but whenever I opened my eyes again, my boy was watching as intently as a 5 year old could.  This is the son who took to baseball at age 2 and is still playing in college, so whenever he used to ask me to play catch with him, even when I wasn't feeling it, "Hey...dad?........You wanna have a catch?" always spurred me on, and it wasn't just playing catch but also any time any of my kids wanted me to do something for them/with them.  Even to this day, when they're 22, 21 and almost 18, it's a reflex that if/when they ask me for a ride to work, or to get down something from a high shelf, I do it without hesitation, because I know that there will come a time that they won't.

wikkidpissah said:
and we cant have anything like that in the Movie Club. we must tread carefully in avoidance of anything interesting occurring in this forum, especially out of respect for sacred rituals such as Having a Catch with the Dead or the possibility that one of the 509,143 movies one might address could be a FBGMC selection sometime in the future and skew reaction
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Um, my dad's still alive.

 
Maybe Field of Dreams will hit me differently when my son gets older. Despite having fond memories of “having a catch” with my dad, it didn’t really hit me differently after he passed away.

I found the father-son rift poorly described, and kind of absurd — Ray’s dad basically stops talking with Ray after Ray said some negative stuff about Shoeless Joe Jackson, and now God (or whomever) is putting the burden on Ray to build a baseball diamond to bring Shoeless Joe Jackson back to life as some kind of penance.  It’s just odd.  

Terence Mann is excitedly watching these ballplayers, and not ranting about Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston getting excluded even in the afterlife?

Then there’s the economic issues about how plowing a small section of crops is going to cause the farm to fail or something, until a bunch of nostalgia-driven folks show up in the carloads at the end eager to pay money to watch. And both the Kinsellas (and the movie’s producers) live happily ever after.

I’m sure there’s more, but I would have to watch again.

 
Don Quixote said:
Maybe Field of Dreams will hit me differently when my son gets older. Despite having fond memories of “having a catch” with my dad, it didn’t really hit me differently after he passed away.

I found the father-son rift poorly described, and kind of absurd — Ray’s dad basically stops talking with Ray after Ray said some negative stuff about Shoeless Joe Jackson, and now God (or whomever) is putting the burden on Ray to build a baseball diamond to bring Shoeless Joe Jackson back to life as some kind of penance.  It’s just odd.  

Terence Mann is excitedly watching these ballplayers, and not ranting about Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston getting excluded even in the afterlife?

Then there’s the economic issues about how plowing a small section of crops is going to cause the farm to fail or something, until a bunch of nostalgia-driven folks show up in the carloads at the end eager to pay money to watch. And both the Kinsellas (and the movie’s producers) live happily ever after.

I’m sure there’s more, but I would have to watch again.
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it might be anachronistic, depending on one's age. Greatest Generation dads were very busy, even with their leisure. and they had figured out how to get stuff and not get killed usually in spite of the responsibilities intrinsic to having likely been conceived to be a farmhand or apprentice in their father's trade. it was, therfore, the code not to intervene in their own sons' well-beings even when they had time to, for fear of spoiling the urgency motive by which successful living is achieved. therefore, "a catch" was the, if not the only,  moment between Boomers & their fathers and the source of great nostalgia and motive behind ruining their own sons  & daughters w indulgence. i never played catch w me Da and turned out perfectly awful, so....

the rest can be chalked up to how hard it is to write fables.

ETA: great point about Negro League ballplayers, tho

 
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On a movie club note, I ate some spaghetti while drinking a martini last night, and thought about The Apartment.  But watched 13th instead.  Powerful doc connecting the dots from the past to the present (featuring the real Bryan Stevenson — albeit, unlike Michael B. Jordan’s rendition, with his shirt on throughout).

I still have to watch “I am Not Your Negro” for the extra credit.

 
I've never seen Field of Dreams.  I read Shoeless Joe and enjoyed it but the changes made for the movie made me less inclined to watch it.

 
krista4 said:
Not an easy watch.  But I was so moved by it I went and saw it in the theater two days in a row.
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I finished watching this and I agree it is quite moving. I am now interested in reading some of Baldwins stuff. He appears to be a very calm and quick thinker. I also felt he was very good at keeping his emotions in check. Very good movie that I have now recommended to friends here.

