What was the last movie you saw?

[HareBrain]

Oh, almost forgot! The horses were 4 side by side, & the villain's chariot had cutters on its wheels that could have chopped horses' legs, but, I just cannot imagine how they could have gotten near the other chariots' wheels!
Where are the other horses?

Well spotted!

 

[Dave Vicks]

ATOMIC CAFE.

Next month Round Midnight,& The Fire Next Time.

 

[Dave Vicks]

NOBODY, 2021.Bob Odenkirk.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back - these films are so much fun.

"Perhaps we can come to some agreement. If you'll stop kidnapping people from my house - I promise to stop breaking into yours. Otherwise this sort of thing could keep up all night!"

I'm wondering if the books are written in a similar vein or it was a Hollywood makeover - I may invest a few quid in a couple of the books to find out.

 

[KGeo777]

"You can't hypnotise me!... I'm British!"

I don't normally think of Peter Cushing doing comedy in a film but that is good comic performance.
He was able to take bad lines and make them work.

 

[KGeo777]

The Night of the Grizzly 1966 -- Frontier homesteader western that after a second viewing reminds me of JAWS in plot. I wonder if Peter Benchley saw it. A former sheriff (Clint Walker) escapes the big city to raise his family out in a rural town and a rampaging grizzly is attacking in the territory. There's a subplot with Keenan Wynn as a land baron who wants his ranch but he doesn't resort to dirty tricks. A hunting party fails to get the bear and a bounty is put out on him, and Leo Gordon, a former associate of Walker, comes to town. It was suggested to me that Gordon would have been a good choice for Quint--he conveys a tough and intimidating persona here--but so much so that I doubt Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss would have been a good match for him. If it was true that Charlton Heston was considered for Brody, then Gordon would have been a good choice for Quint (in that scenario, I nominate Roddy McDowall for Hooper).

 

[KGeo777]

DR MABUSE THE GAMBLER Part 1--released 100 years ago today. Finally got around to watching a Mabuse movie--I first heard of it in Classics of the Horror Film. I guess a master criminal who uses disguises and hypnotism was a scary prospect back in the cabaret days. It seems kind of quaint now in our world of high society criminality.

 

[Guttersnipe]

Prisoners (2013): a mystery too convoluted for me, with a non-ending.

Primal Fear (1996): I already knew the ending from a video. This one shouldn’t be missed.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Wonder Woman 84 - I presented #2 daughter with a choice tonight: Wonder Woman 84 or Cabaret . "How can I choose!" Don't make me chose. Such great legs! Both of them!"

I wonder what it's like having straight kids.

 

[dask]

Absentminded professor type comedy mixing the race for the pennant and the accidental discovery of a chemical that repels wood. Seriously, it works. Well written and acted.

 

[KGeo777]

Death Knows No Time 1969 -- It starts with a typical western marshall (in a distracting wide shoulder-padded coat) coming to town in search of a Mexican bandit but he finds only a trail of bodies. I was wondering why they had such a retro-looking good guy protagonist--it felt like the earliest spaghetti westerns before they made them grungy--but then someone tells him the back story of the man he seeks. That's the real story. A farmer turned bandit who gets into a bank robbery with a gringo and before he can spend the money his wife dies in childbirth and his son is taken to be raised by a kindly sheriff. After spending 10 years in prison he escapes and seeks his son--but he is captured by his former bank robber partner who wants to know what he did with the money he had before going to prison. They kidnap and torture his son in front of him--the kid doesn't know that this is his father...maybe this is a little contrived--wouldn't the kid be wondering why he doesn't resemble his parents? But they spend some time together as a result and the Mexican decides to sign papers so the foster parents can adopt him. It doesn't get so schmaltzy that you want to roll your eyes--the lead actor I have not seen before--he seems a cross between Omar Sharif and Burt Reynolds. If not for him and the bank robber partner--a real jerk who fits more with the standard spaghetti formula--usually the characters are not sympathetic-it would probably feel more pedestrian.

I almost forgot the snake. They shoot the head off a little snake. That is a big thumbs down from me. I hate when they do that. There's a couple of horror movies they did--one is a remake of the first--and in both they have to cut off the head of a snake so you can see it moving around. To that I will employ a little Italian...Vaffanculo!

 

[therapist]

Mysterious Skin (2004) Blew me away how good this was. Acting and sound track were superb. I always love when movies do an internal narrator well (and this had 2 internally narrated characters!) Would recommend to anyone if you don't mind risque subject matter.

 

[Foxbat]

Angry Red Planet and The Time Travelers
A couple of okay for their time SF movies.

In an era when we are used to strong female leads (Ripley being the obvious example), these two films are typical of what went before.

In this older era, a female character had four functions:
1) to provide eye candy,
2) to gaze adoringly at the male lead,
3) to scream at the appropriate time,
4) to faint and, therefore, be carried off to safety or be rescued from the monster by the male lead.

