Rate The Last Movie You Saw

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a0/Lawless_film_poster.jpg
By The cover art can or could be obtained from Hitfix., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35887190

Lawless - (2012)

Some particularly savage violence, Guy Pearce gnawing on the scenery like a rabid rat, and alcohol fumes make up John Hillcoat's Lawless. Hillcoat was an up-and-comer who announced himself with a dusty, feral and fierce opus - Australian film The Proposition - teaming up with Nick Cave. His transition to the big stage came with The Road - that bleak film with Viggo Mortensen and cannibals in it. I never knew he'd made this film (another collaboration with Cave) - based on Matt Bondurant's historical novel "The Wettest County in the World", it treats us to characters that are given the label "invincible" - and I didn't really believe that until I saw them get their throats cut, and shot around 10 times, and yet still survive. The characters in this survive unbelievable things. Anyway, moonshine, hillbillies, the law - you get the scene. Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain and Jason Clarke, no to mention the aforementioned Pearce, give this top heavy movie a bulging cast of big names. Everyone has their own uniqueness - and I thought this was pretty good, without having a scope that would make it great.

7/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/In_%26_Out_%28film%29_poster.jpg
By POV - Impawards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18565154

In & Out - (1997)

I don't know why it's taken me this long to see this Frank Oz comedy - he's pretty dependable, and this particular one has the advantage of having Bob Newhart in it. In case you haven't seen me mention it here or there - I love Bob Newhart, and he indeed makes the most of his scenes in this. In fact, he brings the movie home with his Principle Halliwell presiding over a graduation ceremony that goes awry. Anyway, for 1997 this seems like a brave choice for actors like Kevin Kline and Tom Selleck, to be in a film exploring the topic of homosexuality. In fact, I'm surprised that a mainstream movie in this era would go for it like this does. That attitude helps to give everything in this a good feeling, and from there laughter flows easily. Apparently this was inspired by a speech Tom Hanks gave at the 1994 Oscars (an Oscars speech sets the plot in motion) - so during the 90s things were happening. This succeeds in most of what it sets out to do.

7/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/84/Theycallmemistertibbs1970movieposter.jpg
By May be found at the following website: Movie Goods, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20022118

They Call Me Mister Tibbs! - (1970)

What do you get when you take In the Heat of the Night and remove the racial issues and predicament for main character Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier)? You get a serviceable but uninspiring detective caper involving Tibbs and what's probably too few suspects - Martin Landau is the only other big name appearing, playing Reverend Logan Sharpe. There's a nice chase scene, but this sequel/spin-off seems so small in the shoes of the original giant.

5/10

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMDBmYTZjNjUtN2M1MS00MTQ2LTk2ODgtNzc2M2QyZGE5NTVjXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzAwMjU2MTY@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg


4

[GulfportDoc]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMDBmYTZjNjUtN2M1MS00MTQ2LTk2ODgtNzc2M2QyZGE5NTVjXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzAwMjU2MTY@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg


rating_4
Gideon, you should link to your review. It's a good one.

[Allaby]

Spy Kids: Armageddon (2023) Watched on Netflix. This feels completely unnecessary and redundant, but it does have a few charms that save it. Although the screenplay is mediocre, there are a couple cute, fun moments that work. Zachary Levi's performance fell flat for me, but the other actors manage to do a little more with the roles. Gina Rodriguez does a decent job and is likeable here and Billy Magnussen is somewhat interesting as the villain. The kids do a fine job, especially Everly Carganilla. The CGI and action are mediocre at best, but Spy Kids: Armageddon has just enough positives to make up for its flaws. 3

[Gideon58]

I always write the review first then post here and I guess I j ust assumed people knew that. And thank you , it wasn't an easy film to review.

[Takoma11]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/In_%26_Out_%28film%29_poster.jpg
By POV - Impawards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18565154

In & Out - (1997)

I don't know why it's taken me this long to see this Frank Oz comedy - he's pretty dependable, and this particular one has the advantage of having Bob Newhart in it. In case you haven't seen me mention it here or there - I love Bob Newhart, and he indeed makes the most of his scenes in this. In fact, he brings the movie home with his Principle Halliwell presiding over a graduation ceremony that goes awry. Anyway, for 1997 this seems like a brave choice for actors like Kevin Kline and Tom Selleck, to be in a film exploring the topic of homosexuality. In fact, I'm surprised that a mainstream movie in this era would go for it like this does. That attitude helps to give everything in this a good feeling, and from there laughter flows easily. Apparently this was inspired by a speech Tom Hanks gave at the 1994 Oscars (an Oscars speech sets the plot in motion) - so during the 90s things were happening. This succeeds in most of what it sets out to do.

7/10

I think that, more than anything, In & Out serves as a sort of fascinating time-capsule about how people perceived both gay people and homophobia in the late 90s. It's a relatively gentle film, and I think that the conversations between the students--and particularly the subplot about the kid he's really mentored who suddenly wants to distance himself--are the best elements in terms of the actual story.


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/84/Theycallmemistertibbs1970movieposter.jpg
By May be found at the following website: Movie Goods, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20022118

They Call Me Mister Tibbs! - (1970)

What do you get when you take In the Heat of the Night and remove the racial issues and predicament for main character Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier)? You get a serviceable but uninspiring detective caper involving Tibbs and what's probably too few suspects - Martin Landau is the only other big name appearing, playing Reverend Logan Sharpe. There's a nice chase scene, but this sequel/spin-off seems so small in the shoes of the original giant.

5/10

When I was like 15 or 16 we watched this as a family movie night. Such a disappointment.

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f0/The_outlaw_josey_wales.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8990847

The Outlaw Josey Wales - (1976)

He's part of a cinematic tradition - the character whose family is brutally murdered, providing the means to be free and the motivation for vengeance. Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood) loses everything to a band of marauding Union militants during the Civil War, and upon the war's close becomes a fugitive simply by dint of surviving what would have been an execution. What I like best about The Outlaw Josey Wales though, is the way this protagonist accrues friends and allies throughout the film - even one, Cherokee Lone Watie (Chief Dan George), who at first tries to capture him for the $5000 bounty on his head. There's nothing Wales finds more compelling than meting out a little justice to all the predators and exploiters that scurry through post-war America - and adding to his new peculiar family. That family dynamic and togetherness has a wonderful feel to it - and is a perfect balance to the violence in the movie. It gives this western a warm feeling - one that not many westerns have. The best battle in the movie is the one that never happens - Ten Bears (Will Sampson) and Josey Wales work out their differences through words instead. The movie is very well shot, and has an Oscar-nominated Jerry Fielding score - it cemented Eastwood's place as one of the filmmakers and stars of the 1970s.

8/10

[Fabulous]

Tarantula (1955)

2.5

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/dzBpvnxFTqfCZ0xXK7osZztySbT.jpg

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61gbfCBiFcL._UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg


3

[Act III]

According to this Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/may/19/an-irresistible-mix-of-art-and-genitals-caligula-finally-comes-to-cannes), there were 96 hours of raw footage. I'm pretty keen, and I'm keeping an eye out for any kind of release, either streaming or in arthouse cinemas. I'd be pretty damned disappointed if we never get to see it.

Too much work would go into a full remake for them to allow it to be hidden away forever.

[xSookieStackhouse]

3.5 its an alright horror movie
https://dvvy6louqcr7j.cloudfront.net/vista/HO00014453/heroPoster/It-Lives-Inside.png

[Allaby]

Le jeu avec le feu/Playing With Fire (1975) Watched on blu ray. Stylish and filled with beautiful women, the film looks great. Storywise, not everything works. It's not always coherent and is somewhat muddled, but I still enjoyed watching this. 3.5

[Corax]

rating_3_5 its an alright horror movie
https://dvvy6louqcr7j.cloudfront.net/vista/HO00014453/heroPoster/It-Lives-Inside.png


LOL, "every bit as terrifying as you could hope for" really sounds like damning with faint praise (e.g., "Danny DeVito ran the marathon as fast as you could hope he would").

[Fabulous]

The Black Scorpion (1957)

2

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/ro7cCcme8JQs5vHQVu2jk86XnVw.jpg

[Thief]

TREASURE ISLAND
(1950, Haskin)

https://i.imgur.com/Mexgxsl.jpg


"Aye, Jim, you're the spitting image of me when I was your age. Head full of pirates. But he'll find, same as I, that the sea be mostly hard work; and the biggest satisfaction a man gets is doing his duty."



Based on the novel of Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island follows the adventures of young Jim Hawkins (Bobby Driscoll) as he embarks on a sea journey for a lost pirate treasure. What he doesn't know is that most of the crew accompanying him are pirates led by the treacherous Long John Silver (Robert Newton). It is him who says the above quote when he fears that young Hawkins might be onto him.

The relationship between Hawkins and Long John Silver is interesting, and Newton is clearly having a lot of fun with the role. Driscoll is also pretty good, but I feel like there needed to be a bit more to make me believe the kid would go to the lengths he goes to help the pirate. On the other hand, I think the film needed stronger characters on the "good side" to help balance things out. Squire Trelawney is a bit of a fool and Dr. Livesey is too bland.

Grade: 3


Full review on my Movie Loot (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2413425#post2413425)

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51+WeyQp-bL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg


1st Rewatch...One of Woody's most raw and uncompromising works. This look at two different marriages travelling in two different directions (or are they?) that's mounted in the form of a documentary is one of Woody's most stomach-turning films, reminding me a lot of his earlier masterpiece Interiors. Judy Davis' explosive, Oscar-nominated performance still galvanizes the screen. That scene where she interrupts a blind date to make two phone calls to yell at her ex-husband (Sydney Pollack) never gets old and neither does that scene where Pollack is leaving a party with his new girlfriend (Lysette Anthony). As for Woody and Mia, this is the last film they made together and the tension between them is apparent throughout, which was perfect for this voyeuristic drama that makes the viewer feel so intrusive. 4.5

[PHOENIX74]

https://i.postimg.cc/QMHTQpXy/teacher.jpg
By May be found at the following website: IMDB, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72622873

Teacher - (2019)

I have to admit to finding films where kids are bullied very stressful - there's nothing worse than dumb kids who decide might is right and act like thugs, and there's nothing worse than seeing good kids fold to them under threat of physical harm. Nowadays, bullies have a whole new avenue to explore with the internet. That's why I found Teacher such a tense experience. English teacher James Lewis (David Dastmalchian) was bullied himself as a kid, and when two of his brightest students are being threatened and tormented by another student - one protected by his rich parents - he goes to extreme lengths to try and solve the issue. Oh man, there are attempted suicides, horrific beatings and all kinds of stuff I found hard to watch, and Dastmalchian's character lacks the fortitude to handle it in a way you could be confident about. You just know something really bad is going to happen. David Dastmalchian has had a weird career trajectory. I first noticed him in The Dark Knight, where he really stood out with a very small role as one of the Joker's henchmen/victims. After that role he found a lot of work - he's been in Blade Runner 2049, Ant-Man and Prisoners while more recently it's Oppenheimer, Dune and Ant-Man and the Wasp : Quantumania. My favourite role of his, though, was when he played Polka-Dot Man in The Suicide Squad - that was a riot. I was kind of expecting Class of 1984 stuff here, but we go down an unexpected route, and if I were to tell you which film it reminded me of in the end, I'd be spoiling it.

7/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/The_Keeper_of_Lost_Causes.png
By The poster art can or could be obtained from the distributor., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53004803

The Keeper of Lost Causes - (2013)

The Millennium series by Stieg Larsson and adaptation of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo seems to have set off a spate of crime solving detective films and TV series in Scandinavia. This one, The Keeper of Lost Causes feels like a pilot to a TV series - but in all actuality it's the first in a series called "Department Q" written by Jussi Adler-Olsen, three of which have been adapted as feature films. This first one follows Carl Mørck (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) who is demoted to looking at cold cases after he gets two fellow detectives shot by jumping the gun and going inside a suspect's house before backup arrives. He's partnered with Assad (Fares Fares) a rookie with the disadvantage of being of Arab in an all-white department. When Carl picks up some early clues about an apparent "suicide" in one of the first cold cases he reopens, he goes down a rabbit hole - discovering clues that lead him closer and closer to some shocking conclusions. In the meantime, his bosses order him to close the case - without knowing, as we do, that the victim is still alive and being held captive. Solid crime stuff from Denmark.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ea/Takingchance.jpg
By Ross Katz - Rotten Tomatoes], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36337064

Taking Chance - (2009)

Taking Chance has the unfortunate aura of propaganda, but I think it was made far too late to be any attempt to smooth over America's involvement in Iraq. It's just a straightforward ode to the Americans who have given their life in service to the nation. Be warned though, I've rarely come across a film as heavy-handed about it. Even Joseph Goebbels would look at Taking Chance and say "That's a bit much isn't it?" Lt Col Mike Strobl (Kevin Bacon) stuck behind a desk in the U.S. as the Iraqi insurgency takes a toll on his comrades over there, volunteers to escort a fallen one home - and we follow the process, from being put in an ice-filled metal box and sent to the U.S, being cleaned and dressed, and brought to his family with care. Strobl is struck by the dignity and respect afforded him and his comrade - from airline baggage people taking care not to treat the coffin like baggage to the people he meets who are extra deferential to him. Although he never met this man his experience is a profound, life-changing one. Cue an endless series of slow, sad salutes.

6/10

[xSookieStackhouse]

LOL, "every bit as terrifying as you could hope for" really sounds like damning with faint praise (e.g., "Danny DeVito ran the marathon as fast as you could hope he would").
??????? huh :confused:

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTYyOTc1ODc4Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTU3OTQyMg@@._V1_.jpg

1st Rewatch...I love Barbra and I really wanted to love her first vanity project as producer, director, co-screenwriter, and star, but I still have the same problems with it that I had the first time I watched. The whole story seems to hinge on the gimmick that everyone in this movie who encounters Anshel believes he is a man, but there is not a single second during the running time where Barbra makes me believe Anshel is a man. Julie Andrews was more convincing as a man in Victor/Victoria. I was also troubled by the fact that Barbra produced a musical where she didn't allow anyone else to sing, including her musically gifted leading man, Mandy Patinkin. No argument that she produced mad chemistry with Patinkin, but hearing them sing together would have been magical. Also the screenplay's constant reminders that woman are brainless get really tiresome, but Barbra's real fans will find entertainment value here, though it's not the movie it should have been. 3

[Nausicaä]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e5/Knock_at_the_cabin.jpg/220px-Knock_at_the_cabin.jpg

3

SF = Zzz


[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

[cricket]

Bandit Queen (1994)

3.5+

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjEwMDQxOTUtMjMxZi00MGY4LWFkMDgtMmVhNjJlMmY2MjdhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMDc2NTEzMw@@._V1_.jpg

This controversial Indian film is based on the true story of Phoolan Devi, and I knew nothing about it prior. She ended up being assassinated in 2001. I knew a little bit about arranged marriages and the caste system through a close female friend who left India in 2007, escaping an arranged marriage. She is now an American citizen. This particular story and film is pretty brutal, with a lot of rape and other violence. It's powerful and disturbing without being exploitive. I'm sure I'd like it more if it were exploitative but that's just me. On YouTube with subtitles.

[Fabulous]

You Were Never Lovelier (1942)

2.5

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/e8j21r0gVtJhUPwmP5VMaTTdKPw.jpg

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTkxMTI1MzM3N15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDkzNzcwMw@@._V1_.jpg



5th Rewatch...This 1987 comic re-working of Cyrano de Bergerac has it's problems. The Chris McConnell character is too stupid to live and why was he unable to talk to Roxanne (Daryl Hannah) but had no problem talking to the cute bartender? And Roxanne Is a shallow snotty bitch who took way too long to figure out she couldn't have it all (and she couldn't tell the difference between CD's voice and Chris'?). And the comic relief involving CD's volunteer fire department really weighed the film down, but it's purpose becomes clear later, but everything wrong with this movie becomes irrelevant thanks to the richly layered and often beautifully understated performance by Steve Martin as CD Bales, the intelligent and engaging fire chief of Nelson, Colorado, a performance so beautifully realized it should have earned Martin his first Oscar nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor, an honor that has still alluded him to this date. Martin's tour de force performance is an acting class by itself, whether it's his verbal lambasting of the bully in that bar or that lovely balcony scene where he seduces Roxanne with his words, everything Martin does works here and makes this movie worth watching and rewatching and rewatching again. 3.5

[WHITBISSELL!]

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0a/41/1f/0a411fb4f06eb5e43705cb5c3001e646.gif

Night of the Blood Beast - 1958 scfi schlock. Shot on a budget of around 68,000 dollars and does look threadbare. Or maybe it was the crappy print I found on youtube. I watched this about a week ago and I'm having trouble remembering all but the most basic of plot elements. An astronaut dies while in space, or maybe he dies when his rocket ship crashes. Anyway his team recovers his body and brings it back to their tracking station. While there his body reanimates. Turns out the he picked up some alien hitchhikers that want to use his body as an incubator. It's not remotely as interesting as it sounds and this was an egregiously low energy movie.

25/100

https://i.gifer.com/JU7M.gif

Invasion of the Saucer Men - From 1957 and just as dull and poorly made but in a different way. Aliens land near a small town's lovers lane and it falls to a group of teenagers to battle them. The alien makeup is better than Night of the Blood Beast (which was just laughable) but the actual reveal is so sporadic and poorly shot that it's mostly confusing. It really leans heavily on the "this is a wacky comedy" bit without really earning any honest laughs. Not much in the way of tension either if you don't count the odd disembodied hand crawling around. My experience might have had a great deal to do with the terrible copies I watched. At any rate you probably shouldn't bother wasting your time on either of these dogs.

35/100

[Gideon58]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/pt/f/f4/Boogienightsposter.jpg



3rd Rewatch...Paul Thomas Anderson has never really topped his 1997 masterpiece, robbed of a Best Picture nomination. This look at the decay of the porn industry and what happens when some of the industry's biggest movers and shakers get chewed up and spit out is a riveting cinematic journey no matter how many times I watch it. The late Bu rt Reynolds and Julianne Moore were both robbed of the Supporting Actor Oscars for their work here. Anderson's screenplay creates a dangerous and inviting canvas filled with characters we genuinely care about as the final credits roll. I read Leonardo DiCaprio was originally offered the role of Dirk Diggler, but had already committed to something called Titanic allowing Mark Wahlberg to turn in a star-making performance. And I have to say that the characters played by William H Macy, the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Don Cheadle might be the most heartbreaking movie characters I have ever seen. 4

[Thief]

SOUTH OF THE BORDER
(2009, Stone)

https://i.imgur.com/0VYkBvP.png


"There is a pendulum to history, these things change."



South of the Border follows director Oliver Stone as he travels through different countries in Latin America, investigating the shift to the left within many countries of the region towards the beginning of the 21st Century; the so-called "pink tide". In the process, Stone meets with leaders like Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Raúl Castro (Cuba), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Lula da Silva (Brazil), and several others.

It is not a secret that Stone has a certain agenda. He doesn't hide it, so it's there for everybody to see. He has been a hard-core critic of U.S. government, the establishment, and a firm detractor of President Bush, among other things. Take from that what you may as you watch this documentary, but he still does a great job of presenting facts in a neat package. The rise of leftist governments was indeed surprising and I suppose worrisome to the U.S. establishment.

