What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[velo army]

Watching Skyfall again and I do love it. The dialogue involving M is superb, the music is the best in movie music since You Only Live Twice and some of the action scenes are fantastic.

The dialogue between Bond and Moneypenny is fucking atrocious though. Painfully banal.

Naomi Harris is fucking stunning as Moneypenny and Javier Bardem is a superb baddie. 

It's a fine film, made even better on retrospect after the utter shite that was both Spectre and the other recent one whose name I forget. 

[scottsdad]

Miranda's Victim.

True story of the guy whose arrest brought in the Miranda Rights in the 60s, told from the view of his rape victim.

Really interesting.

[jimbaxters]

A rare visit to the pictures for us last night to see Ken Loach's, The Old Oak. I love everything this man does and this was no exception. Brilliant, heartbreaking and anger provoking at the same time.

The story is set in a mining village near Durham where Syrian refugees start pitching up. The local pub is the centre of the action where the locals argue about the merits/dangers of having this influx into the area. As usual with Loach it's more like a fly on the wall affair than a drama but the ebbing and flowing between the raw emotion of confrontation and gentle, human solidarity. 

As someone who hates celebrity and the social media veneer culture of today, this was refreshing to see that Loach hasn't lost his ability to show REAL life and REAL issues that all of us as human beings face. Can't recommend it highly enough.

[accies1874]

Three I saw last week:

17. Tummy Monster - Cinema (Glasgow Film Festival)

This is an absolute romp that takes place almost entirely in a Glaswegian tattoo parlour. From the off, it sets up so much of what's to come by opening with the tattoo artist, Tales (played by Lorn Macdonald, who I'll get to soon), sleeping in his shop before getting woken in the middle of the night by a call from a celebrity looking to get a tattoo. Tales does the tattoo, he gets paid, asks for a selfie and that's when shit goes down. 

The opening moments are more intriguing than they are tense as the film deliberately withholds a lot of information. The late night callers are mysterious, somewhat otherworldly Americans who are in direct contrast to the down-on-his-luck Glaswegian. That initially makes for a fun dynamic, but it's only the start of something that I found to be baffling, hilarious and interestingly ubiquitous. 

The most baffling thing about it is that probably 70% of Orlando Norman's lines as the celebrity are "rub your tummy or I'll think you're an asshole" yet that facilitates character work that I found to be incredibly engaging. Tales is a brilliantly written character whose flaws make him authentic - you've met him or you are him - and these flaws are the crux of the film's themes, so I was fully on board with exploring them. He's a depiction of the need for validation, the fear of ageing, a lack of fulfilment, the relationships we have with our idols, and the lengths of human resolve. These are pretty big ideas for a film about a man rubbing his tummy for hours on end. 

I am being slightly facetious as while that is the core of the plot, there are different threads that either precede the story beginning or occur off-screen, however you feel all of it through Lorn Macdonald's performance. I found him to be a hilarious comic presence, but that comedy comes from a darker turmoil (the aforementioned themes) which is depicted in the comedy. It's the funniest new release I've seen in a while and he's the main reason for that. I also appreciated hearing a Scottish performer actually speaking how he does irl, as opposed to the overly enunciated stuff we tend to get. The comedy is found in the film's plotting too, as pretty much every plot revelation is equally surprising and frustrating, so you eagerly await Macdonald's reaction to them. That just makes it all the more entertaining. 

I do have a couple of slight complaints about the script. One is that it reached a great flow with the "rub your tummy" stuff early on which kept me smiling, but it interrupted that flow at one point and took a while to finds its rhythm again which made the repetition as annoying as it sounds (which wasn't the case for so much of the 85ish-minute runtime). It's like Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes, only if they went back to that same sequence after cutting to Homer watching TV. Another is that a nice moment occurs between the two leads around 2/3rds of the way through which was a great and necessary moment of levity to let a hectic film settle down, however that got undone immediately and we were back at square one. It made some thematic sense, but I found it to be jarring in its execution, almost like the scene was in the wrong place or they tried to squeeze it in somewhere. 

Those shouldn't overshadow what I found to be a real treat of a low/no-budget film though. It squeezed everything out of that budget to present a stylish look and some impressively immersive moments of sound. Someone in front of me was checking over his shoulder at one point as he thought the noise was coming from across the screening, which is a good way to draw the audience into a confined setting. 