 
Watched Billy Wilder's Hollywood directorial debut "The Major and the Minor" last night.  It's a screwball comedy from 1942 starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland.  The premise is that Rogers, who was 30 at the time, gets mistaken for an 11 year old girl named Su-Su. 

It's totally preposterous and kind of creepy but the snappy dialog and gags still worked for me.  Rogers throws herself into her character's multiple personalities and Robert Benchley steals the couple of scenes he's in.  Streaming on TCM through July 6.

 
"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." - Abraham Lincoln

I look at all the BLM stuff since the murder of George Floyd and it breaks my heart, but not in the way one might think. Growing up on the seam between white & black urban neighborhoods, i watched a lot of young people just like me who were not at all like me. They were different because they woke up with a curse on their head and i didn't. It mattered not whether the curse played out in any particular fashion on any particular day. All that mattered is that they had to live as though it might.

I look at all the BLM stuff since the murder of George Floyd and i see young people with 1000x times the opportunity of those kids on the other side of Washington St in my youth, but just as cursed. Just as cursed, but cursing themselves as much as society does. Cursing themselves with obsession over a past they did not choose and a present they can't control. 

I look at all the BLM stuff since the murder of George Floyd and i think of my Mary. Her hair was almost white and skin almost translucent, but she was the most cursed person i ever knew. As i've recounted before, she was not only molested from age 6-14 by her natural father but traded like a baseball card to other Wisconsin country club perv dads and actually had to "seduce" her father regularly once his attention turned to her younger brother in the hope that he might be the one of the five Lauer children not to feel their father's hot breath and cruel hand (she was successful).

My Mary kept her curse as well as she could, but all its facets showed on her face. Her features rarely softened, kept mostly in a defensive sneer. In the mornings, she'd flash into a rancid wince like dogs get when theyre overtaken by a growl. And, no matter how much fun she was having, i would occasionally see her eyes narrow and jaw tighten like a gunfighter and know she'd just been flooded by some subliminal flashcard of former violation.

My Mary could not handle the damage done to her subconscious without being loaded a good portion of the time, but she was adamant about it not affecting her consciously. In her life and family dealings, she firmly believed that letting what was going on in her insides affect her personal actions was letting the monsters molest her all over again and she simply would not allow it. She kept a relationship with her father and i'm almost sure she picked me as her partner in life because i was his match in verbal gamesmanship. She rarely talked about her childhood, except to say that it was taken from her,, but it was an honest pleasure to watch her engine whirrr in determination that neither her past nor even an addled present would impact what happened next

My Mary, above all, was a transcendent psychiatric nurse. We met working on an adolescent psych unit and, not only was she hard & hip in a way her charges adored, but she specialized in abused kids & queer kids & bullied kids and gave life to their minds and comfort to their hearts that the rest of the world had seemingly conspired to rob them of. She might coddle after a breakthrough or sumn, but was relentless the rest of the time - never letting them simmer in the rendered fat of their misfortunes nor tantrum to get some catharsis. My heart would swell to bear witness - you could just see the flow chart of all the future generations that would be less tainted because of the work she did that day. She'd leave Truckee Meadows Hospital as gassed as a baller who'd left everything on the court and was now counting the buckets she'd filled.

What has this to do with the FBG flix for July? Not a lot, but i dont discuss race around here much because talking about it among mostly white people is a waste of spacetime, so ima get my share out when i do. Certainly not much as far as Just Mercy goes - although i was glad to see a "black" movie that was just corny. Usually this kind of project is saddled with contrived nobilities by those who like to attach honorifics to victimhood, but this was an honest effort that mostly missed the mark, especially missing the fact that Harvard grads, even of color, carry the crimson arrogance they are taught, which would have brought a more palpable drama to the down-dressings of Deep Slouthness. 

