What was the last movie you saw?

MacReady should be the Thing. Rescued and brought back to an Airforce base for debriefing. It will not go well.
 
Road to Utopia (1946) Hope, Crosby, & Lamour in one of the strangest 'road' films, I have ever seen. Robert Benchley pops up from time to time, in the upper left corner to share some tidbits with the audience.

So, the gold miner is murdered by McGurk and Sperry, who have an unexpected encounter with frauds Duke Johnson (Bing Crosby) & Chester Hooton (Bob Hope), running from an irate audience whom they had fleeced. Oops, the frauds knock out the murderers and knowing nothing of the murder, assume their identities, because they are tough guys, & they presume nobody will bother them. Hope intends to go to NY, but Crosby to Alaska. Oops, Crosby tricks Hope into boarding the ship, just as it is leaving. The Murdered man's daughter Sal Van Hoyden (Dorothy Lamour), also wants her papa's map to his gold mine.

Very much fun!


Repeat Performance (1947) Is this actually Noir? Muller thinks so; though in the post film lecture, he did mention Rod Serling & The Twilight Zone. The film opens, it is New Year's Eve 1946, the bells are tolling 12, & Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) had just murdered her husband, Barney Page (Louis Hayward), and is wishing she could live 1946 over again, and somehow avoid that final act of the year.

This is the NY arts crowd, the Murderess is an actress in Broadway stage, others are in the same circle. Richard Basehart as William Williams makes his film debut, in a supporting role, as a troubled poet, who ends up in the nut house, but has a contribution at the film's end.

1st time on TCM, apparently, just recently restored. Nice to see a film I never even heard of, on Noir Alley!
 
Game Night (2018). A hugely surprising film. I thought it was primarily a comedy but it's so much more. The cast is top-notch and wonderfully entertaining. I'm not going to say anything about the plot, just see it for yourself.
 
MacReady should be the Thing. Rescued and brought back to an Airforce base for debriefing. It will not go well.
still dunt add up... what about his pal? Woont he do him in and thing-ize him too? And we have to recreate the young MacReady...
Maybe just - no thingage left round the base... decades pass, then they find sumpthing. A thing-bit frozen somewhere that a dog finds. Or something. But they should get on it!
 
Prisoners (2013)
I'm not sure how I missed this until now, especially considering it stars Jake Gyllenhaal and was directed by Denis Villeneuve. Gripping thriller with an excellent cast as a father seeks his missing daughter.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
I hardly ever see films more than once, but I enjoyed this more than when I saw it at the cinema. Probably the best M:I film.

Shoplifters (2018)
Touching Japanese drama about a family of petty thieves who take in an abused girl they see left out in the cold. I wasn't quite sure about one aspect of the ending:
why didn't the family admit the real parents mistreated their daughter?

Shazam! (2019)
Fun enough superhero film that didn't quite hit the heights and wasn't sure whether it was for adults or kids. I think they should've gone for the latter as the 'adult' stuff wasn't really that funny.

Tag (2018)
Based on a true story about a group of school friends who continue a game of tag well into adulthood, when even living hundreds of miles apart doesn't stop it. It started hilariously, but was just okay in the end.

Game Night (2018). A hugely surprising film. I thought it was primarily a comedy but it's so much more. The cast is top-notch and wonderfully entertaining. I'm not going to say anything about the plot, just see it for yourself.
I agree. I watched Game Night recently - my review is a page or two back. It's one of the best comedies of the 2010s even without the thriller aspect, and the reason I watched Tag, to try and find more good surprising comedies!
 
Cats (2019)

So horrendous it's hilarious. Unfinished CGI. Stories and plots seem pointless. I can't believe it turned out so bad with such a star studded cast.

The positive to the movie is it has two good songs. Both wonderfully performed. The remaining hour and a half is awful though.
 
Had a bit of a classic Movie Marathon. Or rather a Billy Wilder movie marathon.
Some Like It Hot [1959] Billy Wilder
The Apartment [1960] Billy Wilder
Four and a bit hours well spent.
The sexual politics of The Apartment are strange to watch now, but I doubt much has changed if you have power and influence over others.
As for SLIH, I just love it. The jokes are still funny, the characters spot on and the cameo and bit roles note perfect.
And I want to know what the full joke about the one legged jockey!
After that I listened to [rather than watched] The Magnificent Seven [1960] John Sturges. The soundtrack is a knockout and work listening to on its own. I'd have watched it but I had some writing to get done.
 
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Rewatched Moana. It's something of a so-so film, well animated, with great moments, but otherwise drags because of the incessant musical numbers. The ending is clever, but not enough to inspire watching it again.
 
Had a bit of a classic Movie Marathon. Or rather a Billy Wilder movie marathon.
Some Like It Hot [1959] Billy Wilder

As for SLIH, I just love it. The jokes are still funny, the characters spot on and the cameo and bit roles note perfect.
And I want to know what the full joke about the one legged jockey!
I watched that a year ago, and I just do not understand how a physically normal man could ever pass for an attractive woman. :unsure: Likely the only film in which most viewers have seen Joe E. Brown, though not too likely they knew who he is.
 
