Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Elemental (2023)

I liked it, I thought it was pretty fun.

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There has been an awekening.... have you felt it?

Punch-Drunk Love follows Barry (Sandler), a "nice man" that happens to be socially awkward, depressed and, well, prone to violent outbursts. Things take a turn when he meets Lena (Emily Watson), the charming co-worker of one of his seven sisters, just as he starts being accosted by a phone sex operator that was trying to extort him under orders of his shady boss (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

There's something magical in seeing a gifted director like Paul Thomas Anderson take someone like Sandler and what might seem like a tired schtick and make something as beautiful as this film. Punch-Drunk Love is an earnest romcom about the magic of two seemingly different people meeting each other and learning to work with the other person's strengths and weaknesses for the benefit of the relationship; which is pretty much what Anderson and Sandler did with this.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

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Jesus Camp, 2006

This documentary follows several children as they attend an evangelical summer camp run by Becky Fischer, a woman who sees children as the future army of God. From speaking in tongues to leading prayers, to protesting against abortion, the children are called to action to constantly demonstrate their status as true believers.

Walking a thin line between funny and tragic, the earnestness of the featured children makes this a moving film even in its seemingly absurd moments.



Full review

4th Rewatch...this movie gets better every time I watch it. One of the best adaptions of a Broadway musical to the screen, thanks primarily to director and screenwriter Bill Condon who does an extraordinary job of making a stage show look like a movie. This is also that rare musical where the songs actually flesh out characters and advance story. Many have issues with Jennifer Hudson's Oscar win for Best Supporting Actress, but her performance of the show's most famous song, "And I am telling you I'm not going" might possibly be the greatest musical number put onscreen and brings tears to my eyes every time I watch it. Eddie Murphy was robbed of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his dazzling Jimmy "Thunder" Early and Jamie Foxx's less is more performance as the greasy Curtis Taylor Jr is an acting class all by itself. Flawless production values are the icing on the cake h ere.

By Distributed by Fox Film Corporation. - Scan via DivxClasico.com., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=87259991

The Big Trail - (1930)

How much you like The Big Trail might depend on how cynical you're feeling on the day you watch it. I mean, it's typical "Out West" stuff, with a hero, raised by Indians and an expert at just about everything, who woos the girl, finds and kills the villains that murdered his friend, and sees a whole caravan of settlers to their paradise. That hero is played by a 23-year-old John Wayne (discovered by John Ford and recommended), who is devilishly handsome at that young age, but who'd struggle to get parts in A-pictures for nearly the rest of the 30s. I found the movie so very entertainingly active and exciting, with a comedic impulse that had me guffawing out loud - it spoke to me. For a film of it's age, it's quite impressive - and one John Ford threw Raoul Walsh's way, but the latter kept it to John Ford standards. Just a rugged, adventurous, no bulldust western of the highest order despite it's age. Be prepared for some real scenes of both people and horses nearly killed - apparently Walsh would not stop shooting for anything, and a few choice moments of real trouble are up there on the screen.

I can't end it there with this film though, because I thought it worth mentioning how much it wants to have it's cake and eat it too. These "settlers" are often at odds with Native Americans, but Wayne's Breck Coleman, raised by them, often has a powwow or two with the "good Indians" (part of a myth created around the time the Western and cinema itself was in it's infancy) and promising not to settle on their land. I don't know where it stands concerning the rest of colonization, but it seems a bit suspect that a film concerning settlers tries to be so fair to Native Americans. It kind of distracts us from what's happening here. Still, I don't know. It's just an early adventure - and very early "talkie" Western. We get everything in this - blizzards, floods, river crossings, Indian attacks, the passing of impassable terrain, hell-hot deserts, buffalo and the like. There's a colour, widescreen version - but I'm not sure if it exists anymore (it was supposedly breathtaking.) I really liked this - it was really 'alive', and you get the feel that this is being made on a scale never attempted before. I'll remember it for a long time.

