What was the last movie you saw?

[Foxbat]

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. An enjoyable if fairly typical Tarantino romp into what might have been. It's amusing stuff (especially the fight scene with Bruce Lee) but is it worth a golden globe? I think not.

 

[AlexH]

I watched three films today:

1917
The cinema showing was at 19:15 rather than 19:17. I haven't been a big fan of recent highly-rated war films such as Dunkirk, but 1917 was excellent. And was it shot in two takes? Wow! That really worked to keep you in the moment rather than constant camera cuts.

Mustang (2015)
An excellent and powerful Turkish film about five orphaned sisters whose innocent play with a few boys on the beach is taken out of context, leading to the girls' imprisonment in their own home by their grandmother and uncle. I believe the five who played the sisters hadn't acted before, and they were so good I didn't even think they were acting. The film has been compared to The Virgin Suicides, and I could see why.

Giovanni's Island (2014)
Another war film based on true events - this time an anime about the friendship between a Japanese boy and Russian girl when Soviet solders take over a Japanese island towards the end of WWII. It was good, so aside from 1917, one of the better recent war films I've seen.

And erm...I meant Wes Anderson, of course:

Isle of Dogs (2018)
I don't get the big deal with Woody Allen films. This was good with quirky moments I enjoyed, but wasn't anything special. That's what I usually think about Woody Allen films. I couldn't get past Walter White for the Bryan Cranston dog character...

 

[Vince W]

John Wick 3. I wasn't expecting much but it was much better than 2. The story was more engaging and despite some of the overlong kill sets it had some life to it that was missing in 2. I'll be sure to take a look at 4.

 

[Jeffbert]

Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969)

Bottom-of-the-barrel vampire flick from grade Z filmmaker Al Adamson. Starts with a lousy song as a woman drives somewhere. Includes exciting things like closeups of the dashboard. Car breaks down (although it looks like she just parks it somewhere.) She walks around, sees our Igor character (hilariously named Mango), screams, faints, get carried away.

Cut to a photographer and a model taking pictures at Marineland. Through their banter we learn they're engaged. We also see some nifty footage of walruses and such. While riding on a rotating tower at the sea park, some guy brings them a telegram. It seems the photographer's 108-year-old uncle died and left him a castle in the desert, which is rented by a couple.

Cut to the castle, a real place in California that some rich guy built many years ago. The couple are, of course, Count and Countess Dracula, although they use the name Townsend. They're civilized types, drinking blood cocktails brought to them by their loyal butler, George (John Carradine!), who keeps a bunch of young women chained up in the dungeon.

The Draculas somehow arrange to pay a prison guard five thousand bucks to let out their friend Johnny. Johnny likes to kill people, especially during the full moon. (Apparently some TV versions of this thing add a few minutes of footage, with another actor, establishing that he's a werewolf.) He kills a bunch of people on his way back to the castle.

Photographer and model show up and the movie slows down to a crawl. Eventually we find out the Draculas and their servants and friend worship the moon god Luna, sacrificing women to it now and then. After a while, our hero and heroine win out.

Lots of amateurish acting, and the whole thing seems like a parody of horror movies, but without the comedy.

I SAW A FILM CALLED Dracula The Dirty Old Man, but I cannot find any info on it! I recall women chained to the wall, though.


The Big Night (1951) NOIR ALLEY. A nearly adult boy George La Main (John Barrymore, Jr.) asks about the three tickets to that night's fight, papa Andy La Main (Preston Foster) tells him that his girlfriend will not be going with them. It is the boy's birthday, and he fails to extinguish all the candles. 1 remains burning. Suddenly, a sportswriter (Howard St. John) bursts into his father's bar, demands father remove his shirt, and get on all 4s. He then beats him mercilessly with his cane. One of papa's friends has to restrain junior, who is freaking out. After the sportswriter leaves, nobody bothers to tell junior (John Barrymore Jr.) why that happened. So, the kid grabs papa's revolver from the cash register, and goes out, determined to avenge papa.

Spoiler

After much searching, the kid finally finds the sportswriter, whose name was Judge, in an apartment of a woman with a Polish name. He confronts him, accuses him, and wonders why he is in this woman's apartment. It turns out that he is her brother who changed his name to 'Judge', which is English for the Polish word. She is dead. She had committed suicide after the kid's father had refused to marry her. The kid wrestles the guy, a shot is fired, and the kid assumes he had killed the guy, so he flees.

