Thursday, September 29, 2022

Thursday Movie Picks #429 Mystery/ TMP Television Edition - Cold Cases


Hello there and welcome to Thursday Movie Picks a weekly series where you share your picks each Thursday. The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five titles and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page here.

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This week's Thursday Movie Picks is Mystery/Television Edition - Cold Cases

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Inspired by the 2000s TV series called Cold Case, this is another theme that I mistakenly believed was going to be easy. Anyway, I still managed to find three picks and am going with all British series.
 
Unforgotten (2015 - )
This is a pretty good crime mystery drama. It’s a one case per season series and usually a season opens with a body being found which tend to be a missing person from a cold case several years or decades old. I like the series but I do kinda find one thing annoying that is the lead female detective. She is sometimes overly emotional, like sniffling and nearly tearing up emotional even when briefing her subordinates. I get that the cases are heartbreaking, but if you are a commanding officer and need to cry…go into supply closet or something, do it in private…the people you lead do not need to see you all weepy.

Bancroft (2017 - 2020)
A young detective investigating a cold case finds that a senior detective may be connected to it. This is a decent crime thriller with a cunning manipulative villain. The last episode of season 1 was pretty diabolical.
 
The Pembrokeshire Murders (2021)
Based on a real police cold case investigation of unsolved 1980s murder cases. This is another decent crime drama and a sobering reminder how long it can take to catch a perpetrator. The murder cases were two decades old and it took about another half decade to reinvestigate and build a case against the perpetrator.
 
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Thursday, September 22, 2022

Thursday Movie Picks #428 Mystery Edition - Female Investigators (Private or Police)


Hello there and welcome to Thursday Movie Picks a weekly series where you share your picks each Thursday. The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five titles and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page here.

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This week's Thursday Movie Picks is Mystery Edition - Female Investigators (Private or Police)

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This theme is quite a challenge. I think there are much more female investigator roles on TV than there are in movies. Anyway, the past year or so I've been watching a lot of older 2000s and 1990s movies that I've missed and here are 3 that had female investigators.
 
Lethal Weapon 3 (1992)
I had watched Lethal Weapon 4 more recently but I think I liked this better and Rene Russo who plays the internal affairs officer got a lot more to do here, while in 4 she was just the pregnant girlfriend.
 
Copycat (1995)
Criminal profiling was probably such a new thing to explore in a crime thriller back in the 90s, now it's almost a given in every crime movie and TV show. Anyway Copycat was just very 90s and it was a pretty good thriller; I like it. It also had good performances from its two female leads, Sigourney Weaver who plays a psychologist and Helen Hunt who plays the detective.

Taking Lives (2004)
I don't think this is as strong as Copycat. It has a little more cheese but still an entertaining enough crime thriller in which Angelina Jolie plays an FBI agent assisting the Canadian police to profile and catch a serial killer that takes the identity of every new victim.

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Thursday, September 15, 2022

Thursday Movie Picks #427 Mystery Edition - Media or Technology Mysteries


Hello there and welcome to Thursday Movie Picks a weekly series where you share your picks each Thursday. The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five titles and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page here.

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This week's Thursday Movie Picks is Mystery Edition - Media or Technology Mysteries

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Third Mystery Edition. I'm going for the most recent ones that I like.
 
Kimi (2022)
A tech worker finds evidence of a crime in a work file. I really enjoyed this. I came in knowing very little of what it was about because the synopsis I had read was quite vague. Basically a woman, Angela, works for a company that runs a virtual assistant service called Kimi which is something like Alexa and Siri. She gets the failed commands audio files where Kimi doesn't understand the garbled commands or sometimes because as a computer Kimi just doesn't understand the context the user is using. So Angela is tasked to make sense of these failed commands and program Kimi to be able to read such commands better in the future. Then one day she gets a very unintelligible audio file where it seemed to be picking up the sounds of a crime occurring in the background and so she goes on a quest to find out which user's file it was and try to get help. Anyway, the premise is so interesting and I found it to be a pretty good thriller that feels very current. Also one of the characters in the movie actually references a real life case where the police wanted to use an Alexa recording as evidence in an investigation.
 