Brown was popular in the '30s into the early '40s, I believe, so contemporary audiences would have likely still known him, especially since his turn in Show Boat. For today's audience, Alibi Ike isn't even a memory and he's the weird old guy in Some Like it Hot.

Finally saw The Set-Up (1949), dir, Robert Wise; starring Robert Ryan, Audrey Totter

Wise is one of my favorite directors -- The Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, West Side Story, The Andromeda Strain, Star Trek: THe Motion Picture -- and I'd never seen this, by many accounts his best. Broken down lug, Ryan, is sure he can beat the young guy he's boxing that night. Wife Totter is tired of seeing him pummeled, wants him to quit. The fix is on, but his manager doesn't tell him, certain he'd lose anyway. This all works out in real time over the course of the movie. It's film noir, and pretty dark about the underbelly of organized boxing, which was fair since boxing had strong ties to organized crime at the time.


Randy M.
 
The Last Days.

A Spanish apocalypse movie. No zombies just an unexplained pandemic called The Panic. A clever movie and claustrophobic.
 
Finally saw The Set-Up (1949), dir, Robert Wise; starring Robert Ryan, Audrey Totter

Wise is one of my favorite directors -- The Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Haunting, West Side Story, The Andromeda Strain, Star Trek: THe Motion Picture -- and I'd never seen this, by many accounts his best. Broken down lug, Ryan, is sure he can beat the young guy he's boxing that night. Wife Totter is tired of seeing him pummeled, wants him to quit. The fix is on, but his manager doesn't tell him, certain he'd lose anyway. This all works out in real time over the course of the movie. It's film noir, and pretty dark about the underbelly of organized boxing, which was fair since boxing had strong ties to organized crime at the time.


Randy M.
I think this film was on NOIR ALLEY, withing the past 3 or 4 months. Very intense.
 
About The Set-up:

I think this film was on NOIR ALLEY, withing the past 3 or 4 months. Very intense.

I've seen more movies with Robert Ryan than I ever did before because of Noir Alley, and my estimation of his abilities has gone up considerably. I also agree with Mueller that Audrey Totter should have been a bigger star than she was.

Randy M.
 
I thought Robert Ryan was great as Ike Clanton in Hour of the Gun. One of the better movies about The Gunfight at the OK Coral and the aftermath. Jason Robards made for a brilliant Doc Holliday and James Garner a very stoic Wyatt Earp.
 
Operation:Skybolt 1967
As Greek mouzouki music plays we see a striptease in a nightclub, then a beating at the boat club, then a car chase and some guy dragged out, until finally at 5:35 a bad guy says: 'Take it easy, nothing will happen.'
But, a hydrogen bomb has been stolen from a NATO base in Turkey, and Don is gonna hafta go find it. He asks- 'Any clue as to who's behind the Hoist?' So we prepare for further dubbing issues.
Don, code name Alex, is forced to go after his brother Jack, code name Achilles... so he hits the Mermaid pub and then hits on hard-drinking Paula, she tells him a few things but a poison dart ends the conversation.
He meets another dancer, but first has to beat up a guy in his room who gets electrocuted by a trap set for him, then he throws the guy out the window into a big dumpster. Then he wails on the girl with his belt, but they make up and make with some trite dialogue in bed.
At Paula's funeral, a mystery tune is hummed... but Don can't remember what it is. More nonsense, Don disables some guy by throwing chalk in his face. He finds a geiger counter in the nightclub.
"I do the whistling in my league.' Then, we see soap suds thrown on a copy of Playboy magazine...
Don is electro-tortured by a hand-cranked dynamo... a good guy bursts in and shoots everyone, but still nobody knows anything about the bomb.
"Don't you think I'm stacked?" ...geeee... well, now it's closeups of guitar player's hands, no relation to what is playing.. Toni dances in a balloon costume, they go pop, pop,pop... they dodge a couple thrown knives, Don starts a car with a hairpin. Car chase, bad guys fly off a cliff. Don says 'It's all over,' but there's still an hour left in this thing.
Don tips the band, they play the mystery song. "Yeah, the old guy with the guitar.. the guy that never came back, was my brother, Jack." They do some Greek dancing. Aha, Jack, sitting in a dark room, plunking at a guitar, but he's blind.
The rest of this plays out on a yacht, with the bomb set to take out a fleet of ships. China and Armenia are involved somehow.. Rita has a ring that shoots poison darts, but Don gets loose and grabs a machine gun. Everyone escapes, they bust down a door and stop the clock at one second. The movie ends as awful mousouki music plays, while tape-wow from an old VCR goes on, then there's a half hour of blank blue screen, which is an improvement. What is "Operation:Skybolt" ?- No idea, I'm just glad they finally shut that bloody mousouki up!
 
The Hound of the Baskervilles (2000) Not a bad little made-for-TV version of a Sherlock Holmes & Dr Watson mystery.

Tankers (2018) Excellent subtitled film about a WW2 Russian tank crew. Based on a true story.

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Holiday On The Buses was on TV the other day. Lots of phwoar! and saucy seaside postcard-like escapades. Brainless nonsense but it made me smile once or twice.
 

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