Milking our Disney Plus further… just watched Encanto - fantastic music! The story is just a notch below that of Soul or Coco IMO. Still beats many newer Disney movies!
(And if Disney announces a new resort/park in Latin America, you heard it here first!! 
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I haven’t seen Coco but preferred Encanto to Soul. It took me several restarts to get into Soul. Encanto was awesome!
The new Matrix - Matrix: Resurrection - that was just released?
My wife and I thought Matrix 1 was amazing… great story, great acting, mind-blowing premise, etc. Matrix 2 & 3 were just action for action sake and didn’t hold a candle to the first. Looking at the previews we fear Matrix 4 is closer to 2 & 3 than to 1.
Yes. We watched it on HBO Max last night. The best part about it was that we didn’t pay for it. It’s been years since I’ve seen The matrix so I was just lost. But even H who is a big fan and loves Keanu Reeves hated it.
I didn’t know that Lucille flirted with communism before seeing the first few minutes of the Ricardos. I had to look up her biography, and yes, she registered with the CPA in 1936, she was appointed to the Central Committee of the CA CPA and she hosted CPA meetings at her house. (Her claims in the movie that she only “checked the wrong box” on a voting registration were patently false.)
Of course, in the 1930s the Soviets had done a pretty good job hiding the true nature of the regime and their many atrocities. Many in entertainment, the academy and public service thought communism was the path to utopia during this period.
RE: Communism in the 30’s, Oppenheimer faced similar questions when being approved to run the Manhattan Project. There is a line in a movie (Fat Man and Little Boy, perhaps?) where Oppie replies by saying that yeah, he attended Communist party meetings in college for the free beer and loose women! As mentioned, in those days communism wasn’t exactly synonymous with the Soviet version.
MADad, Oppenheimer was not the only one on the Manhattan Project who was sympathetic to communism. While working on the Manhattan Project Klause Fuchs and Theodore Hall provided information to the Soviets about the US atomic program. A slew of physicists working for Oppenheimer at Cal Berkeley - including some whose research were foundational to the US atomic program - were active members in the CPUSA and were not able to get security clearances.
I’ll disagree with you about communism not being synonymous with the Soviets in the 1930s; they were the only game in town. The atrocities of the Soviet system - purges, gulags, famines, murders, widespread loss of any freedom, etc. - however, were not widely known yet in the West (thanks, Walter Duranty).
I fear we are taking the thread on a tangent, so I won’t write anymore about communists in the US in the 1930s and 1940s here. Feel free to message me if you want to discuss further.
Back on topic, I saw The King’s Man over the holiday, largely to have something to do while it poured outside. It was surprisingly good, with a terrific cast (Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Aterton, Djimon Hounsou, and company) and a coherent storyline. It was not a cartoonish mess like the first two Kingsmen movies.
Haven’t watched Soul although I have been meaning to but Coco is amazing. Encanto was fine but Coco just tugs all the heartstrings in the right way. I would rewatch Coco and have. Encanto is probably one and done for me. I liked it but it was very much a kids’ movie ala Frozen but Coco gets the grown ups right in the ol’ ticker. Great movie for all ages.
Good summary! 
Liked Coco a lot. Thought Soul was brilliant at times.
After watching Solo, we watched 14 Peaks. Great real life premise but I thought the film did not work well.
We watched two films on cold war spying based upon real stories. The Courier, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Rachel Brosnahan (who will always be Mrs. Maisel to me). Very good. We then watched Red Joan, similar plot but retrospective, starring Judi Dench but really the younger version of Judi Dench, played by Sophie Cookson, carried the film (good actress and just gorgeous). I didn’t think it was as compelling as The Courier.
H and I decided to watch Being the Ricardos last night since I’ve been taking it easy this weekend recovering from Covid. We enjoyed the movie a lot. I thought it was an interesting way to present the story with the backdrop of Lucy being accused of being a communist.
“checked the wrong box” was what Desi wanted her to say. She says at the beginning something about doing it for her grandfather who was a member of the communist party (? I think, it’s been a few weeks since I watched)
I recently watched Red Joan based on a true story about an English woman who gave info about the atomic bomb to the Russians during the early years of WWII. Similar perspective of her trying to explain to her son that his attitude toward the Soviet Union and communism wasn’t the prevailing attitude when she was involved. Although the spying part was definitely still bad.
A cold and rainy weekend so I watched Encanto - beautiful animation, liked the story a little less than Coco and never could get into Soul
and The Tender Bar - wanted to like it more than I did as I like coming of age stories. Places where I thought it was too slow and others where it jumped around too quickly. Good but not great.
Dune did not hold my interest. Long and slow.
We liked Dune—beautiful sets and we thought good acting.
Watched The Tender Bar last night. I liked it. Not life-changing, but engaging. Interesting thing is that when the name that the absent DJ father often went by is mentioned, I recognized it as a DJ I definitely heard as a kid, but more interestingly, as one whom my FIL had been buddies with in the early seventies. So, that was unexpected! (the movie is based on a memoir, so the characters are real.)
DH and I enjoyed The Tender Bar, too. I ignored the reviews that dismissed the movie as a tired trope. I think we need more sweet, feel-good movies regardless of how old the theme. I always like Ben Affleck.
We’re in the middle of watching The Tender Bar and enjoying it. Ben is such a good actor. We didn’t even recognize him at first. The little boy does a great job, too.
Just watched it and enjoyed it. Loved the music.