Rate The Last Movie You Saw

The only one I've seen is The Girl on the Train, which I found confusing. I will definitely be watching passages because I love Ben Whishaw.

Cure (1997)

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[ J ] - [ S ] - [ F ]

By Netflix -

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/photo/1, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74688944

The Killer - (2023)

Michael Fassbender plays a professional assassin in The Killer, and his narration (to us, or perhaps to himself) leaves no doubt that he's a textbook, dictionary definition of a complete nihilist - or is he really? When this perfect killing machine does what he's never done before - makes a terrible mistake - it brings upon him consequences he rages at in a typically cool manner. His response is atypical, but also ruthless, clinical and the product of real dedication to erasing human lives. There's something of everything in The Killer - thankfully, it's not an action movie (David Fincher isn't one to stoop), but it has probably the best action scene of the year in it. It also has killer Fassbender and Tilda Swinton performances which are ably backed up by a cast of memorable supporting characters. I hope you like The Smiths and Morrissey though - if you don't, then that's going to be a problem. The Killer is basically set to their music, considering our American Psycho-like contract killer only ever listens to them, and he uses music a lot as part of his mind-focusing exercises. I didn't mind at all - you might find a whole new appreciation for them. Trent Reznor irons out the rest with a really recognizable and memorable score. It's a smart movie, and the product of a director who still cares deeply for filmmaking - one to be considered on Top 10 lists at the end of the year. A couple of hours inside the mind of a person completely free from any societal contract - only taking contracts on people's lives.

8/10


By May be found at the following website: IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23639362

The Collector - (2009)

From The Killer to The Collector - I prefer a nihilist to a complete psycho, and here we have a real movie monster who only lives to invade people's homes and start torturing the entire family. As part of his "fun", he sets a ridiculous number of cruel and inventive traps through the place - so when his victims "escape", the run foul of various knives, wire, razors, bear traps, acid and spikes. What he wasn't counting on was thief Arkin (Josh Stewart) returning to rob the place - and while he's up to no good, he's the hero of the moment here. Or, he would be, if he didn't bumble so much - these guys would have been safer left in the monster's hands. There's not much going on here except for torture and maiming - so if you watch movies for anything other than watching guts fall out or fingers sliced off, you've got the wrong movie. Also - there's the torture of a poor cat, who gets eaten with acid and then chopped in half, and that bothered me a great deal. I get angry, because I don't wanna see a cute little animal suffer. Full of crazy this, and not boring - it just loses it's way here and there, and nothing at all about it makes sense.

5/10

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Good film this. Saim Sadiq's debut follows a Pakistani man (Haider) in a rather sullen, arranged marriage who is looked down upon by the patriarch of the family for being weak and unemployed and not giving the family any children, especially male children. Haider is played superbly by Ali Junejo, and the performances are all noteworthy - particularly Rasti Farooq, who plays Haider's wife Mumtaz.

Haider looks for work and ends up being part of an erotic dance troupe at the town's theatre. There he meets a woman who he becomes infatuated with. The dance scenes are a little rough around the edges and the film has a slight tone that leans towards the awards season. But other than that it’s a very good drama which has tension, romance, comedy and tragedy and is centrally a film about unfulfilled desires in a strict regime of conformity.

The themes of family and cultural oppression / sexual taboo are strong enough to see this film still banned in it’s own country, so kudos to the film-makers for sticking their necks on the line. It’s also produced by Riz Ahmed and Gemima Kahn. Haider’s plight is explored and in the end we are left wondering a little of his future but the emotion is enough to make the film a very watchable 2 hours of story-telling. The cinematography of urban Punjab is also really well shot.

Solid drama – 7.6/10

Its a continuation of the story of the anime TV show Goblin Slayer; it connects the 1st season and the 2nd season. However, it works as a standalone movie (also because it contains a summary of the events of the 1st season for viewers who didn't watch it).

