What was the last movie you saw?

JunkMonkey said:

How can people do this? Claim to be 'watching' a movie while typing on a forum at the same time? Films are an immersive experience. You can't be watching a film and doing other stuff at the same time. It would be like saying you're making love to your husband/wife/partner/s while doing your tax return.

The best you can say is that the film is playing in the same room.

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Well as a matter of fact at the moment I'm also with my lady friend and we're ... oh, never mind.

The Martian. Ridley Scott's adaptation of the book. All in all it was a very good film. I realise that no film can cover a book completely, but I felt there were a couple of key elements missing from the story. I won't go into details, but if you've read the book you may feel the same way. And I really can't believe that the American film going public would be put off by using an Indian name on screen. I can see no reason why using the name Venkat would be a negative. Changing it to Vincent serves no logical purpose when no other names are changed.

The cast was great and Matt Damon makes an excellent Mark Watney. I've never really considered him charming before, but he does show a great deal of it in this film.

I think if you haven't read the book yet you would enjoy the film even more, at least until you've read the book.

I watched Hot Tub Time Machine 2...what's there to say?

Also Mortal Kombat for a little throw back, and we started Taken 3 but it was so bad we stopped halfway through. Gotta love Netflix.

Vince W said:

The Martian. Ridley Scott's adaptation of the book. All in all it was a very good film. I realise that no film can cover a book completely, but I felt there were a couple of key elements missing from the story. I won't go into details, but if you've read the book you may feel the same way. And I really can't believe that the American film going public would be put off by using an Indian name on screen. I can see no reason why using the name Venkat would be a negative. Changing it to Vincent serves no logical purpose when no other names are changed.

The cast was great and Matt Damon makes an excellent Mark Watney. I've never really considered him charming before, but he does show a great deal of it in this film.

I think if you haven't read the book yet you would enjoy the film even more, at least until you've read the book.

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Thank you once again, Vince. I wasn't sure about this one but now I'll go see it. Cheers.

You haven't heard JM? Watching two movies at once in the latest thing. It encourages optical independence and brain-splitting. Texting people at the same time is a bonus.

I've already decided to not like The Martian, so will probably watch it split-screen with Reptilicuss or some other classic.

JunkMonkey said:

How can people do this? Claim to be 'watching' a movie while typing on a forum at the same time? Films are an immersive experience. You can't be watching a film and doing other stuff at the same time. It would be like saying you're making love to your husband/wife/partner/s while doing your tax return.

The best you can say is that the film is playing in the same room.

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there are a number of retorts to this but as we're a family forum I shall refrain I will admit though that I too watch quite a few movies with the lap-top going

The Martian. It looked great, but the story was too predictable to be interesting. A "by the numbers" movie from Ridley Scott. Disappointing,

How I Live Now. Deserves a rewatch, but I found myself wondering what the backstory was.

The Super Inframan.
And you thought that plain old Inframan was super. Great costumes, sets, wacky monsters, trite dialogue. I forget exactly what happened, but SuperInframan wins out in the end. Ta-Daaa!

Night of the Eagle aka Burn, Witch, Burn (1962) - small scale film about modern day whichcraft (or delusion and coincidence) based on a Fritz Leiber story and not bad; not bad at all. Some nice acting and some great camerawork.

JunkMonkey said:

Night of the Eagle aka Burn, Witch, Burn (1962) - small scale film about modern day whichcraft (or delusion and coincidence) based on a Fritz Leiber story and not bad; not bad at all. Some nice acting and some great camerawork.

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A fine film indeed, and a nice adaptation of the great novel Conjure Wife.

Cry of the Werewolf (1944)

Low budget chiller which seems to be an attempt to capture the moods of both the Universal classics and Val Lewton films. Notable for being about a female werewolf and for dealing with a full transformation from human to wolf instead of halfway between.

Bad Stuff:

Even at sixty-three minutes, there are some pretty dull stretches, and the comedy relief cops are excruciating. The film's biggest flaw is the fact that the "wolf" is very, very obviously a friendly dog. The leading man is pretty bland.

Good Stuff:

The back story is interesting, the (entirely fictional, I'm sure) Gypsy lore is intriguing, a couple of the smaller roles are nicely acted (I enjoyed the tour guide, the guard who speaks sweetly to a cute cat, and the mortician), and many scenes are nicely shadowy and atmospheric.

Best of all, the rivalry between the two female leads was fascinating. Nina Foch may be a little too all-American (even though she was Dutch-born) as the Gypsy "princess"/werewolf, but she has a certain power in the role. I was quite impressed by the more exotic Osa Massen as the Good Girl, whose "Transylvanian" (actually Danish) accent was charming. In particular, the scene near the end when Foch uses hypnosis of a sort in an attempt to transform Massen into her "sister" werewolf was nicely done.

Once a week a French friend and I settle down on her sofa and watch a couple of films together. She chooses one and I choose one. This week:

Her choice: Le Prénom - funny French film about the dinner party from hell - obviously based on a play but nicely opened out in an intro and coda which probably weren't in the original but worked well. Having a whispered commentary on the political allusions and literary allusions that I would have otherwise missed added greatly to my appreciation of it.

