What was the last movie you saw?

The Bridge on The River Kwai (1957): British POWs build a bridge while being held in a Japanese camp in Thailand.

It is one of the best movies of all time. It won multiple academy awards, including best picture. The original story was written by a Frenchman (who also wrote Planet of the Apes btw), but his book caught the eye of an American producer in Britain who was blacklisted from Hollywood, on suspicion of being a communist. Hence the confusion.

It keeps you hooked, it sparks philosophical discussions about war and honor, and it is even funny at times. If you want to study conflict in storytelling, this is the go-to movie for you. The movie also stands the test of time because there’s no CGI and everything was filmed on location.

Also, the “Colonel Bogey March”, which the soldiers chant at the beginning, is addictive as hell! It goes as follows:


Hitler has only got one ball

Göring has two but very small

Himmler has something sim’lar

But poor old Göbbels has no balls at all

Römmel has 4 or 5 I guess

No one’s quite sure about Rudol Hess
 
MATCHLESS 1967 - Patrick O'Neal gains the power of invisibility (in 20 minute intervals and he has to wait 10 hours to use it again-it having been due to a magic ring given to him by an old prisoner in Mao's dungeons-Henry Silva is also a prisoner). A pretty bad comedy spy film. I wasn't expecting it to be trying for comedy with O'Neal as the star but that's what we get.
 
Angels From Hell (1968)

Episodic motorcycle gang flick. First scene shows our protagonist beating up two white racists who just beat up a black man. He's the good guy, right? Well, maybe.

Turns out he's back from Vietnam and ready to take back the presidency of the local biker gang. He accomplishes this by breaking the leg of the guy who took his place.

After a celebration at a place owned by a woman who will become his love interest (Arlene Martel, best known as T'Pring from the Star Trek episode "Amok Time"), he takes the gang to Hollywood to meet an old buddy who is now a movie star. This sequence is played for comedy, and has nothing to do with the plot.

Somewhere along the way, they chase a non-gang member riding a motorcycle. Again, no relevance. Nothing really happens, either. They just ride around following the guy.

Much later, they hang out with some hippies. It's implied that a mentally disturbed member of the gang (known as "Nutty") rapes and kills one of the hippies. He acts like he doesn't really know what happened. Our supposed hero decides to protect him from the cops.

Speaking of cops, the main plot deals with the cops killing one of the gang, and the protagonist planning to have a huge number of bikers show up at the funeral and trash the city. Don't expect this exciting scene, because the cops shoot him down in cold blood before it happens.

Odd changes of mood throughout, and the film seems to think both the cops and the bikers are the bad guys. Some groovy music by the Peanut Butter Conspiracy and the Lollipop Shoppe.
 
hitmouse said:
Bikini Summer 2 (1992) One of Bergman’s more obscure films. Does not star Liv Ullman.
Click to expand...

I'm just hoping that Death was in it, after his sterling performance in Bill and Ted's Bogus Adventure.
 
alexvss said:
The Bridge on The River Kwai (1957): British POWs build a bridge while being held in a Japanese camp in Thailand.

It is one of the best movies of all time. It won multiple academy awards, including best picture. The original story was written by a Frenchman (who also wrote Planet of the Apes btw), but his book caught the eye of an American producer in Britain who was blacklisted from Hollywood, on suspicion of being a communist. Hence the confusion.

It keeps you hooked, it sparks philosophical discussions about war and honor, and it is even funny at times. If you want to study conflict in storytelling, this is the go-to movie for you. The movie also stands the test of time because there’s no CGI and everything was filmed on location.

Also, the “Colonel Bogey March”, which the soldiers chant at the beginning, is addictive as hell! It goes as follows:


Hitler has only got one ball

Göring has two but very small

Himmler has something sim’lar

But poor old Göbbels has no balls at all

Römmel has 4 or 5 I guess

No one’s quite sure about Rudol Hess
Click to expand...
When I was a kid, the lyrics were
Comet, it makes your teeth so green
Comet, it tastes like gasoline

I cannot recall the rest of it. There were others, one for the TV series BRANDED:
STRANDED, stranded on the toilet bowl,
what can you do when you're stranded, and you can't reach the roll?


Likely there was more, but again, I cannot recall. Should google it.

Seriously, I did not know there even were lyrics to the Col. Bogey March. I always use the captions, & am certain, I saw nothing about eunuchs, last time I saw that film.


Middle part of Marine Hymn:

We will fight for lunch and recess,
we will keep our desks a mess,
We are proud to claim the title,
of the teacher's number one pest! :ROFLMAO:

I agree, that film was awesome!

Poor Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), mean ol' Obi Wan had no compassion for his plight:

If I fail, I will have to commit suicide. What would you do?

I guess I'd have to commit suicide.

As close as I can recall the exchange.

Most recently saw the film during TCM's William Holden month / day.

I had no idea there were so many versions of the parody of The Battle Hymn of the Republic!
 
