What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

[Flybhoy]

London to Brighton. 

A really tough, harrowing watch, some brilliant performances, notably from Lorraine Stanley who is now in Eastenders and Boxer turned actor Johnny Harris who, seems to be the go to guy for independent film makers in Britain looking for a Cockney geezer to play an absolute scumbag, some may recall him getting his brains smashed in with a hammer after a lifetime as an incestuous rapist in This is England 86.

Here he plays Derek, a pimp who bullies Kelly (Lorraine Stanley) to get an underage girl for a rich gangster who gets his rocks off with that type of thing but, things quickly turn very ugly, can't go into much more detail without spoiling it for others, not an easy watch but a gripping one, although the 'twist' at the end I saw coming a mile off.

7/10

[Craig fae the Vale]

Went to see Asteroid City last night.

Delightfully weird, very funny, really enjoyed it. Don't read anything about it before going in, you'll enjoy it all the more.

[Miguel Sanchez]

There follows the first post in a series:

Mission: Impossible (1998)

Televisual nonsense with extremely 1998 CGI. The hacking scene was very tense though.

[Miguel Sanchez]

Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)

The world's most charisma-free man and the world's most boring woman fail to build any chemistry for an hour before lots of shooting, rubber masks and extremely drawn out roundhouse kicks. Nonsense, but boring nonsense.

[coprolite]

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

Office politics in an unethical boiler room.

Hadn’t seen this before. It’s very obvious that it’s adapted from a stage play and although I haven’t seen the play I’d guess it wasn’t adapted much.  It’s very stagey.
 

95% of it is in two locations and I suspect that most of the remainder was only relocated to shoehorn in a gratuitous “Nighthawks” tableau. Generally looked good and the aesthetic captured the grubbiness of the subject matter.
 

It’s very talky. There’s a good rhythm to the dialogue that sort of builds through the film, although a couple of bits felt indulgent/pretentious and some of the attempted zingy back and forth fell flat.

It’s mostly about the performances though. Jack Lemmon (particularly) and Ed Harris hamming it up against understated turns from Kevin Spacey and Alan Arkin, while Pacino is note perfect as a charming manipulator with an undertone of desperation. Even the Baldwin was quite good.

Thematically, it’s a less subtle “Death of a Salesman”

7/10

[scottsdad]

Back to the Future and Back to the Future II.

My daughter had never seen these so we watched them over the last couple of nights. Utterly brilliant movies. Just enjoyable. 

With part 2, there is so much plot in there, it's amazing to think it's less than 2 hours long. If it were made today it would be 3, easily. 

We're watching part 3 on Friday.

[accies1874]

14 hours ago, Miguel Sanchez said:

There follows the first post in a series:

Mission: Impossible (1998)

Televisual nonsense with extremely 1998 CGI. The hacking scene was very tense though.

I think I'll go through all of these next year by the time Part 2 comes out. I've only seen 4 which I enjoyed until I realised that there was still a whole story to wrap up after the scene on the skyscraper. It was all a bit of a let-down after that.

[Comrie]

The Prophecy (1995)

 

A whole bunch of religious nonsense chucked in a blender, but it's Walken as Gabriel who holds this together by going full Walken and just chewing everything he can and is helped by Viggo Mortensen turning up later as Lucifer. Nice supporting roles from Amanda Plummer and Eric Stolz.

If you just go for the full on fun of seeing Walken go nuts, it's worth it.

7/10

[Miguel Sanchez]

3 hours ago, accies1874 said:

I think I'll go through all of these next year by the time Part 2 comes out. I've only seen 4 which I enjoyed until I realised that there was still a whole story to wrap up after the scene on the skyscraper. It was all a bit of a let-down after that.

I don't think I'd seen any before. I don't think I'll be rushing to the cinema.

[accies1874]

24. Asteroid City - Cinema

Well, I loved it. A wonderfully chilled film with a world I was happy existing in for 100 minutes hanging out with the characters. I liked the look of the film from the trailers but was a bit concerned that the Asteroid City section would be constantly interrupted by the black and white stuff, however the colourful world absolutely took precedence with the other stuff acting as interesting and fluid sidebars to branch things out. The saturated colour palette never grated on me, rather it and the score and production design were weirdly comforting to me. 

