This week marks 20 years since Sense and Sensibility was released. The main cast includes –

Emma Thompson as Elinor – she also wrote the screenplay and won an Oscar for it, too!

Kate Winslet as Marianne – this movie was filmed two years before she got on Titanic.

Hugh Grant as Edward – Pre squidgy around the edges Hugh.

Gemma Jones as Mrs Dashwood – also known as Bridget Jones’s Mum.

The two love interests for Marianne could not possibly be any more different – Alan Rickman plays Colonel Brandon – Greg Wise plays Willoughby.

Other notable appearances – Robert Hardy as Sir John Middleton – I loved him as Siegfried in All Creatures Great And Small, too. Elizabeth Spriggs as Mrs Jennings. Harriet Walter as Fanny Dashwood – Hugh Laurie as Mr Palmer which was quite a surprise!

Adaptations of books can go either way – they can be very well done as this one was, or they can be completely changed and bear little resemblance to the book they were adapted from.

When an adaptation is well done, they can often add scenes which you begin to wish were originally placed in the book. In this movie there is a fantastic scene at the start where Edward and Elinor are trying to coax Margaret – a geography nut who loves her Atlas – out from a hiding place by placing rivers in completely wrong countries.

There were quite a lot of scenes added at the beginning to show the developing relationship between Edward and Elinor. You get an idea of how many of these scenes were added when you consider it took them 20 minutes for the first 20 *pages* of the book to be shown on screen.

This movie does remove one important scene from the book however it is not especially missed – the scene where Willoughby goes to speak with Elinor at the home of the Palmers while Marianne is very ill.

I think the highest compliment one can pay to a movie is to say there is nothing about it they would change if they could. I would not add anything, I would not remove anything. I would not put the Willoughby scene back in.

This particular movie is as close to perfect as any Austen adaptation has ever been – it is probably my favourite Austen movie because you must take Pride and Prejudice out of the running – that is a 6 part mini series, not a movie – I will not refer to that absolutely dreadful Keira Knightley movie version, as I prefer to forget that it exists. Apologies if you happen to like it. :)

If you are a fan of Jane Austen, this movie should be somewhere in your movie collection. :)

This movie is by far my most favourite of the Indiana Jones trilogy. But there are four, you say. Not in my world. I do not own the fourth, nor have I seen the fourth. Perhaps this is down to movie snobbery, perhaps it is down to reading some bad reviews..

No, I will admit it isn’t either of those things. It is that the third movie essentially ends at the greatest point possible – Indiana and his Dad riding into the sunset, literally. They could not improve on such perfection. I could not fathom a fourth movie. I never got around to seeing it.

Why is this movie my favourite of the three? This was sheer genius on the part of the movie people – taking a character we already know, love, and care about, and then raising the stakes by adding in the father of that character. Despite their long estrangement, it is apparent these two people care about each other.

The choice of Sean Connery as Henry Jones Sr was a deeply inspired one. Sean Connery and Harrison Ford have some amazing chemistry together – but when you add in some brilliant writing, well, movie magic does not get any better than this. All these two have to do is look at each other and it is comedy gold. There are some of my most favourite movie lines of all time hidden away in here.

Our situation has not improved.

River Phoenix plays a young Indiana Jones and that was also the best choice possible. Released four years before his untimely death, he is fantastic and believable as young Indy. What a career he would have had! It is a great shame.

Michael Byrne plays one of my favourite baddies of all time in this movie. He is deeply hateable as Vogel the Nazi.

Alison Doody is incredible as Dr Elsa Schneider.

Did we ever think that Indiana Jones would meet Adolf Hitler?

I prefer this meeting, myself.

I love that they actually went to Jordan to film the Al-Khazneh scenes. It looks completely like it has been filmed via green screen in the movie but they really did go there.

The scene where Walter Donovan sips from the wrong grail and then instantly ages and dies is a little scary, especially for younger audiences, but it is very well done.

Overall, this movie is a incredibly watchable over and over again, and I say that as someone who had this on laserdisc back in the days of sound lounges selling speaker systems, I have seen some of the scenes in this movie more times than I could ever count, and even to this day I get caught up in what is going on in the movie rather than what I am supposed to be doing – in this case, taking screenshots took a lot longer than it normally does.

For those of us with arachnophobia, there are thankfully zero spiders in this film. For those who do not like snakes, there are some snakes right at the beginning when we learn the origins of Indiana disliking them. There are also quite a lot of rats at one point.

As far as action movies go, this one has a little less action than most – however the snappy dialog between Indy and his Dad more than makes up for it. If you have it at home and have not seen it for a while, re-watch! ;)

Here is an awesome article to read if you want to know more – 15 Things You Might Not Know About ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ – plus Wikipedia has more info on the movie overall.

FYI – I realise there are some movies I love which I have never written about here, so during 2016 I plan to change that, adding one movie review each month to the post schedule. :)

The first time I ever saw a clip from Broken Arrow was at a product night for surround sound, back in the mid-90’s when there was no such thing as downloading a movie and people were into having movie sound at home.

Already being a big fan of both Christian Slater and John Travolta I would have been going to see this movie at the cinema purely based on their being in it.

When I heard that Samantha Mathis was going to be the lead female actress I was even more excited to see it. I was such a fan of Christian and Samantha together in Pump Up The Volume.