Jeffbert said:
When I was a kid, the lyrics were
Comet, it makes your teeth so green
Comet, it tastes like gasoline

I cannot recall the rest of it. There were others, one for the TV series BRANDED:
STRANDED, stranded on the toilet bowl,
what can you do when you're stranded, and you can't reach the roll?


Likely there was more, but again, I cannot recall. Should google it.

Seriously, I did not know there even were lyrics to the Col. Bogey March. I always use the captions, & am certain, I saw nothing about eunuchs, last time I saw that film.


Middle part of Marine Hymn:

We will fight for lunch and recess,
we will keep our desks a mess,
We are proud to claim the title,
of the teacher's number one pest! :ROFLMAO:

I agree, that film was awesome!

Poor Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), mean ol' Obi Wan had no compassion for his plight:

If I fail, I will have to commit suicide. What would you do?

I guess I'd have to commit suicide.

As close as I can recall the exchange.

Most recently saw the film during TCM's William Holden month / day.

I had no idea there were so many versions of the parody of The Battle Hymn of the Republic!
Click to expand...
You’re not wrong on your recollection. I saw in a YT video that they’ve refrained themselves from using those lyrics because it would be immoral.
 
The Skin I Live In (2011)

This movie was great. Its spanish language, starring Antonio Banderas. About a highly skilled and successful skin surgeon, who specializes in replacing the skin and faces from burn victims. Would recommend checking it out. It has an intriguing and insane plot. If you aren't going to watch it, here's a complete spoiler of the whole plot. The surgeons wife is long dead, and now, years later, his daughter gets raped. He kidnaps the rapist, drugs him, and gives him a vaginoplasty (sex change). Then over the next few years performs more surgeries giving him a full transition (including voice and facial structure, the rapist is now a woman). But he created her in his dead wife's image, and she is so convincing that he falls in love with her.
 
The Party (1968)

Peter Sellers is an Indian actor who ruins the filming of a Gunga Din kind of epic. Hollywood executive writes his name down in order to make sure he never works again, but instead the actor is accidentally invited to a big dinner party. Chaos ensues.

That's the entire plot of what is really just an excuse for a series of sight gags in the style of silent movies. It may be disturbing to see Sellers in brownface, with heavy makeup and thick accent, but he's genuinely funny. Steven Franken (not a familiar name, but he shows up on tons of TV shows) nearly steals the picture as a drunken waiter, playing Charlie Chaplin to Seller's Buster Keaton. The last fifteen minutes or so turn into wacky farce, with an elephant in a swimming pool full of bubbles.

"Birdie num nums."
 
Stop That Cab (1951)

Episodic comedy about a taxi driver who gets mixed up with crooks, a radio game show contestant, a woman about to give birth, and his shrewish wife and her relatives. Pleasant enough but forgettable. Less than an hour long.
 
Morgan - yet another in the 'is it sentient? or just trying to kid us?', emerging AI stories in which the AI in question is housed in the body of an attractive young woman. Why are they always women? (Speilberg's A.I. is the only one I can think of off the top of my head where the emerging sentience isn't housed in a hot babe's bod or a clunky robot.) And this one is all a bit sh*t for many reasons despite a great cast (none of whom are really given a lot to do - most of the big names only get one scene: Brian Cox doesn't even get out of his chair!). The AI goes rogue, kills a lot of people before the the shadowy corporation behind its creation finally kill it. The only feelings of 'love the AI expresses are for one of the woman scientists who - backstory fills in - has spurned the advances of the only heterosexual male worth bonking in the cast. Oh boy. Evil lesbian trope box ticked but with an organic robot. It's all very predictable.

It's got one of those irritating, echoey piano ambient soundtracks. And the 'twist' ending pack-shot was so heavily foreshadowed it would have been more twisty if they hadn't done it; it was so obvious.
Seriously - from the first moment the AI and the corporate 'risk assessment consultant' sent to evaluate the project appear on screen together you could have written the ending before they said a word even before all the tricksy reflections and double images the director layered on the glass wall separating them.
 
Juggernaut (1936)

Crime film disguised as a Mad Scientist movie, mainly because Boris Karloff has top billing. He plays the wonderfully named Doctor Gregory Sartorius, a brilliant scientist who could come up with a cure for certain types of paralysis if he only had a ton of money. Adding to his problems is the fact that he's apparently got some kind of terminal disease and hasn't got long to live.

Enter our film's femme fatale, a young gold-digger married to a much older, ailing rich guy. She's fooling around with a worthless fellow who loses all the money she gives him at a casino. To solve both their financial problems, she suggests that Karloff bump off her husband in return for the ton of money he needs. Complications ensue when the rich guy's son by a previous marriage shows up, and it turns out he has control of his father's estate.