Upgrade (2018)
Set in a tech obsessed near-future, Grey a mechanic who becomes a quadriplegic after an attack that also killed his wife, is offered a secret unapproved experimental operation where he receives a chip implant that allows him to regain his mobility. Disappointed that the police investigation of the attack that killed his wife hasn't gotten anywhere, now secretly mobile, he begins his own investigation. I've picked this a few times before and it's here again because it is such a good sci-fi thriller that is very techy.

Searching (2018)
When his daughter goes missing, a father desperately goes through her laptop tracing her digital footprints to find her. I thought I had picked this at least once before, but apparently not. I really like Searching. It's a very good suspenseful thriller which does a great job of presenting the apps, websites, messages, etc on the screen as it tells the mystery of what happened to the girl.

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Thursday, September 8, 2022

Thursday Movie Picks #426 Mystery Edition - Historical Mysteries


Hello there and welcome to Thursday Movie Picks a weekly series where you share your picks each Thursday. The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five titles and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page here.

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This week's Thursday Movie Picks is Mystery Edition - Historical Mysteries

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Second Mystery Edition. This a quite an easy one. Anything with a period setting. I'm picking as usual the most recent ones I've that I also liked.
 
Death on the Nile (2022)
I've only read two of Agatha Christie's books and I'm not really a fan. I especially do not like her smarty detective style novels of which Poirot falls into. So I did not like Murder on the Orient Express. I thought the mystery (which was clearly inspired by the Lindbergh kidnapping) was convoluted and stupid. *SPOILER* Why anyone who was not family (some were only ex servants/employees) want to get involved in some rich peoples' quest for violent justice and jeopardise their own morals and freedom, when the rich people would never do the same for them, and why the rich people didn’t simply hire a hitman...now that should be the real mystery. Anyway...so I was surprised that I liked the Death on the Nile movie. The movie’s mystery is much simpler: love, money and jealousy. It also had a much more fun setting, a river cruise ship.

Enola Holmes (2020)
I've picked this before and I'm picking it again because it is such a fun adventure mystery flick following Sherlock's little sister as she goes looking for her missing mother. The sequel is coming this November.

Elizabeth Is Missing (2019)
Maud is suffering from dementia and depends on reminders and routines to go about her day and when she isn't able to meet her friend, she thinks she has gone missing. Decades ago when Maud was a teenager, her older sister disappeared never to be seen again. Now Maud is confused and agitated. She can't tell if her friend is really missing or if she is superimposing her fragmented past memories of her sister's disappearance on the present. This was good, sad and well performed. It was quite heartbreaking watching Maud sift through her distant past and the recent ones trying to reorder her memories to make sense of it all. 

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Thursday, September 1, 2022

Thursday Movie Picks #425 Mystery Edition - Capers


Hello there and welcome to Thursday Movie Picks a weekly series where you share your picks each Thursday. The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five titles and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page here.

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This week's Thursday Movie Picks is Mystery Edition - Capers

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I had the impression that capers were heists, but apparently they are kinda more broad theft movies which can include heists, frauds and cons. Capers also tend to be more lighthearted and comedic. I'm picking the most recent capers I've seen
 
Ocean's Eight (2018)
I think I've only seen the 60's Ocean's movie and parts of the George Clooney ones. So I don't know how much of a sequel or spinoff this is other that the main character is the Clooney's character's sister. Anyway I didn't love this, but it was fun and funny enough to be an entertaining watch.

Ant-Man (2015) and Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)
So as to the caper part...the Ant-Man is a thief, so he is always tasked with stealing something. I am very unfamiliar with the Ant-Man character thus I kinda went in thinking this seems like a silly superhero and the movie is probably is gonna be bad. Turned out I was pleasantly surprised. I found it to be probably two of the funniest Marvel movies.
 
Logan Lucky (2017)
This is a fun caper about two brothers pulling off a heist during a NASCAR race. Although it does take its time to show us what or how the actual heist is. But if you're patient it gets there.
 
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