Check it out!

18. The Soul Eater - Cinema (Fright Fest)

Children go missing in a sleepy small village and two investigators need to set aside their differences to solve the case. There's a useless police force, there are haunting pasts, there's a sanitorium, and there might be paranormal activity afoot. It's very generic and I got that feeling very early on. Even the cinematography is pretty flat and lacks the atmospheric lighting to sell the tense and creepy moments, though that lighting did sometimes make the aftermath of the film's graphic violence more impactful as it felt authentic. Whether that's deliberate or not, I don't know, but it resulted in an aesthetic struggle between the violent moments and the tenser moments. It looks made for television and it feels made for television. Things pick up a bit in the third act with some left-field decisions, but that wasn't anywhere near enough to make the preceding 70ish minutes worth it for me. 

19. Edge of Summer - Cinema (Glasgow Film Festival)

I'm gonna be a massive hypocrite here, but I don't care. The reason I chose to see this was because I'm really fond of this kind-of-genre of British holiday films set in the country or a small village that tend to focus on someone coming of age. Make Up, The Scouting Book for Boys, Beast, Bait and undoubtedly others that I can't remember off the top of my head. So why did I like this and not The Soul Eater?

To be honest I don't have a definitive answer for what separates them, though I think it's something to do with the characters resembling people more than genre conventions. It focuses on a boy and a girl in rural England, both of whom are suffering the turmoil caused by an absent parent. This loneliness sparks a fragile connection between them as they try to cope without their fathers in ways you'd expect of a child. That results in a narrative that stays ambiguous between metaphor and reality, and the flow of each of their arcs was really nicely done. Yes, it's a bit typical of a coming of age film, but I loved the depiction of seeing through the lies and accepting the pain of the truth and how that can help you move forward.  

[stevieKTID]

On 12/03/2024 at 13:49, velo army said:

Watching Skyfall again and I do love it. The dialogue involving M is superb, the music is the best in movie music since You Only Live Twice and some of the action scenes are fantastic.

The dialogue between Bond and Moneypenny is fucking atrocious though. Painfully banal.

Naomi Harris is fucking stunning as Moneypenny and Javier Bardem is a superb baddie. 

It's a fine film, made even better on retrospect after the utter shite that was both Spectre and the other recent one whose name I forget. 

I'm over visiting my parents this week and went to Glen Coe for a couple of nights, I made a playlist that included Skyfall and the Bond theme had it blasting out as I drove through the glen, unfortunately I was driving a rental Citroen and not an Aston Martin.

[velo army]

4 minutes ago, stevieKTID said:

I'm over visiting my parents this week and went to Glen Coe for a couple of nights, I made a playlist that included Skyfall and the Bond theme had it blasting out as I drove through the glen, unfortunately I was driving a rental Citroen and not an Aston Martin.

In the movie Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) advises Bond to take the A9 . 

[stevieKTID]

3 minutes ago, velo army said:

In the movie Gareth Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) advises Bond to take the A9 . 

For a high ranking member of an intelligence agency he's exposed himself as not being that smart with that advice

[scottsdad]

14 hours ago, jimbaxters said:

A rare visit to the pictures for us last night to see Ken Loach's, The Old Oak. I love everything this man does and this was no exception. Brilliant, heartbreaking and anger provoking at the same time.

The story is set in a mining village near Durham where Syrian refugees start pitching up. The local pub is the centre of the action where the locals argue about the merits/dangers of having this influx into the area. As usual with Loach it's more like a fly on the wall affair than a drama but the ebbing and flowing between the raw emotion of confrontation and gentle, human solidarity. 

As someone who hates celebrity and the social media veneer culture of today, this was refreshing to see that Loach hasn't lost his ability to show REAL life and REAL issues that all of us as human beings face. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Jeez, not exactly Airplane, is it?

[KnightswoodBear]

Argylle.

 

Utter dugshite

[accies1874]

20. Origin - Cinema 

This is a dramatisation of the writing of the book Caste. It starts out with an author played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor looking into the murder of a young black man but turns into an exploration of segregated societies. 