Grade: 3.5


Full review on my Movie Loot (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2413618#post2413618)

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c0/Bunny-bull-poster.jpg
By http://www.lovefilm.com/features/detail.html?editorial_id=17590, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25800196

Bunny and the Bull - (2009)

This was Paul King's (best known at the time for directing The Mighty Boosh) directorial debut feature-wise - it kind of scampered through unnoticed, and it deserves some attention. Although it features Richard Ayoade, Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt (all in very funny roles) it's two leads are played by Simon Farnaby (as the titular Bunny) and Edward Hogg (as Stephen Turnbull). Stephen is a shut-in recluse, not having left his house in a year, and as he goes about his day we flash back to a fateful holiday he took with best friend Bunny, where the two met Eloisa (Verónica Echegui) - forming a love triangle as the three traveled to Spain so Bunny could fight a bull. It's a strange remembrance, where flashbacks feature scenes made up of cardboard/newspaper scenery, and very fake-on-purpose scenic and prop design. It's the way Stephen remembers things. It'll depend very much on who views it, but the various characters who flow through the story tipped the balance for me, making for a delightfully funny and very different movie. If you like things like The Mighty Boosh or anything the likes of Richard Ayoade would be in (King was involved with co-directing Garth Marenghi's Darkplace back in the day) - then you might want to give it a shot. It's a charming little fun-filled snowglobe of a movie.

7/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7e/TaxiPoster.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24751162

Taxi - (1998)

Daniel Morales (Samy Naceri) is an ace driver who has finally been granted a taxi license - using his souped-up car to get clients to where they want to go fast. Émilien (Frédéric Diefenthal) is a cop who simply can't pass his driving test. When Émilien uses Daniel's taxi, without telling him he's a cop, he ends up busting the driver for traveling at 175k/h - around 3 times the speed limit. To square things up, Daniel helps him via his driving skills to try and bring down a gang of German bank robbers terrorizing France. This was a pretty mainstream buddy-type comedy - fast-paced, with pretty decent comedic performances. So popular in France that it was followed by 4 sequels. Marion Cotillard features in it - a very early role for her. I watched the dubbed version without knowing I had the option to watch it in French with subtitles, and it would have been better the other way - but I still thought it was okay.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d2/Hannibalrisingposter.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7862999

Hannibal Rising - (2007)

Dark and dour, Hannibal Rising tells the story of Hannibal Lector's early life, from his Lithuanian childhood to his trip through the Iron Curtain and quest for vengeance after a group of militia during World War II kill and eat his little sister. Relentlessly sour, the audience has nothing and nobody to cheer for as the malignant sociopath chops up people who insult him and visits a terrible revenge on his enemies. It's simply one rotten thing after another, and doesn't give much insight into anything other than the fact that Hannibal's wartime experiences damaged him and turned him into a monster - the film keeps playing that one note, over and over, and in the end it just felt like an relatively empty experience.

4/10

[Thief]

HALLOWEEN
RESURRECTION
(2002, Rosenthal)

https://i.imgur.com/jc2WrL5.png


"It's all fake. We've been set up. You knew you didn't have a show anyone would watch... so you set us all up at our fu¢king expense, huh?"



The rest of the film has nothing to do with Laurie. Instead, it follows the crew of a reality show called Dangertainment, as they prepare to film a group of young volunteers that will spend the night at the abandoned Myers house. What they don't know is that, after Michael's encounter with Laurie, he has returned home and he doesn't like visitors.

Putting aside how ludicrous the logistics of this alleged show are, the film has very little to offer. Characters are paper-thin, the film doesn't really bring anything new to the franchise lore or themes, but rather just unleashes Michael Myers in a house full of meat bags for him to slice through. Oh, and did I mention that Busta Rhymes "kung fu fights" Michael Myers in the end?

Grade: 1


Full review on my Movie Loot (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2413631#post2413631)

[John W Constantine]

Lookin pretty crispy there, Mikey.

[Thief]

Lookin pretty crispy there, Mikey.

Oh, Busta sure got the chance to bust some killer one-liners.

"Trick or treat, motherf**ker!"

[Gideon58]

https://tggeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/b70-17513.jpg

6th Rewatch- The only time four time Tony Award winner Gwen Verdon was allowed to recreate a role she created on Broadway for the big screen was in this exuberant 1958 film version of a musical about a middle-aged baseball fan named Joe Boyd (Robert Schafer) who agrees to sell his soul to the Devil aka Mr. Applegate (Ray Walston, also reprising his Broadway role) in exchange for becoming a young baseball sensation named Joe Hardy (Tab Hunter). Hardy gets homesick and tries to return to his wife and Applegate forces a 172 year old witch named Lola (Verdon) to keep Joe happy as Joe Hardy. That Adler/Ross score can't be beat "Whatever Lola Wants", "Heart", "Shoeless Joe From Hannibal Mo", and "Two Lost Souls", not to mention the film's highlight "Who's Got the Pain" , a dance duet by Verdon and the film's choreographer and Verdon's husband, Bob Fosse, the only time they danced together onscreen, that's worth the price of admission all by itself. 3.5

[Torgo]

The Grey Fox - 4

Some people drink while others smoke. Bill Miner robbed stagecoaches. He's the subject of this very good western from Canada, which dramatizes the time he spent in the country. After serving a 33-year prison sentence, Miner reunites with his sister, who lands him a more respectable job of gathering oysters. He quickly realizes he's not cut out for it or for respectable work in general, and since stagecoaches no longer exist, he feels purposeless. Everything changes once he attends a screening of The Great Train Robbery.

This movie works just as well as a classic western as it does a drug addiction tale, with the drug of course being staging robberies since the best drama comes from whether or not Miner will fall off the wagon, no pun intended. The robbery scenes appropriately elicit disappointment more than excitement as a result although they are no less compelling to watch. Farnsworth is excellent for how convincing he is that robbing is all Miner wants to do or perhaps can do. That also goes for how he presents his difficulty in adapting to his very different time and surroundings. Just as memorable is Jackie Burroughs as Kate, a photographer with whom Bill shares a romance. This sequence is one of the sincerest and mature of a couple falling in love I've seen in a long time and provides the most hope that Bill can reform. Sincere and mature are how I would describe the entire production, really, especially since it never relies on sensationalism. While I like to see a good robbery or shootout as much as the next person, I appreciate that the movie respects my intelligence enough to know that the entertainment in Miner's journey first and foremost. Thankfully, it still makes room to highlight the natural beauty of the British Columbian countryside courtesy of Frank Tidy's cinematography along the way. It ends up being a very compelling and substantive portrait of a criminal and of someone who cannot stop doing a certain thing despite having all the reasons in the world not to. Also, as his relationship with Kate and his adorable interaction with a young man indicates, it ably demonstrates that such people cannot easily be pigeonholed as good or evil.

[Stirchley]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/pt/f/f4/Boogienightsposter.jpg



3rd Rewatch...Paul Thomas Anderson has never really topped his 1997 masterpiece, robbed of a Best Picture nomination. This look at the decay of the porn industry and what happens when some of the industry's biggest movers and shakers get chewed up and spit out is a riveting cinematic journey no matter how many times I watch it. The late Bu rt Reynolds and Julianne Moore were both robbed of the Supporting Actor Oscars for their work here. Anderson's screenplay creates a dangerous and inviting canvas filled with characters we genuinely care about as the final credits roll. I read Leonardo DiCaprio was originally offered the role of Dirk Diggler, but had already committed to something called Titanic allowing Mark Wahlberg to turn in a star-making performance. And I have to say that the characters played by William H Macy, the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Don Cheadle might be the most heartbreaking movie characters I have ever seen. 4

Good movie for sure.

[Thief]

HALLOWEEN
(2018, Green)

https://i.imgur.com/6T7189y.jpg


"He's waited for this night... he's waited for me... I've waited for him..."



This new Halloween is a direct sequel to the original, ignoring all of the other sequels and most importantly, ignoring the twist that had Laurie and Michael as siblings; something that has pretty much shaped the franchise since Halloween II. But, like a character says in this film, "is scary to have a bunch of your friends get butchered by some random crazy person". Allowing Michael to be a random killer on the loose is scarier than tying his actions to a specific family or place.

Of course, Michael was institutionalized in a facility, but Laurie was as captive as him because of the trauma. That duality is evident in the script, but also in the direction. Green does a lot of interesting things to portray that duality, by visually referencing the events of the original, especially in the last act. The character of Karen is also interesting as we see her also reckoning with her traumas, directly caused by her mother's traumas, so it's an interesting illustration of the effects of traumatic experiences.

Grade: 4


Full review on my Movie Loot (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2413701#post2413701)

[Stirchley]

95221

A classic. Nothing needs to be said.

95222

Didn’t know that “X” should be seen first. Think I bailed out of it, but will re-visit.

This one is good: Mia Goth has the sassiest little face.

95225

Knew I would love this & I did. Love me an ensemble cast.

[Gideon58]

https://resizing.flixster.com/P5ZdS6yYcgAsXniyJV6xMfCP1CM=/ems.cHJkLWVtcy1hc3NldHMvbW92aWVzLzhmMGUwMzg0LTg4OWYtNDNlNy05OWExLTBhNTMwZTJiMTBmZC5wbmc=


4

[mrblond]

The Sense of an Ending (2017)

Starring Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling

Came across this movie on the superb European channel TV1000 today.
Wow, what a hidden new title, it turned to be a very good film.
Something to remind us that aging people also had a life once and they still have it. A classic calm type of filming, featuring skilful screenplay and top level acting (of course, there are Broadbent and Rampling).
Recommended for skilled cinema appreciators.

4 ++
85/100
95227

[Fabulous]

The Night Porter (1974)

3.5

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/efFKbu6j6tfVRa1LjiS1bdBtf8f.jpg

[Stirchley]

The Sense of an Ending (2017)

Starring Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling

Came across this movie on the superb European channel TV1000 today.
Wow, what a hidden new title, it turned to be a very good film.
Something to remind us that aging people also had a life once and they still have it. A classic calm type of filming, featuring skilful screenplay and top level acting (of course, there are Broadbent and Rampling).
Recommended for skilled cinema appreciators.

4 ++
85/100
95227

Never heard of this. It’s in my Q now.

[WHITBISSELL!]

http://www.cinemacats.com/wp-content/uploads/gifs/lostmomentcat.gif
http://www.cinemacats.com/wp-content/uploads/gifs/lostmomentrun.gif

The Lost Moment - (1947) There's no getting around it. This is a chick flick. For starters it's Susan Hayward. That alone should have made me rabbit but it was someone else's pick and it seemed rude to get up and leave. It takes place in Venice and unless there's a bank getting knocked over or James Bond and Spiderman are hanging around chances are it's gonna be a chick flick.

Bob Cummings costars as Lewis Venable, an American publisher who's after the lost love letters from 19th century poet Jeffrey Ashton to Juliana Bordereau (a largely indiscernible Agnes Moorehead). The now 105 year old recluse and her niece Tina (Hayward) live in a decrepit palazzo and are in desperate need of funds. Venable exploits this in order to rent a room under the guise of being a writer. He means to comb through the house, find the invaluable love letters and publish them.

There's the usual gothic romance happenings. A lot of crepuscular goings on and secrets by the bagful. There's also cats, forbidden love, schizophrenia, cats, wild haired piano playing (complete with candelabra). And cats of course. I fell asleep at least twice (and honestly didn't miss anything). The performances were a bit of a hoot. And it ends accordingly. Miss Havisham would have given this two thumbs up.

50/100

[GulfportDoc]

The Grey Fox - rating_4

Some people drink while others smoke. Bill Miner robbed stagecoaches. He's the subject of this very good western from Canada, which dramatizes the time he spent in the country. After serving a 33-year prison sentence, Miner reunites with his sister, who lands him a more respectable job of gathering oysters. He quickly realizes he's not cut out for it or for respectable work in general, and since stagecoaches no longer exist, he feels purposeless. Everything changes once he attends a screening of The Great Train Robbery.

This movie works just as well as a classic western as it does a drug addiction tale, with the drug of course being staging robberies since the best drama comes from whether or not Miner will fall off the wagon, no pun intended. The robbery scenes appropriately elicit disappointment more than excitement as a result although they are no less compelling to watch. Farnsworth is excellent for how convincing he is that robbing is all Miner wants to do or perhaps can do. That also goes for how he presents his difficulty in adapting to his very different time and surroundings. Just as memorable is Jackie Burroughs as Kate, a photographer with whom Bill shares a romance. This sequence is one of the sincerest and mature of a couple falling in love I've seen in a long time and provides the most hope that Bill can reform. Sincere and mature are how I would describe the entire production, really, especially since it never relies on sensationalism. While I like to see a good robbery or shootout as much as the next person, I appreciate that the movie respects my intelligence enough to know that the entertainment in Miner's journey first and foremost. Thankfully, it still makes room to highlight the natural beauty of the British Columbian countryside courtesy of Frank Tidy's cinematography along the way. It ends up being a very compelling and substantive portrait of a criminal and of someone who cannot stop doing a certain thing despite having all the reasons in the world not to. Also, as his relationship with Kate and his adorable interaction with a young man indicates, it ably demonstrates that such people cannot easily be pigeonholed as good or evil.
VERY nice review, Torgo! The Grey Fox happens to be in my top 10 favorite movies of all time. I saw it in Hollywood in 1983, and was so impressed I went back for a second viewing. To me it's a flawless picture. Farnsworth was perfect in his characterization, and was Jackie Burroughs.

I couldn't stop thinking about the picture. The music alone (by the Irish group The Chieftains) spoke to me in a way that I hadn't felt in years (and I was in the music performance business). There were zero mistakes in that picture, and all the actors and everyone involved in the production were perfect. Cheers-- Doc

[Torgo]

VERY nice review, Torgo! The Grey Fox happens to be in my top 10 favorite movies of all time. I saw it in Hollywood in 1983, and was so impressed I went back for a second viewing. To me it's a flawless picture. Farnsworth was perfect in his characterization, and was Jackie Burroughs.

I couldn't stop thinking about the picture. The music alone (by the Irish group The Chieftains) spoke to me in a way that I hadn't felt in years (and I was in the music performance business). There were zero mistakes in that picture, and all the actors and everyone involved in the production were perfect. Cheers-- DocThanks, and good call about the Chieftans soundtrack. Oh, and did I mention how beautiful the movie is? If it's wrong to pause and take in the beauty of the British Columbian countryside every now and then, I don't want to be right.

[beelzebubble]

http://www.cinemacats.com/wp-content/uploads/gifs/lostmomentcat.gif
http://www.cinemacats.com/wp-content/uploads/gifs/lostmomentrun.gif

The Lost Moment - (1947) There's no getting around it. This is a chick flick. For starters it's Susan Hayward. That alone should have made me rabbit but it was someone else's pick and it seemed rude to get up and leave. It takes place in Venice and unless there's a bank getting knocked over or James Bond and Spiderman are hanging around chances are it's gonna be a chick flick.

Bob Cummings costars as Lewis Venable, an American publisher who's after the lost love letters from 19th century poet Jeffrey Ashton to Juliana Bordereau (a largely indiscernible Agnes Moorehead). The now 105 year old recluse and her niece Tina (Hayward) live in a decrepit palazzo and are in desperate need of funds. Venable exploits this in order to rent a room under the guise of being a writer. He means to comb through the house, find the invaluable love letters and publish them.

There's the usual gothic romance happenings. A lot of crepuscular goings on and secrets by the bagful. There's also cats, forbidden love, schizophrenia, cats, wild haired piano playing (complete with candelabra). And cats of course. I fell asleep at least twice (and honestly didn't miss anything). The performances were a bit of a hoot. And it ends accordingly. Miss Havisham would have given this two thumbs up.

50/100
Sounds fabulous!

[Thief]

HALLOWEEN KILLS
(2021, Green)

https://i.imgur.com/qvdEwhM.png


"Michael Myers has haunted this town for 40 years. Tonight, we hunt him down."



Set immediately after the events of Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills follows the efforts of the people of Haddonfield, as they try to stop Michael Myers once and for all. After escaping from his fiery cage from the previous film, Myers goes on a brutal rampage through town. Meanwhile, Karen (Judy Greer) and Allyson (Andi Matichak) deal with the aftermath in different ways, as Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) recovers from her wounds at the hospital.

This film was quite a wild ride, starting with the fact that it was bloody and brutal as f**k. The film has probably the most intense kills in the franchise, and maybe some of the most intense that I've seen in a "mainstream" horror film. When I wrote about Halloween (2018), I brought up how relentless Michael was; well, here they amped that up to 11, so if blood and gore is what you're looking for in a horror film, there's plenty here.

Grade: 3.5


Full review on my Movie Loot (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2413913#post2413913)

[WHITBISSELL!]

Sounds fabulous!

https://media.tenor.com/uz0mwtHBsmAAAAAC/men-on-films-in-living-color.gif

[PHOENIX74]

https://i.postimg.cc/T3ndPL9F/dignity.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23802909

A Matter of Dignity - (1958)

Michael Cacoyannis, director of Zorba the Greek, had a sterling early career and made this sensational film during that period. In A Matter of Dignity, young Chloe Pella (Ellie Lambeti) is going through that period of life when she starts getting serious about guys - and when she finds out her high society family has gone bankrupt and is about to lose everything, she pushes herself to marry an older, unappealing man because he's rich and could help the family out. The melodrama contained in that narrative direction can't be overstated - there are times both quiet and hysterical that'll give rise to all kinds of emotion within those watching the film. The lengths the Pella family go to keep up appearances, and the frayed edges around everyone in their orbit because of this, adds to Chloe's personal situation and creates a drama that brilliantly probes wealth, status, familial bonds and of course the dignity implied in the title - or at least each character's sense of dignity. Cacoyannis has an intuitive cinematic touch here that gets us inside the world of it's characters - with a steady increase of pressure leading to a calamitous event. I felt like I'd watched something really great.

9/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/Penny_Serenade_1941_Poster.jpg
By Columbia Pictures - Listal, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42785356

Penny Serenade - (1941)

Sometimes falling into the public domain benefits an old film, because when it does it starts popping up everywhere as people try to make a quick buck. Penny Serenade is one that manages to strike a balance between sweet comedy and drama by alternating the focus between having a few good laughs and scenes played completely straight. Julie Gardiner (the great Irene Dunne) and Roger Adams (the great Cary Grant) meet and fall in love while she works in a record store. Soon marriage follows, but an accident during an earthquake means she can't have children of her own - so the couple adopt young Trina. They go through the usual trials and tribulations of having a baby for the first time (a lot of good comedy comes from this) but events have a way of challenging this couple, and they'll need the strength from somewhere to survive as a united pair. This film has one of the most sudden and unexpected turns in cinematic history - watch out, or you'll get whiplash. It's a huge moment not well handled or part of this film's rhythm, and as such is a clunky pothole in an otherwise great film. Grant is going through his golden period, and his comedic timing is perfect while Dunne is so well attuned to acting with Grant by this stage that she's every bit his equal. The stuff with the baby is gold, and overall it's just a solid and enjoyable romp that's still delightful after all these years.

7/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ec/My_Favorite_Brunette.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14325481

My Favorite Brunette - (1947)

I have to confess to having seen virtually no films with Bob Hope in them during my entire life - as a youngster I came to know him as the man who told really bad jokes on television. I must say though, that I kind of like this younger Bob Hope - even if he lacks the subtlety and grace of some of the more nuanced comedic performers out there. Here he's Ronnie Jackson, a child photographer who becomes involved with intrigue when he pretends to be a private investigator while loitering in Sam McCloud's (Alan Ladd) office. Dorothy Lamour, Peter Lorre and Lon Chaney Jr. play straight parts in a film noir plot for the goofy Jackson to become embroiled in - and to his credit he has some initiative. There are plenty of genuinely funny moments, and watching this gave me a better appreciation for the comedian Bob Hope was before his schtick grew outdated and tired - any Bob Hope comedy made before this one I'd be interested in seeing.

