What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Ewanandmoreagain]

The Imitation Game - the partly true                                                   story of Alan Turing and the breaking of the German armed forces codes during World War 2

Takes liberties with the actual facts but very well done

[101]

On 25/02/2023 at 22:07, Scotty Tunbridge said:

Cocaine bear is a solid 10/10 movie if you want something that does exactly what it says on the tin and doesn’t take itself seriously doing so.

I agree it was an excellent 90 minutes, very fun watch.

[Frankie S]

#18 Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) Mubi 9

It’s great to see another talented young Scottish woman emerge on the filmmaking scene, and Edinburgh-born Charlotte Wells’ feature debut ‘Aftersun’ is as vibrant a declaration of intent as Lynne Ramsay’s powerful first film ‘Ratcatcher’ was in 1999. I loved how Wells adopts an elliptical approach towards story-telling, and fuses experimental techniques into her film, yet retains narrative clarity, resulting in a very artful but nonetheless highly accessible film. Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio are both superb in their leading roles, and this lovely, touching and immaculately-crafted film holds great promise for Wells’ future career.

#19 Party Girl (Daisy von Scherler Mayer, 1995) Criterion Channel 7

Having greatly enjoyed Parker Posey and Liev Schreiber’s double act in ‘The Daytrippers’ (1996) last month, I thought I’d check out this 1995 film, in which they also team up. The presence of The Tom Tom Club, Dawn Penn, The Brooklyn Funk Essentials et al. on the soundtrack was another attraction. While it lacks the finely-crafted wittily acerbic script of ‘The Daytrippers’, it’s a highly enjoyable film nonetheless, though its depiction of boho New York in the 1990s seems rather more stylised than authentic.

#20 Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Payton Reed, 2023) Vue Cinema, Ocean Terminal 4

Back in 2015, the first ‘Ant-Man’ film benefitted from a lovely screenplay by Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright, which gave the film an enjoyably irreverent touch that elevated the source material even as it satirised it. Paul Rudd made for an engaging lead, and he had great support from a cast of talented character actors such as Bobby Cannavale, Michael Peña and David Dastmalchian. However that was back in the halcyon days of MCU Phase Two, when a relatively unpretentious and engaging comedy film masquerading as a superhero movie fitted fairly comfortably under the Marvel umbrella.

‘Quantumania’ is the first film of MCU Phase 6, and after the convoluted multiverse-obsessed nonsense of much of Phase 5, Marvel ‘ups the ante’ further by transporting us to the ‘Quantum Realm’ for this one - a realm, rather similar to Marvel’s non-quantum realm, in which the protagonists predictably spend most of their time running away from hostile forces and avoiding explosions, with the added bonus that, just like the Marvel Multiverse, the Quantum Realm spits out doppelgängers faster than Dunkin’ Donuts can produce sugary dough-based confections. One of the countless curious features of Marvel’s Quantum Realm is that buildings are not only alive, but are equipped with massive machine gun arms, which are immensely helpful when it comes to the obligatory ‘blowing stuff up’ business. As if all that wasn’t enough, we’re also treated to some Quantum Realm / Multiverse entanglement, just for good measure.

As strange, mysterious and unpredictable as the quantum realm surely is, I’d imagine Marvel’s take on it would have come as quite a surprise to the pioneers of quantum theory, and, safe to say, I don’t think Kip Thorne (or indeed anyone) was drafted in as scientific consultant for this film.

On the upside, Jonathan Majors, who rose to prominence in Joe Talbot’s excellent 2019 debut film ‘The Last Black Man in San Francisco’, is outstanding as Kang the Conqueror, who has the potential to be one of the best super-villains that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has ever produced. Majors delivers a Shakespearean performance as a troubled man banished to the Quantum Realm and, as a first rate actor marooned in the MCU, you can almost feel his pain.

#21 Panic in Year Zero! (Ray Milland, 1962) YouTube 7

Before seeing this, I wasn’t aware that Oscar-winning Welsh-born actor Ray Milland enjoyed a (relatively unheralded) parallel career as a film director. This early ‘60s Cold War atomic bomb panic film (starring Milland and Frankie Avalon) was released shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and is a fascinating insight into the paranoia of the times. It plays like an extended episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’, and Milland isn’t afraid to veer into fairly dark territory. The film is imaginative enough to compensate for what was clearly a very low budget, making good use of its lean 93-minute running time.

