What was the last movie you saw?

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Motor Patrol (1950)

Dragnet/Adam-12 style crime film. Starts with the discovery of a dead man on the street, apparently a victim of a hit-and-run driver. Investigation by the detectives on the traffic squad lead to a hot car racket, the victim murdered because he knew too much. The first half of the film has a fair amount of comedy, from interviews with witnesses (a "model" is with her "boyfriend," a much older man whose name she doesn't know; he gives his name as "John Smith") to an extended bit with the manager of a diner (familiar comic character actor Sid Melton) trying to get his nickel back from the operator after a failed phone call. It gets a lot more serious when the murderer also kills a "motor" (motorcycle) cop. The fiancé of the dead cop's brother, a rookie just out of the academy (played by an actor who looks a lot like Clark Gable,) goes undercover to solve the case. It's an OK little B crime film.

 

[KGeo777]

EL CID 1961 - Viewing for the 60th anniversary this month. Some of the early romance stuff is a drag but overall it's quite a film. No humor-which is surprising. I can't remember a single joke--whenever I see Frank Thring I think of Eric Idle though.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

984: Prisoner of the Future (1982)

Odd little dystopian film, apparently made for Canadian television and intended as the pilot of an unsold series, although it's impossible to see how it could have continued. We get our back story in little bits and pieces as flashbacks, so it's not linear at all. A white-haired, white-bearded fellow starts something called "The Movement" which gets him elected to some high office. Immediately afterward, anybody who opposed The Movement gets thrown in prison.

Our protagonist is prisoner 984; the allusion to the Orwell novel seems deliberate. Through a series of beatings and psychological tortures and interviews with "The Warden" (who could easily be a Number Two from The Prisoner,) we find out that they want him to confess to crimes against The Movement. It seems a friend took him to a meeting of corporate types who were planning to oppose The Movement with a nuclear weapon. He wanted nothing to do with it, but it's enough of an association to land him in hot water with The Movement.

The whole thing is talky and cheap-looking, and extremely vague about what The Movement is all about. The few futuristic touches (robot prison guards, like the police in THX 1138; the gray uniforms with small rainbow patches that members of The Movement wear) don't add much. But darned if it doesn't create a eerie mood that makes the viewer pay attention. Oh, there's a twist ending:

Spoiler

After ten years, 984 gets a glimpse of the outside world, and it's a desert wasteland.

 

[hitmouse]

The Haunting of Margham Castle
British set American production (?) about a bunch of american paranormal investigators who travel to Wales to investigate an old haunted castle.
It was...ok, but there was only one person with a Welsh accent, and he was off camera! The barmaid in the pub serving the American guests was a cockney and when asked what Welsh rarebit is obviously had no interest in Welsh traditions!
I wish people would do their research. A good idea wasted

This looks terrible. I live near Margam and know it very well. It has a beautiful old orangery, which is currently being used as a mass vaccination centre. The gardens overlook the Port Talbot steelworks.

 

[Astro Pen]

International (2009)
I think this would review better today than when it was released. The corruption of banks and arms dealers, their machinations and the murderous lengths they will go to to to maintain the secrecy of their deals is far closer to the surface than it was in it's day.
The 'texture' was an interesting mix of Hollywood and good British TV drama. If you enjoy movies in which you have to pay attention to grasp the plot, like the Clooney / Damon Syriana, then you will like it. It has some strong action, paricularly the Guggenheim assasination/ shootout.
(The Guggenheim set must have been a sod to construct.)

 

[JunkMonkey]