In a remarkable scene, the young wife is so angry when she learns about this that she bites the son's hand badly enough that he needs serious medical treatment. This emergency distracts Karloff's pretty young nurse, our heroine, sufficiently that she loses the syringe Karloff uses to kill the rich guy between the pages of a magazine, of all places. Karloff freaks out, screaming at her to find it, which causes her to become suspicious. When she finally locates the syringe, she has a pharmacist examine it to see what was in it, but the pharmacist calls Karloff first . . .

It's a so-so creaky old suspense film, talky but not without some merit. The woman playing the young wife, a Mexican-born French actress, really chews the scenery, which may explain why, as far as I can tell, she never appeared in another English language film. Karloff is always fun to watch, of course. In this movie, however, he mostly comes across as crabby rather than sinister.
 
The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp (1954)

Gentle little fantasy comedy. Angel, in the form of a beautiful young blonde woman in a flowing white gown, is sent to Earth to do good. She figures the first thing she needs is money, so, yes, she pawns her harp. In this way she gets involved with the lonely old pawnbroker, his young, lovesick employee, and so forth. Best described as sweet, so your appreciation of it will depend on your taste for that kind of thing.
 
The Manipulator AKA B. J. Lang Presents (1971)

Mickey Rooney, with full gray beard and long gray hair, plays a madman who imagines himself a great film maker. He's got a woman (cult actress Luana Anders) tied down in a wheelchair in a warehouse full of weird things. Although Keenan Wynn shows up very briefly as a drunk, it's a two-person show, and very nearly a one-person show. Rooney goes way, way over the top as he imagines Anders to be the star of his film about Cyrano de Bergerac. He talks to himself as multiple characters, puts on women's makeup, puts on Cyrano's fake nose, etc. There are also surrealistic hallucinations and bizarre noises on the soundtrack. Not exactly a good film -- in fact, I think most people will hate its self-indulgence and pointlessness -- but Rooney's portrait of insanity is hard to look away from.
 
Hickey & Boggs (1972)

Gritty crime film reunites Robert Culp (who also directed; his only feature film) and Bill Cosby, but don't expect the lighthearted banter of I Spy. Hickey and Boggs are a pair of weary private eyes, both divorced and barely able to pay the bills. They get mixed up in a convoluted case involving a missing woman and $400,000 stolen from a bank. Plenty of gunplay and a high body count in an unrelentingly grim film.
 
A Boy Ten feet Tall/Sammy Going South Saw this movie when I was around 9 years old; I liked it then and still do!
For the last decade or so I have been trying to get an acceptable copy, unfortunately most DVD/blue ray versions are in the PAL format and, being here in the US, my equipment is NTSC format... (without even going into region/area restrictions).
I did locate and down load a copy (with terrible audio) in MP4, and now understand; it is apparently available on you-tube (I will have to investigate to see if the quality is any better there).

Interestingly, I found that my more mature outlook, now, made me appreciate Edward G Robinson's character even more.

'though suffering a bit from age (both myself and the flick); I can still recommend this movie.

Slowly closing in on a very long term goal...
Enjoy!
 
Sleep Dealer is not the exact last film I saw, but so great that I went and found a DVD of it. This is wonderful science fiction. Set in some near future, the story hits the nail on the head. Not really much by way of action -- unless drones destroying things missiles counts -- There is no existential threat. It is the story of the young adult son of a Mexican farmer going to Tijuana to find work in a factory to help support the family. That's the plot - really. But the world created by Alex Rivera is the fantasy future described in public statements by Nestle COE Peter Brabeck-Letmathe and other major corporate CEOs. This is the future real financial powers is pushing for.

There are so many great scenes. But I'll describe one that illustrates the world without revealing too much.
An American is crossing the border into Mexico. At the border he stops at the border checkpoint that instead of having a person has what is similar to an ATM - with the barrel of machine gun pointing at him - He scans his passport into the machine and answers questions asked through a microphone from an unseen person. As he answers questions the questioner's Indian accent becomes more pronounced. Even the border agent has been outsourced overseas.

SLEEP DEALER

Sleep Dealer is a Sundance award-winning sci-fi thriller packed with stunning visuals and strong social and political themes. The LA Times writes 'Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, 'Sleep Dealer' is a welcome surprise. It combines visually arresting science fiction done on a...
www.sleepdealer.com www.sleepdealer.com
 
A Bridge Too Far (1977): An (mostly) accurate depiction of Operation Market Garden, where the Allies, through an enormous airborne operation, were seeking to end the war still in 1944, following the success of D-Day.

One of the best WW2 movies ever. The battle scenes were all done for real, and the viewer watches the operation from multiple perspectives-- the British, Americans, the Poles, the Dutch; from the front line to the Field Marshal's office. The characters are played by an ensemble cast of famous actors.

The operation, although accomplishing some of its objectives, resulted in a devastating loss of lives. The reason why is mostly because of the hubris of the top brass, and a rivalry between Patton and Montgomery.

The ending scene is very solemn: the wounded soldiers singing church music. It’s very touching.
 
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