7/10

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZjcyOTk3YTAtMzFlYi00M2U1LTk4ZDUtNTFjZGI3NGYxY2I3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQzNTA5MzYz._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg



1.5

[Fabulous]

The Damned (1969)

3.5

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/lw8NcKL7vD88b5kIfWszyH8z4W1.jpg

[WHITBISSELL!]

My Favorite Brunette - (1947)I have to confess to having seen virtually no films with Bob Hope in them during my entire life - ... - any Bob Hope comedy made before this one I'd be interested in seeing.7/10The Ghost Breakers and The Cat and the Canary are my recommendations. The Paleface was made the following year in 1948 but it's still pretty funny.

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/75/Other_boleyn_girl_post.jpg
By IGN, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13501435

The Other Boleyn Girl - (2008)

I've been seeing a lot of King Henry VIII lately, and that's what encouraged me to see The Other Boleyn Girl - it presents an interesting take on the King - a monarch ruled by his loins. Still, I think Eric Bana is a strange instance of miscasting, and this hurts the film as a whole. Keith Michell, Damian Lewis and Robert Shaw all felt real - you'd know they're Henry VIII as soon as they step into the room. We know he marries Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman), but here he at first falls in love with Anne's sister, Mary (Scarlett Johansson), sending Anne into a jealous rage. After being sent to France in disgrace after hastily marrying Henry Percy, she's brought back to court when Mary falls pregnant with King Henry's child - the Boleyn family afraid that during Mary's fraught pregnancy he might forget the Boleyns altogether. Anne, however, has plans of her own - revenge against her sister. Her machinations will prove her own downfall when a besotted King breaks with the church to marry her, and then finds her tiresome and unable to produce an heir. Ironically, Mary gave birth to a healthy son. Alright - straight off - this film is fiction. There was a Mary, but no connection has ever been found that gives her this kind of place in the history of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. It does manage to twist the material, in a soap opera kind of way, into a series of events that "could have" happened though, and provides a good lesson on why entering into complex machinations without scruples might get you to the top, but equally be your downfall in the end. This is for those who enjoy melodrama more than history - and even so, I can't overstate how much this film needed a different actor as King Henry. Mark Rylance, Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne are welcome sights - but they don't get enough screen-time to save the movie completely.

6/10

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91woeyqSfxL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg


3rd Rewatch...This lavish musical biopic was originally aired by ABC back in 2001 as a two part miniseries documenting the life and career of the Hollywood legend. This is the closest thing we have to a definitive film biography of the star. Back in the 80's NBC did a TV movie with Andrea McArdle that only c overed her life up to her being cast in The Wizard of Oz. The 2019 film that won Renee Zellweger an Oscar only covers the final two or three years of Garland's life. This film starts with Garland's vaudeville debut at the age of 3 and takes us all the way to her tragic passing in 1969 at the age of 47. The loving detail and carefully mounting of this story has to be credited in large to Lorna Luft, Garland's daughter, who wrote the book this based on and oversaw every aspect of this production. I loved that original Garland recordings were used for the soundtrack and that two actresses were cast to portray the teenage and adult Judy. Tammy Blanchard and the amazing Judy Davis both won Emmys for their work here and Davis is particularly astonishing. Watch the scenes where she recreates "The Man That Got Away" or her first suicide attempt or the night she was nominated for the Oscar or her meeting with the production team for her television show. Davis is a one woman acting class in a dream role that she completely loses herself in. Victor Garber also impresses as third husband Sid Luft, as do John Benjamin Hickey as Roger Edens, Allison Pill as a pre-teen Lorna, and in the best performance of her career, Marsha Mason as Judy's hard-nosed mother, Ethel Gumm. Absolutely dazzling entertainment about a movie legend. 4.5

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjcxZTUwOGItY2YzOC00NWYyLTgwMjctYTdkYTYyZGFmZTMyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjUzOTY1NTc@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg



3.5

[Fabulous]

Down by Law (1986)

4

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/b2IPkTzUeB6Q8cO9XuJ9kQhlB4o.jpg

[WHITBISSELL!]

https://media.tenor.com/nBkb1JLHGx4AAAAd/quantumania-antman.gifhttps://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2022-10/24/16/asset/9234bcbe782b/anigif_sub-buzz-11277-1666629548-13.gif

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania - I was ready to dismiss this as yet another nail in Marvel's coffin but then I read how it has a 82% audience reaction at RT (IMDb is 6.1/10 which is still way too high IMO). This is also meant as a tentpole or buttress to support whatever phase Marvel has in the works. It certainly spotlighted the next major baddie that was supposed to replace Thanos. Anyone who watched the first season of Loki was familiar with Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors). Comic book readers certainly are.

I've read certain reviews praising Majors' performance but it mostly left me underwhelmed. I would say that it didn't seem to jibe with the rest of the movie but there would have to be something going on to jibe with. Not a series of half thought out premises presented in an indifferent, lackadaisical manner. Either way I just can't see Kang carrying an entire new phase. But again, those audience scores seem to say different.

It's top heavy with characters with none of them the least bit engaging. Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer and Evangeline Lilly are window dressing and fade into the congested CGI background. And the character given the lion's share of screentime and therefore standing out does so for the wrong reasons. Scott's now grown up daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton) is meant to be the catalyst for all this but comes off as mostly annoying. Even Rudd seems curiously uninvolved and isn't given much to work with outside of "concerned dad".

Can't really blame it on the director because Peyton Reed also helmed the other two Ant-Man flicks and those were passable. But this is the first A-M to not have been co-written by Rudd. Maybe that had something to do with the feeling of disengagement to the proceedings. Maybe the studio will find a way to make ... what is it? Phase 5? To make it compelling. Find a way to mesh this bad guy's particular personality and story arc and make it somehow interesting. Because this movie sure as hell couldn't and didn't do that.

40/100

[Citizen Rules]

The Purple Heart (Lewis Milestone 1944) True war film about a crew of B-25 bombers who were captured by the Japanese Army and tried as 'war criminals'....

Interesting story but poorly written.

[GulfportDoc]

[Judy Garland]

3rd Rewatch...This lavish musical biopic was originally aired by ABC back in 2001 as a two part miniseries documenting the life and career of the Hollywood legend. This is the closest thing we have to a definitive film biography of the star. Back in the 80's NBC did a TV movie with Andrea McArdle that only c overed her life up to her being cast in The Wizard of Oz. The 2019 film that won Renee Zellweger an Oscar only covers the final two or three years of Garland's life. This film starts with Garland's vaudeville debut at the age of 3 and takes us all the way to her tragic passing in 1969 at the age of 47. The loving detail and carefully mounting of this story has to be credited in large to Lorna Luft, Garland's daughter, who wrote the book this based on and oversaw every aspect of this production. I loved that original Garland recordings were used for the soundtrack and that two actresses were cast to portray the teenage and adult Judy. Tammy Blanchard and the amazing Judy Davis both won Emmys for their work here and Davis is particularly astonishing. Watch the scenes where she recreates "The Man That Got Away" or her first suicide attempt or the night she was nominated for the Oscar or her meeting with the production team for her television show. Davis is a one woman acting class in a dream role that she completely loses herself in. Victor Garber also impresses as third husband Sid Luft, as do John Benjamin Hickey as Roger Edens, Allison Pill as a pre-teen Lorna, and in the best performance of her career, Marsha Mason as Judy's hard-nosed mother, Ethel Gumm. Absolutely dazzling entertainment about a movie legend. rating_4_5
I agree. This 2001 mini was much superior to the 2019 film. And Judy Davis gave a stunning performance as Garland-- much more so than did Zellweger. I'll never understand why they let Zellweger do her own singing. She sang nothing like Judy Garland did. Might have to go back and re-watch the Judy Davis mini. She's a great actress.

[Tugg]

Gran Turismo (2023) 3.5
It has it's flaws and some races are better than others; But overall I liked it.
https://lirp.cdn-website.com/921d7691/dms3rep/multi/opt/7gFEPIcJDQvGq9xTvlPL2ZQB27c-640w.jpg
Blue Beetle (2023) 3.5
The first half is straight up comedy; The second half is as generic as superhero movie can be.
https://privatemoviez.hair/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Blue-Beetle-2023-min.jpg

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/85/Last_stationposter1.jpg
By http://www.impawards.com/2009/posters/last_station.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25683046

The Last Station - (2009)

I found The Last Station a moving portrait of the many real-life characters orbiting the almost messianic Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) during the last year of his life - chief among them Sophia Tolstaya (Helen Mirren), his high-strung, at times hysterical wife. She has good reason to be upset - the altruistic author is planning on signing over all of his works to the public domain as an act of generosity to all. A whole movement has sprung up around Tolstoy, and certain Tolstoyans wrestle for favour as Sophia yearns for more of his attention and generosity. Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) his best friend and right-hand man deplores Sophia, and those feelings are mutual. Valentin (James McAvoy), his new private secretary, has just met the man, finding out that the general Tolstoyan "no sex" rule isn't one Tolstoy himself is a particularly big believer of. The great author's fame makes a peaceful decline and death impossible, and the friction between all increases as wills are changed, papers signed, and attention craved, and this is where Helen Mirren's performance really digs deep, coming up as an unfairly maligned member of this entourage who's heart is breaking. She knows how to stage a great tantrum, but she's also deserving of far more than she gets - she's the man's wife, and has been for a half century. To get squeezed out as his death approaches is so painful under the circumstances. Great stuff from the veteran actress. The film is strong from start to finish, ending where Tolstory's journey ended, at Astapovo railway station - surrounded by disciples and media. As far as biographical cinema is concerned, it's pretty good.

7.5/10

[Act III]

95191

The Jazz Singer (1980)

I finally got around to watching this while its been loaded in my app since renting it. The holiest of all the music related movies I've seen yet I was doubtful through the opening half but it got better. A well constructed drama about a fictional musician played by Neil Diamond, someone I haven't really heard but seen the name a thousand times, so I am unfamiliar with him. I wanted to rate this lower but didn't let my bias get in the way. The story is full and progresses nicely and the acting is superb. Out of all the movies about being a musician this one is the cleanest and least offensive. Although the laser light pentagram at the end seems strange.

7/10

[CharlesAoup]

Zack Snyder's Justice League, 2021 (B)


This is a very long movie with a great many things happening, but it doesn't really coalesce into something greater than its parts individually. It's all very grey and desaturated, which is a choice that gets pointlessly heavy as it goes along. This movie coloring thing is going to be an embarrassing thing to look back on in the future.


All in all, I feel like not enough was presented in other movies, and the most interesting stuff is only hinted at, mostly at the end of the climax. Steppenwolf sucked and his henchmen sucked. All grey and all dull and forgettable, and the obvious fact that Steppen isn't even a top henchman makes this giant, clunky movie feel like an intermission.

[Act III]

95280

Beyond the Sea (2004)

Well done biopic on standards singer Bobby Darin, the guy who sang the classic "Mack the Knife". There's some artistic shots in there with visuals and the lake scene is like a fine painting. A list actors, nothing under quality, a few surprises. Won't disappoint, nothing lude.

7/10

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTYwMWJjZTgtMzJiNS00OGIzLWE1NDYtNjgwMDUwYjZiOTc5XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTA2MDU0NjM5._V1_.jpg


3.5

[Gideon58]

95280

Beyond the Sea (2004)

Well done biopic on standards singer Bobby Darin, the guy who sang the classic "Mack the Knife". There's some artistic shots in there with visuals and the lake scene is like a fine painting. A list actors, nothing under quality, a few surprises. Won't disappoint, nothing lude.

7/10

It is so nice to see some love for this movie...Spacey's passion for this project is evident in every frame.

[Act III]

It is so nice to see some love for this movie...Spacey's passion for this project is evident in every frame.

He was too old for the part. ;) But done well nonetheless.

[Fabulous]

Death in Venice (1971)

3.5

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/4LlLFbeUGnta5KAKguLQJVSzLBd.jpg

[Act III]

95312

The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

A biopic on famed stage musical director Florenz Ziegfeld of the 1890s through up to the Great Depression. An Oscar movie much like the one about Glenn Miller, except I like this one more. He died 4 years before this was released, so its a pretty quick turnaround. You can see how hefty MGM was. This film is big, sparing no expense and going the distance as you can see in the elaborate monolithic size of some of the stage constructions. I am not a fan of Broadway myself but the numbers are fine and classy unlike how they are done in other movies. So, you won't be annoyed if that isn't your thing either. A very honest depiction that plays all the parts well whether its comedy, drama or showbiz.

7/10

[beelzebubble]

The Extra Man (2010) 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etxKmplTT9QIt has been a long time since I have been able to sit through a movie at home. My social media induced ADHD has mostly taken over my life. But last night, I was able to concentrate on something. What was that something you ask? Kevin Kline. The great Kevin Kline, the most theatrical of all movie stars. Who can look away from a Kevin Kline performance? Not this viewer! I was riveted by this odd ball movie, The Extra Man, partly because it was an oddball movie, but in a large part to its inclusion of Kevin Kline. It is about a young man moving to NYC to begin writing and ends up living with an extra man, that is a gentleman who accompanies elderly ladies to dinner and such. The extra man is Kevin Kline and Paul Dano plays the young writer. Besides the odd script and these two wonderful actors, we also have Katie Holmes who looks quite lovely in this film. I give The Extra Man, three stars.

[Darth Pazuzu]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bc/The_Nun_II_%282023%29.jpg/220px-The_Nun_II_%282023%29.jpg

Believe it or not, I don't think I've seen any films dealing with the Conjuring universe until now! But having seen the previews, this sequel to a 2018 spinoff from the original The Conjuring (2013) looked rather interesting. Actually, at my local theater, there were two interesting possibilities: The Nun II or It Lives Inside. The previews of the latter were also interesting, but it felt like perhaps it was too close to the recent Talk to Me, which I had already seen and enjoyed. Also, It Lives Inside was PG-13, and I was feeling in the mood for just a bit more of the "red red kroovy", so The Nun II it was!

But first, a word or two about myself (or as Stephen King would describe it, "an annoying autobiographical pause")...

When I started seriously getting into movies as a young teenager, my first love was the horror genre. I had a lot of interesting books about horror films, including The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (edited by Phil Hardy), Kim Newman's Nightmare Movies, John McCarty's The Modern Horror Film, and Stephen King's landmark non-fiction study Danse Macabre. But the trouble was, as fascinating and compelling as I found the genre, and as enticing as the horror section of the local Video Vision appeared, my parents were very reticent to let me see any R-rated (never mind un-rated) horror films unless they had already seen them and felt like I could handle it. So Alien (1979) and Psycho (1960) were in, but The Exorcist (1973) - which gave my stepmother nightmares - was definitely out. Beyond that, it was such PG or PG-13 fare such as Poltergeist (1982), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Gremlins (1984), etc., etc. (And even then, a PG-13 rating was still no guarantee. They wouldn't let me see 1984's Ghoulies because of the satanic ritual sacrifice at the beginning!)

(Mind you, this was the '80s, you Gen-Z boys and girls - and others - out there! I'm guessing very few of you have had the pleasure of viewing a pan-and-scan VHS cassette tape of something which, 50% of the time anyway, was meant to be seen in a wider aspect ratio. But hey, that was the only option we had back then - that is, until widescreen special editions where you were initially confused about the purpose of those black bands on the top and bottom of the screen! Ahhh, nostalgia...)

Anyhoo... Where was I? Oh yes. Mind you, as unfair as all this might seem, my parents probably had good reason to doubt my fortitude with regard to horrific images. Because believe it or not, at the age of 11, I had actually been terrified by those Terror Dogs from Ghostbusters (1984) when I first saw it in its first theatrical run. It freaked me out to imagine that Sigourney Weaver's and Rick Moranis's bodies had been taken over by evil spirits formerly incarnated in the form of satanic canines! It was only much later that I actually got into a lot of those harder-edged horror films I had become curious about from looking through the horror section at the Video Vision rental store. Perhaps a bit sooner than my parents would have preferred, but... Well, let's just say thank God for sympathetic relatives, and leave it at that! Anyway, when I finally actually saw The Exorcist, I found it a very compelling and dramatic film, but not particularly disturbing. The minions of Gozer the Gozerian had already busted my "possession cherry" quite some time before! Plus I was getting into the likes of Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and a couple of its sequels, Stuart Gordon's H.P. Lovecraft adaptations Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986), Clive Barker's Hellraiser (1987) and its sequel Hellbound (1988), Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977), Sam Raimi's Evil Dead I (1981) and II (1987), David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm (1988), Alan Parker's Angel Heart (1987), and... Well, the end is listless, as they say.

But even then, I had become interested in many other different kinds of films. (Not romantic comedies, mind you. I found the mere idea of those to be boring.) Many of the other titles I'd gotten into included Apocalypse Now (1979), Taxi Driver (1976), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982). Even in the aforementioned book The Modern Horror Film by John McCarty, a couple of the titles he included were Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1972), Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Ken Russell's The Devils (both 1971), and a couple other titles not necessarily considered horror according to any kind of purist definition, alongside the usual suspects such as The Exorcist, Psycho, the Hammer Dracula (1958), Alien, The Shining (1980) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). So I definitely made notice of these titles and at some future point I would see them. (BTW, McCarty's book covers the period from 1957 to about 1988, starting with the Hammer Dracula and Frankenstein films and ending with Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm. Certainly out of date, by today's standards.)

Anyway, if I had to describe the type of cinema that personally resonated with me, in a nutshell, I would have to say that I was interested in anything which dealt with the darker or more traumatic aspects of the human condition. Anything that has an unsettling, disturbing or cathartic quality, in any way, shape or form. In addition to the aforementioned titles in the last paragraph, that also includes the likes of Sidney Lumet's Equus (1977), William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974), Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), etc. One of the reasons why I had gravitated towards horror in the first place was precisely because it tended towards the confrontational and cathartic, the way classic fairy tales used to. But as I've indicated, it's certainly not the only genre to enter into such territory. In fact, one could almost argue that the average horror film has become tame and predictable over time, its conventions and tropes subject to blatant self-referencing and cynically ritualistic recycling. Granted, given today's current cultural climate, things which honestly seek to disturb or unsettle have become rare as hen's teeth. Disturbance is certainly not a priority for the corporate merchants who only have their eyes on the bottom line and seek desperately not to offend or even perplex. (Ask yourself why Warner Brothers hasn't yet released the uncut version of Ken Russell's The Devils in a special edition Blu-ray, or even allowed someone like Criterion, Arrow or Shout! Factory to do the job.)

Which, in a highly roundabout way, brings us (finally!) to The Nun II. I'll make this as brief as I possibly can ("Too late!" I can already hear some of you saying): In this movie, two nuns - Sister Irene from the first Nun and Sister Debra - attempt to deal with a series of apparently demonic killings in Europe in 1957. They're finally led to a boarding school in Europe, where a character from the first film is working and has gotten close to a young student named Sophie and her mother. A few more killings and jump scares later, we find out that the titular spirit taking the form of a nun is actually searching for the eyes of St. Lucy (sort of putting us in Indiana Jones territory). Amusingly enough, we also get an evil horned goat with glowing red eyes, first seen in a stained-glass window but which later emerges in the flesh to terrorize and chase the students of the school! The inevitably overblown climax takes place in the former winery (the school previously having served as a monastery), and let's just say that a miraculous piece of transubstantiation takes place to decisively (?) quench the evil spirit!

