What was the last movie you saw?

Raining Stones

Another tremendous film from the subscription service that keeps on giving, Britbox. Starring Ricky Tomlinson and Bruce 'Les Battersby' Jones, it's the story of a family living in 1980's Liverpool struggling to get the money together to buy their daughter's 'first communion' dress. Funny in parts, heartbreaking and traumatic in others, it's compulsive viewing from start to finish.
 
THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES (1976) My 1st time seeing this, and it is not much like Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns, except for the rapidity with which JW fires his pistols. Still, if I could be any fictional character, I would likely choose the Man with no name; that, despite the fantasy of the fanning the hammer, & actually being able to hit the targets & such.

Anyway, Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) & others had been in the Confederate Army and had since returned to civilian life. But certain Union officers were just not satisfied with that, & wanted them to pledge allegiance to the Union, surrender their weapons, etc. One Ex-Confederate Fletcher (John Vernon) even works with these Union guys, believing in their peaceful intentions.

As it was, some nasty guys had just massacred JW's wife & son, so he was not in the mood to comply with such demands. After everyone but JW had complied with those demands, the Union guy massacred them, while Fletcher stood by, dumbfounded.

What followed was a relentless pursuit of JW, who, just wanted to live at peace.

Some scenes were very intense, & once is enough for me.
 
Summerland - A gentle, touching gay love story with a happy ending. A little overlong and Mills and Boonish but I will forgive it for having a happy ending and giving the world Penelope Wilton telling small children to bugger off.
 
Jeffbert said:
THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES (1976) My 1st time seeing this, and it is not much like Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns, except for the rapidity with which JW fires his pistols. Still, if I could be any fictional character, I would likely choose the Man with no name; that, despite the fantasy of the fanning the hammer, & actually being able to hit the targets & such.

Anyway, Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) & others had been in the Confederate Army and had since returned to civilian life. But certain Union officers were just not satisfied with that, & wanted them to pledge allegiance to the Union, surrender their weapons, etc. One Ex-Confederate Fletcher (John Vernon) even works with these Union guys, believing in their peaceful intentions.

As it was, some nasty guys had just massacred JW's wife & son, so he was not in the mood to comply with such demands. After everyone but JW had complied with those demands, the Union guy massacred them, while Fletcher stood by, dumbfounded.

What followed was a relentless pursuit of JW, who, just wanted to live at peace.

Some scenes were very intense, & once is enough for me.
Click to expand...
Fantastic film. One of the great Westerns imho. Different from the Sergio Leone Eastwood movies. Very moving (and violent.) Must have watched this half a dozen times over the years.
 
Hercules of the Desert 1964 - A desert tribe asks Allah to send them a warrior so they get Hercules (or Maciste actually). Kirk Morris is his usual non-emotive self--he picks up the biggest styrofoam rock I have ever seen. The musical score is pretty good, and the finale has a psychedelic quality to it with him fighting weird ogres that reminded me of Ferengi.
 
Eyes Without a Face (1960; dir. Georges Franju; starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel)

Brasseur is a surgeon, whose reckless driving nearly killed Edna, his daughter (Mayniel) and severely disfigured her face (oddly, her neck and arms appear untouched). Valli is his secretary, once his patient, the recipient of his specialty, skin grafting, and perhaps his lover, though that is lightly implied rather than stated. At his behest she searches for a suitable donor for a new face for Edna. Donating a face tends to be involuntary, and so the police have found the remains of at least one unsuccessful donor. Can the doctor and secretary find a face for Edna before the police find them and before Edna's condition and isolation drive her insane?

If a black and white horror movie can be delicate, this is delicate. The horror of it resides in the doctor's obsession to repair his daughter, the secretary's blind loyalty, and Edna's disintegrating personality. We see Edna's face at one point when a surgery appears to work and she's quite attractive, but somehow the mask she wears before and after the unsuccessful surgery is both beautiful and poignant, almost inexpressibly sad and alarming for how much that masked face can express -- Mayniel has some excellent silent scenes calling her fiance, who thinks she's dead, just to hear his voice. And the scene of the surgery being performed, the intimacy of removing someone's face, is still disturbing after decades of grosser scenes in less nuanced horror movies.

One last observation: If in the first act you hear a kennel of dogs barking, they must have something to do in the final act.
 
Doves flitting around an almost angelic insane living ghost as she nearly floats past her father?
Absolutely. And a kind of fitting bookend to the sequence that opened the movie.
 
Double Indemnity (1944) - It's the first time I've seen this outstanding murder for fraud flick. I love them "noir" movies.

African Queen (1951) - Fantastic drama that is set in WW2. Second time I watched this.

The Mandalorian (TV series 2019) - Astonishing! This Star Wars fan watched the entire series with wide eyes. I felt like a kid again.

The Woman in the Window (1944) - Another film that I watched for the first time. Excellent drama with an awesome cast.

The Guns of Navarone (1961) - I finally got my chance to watch this action movie. I wasn't disappointed. Very cool.
 
