What was the last movie you saw?

Parallels, a new SF flick about a building that travels through alternate Earths. Every X hrs. poof, a new Earth, maybe nuked or maybe something else. It's sort of action-based, but ends with a sequel set up ... it's not a bad hack at the alternate Earths concept.
 
A Man For All Seasons (1988)

Charlton Heston directs and stars in this made-for-television version of the famous play about Sir Thomas More by Robert Bolt. It seems to be much closer to the play than the well-known 1966 film adaptation. The character of the Common Man (a fellow who plays several different roles -- More's servant, a boatman, a jailer, etc.) appears and speaks directly to the audience. It's quite good.
 
Was ill recently and watched these over the last month:

Mockingjay: Part 1 - While not brilliant, I thought it was better than the book. Katniss wasn't so depressing.

The Maze Runner -
I liked the dark elements and intrigue. Slightly disappointed by the ending though. I've not read the book.

12 Years a Slave -
Uncomfortably fantastic.

Nightcrawler -
Bizarre, but very watchable. Think it's one of Jake Gyllenhaal's best performances.

Lucy -
I like Luc Besson's films, but I didn't like this. Found it a little boring for an action film.

Fury - Thought this was the best war film in years. The relationships between the tank crew makes it.

The Imitation Game - Fascinating. I'd watch again.

Interstellar - It was a bit too long, but I enjoyed it. Matthew McConaughey was great, IMO.

Predestination - A truly weird time-travel film. It tries to stretch your brain, but once you've got the hang of it the twists become obvious.
 
Gone Girl. I don't know what to make of it. A dark psychological thriller? Too implausible and unconvincing. A black comedy? No humour in there. Not worth the time.
 
Rembrandt (1936)

Charles Laughton gives one of his fine performances in this classy British biopic. It begins at the height of the artist's worldly success. Before he can enjoy it too much, however, his wife dies. (So quickly, in fact, that she is never seen on screen.) His commission to produce the gigantic painting usually (and quite inaccurately) known as "The Night Watch" results only in contempt and derision, and he begins a long decline into poverty and obscurity.

(This is all very fictionalized, of course. It's a popular myth that "The Night Watch" was initially considered a failure.)

Renowned stage actress Gertrude Lawrence makes one of her few film appearances as Rembrandt's housekeeper who becomes his wife in all but a legal sense. She's portrayed as rather scheming (and somewhat foolish to be wasting her wiles on someone who has to sell his belongings to stay alive.) Laughton's wife Elsa Lanchester (very young and waif-like here) plays a maid who eventually becomes Rembrandt's next de facto wife. (The film doesn't shy away from their unmarried status, and Lanchester is excommunicated for being Rembrandt's "concubine.") Since the universe has no mercy, she also soon dies.

The remarkable last sequence of the film shows us the elderly Rembrandt on his own, spending what little money he is given on art supplies, painting his last self-portrait while saying "Vanity of vanities. All is vanity."

Beautifully filmed with many fine moments, as when Rembrandt hires a beggar to pose for a painting of Saul listening to David play the harp.
 
The Master Touch (1972) (Un uomo da rispettare, "A Man to Respect")

Pretty darn good European crime flick, with Kirk Douglas as the token American star. Douglas plays a professional thief just out of jail who plans one more big score. He takes on a young acrobat as his apprentice, and together they pull off a high tech robbery of an insurance company's super-secure, computerized cash vault. There's a subplot of a hood out to settle a score with the acrobat, which leads to a couple of major fistfights and one hell of a car chase. As you'd expect, there are some plot twists at the end. As you might not expect, there is some decent characterization and acting.
 
A couple newer ones....
Crystal Skulls. There's skulls there, crystal ones... and they are dangerous, as skulls go.... what seems to be missing is the brains part.
The Phoenix Project.... scientist guys try to reanimate dead stuff. Eventually they have to reanimate their pal and he comes back kind of erased... so he probably would like this movie. I wasn't keen on it.
 
X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Whiz! Bish! Bang! Kaboom! - which was all very fine but looked so obviously shot in some form of High Def format. I know this is the norm these days but usually, with big budget productions, the show is filmized (horrible word) before we get to see it. The video cut video footage is made to look like it was shot on film. I can't understand how and why they spent so much money on this and have great chunks of it look like it came from a Sci-Fi Channel, straight to DVD movie. I'm not talking about the SFX, which were incredibly well done, but those parts of the show where the special effects guys weren't needed. A lot of simple dialogue scenes and close ups were so obviously shot on video it hurt.
 
This Rebel Breed (1960)

Combination of campy teen exploitation and serious drama. In what must be Los Angeles, the police send a couple of undercover cops to a high school in join the racially divided gangs. One guy is to get into the Anglo gang. Weirdly, they think it's a good idea to have the other guy play the role of a half-Black, half-Hispanic kid. (He's an Anglo actor in heavy makeup, the film's greatest embarrassment. The character's name is "Frank Serano," so maybe he's really supposed to be what he pretends to be, or at least Hispanic.) As you might expect, he's rejected by both the Black and Hispanic gangs. Of course, all the high school students appear to be about thirty years old.