Its structure is quite strange and non-linear, as the first chunk of the film is more conventional as it sets the scene and establishes the characters in typical movie ways, but then it essentially becomes what I'd imagine is a narration of the book it's based on. The early stages serve to humanise the author and give credence to her passion about the subject matter, and there are some brilliantly fraught discussions about discrimination, but it didn't entirely work for me when it came to the final act which felt more akin to a documentary recreation than a film. This shouldn't be all that surprising given that Ava Duvernay directed the brilliant documentary, 13th, but the style took me out of the film due to it being a bit too maudlin which almost felt like an attempt to separate it from being a documentary. That said, there are some striking images to go along with that, presented in cinematography that ties into the interconnectedness of the past and present - a key part of Origin. 

It's worth watching to learn more about its subject matter and I do think that a dramatisation was worthwhile, just that it could've been executed more smoothly. At 140 minutes it very rarely drags and at points even resembles a (sombre) globetrotting thriller. 

21. Perfect Days - Cinema

Sometimes a film just hit perfectly when you're feeling a certain way and this was certainly the case for me when I watched Perfect Days. 

It's very serene at points with peaceful journeys through Tokyo seen through the eyes of Hirayama as he cleans toilets around the city, being friendly without making friends, and finding beauty in the world despite working an unglamorous job. That touched me a lot, particularly his detached game of noughts and crosses. However, it never lets go of the question about his mind behind his smiling eyes and what has happened in his life to lead to where we find him. There are Eraserhead-esque interjections of creepy black and white imagery to contrast the tender tone. Has he always been happy with his lot despite his standing in society, or have there been experiences which have taught him to try and appreciate life for what it is? I thought that the final shot reflected an earlier one which either gives an insight into his mindset or depicts the toll that the understated journey of the film has taken on him. It's very sleepy but has the kind of development that I only really appreciated as it ended. 

Hirayama is a very endearing character who speaks very little - something I'm always a fan of - and it's not as if the characters around him fill in the blanks with explanatory dialogue, though there are a couple of lines that I found to cut through the silence brilliantly. It's mostly told through Koji Yakusho's performance, the set design and natural character traits. The soundtrack is key too (I loved it and am listening to it while writing this) and comes from his old cassettes which again alludes to a previous life which informs his current one. 

I'm far from a Wim Wenders aficionado, but when I saw The American Friend for the first time I was blown away by his ability to control my eyes through the composition of his shots with expert uses of colour and movement within the frame and movement of the camera itself. While that wasn't a standout quality of Perfect Days, this film does have another element that I found so brilliant about The American Friend (and also Wings of Desire): its sense of place. Tokyo's Skytree features prominently and there are a lot of repeating locations that Wenders manages to find beauty in while also providing a familiarity that puts you in Hirayama's shoes. The routine of the film draws you in and then packs a punch when it's interrupted. 

[JustOneCornetto]

Cabrini (2024) - Cineworld

Finally got round to my second outing to the 'pictures' this year. Had narrowed it down to Copa '71 at GFT but this one won out after reading some reviews and looking at the cast with the ever reliable John L:ithgow and David Morse with the lead role of Mother Cabrini played by Christiana Dell'Anna who I knew from Gomorrah where she played Patrizia one of my favourite characters. The film is a biography about the remarkable story of Francesca Cabrini who initially had wanted the Catholic Church to allow her to set up a missionary in China at the end of the 19th Century but was persuaded to head to New York where hundreds of thousands of Italians had headed to to seek a better life. Once there with her Sisters she witnessed abject poverty and disease in the slums of New York. In the face of sexism and racism she was able to set up an orphanage and pretty basic hospital. Despite her own suffering due to a chronic lung condition she never took 'no' for an answer and using some great negotiating skills and entrepreneurial vision she was able to extend her projects to provide better healthcare and housing for the Italian immigrants. Dell'Anna is so suited to this story and really does a great job playing the woman whose amazing work was later recognised when she was canonised as Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini , the patron saint of immigrants.