As you can gather from the somewhat irreverent tone of my condensed plot description, you can probably tell I wasn't overly impressed. Granted, I like me a good religious-themed supernatural horror film, but this one doesn't really bring anything new to the table, being rather clichéd and overbaked. Maybe I'm just a cranky old-timer who's seen it all done before and better, but I just felt The Nun II was all just a bit by the numbers. I guess I could say, on a positive note, that the jump scares were very well-handled. They seemed to be very effective for a good many of my fellow patrons in the theater, anyway! So I guess that's something...

Speaking of religious-themed horror, I find that I am simultaneously looking forward to and dreading the arrival of David Gordon Green's The Exorcist: Believer. The involvement of Ellen Burstyn, returning as Chris MacNeil, has definitely raised my hopes that the movie will be at least decent. Both the trailers I've seen make the film seem somewhat opportunistically cheesy, and give away far too many details of the plot. However, I like the way the first trailer sneaks in the Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells melody gradually and only a few notes at a time. Very clever. And in the second trailer, we definitely get the impression of playing for very high stakes. Apparently, we'll get a situation in which the lives of two possessed girls will be held in the balance. Who will live and who will die? Stay tuned! (I'm reminded of the horrific and impossible moral choice that the Father Merrin character - played by Stellan Skarsgård - was forced into during the flashback scenes of the Dominion and Beginning prequels from 2004.) But my deepest fear is that this is just going to be Star Wars: The Force Awakens all over again, recycling plot elements from the original and cynically attempting to replicate those things audiences remembered best from the original.

Hopefully, after having seen the impressive Talk To Me and the somewhat less than impressive The Nun II, I haven't already spoiled my appetite for The Exorcist: Believer. Do you think I ought to sneak in a viewing of It Lives Inside, or do you think that's enough demonic / possession horror for the time being? :D

[Nausicaä]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/30/The_Wonderful_Story_of_Henry_Sugar_poster.jpg/220px-The_Wonderful_Story_of_Henry_Sugar_poster.jpg

3.5

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

[TheUsualSuspect]

No One Will Save You

4

This is a film that runs 1hr33mins and it has no dialogue. Bravo.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYzljNjY1ZDctZmRjNC00N2QzLWE4ZjQtMzM5MDg2NGQzMDVkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzc5MjA3OA@@._V1_.jpg


3.5

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2a/Monsters_University_poster_3.jpg
By Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures - Nerdist.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38651428

Monsters University - (2013)

Strike another Pixar film off the list - Monsters University. It was fun, surprising me with it's prequel story which I followed with some interest. Friends in the first film, here Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sulley (John Goodman) are rivals at university. Mike dreams of becoming a scarer, despite not being naturally scary, while Mike is trying to breeze through on his family's name. It's hard work versus natural talent. I guess it felt original, mostly because of the bonkers world these monster characters live in. Another thing that really impressed me was the lesson to kids held up by this animated film - that not everything can be attained by hard work. Natural talent cannot be learned. Colourful and funny, Monsters University serves up a huge load of imagination and a virtual flowerbed of visual motion and design. It's crazy and has Archie the Scare Pig in it, which is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

7/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/73/Lady_on_a_Train_1945_Poster.jpg
By Universal Pictures - http://www.movieposterdb.com/poster/c7bb5238, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37023721

Lady on a Train - (1945)

Hey - I really like Deanna Durbin! After watching and probably underrating It Started With Eve earlier this year I come across another of the films she starred in - Lady on a Train. It's much more comedy than Agatha Christie-like mystery, with debutante and mystery novel-lover Nicki Collins (Durbin) witnessing a murder through a window while on a train to visit her aunt in New York. From there she goes to great lengths to solve the crime after the police and mystery novel writer Wayne Morgan (David Bruce) dismiss her claims. Ralph Bellamy and Dan Duryea play the sons of the murdered party - but they both inherited $1 each, while the absent Margo Martin (Maria Palmer), who Nicki pretends to be, gets everything. There are some really funny moments in this - and it's evident how much comedic talent Deanna Durbin has. She's so good that she carries this entire movie by herself - and I look forward to seeing more of her.

7/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4f/Robin_hood_1991.jpg
By IMP Awards / 1991 Movie Poster Gallery / Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Poster (#1 of 2), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2327520

Robin Hood : Prince of Thieves - (1991)

Oh boy. In 1991 there was no escaping the Bryan Adams song "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You" - I'd hear it several times a day despite not wanting to. At the time, someone I fell in love with, who loved this song, jilted me for a rival - thus I hated the song even more. Because of all that - I never, ever really wanted to see Robin Hood : Prince of Thieves, even a little, and in any event I'm not the biggest Robin Hood fan regardless. Sigh. A year later I was in a committed relationship when my love from the previous year had abandoned her guy and asked me out. I hate that - it feels like I'm living in a soap opera. It wouldn't be the last time that happened to me either. Ahem - sorry, about the movie - it's one of those big budget mainstream films with no real faults that plays everything safe. It's big and obviously well made, but contains absolutely no surprises - it's dull epic beige, which deserves respect but not acclaim. I was right not to go see it, but I'm still glad I finally got around to giving it a go. Alan Rickman does a pretty good Sheriff of Nottingham, and Morgan Freeman gets a few good verbal jabs in.

6/10

[PHOENIX74]

Speaking of religious-themed horror, I find that I am simultaneously looking forward to and dreading the arrival of David Gordon Green's The Exorcist: Believer. The involvement of Ellen Burstyn, returning as Chris MacNeil, has definitely raised my hopes that the movie will be at least decent. Both the trailers I've seen make the film seem somewhat opportunistically cheesy, and give away far too many details of the plot. However, I like the way the first trailer sneaks in the Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells melody gradually and only a few notes at a time. Very clever. And in the second trailer, we definitely get the impression of playing for very high stakes. Apparently, we'll get a situation in which the lives of two possessed girls will be held in the balance. Who will live and who will die? Stay tuned! (I'm reminded of the horrific and impossible moral choice that the Father Merrin character - played by Stellan Skarsgård - was forced into during the flashback scenes of the Dominion and Beginning prequels from 2004.) But my deepest fear is that this is just going to be Star Wars: The Force Awakens all over again, recycling plot elements from the original and cynically attempting to replicate those things audiences remembered best from the original.

Hopefully, after having seen the impressive Talk To Me and the somewhat less than impressive The Nun II, I haven't already spoiled my appetite for The Exorcist: Believer. Do you think I ought to sneak in a viewing of It Lives Inside, or do you think that's enough demonic / possession horror for the time being? :D

I watched The Nun (2018) when it came out, thought it was terrible, and was thus done with any sequels. A quiet lull indeed, when The Nun II is the best offering. It all has me going so far as to not go to the movies at all the last few weeks simply because there was a lack of anything really worth seeing. That includes It Lives Inside, which by all accounts is rather average. I have similar taste to you, going by your well-written account of how your movie tastes have evolved. I fear that The Exorcist : Believer is going to be terrible - but I thought that about Evil Dead Rise after seeing it's trailer, and was pleasantly proved wrong. It just looks like another extra-cheesy Exorcist sequel, with the inclusion of Ellen Burstyn an attempt to make a direct link to the original and draw attention away from the fact that this is yet another stab at a series with a poor track record. I eagerly anticipate whatever the next truly great and enjoyable horror/supernatural scary experience is going to be - but I don't think it's any of these films. Like Talk to Me - it'll be something new.

[Fabulous]

To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)

3.5

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/1XrnrjrxDlYHtz5fGVznPnYJjyN.jpg

[Marco]

Candy (2006)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/40/Candy_%282006%29.jpg
Downbeat story of a young bohemian couple who end up in love and addicted to heroin. It's cut into sections which works well but we do not get a proper idea of the physical toll that a 24/7 addiction to hard drugs will take, both Cornish and Ledger look at the end, after years of abuse, like they did at the start. Not saying they should have method(one) acted it though. The interplay between them is sometimes cute but mostly mawkish. Interaction with her family just grinds through the gears. The heavy thing is the pimping out your wife for scag and considering becoming a male prostitute too. Panic in needle park did this storyline much better in my view.
2

[xSookieStackhouse]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bc/The_Nun_II_%282023%29.jpg/220px-The_Nun_II_%282023%29.jpg

Believe it or not, I don't think I've seen any films dealing with the Conjuring universe until now! But having seen the previews, this sequel to a 2018 spinoff from the original The Conjuring (2013) looked rather interesting. Actually, at my local theater, there were two interesting possibilities: The Nun II or It Lives Inside. The previews of the latter were also interesting, but it felt like perhaps it was too close to the recent Talk to Me, which I had already seen and enjoyed. Also, It Lives Inside was PG-13, and I was feeling in the mood for just a bit more of the "red red kroovy", so The Nun II it was!

But first, a word or two about myself (or as Stephen King would describe it, "an annoying autobiographical pause")...

When I started seriously getting into movies as a young teenager, my first love was the horror genre. I had a lot of interesting books about horror films, including The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (edited by Phil Hardy), Kim Newman's Nightmare Movies, John McCarty's The Modern Horror Film, and Stephen King's landmark non-fiction study Danse Macabre. But the trouble was, as fascinating and compelling as I found the genre, and as enticing as the horror section of the local Video Vision appeared, my parents were very reticent to let me see any R-rated (never mind un-rated) horror films unless they had already seen them and felt like I could handle it. So Alien (1979) and Psycho (1960) were in, but The Exorcist (1973) - which gave my stepmother nightmares - was definitely out. Beyond that, it was such PG or PG-13 fare such as Poltergeist (1982), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Gremlins (1984), etc., etc. (And even then, a PG-13 rating was still no guarantee. They wouldn't let me see 1984's Ghoulies because of the satanic ritual sacrifice at the beginning!)

(Mind you, this was the '80s, you Gen-Z boys and girls - and others - out there! I'm guessing very few of you have had the pleasure of viewing a pan-and-scan VHS cassette tape of something which, 50% of the time anyway, was meant to be seen in a wider aspect ratio. But hey, that was the only option we had back then - that is, until widescreen special editions where you were initially confused about the purpose of those black bands on the top and bottom of the screen! Ahhh, nostalgia...)

Anyhoo... Where was I? Oh yes. Mind you, as unfair as all this might seem, my parents probably had good reason to doubt my fortitude with regard to horrific images. Because believe it or not, at the age of 11, I had actually been terrified by those Terror Dogs from Ghostbusters (1984) when I first saw it in its first theatrical run. It freaked me out to imagine that Sigourney Weaver's and Rick Moranis's bodies had been taken over by evil spirits formerly incarnated in the form of satanic canines! It was only much later that I actually got into a lot of those harder-edged horror films I had become curious about from looking through the horror section at the Video Vision rental store. Perhaps a bit sooner than my parents would have preferred, but... Well, let's just say thank God for sympathetic relatives, and leave it at that! Anyway, when I finally actually saw The Exorcist, I found it a very compelling and dramatic film, but not particularly disturbing. The minions of Gozer the Gozerian had already busted my "possession cherry" quite some time before! Plus I was getting into the likes of Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and a couple of its sequels, Stuart Gordon's H.P. Lovecraft adaptations Re-Animator (1985) and From Beyond (1986), Clive Barker's Hellraiser (1987) and its sequel Hellbound (1988), Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977), Sam Raimi's Evil Dead I (1981) and II (1987), David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm (1988), Alan Parker's Angel Heart (1987), and... Well, the end is listless, as they say.

But even then, I had become interested in many other different kinds of films. (Not romantic comedies, mind you. I found the mere idea of those to be boring.) Many of the other titles I'd gotten into included Apocalypse Now (1979), Taxi Driver (1976), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982). Even in the aforementioned book The Modern Horror Film by John McCarty, a couple of the titles he included were Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1972), Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Ken Russell's The Devils (both 1971), and a couple other titles not necessarily considered horror according to any kind of purist definition, alongside the usual suspects such as The Exorcist, Psycho, the Hammer Dracula (1958), Alien, The Shining (1980) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). So I definitely made notice of these titles and at some future point I would see them. (BTW, McCarty's book covers the period from 1957 to about 1988, starting with the Hammer Dracula and Frankenstein films and ending with Ken Russell's The Lair of the White Worm. Certainly out of date, by today's standards.)

Anyway, if I had to describe the type of cinema that personally resonated with me, in a nutshell, I would have to say that I was interested in anything which dealt with the darker or more traumatic aspects of the human condition. Anything that has an unsettling, disturbing or cathartic quality, in any way, shape or form. In addition to the aforementioned titles in the last paragraph, that also includes the likes of Sidney Lumet's Equus (1977), William Friedkin's Cruising (1980), Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974), Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), etc. One of the reasons why I had gravitated towards horror in the first place was precisely because it tended towards the confrontational and cathartic, the way classic fairy tales used to. But as I've indicated, it's certainly not the only genre to enter into such territory. In fact, one could almost argue that the average horror film has become tame and predictable over time, its conventions and tropes subject to blatant self-referencing and cynically ritualistic recycling. Granted, given today's current cultural climate, things which honestly seek to disturb or unsettle have become rare as hen's teeth. Disturbance is certainly not a priority for the corporate merchants who only have their eyes on the bottom line and seek desperately not to offend or even perplex. (Ask yourself why Warner Brothers hasn't yet released the uncut version of Ken Russell's The Devils in a special edition Blu-ray, or even allowed someone like Criterion, Arrow or Shout! Factory to do the job.)

Which, in a highly roundabout way, brings us (finally!) to The Nun II. I'll make this as brief as I possibly can ("Too late!" I can already hear some of you saying): In this movie, two nuns - Sister Irene from the first Nun and Sister Debra - attempt to deal with a series of apparently demonic killings in Europe in 1957. They're finally led to a boarding school in Europe, where a character from the first film is working and has gotten close to a young student named Sophie and her mother. A few more killings and jump scares later, we find out that the titular spirit taking the form of a nun is actually searching for the eyes of St. Lucy (sort of putting us in Indiana Jones territory). Amusingly enough, we also get an evil horned goat with glowing red eyes, first seen in a stained-glass window but which later emerges in the flesh to terrorize and chase the students of the school! The inevitably overblown climax takes place in the former winery (the school previously having served as a monastery), and let's just say that a miraculous piece of transubstantiation takes place to decisively (?) quench the evil spirit!

As you can gather from the somewhat irreverent tone of my condensed plot description, you can probably tell I wasn't overly impressed. Granted, I like me a good religious-themed supernatural horror film, but this one doesn't really bring anything new to the table, being rather clichéd and overbaked. Maybe I'm just a cranky old-timer who's seen it all done before and better, but I just felt The Nun II was all just a bit by the numbers. I guess I could say, on a positive note, that the jump scares were very well-handled. They seemed to be very effective for a good many of my fellow patrons in the theater, anyway! So I guess that's something...

Speaking of religious-themed horror, I find that I am simultaneously looking forward to and dreading the arrival of David Gordon Green's The Exorcist: Believer. The involvement of Ellen Burstyn, returning as Chris MacNeil, has definitely raised my hopes that the movie will be at least decent. Both the trailers I've seen make the film seem somewhat opportunistically cheesy, and give away far too many details of the plot. However, I like the way the first trailer sneaks in the Mike Oldfield Tubular Bells melody gradually and only a few notes at a time. Very clever. And in the second trailer, we definitely get the impression of playing for very high stakes. Apparently, we'll get a situation in which the lives of two possessed girls will be held in the balance. Who will live and who will die? Stay tuned! (I'm reminded of the horrific and impossible moral choice that the Father Merrin character - played by Stellan Skarsgård - was forced into during the flashback scenes of the Dominion and Beginning prequels from 2004.) But my deepest fear is that this is just going to be Star Wars: The Force Awakens all over again, recycling plot elements from the original and cynically attempting to replicate those things audiences remembered best from the original.

Hopefully, after having seen the impressive Talk To Me and the somewhat less than impressive The Nun II, I haven't already spoiled my appetite for The Exorcist: Believer. Do you think I ought to sneak in a viewing of It Lives Inside, or do you think that's enough demonic / possession horror for the time being? :D
did u watch post credit scene?

[Stirchley]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYzljNjY1ZDctZmRjNC00N2QzLWE4ZjQtMzM5MDg2NGQzMDVkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzc5MjA3OA@@._V1_.jpg3.5

I see this was directed by her husband. Didn’t know he directed. Knew him as a production designer.

Candy (2006)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/40/Candy_%282006%29.jpg
Downbeat story of a young bohemian couple who end up in love and addicted to heroin. It's cut into sections which works well but we do not get a proper idea of the physical toll that a 24/7 addiction to hard drugs will take, both Cornish and Ledger look at the end, after years of abuse, like they did at the start. Not saying they should have method(one) acted it though. The interplay between them is sometimes cute but mostly mawkish. Interaction with her family just grinds through the gears. The heavy thing is the pimping out your wife for scag and considering becoming a male prostitute too. Panic in needle park did this storyline much better in my view.
2

Interesting you say their chemistry was sometimes cute. Wasn’t their affair the cause of Michelle Williams ending her relationship with Ledger?

95329

Not a bad movie, but nothing major. Jessica Lange epitomized her rôle very well.

[Gideon58]

I see this was directed by her husband. Didn’t know he directed. Knew him as a production designer.



Interesting you say their chemistry was sometimes cute. Wasn’t their affair the cause of Michelle Williams ending her relationship with Ledger?

95329

Not a bad movie, but nothing major. Jessica Lange epitomized her rôle very well.

Spacek's husband also directed her in Raggedy Man

[Corax]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYzljNjY1ZDctZmRjNC00N2QzLWE4ZjQtMzM5MDg2NGQzMDVkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzc5MjA3OA@@._V1_.jpg


rating_3_5


Huh, this exists. Strange. I have no memory of this summer.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTdjNWY2ODctM2EwMC00MzJlLWFmY2YtOWZlNjU0NDZlODEwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMDc5ODIzMw@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg


4

[Corax]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BOTdjNWY2ODctM2EwMC00MzJlLWFmY2YtOWZlNjU0NDZlODEwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMDc5ODIzMw@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg


rating_4


I feel like I've already seen this movie.

[Stirchley]

I feel like I've already seen this movie.

I feel glad I haven’t.

[Torgo]

Project A - 4
Magnificent Warriors - 4

You can read my reviews and many others in my Hong Kong thread (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?p=2284486#post2284486).

[matt72582]

Heroes For Sale - 7/10
This was made 90 years ago, but a few issues it deals with is war, opiate addiction, veterans down on their luck, prison, nepotism, conscience, including this Russian "Red" who criticized capitalism endlessly, until he goes into business (as an inventor) with our protagonist.. Barely over an hour long. Very easy watch, and the first movie I've seen in months.


https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/Film_Poster_for_Heroes_for_Sale.jpg

[Gideon58]

Candy (2006)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/40/Candy_%282006%29.jpg
Downbeat story of a young bohemian couple who end up in love and addicted to heroin. It's cut into sections which works well but we do not get a proper idea of the physical toll that a 24/7 addiction to hard drugs will take, both Cornish and Ledger look at the end, after years of abuse, like they did at the start. Not saying they should have method(one) acted it though. The interplay between them is sometimes cute but mostly mawkish. Interaction with her family just grinds through the gears. The heavy thing is the pimping out your wife for scag and considering becoming a male prostitute too. Panic in needle park did this storyline much better in my view.
2

I thought Ledger was brilliant in this movie.

[Darth Pazuzu]

Referring to The Nun II...

did u watch post credit scene?

