What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[MSU]

070 Sasquatch Sunset -- It's never a good sign when an 88 minute movie feels like 2 hours and this disjointed tale of a pod of sasquatches out in the wild going about their weird sasquatch business of pissing and shitting on things. This might have been a decent short, but even then I'm worried that the premise just doesn't hold up for anything more than a 5 minute SNL skit. On the positive side, the make-up and costumes are great, the scenery of the forest and the wilderness is amazing, and Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough do a decent enough job, but there isn't much of a plot and then it tries to be funny and just ruins whatever little suspension of disbelief it had built up. There were six people in the showing I was at including me and Mrs MSU. By about midway, it was just me and the missus. A generous 4/10 but depending on whether you can tune into its wavelength it could be anything from 1 to 7.

071 Abigail -- A group of six criminals are hired to kidnap Abigail, the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a mysterious underworld figure. They have to hold on to her in a mansion for 24 hours and then will get the payday of their lives, if they can survive. It's a simple enough premise and the movie takes its time introducing its characters and the little girl and as it moves through the first act, we discover that there's plenty of distrust among the gang and Abigail herself may not be the helpless victim in all this. The movie is a huge amount of fun, frequently hilarious, and has a Danzig needle drop that might just be my favorite sequence of the entire film. It's bloody and tense and shot superbly with lots of wirework that I understand the wonderful Alisha Weir, as Abigail, did herself. With a supporting cast of Kathryn Newton, Giancarlo Esposito, Dan Stevens, and Scream's Melissa Barrera, it has an enormous amount going for it. Fun fact, Alisha Weir is Jessie Buckley's daughter in Wicked Little Letters. 9/10

[Florentine_Pogen]

On 25/03/2024 at 21:34, MONKMAN said:

Poor Things - spent the majority of the film wondering what the f**k I was actually watching.
Visually, it’s superb.  It’s as engrossing as it is messed up, which is a lot. I lost count of the amount of times the wife and myself just looked at each other in agreement thinking “what the f**k is actually going on here”. Utterly bizarre film that is unlike anything I’ve seen before. 
Emma Stone deserved her Oscar though, she was superb. 

Thanks for that review Monkman, I came on to write one and it would have been pretty much a copy of yours.

Wife and I were completely bemused at times and I was very surprised to see Mark Ruffalo in such a wackjob of a film. However, on finding out it's based on Alasdair Gray's book of the same name, I looked at it in a different light.

Willem Defoe's attempt at a Scottish accent was woeful. Why couldn't they get a Scottish actor, I wonder ?

[ScotiaNostra]

New Jack City 1991 - Surprisingly good still. Its dated but in a good way in that it really captures that time. The look, music etc. The soundtrack is great. Strong cast. Its a bit over the top and obvious at times and verges on the blaxploitation genre but overall a great movie still.  The cinematography still looks good and must of had a decent budget in its day, some of these older movies have far better cinematography than newer digital movies or TV series. Theres a lot still to be said for real film compared to digital. 

 

[JustOneCornetto]

Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) -GFT

I liked this, ok it's a very slow pace and there's a lot of awkward silences but we get to see the thoughts of Fran, played brilliantly by Daisy Ridley, through those moments where all the banter is going on with her co-workers while she gets on with her work at the same time wishing she was somewhere else and imagining lying dead in different settings. Her life and social interactions look like they've improved when new worker Robert shows an interest in her but after a couple of dates Fran still has that deep rooted social anxiety and the film ends in such a poignant way which will relate to the many people who have suicidal ideation.

[accies1874]

2 hours ago, JustOneCornetto said:

Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) -GFT

I liked this, ok it's a very slow pace and there's a lot of awkward silences but we get to see the thoughts of Fran, played brilliantly by Daisy Ridley, through those moments where all the banter is going on with her co-workers while she gets on with her work at the same time wishing she was somewhere else and imagining lying dead in different settings. Her life and social interactions look like they've improved when new worker Robert shows an interest in her but after a couple of dates Fran still has that deep rooted social anxiety and the film ends in such a poignant way which will relate to the many people who have suicidal ideation.