Requiem pour un Vampire (aka Requiem for a Vampire and Caged Virgins) My second Jean Rollin film of the week. This one was made 3 years after La vampire nue . Several actors reappear. The films starts off with two girls dressed as clowns in a speeding car driven by a man. The girls have guns and they are being pursued by another car. Lots of shots are fired. The man is killed and the girls lose their pursuers. They set fire to the car with the body in it and wander around till they find a castle. In the castle they find a bed. Because they are French and in the presence of a bed they immediately take their clothes off. After a short scene of under-rehearsed and unenthusiastic sex they are disturbed by noises off and leave. They find they can't leave. Every path they take leads them back to the castle. There are vampires in the castle. Other women are in the dungeon chained to walls - actually 'chained' is not quite the right word. As she is violated by the vampire underlings one of the women lets go of the chain she had wrapped round her wrist and has to reattach herself to the wall as she is tenaciously groped by a bloke who looks like he is enjoying at much as she is. I don't know what he was looking so miserable about; at least he had clothes on. The actress getting... whatever it was that was going on done to her, was having to do all this with her bare bum on a gritty dungeon wall. The two clown girls aren't vampirised because the head vampire realises they are virgins and he will breed with them. In the meantime they can go out and lure people to their doom. The next day one of them willingly loses her virginity to a passing stranger while on luring duty. She loses it doing that strange, not-quite-touching-or-moving sex that they had to do back then to get past the censors. Or maybe that's the way the French did make love back then. Apparently there is a HUGE swathe of France called "La diagonale du vide" which is incredibly unpopulated. I was was listening to a radio show about an author who had walked it recently researching a book. He claimed that at one point during his journey he walked for three days without seeing a single other person. If this is the way French people really f***ed back in the 1970s that would explain a lot... The other girl meanwhile lures her passing stranger by running around naked and dangerously hanging off the top of some very crumbly-looking, very tall, castle walls. It looked insanely dangerous. If she was wearing any kind of safety harness I cannot for the life of me work out how. Lesbian BDSM follows. The vampire's men attack. The girls shoot them all dead. The boss vampire decides he doesn't want to be a vampire any more and goes off to his crypt to die. End of film. WTF?

Rollin is, on the evidence of the four films of his I have watched, one of those guys (like Orson Wells) who started at the top and worked his way down.

La vampire nue was almost dreamlike and arty weird - Requiem pour un Vampire was trying for the same but added lashings (literally) of sex and sadism that made the weird vibe just look cheaper and tatty - more like porn linking material.

There was armpit hair.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Star Knight (El caballero del dragón, "The knight of the dragon," 1985)

Spanish science fiction film disguised as a medieval fantasy. Klaus Kinski is some kind of alchemist/healer/magician to a count. He casts a spell that, it seems, actually works, causing the night sky to light up brightly. Next we see a guy calling to one of his goats, asking it to jump down from a cliff. Instead, the goat floats up into the air. This event, and I suppose others we don't see, lead all the peasants to think there's a dragon around.

Meanwhile, the count's pretty daughter is restless, looking for a boyfriend. Harvey Keitel, looking and sounding completely out of place, is the count's enforcer, who wants to be a knight and the daughter's boyfriend. She defies Daddy's command that she remain in the castle while the dragon is around, and runs off.

This leads to the introduction of a character who serves only as a running gag. Calling himself the Green Knight, he claims to be defending a bridge against all challengers. He lets the daughter cross when she takes off her hood, revealing herself to be a woman. Later in the film, he'll let others go over the bridge without a fight, either because they talk their way across or he's busy relieving himself. It's a really odd subplot, and the character seems to think he's in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Anyway, the daughter goes skinny dipping and disappears. Later, she shows up in a comatose state. (More eccentric comic relief: When she's gone, the count forces all the peasants to dye their clothes black. When she returns, they have to dye them bright colors.) Kinski hypnotizes her and finds out what happened.

It turns out that an alien (played by a guy who is apparently a huge singing star in the Spanish-speaking world, and who looks a lot like Sting) in a spacesuit took her inside his spaceship. Despite the fact that he only speaks in little electronic beeps (which she can apparently understand) they fall into True Love right away.

After some fighting and such, Keitel, with the help of the count's priest (Fernando Rey) who opposes Kinski, finds out how to open the alien's "armor" (spacesuit) in order to expose him to Earth's poisonous atmosphere. But Love Conquers All, and there's a happy ending.

Credit where credit is due: The exterior of the spaceship is pretty cool, and the interior is really nifty, looking like a combination of the skeleton of a sea beast and a cavern with stalactites and stalagmites. Some of the alien stuff is pretty neat, like a sphere that seems to be some kind of computer that projects images of the answers to questions you ask. (It's a prominent plot point, as it reveals the secret of "liquid gold" [elixir of life] to Kinski and how to open the alien's spacesuit to Keitel.)