 

Edited March 15 by JustOneCornetto

[jimmy boo]

22 Bullets (L'Immortel).......Jean Reno plays a reformed gangster/hitman in Marseille who has turned his back on his previous life to settle down with his new wife and family until his old foes decide to bump him off by pumpimg........22 bullets into him. Standard revenge story with lots of violence which I had been meaning to get around to watching and finally have. Didn't realise it's based on a true story!! 7/10

[MSU]

058 The American Society of Magical Negroes -- I thought this was a pretty decent satire that posits that the tendency in fiction for white protagonists to have a black character to help them figure out the plot is actually real and there's a society who have special powers to ensure that white people don't feel uncomfortable. Ever. This eventually puts underappreciated yarn sculptor and new recruit to the society, Aren, played by Justice Smith, into a situation where he's working for a social media company to make designer Jason, Drew Tarver, feel better about himself. This is complicated when part of the journey to get there requires Aren to set Jason up with Lizzie, An Li Bogan, who Aren has already fallen for. The society rules that members must never put themselves first, so there's the conflict. The chemistry between Justice Smith and An Li Bohan is amazing so as a romantic comedy, this works very well and Smith as a comedy actor is endearing. There's the fantasy, magical side of the movie that undoubtedly becomes a passenger to the romance, and that's a bit of a shame considering the whole purpose of the satire. That said, I think the movie gets a lot of things right. The existence of the society, while initially being presented as a kind of racial Hogwarts, isn't a good thing, and the movie ends up not giving a shit about anything other than Aren and Lizzie, and there's a little sting in the tail that rounded the whole thing off perfectly. 8/10

059 Love Lies Bleeding -- I don't really care for Kristen Stewart and frequently think she's the worse thing in whatever I'm seeing her in, but I have to admit that this is maybe the best performance of hers I've seen. This is a smelly movie. Everything you're looking at stinks of sweat or cigarettes or vomit or blood and, for a few moments, all of that made me think of the humid claustrophobia of Blood Simple. The story here is also a simple one that's complicated by people's actions as Stewart's character Lou falls for bodybuilder Jackie, played by Katy O’Brian. Turns out their relationship isn't exactly healthy and when Lou's sister is beaten again by her husband and eventually Lou's dad -- a bizarrely mulleted Ed Harris -- is brought into the mix. The movie is fine if for no other reason than how it deals with having Dave Franco in it, but as it progressed and as it became more surreal, I found myself caring less about smelly characters I didn't really care too much for to begin with. 5/10

[accies1874]

22. Showing Up - Cinema

This had been on my radar for around a year now (made some people's Best of the Year So Far midway through last year) but just seemed to take forever to release in the UK. I thought that it would be consigned to streaming, and it seems that it is currently available to rent digitally, but I'm glad I saw it in the cinema as - like with Kelly Reichardt's last film, First Cow - I reckon my mind would've wandered watching it at home. This is another sleepy film from her, though unlike with First Cow I didn't actually fall asleep during this one (I was tired!). The characters are very naturalistic, the interactions are given a lot of room to breathe, the camerawork is patient, there is very little to the plot and the limited score is touchingly simplistic. It's really just a slice of life film. 

I think what I liked about it was the response I had to the cast of characters and how they reflected Lizzy's struggles as a down-on-her-luck artist, as well as the depiction of art's place in the world. She is a repressed character, embodied perfectly through a performance from Michelle Williams that always simmers but never explodes, which the film taps into by showing how she responds as an NPC (for want of a better term) surrounded by main characters. She finds it difficult to express herself emotionally through 'normal' means, so she needs to channel those emotions in different ways such as her sculpting and when she learns to love a pigeon. That story with the pigeon was what I found most interesting. It was nice watching someone learn to love a living creature, especially as they both occupy a similar place in the world, which is reflected in Lizzy's and the pigeon's treatment by Jo - Lizzy's landlord, neighbour and fellow artist - who has a sort of removed but inwardly knowing quirkiness that is very easy to hate. The way some of the images contrasted their conjoining apartments stood out in my mind more than the rest of the film's visuals.

Something that doesn't take much prominence in the film but stood out to me were the few moments spent observing the students at the art college. It made me consider that they all had stories going on that were as mundane as Lizzy's, but art provides them with the opportunity to find their own wee corner of the world. Creating something and sharing the fruits of your labour to the world is a good thing in amongst all of life's mundanities, even if a lot of pain goes into that creative process. The pigeon can be viewed as a metaphor for the creative process, though the creative process is intrinsically linked to emotional processing so it could also be linked to that. It comes together nicely. 