#22 Flesh and Fantasy (Julien Duvivier, 1943) VSL blu-ray 8.5

I’ve loved each of the Julien Duvivier films that I’ve seen to date - the brilliant 1937 proto-noir ‘Pépé le Moko’ starring the great Jean Gabin, and ‘Panique’ (1946), Duvivier’s superb adaption of George’s Simenon’s short novel ‘Les Fiançailles de M. Hire’, which was subsequently adapted by Patrice Leconte as Monsieur Hire (1989) - so when I heard that his little-known 1943 horror anthology ‘Flesh and Fantasy’ was to be released on blu-ray, I was intrigued. The wonderful cast (Edward G. Robinson, Barbara Stanwyck and Charles Boyer) clinched the deal. I’m delighted to confirm that it’s a joy from start to finish, with atmospheric expressionist cinematography provided by ‘Night of the Hunter’s Stanley Cortez. It’s not remotely scary - two of the three segments are essentially romances with added supernatural elements - so it’s unlikely to hit the spot for horror enthusiasts. In fact, ‘Flesh and Fantasy’ strongly reminded me of the work of one of my favourite directors - Duvivier’s contemporary - the masterful Max Ophüls.

#23 Cosmos (Andrzej Żuławski, 2015) Mubi 7

I’m looking forward to the box set of Andrzej Żuławski’s early films, due for release by the Eureka ‘Masters of Cinema’ label in May, so I was keen to see ‘Cosmos’ when it arrived on Mubi. Sadly, the last film of the Polish auteur’s career, and the third of his films that I’ve seen, didn’t quite live up to expectations, though the previous two films had set the bar fairly high: ‘Possession’ (1981) is such a defiantly weird film - as unsettling as anything in the filmographies of Cronenberg or Lynch - and 1996’s ‘Szamanka’ is almost as strange, if not quite so disturbing.

‘Cosmos’ plays like a surrealist take on a whodunnit, set in a French provincial country house. The ‘mystery’ plotline isn’t particularly compelling, and the dialogue is a haphazard assemblage of scattershot non-sequiturs, pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo and stream-of-consciousness whimsy that presumably lost something in translation. And yet, despite the film’s obvious weaknesses, it’s very watchable - a testament to the excellent cast. Swiss character actor Jean-François Balmer excels in the role of the eccentric but charming host Leon, and Victória Guerra is memorably unhinged as the beautiful but troubled Lena. André Szankowski’s gorgeous cinematography and the lovely score by Polish composer Andrzej Korzyński are both superb, but the often impressive component parts of this curiously inscrutable film never quite coalesce into a coherent whole.

[accies1874]

9. Women Talking - Cinema 

This will probably be the last of the Best Picture nominations I'll see and that's really the only reason I made an effort to watch it. 

Everything about it seems to be a showcase for its actors, giving them big, weighty speeches shot in unbroken closeups, so it succeeds in that respect (however they'll be gutted that there weren't any Oscar acting nods) and it succeeds in getting its message across, although it would've been pretty embarrassing if it hadn't got its message across given that it's literally Women Talking about the themes. I suppose it's pretty similar to 12 Angry Men only much less natural and, imo, less engaging. I like the simplicity of tackling oppression being boiled down to Do Nothing, Stay and Fight, or Leave, but it's more like an articulate message board than a screenplay. 

The desaturated look has intrigued me since I first saw the trailer as it's quite an unusual looking film which works as a more stylish method of not giving us a sexy colourful film about grim topics more than when these films just look like a disgusting greyed out Marvel movie. The brief flashbacks actually held the whole thing together for me as they're the silent, harrowing aftermaths of brutal acts, made all the more powerful by the blood standing out against that desaturation. Kermode's take of it being like The Wizard of Oz in that there may be a more colourful world beyond the one we're watching is interesting too. 

So yeah, I thought it was alright. One of those Best Picture noms where I shrug my shoulders and forget about it despite being understand of why it was nominated. 