Yes, I did. I recognized Patrick Wilson, and I knew he had been in the original. But not having actually seen the original, it didn't have much resonance for me. Oh well, one of these days I might get The Conjuring Universe Blu-ray 6-pack (provided the price is decent) and watch the whole thing in a marathon viewing. Maybe I'll like some films in the set better... ;)

[Takoma11]

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwildfiremovies.files.wordpress.com%2F2020%2F04%2Fr-crumb.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=d178e504688526aa531fb51de5e9092400345d156ad0da9b1d5f6fcd0e7bb0bb&ipo=images

Crumb, 1994

This documentary takes a look at the career and personal life of cartoonist Robert Crumb. As we learn about the origins and evolution of his work, we also see that the factors that shaped his outlooks and proclivities have also had deep and devastating effects on his family, particularly his two brothers.

This is a fascinating, funny, frustrating, tragic, hilarious look inside a very unique mind.

4

Full review (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2414670#post2414670)

[skizzerflake]

Wow, is this a dose - The Creator - Between action, plot and FX, it's one of those movies I'm reluctant to say much about until I see it again. It's really a huge FX extravaganza. I don't know how they got all of this into a budget of 80 million. It's a future war between wet-ware humans and beings that span a range of robotic and semi-human characters and a pivotal character, a kid who is robotic and seems to hold the key to the future. You're never quite sure just who is really what unless sometimes they turn sideways and you can see into their ear and out the other side. Even then, you're not sure. The androids are "programmed" (are they really?) to act like us and seem to have emotions, but part of the question is whether our emotion is really different from programmed emotion. Robots run the range from disposable mechanical gadgets to convincing humans. The question of what is human leads us down blind alleys. I don't want to say too much because I was sufficiently visually overwhelmed that I need a do-over to get the plot line subtleties.

It has elements of a sort of mashup of Star Wars, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now and The Forbidden Planet, coupled with some episodes of The Outer Limits and the Twilight Zone. It channels themes and images from the Viet Nam War throughout. If you're going to do it, find a theater with terrific sound and screen, since it really is a visual and sonic overload. Having been under-whelmed by a lot of recent movies, this one is worth a repeat. I'd definitely give it better than IMDB's 7.1.

:popcorn::popcorn::popcorn::popcorn:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex3C1-5Dhb8

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/No-one-will-save-you-poster.jpg
By Hulu - IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74754690

No One Will Save You - (2023)

There are a few surprises in store for those who watch No One Will Save You - chief among them the tone of the movie, which takes this alien invasion/abduction movie in a more playful direction than I was expecting. It's not without terror, horror and suspense - there are bucketloads of that - but it's not big on documentary-like realism. Secondly, the fact that it's dialogue free - which at times for me was too much of a distraction. There are those who complain that 'one-shot' movies rely too much on that one gimmick - but the same held true for me in this, with all the various instances where you'd expect dialogue twisted and contorted into instances where it never happens. I was always too aware of it. All that out of the way though - it was a gripping, compelling ride which I couldn't tear my eyes away from. Brian Duffield has some imagination, and you'll see how various sci-fi alien abduction tropes have been combined in novel ways - there's not much that's particularly new, but all-up the utilization of ideas and Duffield's methods make for an entertaining movie night. Booksmart's Kaitlyn Dever also deserves praise for carrying an entire feature film without one spoken line - an enormous challenge. A lot of fun this - fast paced in a manner that never lets up, and full of surprises.

7/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3a/Flipped_poster.jpg
By The poster art can or could be obtained from Castle Rock Entertainment., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28089583

Flipped - (2010)

I was feeling a little stressed and sick yesterday - I'd just watched Triumph of the Will and it had left me with an awful feeling. Flipped was the perfect remedy for that - a feelgood movie that was really warm without being overly sentimental or saccharine. Juli Baker (Madeline Carroll) has had a crush on neighbour Bryce Loski (Callan McAuliffe) since infancy - but as she grows up and becomes wiser she comes to see his faults more clearly. In the meantime Bryce, who started out disliking Juli's attentions begins to like her, and grow attracted to her. With roles reversed, Bryce has to learn to be more courageous and be a better person as both Juli's and Bryce's families try to smooth over a kind of cold war that exists between them. Rob Reiner, coming off a hit with The Bucket List, was just about to lose his touch - but don't let that prejudice your view of Flipped. It's a genuinely good movie - and if you're looking for something the whole family can enjoy, or just a great coming of age romance, this is one that has a lot of heart in it. It's not by the numbers - every scene and character has been carefully worked out. Give it a chance.

8/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/30/Ant-Man_and_the_Wasp_Quantumania_poster.jpg
By http://www.impawards.com/2023/antman_and_the_wasp_quantumania_ver4.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72090715

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania - (2023)

To Marvel : I know you want to try and squeeze in more and more to try and top the previous films that have been part of this universe. Trouble is, they're already stuffed with far too much. We need better stories and characters. We need careful consideration payed to what you want audiences to feel other than shock and awe at what's onscreen at any one time. This atomic bomb full of glitter, luminescence, gold, silver and multi-colored crystals is a meaningless, by-the-numbers mess that proves these films are heading in the wrong direction. It's cinematic madness. A movie is more than the sum of it's art design and computer-generated imagery, and audiences will feel empty if that's all you give them. It's like going to a restaurant and getting a plateful of chocolate and nothing else. I can't get through many more of these.

4/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1a/Triumph_des_Willens_poster.jpg/320px-Triumph_des_Willens_poster.jpg
By Erich Ludwig Stahl (1887–1943) - https://www.ushmm.org/propaganda/archive/poster-triumph-will/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116438048

Triumph of the Will - (1935)

Here's what I wrote on letterboxd in my misery after watching Triumph of the Will yesterday : "So many fellow film buffs have seen this and either simply logged it or rated it that I found it necessary to do likewise so as to be steeped in all manner of documentary filmmaking. What did I find, personally? Mind-numbing order, monotonous rhythmic stomping of boots, terrifying portents of doom with the advance knowledge we have and meaningless cries and calls for "strength, unity, brotherhood and peace" - it was a frightening, sad attempt at the formulation of a new empire in the model of the old Roman one. The shouts and cries echo in my ears, and the endless marching made me nauseous. I can't rate this - but I've seen it, and that's enough."

No rating

At the time I was thinking about how strange it was, watching Triumph of the Will and Flipped together - what a weird double feature that would make at the movies.

https://i.postimg.cc/HnXtHm4F/double-feature.jpg

[Takoma11]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/No-one-will-save-you-poster.jpg
By Hulu - IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74754690

No One Will Save You - (2023)

There are a few surprises in store for those who watch No One Will Save You - chief among them the tone of the movie, which takes this alien invasion/abduction movie in a more playful direction than I was expecting. It's not without terror, horror and suspense - there are bucketloads of that - but it's not big on documentary-like realism. Secondly, the fact that it's dialogue free - which at times for me was too much of a distraction. There are those who complain that 'one-shot' movies rely too much on that one gimmick - but the same held true for me in this, with all the various instances where you'd expect dialogue twisted and contorted into instances where it never happens. I was always too aware of it. All that out of the way though - it was a gripping, compelling ride which I couldn't tear my eyes away from. Brian Duffield has some imagination, and you'll see how various sci-fi alien abduction tropes have been combined in novel ways - there's not much that's particularly new, but all-up the utilization of ideas and Duffield's methods make for an entertaining movie night. Booksmart's Kaitlyn Dever also deserves praise for carrying an entire feature film without one spoken line - an enormous challenge. A lot of fun this - fast paced in a manner that never lets up, and full of surprises.

7/10

I JUST finished watching this one. I think my response was a tad bit less positive than yours, but I agree that it manages to take things in some surprising directions and shows some good flair for imagination.

[Allaby]

Street Trash (1987) Street Trash relies on shock value and trying to be offensive and gross just for the sake of it. The story doesn't work very well and the acting is pretty bad. The score and cinematography are better than expected but overall this film is not very entertaining or very good. 2.5

[PHOENIX74]

I JUST finished watching this one. I think my response was a tad bit less positive than yours, but I agree that it manages to take things in some surprising directions and shows some good flair for imagination.

I look forward to reading your thoughts about it. I thought it definitely had a few major flaws, but I based my overall enthusiasm on the fact that once it got rolling I couldn't stop watching, even for a moment. It'll be interesting to see where it lands when 2023 is summed up early next year.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYWVmZjNkOWQtZmI1MC00NDA4LWJjN2ItZTFmMGI0NGFkNmNhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTY5Nzc4MDY@._V1_.jpg



3.5

[skizzerflake]

Triumph of the Will - (1935)

Here's what I wrote on letterboxd in my misery after watching Triumph of the Will yesterday : "So many fellow film buffs have seen this and either simply logged it or rated it that I found it necessary to do likewise so as to be steeped in all manner of documentary filmmaking. What did I find, personally? Mind-numbing order, monotonous rhythmic stomping of boots, terrifying portents of doom with the advance knowledge we have and meaningless cries and calls for "strength, unity, brotherhood and peace" - it was a frightening, sad attempt at the formulation of a new empire in the model of the old Roman one. The shouts and cries echo in my ears, and the endless marching made me nauseous. I can't rate this - but I've seen it, and that's enough."

No rating

At the time I was thinking about how strange it was, watching Triumph of the Will and Flipped together - what a weird double feature that would make at the movies.

https://i.postimg.cc/HnXtHm4F/double-feature.jpg

Triumph of the Will is definitely the creepiest movie I've ever seen, far surpassing any horror movie, mainly because it's real, not a monster fantasy or mythical war. I need to watch it again some time, just to make sure that it's as weird as I recall.

One of my way-back college professors, teaching history, was a guy who had been in the Hitler Youth in Germany back then. He saw all that sh*t up close and personal as a teenager and said that something people miss is that it had to be more fun to be in the party than to be anybody else in Germany at that time. By the time he got in the real shooting war, the scales were off his eyes and he found a way to surrender and spend the duration in a POW camp, but his insights into life in that world were chilling.

[PHOENIX74]

Triumph of the Will is definitely the creepiest movie I've ever seen, far surpassing any horror movie, mainly because it's real, not a monster fantasy or mythical war. I need to watch it again some time, just to make sure that it's as weird as I recall.

One of my way-back college professors, teaching history, was a guy who had been in the Hitler Youth in Germany back then. He saw all that sh*t up close and personal as a teenager and said that something people miss is that it had to be more fun to be in the party than to be anybody else in Germany at that time. By the time he got in the real shooting war, the scales were off his eyes and he found a way to surrender and spend the duration in a POW camp, but his insights into life in that world were chilling.

I've been told a story as well, by someone who was there during those years - a kid at the time, who was called up during the last years of the war to a Hitler Youth/Youth Brigade kind of thing. His mother was actually overjoyed - not because of any loyalty to the party, but because he'd be fed and clothed. During those tough years, she could hardly feed her family or provide for them. He'd had a sister born around that time, and she died due to the effects of malnutrition. It goes to show that a person's feeling about participating in all this could be due to circumstance as much as ideology.

[Fabulous]

Darling (1965)

3.5

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/56znlTKexXwzeAcII5wqAANQiRY.jpg

[Marco]

Didn't know that about Heath Ledger and Cornish, not that it matters. The film itself was so-so in my view.

[Marco]

I thought Ledger was brilliant in this movie.

I agree, both played difficult parts that didn't lend the characters to sympathise, the point I suppose.

[xSookieStackhouse]

rating_5 huge fan of saw movie trilogy <3. loved the storyline and loved the gore so much :love: im so happy that amanda is back shes one of my favorites :) and theres post credit scene also https://imgix.hoyts.com.au/movies/posters/sawx-tsr-online-poster.jpg
rating_5 loved gemma chan from eternals shes did amazing job and loved the storyline and loved the casting and the action scenes and it reminds me of A.I movie with jude law
https://lumiere-a.akamaihd.net/v1/images/au_movies_20cs_thecreator_payoff_incinemasseptember_e02de595.jpeg

[Takoma11]

Street Trash (1987) Street Trash relies on shock value and trying to be offensive and gross just for the sake of it. The story doesn't work very well and the acting is pretty bad. The score and cinematography are better than expected but overall this film is not very entertaining or very good. 2.5

Ages ago I watched Street Trash and rated it an 8/10. I'm interested to go back for a rewatch to remember why I liked it so much.

[chawhee]

Smile (2022)
https://justformoviefreaks.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Smile-2022-Movie-Review-India.jpg
3
I think I have seen mostly good reviews of this movie here, and I really enjoyed it. It emotionally goes deeper into the subject matter than most horror movies. However...

the ending still consists of smart characters acting dumb, which dropped the rating for me. The tall lanky monster at the end brought back visions of Conjuring and It Follows which definitely freaked me out though.

[Tugg]

To me, those smiles were so creepy and scary. They were the central idea and axis on which the whole movie was based.

[Allaby]

Macumba sexual (1983) I enjoyed this. It's beautifully filmed, stylish, and sensual with a dreamy feel to it. The story is the weakest part, but it didn't really matter because the film is so compelling and seductive. 4

[Nausicaä]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f8/Cassandro_film_poster.png/220px-Cassandro_film_poster.png

3.5

SF = Z


https://64.media.tumblr.com/1fa2f0371e294449ad7a1daf32220db3/56c55584ee743ae3-d8/s640x960/fa3980e13536be2ec5e53383ededb94f90b02a9b.gif



[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

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMDM0Nzc2NjYtMDYzZS00MDA5LWFkNWUtOGExZGNjN2NhZGFiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTUyNjc3NDQ4._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg


3.5

[Act III]

95342

High Society (1956)

Not as good as Guys and Dolls. Has Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong to accompany Sinatra although Sinatra doesn't play in the house band. He's a reporter for Spy magazine, hired to write a piece on the main character Tracy Lords, but I didn't catch what she was famous for. Sort of a mediocre film with a solid story. The music is mediocre, not trying too hard. No problems with the content.

6/10

[McConnaughay]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/77/With_the_zohan.jpg/220px-With_the_zohan.jpg
It was about as stupid as I remembered. I did have fun with a couple of the gags here and there though.

[WHITBISSELL!]

https://media0.giphy.com/media/3k3SdWm5T159ds1eQh/giphy.gif
https://media2.giphy.com/media/AgNvzDJykrj3Uew9G7/giphy.gif

Guy Ritchie's The Covenant - First thing you should know about this going in is that it's not based on a true story. You would think it is. I thought so at first. But turns out it's a product of director Guy Ritchie's imagination. Along with Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies. And I think they do a fine job with the screenplay. It's more grounded with none of the stylistic flourishes that usually indicate a Ritchie production.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Special Forces Master Sergeant John Kinley. During a tour in Afghanistan Kinley, along with his unit and his interpreter Ahmed Abdullah (Dar Salim) discover a hidden cache of arms and explosives at an abandoned mine. Alerted by one of the workers a heavily armed group of Taliban descend on their location. They wipe out Kinley's entire unit leaving only he and his interpreter alive. The two men are forced to shoot their way out and return to their base on foot. Kinley is eventually wounded and Ahmed ends up having to haul him over mountainous terrain for several days. When Kinley finally comes to he's been evacuated and has no recollection of what happened. It's only after weeks have passed that he learns the fate of the man who saved his life. Ahmed and his family are still in Afghanistan and in hiding. He's considered a high value target and the Taliban are going to great lengths to capture and kill him. Kinley tries for weeks to swim through an ocean of bureaucratic red tape to get Ahmed and his family visas. He finally comes to the realization that if he is to get them out of Afghanistan he will have to be the one to go there and do it.Even knowing that this is a work of fiction it's still a white knuckle experience. The whole "search and rescue in hostile territory against overwhelming odds" has been done before of course but Ritchie does a very effective and mesmerizing job of drawing you in.

80/100

[Marco]

Boiling Point (2021)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/18/Boiling_Point_poster.jpg/330px-Boiling_Point_poster.jpg
Stephen Graham plays a talented chef who is struggling financially and personally to keep his head above water in a high end eatery. This is quite insular due to the nature of getting across the pressure and demands of a man trying to do the right thing but with pressures on all sides. Graham is the main interest and acts wonderfully...also a kindness and vulnerability in his part that comes across well. Probably the most underrated actor un the UK now. See his work in "The Virtues" a mini series.

3.5

[Act III]

95345

The Trouble With Girls (1969)

Not a great movie. The story, the songs and everything hold it all together to make it a movie but nothing there to get excited about or mention. Don't care to see this one a second time.

5/10

[Gideon58]

Tracy Lord isn't really famous. She's just a wild-living socialite from an important family whose every move makes the front pages...sort of a 1950's version of Kim Kardashian.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMGI5ZjUyNGQtODEwMi00ZmNlLWFjOTQtMWI4ZTQyZTAzZTcyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjc1NTYyMjg@._V1_.jpg


1st Rewatch...A nearly forgotten dark horse from a very good year at the movies. This 1982 comic mystery about an aging playwright's plan to revitalize his career is the film version of one of the longest running plays in Broadway history that was written by Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby), who collaborated on the crisp and intelligent screenplay with Jay Presson Allen that requires complete attention. Highly theatrical performances from the leads (with an especially eye-opening turn from Christopher Reeve) and Sidney Lumet's accomplished polish from the director's chair, this one is still a winner that nobody saw back in '82. 4

[WHITBISSELL!]

... this one is still a winner that nobody saw back in '82. rating_4I did.

[Raven73]

Howl's Moving Castle
8/10.
Wow. Weird but amazing and beautiful. I want to see more from this writer/director.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTY1OTg0MjE3MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTUxMTkyMQ@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/37/Bean_movie_poster.jpg
By [1], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4734680

Bean - (1997)

When Mr. Bean arrived on television in 1990 I knew it was something special - but as with all things special these days, it's success would be exploited to the full, and eventually the genius would wear thin. Still, I'm often surprised by the flak this initial cinematic adventure has received over the years. I think it's because your enjoyment of it depends on so many varying factors - being neither British nor American helps give a better perspective of the British Bean's childlike appreciation for landing in a place that's culturally so different. Also, I think being on the bandwagon from the start helps - I'd hate to be getting to know what this is while watching the film. I say all this because even as I watched it yesterday, I laughed long and hard during the entire movie. Rowan Atkinson still had full control of the character - an adult child that the series implied fell to Earth as is. A film that has given me so much joy over the years I have to rate highly, but I do so with the knowledge that many hate this movie - I know it's not perfect, but for me it has a long laundry list of hilarious moments that at times even outdo some of the initial series' biggest laughs. I don't mind that some have been recycled. Taking Mr. Bean from short skits to a full-length feature was a tall order - and really the film's length should have been closer to 65 minutes (it really ends after 65, then keeps going past the requisite climax out of feature-length necessity), but I'm willing to cut something this funny so much slack.