Think I'm gonna end up missing this in the cinema but it's one that I'll likely seek out when it comes to streaming. The trailer definitely seemed up my street. 

[accies1874]

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) - Cinema

My favourite film from my favourite working director. Probably my favourite film from the 2010s. Probably my favourite actor/actress around at the moment. Projected in 35mm. Delightful. Actually, maybe “delightful” is the wrong word for this…

A calling card of Lynne Ramsay’s work is her silent protagonists. They create a sense of mystery around them, particularly their relationships with other characters, which then draws me into their actions and the filmmaking even more. It must be difficult being the lead performer in one of her films due to the lack of dialogue you have to work with, but they pull it off every single time. In this, we see Tilda Swinton’s Eva at different points in her life, but that all needs to build to what we see in the most ‘present’ of the timelines. The film is about her reflecting on her behaviour as a mother, so she needs to convey liberation prior to having kids, anxieties while pregnant, frustration when her life grinds to a halt, apprehension when she begins to believe that her son might not be so good. These emotions all pretty much disappear after The Incident, so Tilda Swinton’s performance needs to help the audience understand her vacantness in the present day. The casting of Ezra Miller has also aged impeccably well.

I’ve never read the book so don’t know how the story is told in that, but what I find interesting about the non-linear aspect of the film is that could also, to a certain extent, be perceived linearly. Like I said, it’s all about Eva’s reflection on her own behaviour, so you could consider all of the non-linear aspects to be the memories that she is struggling to escape from. That’s also conveyed by the red that permeates so much of this: red lights her face in many scenes, her house and car are vandalised with red paint, she gets that paint in her hair, there are flashbacks to her at a tomato festival, and continuing the tomato theme there’s also a shot of her hiding behind shelves of tomato soup. This gives a sense of her inability to escape what happened in the past (both her and Kevin’s actions) and could also be a way to draw attention to the idea of what parents pass down to their kids (blood is thicker than water). Parallels are drawn between Eva and Kevin like showing one of them dunk their head in water before turning into the other, or where they both comment on the other’s unforgiving way with words. In a certain sense, it could be comforting to Eva that there was nothing she could do to raise a better child, but then there’s a nihilism to that which is perhaps even worse due to her blood resulting in such trauma in the town. The subjective point of view of the film means that you wrestle with Eva’s regrets just as she does, but there’s a psychological ambiguity that comes from her being an unreliable narrator. Sometimes Kevin’s demeanour will change within a shot or an edit (the latter I’d put down to an editing mistake if it were a lesser film) and the Cool Dad, played by John C. Reilly, doesn’t see or believe some of the shit Kevin gets up to (bringing to mind domestic horror like Rosemary’s Baby). Guilt makes her mind play tricks on her and you feel that as a viewer. I suppose what is also interesting is why she’s reflecting. She didn’t want to have the kid, she didn’t want to be the one to raise the kid, she didn’t want to move out of New York – yet she’s the one who has to live with all of this regret, not the Cool Dad who encouraged Kevin’s archery, watched him angrily kill folk in games and turned a blind eye to his troubling behaviour from afar while the mother at home had to deal with it. All that pressure piled onto someone non-consensually. The way Tilda Swinton’s and John C. Reilly’s performances contrast is perfect; her in full-on starey mode and him in full-on friendly John C. Reilly mode.

To provoke all of these thoughts and ideas without much dialogue is why Lynne Ramsay is my favourite director currently working, though her gap between releases is not good. She makes films that remind you why people make films as opposed to any other medium. It’s just class to have someone so great hail from Scotland. I also doubled this up with a showing of Ratcatcher which means that I’ve now seen all of her features on the big screen after seeing Morvern Callar a few weeks ago. Think Greta Gerwig is the only other director with 3+ films that I’ve seen all in the cinema.

