What was the last movie you saw?

Airship Destroyer [1909]
Airships are attacking England and no-one can stop them!!! They are striking at will and indiscriminately across the land and there is nothing that can be done!!! Aircraft sent up to attack them seem useless. All is lost!!!
Except a scientist that has developed an aerial torpedo [that looks one part Dragonfly, one part cardboard loo roll, with hints of V1 thrown in - it had rockets and a propeller].
It is launched!!!
And takes down the offending airship!!! [and then he gets the girl, and yes there are a lot of exclamation points!!!].
All this in 6 and a bit minutes
The special effects weren't bad especially given the films age, I've seen worse in films 50 years younger.
It had an odd sound track that I assume wasn't original. but it was discordant enough to also be interesting.
And all this because I wanted to know how far a cruise missile could fly...
 
Airship Destroyer [1909]

1909??!!! Wow a S.F. movie that early? That's hard to believe. I'm not a movie buff so maybe there had been some earlier but this is the earliest I ever hear heard about.

Edit: Just watched it. It is not half bad for a silent flick. For 1909 it had to be way ahead of the curve.
 
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (2019)

A CNN documentary about the life and times of singer, Linda Ronstadt. For anyone who lived through her rise to fame, and maybe more so for those who came of age in that era, her music is woven into our memories of the time -- she mainly covered the songs of others, making hit after hit with them, including versions of "It's so Easy", "Desperado," "When Will I be Loved," "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" and especially "Blue Bayou." This is a fascinating survey of her life and career -- I hadn't realized she was tied into the birth of the Eagles and her connection to J. D. Souther -- and bittersweet given her diagnosis of Parkinson's.


Bad Times at the El Royale (2018), dir. Drew Goddard; starring Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, Jon Hamm

Nifty crime thriller. We know from the start a man hid a suitcase in a hotel room, and that he was killed shortly after. Now in the 1960s the old hotel, no longer much visited, has several strangers show up at one time, at least some of them looking for the suitcase. And the old place has a secret or two of its own to complicate matters. Intriguing for about 3/4 of its running time, I thought it tailed off a little toward the end. Notable for a bit hammy but enjoyable performance by Chris Hemsworth (uncredited) and its indication that Dakota Johnson can act -- she's pretty effective in this one. Bridges is solid as usual, and Erivo is a strong presence with a terrific singing voice.


Randy M.
 
I watched Mortal Engines last night. I thought it was pretty entertaining. The two leads were enjoyable enough. I wouldn’t mind having a go at the novel.
 
Thanks for the post about Tankers, Starbeast. I just watched that film, & liked it; though the Mark IV panzers were Russian tanks in drag. The large road wheels are a dead give away. A few years ago, I saw a Soviet WWII film, with a USSR tank wearing a Tiger skin.

Speaking of Tigers, I just watched Tiger Day: Tiger Tank 131, & Tiger 131 Revisited. Both are documentaries from the Bovington Tank museum in the UK. Sadly, neither satisfied my desire to see Tiger 131. There was just too much of everything else. There were a few HD inside the tank clips, & I was happy about them, but too few of those. As a former tank model builder, I want more! The latter film did have a War Dept. film about how to recognize a Tiger, & a few pages from the Tiger's crew manual. But they cropped the film to make it widescreen!

They showed radio control tank models, & there was one brand that used true to scale thicknesses on the parts it its kits. Interesting, but the the film jumped around and changed scenes far too often. Just as they were showing the inside of the engine compartment of either the model or the real thing, they changed scenes, and went to a clip of an interview of a visitor to the museum. No fair! :cry:



The Big Sleep (1946)
I have seen this more than a few times, but this was NOIR ALLEY, so, I could not resit! Muller spoke about the plot being somewhat hard to follow, though it was secondary to the film being enjoyable.

So, this prominent wealthy family has daughter problems, & hires a P.I. to solve them. Bogart & Bacall, again. Great film! E. Cook, Jr., again, in a supporting role.
 
Saturday: 1917 in the afternoon, Easter Parade in the evening. Two great movies in the same day. What are the chances of that?
 
Saturday: 1917 in the afternoon, Easter Parade in the evening. Two great movies in the same day. What are the chances of that?
Went to 1917 , it was good, there are not that many modern films about WWI , I think Paths of Glory and Gallipoli were better … this is a straight forward story , kind of WWI Saving Private Ryan … a little less elaborated... thought the recent Dunkirk was a better war story... but liked this one.