8/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/87/Mr_beans_holiday_ver7.jpg
By http://impawards.com/2007/mr_beans_holiday_ver7.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24105997

Mr. Bean's Holiday - (2007)

The second Mr. Bean film was an out-and-out disappointment - the entire format that allowed the character so many of his unusual moments was gone, and the character's attributes - his selfishness, occasional malevolence and general childish attitude were diluted. The entire film feels flat, and lacks the inspiration previous incarnations had in spades. In this he's off to France on a holiday after winning a raffle, and the laugh-free set-up and opening scenes give the audience a taste of what's to come. Occasionally, we'll see a small glimpse and situation that's better - but these moments are isolated and rare. This movie was considered an improvement over the first as far as critics were concerned, and that really surprises me. It convinces me that many people never really understood why the character was so original and funny - perhaps you really needed to have been onboard from the very beginning all those years ago. I did like his old-lady/mother disguise near the end - and wish it had of been part of a real Mr. Bean movie, and not squeezed (along with the character) into such a conventional comedy.

https://media.tenor.com/-yxiVqbOVQ8AAAAM/mr-bean-bean.gif

4/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Johnny_English_movie.jpg
By May be found at the following website: http://www.moviepostersdirect.co.uk/uploads/images_products_large/4956.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=998648

Johnny English - (2003)

Rowan Atkinson's other comedic character was less brilliantly original than Mr. Bean - spy spoofs were a dime a dozen by the time he had Johnny English up and running. The movies often stole from the Austin Powers films. Here he's stopping French prison owner Pascal Sauvage (John Malkovich) from enacting a scheme whereupon he ascends to England's throne and turns all of Britain into a World prison colony. A funny moment here and there - Johnny English is at it's best when we find the titular secret agent in incredibly embarrassing situations. The character's desire to be suave wears thin after a while, and I find myself wishing he'd be more wise to his limitations - but I guess that's the whole idea of the character. Oh, and Natalie Imbruglia - we're sorry. That's our bad. I'm not a huge fan of the character or this movie, but it's okay and quite watchable.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cb/Dudleydo-rightmovieposter.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5993033

Dudley Do-Right - (1999)

Wow - okay. Nobody should ever watch Dudley Do-Right. It has the feel of a film that was never even meant to be watched. Based on the Dudley Do-Right cartoons, it tries to bring a sense of "living cartoon" to all it does, but ultimately ends up just making every scene so bizarre that funny moments are really hard to find or fathom. Eric Idle and Alfred Molina shame themselves. Nothing works. There's a lot of sparkle to the $70 million production, but all of it seems terribly misplaced - and only Brendan Fraser can hold his head high. Embarrassingly not funny, with an insanely chaotic and meaningless plot, it has the feel of a fireworks factory on fire - explosively disastrous.

3/10

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMzQ5ZDZhZDItZTNmZi00MWQ0LWJlNDUtZTE4ZWJmODNlM2Y3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMDA4NzMyOA@@._V1_.jpg


2nd Rewatch...Steven Spielberg crushed it here, accomplishing something that many, myself included , thought could not be done...improving on the 1961 film version of the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical that won ten Oscars, including Best Picture, but he did just that. First of all, he didn't just try to reproduce the '61 film, he went back to the 1957 Broadway musical and returned certain scenes and musical numbers to their original places in the libretto. Second, he actually hired Latino actors to play the Sharks and allowed screenwriter Tony Kushner to pepper the dialogue with enough Spanish to make their characters more authentic. Then he hired four actors for the leading roles who could actually sing. I had minor issues with a couple of musical numbers in terms of choreography, but Justin Peck knocked it out of the park with "America" and the dance at the gym. As I said in my original review of the film, Mr. Spielberg, we're not worthy. 4.5

[Captain Steel]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/77/With_the_zohan.jpg/220px-With_the_zohan.jpg
It was about as stupid as I remembered. I did have fun with a couple of the gags here and there though.

I saw this years ago, but couldn't remember who played the lead role... first I thought it was Sacha Baron Cohen, then I thought it was Ben Stiller. But... of course it was Adam.

[Nausicaä]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/eb/Infinity_Pool_poster2.jpg/220px-Infinity_Pool_poster2.jpg

3

SF = Z


https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExN2E2cG56bzNtbGwzMG1jM2M3aXprdnVwZ2hqOXBhMnZlMjY1c2hzcSZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfY nlfaWQmY3Q9cw/JZFipnMHADuW4eywwO/giphy.gif



[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

[Fabulous]

Safety Last! (1923)

3.5

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/3zo6ZONR4Mth2nWFbQK9dhCWbVz.jpg

[McConnaughay]

I saw this years ago, but couldn't remember who played the lead role... first I thought it was Sacha Baron Cohen, then I thought it was Ben Stiller. But... of course it was Adam.
It does feel like a film that Sacha Baron Cohen would be in before Adam Sandler. Adam Sandler has a lot of goofy movies certain, but usually not goofy in this particular way.

[Act III]

95353

Star Wars (1977)

Classic.

10/10

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZmExNmEwYWItYmQzOS00YjA5LTk2MjktZjEyZDE1Y2QxNjA1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQxNzMzNDI@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg


2nd Rewatch...Quentin Tarantino put himself on the map with this relentlessly bloody thriller about the robbery of a jewelry store that goes horribly wrong but the viewer witnesses everything but the crime itself. We meet the players, are introduced to the bloody aftermath of what happened and then get backstory on how these criminal misfits get together. Love Michael Madsen's torture of the cop, Tim Roth's memorization of the story to tell in order to get the job and everything that happens with Roth and Keitel. And Steve Buscemi's explosive performance is probably the best of his career. LOVE that opening scene too where the guys are having breakfast because it offers no clue as to what is about to go down. Tarantino changed the art of cinematic storytelling forever with this one. 4.5

[Gideon58]

https://pics.filmaffinity.com/Bus_Stop-974903378-large.jpg


2nd rewatch...For my money, the finest performance of Marilyn Monroe's career that actually earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress Comedy or Musical and should have earned her an Oscar nomination...yeah, I said it. Though it barely resembles the William Inge play it was based on, it has been effectively re-imagined to showcase Marilyn. She plays a 4th rate saloon singer named Cherie who catches the eye of a naive young cowboy named Bo Decker (Don Murray) who falls in love with her on sight and has decided she is going to be his wife whether she likes it or not. This was the first film Marilyn made after spending a year in New York studying with Lee Strasberg at the Actor's Studio and if you watch her work before this film, you can tell the difference. Those of you who believed Marilyn couldn't act need to watch this movie because she's quite good here. Monroe has never been so warm and vulnerable onscreen. Don Murray made an impressive film debut as the nutty young cowboy Bo, a charming performance that earned him an Oscar nomination. Arthur O' Connell, Hope Lange, Betty Field, and Eileen Heckart make the most of their roles too, but this is Marilyn's show. 3.5

[cricket]

Cocaine Bear (2023)

3-

https://64.media.tumblr.com/9c93d39c3d6b62b183857d7a6f2d6077/fe4335a1a60e9361-3a/s400x600/d3fa7f62493edd8ac4682590958ddaa576e274c5.gifv

As a long time fan of bears and cocaine, I had to give it a shot. It was as expected; silly, humorous, and amusing. RIP Ray Liotta.

[Takoma11]

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn3.movieweb.com%2Fi%2Fbackdrop%2FWycrdvWDginCHX4dNpiMQBePEheNo8%2F1200%3A100%2FSm ashed.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=3e2a6727114e7f10a0cae0e39782d999f2e83203bff09b5f39c80f8d4aa73f0b&ipo=images

Smashed, 2012

Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and her husband Charlie (Aaron Paul) are a young couple living a life of functional alcoholism. Waking up to hangovers, making their wobbly way home on bicycles late at night. But for Kate, the “functional” part starts to become more questionable as her drinking spills over in nasty ways into her personal and professional lives outside of the bar.

Great cast, and great lead performance from Winstead, but pretty thin overall.

3.5

Full review (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2414973#post2414973)

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/5137mySXnIL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg

1st Rewatch...This mesmerizing psychological thriller is my favorite Francis Ford Coppola film and it features my favorite Gene Hackman performance. Sandwiched between his two Godfather epics, Coppola triumphs with this sizzling suspense thriller about a surveillance expert who has let his work become his life and suffers a crisis of conscience regarding his latest assignment. This film lets the viewer into a world we know so little about through one of cinema's most enigmatic characters, beautifully brought to life by Gene Hackman. I love this character because even though he never displays a shred of anything resembling ego. he is the best at what he does and knowing this is his entire reason for living. Love that scene at the party in the office where the obnoxious Allen Garfield character is trying to get him to spill the beans about his work and trying to persuade him to partner with him at the same time. And the final five minutes of this film are absolutely bone-chilling. Hackman should have won his second Oscar for this performance and wasn't even nominated. A classic that I enjoyed more the second time than the first. 4.5

[GulfportDoc]

95370

Jules (2023)

Gideon recommended this film several days ago, which compelled me to look it up for a watch. It’s been quite a little while since I’ve been so charmed by a movie! The picture stars the great Ben Kingsley, the veteran Harriet Samson Harris, and Jane Curtain.

Milton (Kingsley) is an old widower who lives alone in a nice vintage home in an old suburban New Jersey area. He’s content with his solitude, but does frequently find things that he feels need done in his town, of which he routinely brings up in the public comment portion of the city council meetings. He tends to harp on the same issues, and the council accepts him as a well meaning but slightly kooky 79 year old. Similarly Sandy (Harris), an old lady who uses a more sugary approach, typically brings up projects that would benefit the community.

One night Milton is awakened by the sound of an object crashing into his back yard azalea patch. He shrugs it off, but the next day he is shocked to see that a medium sized flying saucer has crashed partly imbedded in the ground. Still later he discovers a small alien who had crawled out of the wreck and is laying unconscious on the ground. He immediately calls the authorities to report the incident, but he is brushed off as a delusional senior. He likewise mentions it at a city council meeting, but they too believe he’s just being senile. Meanwhile Milton takes the small alien into his home and feeds it with water and apples. The alien recovers and is content to perch on the couch, never uttering a sound.

Along the way Milton meets Sandy, who offers to drive him home from a meeting. Milton invites her in to his house, where Sandy is utterly shocked to see the strange small human-like alien sitting there. Sandy is gradually taken into confidence, and she too accepts the situation and starts to fuss over the alien. Another citizen, Joyce (Curtain), noses around, and is eventually brought into their tight circle, where they aim to keep the ship and alien a secret.

That forms the basis for the rest of the story. There are a couple of close calls with a government agency as with Milton’s overly protective daughter, while the suspense and twists keep us glued to the action up to its satisfying if slightly mystifying end.

Kingsley shows in spades why he is one of the very elite actors of the 20th/21st Centuries. His manor, his mid American accent, his expressions make one feel like they’re watching the real guy in life. One would hope he’s considered at awards time. So too does Harris wow us with her personality and technique. I haven’t previously seen much of her career (she’s done much stage work), but I’ll certainly be looking for her in future. Curtain’s character’s writing was a little hit and miss, but she too brings in her role in a journeyman’s fashion.

Sci-Fi comedy is one of the trickiest style of movies to be convincing. They tend to be either too goofy or painfully unrealistic. Jules checks all the boxes. If one wants to see how that’s done, this picture is on the very top of the heap to experience.

Doc’s rating: 10/10

[Takoma11]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/5137mySXnIL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg

1st Rewatch...This mesmerizing psychological thriller is my favorite Francis Ford Coppola film and it features my favorite Gene Hackman performance. Sandwiched between his two Godfather epics, Coppola triumphs with this sizzling suspense thriller about a surveillance expert who has let his work become his life and suffers a crisis of conscience regarding his latest assignment. This film lets the viewer into a world we know so little about through one of cinema's most enigmatic characters, beautifully brought to life by Gene Hackman. I love this character because even though he never displays a shred of anything resembling ego. he is the best at what he does and knowing this is his entire reason for living. Love that scene at the party in the office where the obnoxious Allen Garfield character is trying to get him to spill the beans about his work and trying to persuade him to partner with him at the same time. And the final five minutes of this film are absolutely bone-chilling. Hackman should have won his second Oscar for this performance and wasn't even nominated. A classic that I enjoyed more the second time than the first. 4.5

I love The Conversation and have some different fond memories of it.

One of my parents' friends did sound work on the film, and it was the first DVD my family ever owned.

And then during the Pandemic, my sister and I co-taught an online class about thrillers (watching and analyzing one film each week) and our students really loved this one.

[GulfportDoc]

[The Conversation, 1974]

1st Rewatch...This mesmerizing psychological thriller is my favorite Francis Ford Coppola film and it features my favorite Gene Hackman performance. Sandwiched between his two Godfather epics, Coppola triumphs with this sizzling suspense thriller about a surveillance expert who has let his work become his life and suffers a crisis of conscience regarding his latest assignment. This film lets the viewer into a world we know so little about through one of cinema's most enigmatic characters, beautifully brought to life by Gene Hackman. I love this character because even though he never displays a shred of anything resembling ego. he is the best at what he does and knowing this is his entire reason for living. Love that scene at the party in the office where the obnoxious Allen Garfield character is trying to get him to spill the beans about his work and trying to persuade him to partner with him at the same time. And the final five minutes of this film are absolutely bone-chilling. Hackman should have won his second Oscar for this performance and wasn't even nominated. A classic that I enjoyed more the second time than the first. rating_4_5
I couldn't agree more with your points. The Conversation is one of my favorite all time films. The story was innovative and well written, and the acting was first rate. It strikes a mood that never lets one out of its grip. A masterpiece.

[Gideon58]

95370

Jules (2023)

Gideon recommended this film several days ago, which compelled me to look it up for a watch. It’s been quite a little while since I’ve been so charmed by a movie! The picture stars the great Ben Kingsley, the veteran Harriet Samson Harris, and Jane Curtain.

Milton (Kingsley) is an old widower who lives alone in a nice vintage home in an old suburban New Jersey area. He’s content with his solitude, but does frequently find things that he feels need done in his town, of which he routinely brings up in the public comment portion of the city council meetings. He tends to harp on the same issues, and the council accepts him as a well meaning but slightly kooky 79 year old. Similarly Sandy (Harris), an old lady who uses a more sugary approach, typically brings up projects that would benefit the community.

One night Milton is awakened by the sound of an object crashing into his back yard azalea patch. He shrugs it off, but the next day he is shocked to see that a medium sized flying saucer has crashed partly imbedded in the ground. Still later he discovers a small alien who had crawled out of the wreck and is laying unconscious on the ground. He immediately calls the authorities to report the incident, but he is brushed off as a delusional senior. He likewise mentions it at a city council meeting, but they too believe he’s just being senile. Meanwhile Milton takes the small alien into his home and feeds it with water and apples. The alien recovers and is content to perch on the couch, never uttering a sound.

Along the way Milton meets Sandy, who offers to drive him home from a meeting. Milton invites her in to his house, where Sandy is utterly shocked to see the strange small human-like alien sitting there. Sandy is gradually taken into confidence, and she too accepts the situation and starts to fuss over the alien. Another citizen, Joyce (Curtain), noses around, and is eventually brought into their tight circle, where they aim to keep the ship and alien a secret.

That forms the basis for the rest of the story. There are a couple of close calls with a government agency as with Milton’s overly protective daughter, while the suspense and twists keep us glued to the action up to its satisfying if slightly mystifying end.

Kingsley shows in spades why he is one of the very elite actors of the 20th/21st Centuries. His manor, his mid American accent, his expressions make one feel like they’re watching the real guy in life. One would hope he’s considered at awards time. So too does Harris wow us with her personality and technique. I haven’t previously seen much of her career (she’s done much stage work), but I’ll certainly be looking for her in future. Curtain’s character’s writing was a little hit and miss, but she too brings in her role in a journeyman’s fashion.

Sci-Fi comedy is one of the trickiest style of movies to be convincing. They tend to be either too goofy or painfully unrealistic. Jules checks all the boxes. If one wants to see how that’s done, this picture is on the very top of the heap to experience.

Doc’s rating: 10/10


So glad you enjoyed this movie as much as I did and yes, I would love to see Kingsley get some award love for it, Harris as well.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTU4YWE5NzMtZmFlYS00MjQwLTk0YzctZjJhMGZmZGYwNTA3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjc1NTYyMjg@._V1_.jpg


Umpteenth Rewatch...This 1962 Best Picture nominee is one of the strongest stage to screen adaptations of a musical ever and a lot of credit has to go to Frank Sinatra, who had the good sense to turn down the role of Harold Hill when it was offered to him, so that the iconic Robert Preston could reprise his Tony-Award winning role as a charismatic con man who convinces a small town that they need a boys band. Preston lights up the screen and is well matched by the enchanting Shirley Jones as Marian Paroo, the local librarian who initially wants to expose him. Paul Ford, Hermione Gingold, and Buddy Hackett shine in supporting roles and you can't beat that Meredith Wilson Score. There is also some spectacular choreogrphy by Onna White (the "Marian the Librarian" number is brilliant). Sixty-one years after its release, this movie is just as entertaining now as it was then. 4.5

[SpelingError]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTU4YWE5NzMtZmFlYS00MjQwLTk0YzctZjJhMGZmZGYwNTA3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjc1NTYyMjg@._V1_.jpg


Umpteenth Rewatch...This 1962 Best Picture nominee is one of the strongest stage to screen adaptations of a musical ever and a lot of credit has to go to Frank Sinatra, who had the good sense to turn down the role of Harold Hill when it was offered to him, so that the iconic Robert Preston could reprise his Tony-Award winning role as a charismatic con man who convinces a small town that they need a boys band. Preston lights up the screen and is well matched by the enchanting Shirley Jones as Marian Paroo, the local librarian who initially wants to expose him. Paul Ford, Hermione Gingold, and Buddy Hackett shine in supporting roles and you can't beat that Meredith Wilson Score. There is also some spectacular choreogrphy by Onna White (the "Marian the Librarian" number is brilliant). Sixty-one years after its release, this movie is just as entertaining now as it was then. 4.5
That one would rank pretty high amongst my favorite musicals.

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e2/Pig_poster.jpeg
By IMP Awards / 2021 Movie Poster Gallery / Pig Poster (#2 of 2), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67976654

Pig - (2021)

Spoilerish - about a film that's great to see blind

Pig is something like a modern day action movie with absolutely no action in it - and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order, because character Rob Feld (Nicolas Cage) sorts out his problems in this without resorting to violence. That's a welcome change. That's not to say violence isn't inflicted on him - it is - but imagine my surprise when, as I'm thinking "Oh that villain! - Kick his posterior Rob!" Rob instead cooks him a nice meal. That might not make sense to those who haven't seen the film - but it will if you do. Rob has his beloved truffle-hunting pig stolen from him, and if that doesn't immediately break your heart you probably aren't a pet person. It forces Rob to return from self-imposed exile in the wilderness with buyer Amir (Alex Wolff), and revisit his past in the city. When the movie ended I felt really satisfied with the journey - both main characters are fully fleshed out, and the film as a whole has this modern-day undercurrent of dissatisfaction with our shallow, pretentious dog-eat-dog, or pig-eat-pig, lives. A great film about love and loss, with an extra-special performance from Cage who shows he can play meditative as well as crazy.

8/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/60/Theholidayposter.jpg
By Impawards.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7707150

The Holiday - (2006)

I don't watch a heap of romantic comedies (and look, I could probably just call this a romance film, because it doesn't have any more or less comedy in it than the average drama) but when I do the measure of how good it was can actually be scientifically measured by how many times I check to see how much running time is left. I only checked around four times with The Holiday - so it did have it's good points. Every actor in this gives 110%, so as far as Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black are concerned - full marks. Overall - I think more attention could have been paid to how characters Iris (Winslet) and Amanda (Diaz) overcome the long distance problems their new 'on holiday' loves have provided them, but the film is already a little on the long side. I don't have too many complaints, other than the fact that there's no sexual chemistry on display - no "can hardly keep these two apart" physicality there. Iris and Amanda are really complete characters though, and the film as a whole, once it gets going, is okay and very watchable. Nice to see an actor like Black play against type in a romance.