10. Nostalgia - Cinema

A decent character study that actually kind of has parallels with Women Talking in terms of the options when tackling your problems. It also looks into, you guessed it, nostalgia a wee bit by wondering what compels a person to return and stay somewhere when you've got something good and better elsewhere which also raises questions of the side of the main character's life that we don't see. I like it when films give hints about a character's backstory by how they act in the present - a Lynne Ramsay special.

It's impressive that literally everyone tells the main character to do one thing but I completely bought why he did the opposite despite it being the wrong option, mainly because I was just invested in why he was doing it more than anything. 

While this isn't a mob flick, there are flourishes and teases of us getting a really different mob film that tries to be emotional rather than exciting (because this is far from exciting) but it's more window dressing than an actual subversion of that genre. Speaking of window dressing, I also liked how alive the world felt in pretty simple ways: the cafes, food, shops, pedestrians and, importantly, vehicles. Having background vehicles, especially mopeds, whizzing about raised the tension due to the established threat they pose, but the main character is always oblivious to them, just as he's oblivious to the dilapidated city, which feeds into that depiction of nostalgia. 

I don't have many bad things to say about it, but I also wasn't really blown away by anything it did. I quite liked it and not much more, so I suppose that's pretty positive?

[Steve_Wilkos]

Titanic 25th anniversary 4k 3d etc - 7/10

Alien - 5/10

[Ewanandmoreagain]

3 hours ago, Steve_Wilkos said:

Titanic 25th anniversary 4k 3d etc - 7/10

Alien - 5/10

Alien just five ?!

[Ewanandmoreagain]

On 25/02/2023 at 06:30, MSU said:

I'm intrigued by Cocaine Bear. The trailer looks nuts and it doesn't seem to be taking itself seriously at all. Hopefully I'll get to it in the next couple of weeks.

 

On 25/02/2023 at 22:07, Scotty Tunbridge said:

Cocaine bear is a solid 10/10 movie if you want something that does exactly what it says on the tin and doesn’t take itself seriously doing so.

Slight spoiler alert !

 

 

 

giving bears a bad reputation !

The original , real bear did not kill anyone

[Ewanandmoreagain]

On 26/02/2023 at 13:12, MSU said:

Already looking forward to the sequel, Amphetamine Tortoise. 

Sugar ! Sorry messed up on the multiple quotes again.

The tortoise might move a bit faster , but

 

[UpInTheAyr]

Magic Mike's Last Dance. Turned it off after half an hour, incredibly boring.

Infinity Pool. Brandon Cronenburg certainly inherited his dads flair for weirdness. Enjoyed it though.

[DA Baracus]

Studio 666

The Foo Fighters record their 10th album in some old massive house. 8/10.

 

It's a horror comedy starring Foo Fighters. Most are surprisingly good actors, especially Dave Grohl. Turns out they're recording in the same house some band who all died in did 20 years previously.

Pretty funny stuff with some amusing bloody deaths.

Would recommend. Definitely far better than you might think.

[MSU]

060 For Your Eyes Only -- It's obvious that Moore's age, at the start of the 1980s he was in his mid-50s, is starting to become a problem for most of the action and many of the love interests. Talking of which, Bibi Dahl has to be the most annoying so far. I appreciated the more serious tone, and the Sheena Easton theme tune, but I can't imagine this to be the top of anyone's list. Middling Bond fayre at its most mediocre, perhaps. 5/10

061 Octopussy -- By 1983, Roger Moor had turned into his own Spitting Image puppet. Steven Berkoff is prime baddie-with-an-accent as the Soviet general who, I think, wants to trigger a nuclear explosion that will lead to unilateral disarmament, which will then in turn lead to worldwide communism, and all of this has something to do with Faberge eggs maybe. Maud Adams is interesting as Octopussy -- apparently, it was her father's creepy nickname for her -- until Bond beds her. But the thing that I'll remember from this viewing is how the first half of the movie crams in a frankly incredible number of lazy Indian stereotypes. Rating-wise, honestly it's somewhere between a 4 and a 5, but I'm marking it down for Bond in a gorilla suit checking his watch, and a honking theme tune. 4/10

