What was the last movie you saw?

[Ian Fortytwo]

I watched Force 10 From Navarone.
They cleverly put Robert Shaw and Harrison Ford on footage of the original film. 8/10

 

[Astro Pen]

One Hour Photo Terrible pacing and ambiguous ending but Robin Williams excels, playing straight, as a creepy print shop guy.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Malpertuis - from the same director as Daughters of Darkness - which, disappointingly, was a bit of a long rambling frustrating shambles. I cottoned on to the underlying allegory far too early for the mystery to carry the film and it went on for far too long.

 

[Guttersnipe]

Fatal Attraction (1987): This film filled me with dread, leaving me feeling as paranoid as Douglas's character. Glenn Close does a good job portraying a person who may well suffer from an extreme case of Borderline Personality Disorder.

Alice, Sweet Alice (1976): I didn't enjoy this movie as much, but I did like the quality of it and the direction. Scary in parts, sometimes thrilling, but overall underwhelming for me.

 

[KGeo777]

The Liquidator 1965 -- Thanks to a Shirley Bassey title song it feels the most Bondian of the Eurospy films but it is a comedy. Most of the humor works though because it doesn't lay it on too thick and British humor of the 60s doesn't date like American film humor can.

 

[Jeffbert]

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987) I had little idea that this was supposed to be historical or biographical, or even non-fiction, about a real man. Yet, given that the Chinese cooperated in the making of it, I must wonder, is it history or propaganda. So, they show the deposed E as a political prisoner, being coerced into writing his confession, while he denies the charges, then the flashback sequence, depicting what he had just denied.

 

[KGeo777]

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987)

I remember in the Siskel and Ebert review of it, the latter said he found happiness as a gardener in the palace. The message of the story was that he was better off as an anonymous worker.
Hollywood has had a romance with communism for a long time. Although China was used as a villain in the 1960s, there were still films that flattered the political system. The Chairman 1969 starring Gregory Peck is like that. What is bizarre about that film (beyond the US and the UK governments being presented as more sinister than their Russian and Chinese counterparts) is that it follows the plot of Planet of the Apes almost exactly. The same producer was behind it. Even the last shot of the movie--has Peck and a woman walking off in the distance.
There's a Forbidden Zone and the Lawgiver's scrolls (Mao's Little Red Book).

 

[JunkMonkey]

British humor of the 60s doesn't date like American film humor can.

Cough! splutter! I guess you only got the good stuff exported. Trust me there was a LOT of hideously awful British comedy made in the 60s that was outdated even as it was being made.

 

[KGeo777]

Cough! splutter! I guess you only got the good stuff exported. Trust me there was a LOT of hideously awful British comedy made in the 60s that was outdated even as it was being made.

Yeah we didn't get much -- Fawlty Towers, Benny Hill, Dave Allen At Large, and the Two Ronnies.
I generally avoid comedy movies of any country but the UK spy comedies I have seen are better than the American equivalents I've watched. Matt Helm and Flint for example. Lots of groans.

 

[KGeo777]

Carry On and On the Buses we also got over here.

They could have done a cross over

Carry On the Buses

 

[worldofmutes]

Watching The Postman, sitting on the couch with muh dad. We’re having a good time!

Will report back later.

 

[worldofmutes]

Rams (2015)- in a remote valley in Iceland, two bothers, sheep farmers working on the same land and living separate houses a couple of dozen meters apart, haven't talked to each other for 40 years. They communicate, when they have to, by messages delivered by one of their dogs. One of their rams gets scrapie (a horrible brain-rotting sheep disease) and every sheep in the valley has to be killed. The film is very slow. Very real. And sometimes very funny. One of those films where you had no idea where the story was going to go. There are no subplots, or romantic interest. Just two guys who hate each others guts facing up to the fact that their way of life is coming to an end. I liked it.

There is, I have just discovered, an Australian remake. starring Sam Neill which from the look of the trailer has turned the story into an identikit feelgood 'quirky' comedy where everyone will know exactly how the story will end from the start of the second act.

That sounds like a great movie!

 

[Foxbat]

Roger Corman’s Forbidden World (1982).
Essntially a poor man’s Alien.
In the planet Xarbia, a group of scientists create a new life form that gets out of control. Cue a Han Solo-alike reject with his trusty robot companion (who looks suspiciously like a cylon bought in a yard sale and painted grey).

Much chaos ensues and the alien, at one point, enters the ventillation system (I wonder where they got that idea from….It, The Terror From Beyond Space, Dark Star or Alien…take your pick).

Mediocre, derivative and yawn inducing.