I prefer Ripley. She don’t need no man

 

[JunkMonkey]

Oh sorry but I beg to differ. I though the female leads in both were pretty proactive for a films of the era. In Angry Red Planet it was the female member of the crew that came up with the solution (electricity!) to the amoeba eating the male lead problem. And the females in The Time Travelers were very forward looking for their time:

The running-away sequence when our hero scientists are escaping the mutants; the only woman in the group out-paces the men. IN HEELS! None of this lagging behind, and tripping over a twig, twisting her ankle and getting rescued crap. When she's threatened by the mutants in the lab she doesn't scream or shrink away but grabs a fire extinguisher and blasts them in the face. When the girl from the future (the one making the eyes played by Playboy model Delores Wells) invites the comedy relief to her cubicle (presumably for a good old shag - given the later dialogue in the nude bathing scene about how she's looking forward to the mini baby boom they will have to create on 'New Earth'). That's incredibly liberated for 1964. The interstellar ship propulsion system is explained to our time travellers by the chief female scientist. Thinking about it, there was very little sex differentiation in the jobs people were doing in the future.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome - better than I remember but nowhere near as good as number 2.

 

[Mark_Harbinger]

CODA.

Some movies I'm like: "That was pretty good."
Some: "That was great!"
Some: "That was great! Wow. One of the best I've seen this year!" (the Oscars have conditioned me to think in years, of course)
Some: "Wow. That was amazing...the best movie I've seen in a long time...one of this decade's best!"
And for some, It's just: <stunned silence> "Did I just watch the best movie...ever?"*

*-I've only had that response a handful of times. But CODA was one of them. A lifetime's worth of humanity reflected in under two hours. Remarkable. I feel fortunate the producers decided to make an English version.

 

[Wreath]

Fantastic beast and where to find them 3 secrets of dumbledore

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Der Hexer (1964)

Entertaining krimi based on an Edgar Wallace novel (The Ringer) that had already been filmed multiple times, going back to the silent days. Starts with a secretary overhearing something her boss is saying on the phone. She is then strangled. We cut to her body inside a tiny submarine, and the otherwise black-and-white movie turns into psychedelic color, as we get a rock 'n' roll song mixed with screams, moans, and the sounds of guns being fired over the opening credits.

That's quite a beginning. The woman knew too much about a white slavery ring, and also happened to be the sister of a notorious vigilante called DER HEXER ("the magician," in the English subtitles) who drove criminals to suicide, and is now in Australia. His wife arrives in England, and it's obvious that he's snuck in as well, ready to avenge the murder of his sister.

This leads to a three-way cat-and-mouse game, as the cops try to catch the white slavers and DER HEXER, while the white slavers try to kill the inspector on the case and evade DER HEXER, and DER HEXER kills the white slavers one by one (although they also do some of the work for him themselves) while evading the cops.

There's a guy from Australia claiming to be a writer who's following DER HEXER's wife, there's a kleptomaniac turned butler to the leader of the white slavers, there's the inspector's girlfriend, the inspector's boss and his sexy secretary, and a retired inspector who is the only person around who can identify DER HEXER, who is also a master of disguise. Lots of killings and attempted killings, chases, a multiple twist ending, and some comedy relief that is actually pretty amusing. An enjoyable romp, overall.

 

[hitmouse]

Doolittle (2020). What an unsatisfactory mess. Starts out moderately promising, some interesting ideas which are never properly developed. Lavish production but a weird uneven script, plot and character development, and a lack of overall quality control.
Robert Downey Jr does an unusual, but quite amusing south Walian accent, which I imagine probably required subtitles in parts of the English-speaking world.

 

[Jeffbert]

Death Knows No Time 1969 -- It starts with a typical western marshall (in a distracting wide shoulder-padded coat) coming to town in search of a Mexican bandit but he finds only a trail of bodies. I was wondering why they had such a retro-looking good guy protagonist--it felt like the earliest spaghetti westerns before they made them grungy--but then someone tells him the back story of the man he seeks. That's the real story. A farmer turned bandit who gets into a bank robbery with a gringo and before he can spend the money his wife dies in childbirth and his son is taken to be raised by a kindly sheriff. After spending 10 years in prison he escapes and seeks his son--but he is captured by his former bank robber partner who wants to know what he did with the money he had before going to prison. They kidnap and torture his son in front of him--the kid doesn't know that this is his father...maybe this is a little contrived--wouldn't the kid be wondering why he doesn't resemble his parents? But they spend some time together as a result and the Mexican decides to sign papers so the foster parents can adopt him. It doesn't get so schmaltzy that you want to roll your eyes--the lead actor I have not seen before--he seems a cross between Omar Sharif and Burt Reynolds. If not for him and the bank robber partner--a real jerk who fits more with the standard spaghetti formula--usually the characters are not sympathetic-it would probably feel more pedestrian.

I almost forgot the snake. They shoot the head off a little snake. That is a big thumbs down from me. I hate when they do that. There's a couple of horror movies they did--one is a remake of the first--and in both they have to cut off the head of a snake so you can see it moving around. To that I will employ a little Italian...Vaffanculo!

That plot is very similar to THE LAST GANGSTER, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. Edward G. Robinson goes to prison, and then his wife learns he was a gangster, regrets marrying him, etc. His son is born, reaches age 10, papa is released from prison, & wants to re- pickup where he left off, & start with his son. Just as you say above, the old gang kidnaps the boy, etc., no adoption papers, though.