Being set in a medieval fantasy world about a guy whose sister was killed by goblins and who decided to become a professional killer (or hunter?) of goblins, it is fairly straightforward stuff: it features lots of goblins slain. Goblins kills lots of people as well, but Goblins Slayer and his band eventually triumphs as they should (otherwise, there wouldn't be a second season ). The art and animation are not very good for a movie but would be above average for TV.

7/10

By IMDb, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49989861

Things to Come - (2016)

I have to admit - I'm going through a Mia Hansen-Løve phase, and loving her work. I saw Father of My Children late last year - and loved it. I saw One Fine Morning at the movies a few months ago - and loved it. Now it's Things to Come, based on Hansen-Løve's mother, a philosophy professor, and her split from her husband. Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) goes through a period of life where one disastrous loss after another nearly brings her down completely. She's forced to put her neurotic mother into a nursing home, where she declines and dies. Her divorce severs completely from places that hold a special significance for her. Her publishers drop her. Because her children are old enough to not need her support, she experiences "true freedom" for the first time in decades - but at a terrible cost. Can she reignite the passions of her youth? Can she reinvent herself as a self-reliant older woman? Can she push through the relentless grief that seems to have no end? Can she survive the guilt? Her mother's cat, Pandora, who she hates at first, will provide some strange solace (based on a real cat called Desdemona - the name was changed to "respect the cat's privacy".) There's a lot of pressure on Isabelle Huppert to deliver the goods performance-wise, and she is definitely the attraction here - when there's a focus that's so relentless, it's puts a lot of pressure on the actor. Needless to say, she won many awards and accolades. Such a probing, life-affirming, humanistic film - it charts an epic emotional journey.

8/10


By http://www.impawards.com/2022/bones_and_all_ver3.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71647420

Bones and All - (2022)

A romantic horror film - a mix of genres that can be a little like steak and ice cream. The concept though, of a certain breed of humanoid that needs to feast on human flesh, is interesting in this context. There are all kinds of metaphorical opportunities, and so much reflexive, subconscious thought when it comes to young love, adolescence, and the way these young monsters discover what they are. Along the way, Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) discover the various pitfalls and traps and wrong roads their lives could go down. There's the Sully (Mark Rylance) one - lonely and twisted, he's obviously become unbalanced and psychotic. There's Maren's real mother Janelle (Chloë Sevigny) - institutionalized and haunted. These two kids are already dealing with trauma - what can they give to each other to unburden the load? I liked the idea of this film a little more than it's execution - but I think that was more because it wasn't my thing than a bad movie. There's some real horror, and it's interesting - nice to hear a unique voice fiction-wise. Rylance is freakin' fantastic in this. There's also a good David Gordon Green cameo. Maybe I liked it more than I thought I did. Time and a rewatch might decide that.

6/10

Night of the Eagle (1962)

2 Very good reviews. Have you seen Hansen love's 'Bergman Island'? It's very good, perhaps the best of her films I've seen.

Finally a Halloween watch that satisfied me. A truly creepy, chilling and intelligent horror film from Kyoshi Kurosawa. Ghosts appear to haunt individuals in Tokyo, and as soon as they do, the victims normally succumb to nefarious occurrences. On the surface it’s a ghost story but looking deeper there are metaphors everywhere and it seems to be a film that reflects on loneliness, existential dread and whether death after life is just as lonely as life before death. It will take me a while to process this film. Repeated viewings may offer more clues but I enjoyed it quite a lot. Kurosawa is a very good film-maker.

Train was confusing to me both times I saw it. I kept getting the two blondes missed up as to who was whom. Which was what we were supposed to do I guess.

Ben Whishaw is so good in Passages as is the other male lead.

Have you seen Whishaw in This is Going to Hurt? Dark & hilarious: he plays a Labor & Delivery doctor.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Haven’t a clue why someone of the caliber of Jennifer Lawrence would star in quite an average movie though the storyline is amusing. And then she runs completely naked on a beach? We see Jennifer naked, but the scene itself is gratuitous.