6/10

[Fabulous]

Godzilla (1954)

4

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/fN4DdXvXyqiazN4hkeoKdjZuK6O.jpg

[iluv2viddyfilms]

Le Mans - A+
Carnival of Souls - A-
In Which We Serve - B

[PHOENIX74]

2nd Rewatch...Quentin Tarantino put himself on the map with this relentlessly bloody thriller about the robbery of a jewelry store that goes horribly wrong but the viewer witnesses everything but the crime itself. We meet the players, are introduced to the bloody aftermath of what happened and then get backstory on how these criminal misfits get together. Love Michael Madsen's torture of the cop, Tim Roth's memorization of the story to tell in order to get the job and everything that happens with Roth and Keitel. And Steve Buscemi's explosive performance is probably the best of his career. LOVE that opening scene too where the guys are having breakfast because it offers no clue as to what is about to go down. Tarantino changed the art of cinematic storytelling forever with this one. 4.5

Reservoir Dogs is up in my Top 10 as far as favourite films are concerned. If I were a filmmaker, this is the film I would have liked to have made.


1st Rewatch...This mesmerizing psychological thriller is my favorite Francis Ford Coppola film and it features my favorite Gene Hackman performance. Sandwiched between his two Godfather epics, Coppola triumphs with this sizzling suspense thriller about a surveillance expert who has let his work become his life and suffers a crisis of conscience regarding his latest assignment. This film lets the viewer into a world we know so little about through one of cinema's most enigmatic characters, beautifully brought to life by Gene Hackman. I love this character because even though he never displays a shred of anything resembling ego. he is the best at what he does and knowing this is his entire reason for living. Love that scene at the party in the office where the obnoxious Allen Garfield character is trying to get him to spill the beans about his work and trying to persuade him to partner with him at the same time. And the final five minutes of this film are absolutely bone-chilling. Hackman should have won his second Oscar for this performance and wasn't even nominated. A classic that I enjoyed more the second time than the first. 4.5

And The Conversation is Top 25/50, one of the all-time greats.

[Act III]

95372

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Classic.

I remember this on Betamax and the Yoda scenes, brings it all into focus again. Funny how things like this reactivate old memories.

10/10

[Stirchley]

95377
95378
95379

Three very good movies.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTc5MDU1NzcyN15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMDA0ODYyNA@@._V1_.jpg


4

[Thief]

HALLOWEEN ENDS
(2022, Green)

https://i.imgur.com/kABP08a.jpg


"You're just a man in a Halloween mask. What are you gonna do now?"



That new shape is kind of what Green presents in this film, as he introduces Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a nerdy teen that is dealing with his own traumas and inner demons. Meanwhile, Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is trying to rebuild her life along with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) after the events from Michael Myers' last killing spree.

I applaud Green and Co. for having a defined vision and story arc, and sticking to it. That doesn't mean it was well executed all the way, or make it any less muddled, but I have more respect for that than for what had been done with the franchise before where every film seemed to reinvent the rules and sources of this evil, from evil corporations to Druid cults. Here, it's "just a man in a Halloween mask".

Grade: 2


Full review on my Movie Loot (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2415156#post2415156)

[Thief]

A GIRL ALONE IN A HOUSE
(2018, Jones)

https://i.imgur.com/qObyNAs.png


"Johnnie Marat is dead. I killed him."



A Girl Alone in a House follows Charlotte (Kitzia Jimenez), a young woman still reeling from an attack some time before. When she's asked to house-sit for a friend during July 4th, Charlotte finds herself again alone in a house, haunted by the memories of the past attack and the possibilities of it reoccurring. But this time, she's more prepared.

Grade: 4


Full review on my Movie Loot (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2415161#post2415161)

[Steve Freeling]

https://images.static-bluray.com/reviews/18800_2_1080p.jpg
The Natural (1984) - Rewatch on 4K Blu-ray rating_5
Returning to a childhood favorite after some years of lapses in rewatches is always interesting. The Natural is no exception. It was every bit the film I remembered seeing for the first time at age 13 and somehow, even better as I picked up on nuances I missed all those years ago. It simply does everything right in terms of acting, storytelling, and musical scoring, and films seldom come more rewarding or emotionally satisfying than this one. In his review of the original 2010 Blu-ray, Martin Liebman of Blu-ray.com correctly called it "an incredible movie of the power of the human spirit and with an honest and important message that says that it's never too late to realize one's dreams as long as the motives are good and the intentions true" that "stands proudly as one of the finest sports films of all time," observing that, "like the best of its genre, it uses sport as but a backdrop for the deeper meaning to be found." As for the UHD, the film's never looked better than it does in Sony's 2160p presentation. Skin tones are natural throughout, the green of the ballpark's grass pops, and detail is stunning to the point that in several shots, you can see every detail of the actors' faces. The Dolby Atmos track is also a juggernaut, with the spoken word generally clear, every ball hit and lightning strike—not to mention a couple of gunshots—as resonant and attention-grabbing as the real thing, and Randy Newman's score as rousing as it ever was. All in all, both the film and the UHD score a home run, and I'll certainly be returning to this one many more times in the future.

[Thief]

WARPAINT
(2020, Jones)

https://i.imgur.com/BLeRIPA.png


"If you can't remember who you hurt, you'll never see us coming."



Warpaint follows a mysterious woman (Kitzia Jimenez) seeking revenge against a man that hurt her. There's something to be said about a 2-minute short that can carry so much inferred story into its short runtime. This is a perfect example of that since you pretty much know everything you need to know about both characters in those 2 minutes.

Grade: 4


Full review on my Movie Loot (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2415172#post2415172)

[Gideon58]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e2/Pig_poster.jpeg
By IMP Awards / 2021 Movie Poster Gallery / Pig Poster (#2 of 2), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67976654

Pig - (2021)

Spoilerish - about a film that's great to see blind

Pig is something like a modern day action movie with absolutely no action in it - and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order, because character Rob Feld (Nicolas Cage) sorts out his problems in this without resorting to violence. That's a welcome change. That's not to say violence isn't inflicted on him - it is - but imagine my surprise when, as I'm thinking "Oh that villain! - Kick his posterior Rob!" Rob instead cooks him a nice meal. That might not make sense to those who haven't seen the film - but it will if you do. Rob has his beloved truffle-hunting pig stolen from him, and if that doesn't immediately break your heart you probably aren't a pet person. It forces Rob to return from self-imposed exile in the wilderness with buyer Amir (Alex Wolff), and revisit his past in the city. When the movie ended I felt really satisfied with the journey - both main characters are fully fleshed out, and the film as a whole has this modern-day undercurrent of dissatisfaction with our shallow, pretentious dog-eat-dog, or pig-eat-pig, lives. A great film about love and loss, with an extra-special performance from Cage who shows he can play meditative as well as crazy.

8/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/60/Theholidayposter.jpg
By Impawards.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7707150

The Holiday - (2006)

I don't watch a heap of romantic comedies (and look, I could probably just call this a romance film, because it doesn't have any more or less comedy in it than the average drama) but when I do the measure of how good it was can actually be scientifically measured by how many times I check to see how much running time is left. I only checked around four times with The Holiday - so it did have it's good points. Every actor in this gives 110%, so as far as Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black are concerned - full marks. Overall - I think more attention could have been paid to how characters Iris (Winslet) and Amanda (Diaz) overcome the long distance problems their new 'on holiday' loves have provided them, but the film is already a little on the long side. I don't have too many complaints, other than the fact that there's no sexual chemistry on display - no "can hardly keep these two apart" physicality there. Iris and Amanda are really complete characters though, and the film as a whole, once it gets going, is okay and very watchable. Nice to see an actor like Black play against type in a romance.

6/10

Glad to see someone else enjoyed Pig. I liked The Holiday, even if Cameron Diaz' character was kind of all over the place.

[Takoma11]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e2/Pig_poster.jpeg
By IMP Awards / 2021 Movie Poster Gallery / Pig Poster (#2 of 2), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67976654

Pig - (2021)

Spoilerish - about a film that's great to see blind

Pig is something like a modern day action movie with absolutely no action in it - and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order, because character Rob Feld (Nicolas Cage) sorts out his problems in this without resorting to violence. That's a welcome change. That's not to say violence isn't inflicted on him - it is - but imagine my surprise when, as I'm thinking "Oh that villain! - Kick his posterior Rob!" Rob instead cooks him a nice meal. That might not make sense to those who haven't seen the film - but it will if you do. Rob has his beloved truffle-hunting pig stolen from him, and if that doesn't immediately break your heart you probably aren't a pet person. It forces Rob to return from self-imposed exile in the wilderness with buyer Amir (Alex Wolff), and revisit his past in the city. When the movie ended I felt really satisfied with the journey - both main characters are fully fleshed out, and the film as a whole has this modern-day undercurrent of dissatisfaction with our shallow, pretentious dog-eat-dog, or pig-eat-pig, lives. A great film about love and loss, with an extra-special performance from Cage who shows he can play meditative as well as crazy.

8/10


I thought Cage was great, and Wolff was quite good as well. (Took me a moment to realize "It's the kid from Hereditary!").

I had a feeling I knew where the film was headed, but it was so lovely and slow and thoughtful that I didn't care, and it still managed to land a few surprises.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTQ0NWE4M2EtOTY2NC00NTdiLWJhYjgtMjQ2ZGE1MzEwNDhmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNjk3NTM2ODg@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg


1.5

[Fabulous]

The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

4

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/6FSs7jMimg1PBYdhZtPNQhtKtEc.jpg

[Act III]

95401

Return of the Jedi (1983)

Classic.

Although less epic and grand than the other two, its the more intimate scenes with Lord Vader and the Emporer that make up for it. This closes the trilogy well and makes you regret that was the end.

10/10

[wositelec]

Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) - 7 / 10

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTYwNTEzNjgyNV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTY2NjEzNA@@._V1_.jpg

[Act III]

95405

The Expendables (2010)

A traditional style action movie. Mercenaries, guns, explosions, fights and plenty of smart cracks. Not many of these sort of movies anymore. What's missing is an ultra huge scene, but there's plenty here to make an action fan happy.

8/10

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/94/The_Creator_2023_poster.jpg
By https://assets.gettyimages.com/bf-boulder-whitelabelbucket-getty-prod/k9fvn99jq3m73fqftb9smgt/v/1123133545/original/CREATOR_1SHT_DIGITAL_376_sRGB_V6.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73799715

The Creator - (2023)

I have a lot of admiration and respect for what The Creator does, framing the topical A.I. debate in relation to the more primal and savage laws of evolution, competition and extinction. It does this by making this film more or less resemble one about a new species, and our antipathy towards what's different similar to a racial issue. In a very believable future, three decades from now, the United States military are on a mission to wipe out all forms of A.I. after the nuclear destruction of L.A. - purportedly carried out by anti-human A.I. entities. Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) is working undercover, close to the spiritual leader and lead architect of all A.I. on Earth, Nirmata, when an overzealous chain of command ends up killing his pregnant wife using NOMAD - a Death Star-like orbiting platform capable of search and destroy missile launches. 10 years later he's called upon again, reluctantly at first, to infiltrate an A.I. base and obliterate a new weapon they're developing which will turn the tide of the war. He agrees more readily when he finds out a woman bearing the exact likeness of his dead wife is working on the weapon. The weapon itself turns out to be a mysterious young boy. I have to say there's not much in this film that I haven't seen many times before - but The Creator is so well thought out and interesting that I didn't care. It's very nice looking at the same time, with modern technology so very pleasing to the eye. It's one of the first science fiction films I've seen where A.I. is seen from a more sympathetic standpoint, and will have you seeing the debate from a quite different angle. Not a movie I'd see many times, but one that's definitely worth seeing.

7.5/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ee/Its_complicated_ver2.jpg
By http://www.impawards.com/2009/its_complicated_ver2.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25477809

It's Complicated - (2009)

Jane Adler (Meryl Streep) and Jake Adler (Alec Baldwin) have been divorced for 10 years when, during their son's graduation ceremony, they start having an affair. It's complicated due to the fact that Jane has just started dating her architect, Adam Schaffer (Steve Martin) and Jake is married to Agness (Lake Bell). I have to admit that this was fun. There are a few riotously funny jokes that pop along when you're least expecting them, and the likes of John Krasinski making the absolute most out of a relatively small part - that of future son-in-law Harley. Streep and Baldwin seem to have been picked to play this from their comfort zones - so Streep does a typical 2000s Streep character and Baldwin does pretty much the same, accentuating their spritely, at times goofy, energy (the same can't be said for Steve Martin however.) It's a movie that had me on it's side for 2 hours, with it's good-natured probing of middle-age relationships and regression. A bit of a surprise for me. It feels like something that was meant to be seen at cinemas on release, liked, and then discarded - never to really be fodder for film buffs and cinephiles - but it's another movie I was happy to see once.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9c/Cruel_intentions_ver1.jpg
By Columbia Pictures - Allposters.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13030408

Cruel Intentions - (1999)

I guess a lot of people look back on their college days with fondness - but it's a fraught time in a person's life that can turn into a nightmare. There's sex, drugs and bad people - a volatile mix. Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe) - step-brother and sister - come from a wealthy family and play with the lives of new, naïve students for sport, or as wagers. When the wicked Sebastian falls in love for the first time in his life, he at once realises that his wayward ways have doomed any path towards happiness that might have been with Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon) - the subject of a wager between the incestuous, evil pair. Cruel Intentions is based on old French novel Les Liaisons dangereuses, which has been adapted to film as Dangerous Liaisons a few times. You need a strong stomach for how icky it's two protagonists are (Sebastian comes of as an antisocial psychotic in the film's first scenes, which always made me question his sudden turnaround) and how icky the film as a whole is - but the great soundtrack and strength of it's ending earns it points with me. This has turned into something of a cult classic.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/24/Ice_Age_Dawn_of_the_Dinosaurs_theatrical_poster.jpg
By The poster art can or could be obtained from 20th Century Fox., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23425833

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - (2009)

These Ice Age animated films are all getting a bit samey for me - but this one does have the requisite amount of funny Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo) moments in it, and that's all I'm asking for really. I think I'm watching the whole series just for that one character. His yearning to be a parent - to the point of adopting three eggs, and seeing everything through even when they bizarrely turn out to be dinosaurs - was a gas, and I liked it. Everything else in the film : eh.

5/10

[Act III]

95407

The Expendables 2 (2012)

Action packed but loses its grip and starts getting into parody terrirory, but thats okay because its done by all the big action stars so it doesn't get bad. This seems to be under the surface like an excuse to have a good time and not take action too seriously since all the biggest stars are in it together. Hopefully though #3 doesnt take this further because I like a good real action movie. Take my statements on #1 and add "all-star" and "light parody" to it.

You'll laugh and be happy to see all of them on the screen together, duking it out.

7/10

[Act III]

I wanted to explain that I'm rating modern action movies against Olympus Has Fallen as that seems to be the best of the modern action films I've seen yet. It wasn't perfect but it was sure damn good.

[harry81]

Last day I watched star wars. Star Wars is my favorite. The Force Awakens. It was the greatest part of star wars for me because of Harrison Ford. I liked his acting and character very much. Moreover, I was amazed by the proffie lightsabers used by the characters. This is what makes this movie more exciting and phenomenal.

[chawhee]

No One Will Save You (2023)
https://i0.wp.com/dibalikcerita.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/no-one-will-save-you-2023-review-e1695876246715.jpeg?fit=930%2C524&ssl=1
3
I really enjoyed the first half of the movie building suspense, but things got a little off the rails once the action picks up. I had similar criticisms of A Quiet Place. The ending drags on a bit too long as well...

[Deschain]

I wanted to explain that I'm rating modern action movies against Olympus Has Fallen as that seems to be the best of the modern action films I've seen yet. It wasn't perfect but it was sure damn good.

Some of my favorite modern action movies:

Mad Max Fury Road
Dredd (2012)
The Raid
The Raid 2
John Wick 1-4

[Steve Freeling]

https://images.static-bluray.com/reviews/26016_4_1080p.jpg
The Untouchables (1987) - Rewatch on 4K Blu-ray rating_5
What can be said that hasn't already? It's a fun and exciting film with a cast of heavyweights doing what they do best—while spewing the legendary David Mamet's immensely quotable ("Never stop fighting 'til the fight is done. Here endeth the lesson." "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way." "Tell your master we must agree to disagree!") dialogue, no less. Costner is the perfect Ness, Connery's Oscar-winning turn as Malone remains one of his best, and De Niro sells Capone as a psychopath with no remorse for his crimes—making the film's good vs. evil battle that much more convincing—and the rest of the cast is also up to par. The UHD is also impressive, with the 2160p transfer destroying the DNR'd and edge-enhanced 2007 Blu-ray—funny to think we once considered that an acceptable transfer—in every area that matters: skin tones are more natural, a natural layer of film grain is present throughout, and there's no shortage of detail in every shot. The Dolby Atmos track is also an impressive upgrade from the 2007 Blu-ray's already-great DTS 6.1 track, with dialogue clear throughout, explosions and gunshots more powerful than ever, and Ennio Morricone's heroic musical score as arresting as ever. Overall, the film itself remains one of the best of its kind—not to mention one of the best of the '80s and this guy's favorite De Palma film—and the UHD is the best possible experience short of seeing it theatrically.
https://cdni.fancaps.net/file/fancaps-movieimages/626574.jpg
The Boy and the Beast (2015) - Rewatch on Blu-ray rating_4_5
Mamoru Hosoda is one hell of a filmmaker. For my money, this man has yet to make a bad film or one that lacks replay value, and The Boy and the Beast is no exception. I've returned to it a couple of times over the years and it remains a fun, at times poignant, and emotionally satisfying film. Hosoda explores themes of loss, family dysfunction, the human condition, the darkness we carry inside and what happens when one lets that darkness consume them, and the inner strength necessary to go on living, effectively combining action, adventure, drama, and humor. Funimation's English dub also remains a great one. Eric Vale and Luci Christian effectively portray Ren/Kyūta, a boy grappling with the loss of his mother, at ages 17 and nine, respectively. John Swasey remains gruff but likable as Kumatetsu, a bear-like beast who raises Ren as his apprentice, Kyūta, for eight years in a world of anthropomorphic animals in which Kumatetsu wishes to earn the title of lord. Bryn Apprill is also excellent as Kaede, a girl who teaches Ren to read and eventually becomes his love interest after he returns to the human world. All the rest, including Ian Sinclair as Tatara, a friend of Kumatetsu's, Alex Organ as Hyakushūbō, who is often the voice of reason when Kyūta and Kumatetsu argue, Sean Hennigan as Iōzen, Kumatetsu's opponent for the title of lord, Austin Tindle and Morgan Berry (different ages) as Ichirōhiko, Iōzen's son with a surprisingly dark secret, Josh Grelle and Brittney Karbowski (also different ages) as Jirōmaru, Iōzen's son who initially bullies Kyūta before becoming friends with him, and Chuck Huber as Ren's father, are also up to par and the dub script is completely natural. Watching it on Studio Canal's Blu-ray—yeah, Funimation's release cost $100 from third-party sellers on Amazon at the time, so I got Studio Canal's for, like, $15 since my Sony UHD player is region-free—is quite an upgrade from how I first saw the film, which was on a smartphone with the volume maxed out because I couldn't hear the actors over my evil sister-in-law—yeah, she's one of those people who let the darkness consume her in the way the film depicts—even with DTS:X 3D Surround Sound turned on. Anyway, the 1080p transfer is a strong one. Studio Canal seems to have licensed Funimation's master as the print used has English credits, and that isn't a bad thing with colors popping and the film's stunning animation presented with the utmost clarity. Studio Canal has chosen to present both Funimation's dub and the original Japanese version in both DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and LPCM 2.0, which is similar to how Japanese Blu-ray releases of anime include a surround track and a stereo track, though one has to question its usefulness with a film like The Boy and the Beast that was made in 5.1 to begin with. In any case, I watched the dub in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, and it's a sonic beast. The opening narration and Masakatsu Takagi's adventurous musical score start the film off with an oomph that remains for the rest of the film. Dialogue is clear throughout, sound effects such as sword clashes and punches are attention-grabbing, and Takagi's score is loud and clear at every turn. Overall, revisiting this one was quite the experience.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZGFiZjRhMTYtZmMzYS00MGEyLWEzN2EtNWMzMjA3OGI0NGZlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTAyODkwOQ@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg


3.5

[Fabulous]

This Happy Breed (1944)

4

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/jn0RBevttgNwgU64hsytIMNGdln.jpg

[skizzerflake]

This is pretty good in a very talky, but quiet, British, reserved way - Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan in The Dig, on Netflix. Set in 1938 in UK, an archeologist begins excavation of the Sutton Hoo site, a treasure trove of dark age Anglo-Saxon artifacts including an entire wooden ship that was buried there. It's sooooo English, done with minimal FX, just acting and props and lots of accents that I don't recognize, various sub-dialects of rural English English. It's full of cloudy, muted colors and quiet, rural scenery of the 1930's..... - IMDB - "There is a lot I can say about this film, but I'll keep it short. If you love simple stories being told in a beautiful and clear manner, and if you like Archaeology, then this is the film for you. All of the actors have done a wonderful job."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZQz0rkNajo

[Act III]

95430

The Expendables 3 (2014)

That was an awesome gritty movie. They layed it on thick with the ending sequences. I would say the best of the three. The amount of action and stunts and expert fighting they crammed into the action scenes is amazing. Not a lot of deep dialogue but the line, "You ffkd up and I'm wearing it." struck a nerve.