It can sometimes be hard to get a proper read on something so sleepy and vibesy, but it succeeded for me in terms of being a touching character study. A lot of folk will hate it, though, so it's a hard one to recommend. 

[RuMoore]

Spiderman - 1st of the Tom Holland ones.

Surprisingly good, I don't particularly enjoy spider man and I hate 99% of Marvel content but felt like the character was really well done, my limited viewpoint is that spiderman should be some youngster with shite patter that tries too hard rather than stoic or smouldering older chap. 

7/10 (for a superhero movie)

5/10 (for a movie)

20 Days In Mariupol

Considering I don't put much if any thought into my reviews and they're very entry level I don't even want to try and do this justice as I would struggle to. Extremely harrowing and I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying people need to watch it, I mean someone does and it should be documented but don't expect anything other than pure trauma. 

9/10 

[Bully Wee Villa]

Also watched 20 Days in Mariupol (All4). It's really very good indeed, but also possibly the most upsetting thing I have ever watched, I couldn't watch it all in one go. I hope I live long enough to celebrate that b*****d Putin's death (same for Netanyahu and any other scumbag who orders the death of babies to boost their ego).

Edited March 18 by Bully Wee Villa

[accies1874]

23. Banel & Adama - Cinema

Like one of my favourites from last year, Godland, Banel & Adama is an interesting look into nature and religion, specifically in relation to agency. Banel is a woman who's in her second arranged marriage, this time to Adama, the man next in line to be chief of their remote Senegalese village and brother of her previous husband. They are told that they need to have a kid together to stave off the 'apocalyptic' drought they're currently experiencing, but they both just want to abscond to isolation together. Faith is perceived by some of the villagers as a comfort that you can control nature through your actions (punishment or rewards depending on your actions), but that illusion of choice is turned on its head as it railroads Adama and especially Banel into a life they don't want to live. Fear is apparent throughout, as well as the question of what it would mean if there were an actual purpose to life. It's pretty decent, though I doubt I'll remember it in a couple of days. 

24. Four Daughters - Cinema

A documentary that occupies a strange space between real-life observations and storytelling and recreations of some of the real-life storytelling. It's about two of the four daughters being radicalised by ISIS, but that's very much the narrative climax, so much of the runtime is devoted to understanding how they were led to radicalisation. Due to the strange form - using actors to stand in for the missing daughters as well as an actor for the mum of the family - it means that there's a strange non-linearity to it all as the remaining family members are allowed to 'revisit' traumatic memories and reflect on their choices, which is especially true for the mother. It actually reminded me of We Need to Talk About Kevin in a lot of ways, though I think that's the gold standard for the Regretful Parent genre. My main issue with Four Daughters was that I just couldn't see past its form. I couldn't always track the authenticity of it, which was especially frustrating in the more emotional scenes as I was thinking more than I was feeling. That wasn't always the case - there's undoubtedly some saddening moments - but I was confused more than anything else. 

[Scorge]

Immaculate - Sydney Sweeney as a nun, which will probably lure in some of the posters on 'that' thread over in general nonsense right now. It's a fairly generic dark-quiet-dark-quiet-THUMP horror for about an hour, but her performance is really good, and the final 20 minutes are deliciously nasty.

Late Night With The Devil - now THIS is my kind of unsettling slow burner horror film. David Dalmaschithingimabob playing as a slick 70's American TV show on 31st October (tick) as a piece of found footage (tick) with a young female guest who does exorcismy things (tick). Sounds counter intuitive, but if you ignore it as a horror film and watch it with a straight bat a'la Alan Partridge Does Halloween, then it's great fun, and the visuals/set/etc are really good. Suitably bonkers final act, too. Won't be everyone's cuppa, but I loved it.

[mathematics]

46 minutes ago, Scorge said:

Sydney Sweeney as a nun,

What kind of nun? The good kind?

[Squalor Vic]

RoadHouse (2024)

Conor Magregor must have funded some of this as it's the only explanation for why he is in it. Quite possibly the worst acting I've ever seen in a 'big' release like this. Plus he looks coked out his nut and I think he wrote his own lines too. It's also 2 hours long.

Apart from all that, I thought it was awright 6/10