The ending had the cops arrive at the bar/apartment, and arrest the dad, but the kid assumes dad is protecting him, and taking the rap for him. Dad explains a few things, apologizes for not having told his so about this and that, but, unless I missed something, there was no reason stated or implied as to why they arrested the dad. He tells Jr. that he could not marry the woman because his wife, whom he had told the kid, had died, was alive, and he was still married to her. But no explanation for arresting dad!? Maybe I should re-watch the ending. Muller spent most of the post film lecture on the director, who had trouble with HUAC, and little on the film itself.

This was ok, up until the ending, which left me scratching my noggin, wondering what I mkissed.

 

[Vince W]

Peter Rabbit. I'd heard good things about this but was sceptical. It turned out to be rather entertaining but the titular character was a bit of a knob and not very likeable. All in all, though it's a decent film for a chilly afternoon.

 

[Rodders]

I watched "The Dead Don't Die" again yesterday. I'm not sure what prompted me to watch it again, but it was better the second time around. It's got a social commentary on consumerism turning us in to Zombies. Good cast. Adam Driver is turning into quite a watchable actor.

I also watched "Replicas". A Keanu Reeves flick. Keanu is working on a government project to upload a human consciousness into a robot. His wife and family die in an accident and he uses his company's cloning facilities to clone them and upload them into their new bodies. I wouldn't say it was bad, but it wasn't good.

 

[Mouse]

Voices. Ryan Reynolds hears his bad cat and good dog talking to him. He kills people. There's a jaunty song at the end.

 

[Randy M.]

Ready or Not (2019), dir. Matt Bettineli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett; starring Samarra Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O'Brien.

Grace marries into a family with a fortune from manufacturing games. What she learns on her wedding day is, first, the family has a tradition of playing a game on every wedding night. Second, the game is chosen by drawing a card randomly (supposedly) from a device given to their late grandfather by an acquaintance. Third, the family believes the acquaintance was the Devil. Fourth, picking "Hide & Seek" is bad. The new family member not only becomes the one sought, but is a sacrifice to the continued success of the family. Naturally, Grace gets Hide & Seek and her only chance is to survive until dawn, but if she does the family is certain something will happen to them.

Billed as horror/comedy, it is, but not as laugh out loud funny as, say, Happy Death Day. This is more satirical humor that mostly stems from the characters around Grace. I mostly recommend the movie because the cast is terrific: Weaving, Brody and O'Brien are all capable and work well together and much of the movie's success depends on Weaving being believable and she is; Grace is by turns, snarky, frightened, resourceful, determined, and so on, and Weaving nails them all. The supporting cast here is terrific, Andie McDowell, Henry Czerny, and Kristen Bruun (Orphan Black) among others make this worth watching. There are moments that are gory, especially toward the end, though one of the most gory I also thought was the most funny.


The Captive City (1952), dir. Robert Wise; starring John Forsythe, Joan Camden

Part of the Noir Alley presentations from Turner Cable Movies, introduced by Eddie Muller. Muller explained this isn't really film noir -- there are some trappings of noir, though I'd agree -- but it is the first movie in the 1950s shifting the focus of crime movies away from the personal and more toward the social. This comes in the wake of the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce led by Senator Estus Kefauver, who liked the movie enough to provide a filmed statement that runs after the movie.

When a private detective is murdered, an integrous small city newspaper editor becoming aware of the effects of a local bookmaking operation taken over by organized crime. Slowly he pieces together the corruption under the city's administration and business leaders he'd been unaware of during his five years as a resident and has to decide what to do about it.

Forsythe's first starring role, this is a nicely done, fairly straight-forward crime movie, based (loosely, I imagine) on Newsweek articles by one of the screenwriters. Early use location shooting rather than studio back lots for crime movies. Not great, but as watchable as every other movie I've seen from Wise.


Randy M.

 

[Av Demeisen]

Color Out of Space. I didn't realise this was based on Lovecraft. Pretty good horror. The film looks great in principle, but it was hard to tell how good the effects really are since this was a 1080p screener.

 

[Parson]

Voices. Ryan Reynolds hears his bad cat and good dog talking to him. He kills people. There's a jaunty song at the end.