8/10


By http://www.impawards.com/2022/survivor.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70470644

The Survivor - (2021)

Jewish Boxer Harry Haft (a nearly unrecognizable Ben Foster) slowly opens up to the press about his experiences in Auschwitz, where he was forced to fight fellow inmates in matches where the loser is shot. He tells this story in the hopes his pre-war love sees the articles and contacts him. When that doesn't work he sets up a suicide bout with champ Rocky Marciano. Slick direction from Barry Levinson can't hide the fact that we never really get close to getting inside Harry's mind. We know he's damaged, determined to find someone in an almost naïve, child-like belief they could start up again from where they left off, and it gets tough after that. He has that Neanderthal Jake LaMotta feel about him, and Ben Foster gives him way too much of a swagger in his concentration camp scenes. The story of Harry Haft is a true one - but Levinson's film is always slightly off-track and it feels way too hard to become emotionally involved with it's characters, all of whom aside from Harry are one-note - even his eventual wife Miriam (Vicky Krieps). It's fine looking, and using black and white for the Auschwitz scenes work - they're chilling, but not as chilling as Son of Saul or The Auschwitz Report (two recent Auschwitz films) are. This was decidedly average.

6/10


By http://www.impawards.com/2018/avenge..._war_ver2.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53151892

Avengers : Infinity War - (2018)

Rewatch - Incredible what Marvel did here. I never would have believed I'd be this enthusiastic about watching a Comic Book Superhero film, or like it as much as I do. This and Endgame will go down as modern classics, and we may never reach these heady heights again. We had a great build-up, but the payoff with those two films was kind of miraculous.

9/10


Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53151892

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat - (1999)

Okay - so this was a film. When I put it on, I thought I was going to get a straight-up recorded stage version, but this low budget, straight-to-video version was my strange introduction to the 1972 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Imagine my surprise when I notice the likes of Richard Attenborough and Joan Collins in the cast. Maybe I hallucinated this - it feels like maybe I did.

7/10

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Dragonwyck - A-

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The Quiet Girl -

This beautifully quaint drama from Ireland shows how a little love can go a long way. The titular girl is Cáit (Clinch), the middle child in a large dysfunctional family who has more than one reason to be the "quiet one." Not only is she bullied and misunderstood in school, but her home life is also not far removed from Harry Potter's at the Dursleys or Dawn's from Welcome to the Dollhouse. With another sibling on the way, her detached and alcoholic father (Patric) makes her stay at a cousins' dairy farm for the summer. Their treatment of Cáit could best be described as mixed at first, which is understandable when she discovers why.

A movie that could easily be a silent one - no pun intended - first-time director Bairéad lets the images do most of the talking in a way that values simplicity and elegance. A sudden cut to Cáit and her father at a dimly lit bar explains their relationship better than words ever could, for instance. There's another similar moment I won't say much more about other than it proves my opening statement, and the ending notwithstanding, it's likely to be the one you will recall the most. There's also the sweetly nostalgic vibe of the farm, whether it's how much the sunlight overwhelms - in a good way - each outdoor scene or the repeated shots of its landmarks like the well or the milking parlor. With each revisit to these places, you can almost hear the memories being etched into Cáit's mind. Clinch deserves praise for her work as Cáit, especially for how gradual she charts her long-time-coming growth. Cinematographer McCullough also deserves credit for keeping everything at Clinch's height so we feel like we're in her shoes. As for the ending, it not only pays off a memorable sequence, but also has just the right amount of ambiguity. It ends up being a movie bound to charm you with its optimism that it only takes a little love to make things better and that doing so is possible no matter what happened before.

Nothing needed to be said.

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Asteroid City (2023)

Written amd Directed by Wes Anderson
Starring: a dozen of movie stars...

It is always a feast watching a Wes Anderson film. The last of his works delivers as usual: great cinematography, superb production design, a nice collection of interesting characters... Only the screenplay this time limps a bit - starting great and then lose ideas from some point onward.

80/100

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"Population don't imitate art, population imitate bad television." W.A.
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The Last Run (1971)

Set a year after Halloween 4, Halloween 5 follows Loomis as he realizes once again that Myers is back, once again to try to murder his niece, Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) who is recovering from the trauma of the year before when she attacked her foster mother. That attack is now attributed to a sort of telepathic link with Michael.

One of the many mistakes of the final film is how it brushes off what happens in the end of the previous film, which would've been infinitely more interesting. Instead, the film just feels like a rehash of Part 4 as Jamie is put in danger again and again, while Michael Myers looks for her. The whole story feels more formulaic and pretty much like a checklist to put dumb teenagers in his path to be dispatched.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

1776 (1972)

Good historical movie that gives you a look at how the decision to declare independence was configured but as a musical the numbers are tiresome and mediocre so it was better to have left the songs out and make it a straight non-singer. Without the music my score would be higher. It's a good thing the songs take less than 1/4 to a 1/3 of the screen time IMO.