My quibble is with 13th. Ava Duvernay is an impressive talent. Her When They See Us is one of the very few films to help this ol' ofay internalize some of the curse of racism and her selections and analysis as host of the last season of TCM's The Essentials opened my eyes on some things. Her gift for polemics is apparent in 13th but all this talent will be mostly for naught unless she has a second gear.

It's time for Miss Duvernay and black people in general to learn the lesson my Mary did. She was not successful for herself, could not lose the the curse of her past nor gain full control of her present, but she was blindingly successful at affecting the future. The curse of institutionalized racism is real, just as my Mary's was, but the white world is not mostly racist, just as they are not mostly molesters. I'm comfortable saying a huge majority of us would, at the the very least, like this legacy of hate which stains, if not curses, us to be over and most would be glad to help. But black media people are still obsessed with and caught up in the catch & punish phase and are leading their people down a dead-end street. 

Most non-blacks know the Curse is real, the pain is real, the death is real - the grocery lists aint helping, they're almost disqualifying help. The Curse didn't end with 100 years of "freedom", the Curse didn't end with 50 years of "equality". Black people dont have a past they chose for themselves nor a present they can control. The future is essentially their only unCursed domain- every second spent dwelling on the past or indulging the pain, confusion & hate they feel today detracts from that legacy. There are still molesters out there, but still giving them their moments ensures they will curse the future as well. If we dont have more corny, hopeful movies about black folk or polemics from filmmakers as talented as Ms Duvernay about black people leading America's future, the Curse will outlive Black Lives Matter.

 
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I agree with Wikkid in the sense that much talk about racism or discrimination in the criminal justice system between a bunch of white guys 35-70 years old seems pointless in 2020. I also don't think there is anything wrong with watching, listening and our own self reflection. Sometimes we should just listen. As for movie making, Just Mercy is flawed. Corny is maybe a good way to describe it or just cliched. Every character is almost totally good or totally bad- not much gray except for in the vet on death row. I've heard the book is much better. I still liked it though, it was a solid movie. It actually didn't feel like a 2020 movie but more like a 1990 movie. That's not a pejorative, just an observation that they don't seem to make movies quite like this these days. 

 
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I liked both movies this month, and they definitely were topical. 

I could see where Just Mercy gets a little criticism for being hammy portraying "good and bad" characters, but it did hit home for me in that instance. I'm a 54 y/o white dude, and never experienced racism directed towards me, but I saw it firsthand, in an ugly way. In the early 90's, I worked as a retail manager. Our district manager was an old southern dude named Pete. Pete was racist, in that good-old-boy joking way. Lots of innuendo and N-word jokes/etc. He was cordial and smiling whenever he was face to face with POC, but I knew what he really thought. And he flat out said "I will never have a black manager working in one of my stores" - I mean, he told me that exact line. I'm in my mid 20's, and a little... well, not stunned, but I'm new to management, and not really experienced enough to call him out on it.

Anyway,  my point is this is not ancient history - this is 1991, and in NY. And while it's more likely he's retired or dead (he'd be in his early 80's now), it's possible Pete could still be making decisions somewhere. And even if he's not, there are still millions of "Petes" out there. 

Bringing this back to the movie, yes, in terms of race, the "evil" guys are indeed evil, and make big decisions based on nothing more than skin color. So I was ok with the stereotypes. It was well-acted, a good story based on real life, and reminded me of films like a Time to Kill and similar. Good two hours.

13th is... well, it's a documentary, and pretty typical of what I expected - it was very effective at showing how we've almost criminalized color without really saying such. I liked that much of it was relevant to my life and experiences, and appreciated the look back on things I lived through. I was a teen / young 20's in the 80's, and not mature enough to see what was happening with the war on drugs / crack / Willie Horton in terms of race. I saw Willie Horton as a criminal and crack as "really bad", not really understanding the racial context behind the media portrayals. But looking back, it was as bad as The Birth of a Nation, just not as in-your-face. I appreciated this documentary. 