[DeeTillEhDeh]

On 14/04/2024 at 09:01, Biscuits said:

Back In Black.  Wanted to go and see Civil War but, as is life, overruled by mrs biscuits.  Really enjoyed it - music was outstanding obviously.  The paparazzi are c***s.  8/10 

I gave it 5/10 - and that was for the music.

It was like a monotonous,  sanitised Nancy & Sid.

[Bert Raccoon]

Saltburn - Worth much more than the scenes everyone talks about. Not an amazing film but really enjoyed it. Also a fantastic soundtrack 

[Scorge]

Boy Kills World - utterly nuts revenge 'em up a'la Monkey Man, but with a more video game styling about it. Great lead performance from the boy Skarsgard, who says so much without really saying anything. Enjoyable.

Just settling in to watch ISS, edit to follow later. - [EDIT], meh, not bad. 20 minutes of characters bonding followed by an hour of paranoia about murdering each other and basically turns into a game of 'guess who gets merked'. Not great, but not toilet either.

Edited April 27 by Scorge

[MSU]

072 Alien -- Not a new movie, obviously, but it's the 45th anniversary and this was my first time seeing it on the big screen. I saw Jaws at the cinema last year and it was amazing and this was no different. Everything I love about the movie feels better, the tension and mood and the lighting etc, the exploration on LV-426, the organic-industrial feel, it was all great. The puppet bursting out of John Hurt's chest has looked a bit silly for years and the bigger screen does it no favors, same goes for the explosion at the end which has always looked painted on, but so many of the effects still stand up, like Ash when they jump-start him. The screening started with an interview between Ridley Scott and Fede Aldavez who's directing the upcoming Romulus and I don't know how much I'm looking forward to that now, but the original and the sequel are still pretty much perfect for me. 10/10

Edited April 28 by MSU

[accies1874]

I've never been able to love Aliens for similar reasons to why I've always much preferred The Terminator to Terminator 2, but I can only imagine how class the original would be on the big screen. 

[scottsdad]

Seeing Jaws in the cinema, in 3D, was amazing. Shame I missed Alien. 

[BFTD]

Can confirm Alien was great in the cinema; saw it as a double-bill with Aliens in the cinema a year or two back. Oddly, I don't think Aliens loses anything from being seen at home. Much the same experience.

I'd no idea they 3D-ified the original Jaws - I always hear that those efforts to add 3D to films don't turn out well. I did, however, see Jaws 3D in the cinema when I was a wee boy, and if anything it was even worse than seeing it at home. Don't know how Jaws: The Revenge gets so much flack for being shite when the third one was so criminally boring. The effects are godawful too, and they fucked up the 3D so they've never been able to produce a 2D version that isn't blurred round the edges.

[accies1874]

38. High & Low - John Galliano - MUBI

My quest to watch more documentaries continues. I'm not all that bothered about this kind of fashion, but I saw the trailer and thought that it teased an interesting fall - the low of the title rather than the high.

It opens with the main cause of that low, a drunken antisemitic spiel, which somewhat recontextualises the rise you then watch. You understand the toll of fame and success, aware that he's hurtling towards a fall. That's pretty standard stuff and I didn't find John Galliano's story compelling enough to elevate the documentary above that, despite some interesting stuff bubbling underneath such as the idea of fashion as a form of defence or escape rather than self-expression. He's prominent as a talking head which is often shot in a way that frames him as a bit mad, like you're peering into the delusions of someone not quite there.

39. Immaculate - Cinema

I might have liked this more if I hadn't rewatched Rosemary's Baby last night. As it is, I didn't like Immaculate much at all. I suppose a subversion of Rosemary's Baby is the fact that the cult in that film are trying to birth the son of the devil, whereas in this they're trying to birth a new Jesus yet the outcome is the same - a paranoid horror movie. So let's talk about the horror elements of Immaculate.

