We watched a few good movies recently.

Made in Italy (2020) – A decent drama about a man and his son and their personal and family problems. The mother of the family died in a car accident when their son was very young, and the father took everything and anything that would remind his son of his mother and locked it away to try to protect his son from the pain of losing his mother. He even sent his son away to boarding school and abandoned their beautiful family home in Italy and moved away. As a result, the son grew up almost completely forgetting his entire childhood before his mother died.

Eventually, when the son is 22 and trying to make a living, he ends up having his own personal issues and is in need of a large sum of money to buy the gallery he runs or lose his job altogether. He tries to convince his father that they should sell the big abandoned house in Italy (they both own half of it) so he can buy the gallery. So they go back to the abandoned house where it is now just a run-down mess of an estate, so they try to fix it up. I’ll stop there.

Sandy and I both enjoyed the movie. It had its moments, both good and bad for the characters and in for the story itself, and we had a good time watching how everything turned out. It stars Liam Neeson as the father. The other actors in the movie I didn’t know.

An American Pickle (2020) – This was a pretty amusing movie starring Seth Rogen and Seth Rogen. Yep, he plays two characters in this movie– Herschel Greenbaum and Ben Greenbaum, Herschel’s great-grandson. Herschel gets a job in a pickle plant and a freak accident involving a swarm of rats ends in him accidentally falling into a pickle vat right at the instant the pickle plant is shut down and closed permanently, and the vat he fell into is immediately sealed shut. He is discovered 100 years later, in present-day, perfectly preserved and “pickled”. He finds all of his family long gone except one living relative–his great grandson Ben, who just happens to be exactly the same age as he is/was.

Seth Rogen pulls off a really good accent with Herschel and does an impressive job acting with himself through this story. It was pretty fun to watch and the story, albeit pretty far-fetched and very obviously just a silly comedy, turned out pretty good. Overall I enjoyed it a lot. Sandy, on the other hand, didn’t seem to get a lot of it and did a a lot of eye-rolling.

The Boys in Company C (1978) – I heard about this movie recently while watching a behind-the-scenes documentary on YouTube about Full Metal Jacket, my favorite war movie. They talked a lot about R. Lee Ermey, the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, and how he was an actual drill sergeant in the Marines when he was younger, and played a very similar drill sergeant in The Boys in Company C, another movie about Vietnam, that came out almost 10 years before Full Metal Jacket. That piqued my curiosity, so I had to find this movie and give it a watch. I’ve watched only half of it so far (this evening), so I can only say that I can tell it’s no Stanley Kubrick classic, but it’s pretty good and was probably highly rated back in 1978 when it came out. Things just aren’t as “polished” as Full Metal Jacket was, and even the drill instructors (R. Lee Ermey) didn’t have things as perfected as much, but it’s interesting to see the fates of each of it’s stars as the movie progresses and the story unfolds. Very good so far. I’ll finish it up tomorrow evening, probably.