Re-watch of an excellent movie from Romania.

I have not seen This is Going to Hurt, but I loved Whishaw in Mary Poppins Returns and he was robbed of a Best Supporting actor nomination last year for Women Talking.

I really liked Bones and All...here's a link to my review:

https://www.movieforums.com/reviews/...s_and_all.html

From the sublime...



OCTOBER 24, 2023

In a word... Wow!!

But hey, you know me! Why limit myself to one word when a thousand will do? Am I right?

It's time-consuming enough for me to post these analyses, so I'll spare you a plot summary. After all, that's what Wikipedia is for. Instead, I'll just give you some of my emotional impressions.

First off, Killers of the Flower Moon has now vaulted ahead of Oppenheimer to become my current favorite movie of 2023 (so far). And even if it hadn't, I think it would definitely have been a worthwhile viewing experience, because a worthwhile cinematic experience is what Martin Scorsese always delivers consistently, whether or not one thinks his latest effort (whatever it may be) ranks among his all-time greatest. I fully admit, I myself had mixed feelings about The Irishman, but I can say quite unequivocally that this time around, Marty's knocked it out of the park.

It must be said that the trailer gave absolutely no impression whatsoever of the kind of film this would be. To watch the trailer, one would think that this was going to be some kind of straightforward period thriller about a power struggle between affluent Native Americans and the jealous white man, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a man in an interracial relationship who gets caught in the middle and Robert De Niro playing a man (possibly a relative) with some sort of ambiguous involvement in the proceedings. Granted, that isn't completely the wrong impression. And the upside of the flawed impression created by the trailer is that it doesn't really give away much in the way of details. Given how most movie trailers these days seem almost afraid to not spell everything out, I consider this a blessing. Because one thing the trailer does not give away is just what a chilling portrayal of creeping moral paralysis in the face of human evil Killers of the Flower Moon is.

Granted, that doesn't make the film sound exactly attractive. But Scorsese's achievement here is extremely powerful. And that's something which informed viewers should not find unexpected. Because from Mean Streets onwards, Scorsese's recurring thematic preoccupation is with how people of good intentions can get caught up in situations involving violence, criminal activity and/or the destruction of human life, at some point finding themselves completely in over their heads and not knowing what to do. And what their ultimate decisions are regarding the situation is the key to either their damnation or redemption. As most people know, Scorsese was raised with a Roman Catholic background, in a tough urban environment (New York's Little Italy) in which the applicability of spiritual lessons was often thrown into doubt, and such moral preoccupations are absolutely the key to the man's artistry.

At a certain point in the movie, the character of Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) becomes complicit in what are acts of systematic murder and theft of members of the Osage tribe, many of the victims female and married to white men. Worse still, one intended victim is his Osage wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone). Now, how should he respond to the situation? In the face of such an obvious atrocity, we'd all like to think that we'd step up and tell someone in a position of authority that such crimes are happening. But that is not what happens with DiCaprio's character... at least not until it's too late. And sadly, what happens in the film is how things happen far too often throughout history, because people see the evidence before them and fail to act. One thinks of the Holocaust and World War II. The character of William King Hale, played by Robert De Niro, whom we at first get the impression of being a friendly neighbor and ally of the Osage tribe, attempts to console his nephew Ernest about what he claims is the inevitability of the Osage's passing from the Earth. "You know, these people are a wonderful, delightful people with a rich culture, but they're becoming ill and sickly and they're on their way out, so you know we might as well inherit all this oil and wealth, because it should rightly be ours anyway!" (Granted, I'm paraphrasing and that's not the exact line, but that's the nature of Hale's argument.) And amazingly enough, as complicit and morally paralyzed as DiCaprio's character is rendered by his uncle's blandishments throughout much of the movie, the viewer's response to his failures is not hatred, but pity. Because deep down, we don't know how we'd respond in the face of absolute evil, particularly when it creeps up on us and insinuates itself into our very way of life. And that is the key to the movie's chilling effect.