Memento - for the second time with number two daughter who loved it. Watching the end credits I spotted a name that was familiar. One of the drivers (not an on screen stunt driver but one of the ' pick up mister Pearce at his hotel at 4am and take him to the location' drivers) was John 'Bud' Cardos, the director of the oddly brilliant William Shatner eco-disaster flick Kingdom of the Spiders. I love reading the end credits of movies. You discover all sorts of odd connections.
 
The Devil's Daffodil 1961 - Krimi in which Christopher Lee has a role as a Chinese detective who speaks fluent German (since it was subtitled).

Triumph of Hercules 1964 - This has a goofy Hercules but a rather cool challenge involving a dagger that can create 7 golden warriors who clobber everyone around them. Also there's cute use of a monkey.
 
DESTINATION MOON (1950) General Thayer (Tom Powers) is convinced that for the USA to maintain it position as the leader among nations, it must be 1st to the Moon. It does seem odd that a military base on the Moon would be more important that satellites orbiting much closer, but, perhaps nobody was thinking of that then. BTW, Sputnik went into orbit October 1957).

So, the General convinces leaders of industry that they must cooperate, finance and produce the vehicle that will carry men to the Moon. Once the Government sees this, it will gladly spend the taxpayers' money to buy more of the same.

So, they go to the Moon, encounter numerous difficulties along the way, etc., just to make it more interesting.

Anyway, I still enjoy these old sci-fi films, & this one has a premise that, at the time, seemed plausible. Except for the propulsion system, which I find fanciful (but, what do I know?) it seems not so far-fetched. Even W. V. Braun was expecting to have the entire spaceship land on the Moon, but was dissuaded by those with better ideas.
 
Watched John Wick tonight. Was fun picking out the Russian, but the subtitles were very small and the music was so loud. Still pretty awesome though. I’m thinking “Keanu Reeves needs to chill out, he’s a terrorist!” Good thing mass murdering hitmen are only in movies… because John Wick killed just about everybody regardless of the casualties. What is the value of a life? Overall, a macho movie about a man mourning the death of his wife, and going through anger issues after losing the dog that could help him mourn for her. Forced out of retirement, put back in the line of fire, the man can’t catch a break, because everybody wants him dead. At least Hotel International treat him well. And Willem Defoe was cool. Sometimes it’s like, your instinct when seeing him is a movie is, “Wow! It’s Willem Defoe!” Yet, what is it about Defoe that makes people say that? Could it be his part in The Boondock Saints? Like most actors I guess, he has a very niche appeal. Is it the man himself, his acting, or the roles he chooses? And as for Keanu Reeves, the same can be said. You really can’t not like Keanu, however I thought John Wick was a bit over the top. Better than Jason Bourne, without a doubt, but really, nothing but a good action flick.

That’s what I thought, anyway.
 
MINOTAUR THE WILD BEAST OF CRETE 1960 -- The creature costume for the title character is pretty good--doesn't really look like a bull but neat costume all the same. Some nasty tortures in this --a hot poker in the face, falling into a pit of hyenas, a torch in the eyes. Fun times.
 
The Silent Enemy (1958)
During WW 11, Italian mini-submarines, Chariots, sink two British battleships in Alexandria. Lieutenant Krabbe, a demolition expert with no diving experience, arrives in the British fortress of Gibraltar with orders to protect convoys that are under threat by this new form of naval attack. A cracking yarn based on a factual story and quite tense at times. I hadn't seen this fine British movie since I was a kid yet enjoyed it just as much now as then. Highly recommended, even for those who don't like B&W movies.
 
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022): A sci-fi comedy action blend that involves a Chinese-American laundromat owner who must fight along with her family's interdimensional versions of her family members to preserve the multiverse. Funny and disgusting throughout, with a good message.
 
Nylon Noose (Die Nylonschlinge, 1963)

Like many of these German krimi films, this one pretends to take place in England. Starts with a guy strangled with a NYLON NOOSE in a nightclub. It turns out that he was a police inspector, taking an extortion payoff to the club in the place of the intended victim. (Everybody in the dubbed dialogue calls it blackmail, but it's definitely the "pay me or I'll kill you" type of crime.) Pretty soon the guy who was really the target of the extortionist gets killed the same way.

The son of an aristocrat has been romancing with the club's sexy dancer, and there's a meeting of stockholders at his father's manor. One of the stockholders was the murdered extortion victim, so the police inspector on the case (with the mandatory Comic Relief assistant) puts two and two together and comes up with twenty-two, figuring one of the stockholders must be the killer.

Among the crowd is a pretty young woman with whom the police inspector has a romance. The lord of the place takes the film into the realm of Mad Science, as he experiments with centuries-old mummified corpses located in the catacombs beneath the manor. He's even got a huge servant with a badly scarred face. Most of the stockholders have some kind of skeleton in the closet, so we've got lots of suspects. One more murder follows, and we eventually get the expected scene of the killer chasing the nightgowned young woman through the catacombs.

It's an entertaining bit of nonsense.
 
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