What was the last movie you saw?

[JunkMonkey]

Spotlight - I'm a sucker for newspaper stories. The genre usually allows for ensemble acting rather than individual heroics and often attracts good strong casts with a structure that involves piecing together a story alongside the characters rather than just having it presented to you. Spotlight is the story of the Boston Globe's expose of the cover up of by the Catholic Church of paedophile priests. It's pretty gripping stuff and I was moved to tears at points.

 

[Droflet]

THE WATERMELON MAN (1970) This white guy is a racist, uses a sunlamp & his own concoction as tanning lotion. One morning, he awakens to find himself a black man. a similar thing happened to a villain in an episode of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. Anyway, it is rather funny. Some might be offended by the N-word.

They ought to run this along with BLAZING SADDLES.

Yeah, I remember this one. Particularly him, as a black man, running for the bus. With a quizzical expression on my face, I laughed as often as I cringed.

 

[KGeo777]

Mutiny in Outer Space 1965-- Cheap but I was kept involved. Interesting that this low budget independent film gave a number of roles to women in the space command, a year or two before Star Trek's pilot. The space station with moss on it reminded me of The Green Slime.

 

[Randy M.]

Watched Bringing up Baby.

Any Howard Hawks movie reccomendations?

If you want more comedies, I Was a Male War Bride and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes are good. Even better was His Girl Friday, which is one of the best comedies I've ever seen, an updating of the play, the Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. I've never seen Twentieth Century or Ball of Fire but they get good reviews.

If you mean just Hawks movies in general, he was among the best directors of Westerns during that time: Rio Bravo (with a genre connection since Leigh Brackett scripted) is so great, he filmed it twice more under other titles, all with John Wayne. Another Hawks Western surprised everyone that Wayne could act, Red River was also notable for introducing Montgomery Clift. In some ways Wayne's character in that was a warm up for his later role in Ford's The Searchers. After Ford, Hawks was the director most responsible for how Wayne's persona developed.

Other Hawks movies I've enjoyed are The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not and, of course, The Thing (From Another World) -- ignore who the credits show as director, the movie is Howard Hawks from beginning to end.

All of his movies that I've seen incorporate humor in their structure, and they were somewhat unusual for their time by portraying women as intelligent and even courageous and not just romantic partners for the male stars, though of course that, too.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Ball of Fire is great fun - it has Barbara Stanwyk in it at her glorious walking sexbombish zenith. And Gene Krupa playing a matchbox.

 

[Toby Frost]

And Gene Krupa playing a matchbox.

It took me a moment to remember that he was a drummer, and not just a very versatile impersonator.

 

[pogopossum]

Ghostbusters Afterlife [2021]
The grandkids of one of the Ghostbusters, discover that he wasn't just a crazy old man and was right all along...
Cue associated mayhem. With pretty lights.
Enjoyable with enough laughs to make it worth the time. And the expected cameos were nicely done.
But I fear that Ghostbusters as a franchise is getting lost in it's own mythos. If you didn't know the first film, I don't know how much of this film made sense. Unless there is a real break with the past I can't see that there are any new stories to tell. As films. It seems ripe for a short TV series or two.

Also watched it. Cup got it right, although it was not the laugh fest he implied.
So slow and unrealistic (Unrealistic? In a Ghostbusters movie?) that one wonders where it is going. But it finally drags you along.
The producer/director/writer Reitman really wanted to make a tribute to the original. As such, he chose to slowly unveil the artifacts, physical and plot references, from the original. Hence Cupofjoe's comment that you had to know the first film. But who doesn't? Certainly almost no one who thought to pick this one up.
*** of five.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948)

Based on the 1939 novel of the same name by James Hadley Chase, famously pilloried by George Orwell in his essay "Raffles and Miss Blandish."

Raffles and Miss Blandish | The Orwell Foundation

This material remains under copyright and is reproduced by kind permission of the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books. Nearly half a century after his first appearance, Raffles, ‘the amateur cracksman’, is still one of the best-known characters in English fiction. Very few people would need telling...

www.orwellfoundation.com

Just as Chase was a British author writing a hardboiled crime novel set in the United States, in American language, the movie is a British film set in the USA with tons of American tough guy slang. It was much reviled for its excessive violence upon release. The plot is somewhat hard to follow, characters being introduced left and right, but the basic outline is as follows. Filthy rich Miss Blandish is kidnapped and her fiancé murdered, at first for her diamonds and then for ransom. In the most sudden and bizarre case of Stockholm Syndrome ever seen, she quickly falls in love with one of the captors. This might be acceptable if they had some twisted sadomasochistic relationship (and I suspect that's pretty much how it was in the book, which was notoriously salacious) but the movie treats it like a sweet romance, with lush music on the soundtrack and such. Suffice to say that things don't work out well for the lovers.