Keitel's New York accent mixed with Rey's Spanish accent and a miscellany of other voices is pretty amusing, and there's a lot of bombastic music trying to convince me that this is an epic instead of the goofy semi-comedy it really is.

 

[Foxbat]

The Many Saints Of Newark

I come to this movie as a fan of The Sopranos TV series (this movie being a prequel of sorts).
Overall, I was disappointed. It was okay as a movie but nothing startling. The plot was set in such a way that you didn't have to have watched The Sopranos to understand what was going on. The writers, however, added a few scenes that were related to the series (most notably the gun and the beehive hair). This, I presume, was to allow the die hards to nod knowingly to themselves but, for me, it all just felt a bit too contrived.

Given that it has gangster movie DNA, it in no way came anywhere near the likes of Goodfellas or The Godfather, but the biggest problem with this particular film was that there just wasn't much of a story there. Not even enough to fill a Sopranos episode.

And finally, why do some writers try and come up with a gritty script only to have it narrated by someone from beyond the grave? What is this, Gangster Ghostbusters?

A perfect example of why back story is often best left as back story.

Five out of ten at best.

 

[AE35Unit]

This looks terrible. I live near Margam and know it very well. It has a beautiful old orangery, which is currently being used as a mass vaccination centre. The gardens overlook the Port Talbot steelworks.

It is. And I adore Wales

 

[KGeo777]

KERIM SON OF THE SHEIK 1962 - Gordon Scott as an arab prince who moonlights as a masked avenger. It's pretty standard but I like desert-set movies. There's no humor except one--I assume--line that was added without anything noticing where he is asked what they should do and he replies: "we have to try to open that damn door."

 

[JunkMonkey]

And finally, why do some writers try and come up with a gritty script only to have it narrated by someone from beyond the grave?

Two words : Sunset Boulevard

 

[KGeo777]

HANNIE CAULDER 1971 - Raquel Welch learns to be a gunslinger so she can get revenge on three rapists with Robert Culp's help (and Christopher Lee's gunsmith skills). When a wimpy sheriff says she is a hard woman, she says: "There are no hard women. Only soft men."
Good score this has.

 

[CupofJoe]

Teen Spirit [2018]
Elle Fanning plays the polish born daughter of a mother trying to keep their farm, living hand to mouth on their small farm on the Isle of Wight. Elle is a singer Violette/Violet, that with the help of an ex-opera singer Vlad, enters a TV talent contest. There highs and lows along the journey. I won't spoil the ending, but it was not what I expected.
This is not High School Musical. For what is a at heart a feel-good film it starts off fairly downbeat and doesn't get much lighter..
Elle Fanning can sing! Her vocal are live and not post recorded, I've just read.
Zlatko Buric is very believable as the rundown ex-opera singer. Just enough seediness and hulking presence.
And Rebecca Hall is all but perfect as the slightly sinister Manager/Agent.
A truely comic moment is when the boy-band "The Shades" do a cover of Teenage Kicks. It is out loud laughably sweet and saccharine, totally missing the point of the song. The Undertones must have hated it.
The only thing I didn't really like is that the film make a point of saying it is on the Isle of Wight [as the old joke goes... If it 11 o'clock in London, what time is it on the Isle of Wight? About 1958]. But there is no real evidence of the island in the film. It could have been set anywhere a bit rundown.
The film was the first directed by Max Minghella [son of Antony Minghella and whose family have long ties to the Isle of Wight] and there are some nice cinematic touches, such as a long single take of walking to the stage at the final as the tension builds.
There are no great surprises in the film but it is very watchable.

 

[AE35Unit]

Krampus Well that's an hour and half of my life I won't ever get back. They should have made it as an out and out comedy. I mean, being attacked by a nail gun wielding gingerbread man. No way you can take this film seriously lol

 

[pogopossum]

137 Shots.
Just released on Netflix.
Murder by cop documentary in Cleveland.
This incident was the occasion of the city police department being put under (poor) federal court order.

 

[hitmouse]

Watched Little Miss Sunshine again at the request of the kids. A hilarious, subversive classic for the (slightly older) family. The ending is possibly the funniest thing I have ever seen on film. You do need to be in the right frame of mind for this film. I recommended it enthusiastically to a friend who didn't get it at all.