The story revolves around the character played by pre-West Side Story Rita Moreno, who steals the film with a strong performance. In a plot device which anticipates that of the movie that won her an Oscar, she's in love with one of the Anglo guys. (In a powerful line, she tells him that she's tired of hiding their affair "like cats in the night.") Long story short, this decent fellow winds up getting killed by the nasty leader of the Anglo gang, who's also a drug pusher. (Yes, there's a "wild marijuana party" scene.) Moreno sets out to prove his guilt. (I'll give the film a few points for dealing honestly with the fact that she's pregnant by her murdered lover.)

One notable subplot involves "Wiggles," the girlfriend of the killer, played by a young and extremely curvaceous Dyan Cannon (back when she was still billed as "Diane.") In another example of awkward racial casting, the creep dumps her when he finds out that she's Black, passing as White. At least they didn't try to disguise Cannon's extreme Whiteness with makeup, but that makes this plot twist even more ludicrous.

It's worth noting that the version of this film I watched bore the new title The Black Rebels for its 1965 re-release. The Black gang is hardly in the film at all, so the new title is very misleading. They also added several brief sex scenes at random. No nudity, but lots of women in their underwear and some fondling and groping. They got the actor who played the Anglo cop to film a running gag where he walks in a door, sees what's going on, says "excuse me" and leaves. These sequences are really stupid, and badly disrupt a film which has some good points.
 
Sharknado on DVD. Bad plot. Bad acting. Bad effects. It got so ridiculous in places that I started shouting obscenities at the TV.

Having said all that, I kind of enjoyed it. Perhaps I had a smidgeon too much alcohol:confused:
 
Watched TrollHunter last night on Netflix. A Norwegian film with subtitles, it was released in 2010. Pretty much exactly what the titles implies, it has a group of college students following around a guy who works for the government hunting trolls. Done sort of in the style of Cloverfield, with lots of handheld camera work.
Nothing much in this film to add to the lore of trolls. Sunlight turns them to stone, but they can also explode. One of them gets rabies, and infects some others who end up on a rampage. Kind of silly to think the government can hide 200 foot tall creatures roaming the countryside, but on the plus side there's some nice shots of the Norwegian countryside.
It's not very good, in my opinion, but neither is it terrible. Some decent action scenes, and the trolls look okay, I guess.
 
So far this month:

  1. Frozen - Friday night choice of Number One Son (aged 6) - who has seen it before so has no excuse. Not as bad as I was dreading but the SONGS! Dear Gods! (Probably - almost certainly!- the first use of the word 'Fractals' in a Disney movie in the lyrics to Let it Go: "My soul is spiralling in frozen fractals all around...") A couple of non Disney moments struck me as I watched it. For though this looks feels and sounds like a 'Classic' Disney fairy tale there is a great chunk of 21st Century feminist subtext going on here: the sudden sexualisation of Elsa as she builds her Fortress of Solitude was remarkable. And the Act of True Love that makes everything better in the end is not the expected heterosexual kiss but the heroine sacrificing herself for her sister. Very modern; almost interesting. If only it wasn't stuffed full of bloody awful songs!
  2. Voyage of the Rock Aliens - and as bad as that title sounds the reality is worse. It's a 1980s sf comedy rock musical starring Pia Zadora. My 13 year old daughter 'officially hates' me for making her watch it with me.
  3. Humanity's End (2009) - About 5 minutes in I remembered where I had seen the director's name, Neil Johnson, before. He'd directed a piece of sh*t called Demon's in my Head which (it turns out after a bit of poking about in my diary and the IMDb) I watched some ten years ago.* As it happens Johnson made Humanity's End, a zero budget Battlestar Galactica wannabe, ten years after he made Demon's in my Head. He hasn't improved as a director or scriptwriter in the intervening decade. The story is confused and doesn't make any sense, is badly told; the characters, not even paper thin, do stupid things and swap sides for no apparent reason, and have rambling, 'WTF is this all about?' inducing conversations at the drop of a hat. It's just a bunch of ideas and lines from other films piled up together in the hope that something will gel. It doesn't. A (very naff) self-published novel made flesh.
  4. Saint (2010) - stupidly gory Dutch horror film about a demonic Saint Nicholas who, every 32 years when a full moon falls upon December 5th, terrorises Amsterdam. Not often you see a film in which our hero is rescued from police custody by a horse falling from a rooftop onto a police car and then rescued from the horse's demonic owner by someone waving a flame thrower. I almost enjoyed it.
*Some days I think I will get over this bad movie jag I'm on - but after a decade I'm starting to suspect I'm stuck with it.
 
I recently watched "Eragon" with my 14 year old daughter. I thought it was ok, but she said the story is cliche and predictable, and kept pointing out other works from which the story appears to take ideas. Apparantly the CGI blue dragon wasn't enough to save that movie. :)
 
I watched Maze Runner last night. It was ok and left me with a lot of questions, so I'll look forward to the second part.
 

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