Movie Details
| Title: | Hopscotch | |
| Director: | Ronald Neame | |
| Year: | 1980 | |
| Genre: | Spy | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 11.13.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (3)
- Gambit
- The Man Who Never Was
- The Poseidon Adventure
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 11.13.25 | Blu-ray | This Screening is part of event: DVRfest 2025 spine: 163 roll: 1 If the spine and roll didn't give it away, Dat Two of this year's fest is another installment of the now-traditional Criterion random roll, where i let fate decide which Criterion discs on the shelf I finally get around to watching. Keen-minded readers who followed along last year might recall that I had dwindled the list to... nothing! What started out as a pile of 30 discs finally became zero, opening the gates to a whole new tier of the Criterion Collection that I didn't include in the initial list: box sets. Now, This movie I got as a gift on my birthday, so technically speaking the non-box-set list count went up to 1... all bizarre internal logic to say I felt the need to watch this before diving into the boxes. This is a perfectly light and charming spy comedy where Walter Matthau plays a spy who's sidelined by buffoon boss Ned Beatty and decides to go on a merry romp across several continents while riling up his former bosses and every other intelligence community with a tell-all book delivered chapter by chapter. It might seem like the same premise as the Coens' Burn After Reading but the tone is drastically different. This one is playful and ebulliant and Matthau is always two steps ahead leading everyone on a merry goose chase. And nobody gets shot in a closet. I recently watched a show called The Sandbaggers which was about as serious a take on cold war spy politics as you can get so it was quite fun to throw all of that out the window and watch Matthau's parade of disguises and accents and twists and turns play out. Ned Beatty, perhaps one of the original punch-able faces, is perfect as the asshole manager and a not-grey-yet Sam Waterson is great as the younger agent mentored by Matthau. You get a bunch of late 70s location stuff including the Hofbrauhaus in Munich at the start of the movie. There's some stunt flying, there's a hovercraft, there's a concorde. It's not gritty like Charlie Varrick at all but just a fun cloak and dagger romp. Loved it. Glad to own it. I've seen a lot of renewed interest in "physical media" lately, particularly a few podcasts by The Ringer featuring Tracy Letts and his massive 15k disc collection. I have to say it makes me want to get back into the game a bit. All the boutique publishers that used to have stands set up at Fantastic Fest are lovingly releasing all sorts of stuff from outright trash to hidden gems and previously-unavailable titles. I don't know if I have the space to start buying more discs, but I feel the impulse. But I suppose this is not about buying more shit but watching the shit I already bought, so let's dive in to the box sets. My criteria remains the same as single discs. I'm only including the films I haven't seen, so although I still haven't watched my blu-ray Citizen Kane disc, I'm not counting it because I've seen the movie. So with that in mind, I have four criterion box sets containing movies I haven't seen, and four eclipse sets. That's not including the golden age of television set which... I don't know if i'll ever see to be honest, or Carlos the 6-hour mini-series that I want to see but not on a day like today. I'm also excluding the Godzilla book because I think it would be weird to watch 13 of the 15 movies in there, like skip the first Godzilla movie and go to the second? Also, it would be weird for me to watch those out of order, so that will be a separate thing. Of what remains, I have 39 titles on the new list. Bigger than the initial list! So for the first few roles I'll be using a d4 to divide by 10, then a d10 to pick the movie (if i roll 4/10 i'll just re-roll). Ok enough nonsense. It's time to roll. |