I'm also very much reminded of a movie like Liliana Cavani's controversial The Night Porter (1974), in which a cabal of former Nazis (whom Dirk Bogarde's character initially belongs to) holds pseudo-therapeutic mock trials for their members and plots to have witnesses to their past crimes and atrocities "filed away" (one of which includes the character portrayed by Charlotte Rampling). This sort of euphemism also turns up in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). When Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) comes face to face with the shade of former Overlook Hotel caretaker Delbert Grady (Philip Stone) and confronts him about having killed his own wife and daughter, Grady replies that he did not remember such a thing having happened, but then tells Jack, "My girls never cared for the Overlook, sir. One of them actually stole a pack of matches and tried to burn it down. But I... corrected them, sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I... corrected her." Lest we forget, Scorsese was a great admirer of Kubrick. He was also a friend of Cavani's, and they both had a mutual admiration for each other's work. And there is very much a thematic overlap between the work of all three directors, particularly in how they deal with the issue of human Evil (with a capital E).

OK, OK, I know I'm making this movie sound like extremely heavy going. And yeah, it's hardly escapist popcorn fare. But trust me, Killers of the Flower Moon is an absolute must-see. You will not regret it one iota, and you will have plenty of food for thought afterwards.

...to the ridiculous!



OCTOBER 31, 2023

Once again, see Wikipedia for the plot summary.

Well, this is a bit of a hot mess! And believe me, I really did want to like this one more than I did. Granted, I did think that the whole notion of ghost children possessing animatronic pizza-parlor characters was a trifle silly. Amazingly enough, I had no idea when I first saw the trailer that this was based on a video game franchise. Mind you, as I explained in my review of Gran Turismo a couple of pages back, I'm a 50-year-old geezer who doesn't really keep up with that side of popular culture. But I certainly don't mind a bit of occasional silliness in my movie-going experience, and after the rather heavy feast that was the previous week's Killers of the Flower Moon, I was sort of looking forward to dumbing down just a little and watching a fun kiddie horror flick.

Problem is, this movie suffers from a goofy story, a cataclysmic identity crisis, and has no idea what kind of movie it wants to be. Yes, there is something interesting about the protagonist Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson)'s dilemma, even somewhat moving. Being a traumatized witness to his own little brother's abduction as a boy, being the sole guardian of his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), being an abuser of sleeping pills and having trouble holding down a steady job as a security guard, it's safe to say that the guy's got issues! And for a while, his plight is admittedly involving and generates audience sympathy. But this is ultimately let down by the fact that the seriousness of its characters' issues, like child abduction, badly clashes and conflicts with the silliness of the premise. And the sub-Scooby Doo revelation of the story's main villain should come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone familiar with Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, which clearly states "A character who is introduced with no clear role will turn out to be important to the plot." Not to mention, it feels more or less ripped straight from Who Framed Roger Rabbit: "Remember me, Eddie? When I killed your brother, I talked... just... like... THIS!!!"

Oh well, you can't win them all! One masterpiece in a month at the local theater is certainly more than enough to tide me over.

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"It's what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid." - Clint Eastwood as The Stranger, High Plains Drifter (1973)

SF = Z


[Snooze Factor Ratings]:
Z = didn't nod off at all
Zz = nearly nodded off but managed to stay alert
Zzz = nodded off and missed some of the film but went back to watch what I missed
Zzzz = nodded off and missed some of the film but went back to watch what I missed but nodded off again at the same point and therefore needed to go back a number of times before I got through it...
Zzzzz = nodded off and missed some or the rest of the film but was not interested enough to go back over it

I haven't seen that yet, but I'm looking forward to it. It's one of hers that I've seen mentioned quite a lot with glowing praise.