6.5

Psycho follows Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), a real estate secretary that decides to steal $40,000 from her boss perhaps to escape her own private trap, or is she stepping into a new one? While on the run, she stops at the remote Bates Motel, where she encounters owner Norman (Anthony Perkins), who happens to be in his own private trap himself.

I assume there's no need to tiptoe around the plot, but I guess it goes without saying that neither Marion's nor Norman's budged an inch. Instead, their traps end up clamping down on them harder. In the surface, Psycho might seem like a simple film, but in reality, it is an interesting mixture of character study and plot-driven thrills.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

Agree with your rating in spades. One of the great films. I think it's interesting that the first part of the film is a perfect noir; but from the shower scene on it's a horror film.

Yeah, that's one of the most interesting aspects of the film indeed. One that has lost its edge because of popular culture knowledge, but it's still cool to see it unfold and analyze the how/why of it all.

Lifted follows an alien who seems to be undergoing some sort of test to abduct a human farmer using the spaceship's beam and hundreds of buttons. However, abducting a human being is one thing; but doing it under the eye of a strict examiner is another.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

Bao follows a Chinese-Canadian woman who is baking a batch of bao for her husband, only to realize one of the buns has come to life. The woman then decides to raise the bun as we see "him" go through different phases of life, from a child to a teenager and eventually a young adult.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

1st Rewatch...I rewatched this entire miniseries in less than 36 hours. There's mad entertainment value here, but the main thing that keeps this miniseries sizzling is the ferocious performance by Oscar winner Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford.

By Illustration by Heinz Schulz-Neudamm. Distributed by UFA. - https://www.moma.org/collection/works/88251, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63350586

Metropolis - (1927)

I had the pleasure of watching the closest we've come to Fritz Lang's original cut of Metropolis last night - the 148-minute version. It's strange now, to think that the 1984 'rock soundtrack' 83-minute version tells us that most of the film has been "lost forever". Not until 2008 did we find most of what was gone. It's such a sprawling behemoth of a film it's hard to just say this and that about it. Set in the great city of Metropolis, where wealthy magnates and industrialists along with their families live in a utopia, the working masses that keep everything running, from underneath the city, toil in 10-hour shifts, driven to concentration camp levels of exhaustion and despair. Enter Maria (Brigitte Helm) - a revered figure underground who preaches the word that a great "mediator" will arrive to negotiate with those in power. "The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart" - this man turns out to be Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) - the son of the master of Metropolis, Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), who is conspiring with the mad scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to build a robot that can help him put down any notions of hope or deliverance for the city's workers.

It's a dystopian/utopian, somewhat Marxist vision that's to a certain degree simplistic - but that's what movies are. They simplify and use metaphors to both entertain and (sometimes - though rarely) educate. The concrete world created for the film is utterly breathtaking in every single scene. There's a lot of that German expressionism which inevitably leads to crazy designs that nonetheless work better than anything else would - the madness taking place in front of your eyes during Metropolis is dream-like operatic splendor on an epic, gargantuan scale, and has never been bettered. I mean, if Metropolis was made now, would it even come close to this? No. This movie fuses everything into it's DNA, and is biblical at the same time as being a frightening futuristic vision - that of life in this new era of concrete and glass cities stealing away our souls. Or at least the souls of the worker ants, trapped inside the cold, dark interiors and keeping the machinery which fuels all motion alive. Fiction often depends on the arrival of a messiah, as it does here, which along with it's length are the only two small quibbles I have with the film. It's a magnificent masterpiece, and required viewing.

9/10



I am Patrick Swayze - (2019)

Just a summary of what Patrick Swayze's family, friends and fellow actors had to say about him : He was a man with a burning desire to be the best at everything - and when being overcompetitive at football somewhat cruelled the dream of ballet (it's always the knees that can't take it), he slipped on over into acting. Swayze always wanted to be an actor first and foremost, and be the best. When he kept on getting sucked into the "world's sexiest" star status he'd express genuine dismay. I know it'd be nice, but it's understandable - those people are not taken seriously as actors, making it a sore spot. He approached surviving cancer the same way, but unfortunately it was too much even for him. He learned to drink to excess when his father died, and from time to time he was too reliant on booze to ease whatever pain he might be experiencing in the moment. I always felt a good vibe concerning Patrick Swayze, and thus although I didn't always like the movies he was in or the roles he got, I liked him regardless.

6/10