mjjusa-1
Joined Dec 2005
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mjjusa-1's rating
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mjjusa-1's rating
I guess at a certain point in your life, most things remind you of other things.
Especially with movies.
Movies have been an important part of my life since my father took my brother and I to see westerns at Army post movie theaters wherever we were stationed.
Overseas Army posts were little Americas no matter where they were built or repurposed from Japanese Army camps, or Wehrmacht training bases. They all had American grocery stores called Commissaries.
They all had non-denominational churches staffed by Catholic priests and Protestant ministers.
Fancy restaurants with cocktail bars, and dance floors. They were all called Officer's Clubs.
They all had much more fun, cooler, restaurant/tavern/dance halls called NCO Clubs.
Officers' kids longed to go to the NCO clubs. We weren't allowed to.
They all had a gym with basketball courts, weights, climbing ropes, trampolines, medicine balls, machines that wiggled the fat away, small hot boxes that you sat in and sweated the fat away, and even indoor pools to use in winter when the Officer's Club with its outdoor Olympic sized pool was closed.
Oh, at Fort Benning, tennis courts with pro instructors and beginning classes.
Major Freeman Ledwith took my brother and I to the Camp Fuchinobe Theater in Japan to see Red River. The first movie I remember.
Many decades of movie going on, when I see an old movie in a theater, Brazil recently, I have the odd feeling of meeting a thirty years younger Michael Jones while watching it.
He's sitting two rows down and four seats over as my reaction to a scene in 2025 rubs up against my initial, oft remembered and discussed over drinks with friends reaction the first time I saw it.
As if two movie lovers passing in the night, nod to each other in a mysterious recognition as one experience overlaps with another.
And, when watching a new movie, like yesterday seeing 'I'm Still Here', it becomes a layered experience of 'the movie' and all the movies I've seen.
Movies tugging at my shirt, sotto voce-ing, remember 'Z'?
Costa-Gavras' masterpiece.
'The Lives of Others'?
The movie that introduced the word Stasi to America.
'The Battle of Algiers'?
'I'm Still Here' is set during the first years of an anti-communist military takeover in Brazil. Based on a memoir written by the son of a former Congressman, arrested and taken away by undercover government agents.
His devastated wife and children in their nice house, living a nice life left wondering what has just happened?
Armed agents in civilian clothes. The father seized and 'disappeared'.
Don't worry, he'll be back in a few hours.
Beyond other movies, reminding me of what happened in America after J6. The Government raiding homes at 5am.
Armed FBI agents and US Marshalls.
Citizens bundled away.
Wives and children left sobbing and frightened.
In America.
Older movies flitting through my brain pan, usually a pleasant exercise in time and memory. The gut punch of watching 'I'm Still Here', the punch of recent events.
All brought on by a movie. A great movie.
The family real. The abducted husband missed and worried about with increasing dread by the family. The actress playing the wife, thrust by a tectonic shift in Brazilian history, into an unimaginable new reality, wonderful.
It's a movie of course.
But, so human. So real.
Me, running into a recent me, forced to think about the sudden, arbitrary, un-Constitutional COVID shutdowns. Being forced to get a vaccination. To carry a card showing that I had gotten one.
The arrests of church goers. Human behavior dictated by government diktat.
Like what it was like to be alive as the Nazis seized power.
One day, one thing. The next day, something unimaginable.
I was familiar with the Argentina of the The Mothers of Plazo de Mayo protesting the abductions of their children by the military junta. Of the torture used to discover communists. The secret executions. The hundreds of students and intellectuals being thrown out of helicopters, hands tied, over the ocean.
The disappeared.
The basis of a haunting novel by Lawrence Thornton, 'Imagining Argentina'.
Until seeing this movie, I had no knowledge of the same thing happening in Brazil.
'I'm Still Here' is an evocative film title.
This is recent, though unknown to most, history.
The mother in the movie is still here. The kids are still here.
Brazil convulsed again, in the aftermath of a bent election and the attempt to jail the probable winner and former President, teetering on the brink of violence again.
And, of course, we're still here after living through the COVID hysteria.
Living through the 2020 election/post J6 police state excesses.
Until recently, hundreds of Americans had been arrested in raids and put in prison for 'disrupting an official proceeding', and 'trespassing'.
You might meet yourself while watching 'I'm Still Here' because you too may have sat in other dark theaters, amid strangers, watching images move on a big screen like me.
If you see 'I'm Still Here', you too might remember 'Z', and the other movies about worlds turned upside down by governments.
It certainly will make you remember the videos of the father arrested in front of his wife and kids by armed FBI agents in military gear and bundled into a government SUV.
Gleefully covered live by news networks alerted by the government to make sure Americans discovered, perhaps for the first time, who was ruled by whom.
Until Americans pushed back in the next national election.
It's a great movie. I hope Oscar honors it.
Highly recommended.
Especially with movies.
Movies have been an important part of my life since my father took my brother and I to see westerns at Army post movie theaters wherever we were stationed.
Overseas Army posts were little Americas no matter where they were built or repurposed from Japanese Army camps, or Wehrmacht training bases. They all had American grocery stores called Commissaries.
They all had non-denominational churches staffed by Catholic priests and Protestant ministers.
Fancy restaurants with cocktail bars, and dance floors. They were all called Officer's Clubs.
They all had much more fun, cooler, restaurant/tavern/dance halls called NCO Clubs.
Officers' kids longed to go to the NCO clubs. We weren't allowed to.