 
While Just Mercy does traffic in some clichés, I hesitate to put in that bucket because it is based on a true story and an important story worth watching.  And it did avoid the “white savior” cliché that often gets portrayed in stories like this.  If the story feels a bit familiar, that’s on America.  I don’t think there is anything wrong with showing that incidents like those portrayed of people getting sentenced to death row for crimes that they did not commit are not isolated. Hurricane was based on an arrest in 1966, which may feel like a different era in race relations to most, whereas Just Mercy based on one 20 years later.  

Agree with jwb’s take on 13th.  It was pretty powerful in bringing everything together on the rise of the prison population.  All of the “Say No to Drugs” type stuff in the 1980s seemed a good, innocuous message to my younger self back then, but I did not really understand the impacts of it until much later.

 
now, the Movie Club "extra credit" of I Am Not Your Negro is a brilliant use of time for anyone. I didnt much care for Baldwin backinaday. I had very little use for the effete, "reviewing the world" cabal of Susskind/Buckley/Mailer/Vidal and i grouped Baldwin's ambitions with theirs. Furthermore, in an age of Malcolm, MLK and the gloriously glamorous Fred Hampton, introspection without action on matters of race seemed counterproductive.

i dont know if we caught up to James Baldwin or he's caught up (or sunk down) with us, but that brand of introspection becomes paramount in this selfish era. Agree with him or not (you'll probably do both), his "moral imagination" (as Atlantic Magazine called it) touches the heart of restoration and resolution in just the manner this relativistic era needs to hear. wikkid say check it -

 
Don't have too much to contribute, a lot of good observations already.   I watched the extra credit movie too, and I liked all three for the most part, but I was for sure more into the mindframe for the documentaries as I powered through these, and so Just Mercy suffered a bit by comparison.  I think 13th did as good as it could toeing the line down the middle, especially with the Clinton stuff and PIC.  

Good suggestions this month! 

 
KarmaPolice said:
Anyway - I hope we didn't hit our wall with the movie club. :(
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FWIW, I don't feel like we've hit a wall, but for me, this month's films were too 'topical' whereas I could have used more of an 'escape' from current events, or at least, this variety  of current event. I know I've missed the last two months, but hopefully the next choices will have some sort of appeal for me, even though I have no idea what will or won't appeal until I find out what they are.

 
Ilov80s said:
Yeah not sure what it is but COVID seems to have killed a lot of the interest. Or we’ve done a bad job picking movies the last few months. 
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0 clue.  

Personally, I have started to watch more movies again, but with everything swirling around I seem to find myself watching crap I've seen before or if its something new, it probably on the light side.   I don't think there is anything wrong with any of our pairings, but I others are in my camp, maybe they aren't up for more serious fare + discussions, and on the flip side if it's something most have seen before or on the light side, there is probably not a lot of discussion.  Not sure where that leaves us, but I would like a way for this to continue.  

 
Mr. Mojo said:
Maybe something more mainstream next?
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I was looking at a possible pairing this month that is a beloved classic movie we all have likely seen but I would bet for many it’s been 20-30 years with a brand new movie that has similar plot but was likely seen by nobody here. I’m still debating.

The Man With No Name said:
Suggestion:

Morricone and/or Reiner with their recent deaths
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Certainly could and those would be mainstream. There’s just very limited options to choose from. Or at least mainstream movies. Morricone has a bunch of spaghetti westerns steaming. It might be a crapshoot but I could definitely do spaghetti western theme. What do you think?

 
Ilov80s said:
Yeah not sure what it is but COVID seems to have killed a lot of the interest. Or we’ve done a bad job picking movies the last few months. 
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Has there been a large drop off? I don't think I got to vote on the documentary. I do not recall ever seeing the poll for it? 

 
KarmaPolice said:
Anyway - I hope we didn't hit our wall with the movie club. :(
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Ilov80s said:
Yeah not sure what it is but COVID seems to have killed a lot of the interest. Or we’ve done a bad job picking movies the last few months. 
Click to expand...