062 Share (#83 in the A24 series) -- The movie opens after the pivotal moment where 16 year old Mandy is sexually assaulted while passed out drunk and the video of it goes viral round her school, and it deals quite expertly with the fall out and the pursuit of justice from a system ill-equipped to provide it. Rhianne Barreto is great as Mandy and Pippa Bianco in her first feature directs with a careful eye, and an intimate and intense approach as she uses close-ups of whispering characters as more of the story is revealed. The ping of a new text message has rarely felt so panic-inducing. Grim stuff, but. 7/10

063 The Kill Team (#85 in the A24 series) -- It's a fairly interesting, but by-the-numbers movie about American atrocities committed in the name of war in Afghanistan and while it asks important questions and touches on themes of groupthink and blindly following orders, Alexander Skarsgård's villainous Sergeant Deeks is a bit too one-dimensional to be truly effective, and the movie seems to realize this in the final act when we're all swiftly kettled towards a conclusion. Based on a true story because of course it is. 6/10

064 Causeway (#122 in the A24 series) -- I very much enjoyed this character-driven piece mostly for the slow pace and reflective nature and outstanding score by Alex Somers, but really the movie revolves around the performances from Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry as two emotionally and physically scarred people who strike up an unexpected and slightly co-dependent relationship. I honestly don't think I've seen either be better in anything else. Brian Tyree Henry is pretty much in a leading role so I suspect the Supporting Actor nomination is a pragmatic decision, and while I don't think he's really in any danger of picking up the Oscar later this month, that shouldn't detract from how incredible he is here. 9/10

065 A View to a Kill -- My memories of this are mostly around the big ticket set-pieces; the Eiffel Tower parachute chase, the mine, the blimp at the Golden Gate, and the horrendous gameplay of the tie-in game for the ZX Spectrum, so much of it is better than I remember. Christopher Walken gloriously camps it up as the psychotic main villain -- I may have cheered when he tells Bond he's incompetent -- Grace Jones is fabulous as his henchwoman, and Patrick Macnee is brilliant fun as Tibbett. It's by no means the stain on Moore's tenure as Bond I had remembered it to be, but he was wise to bow out here. Cracking theme song, too. 5/10

066 Cocaine Bear -- As I was leaving the cinema, someone behind me said that this movie was both everything and nothing like they were expecting. Well, what can you really expect from a film about a bear roaming a national park, high on cocaine that had fallen from a smuggler's plane? The very very loose true story has been embellished and built upon by Jimmy Warden and directed by Elizabeth Banks, out of off of Pitch Perfect, and they do a pretty fantastic job cutting a story with lines that intertwine, giving it a narrative arc, and filling it with characters that might avoid development, but are still interesting and have realistic goals, even if one of their primary objectives is to avoid being eaten by a bear out of its tits on cocaine. Funny and beautifully gory, it's an unexpected high point of 2023 movies so far. 8/10

Edited March 5, 2023 by MSU

[Steve_Wilkos]

Cocaine Bear - 4/10

[BFTD]

Ant-Man 3 (cinema) - it's fine. It's just fine; certainly no worse than the majority of Marvel films over the last few years. It's just getting such a pounding because everyone had decided that Phase 5 was when the Marvel films would become really good again; this film's shown that's very much not the case, and people are not pleased.

FWIW, I think the real problem here is Disney - everything they touch turns to shit. Presumably it took longer with Marvel because they already had a path set when they were bought and were allowed to get on with it, but now Big Mouse is getting more involved and it's every bit as mediocre as their Star Wars, Pixar, and own-brand output since the Seventies.

Cocaine Bear (cinema) - bit of a weird feel to this one; it didn't seem sure exactly what it wanted to be, and didn't really satisfy as a result. Also felt like there was some lazy  rewrites/reshooting involved, as there were a couple of bits that felt like they were going somewhere before being dropped, like the forest ranger implausibly managing to avoid death. The final third really drags, and the CG is pants, but it gets away with that because it's a spoof of...something...so being deliberately crap is part of the charm. It was meant to be a spoof, right?

Certainly wasn't bad, and could've been a lot worse, but really not all that good either, and I can't imagine wanting to see it again.

