What was the last movie you saw?

I have been planning to see Bell Book and Candle for a while. I am most curious because it came out months after Vertigo.

On the subject of "The Girl Most Likely To.." It was pointed out the cliche in movies where the popular students are mean.
The popular kids I remember in school-or rather the ones considered at an advantage, either were nice or indifferent. Why would they need to be mean to be popular? How does that aid their popularity?

There was a movie planned--I assume it was never made--it was supposed to star Kelly LeBrock as a woman who, in order to find out if her husband really loves her, has surgery to make herself ugly.
That is an extreme step to take.
 
MASH (1970) a re-watch after many years. Seems a bit awkward now in places (casual mysogyny) but otherwise terrific. Completely different tone to the tv series. Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould are excellent.
 
Bell, Book, and Candle is a charming film. Kim Novak is a fetching witch, and Jack Lemmon is fun as a bongo-playing warlock.

Perhaps the cliché of the mean popular kids has something to do with the kind of people who become writers? I suppose it's also a easy way to win the sympathy of the audience, although true school bullies probably aren't usually the upper class/attractive/popular.

If memory serves, Harlan Ellison's story "Sally in Our Alley" features a handsome guy who makes use of plastic surgery to become less attractive. (As the last line of the story says, "How beat can you get?")
 
Champagne For Caesar 1950 --Very clever comedy with Ronald Colman as a genius but impoverished bookworm who is appalled by quiz game host Art Linkletter and what he predicts will be the destruction of the American intellect through tv and radio, so he schemes to get on the show and keep winning until he bankrupts the soap company owned by Vincent Price, who hires a con woman (Celeste Holm who is extremely good) to destroy Colman's suave calm and ruin his winning streak. Great ending. Mel Blanc is the voice of Caesar.
Price told an anecdote about this film--Colman invited him to dinner at his house. Since Colman was the next door neighbor of Jack Benny in his radio show, Price assumed that was where he lived and found out the hard way that it wasn't the case.

ASSASSINATION 1967 - Henry Silva is framed and then saved from the electric chair by the CIA to investigate a criminal ring in Europe by posing as his fictitious brother. One of those slow Euro crime flicks with moody atmosphere and picturesque shots of 1960s New York and Germany.
 
Crawl (2019)

A student goes to fetch her father during a storm in Florida. Unfortunately the waters are rising and they're full of hungry alligators. Fortunately, she's an expert swimmer.

This is a small film without grand ambitions that does what it set out to do extremely well. Kaya Scodelario is very good as the determined heroine. It's not deadly serious, but it never gets campy or winks to the camera. It's got that very American quality of the abandoned houses looking run-down but absolutely huge. Well worth a look if it's your sort of thing.
 
AE35Unit said:
Pyewacket 2017
Dreary cliché-ridden horror about a moody teenage girl who hates her life and her mom and sets out to do something about it. Yawn.
The title was the name of a cat in a comedy film called Bell Book and Candle. That was good, this isn't.
Click to expand...
Agreed!! Dreadful film. And the mother’s acting was dreadful. I was shocked because it has had fantastic reviews from the academic podcast Faculty of Horror.
Toby Frost said:
Crawl (2019)

A student goes to fetch her father during a storm in Florida. Unfortunately the waters are rising and they're full of hungry alligators. Fortunately, she's an expert swimmer.

This is a small film without grand ambitions that does what it set out to do extremely well. Kaya Scodelario is very good as the determined heroine. It's not deadly serious, but it never gets campy or winks to the camera. It's got that very American quality of the abandoned houses looking run-down but absolutely huge. Well worth a look if it's your sort of thing.
Click to expand...
Such fun - some really enjoyable scenes. Just popcorn fun. Love the scene with the thieving kids —
and any film where the dog survived is okay by me.
 
OVER-EXPOSED (1956) NOIR ALLEY, though it seems not to fit the genre, Muller assures that, in its own way, it does.