KarmaPolice said:
0 clue.  
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maybe its cuz, early on,  there were lots of comments so, if all you had to say was that one movie was like Groundhog Day with kittens and the waitress in the other was heartbreakingly charming, it would get lost in the mix even if it was silly.

now, to make a comment you gotta compete with the forum "experts", one of whom is a flashback factory who hammers out 4000 words of gasbaggery about the moral imperatives and Rosicrucian connections between the two masterpi. i mean, buy yourself a meerschaum pipe and beat yourself to death with it already...

 
prosopis said:
Has there been a large drop off? I don't think I got to vote on the documentary. I do not recall ever seeing the poll for it? 
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Last month was the fewest votes and comments we’ve had and then we only have 6 votes this month. We were in the 18-30 range for most other months. I didn’t put up a poll for 13th because it just didn’t seem right to rate the movie given the seriousness of the topic and it being a doc. 

 
Just curious- are we losing more with the Prime pairings? 

Seems like everyone keeps NF (for some unknown reason ;) ), but have people moved off Prime to others like Disney in 2020? 

 
Ilov80s said:
I was looking at a possible pairing this month that is a beloved classic movie we all have likely seen but I would bet for many it’s been 20-30 years with a brand new movie that has similar plot but was likely seen by nobody here. I’m still debating.

Certainly could and those would be mainstream. There’s just very limited options to choose from. Or at least mainstream movies. Morricone has a bunch of spaghetti westerns steaming. It might be a crapshoot but I could definitely do spaghetti western theme. What do you think?
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There are some good-excellent spaghetti westerns Morricone did that some probably haven't seen. Whether they are free to see I have no idea. I have a bunch on dvd.

Edit: Just did a search on Amazon Prime video. Available movies: 

Once Upon A Time in The West
Death Rides a Horse
Crazy Desire
The Black Belly of the Tarantula
The Hellbenders
Autopsy
Memories of Anne Frank

There could be more
 

 
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Just throwing this out there...

"Tribute to Carl Reiner"

2 movies whose only connection is they both contain the line "Secure the perimeter." He said in an interview that one time this was the only criteria he and Mel Brooks used to decide which movie to watch; if we do that as well, there's a chance we may watch the same one they watched together.  Or we could just celebrate the spirit of their 'zaniness' and pick 2 otherwise unrelated films that only share one detail that's unimportant to the rest of the story.

 
The Man With No Name said:
There are some good-excellent spaghetti westerns Morricone did that some probably haven't seen. Whether they are free to see I have no idea. I have a bunch on dvd.

Edit: Just did a search on Amazon Prime video. Available movies: 

Once Upon A Time in The West
Death Rides a Horse
Crazy Desire
The Black Belly of the Tarantula
The Hellbenders
Autopsy
Memories of Anne Frank

There could be more
 
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There’s a few that I saw that looked like good choices. I’m definitely considering this idea as I do love Morricone. I would probably lean away from Once Upon a Time and The Good, The Bad, The Ugly (on NF) just because I feel like everyone has seen them. It might be more fun to do something a little different, maybe cheesier. I watched the original Django (not a Morricone movie but certainly in the style of many movies he did) and it was fantastic.Silly but in the best way possible.

Charlie Steiner said:
Just throwing this out there...

"Tribute to Carl Reiner"

2 movies whose only connection is they both contain the line "Secure the perimeter." He said in an interview that one time this was the only criteria he and Mel Brooks used to decide which movie to watch; if we do that as well, there's a chance we may watch the same one they watched together.  Or we could just celebrate the spirit of their 'zaniness' and pick 2 otherwise unrelated films that only share one detail that's unimportant to the rest of the story.
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My only issue with secure the perimeter is that I don’t know what movies that is said in and then when I find them I have to hope they are on NF or Prime. I wish their was a Spotify for movies that just had everything.

 
Ilov80s said:
No, I really liked @Don Quixote picks. I just think it was a combo of people looking for more escapism and some recognition of the downside of discussing racial issues in this context. 
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Time for a turn in the other direction?  I ##### about NF a bit, but I think it was that service I was excited to add the Verhoeven double feature of Total Recall/Starship Troopers to my queue.  ;)  

 
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