Jumpscares! Rubbish. There are a couple of terrifically tense scenes in this, one in particular goes on for a while and was brilliantly done; big open sets where danger could lurk and complete silence except for some creaks from doors and floors and the crackle of a fire. The issue I had with this was that by the time it got to that scene it was already well-established that any moment of silence would end in an obnoxious and distracting loud bang, so rather than enjoying the tension of the scene, I was just waiting for that bang to happen. When it did, it wasn't even a threat to Sydney Sweeney's Cecilia, it was just a loud noise to startle the audience.

It's got an 18 rating, so you're fully expecting some blood and guts in this horror. And there's lots of blood and a fair bit of gore, but even I, who isn't great with 'injury detail', found that aspect completely toothless. It's either shot in a detached manner where I didn't feel the pain or the digital effects are so obvious that I just didn't care. There's been plenty of chat about the ending, which yeah it was definitely effective, but what's interesting to me is that it was effective without showing you the horror - all you see is the effect that it has on Sydney Sweeney.

[accies1874]

Sources say he's going on about Lynne Ramsay again...

You Were Never Really Here (2018) - Blu Ray

When I first saw You Were Never Really Here in the cinema back in 2018, it was one of those genuinely transformational cinema experiences. I remember the podcast I was listening to driving in, where I parked, the jackass who barged past me on the escalator (and then bizarrely had a proper Max Cady laugh at the ending), what I got for lunch and the classes I skipped at college to go see it. Friday afternoons were Shorthand and Scots Law – two subjects I was hopeless at – so I saw some pretty good film instead of facing my fears of those classes. The Breadwinner, Funny Cow and A Quiet Place were all good, but You Were Never Really Here was the one that had the biggest impact on me. I was disappointed that I couldn’t make either of the reruns in the past week, so I had to make do with fishing out my Blu Ray of it – a Blu Ray that gets fished out once a year (though funnily enough not the year where I reviewed every film I saw) and is a weird comfort film for me given it’s about a mentally broken man trying to rescue a sex trafficked girl.

This was the first time I’d watched it having also read the book, and that slightly increased my admiration for it. Lynne Ramsay took a pulpy 90-page book and turned it into an 80-minute masterclass in how to put the audience into the mind of a character. The first time I watched it, I don’t think I’d ever seen editing like it, certainly not in the cinema. The quick cuts to Joe’s traumatic past, to those he couldn’t save, which then inform the character we see in the film. It made for something incredibly exciting, unsettling and pertinent. The main thing that has stayed with me throughout the years, though, is how it shoots violence. I’ve never really had a proper grasp on why Ramsay chose to shoot Joe’s violent acts in detached ways – through CCTV footage, off-screen, reflected off a mirror – but this time around I think that the decision plays into the title. Joe’s someone who is haunted by his past so tries to erase himself from the present by leaving no trace of his actions. He’s a ghostlike figure, just missed by the camera in certain scenes or one where he disappears behind a car (not in a corny way), and tries to cope in this world by not forming connections with anyone other than his mother. That obscured violence could be a reflection of his ghostliness as he tries and ultimately fails to leave no trace of his actions, it could be a setup for a reveal towards the end, or it could be Lynne Ramsay telling the audience to remove themselves from the violence and focus on Joe’s motivations. Taxi Driver is an obvious comparison, but it wasn’t until this most recent watch that I was getting Eyes Wide Shut vibes. There’s a lurid conspiracy taking place underneath the surface of highrise office buildings, a governor’s mansion, a bodega, a simple hotel and even Joe’s unassuming childhood home – a conspiracy that the wider public isn’t aware of and never will be. It was Never Really Here.