When Wes Anderson's on form, one of the main things I like about his films is the alive cast of characters who either get minimal screentime or just linger in the background, and this film did really tap into that. In fact, it's actually a key component of the film. 

The idea of storytelling is tackled in a much more appealing way to me than The French Dispatch approached it. The story within a story within a story made me consider the psyche of Edward Norton's character - a small role - and how his own emotional processing fractured into creating this vast array of characters, which in turn draws attention to Wes Anderson's mindset as he created that character as a branch of his mind to explore all of these different emotions represented by the characters in Asteroid City. 

I wondered in the opening credits when he did his first typical quick-pan what must be going through his head when making a film nowadays. He must know about all of the memes, parodies and A.I.-generated imitations, however he still goes into his films and executes his style perfectly, and that kind of all comes together on a few different levels. Firstly, there are the junior stargazers who are all geniuses meeting other geniuses which should, in theory, lessen the uniqueness of their talents - something that one of them clearly struggles with - but their individual quirks ultimately allow them to stand out in this field. There's a short moment at the start of Act II after the alien has landed where the camera tracks past them and it's interesting watching how that event affected their previously established personalities - fear, obsession, strength. It all feels completely natural despite depicting an otherworldly scenario. Then on another level, the Asteroid City televised play production brings together a bunch of actors who have "made it" more than most end up making it, yet they similarly have identity crises in their profession, especially in relation to using personas to externalise internalisation. I find that whole concept of personas and defence mechanisms interesting, although it wasn't until the end of my second watch last night that I began to wonder how much of the Asteroid City section of the film was showing slips of character - definitely a couple of times towards the end, but I'm not sure if it was prevalent throughout the film. 

It seems to be a celebration of all of these different characters within a wider world, struggling to stand out in a huge world with vast personalities confined to a tiny town which is emphasised by some of his tracking shots which seem to just incidentally land on a conversation which we might not get to hear if the camera kept moving. Watching the chaos provoked by the alien was great, too, as it acts like an inciting incident for a lot of the characters except the ones who prefer to maintain the façade of emotional understanding. A fun theory I have is that we are essentially the alien, dropping in and out of a huge planet/galaxy/existence to find these chaotic people at breaking point. 

I can't quite articulate what I make of the "you can't wake up if you don't go to sleep" stuff, but imo it's essentially what we see portrayed throughout the entire film.

[Miguel Sanchez]

Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Several things spring to mind.

Tom Cruise makes films so he can kiss women. Tom Cruise makes action movies so he can kiss women and then talk about women at inopportune moments when the action is happening. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a tremendous loss. This is the second JJ Abrams film I've seen where he takes a popular, career defining franchise and makes a new instalment which pretty much copies the entire plot from the original. This was originally supposed to be directed by David Fincher and that would have been much more entertaining. 

[Empty It]

Just watched Human Traffic, never seen it before and it was recommended last night when I was out with mates and had a spare couple hours.

Great movie, absolutely mental.

[BFTD]

Indiana Jones and the Dial-a-Journey (cinema) - a retiring and lonely Dr Jones is enlisted by his goddaughter to track down her father's obsession, the Antikythera Mechanism, which may have properties beyond the prediction of astrological positions.

It's alright; better than Crystal Skull. The film maybe suffers by throwing us straight into a classic Indy adventure, attempting to stop the Nazis from recovering the Spear of Destiny, and it's so much better than the rest of the film. This is the point at which I realised that I'd be susceptible to more Indy films with a CGI Harrison Ford, even if there's dodgy physics and some of Ford's performance can't be replicated by computer.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is about as annoying as you'd imagine, but she's not as bad as Shia LaBeouf, who thankfully does not feature in this film. There's also a kid who tags along for some reason and isn't as annoying as Short Round...it's a bit of a shame he's not in this film, as it's supposed to be canon that Indy took him to the US and put him through college. There are a few other cameos from prior films, however.