Watching this thing is an odd experience for an American. With many actors failing to disguise their British accents, and nearly constant hardboiled dialogue, often screamed at other actors, it's almost like somebody in the UK, with no other knowledge of the USA, saw some American gangster movies and decided to imitate them. Add to that the fact that the film comes to a dead halt for some nightclub songs (and a truly abysmal nightclub comic) and you have what is not a very good movie at all.

 

[alexvss]

Bad Genius (2017). A Thai film based on the real case of students cheating the SATs by sitting for the test in Sydney first, then passing the answers to others. This is actually a heist movie, with all the tropes applied to students cheating. And what a great movie! It's masterfully directed. They really know how to create tension, putting you on the edge of your seat. I just didn't like some of the acting, so I'll give this a 9/10.

 

[KGeo777]

A FINE PAIR 1968 - Rock Hudson is a square police official who becomes involved with the quirky free spirit daughter (Claudia Cardinele) of a deceased colleague. He also has a housekeeper played by Grandma Walton. This must have been inspiration for McMillan & Wife. She is a jewel thief who uses the cop to break into museums to put back the jewels while she steals other ones.
It's an eccentric film although it has a few laugh out loud moments. Rock Hudson was on Variety's list of the most overpaid stars of 1968.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Tales That Witness Madness (1973)

Not the best horror anthology film I've seen, although there are some that are much worse. In brief, we see the experiences of four mental patients.

1. A young boy with squabbling parents and a tiger as an imaginary friend.

2. Odd, confusing story about an old photograph that keeps changing its expression and an antique bicycle that takes the protagonist back in time, and other haunting type stuff.

3. A woman's rival for the affections of her husband is a tree trunk. Just as wacky as it sounds.

4. Slow, predictable tale of human sacrifice that telegraphs its shock ending way in advance.

Watchable if, like me, you like these things, but forgettable.

 

[KGeo777]

Tales That Witness Madness (1973)



3. A woman's rival for the affections of her husband is a tree trunk. Just as wacky as it sounds.

"Is there someone here who loves me?"

Interesting trivia is that the writer of this was the actress Jennifer Jayne (the vampire wife in Dr. Terror's House of Horrors).

 

[JunkMonkey]

The Lady from Shanghai - My favourite Welle's film (until I watch Mr Arkadin again) shared with Number Two Daughter who dug it.

 

[Av Demeisen]

I didn't finish the last film I watched. I was rewatching an old favourite as there aren't many new releases that I'm interested in watching.

 

[Danny McG]

I'm almost finished watching it, I got it saved on my phone and I'm viewing it a few minutes at a time when things are quiet.
My cousin Vinny

 

[JunkMonkey]

The Curious Female (1971) - In the distant future where the world is run by a master computer and Los Angeles is an island, a bunch of semi-naked people in Star Trek fetish clothes sit around and illegally watch a film from the days when the world wasn't run by a master computer, and Los Angeles was still part of the mainland. The film they watch is a desperately unfunny, unsexy sex comedy about three girls losing their virginity. From time to time the film either breaks down (or there is a reel change; they only have one projector) and the future people get to comment on, and lecture each other about, the quaint and outmoded habits of their ancestors. A few interesting visuals - the obligatory for the era drugs trip sequence was pretty groovily done and the stripey, gobo lighting during one of the 'deflowering' sequences made it look like there were two Bridget Riley paintings having sex - which is an image I'll have in my head for a while. The woman in question played by the rather lovely Charlene Jones, realises she didn't like being humped by an insensitive Pop Art painting and finds happiness in the arms of a woman called Andie who drinks beer in bars with topless go-go dancers. Not recommended.

 

[dask]

Absorbing film about a group of super studio musicians who in no small way helped create the sound of the sixties at least in the US. Rarely given credit on the album covers they worked their magic in relative obscurity. The three that I am most familiar with are: Glen Campbell, Billy Strange, and Leon Russell.

 

[KGeo777]

THE CONCORDE AFFAIR 1979 - Someone is crashing concorde jets and a stewardess survives only to be kidnapped and held for ransom. A tabloid reporter gets involved and it leads to an underwater crash site where a shark in a sunken jet provides a very good jump scare. There's a minor character in this who is also in the other Concorde movie of 79, in both films as air traffic controller.

 

[JunkMonkey]

City Beneath the Sea - awful Irwin Allen TV movie/pilot. Too dull and stupid to be any kind of funny.

 

[KGeo777]

City Beneath the Sea - awful Irwin Allen TV movie/pilot. Too dull and stupid to be any kind of funny.

Yes, it is quite a dull viewing experience.