Johnny Greenwood’s score is another aspect of the You Were Never Really Here that remains incredible. There’s nothing melodic about it, you won’t choose to listen to it outside of the context of the film, but the fragmented nature of the music is a perfect insight into Joe’s mind. When he leaves the hotel room right at the start, you’re immediately aware of the character you’re about to spend the rest of the runtime with and the score plays a big part in that – though not the only part, as the opening also contains my favourite shot. Joe leaves the hotel room and goes downstairs to the lobby where it looks like we’ve gone to a POV shot, only the camera stops when it’s revealed that there are flashing blue lights outside. It then pans around to find Joe going off in another direction. That shot establishes that Joe and the camera won’t always be as one, it conveys his paranoia, and it lets us know that the police aren’t on his side. The opening scene has a few moments of visual storytelling like this (Joe opening a door then immediately closing it when someone walks past, going in one direction then changing direction when he’s disturbed), so given the fact that this was my introduction to Lynne Ramsay’s work in 2018, it’s really no wonder that I became so drawn to it. Like I said about We Need to Talk About Kevin, the mystery around her characters is always fascinating to me, and with Joe I’m interested in the irony of a man who saves people giving off the impression that he loathes existing. He can be brutal to his mum, but then we see him sharing a song with her; he shoots a man and aggravates the wounds, but then we see him holding the victim’s hand in his final moments. It’s a product of his broken mind which is a product of his traumatic past.

Just finally, the book did make sense of a short scene where Joe reads a book (not You Were Never Really Here) from the ending backwards and tears out some pages as he goes. I’d previously struggled to articulate my thoughts on this, but the YWNR book has a line about Joe’s planned suicide being his favourite story as it’s the only one he knows the ending to. Think that sums it up well – both that scene and his approach to life.

[CraigFowler]

31. Love Lies Bleeding

Not what I expected from the trailer, which made it seem almost like a Thelma & Louise style on-the-run movie but with a lesbian romance at the heart of it. The latter part is accurate, but it's more a film about obsession, the blinding impact of love, trauma, retribution and dysfunctional family dynamics. It's also way more violent than I imagined. At points it drifts across into horror-film territory. I genuinely regarded it as bit of a weird story and then there was a choice near the very end which took me out of it entirely. There were also a few jarring tone shifts. Not the worst but I expected and hoped it would be better.

32. Bros

A hyper-sexualised romantic comedy that's about a gay couple rather than a straight one. Was disappointed to hear this has flopped at the box office but not surprised at all. As my partner and I both remarked to each other after about 20 minutes into the movie, very regrettably, that it was strange to see what was so obviously a Hollywood movie, with the sheen and gloss of a typical US romcom, but with the romance at the heart of it one of a gay, male couple. Even if a lot of society, in the UK at least, is becoming more and more accepting of gay culture and stories, it's still a relatively new thing in mainstream cinema and I hope the studios persist even if this one didn't wash its face. Because after those first 20 minutes I forgot all about the internalised biases and really enjoyed it. I was fully invested in their story and blubbed like a bairn at the end. My one big criticism is that, while I found it consistently funny, there weren't any real big laughs for me. And I watched it while [redacted], so I was primed for that.

33. The Wolf of Snow Hollow

A horror-comedy crossover which doesn't quite nail either. I didn't find it scary or even that tense, and I only laughed out loud a couple of times, but I still really quite liked it. I'm not sure what to make of Jim Cummings overall, having not enjoyed Thunder Road, but his struggling-to-stay-afloat-in-the-world, goofily intense charm worked for me a lot better in this one. I enjoyed how they told the story with time hoping back and forth often in quick cut-cut-cut scenes. It was an fresh way to tell a story that's been done many times and I found the ending pretty satisfying. My favourite of the three above, but Bros comes a close second.

[JustOneCornetto]

That They May Face The Rising Sun (2023) - GFT

Based on the final novel by highly influential Irish author John McGahern this is an excellent film, very contemplative, about life, death and being at peace with your own existence. It centres around a middle aged couple, Joe, an author, and Kate, an artist who have moved back from London to rural Ireland in the late 1970s. It's beautifully filmed, so much, that nature itself becomes a central character. The plot is pretty flimsy and most of the things you see going on are the collection of characters, a lot older than Joe & Kate, who seem to gravitate to them with some amusing scenes and a very moving scene involving Joe preparing a deceased friend for his funeral.