I don't think anyone wanted to see a film about Indiana Jones' unhappiness in old age, and they shat out of a bittersweet ending for our hero, but this isn't terrible despite being a bit dull in places (a long Wacky Races style car chase, for one). Worth seeing for the opening romp, and Harrison Ford still knowing how to put in a performance.

[Mark Connolly]

I really enjoyed Indiana Jones and the McGuffin of the Month. It's obviously not on the level of Raiders or Last Crusade, but are far more positives than negatives.

Toby Jones was excellent in the Marcus Brody-type role, Mads Mikkelsen was an excellent baddie, and, as BFTD says, the opening sequence was fucking tremendous. I'm not a huge fan of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but even she wasn't too bad.

Spoiler

Thought Antonio Banderas was great in his brief cameo too.

The emotionally vulnerable Indy was an interesting approach, and the discussion about what happened to his son was genuinely heartbreaking (although less so when I remembered the abomination that was Mutt Williams)

I will caveat this by saying I was never a fan of Temple of Doom, and that Last Crusade is my favourite film of all time, but I would now rank the series:

Last Crusade
Raiders



Dial of Destiny/Temple of Doom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The fourth one

[MSU]

130 Run Rabbit Run -- Another horror movie about motherhood and generational trauma, but this time in Australian. Sarah Snook (out of off of Succession) plays Sarah, a single mother struggling with the death of her father, her own mother's diagnosis of dementia, and a secret from her past about a missing sister, Alice. Sarah's own daughter, Mia, turns seven, the age Alice disappeared, and begins to behave oddly until she claims she is the reincarnation of Alice. It's hard to disagree that there are similarities between the two. The movie tries to elevate itself above jump scares but in doing so it relies heavily on other horror tropes. There's a big empty house, there are dream sequences that bleed into reality, there are rushes of wind past characters' faces, loud ominous music for no reason, and there has to come a time when all the promise of something weird going on here has a satisfying pay-off. It was nice to see Greta Scachi again as Sarah's mum, but a 100 minute movie should never be as dull as this. 4/10

131 No Hard Feelings -- In a coastal New York town, thirtysomething Maddie, Jennifer Lawrence, is about to lose her deceased mother's house when her car is impounded so she can no longer work as an Uber driver, nor afford the property taxes, which have escalated due to out-of-towners who summer in the area. Desperate, she sees an ad from a couple looking for a girl to "date" their introverted 19-year-old son, Percy, and teach him a few ways of the world before he goes off to Princeton in the fall, and in return, they'll give her a car. It's kinda like Happy Gilmore except instead of a grandmother's house, it's a mother's house, and instead of hockey, it's sex with a boy barely out of high school. So Maddie uses her feminine wiles on the lad only to find he's a little more difficult to break down than she anticipated. Case in point, he maces her at one point. I found it quite mean-spirited and then learned that it was written by the folks behind Dirty Grampa and Bad Teacher. It is kinda funny in places in a quick-exhale-down-the-nostrils sort of way, and does feature quite a bit of Jennifer Lawrence running about stark bollock naked and taking a boot to the pie for her troubles, so it's not entirely a waste of time or money. 5/10

132 Past Lives (#135 in the A24 series) -- Nora and Hae Sung are childhood friends in Seoul, childhood sweethearts even after their first date together, until Nora's family moves to Canada. From there, a number of years later, Nora moves on to New York and 12 years after leaving Korea, she and Hae Sung reconnect by chance on Facebook and then Skype. Their relationship goes about as far as it can with her in the US and him in Korea, so she ends something that hadn't really begun, and so they lose touch for another 12 years until Hae Sung visits Nora in New York, where she is now married, and he is coming out of a relationship of his own. The movie touches on fate, and destiny, and connections, and the immigrant experience, and love, and longing, and distance, and unexpressed emotions about undefinable relationships. Celine Song's debut as director is assured and incredibly shot -- New York hasn't looked this amazing in forever -- and she takes such care and patience to let the story tell itself. Greta Lee and Yoo Teo are sublime as the two ships that continually pass in the night, as is John Magaro as Nora's understanding and slightly threatened husband, who sees himself as the potential villain in the story of long-distance love.  The immigrant experience is a difficult one to describe -- my own experiences were much simpler and didn't have such a culture shock and had different punctuation points -- but I understand that when Nora looks at Hae Sung, she sees something in him of the little girl she used to be, and the relationship they had as children was exclusively theirs, that this was something she left behind and she lost something as a result. It's a remarkable film that captures all this and a ton more without spelling it out. A triumph! 10/10