[scottsdad]

7 hours ago, BFTD said:

Ant-Man 3 (cinema) - it's fine. It's just fine; certainly no worse than the majority of Marvel films over the last few years. It's just getting such a pounding because everyone had decided that Phase 5 was when the Marvel films would become really good again; this film's shown that's very much not the case, and people are not pleased.

FWIW, I think the real problem here is Disney - everything they touch turns to shit. Presumably it took longer with Marvel because they already had a path set when they were bought and were allowed to get on with it, but now Big Mouse is getting more involved and it's every bit as mediocre as their Star Wars, Pixar, and own-brand output since the Seventies.

Cocaine Bear (cinema) - bit of a weird feel to this one; it didn't seem sure exactly what it wanted to be, and didn't really satisfy as a result. Also felt like there was some lazy  rewrites/reshooting involved, as there were a couple of bits that felt like they were going somewhere before being dropped, like the forest ranger implausibly managing to avoid death. The final third really drags, and the CG is pants, but it gets away with that because it's a spoof of...something...so being deliberately crap is part of the charm. It was meant to be a spoof, right?

Certainly wasn't bad, and could've been a lot worse, but really not all that good either, and I can't imagine wanting to see it again.

You can't say that stuff out loud! The provisional wing of the Star Wars thread will be long soon to explain how some obscure spinoff about someone who was in a movie for 10 minutes is actually the best TV show ever made, eclipsing The Sopranos for drama, plot and excitement. 

[coprolite]

Up (2009)

Whimsical parable about a man with an unfeasibly square face. 

The opening 10-15 minutes montage would have made a really sweet short. 

Some of the animation was really good looking, but the design was all over the place. Different animals and human characters looked like they were out of different films. 

There were some entertaining and funny bits but overall it fell on the mawkish side of the emotions it was trying to elicit. 

5/10

Big Hero 6 (2014)

Wayward prodigy plus loveable robot take on baddies. Plus learning. 

This was more like it. Apart from the lab tech guy who was annoying and my as yet unanswered questions about power supply. 

7/10

Glass Onion (2022)

Thouroughly forgettable fluff with disproportionate acting talent and production values. 

Entertaining. 

6/10

[Miguel Sanchez]

I watched Robocop last night

Why weren't Arnold Schwarzenegger or Michael Ironside in it?

[Guest]

EO, a Polish film following the travels of a donkey released from a bankrupt circus. Incredible photography, very atmospheric but the cinema decided to crank up the volume to about a million and the jarring dischordant score soon became a bit of a headache, which made me glad that it was only 90 minutes long. 

That meant though, the little tales (tails?*) with each new set of encounters along Eo's way seemed too short for any character development, although in fairness I probably missed a load of allegorical references throughout. Worth seeing for the photography but take your earbuds just in case.

[* First rule of Bad Pun Club: if you think it, you must share it]

The previous visit was for Heaven in Hell, another Polish film following the relationship of a late forties-ish professional and an adventure sports instructor fifteen years her junior, and the dark twist behind it. That came in at two hours, perhaps a little bit long but they had to get through a lot of shagging. 

Edited March 8, 2023 by IncomingExile

[DA Baracus]

Fall

Two women get stuck up a very tall radio mast.

Far better than that sounds. Enjoyable stuff.

[BFTD]

On 07/03/2023 at 18:34, Miguel Sanchez said:

I watched Robocop last night

Why weren't Arnold Schwarzenegger or Michael Ironside in it?

The film was made for $13m when Arnie was earning more than that alone and, much as I love Ironside, Kurtwood Smith was irreplaceable in that film.

Total Recall for your Verhoeven\Schwarzenegger\Ironside fix!

On 06/03/2023 at 07:25, scottsdad said:

You can't say that stuff out loud! The provisional wing of the Star Wars thread will be long soon to explain how some obscure spinoff about someone who was in a movie for 10 minutes is actually the best TV show ever made, eclipsing The Sopranos for drama, plot and excitement. 

Star Wars is thoroughly dead to me, and I wish I'd given up after Attack of the Clones TBH.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, DA Baracus said:

Fall

Two women get stuck up a very tall radio mast.

Far better than that sounds. Enjoyable stuff.

Broke into a cold sweat several times during that film. I wouldn't say I have a fear of heights as such but the edge of my seat was too close.