[Scorge]

7 hours ago, CraigFowler said:

31. Love Lies Bleeding

Not what I expected from the trailer, which made it seem almost like a Thelma & Louise style on-the-run movie but with a lesbian romance at the heart of it. The latter part is accurate, but it's more a film about obsession, the blinding impact of love, trauma, retribution and dysfunctional family dynamics. It's also way more violent than I imagined. At points it drifts across into horror-film territory. I genuinely regarded it as bit of a weird story and then there was a choice near the very end which took me out of it entirely. There were also a few jarring tone shifts. Not the worst but I expected and hoped it would be better.

The ending is very Marmite, but I think the film does lead to it fairly well and I completley bought the narrative anyway. This film is what Drive Away Dolls should have been like if it had been any good. Will probably see again, although partly because I had to share a row with three annoying little shits who wouldn't shut up.

Also saw Tarot this afternoon - bread and butter painting by numbers jump scare horror film that has the most obscene amount of Basil Exposition I think I've ever seen in a film, and a last 20 minutes with plot holes big enough to drive a bus through. It's watchable, but not much more than that.

[velo army]

London Has Fallen.

I know, it serves me right, but I saw the cast and felt a bit of hope that it wouldn't be dire. It was fucking dreadful and I quit half way through. It's a profoundly stupid movie in which every person in it is stupid and the plot feels like it was written by a child. There's a terrorist attack in London which wipes out the leaders of some very important countries (but not the UK and US, hoorah). All the police present are apparently involved. Why? No idea. The motivation for it seems to have been a drone killing of a Pakistani wedding. Quite why white English police officers would suddenly decide to participate in a kamikaze revenge attack isn't explained. Where the rest of the Metropolitan Police are after this, with baddies coming out of every side street as the President and his Bodyguards escape, isn't entirely clear. 

It's terrible and the script is worse. Morgan Freeman just takes whatever work is going, it seems. He must have Nicolas Cage type debts. 

[BFTD]

2 hours ago, velo army said:

London Has Fallen.

I know, it serves me right, but I saw the cast and felt a bit of hope that it wouldn't be dire. It was fucking dreadful and I quit half way through. It's a profoundly stupid movie in which every person in it is stupid and the plot feels like it was written by a child. There's a terrorist attack in London which wipes out the leaders of some very important countries (but not the UK and US, hoorah). All the police present are apparently involved. Why? No idea. The motivation for it seems to have been a drone killing of a Pakistani wedding. Quite why white English police officers would suddenly decide to participate in a kamikaze revenge attack isn't explained. Where the rest of the Metropolitan Police are after this, with baddies coming out of every side street as the President and his Bodyguards escape, isn't entirely clear. 

It's terrible and the script is worse. Morgan Freeman just takes whatever work is going, it seems. He must have Nicolas Cage type debts. 

Yeah, the first one was similarly blockheaded yet still managed to be entertaining, mainly through being part of an alien genre that seems ludicrous to anyone who isn't American, containing a worldview and paranoia that plays purely to a US audience (they've made more than one blockbuster film about being conquered by North Korea, FFS). "Profoundly stupid" is an excellent descriptive term for it. This one was just dull though, and suffered badly from not being set in the fantasy world of Fox News America.

Edit: Morgan Freeman might just be one of those jobbing actors like Donald Pleasance and Christopher Lee who remembered the days when the work wasn't rolling in and didn't turn down work as a matter of habit.

2 hours ago, Scorge said:

Also saw Tarot this afternoon - bread and butter painting by numbers jump scare horror film that has the most obscene amount of Basil Exposition I think I've ever seen in a film, and a last 20 minutes with plot holes big enough to drive a bus through. It's watchable, but not much more than that.

I think excessive, lazy exposition needs its own thread - one of the things that annoys me most about a film is when a character suddenly explains the plot, especially when there's no logical reason to know/concisely grasp the events they're summarising. Godzilla x Kong was full of it, presumably because the makers figured everyone's brains were so checked out that difficult concepts like "the monkey is in this place now!" might have zoomed right over our heads.

Edited May 3 by BFTD