My choice: Orlando - the umpteeth time of watching for me and the first for her. One of my favourite films ever. I'm not sure my whispered commentary on some of the historical literary allusions helped her much but at least I had time to make them, by Christ, French actors can't half rattle off the dialogue fast when they get going.

Orlando is a stunningly beautiful film. The novel by Virginia Woolf is excellent too.

The Undying Monster (1942)

Unusual combination of murder mystery and supernatural horror film. Only an hour long, the story moves along briskly, with plenty of Gothic chills and red herrings. The plot features a pair of investigators working for Scotland Yard, one a scientist and one who seems to be a psychic detective of sorts. This character is often used for comic relief, but it's also made clear that her "intuition" comes in handy in this sort of situation. (As I understand it, the novel from which this was adapted features only a female psychic investigator, and this character seems to be loosely based on her.) There's a really lame attempt at the very end to explain away the supernatural events in a rational way, but that's pure nonsense; we see the monster (briefly, to be sure, but there's no doubt that it's real.)

Victoria Silverwolf said:

Orlando is a stunningly beautiful film. The novel by Virginia Woolf is excellent too.

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It's the only Woolf I've enjoyed. (The only one I've finished to be honest.)

Interstellar (2014) - Very long, but not bad. Not great, but not bad.

Kung Fu Zombie (1982) - Good, silly horror flick. Nice little gem to find.

Godzilla (2014) - What a pile of lizard crap.

Blood of the Vampire (1958) - I haven't seen it in decades. Not a bad little film. Creepy, for the 1950's.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) - I loved it. Best vehicle action movie, IN A LONG TIME!!!

Republic Pictures Hour Long Horror Movies Double Feature:

Valley of the Zombies (1946)

Moderately entertaining, old-fashioned (even for its day) chiller about a mad undertaker who, before the film begins, found a way to induce himself into a state between life and death in the (otherwise unseen) "valley of the zombies." The only problem is that now he needs regular blood transfusions to maintain this living death, so he progresses from stealing blood from hospitals to killing the doctor who sent him to an insane asylum years ago, where he "died" and was entombed, only to rise again. This fellow goes to the trouble of embalming the victims from whom he drains blood. Dressed in a long cape, he seems more vampire than zombie. Unfortunately, he disappears from the film for most of its running time, as we watch the antics of some incompetent cops as well as the amateur sleuthing of our heroes, a doctor and a nurse. (With all their wisecracks, they might as well be Spunky Reporters from the 1930's.) There are some nice spooky scenes, like a corpse falling out of medical refrigerator.

The Vampire's Ghost (1945)

Unusual and quite effective vampire flick set in colonial Africa. The bloodsucker is a British fellow (familiar character actor John Abbott; he was one of the Organians in the Star Trek episode "Errand of Mercy") who was cursed way back in the time of Elizabeth I and has since walked the Earth as one of the undead. He now owns a rather disreputable bar/gambling den somewhere in the middle of the Dark Continent. The character is a complex, interesting one, and the film features some twists on the vampire legend. It's worth noting that the "natives" figure out what's going on pretty quickly, long before the colonists do. Credit for the film's quality probably goes to the well-known mystery/fantasy/science fiction writer Leigh Brackett, who provided the story and co-wrote the screenplay, before she went on to write things like The Big Sleep and The Empire Strikes Back.

Star Pilot. This movie features one of the weirdest dubbed-in speeches ever. Watch it for that alone, plus nice costumes and the usual meteors, UFOs and other space-dangers.

Westworld, great movie, great sf, one of my favorites. Could almost be seen as sf/horror, or techno-horror, and therefore a perfect movie for the magic hour when all the trick or treaters have gone home to pig out.

J Riff said:

Star Pilot. This movie features one of the weirdest dubbed-in speeches ever. Watch it for that alone, plus nice costumes and the usual meteors, UFOs and other space-dangers.

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You mean this one?


I love this film. Apart from anything else it has the second best attractive, scantily-clad girl in freefall shot in Italian movies of the sixties. (First best was, of course, Barbarella.)

Last night I chalked another of Daughter Number One's bucketlist by sharing the deliciously creepy, 1945 Ealing chiller, Dead of Night with her. The final shot of Michael Redgrave in the ventriloquist story gave me the shudders. Great stuff. I was afraid she would find it talky, and slow, and dated but she loved it.

Night Monster (1942) - This was the first time I watched this classic black and white spooky thriller. It seemed a bit ho-hum to me because it's dated. But I did enjoy two things in the movie that stood out:

1. Bela Lugosi - he is cool to watch, and I always enjoy listening to him speak any dialogue (no matter how outrageous it is).

2. The elderly, old-fashioned, inept policeman who didn't notice any clues that were right in front of him, until the male lead in the story pointed them out to him (which I guess was supposed to make the male lead look cool, and on his toes). That was funny to me. Plus, the cop was always ready to arrest the first suspect without any solid evidence.

Went to see The Martian on Saturday. It was okay, but a bit meh. It didn't help that I knew before it began that there would be a happy ending, which rather deflates the "tension" of the will-he-won't-he plot... Also, the whole 'lets not tell the crew just yet' plot thing seemed completely overdone. But Matt Damon was good, as was Chiwetel Ejiofor and the tech-y African dude who does the orbital mechanics. The best bit was using Pathfinder to communicate. Very clever. Did not like the 'wisecracking' humour though.