 

[hitmouse]

Red List on Netflix. Lazy, incoherent, derivative and unfunny excuse for a heist movie.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Catching up. Over the last few days:

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking - BBC Made for TV starring Rupert Everett doing even less than usual. I only kept watching because of a standout performance by one of the younger members of the cast who I had not come across before and was giving much more to the show than the material deserved. 'She's got something' I thought. Perdita Weeks has chanked up a lot of credits on the IMDb since. .

Star Trek : Generations - which was less awful than I remember.

Florence Foster Jenkins - What a sweet film. Streep was wonderful.

 

[worldofmutes]

Finished up The Postman.

I can say, aside from a Halo: Fall of Reach and Lester Del Rey’s Day of the Giants from my time in jail… er- David Brin’s The Postman was the first SF book I ever read, and yet I barely remember it. Actually, compared to my time with the amazing Kevin Costner film- I cannot fathom Rotten Tomatoes anymore, or how they’ll rate the latest movie from Disney/Marvel a near perfect score while The Postman is rated no higher than Waterworld. I will need to read the book again later, but I appreciated the movie’s wholesome perspective about a mis-gotten postman bringing democracy to a post-apocalyptic America under the fascist Holnist leader, Genereal Bethlehem.

Some fun facts, the mill where the Holnists dye fabric and watch „The Sound of Music” was possibly recorded in my hometown, Morenci. My dad says that movie crews were not uncommon in the copper mine that he worked in for 30 years. And also that we recognize the area, and even the mountainous region which looks like Silver City, NM, some of our old stomping grounds. This blows my mind a little bit, if so.

I puffed a little something something and started to lose focus at some point and we stopped the movie. So I finished it today. I was off on a long ramble about how in the book, this machine that Kevin Costner didn’t exactly invent- but that was invented for him to communicate correspondence between villages. I was very confused by this in the book, being a relatively new reader at the time, and in the movie I saw no such references to any machine at all! Meh.

This movie was fantastic, and being my dad’s favorite, it’s mine too. Especially for how close to home it is.

 

[Rodders]

The Postman was a very underrated film in my opinion, too.

I’ve not read the book as I really struggled with Brin’s writing style.

 

[alexvss]

A Scanner Darkly. Good sci-fi flick based on a K. Dick novel. Keanu Reeves is as bad and mechanical as ever, but the story of his character saves him (it's pretty dramatic and based on true events). I like Robert Downey Jr's character, he's hilarious. The idea of an outfit that makes you unrecognizable for face recognition by changing your appearance to one of the more of 1.5 million persons in a database is crazy and ridiculous... but it somehow works here. Funny that, according to wikipedia, the movie is more known for its animation techinique than for its story. I say 'funny' because rotoscope animation is not a new technique at all. Just look at Bakshi's masterpiece Fire and Ice (1983).

 

[JunkMonkey]

A Scanner Darkly. Good sci-fi flick based on a K. Dick novel. Keanu Reeves is as bad and mechanical as ever, but the story of his character saves him (it's pretty dramatic and based on true events). I like Robert Downey Jr's character, he's hilarious. The idea of an outfit that makes you unrecognizable for face recognition by changing your appearance to one of the more of 1.5 million persons in a database is crazy and ridiculous... but it somehow works here. Funny that, according to wikipedia, the movie is more known for its animation techinique than for its story. I say 'funny' because rotoscope animation is not a new technique at all. Just look at Bakshi's masterpiece Fire and Ice (1983).

"Goddamn shapeshifting lizard bitches!"

Bakshi was working pen/paint on paper/gels. Linklater's guys did it digitally. (As they had done on Waking Life). There were teams working on each frame. One animator worked on one character another on another - I think they even broke it down further than that with animators given individual features - Robert Downey Jr's mouth, Keanu Reeve's eyes etc. - and they still managed to leave a mismatch in the edit. There's two shots during the orphan gears scene where (from memory) Woody Harrilson's hand drops in a cut from holding the bike's wheel to his side.

Disney used rotoscope back in 1937 in Snow White where an actress was filmed in costume as the central character and then laboriously projected and traced frame by frame.

A Scanner Darkly is a great film. I love it dearly. The best adaptation of a Dick novel - or at least the most true to the author's style. The most Dickish.

 

[KGeo777]

The Rookies 1972 -- pilot film for the series. Despite Darren McGavin and Cameron Mitchell (who gives a monologue to a kitten--he has done that a few times where he speaks to a critter companion) it is rather on the bland side.


Hollywood Man 1976 --William Smith portrays a stunt man turned film director who has to go to a mob boss to get the money to complete his film (which is called Die Hard according to the name written on the clapperboard).
But the mobsters want to shaft him so he ends up dealing with all sorts of trouble and getting into fights. I thought it was uneven although the ending was looking pretty good until they decided to go for the shock freezeframe and I think it was a tired 1970s trope to end with.