They all had a gym with basketball courts, weights, climbing ropes, trampolines, medicine balls, machines that wiggled the fat away, small hot boxes that you sat in and sweated the fat away, and even indoor pools to use in winter when the Officer's Club with its outdoor Olympic sized pool was closed.
Oh, at Fort Benning, tennis courts with pro instructors and beginning classes.
Major Freeman Ledwith took my brother and I to the Camp Fuchinobe Theater in Japan to see Red River. The first movie I remember.
Many decades of movie going on, when I see an old movie in a theater, Brazil recently, I have the odd feeling of meeting a thirty years younger Michael Jones while watching it.
He's sitting two rows down and four seats over as my reaction to a scene in 2025 rubs up against my initial, oft remembered and discussed over drinks with friends reaction the first time I saw it.
As if two movie lovers passing in the night, nod to each other in a mysterious recognition as one experience overlaps with another.
And, when watching a new movie, like yesterday seeing 'I'm Still Here', it becomes a layered experience of 'the movie' and all the movies I've seen.
Movies tugging at my shirt, sotto voce-ing, remember 'Z'?
Costa-Gavras' masterpiece.
'The Lives of Others'?
The movie that introduced the word Stasi to America.
'The Battle of Algiers'?
'I'm Still Here' is set during the first years of an anti-communist military takeover in Brazil. Based on a memoir written by the son of a former Congressman, arrested and taken away by undercover government agents.
His devastated wife and children in their nice house, living a nice life left wondering what has just happened?
Armed agents in civilian clothes. The father seized and 'disappeared'.
Don't worry, he'll be back in a few hours.
Beyond other movies, reminding me of what happened in America after J6. The Government raiding homes at 5am.
Armed FBI agents and US Marshalls.
Citizens bundled away.
Wives and children left sobbing and frightened.
In America.
Older movies flitting through my brain pan, usually a pleasant exercise in time and memory. The gut punch of watching 'I'm Still Here', the punch of recent events.
All brought on by a movie. A great movie.
The family real. The abducted husband missed and worried about with increasing dread by the family. The actress playing the wife, thrust by a tectonic shift in Brazilian history, into an unimaginable new reality, wonderful.
It's a movie of course.
But, so human. So real.
Me, running into a recent me, forced to think about the sudden, arbitrary, un-Constitutional COVID shutdowns. Being forced to get a vaccination. To carry a card showing that I had gotten one.
The arrests of church goers. Human behavior dictated by government diktat.
Like what it was like to be alive as the Nazis seized power.
One day, one thing. The next day, something unimaginable.
I was familiar with the Argentina of the The Mothers of Plazo de Mayo protesting the abductions of their children by the military junta. Of the torture used to discover communists. The secret executions. The hundreds of students and intellectuals being thrown out of helicopters, hands tied, over the ocean.
The disappeared.
The basis of a haunting novel by Lawrence Thornton, 'Imagining Argentina'.
Until seeing this movie, I had no knowledge of the same thing happening in Brazil.
'I'm Still Here' is an evocative film title.
This is recent, though unknown to most, history.
The mother in the movie is still here. The kids are still here.
Brazil convulsed again, in the aftermath of a bent election and the attempt to jail the probable winner and former President, teetering on the brink of violence again.
And, of course, we're still here after living through the COVID hysteria.
Living through the 2020 election/post J6 police state excesses.
Until recently, hundreds of Americans had been arrested in raids and put in prison for 'disrupting an official proceeding', and 'trespassing'.
You might meet yourself while watching 'I'm Still Here' because you too may have sat in other dark theaters, amid strangers, watching images move on a big screen like me.
If you see 'I'm Still Here', you too might remember 'Z', and the other movies about worlds turned upside down by governments.
It certainly will make you remember the videos of the father arrested in front of his wife and kids by armed FBI agents in military gear and bundled into a government SUV.
Gleefully covered live by news networks alerted by the government to make sure Americans discovered, perhaps for the first time, who was ruled by whom.
Until Americans pushed back in the next national election.
It's a great movie. I hope Oscar honors it.
Highly recommended.
Well, now that the Oscar Best Actress Award has been given out seven months early to Willa Fitzgerald we can discuss the most imaginative, stylish movie of 2024. Maybe the most imaginative, stylish movie since Atomic Blonde. There are similarities between them
The same for half remembered Linda Fiorentino noirs from the early nineties. But, read this with a grain of salt because 'chapter' movies 'al la Tarantino', told out of order are a favorite genre of mine.
A serial killer is afoot in the Oregon (Washington?) forests. The pursued/pursuer is desperately seeking escape/the kill. The Serial Killer does not want to kill but, hey, scheisse happens. Red plays almost as big a scene/wardrobe role as it did in Don't Look Now. The killer as demented and sane, cool and grotesque as the killer in the Australian movie Crater Lake. There are similarities between them.
Will absolutely see it again to pay attention to how Willa Fitzgerald does that voodoo that she do to the audience.
The same for half remembered Linda Fiorentino noirs from the early nineties. But, read this with a grain of salt because 'chapter' movies 'al la Tarantino', told out of order are a favorite genre of mine.
A serial killer is afoot in the Oregon (Washington?) forests. The pursued/pursuer is desperately seeking escape/the kill. The Serial Killer does not want to kill but, hey, scheisse happens. Red plays almost as big a scene/wardrobe role as it did in Don't Look Now. The killer as demented and sane, cool and grotesque as the killer in the Australian movie Crater Lake. There are similarities between them.
Will absolutely see it again to pay attention to how Willa Fitzgerald does that voodoo that she do to the audience.
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