 

[M. Robert Gibson]

One Cut Of The Dead A Japanese zombie comedy with a fantastic ending. I was watching for about 10 minutes and it struck me that I hadn't seen a cut, so I rewound (is that the correct verb for a digital offering?) and sure enough, there hadn't been. In fact, the first 30 minutes or so was done in one take. The rest of the film is a flashback to the run-up to the first part.
I won't give any spoilers, and if anyone decides to watch it, I recommend avoiding any spoilers

However, here's the top review on IMDB, which sums it up nicely

So at first you just cringe and laugh at the silliness of the movie. Then you are confused. And then you laugh at how amazing the movie is. The last 30 minutes were one of my best movie watching experience.

 

[paranoid marvin]

The Many Saints Of Newark

I come to this movie as a fan of The Sopranos TV series (this movie being a prequel of sorts).
Overall, I was disappointed. It was okay as a movie but nothing startling. The plot was set in such a way that you didn't have to have watched The Sopranos to understand what was going on. The writers, however, added a few scenes that were related to the series (most notably the gun and the beehive hair). This, I presume, was to allow the die hards to nod knowingly to themselves but, for me, it all just felt a bit too contrived.

Given that it has gangster movie DNA, it in no way came anywhere near the likes of Goodfellas or The Godfather, but the biggest problem with this particular film was that there just wasn't much of a story there. Not even enough to fill a Sopranos episode.

And finally, why do some writers try and come up with a gritty script only to have it narrated by someone from beyond the grave? What is this, Gangster Ghostbusters?

A perfect example of why back story is often best left as back story.

Five out of ten at best.

Thanks for this. I will save off renting the movie now and wait for it to come on Sky/Netflix.

I think the problem with this type of big budget movie is deciding whether to alienate those unfamiliar with The Sopranos , or making it accessible to all, but watering down the parts that would make fans pleased. the danger is that you end up appealing to neither - it sounds like this is the case here.

It reminds me very much of the Deadwood or El Camino movies, but that were entirely made for fans of the show, and you wouldn't have got much from them if you hadn't seen the tv shows first. They wrapped everything up nicely and waere a great way for the shows to finish. Having said that, they were never cinema movies so didnt have to worry about raking money back from a non-Sopranos/Breaking Bad audience.

Perhaps the way they should have gone about it was like with The Irishman (a brilliant movie) that had a limited paid streaming option, then went straight to Netflix. It's a shame that Prime/Netflix/Sky didn't commission this movie in a similar way, and have a movie wholly devoted to fans of the show, with the intention of reviving interest in the original or perhaps even bringing out a pre-Sopranos series on tv.

Sounds like a missed opportunity.

 

[Jeffbert]

November was Sydney Greenstreet month at TCM, & I watched a few of my favorites, both costarring Peter Lorre.

THE VERDICT (1946) Scotland Yard Superintendent Grodman (Sydney Greenstreet) convicts and hangs a man purely on circumstantial evidence, in part because he could not provide an alibi. But the man who could have given him an alibi had gone not to Wales, but New South Wales, where they had not thought to search for him. Disgraced, Grodman takes an early retirement, and sets out to similarly disgrace his successor, Superintendent Buckley (George Coulouris). Victor Emmric (Peter Lorre) Grodman's friend is an artist, and offers to illustrate his Autobiography.


THREE STRANGERS (1946) Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald), talks two strangers into entering a pact with her, in which they agree to wish for the same thing, money, which they agree if their sweepstakes ticket, already purchased by Johnny West (Peter Lorre), they will bet on a particular horse. All three are needing money, Shackleford wants to regain her estrang ed husband, and believes by becoming independently wealthy, she can win his love. Jerome K. Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet), an investment guy, has misused his client's money, and of the three, is most desperate to gain immediate wealth. West, just wants the money.

The ending reminds me of Twilight Zone stories. I will leave it at that.


Greenstreet had top billing in both, and Lorre, dropped from #2 to #3 in Three.

 

[Droflet]

I remember the Verdict and the confusion between Wales and New South Wales. Top flick. Now to hunt down the other. Thanks for that Jeffbert.