So this buxom young woman Lily Krenshka (Cleo Moore) takes a job in the big city, not knowing it is a striptease joint, is arrested, given 24 hours to leave town, & ends-up learning photography from Max West (Raymond Greenleaf), a washed-up photographer on the verge of retirement.

So, she ends up working in a fancy restaurant snapping pic of customers. She snaps on of one of West's former clients on her birthday, an elderly woman, retouches it, and please the woman. Next year as she is doing the same thing, the woman suffers a fatal heart attack or stroke. The same newspapers that had turned her down as an employee, are now offering her big bucks for that photo, & promising her lifetime employment, etc., but to do so, would be a betrayal of her client. Eventually, some low-life reporter steals the negative, the photo ins in the newspaper, & the young woman gets the blame, and loses her job.

The NOIR element has to do with a certain gangster's alibi, which she can destroy with a photo she snapped of someone else, in which the gangster appeared in the background. Now, out of a job, she tries her hand at blackmail.
 
DON'T GO NEAR THE WATER (1957) A Navy public relations unit on a small pacific island commanded by Lieutenant Commander Clinton T. Nash (Fred Clark) has its problems, one of which is the reporter Gordon Ripwell (Keenan Wynn) who is usually writing something bad about the Navy, while another is sailor Adam Garrett (Earl Holliman) who is dating a nurse. A violation of the rules for military, for enlisted and officers to fraternize.

All three actors would be in certain TWILIGHT ZONE stories. Holliman would be in the pilot, Clark in one about a very special camera, & Wynn, in one about burning snips of audio reel to reel tape in a fireplace. :giggle:

Yet, the main character was Lieutenant Max Siegel (Glenn Ford), who is the guy who solves all the problems. Another problem is a female reporter Deborah Aldrich (Eva Gabor), who insists on being in action, despite there being no accommodations for women on battleships.


Unfortunately, the recording was just a bit shorter than the film, so, I missed the last few minutes.
 
The Inner Circle (1946)

Low budget detective film that often plays like a screwball comedy. Our hero is private eye Johnny Strange. The first thing we see is his ad in the phone book.

Are you troubled - frightened -
suspicious - or merely curious?

Where Others Fail I Get Action
YOUR Problem is MY Problem

contact

JOHNNY STRANGE
Private Investigator

Action Incorporated
610 SECURITY BUILDING

AUSTIN 7141 or AUSTIN 7142

(The fact that he has two phones is a plot point.)

The camera then pans to a gun on the floor, followed by a dead man.

We then cut to our hero, seen darning a sock, while talking on the phone about placing a want ad.

"Hello, this is Johnny Strange of Action Incorporated. No, not Strange Action Incorporated. Johnny Strange *of* Action Incorporated. Yeah. I want to place an ad in the Help Wanted Female. Mm-hm. Wanted: secretary to human dynamo. Exclamation point. Must be blonde, beautiful, between 22 and 28, unmarried, with a skin you love to touch and a heart you can't."

Right away a blonde who walked into his office unnoticed hangs up the phone and forces her way into the job. This character is always way ahead of the rather hapless PI throughout the film. She tries to place a call, then answers the other phone (remember that?) to send the shamus to meet with a Spanish-accented woman, completely hidden under hat and veil. This woman shows Johnny a dead body (remember him?) and, after briefly offering our honest hero a ton of loot to get rid of the body, conks him on the head, so he become the prime suspect. We then see that it's the blonde secretary in disguise. This major plot twist takes place only ten minutes into the movie!

What follows is a convoluted plot involving blackmail, a crook who got killed in a car wreck, a record sent to the dead man by a sultry nightclub singer (played by an actress best known for portraying Mrs. Olsen in coffee commercials years later) and so forth. The murder is solved by having all the suspects recreate their actions as a radio play!

Nothing comes up to the level of the wild first ten minutes, but it's not a bad little B movie.
 
Nightmare Alley (2022). Boring movie, despite the ensemble of famous actors and having Guillermo del Toro as the director.