 
Just finished watching all 9 of the Star Wars movies. It is quite a different experience to watch them in timeline order. Surprising, to me the prequels come off much better there, then when I saw them originally.
 
Just finished watching all 9 of the Star Wars movies. It is quite a different experience to watch them in timeline order. Surprising, to me the prequels come off much better there, then when I saw them originally.

Good to know. That's something else I've been wanting to do. I've also wondered how I would see the prequels and I hoped I would see them as better than I did.
 
The Shining [1980] Stanley Kubrick
I'm sure I saw it not long after it came out, and I think I've seen it once on TV in the last 40 years. But on Sunday I sat down and watched it without interruptions [119 min cut]. It is still as scary as anything without being too graphic. and I could rave about Kubrick's auteur style, but I won't. It's a Kubrick film. Every shot looks great... Even if you don't like the picture.
But... the acting from Jack Nicholson just seems so over the top. Maybe it's because I have 40 more years of Nicholson acting memory to call on that is colouring my view. Shelley Duvall shows someone unravelling quiet well [I forgot she was Olive Oyl in Popeye about the same time]. But for my the stand out is the perfectly underplayed Scatman Crothers. He makes the film for me.
 
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 also watched The Shining again quite recently and was struck by how mad Jack seems from the start. I still think the performance works, though: it just made me think that their home life was probably stranger and more worrying than I'd originally thought. There are hints that he is a violent man, and/or is recovering from a terrible crisis, and I wondered if I'd missed them on earlier viewings.
 
BlacKKKlansman I thought this was a powerful film that, whilst carrying a strong and important storyline, was not without its moments of humour. I'd say that this was one of Spike Lee's best movies.
 
The Break (1962)

British crime film starts with a bang. We see two guys roll off a moving train, fighting each other. One punches the other senseless (and, we're told later, kills him.) Then he gets picked up by a truck, down a river by boat, and into another truck, where we see he's got handcuffs. Cut to the titles.

After this tense opening sequence, without dialogue, we see three people, on holiday, being driven by jeep to an isolated farmhouse somewhere in Devon. The landscape is all mud and low-lying brush, creating a real sense of bleakness. There's a talkative fellow, and two taciturn folks, a man and a woman. The silent man is a novelist, obviously bitter for some reason; the mouthy guy isn't what he seems to be; and the woman is the innocent sister of the guy who escaped from the train while he was on his way to prison. She's there to bring him the loot he got from the robbery that was supposed to send him behind bars. Add in the proprietor of the bed-and-breakfast farmhouse, in on the scheme to help the crook and his sister get away to Argentina; the proprietor's wife, having an affair with the crook; a couple of mute servants; and the local religious fanatic, and you have the recipe for a couple of killings and lots of plot twists. There's a nifty chase scene with a guy in a jeep after a guy on foot, through the rugged countryside. Not bad at all.
 
@Jeffbert You're very welcome. I want to see it again.


Gone With the West (1974) Stars: James Caan, Sammy Davis Jr. & Stephanie Powers. A violent, quirky and sometimes surreal western, with a blend of groovy music in the background. James Caan portrays a framed man, but once out of prison, he's filled with vengeance and takes care of business. Be sure to watch the movie all the way to the credits (you'll find out why). I liked this weird little flick.

Fury of the Demon (2016) A documentary investigation on the rarest and most controversial French movie in the history of early cinema: a fascinating, lost and dangerous short film which causes violent reactions to those who watch it. This movie was first screened in 1897, then viewed again in 2012. The film was either created by the great founder of cinema, Georges Melies, or a mysterious man named, Victor Sicarius. I was blown away by this documentary, I thought it was incredible, shocking and thought provoking.
 
Wild Rose (2018)
Excellent film about a Glaswegian country singer just released from prison who aims to make it in Nashville, though it's more about her relationship with her family. What an amazing job Jessie Buckley did (acting as expected but singing too)!

The Way He Looks (2014)
Easy-to-watch Brazilian film about a blind teenager and his best friend...until a new classmate comes along. A nice film!

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...

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)
The animation looked great but the film didn't engage me. I don't think I've seen the second one.
 

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