So the storyline goes like this – Captain Hale (Slater) and Major Deakins (Travolta) are taking a stealth bomber out on an “exercise” over Utah with two nuclear weapons. Deakins wants to steal the weapons and he has everything all planned out, including ejecting Hale from the plane as a surprise to himself. Hale, understandably not a fan of any of these plans, teams up with a park ranger (Mathis) to try and foil the theft.

John Travolta is suitably bad-a** in this film

Alas poor helicopters! I did not anticipate the massive amount of violence towards helicopters which appears in this film. They crash and blow up *four* of them. Plus they crash a stealth bomber.

It is my opinion that this movie contains a lot of brilliant lines but by far the best one is “Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons?” said through the clenched teeth of John Travolta.

The scenery should get credit as a co-star because it is utterly gorgeous.

It had been so long since I had seen this movie, the copy I own is on VHS video. I was sure I had it on dvd and searched the movie shelf to no avail. I asked The Other Half if he knew where it was and he told me we did not own it on DVD.

Oops, small movie fail – this aircraft is being towed, you do not need the person with the lighted wands as well. :) There are quite a lot of movie fails in this movie however that does not stop it from being awesome and worth watching.

Overall the film is great if you want an action movie where you can go along for a ride and not have to think too much. Beware though, if you do start thinking, you’ll see a raft of errors, continuity fails and goofs. If you have a helicopter phobia, this film might be best avoided.

And a final Christian Slater note – the hair is too short to do that awfully cute flopsy thing he has going in some of his other movies, plus the eyebrows are not quite dark enough to have them make their usual impact. I am a big fan of his. I have already mentioned he is a man I love to watch, so of course I would enjoy any movie with him in it.

Thanks to Darylisms Tumblr for the gif – I searched high and low for one photo that would do proper justice to the well groomed eyebrows of Christian Slater and none of them did, but this gif image does. :)

Rami Malek and Ben Stiller in Night At The Museum

When I was in primary school, my favourite book was From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg. The book is about two kids who run away from home to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

For about 20 years I forgot the name of the book and did a lot of trying to find it. Eventually I posted a question somewhere on the web and received the name of the book as the answer, so I ordered it and settled in to revisit an old favourite. It was just as great as I remembered it to be.

Growing up my Grandma – Granny as we called her – would take us on the tram to Adelaide. From there we would catch the beeline bus to North Terrace and visit one of two places – the South Australian Museum or the Art Gallery of South Australia. Sometimes we would go down to the River Torrens and catch Popeye around to the Adelaide Zoo. For many years these were my favourite places in the entire world.

Whenever we visited the Museum, I would imagine what I would do if I was able to take up residence there. We spent a lot of time in the room full of rocks and minerals and all the cabinets were locked – maybe if I lived there, I could find the key and open up those cabinets.

Ahkmenrah attempts to broker a peace between Larry and Attila The Hun

So it came to me as a surprise that I somehow had missed out on the awesomeness of the Night at the Museum movies. I discovered them thanks to my present fan obsession – Rami Malek is in the movies as the Pharaoh Ahkmenrah.

The storyline goes a little like this – Larry (Ben Stiller) gets a job as the night guard in the American Museum of Natural History. Unknown to most of the world, the museum contains a magical tablet which makes all the exhibits spring to life at sundown. If they are outside when the sun rises, they will turn to dust, so it is important that the night guard keeps everyone *in* as well as keeping other people out.

Robin Williams plays Teddy Roosevelt

Robin Williams is in all 3 films and the final film was one of four not yet released at the time of his death. While my favourite Robin Williams role will always be John Keating from Dead Poets Society, followed of course by Mrs Doubtfire, this role is in third place, for me anyway. I also loved that he spent a lot of time on a horse.

Part of the fun of the following movies is the new historical characters appearing plus the new locations. Movie 2 has Amy Adams as Amelia Earheart and Hank Azaria is hilarious as the very angry Egyptian raised from the dead. I thought the second was the best of the films – Amy Adams was so fantastic in it.

Movie 3 has Dan Stevens as Sir Lancelot and Rebel Wilson as a British museum security guard. Plus Hugh Jackman makes an appearance. But beware, this movie you might need to BYO tissue box.

Rami Malek is incredibly believable as the Pharaoh Ahkmenrah. For much of the first movie, he is locked in his sarcophagus desperately trying to get out, and there is a level of fear created around his being able to escape. But when he is eventually released towards the end of the movie, he is just delightful and not scary at all. Sadly he is missing for a lot of the second movie, but in the third he is present for most of the movie.

It should be made clear that I am not usually a Ben Stiller fan but I did enjoy him in these movies. I think the biggest problem for me, with him, is he seems like he is about to burst out laughing the entire time he is on the screen. Kind of like Jerry Seinfeld who just never could keep a poker face.

If you watch the out-takes, he does laugh a lot. But then again how could you not laugh at Ricky Gervais and Robin Williams? And Jerry had to contend with 3 very funny people but worst of all, Julia Louis Dreyfus. There are lots of Seinfeld bloopers on youtube.

If you have not seen these movies and you love a museum and/or historical figures, you will probably deeply love these movies. When people talk about movie magic, I think they are talking about movies exactly like these. :)

Over To You –

Which historical figure would you want to bring back to life and talk to? What would you do if you could live inside a museum or art gallery? What museum would you most like to take the magical tablet to?

Here are the trailers for all 3 Night at the Museum movies.