I have mixed feelings about this one. It's the second adaptation of a novel of the same name, which probably means that the novel is great and they thought they would profit with another remake (they didn't; it flopped), but I think Del Toro wasn't the right director for this. Particularly, I'm not his fan, but I acknowledge his abilities as a director, and they just weren't used here. The only exceptions are the extreme violence and some recurring actors. But hiring Del Toro for this gives wrong expectations for the viewer. You can't stop thinking about Pan's Labyrinth (2005) and Chronos (1993) and others. And this movie has nothing supernatural at all.

The cast is famous enough to make you ask how the studio could afford to contract them all—Willem Dafoe, Bradley Cooper, Rooney Mara, Ron Perlman, Cate Blanchett, Toni Colette...—, the director is oscar-winning and the dialogue and plot twists are clever. Yet, the movie is a bore. I was trying to understand why. Maybe it's the long scenes where nothing but dialogue happens. Maybe it's the lack of a compelling main character: takes an awful lot of time for you to get what he wants and needs.

Despite being boring for circa 100 minutes, the third act is worth it. There's a plot twist in the end that made me disappointed with myselft, as a writer, for not seeing it from a mile away.

Watch this only if you have a lot of patience.
 
Star Trek IV: The Whale One - Number One Son's favourite so far - certainly the most fun. Not sure that it made any more sense than any of the others but there were more genuinely funny jokes, some interesting visuals and, as #1 Son pointed, out the first Star Trek adversary which has no real understandable motive beyond simple curiosity.
 
The Invisible Man
Not a H. G. Wells adaptation as such, but a film about a woman in an abusive relationship who drugs her husband so she can get away. Then she discovers he's died and left her a fortune. But then she starts seeing him again, or rather, she doesn't.
Elizabeth Moss from Handmaid's Tale stars.
 
Infinitum: Subject Unknown - shot in the first Covid lockdown on an iPhone with a crew of two - one of whom doubled as most of the cast. From that point of view it is technically interesting and I can see why they did it - but the story would have struggled to fill a 20 minute short - stretched to an 86 minute feature length I'm sorry to say it became a bit of a drag.
 
The Tiger Woman (1945)

For some reason, I've watched a fair number of low-budget private detective movies with an actress named Adele Mara in the cast; Blackmail, Exposed, The Inner Circle. Sometimes she's a Good Girl, sometimes the femme fatale, sometimes the detective herself. She's quite good in each role. (I've also seen her in the interesting low-budget horror movie The Vampire's Ghost, but that's another story.)

Anyway, this time she's a sultry nightclub singer. (Is there any other kind, and what would a 'tec movie be without them?) She hires the PI to protect her husband from the hood to whom he owes a big gambling debt. The Pi happens to be sort of a friend of the crook, so he visits the guy. The hoodlum tells him the husband paid him already. Meanwhile, the singer and her boyfriend find the husband dead, an apparent suicide. They have to make it look like murder for her to collect the dead man's insurance. At first the cops suspect the crook, but the PI gives him an alibi. Next to face the police is a young, dark-haired woman a cleaning woman saw near the time of the murder.

You'll probably figure out whodunit long before the detective does, but it's a fun ride. The movie veers into film noir territory at times, which is a good thing. The guy who plays the hoodlum is enjoyable, too. He's sometimes charming, sometimes scary. The whole thing is less than an hour long, so it moves briskly.
 
WHEN MICHAEL CALLS 1972 -- Tv-movie-it came out this very night in 1972. Pretty suspenseful with a dead child making phone calls
I didn't guess the ending until late into it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Thread starter Similar threads Forum Replies Date
Toby Frost Lasting Impact? Game of Thrones 26
AnRoinnUltra The last days of the Lóntuisteach Promotions 0
The Judge DISTAFF -- Last Chance to Buy!! Promotions 0
Extollager Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn (1968 novel -- not movie) Classic SF&F 11
N Y: The Last Man, movie or telly series? Graphic Novels & Comics 3

Similar threads


Back
Top