133 Jewel of the Nile -- It's definitely one of those sequels that tries to cash in on the original but is weaker on practically every level that made the original successful. It's not as funny, the action isn't as thrilling, the story is utterly bonkers, and the romance has already gone stale. It's not entirely without merit, and Lewis Teague has made a glossier product, but there are so many movies that do "this kind of thing" better, not least of all Romancing the Stone. 5/10

[BFTD]

43 minutes ago, Mark Connolly said:

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Thought Antonio Banderas was great in his brief cameo too.

The emotionally vulnerable Indy was an interesting approach, and the discussion about what happened to his son was genuinely heartbreaking (although less so when I remembered the abomination that was Mutt Williams)

I blew my son's mind by whispering "Puss in Boots" during the diving scene  

[Guest]

Saw Jesus Revolution a week ago. It was a 3pm Sunday viewing. I liked the look of the (overly-long) trailer. Can we please limit trailers to 45 seconds, for the love of Satan?

I wanted to see the film for the interaction between the straight-laced conservative regular churchgoers and a bunch of spaced-out displaced hippies invading their church. Little did I know that my viewing of the film coincided with what was clearly a Sunday leisure outing of a number of fringe Plymothian community churches, where apparently it's alright to talk constantly through a film at the top of your voice, and throw in a few 'Praise The Lord!'s for good measure.  Perhaps I should forgive them, but they ruined my £6.99 super saviour ticket.

One of my favourite songwriters appeared as a well-used but uncredited extra, Kelsey Grammer played a straight bat as the prig who opened up his mind, the portrayal of the changing relationships between key characters was very engaging, and overall it wasn't a bad account of a true story (the bit about the 1970s). Enjoyable. 7/10 for the film, none for the missed conversion. 


 

Edited July 9, 2023 by IncomingExile

[scottsdad]

Back to the future 3

I always remember this as being the weakest of the three, and it really is. Don't get me wrong, they had to get away from the times they had been before and the western makes total sense. I remember seeing part 2 as a kid, one of the first movies I ever saw at the cinema, which included the trailer for part 3 at the end and being really excited. 

Too much Doc Brown in this one. The romance was nonsense, badly done. The Irish ancestors were dreadful. But the first part where he gets back to 1885, and the last 20 minutes, were really good. 

[accies1874]

12 hours ago, IncomingExile said:

I wanted to see the film for the interaction between the straight-laced conservative regular churchgoers and a bunch of spaced-out displaced hippies invading their church. Little did I know that my viewing of the film coincided with what was clearly a Sunday leisure outing of a number of fringe Plymothian community churches, where apparently it's alright to talk constantly through a film at the top of your voice, and throw in a few 'Praise The Lord!'s for good measure.  Perhaps I should forgive them, but they ruined my £6.99 super saviour ticket.

 

This sounds miserable as a film-goer but would probably be quite funny as an onlooker. I reckon I'd have chucked it as soon as I saw them walk in. 

Also @MSU sadly we need to wait a couple of months to see Past Lives but I'm really looking forward to it. Seems to have got quite a similar reception to Aftersun in terms of being a standout Best of the Year for pretty much everyone who's seen it. 

Edited July 10, 2023 by accies1874

[coprolite]

Re: mission impossible series 

saw all of these in order twice during lockdown because my mrs likes them.

If you don’t expect great art or even good cinema, they’re pretty entertaining.

The set piece stunts/cgi are usually pretty spectacular and/or memorable.  I pretty much remember which one’s which by bits as much as who’s in them. 

They don’t usually go on for too long without stuff happening. The plots are really easy to follow and there is almost no moral complexity or shade.

If you want something that won’t generate a lot of stupid questions from your companion, then they’re ideal.