@Mouse your spare style and deadpan criticism of this flick makes me think you should do this more often. Maybe people would eventually pay to read them.

 

[REBerg]

1917
A well-executed, graphic reminder that war is horror. This film deserves its 10 Academy Award nominations.

 

[Parson]

I find myself thinking 1917 should have been plotted for an earlier war. I know that a lot of communication during that war was done by telephone and telegraph. A runner with that important of a message doesn't ring true. --- But maybe there was a reason for the runner given in the movie?

 

[CupofJoe]

I find myself thinking 1917 should have been plotted for an earlier war. I know that a lot of communication during that war was done by telephone and telegraph. A runner with that important of a message doesn't ring true. --- But maybe there was a reason for the runner given in the movie?

First off, I haven't seen the film, so I don't know how it works in the film. At the time [or at any time really] Field Telephones were notoriously unreliable and usually didn't go all the way to the front line. If you wanted a message to get somewhere, send a runner or three...

 

[REBerg]

I find myself thinking 1917 should have been plotted for an earlier war. I know that a lot of communication during that war was done by telephone and telegraph. A runner with that important of a message doesn't ring true. --- But maybe there was a reason for the runner given in the movie?

I wondered about radio communications when I saw the trailer. They said very early in the movie that the "Huns" had cut the telegraph lines.

Spoiler

My wife and I were wondering how the paper message had not only survived but remained legible in the soaking it must have taken in the river.

 

[TECHNISCOPE]

I revisited "The Thing 1982 yesterday. The most realistic and chilling practical effects ever put on screen. The craft in this film is second to none.

 

[J Riff]

@Mouse your spare style and deadpan criticism of this flick makes me think you should do this more often. Maybe people would eventually pay to read them.

yeah, at a penny a word you could... nm. )

 

[Vince W]

I revisited "The Thing 1982 yesterday. The most realistic and chilling practical effects ever put on screen. The craft in this film is second to none.

Absolutely brilliant film and effects.

 

[CupofJoe]

I revisited "The Thing 1982 yesterday. The most realistic and chilling practical effects ever put on screen. The craft in this film is second to none.

I've just rewatched The Thing from Another World [1951].
Okay, I'll admit that "The Thing" is a bit of a joke, but the rest of the film is still great.
I think it has some of the best film dialogue ever.
And a score from Dimitri Tiomkin...

 

[Randy M.]

I generally prefer the 1951 version, probably in part from the nostalgia of first seeing it as a kid. And while I agree Carpenter's movie is technically excellent, the emotional distance between the characters dilutes its effect for me. If the characters in the Nyby/Hawks version had faced the creature in the Carpenter version, I might have been less on the edge of my seat than fallen off and curled up on the floor.

In another sense, the 1951 film is post-WWII product -- cohesive American team work with good management saves the day. The 1982 film is a post-Vietnam product -- the rag-tag non-conformists narrowing down the possibilities through intelligent, ad lib decisions (and don't trust the authorities!), but never sure of the outcome all the same.

More recent versions appear to be post-Hollywood makes money on franchise products.


Randy M.

 

[CupofJoe]

I generally prefer the 1951 version, probably in part from the nostalgia of first seeing it as a kid. And while I agree Carpenter's movie is technically excellent, the emotional distance between the characters dilutes its effect for me. If the characters in the Nyby/Hawks version had faced the creature in the Carpenter version, I might have been less on the edge of my seat than fallen off and curled up on the floor.
In another sense, the 1951 film is post-WWII product -- cohesive American team work with good management saves the day. The 1982 film is a post-Vietnam product -- the rag-tag non-conformists narrowing down the possibilities through intelligent, ad lib decisions (and don't trust the authorities!), but never sure of the outcome all the same.
More recent versions appear to be post-Hollywood makes money on franchise products.
Randy M.

While I can appreciate it and even enjoyed watching it in the cinema, late one night, I'm not a fan of the Carpenter version because it is too visceral, when it doesn't need to be. At least for me.
Yeah, and teach me not to read the disc information closely...
I bought the 2 disc box set, the original and follow up set... Only to find it was the 1982 "original" and the 2011 remake/follow-up. The latest film is fine, but it has nothing to add that isn't in the Carpenter version.