9/10

[Gideon58]

https://static1.moviewebimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/no-one-will-save-you-hulu.jpg



3.5

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c5/Fantasia2000_Poster.jpg
By http://www.impawards.com/2000/fantasia_two_thousand_xlg.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2146355

Fantasia 2000 - (1999)

With what I've seen in animation over the years, I have to say that Disney's follow-up to Fantasia didn't quite live up to my expectations. The best segment is, ironically, the one carried over from the previous film - Micky Mouse and his antics in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but one other segment had me glued to the screen - the 1930s New York animation set to George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. The rest is all pretty abstract, with the next notable an animated piece based on "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" by Hans Christian Andersen scored with a Dmitri Shostakovich concerto. There's Daffy Duck as Noah, fire birds, whales and all kinds of imaginative dreamlike imagery - but somehow I expected a little bit more. I'd still go see this in an IMAX theater for the full effect though - which I figure might transform my experience significantly - it's the way it's meant to be seen.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Bill_On_His_Own.jpg
By http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTI2MjUyNjUwOV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTk5Nzc0MQ@@._V1__SX589_SY557_.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47486516

Bill On His Own - (1983)

The last we saw of Bill (Mickey Rooney) in 1981 telemovie Bill he was working at a coffee shop on a college campus after being befriended by novice filmmaker Barry Morrow (Dennis Quaid). In this sequel, a very young Helen Hunt (she was 19 or 20, but already a television veteran!) features as a student named Jenny Wells, who wants to teach Bill the basics of reading, adding and using the telephone - writing up the results for her sociology course. Harry Goz and Quaid return with small roles in this, but it's Mickey Rooney's performance as loveable scamp Bill that makes this tolerable. Hunt is very energetic and is also a commanding presence. At the end of the film we're informed that the real Bill died in 1983, the year this was made and broadcast, which is a bit of a dampener on our fun. Nothing like bursting into the room when we're all happy and saying "He just died."

5/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6c/Ice_Age_Continental_Drift.jpg
By http://www.theatresmoa.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/IceAge.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33070247

Ice Age : Continental Drift - (2012)

I'd just like to say title-wise that in Australia, the Ice Age films are numbered. So, the last one was Ice Age 3 : Dawn of the Dinosaurs and this one Ice Age 4 : Continental Drift. Anyway - we're getting far, far too many characters now. They're accruing as we go along - remember that in the first Ice Age we had our group of three protagonists, a human baby macguffin, and a group of saber tooth tigers on the periphery. Now the number of protagonists has swelled to seven, and the villains are more pronounced - including a star turn from Peter Dinklage as Captain Gutt. The story is the usual - escape the predators and find a safe home. But absolutely none of that matters - I only want to know how much Sid the Sloth is in this - and it's not enough. This is a bright, if crowded, entry into the series - but setting aside how great the original is, the third film is shaping up as my favourite out of the sequels. This one, the least.

4/10

[Stirchley]

This is pretty good in a very talky, but quiet, British, reserved way - Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan in The Dig, on Netflix. Set in 1938 in UK, an archeologist begins excavation of the Sutton Hoo site, a treasure trove of dark age Anglo-Saxon artifacts including an entire wooden ship that was buried there. It's sooooo English, done with minimal FX, just acting and props and lots of accents that I don't recognize, various sub-dialects of rural English English. It's full of cloudy, muted colors and quiet, rural scenery of the 1930's..... - IMDB - "There is a lot I can say about this film, but I'll keep it short. If you love simple stories being told in a beautiful and clear manner, and if you like Archaeology, then this is the film for you. All of the actors have done a wonderful job."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZQz0rkNajo

I bailed out. Found it to be dull.

[Stirchley]

95441

Quite good.

95442

Bailed out the first time, but did finish it this time. Flagged big-time halfway through & I may have fallen asleep. Woke up & missed most of the plot points by that time. Then suddenly out of the blue appears Hillary Swank totally wasted in a tiny cameo. Ditto Katherine Waterston.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNjAyMjc3ODEtYzk3NS00Y2Q2LWEzMGUtYjY3ZTZmZTQ5MWMyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMzU0NzkwMDg@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg


4.5

[Gideon58]

95441

Quite good.

95442

Bailed out the first time, but did finish it this time. Flagged big-time halfway through & I may have fallen asleep. Woke up & missed most of the plot points by that time. Then suddenly out of the blue appears Hillary Swank totally wasted in a tiny cameo. Ditto Katherine Waterston.

LOVED Rachel, Rachel

[Stirchley]

LOVED Rachel, Rachel

I can see why.

[Darth Pazuzu]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/30/Saw_X_poster.png/220px-Saw_X_poster.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/94/The_Creator_2023_poster.jpg/220px-The_Creator_2023_poster.jpg

Yup, yesterday was a two-fer! (Thank you, Marcus Theatre's Value Tuesdays.) I couldn't make up my mind which one I wanted to see, and I had enough time in the day to see both Saw X and The Creator. All things are not equal, however, and I found one viewing experience to be vastly superior to the other.

You know... Once any horror movie franchise starts to get several films deep, the question of whether the latest entry in the series is any good or not actually becomes irrelevant. Rather, the important question becomes (at least from a corporate standpoint): What sort of crazy twist or plot development can we introduce to keep the ball rolling? The ultimate case study in this phenomenon is the Friday the 13th series. You never go to a Friday/Jason film expecting anything resembling good cinema (with the arguable exception of Part VI: Jason Lives), it's just that you're morbidly curious to see exactly how they're going to defibrillate the hulking, homicidal, machete-wielding dead guy in the hockey mask this time around. (I've actually got the Scream Factory Blu-ray box set, so I guess I can't really be too much of a snob about it!)

The Saw films, however, are actually extremely unique because of their extremely fluid, back-and-forth timeline in which later films can revisit the events from earlier films in order to discover the fates of surviving characters (the way we catch up with I's Cary Elwes in VII), or to set up exactly when a character we're first introduced to in later films actually entered into the story from a chronological standpoint (such as Costas Mandylor, who's introduced in III, whose role and function is established in IV and whose involvement in the continuing storyline is established in V as having begun before the events of I... I think!). Confusing? Yeah, I know. I was kind of racking my brain figuring out how to phrase those last couple of sentences. :lol: Saw X, the tenth and newest entry in the series, was directed by Kevin Greutert, who not only also helmed VI and VII but was the editor of I-V. You know, I guess it's really not all that hard to jump back and forth in time within a series when your former editor has such a hands-on role in the creative process. :D

Anyway, the events of X take place in between the events of I and II. In this movie, we discover that the nefarious Jigsaw, a.k.a. John Kramer (Tobin Bell) isn't completely infallible, and that he certainly can be taken for a ride. But those that try, certainly do so at their own peril. Kramer, as we all know, is dying from terminal brain cancer, and here he is offered a lifeline. He finds out about an experimental drug treatment program run by Dr. Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund). Her clinic supposedly was started in Norway, but has to pick up and move around from time to time and is currently stationed in Mexico. Anyway, our man John undergoes the operation, but eventually finds out that Pederson and her associates are complete and total frauds. Upon which point, Hell is unleashed and one by one, Pederson and her ne'er-do-well accomplices are rounded up and captured by Kramer and his accomplice Amanda (Shawnee Smith) to serve as players in his lethal games.

This one was actually pretty decent. The first half-hour or so of the movie starts out as mostly a rather straight drama, with John Kramer coming to terms with his impending death and finding out about the experimental clinic through a man claiming to be a fellow cancer survivor (Michael Beach) (a character who one feels throughout this movie has a lot of explaining to do and whose fate you will discover partway through the end credits). The straight dramatic mood of this first act is broken up only by one horrific trap sequence, a gag involving broken fingers and eyeball suction, which one feels had to have been shoehorned in just to remind audiences that they were, in fact, at the latest Saw sequel and not wandered into some dramatic tearjerker starring Tobin Bell by mistake.

But things eventually do get bloody and once Cecilia and her cronies are captured, events unfold pretty much as one would expect and all the major players in the game have to go through some gruesome grand guignol self-extrication from their respective traps. The most gruesome bit involves the use of a Gigli saw, and is actually one of the few scenes in the entire series which I had to force myself to look at and not avert my eyes! (I am for the most part a hardy soul when it comes to visceral on-screen horror.) Then, towards the end, there is an apparent setback when the evil Cecilia (with the aid of an accomplice) manages to (apparently) turn the tables on John and Amanda and force John into one of his own traps. Cecilia also, quite refreshingly, calls John out for his own moral hypocrisy, throwing his own words from an earlier scene back in his face. But John Kramer is a cagey cat, all wheels within wheels and contingency plans afoot, and his ultimate survival (well, until the end of III) is a foregone conclusion.

In short, it's not the greatest entry in the Saw series, but it's certainly not the worst either. (After the 2004 original, the two best in my opinion are the grim and claustrophobic III and the social commentary of VI, while the two worst for me would VII in 3-D and failed stylistic departure of eighth entry Jigsaw.) I guess I would put it in 5th place after I, III, VI and II.

(You know, it's really hard to believe - as well as kind of funny - that something so convoluted and non-linear could possibly originate from what was basically just a "two guys trapped in a room" scenario. :p)

--------------------------------------------------

The Creator, on the other hand, is probably one of the best movies I've seen so far this year! In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say that this is the type of science-fiction epic that Ridley Scott, James Cameron and the Wachowskis used to be able to make in their sleep! Set in the year 2070, fifteen years after a nuclear warhead destroys Los Angeles, the story deals with the power struggle between humanity and artificial intelligence. This type of AI is mostly represented by humanoid simulants who in actuality are more "human" than the humans, and they are at war with a very powerful high-altitude aerospace platform called the USS NOMAD which is capable of locating the AI's hiding places and launching missile strikes against them. John David Washington (who greatly impressed me in both Spike Lee's BlackKklansman and Christopher Nolan's Tenet) plays special forces operative Joshua Taylor, who is recruited by the U.S. government to track down and destroy an AI superweapon capable of shutting down and controlling human technology, something that would greatly shift the balance of power. Taylor leads a special team behind enemy lines (somewhere in New Asia, where AI hasn't been outlawed), where the superweapon is ultimately discovered. The catch? It's a child! The rest of the story details Taylor's attempts to protect this child (a very good Madeleine Yuna Voyles) from anyone who would seek to destroy or capture her for destructive purposes.

In addition to just being a great sci-fi epic, it's also a terrific character study. Joshua Taylor is actually a very tragic yet ultimately redemptive character, who starts out as a soldier working undercover and doing his duty battling a potential threat to humanity but at one point early in the story (ten years after the nuking of L.A. but five before the main body of the action) he ends up losing his wife and unborn child in the process once he's revealed his true intentions. There is a great deal of religious allegory and talk about Heaven in this picture, and even the very title of this movie reminded me of the plight of the space probe V'Ger in 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, who is also looking for its "Creator."

The Creator was directed by Gareth Edwards, whose previous directing gigs included the 2014 remake of Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story from 2016. While I thought Rogue One was okay (not being overly impressed with latter-day Star Wars), there was nothing in that movie to prepare me for what Edwards did with this picture. The man has certainly given himself a tough act to follow, and I'll be very interested in what he does next. In short, The Creator is definitely one I'll get the 4K + Blu-ray set for! :up:

[EndlessDream]

1. Vampires (1998/Netflix)

https://i.imgur.com/PkTvTks.jpg

For the first movie in my annual October horror marathon, I decided to watch John Carpenter's Vampires. The generically-named film follows Jack Crow and his team of vampire hunters, who end up crossing paths with Valek, the first ever bloodsucker. Valek is searching for an unholy relic that will increase his power, but can Crow and company stop him before he attains it?

This had been on my watch list for years, so I decided to finally pull the trigger. I enjoyed it. It doesn't stack up to Carpenter's earlier work, but there's a lot to like about it. The fight scenes are enjoyably violent and bloody. James Woods isn't the prototypical action star, but he's fun to watch as Jack Crow. And I thought it was creative how the vampire hunters use a tow to drag the vampires into sunlight, which causes them to explode into flames.

Overall, Vampires isn't a revolutionary vampire movie, but it's worth a watch.

2. The Exorcist (1973/Theater/Rewatch)

https://i.imgur.com/tXvqohN.jpg

I was terrified of The Exorcist as a kid, but have learned to really appreciate it as an adult. It manages to make each of its characters compelling and then weaves their stories together into a really satisfying conclusion. I saw it in a theater for the first time and the big screen audio really added another dimension to it, which made me give a lot more credit to the great sound design.

[EndlessDream]

3. Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (1972/Pluto TV)

https://i.imgur.com/PHGRuCR.jpg

This early Bob Clark film is about a theater troupe who visits a cemetery on a deserted island to hold a satanic ritual. When the group takes things too far and starts desecrating corpses, the dead rise to take revenge. The title really says it all.

Children… is a low-budget zombie picture that nevertheless shows off some of Bob Clark's directing skills. It takes over an hour for the obvious plot twist to occur, but once it happens, there are some effectively creepy moments. One of my favorite scenes is when they look out the window to see a zombie eating someone in a tree. The zombie costumes are a mixed bag as a whole, but a few of them look damn good (like the aforementioned tree one).

This is a slow movie with amateurish acting and the payoff for the villain is not all that satisfying, but there's a certain amount of charm in its execution.

4. The Boogens (1981/YouTube)

https://i.imgur.com/iDn0kfX.jpg

The Boogens is about young people in a mining town who encounter a slimy tentacle monster in their rental house. The monster is barely in it and the effects aren't very good, but the romance subplot manages to be kinda cute. As far as '80s creature features go, this isn't nearly as good as The Kindred, but much better than C.H.U.D.

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/Madagascar_Theatrical_Poster.jpg
By About.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22473682

Madagascar - (2005)

Hard one to rate - I didn't really fall in love with any of the main four characters in Madagascar - a lion called Alex (Ben Stiller), a zebra called Marty (Chris Rock), a giraffe called Melman (David Schwimmer) and a hippo called Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith). I did, however, fall in love with all the cuter little creatures we meet in the second half of the film, and there's some decent comedy throughout. King Julien XIII, a ring-tailed lemur (voiced by Sacha Baron Cohen) lends the film some nicely timed insanity - his advisor Mort (Cedric the Entertainer) and especially the little mouse lemur (Andy Richter) also tip the cuteness scales in this movie's favour. I once knew someone who thought everyone's character-type could be loosely defined by one of the characters in this film - and I think I was judged to be the giraffe. Anyway, I couldn't dislike it if I tried - so overall the whole package has enough to merit a passing grade. A bunch of zoo animals who escape, are recaptured, and escape again to find themselves in their natural habitat - which for them is unfamiliar surroundings. I thought the writing was pretty strong - at least jokes-wise. Not in a knee-slappingly classic way - but good enough.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/Madagascar2poster.jpg
By http://www.impawards.com/2008/madagascar_two_ver3.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17774651

Madagascar : Escape 2 Africa - (2008)

The second Madagascar film starts really strongly, with a fantastic sequence featuring an old plane which takes our characters on a perilous journey over the ocean - then, once we're done with that we run into a plot-heavy remainder of the film. The great moments seem more diluted, and there's not nearly enough time spent with cute little characters. Alex finds his parents, Marty loses his identity when he finds many zebras just like him, Gloria finds superficial love and Melman becomes a witch doctor. Props to the creators for putting story first and acknowledging that's important - but I just needed a little more random anarchy in an animated film like this. It is pretty crazy, but the laugh-a-second, breakneck speed opening wasn't maintained, and as such this wasn't quite as good as the original.

5/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0a/Cruelintentions2-2.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7533494

Cruel Intentions 2 - (2000)

Originally meant to be a television series, this prequel to Cruel Intentions is horrible in every way imaginable. Not only that, but nothing that happens in it makes much sense in connection with the first film. Sebastian (now played by Robin Dunne), who fell in love for the first time in the first film, falls in love in this one - which kind of means Sebastian didn't fall in love for the first time - he's constantly falling in love. An avid photographer in the first film, he picks up a camera in the final scene of this, for no reason - lazy writing. It has a George Lucas Star Wars prequel feel of awkwardly guiding each character to the point they were in at the start of the original. The tone is much, much more comedic and light. All of the characters are horrible, and there are no redemptions. The end is bafflingly abrupt, and twists the film in an unnatural way - you can tell it was filmed after the series was shot down. Overall this was a train-wreck I couldn't look away from for a second - one car crash of a movie about kids who are either abominable or ditzy and stupid. I've rarely seen a sequel this seemingly distanced from an original - but then came Cruel Intentions 3.

3/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Cruel_Intentions_3_DVD_Cover.jpg
By May be found at the following website: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0001LJCKC, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4764193

Cruel Intentions 3 - (2004)

The Cruel Intentions movies already had an uncomfortable combination of sex and malevolence throughout - but hey, why not add rape? That's the mistake Cruel Intentions 3 makes, which pretty much takes everything from discomfort to outright pain. The silliest aspect is the way it's tenuously linked to the first two films - two characters drop a comment that one of them is distantly related (a second cousin or something) to a character in the first two films. That's the last of any linkage there will be - it's obviously a teen film that was probably original at first, and at the last minute made part of the Cruel Intentions "franchise". It's no longer about ruining people's reputation - now we've moved up to destroying lives, forcing sex on girls through blackmail or straight up raping them. I've tried - and I can't comprehend what sort of person might like watching this. A monster perhaps? A masochist? A misogynistic, drunk college guy? Well, I can say one thing - the sequels to Cruel Intentions end up making the first film look like a masterpiece!

2/10

[skizzerflake]

I bailed out. Found it to be dull.

Yeah, but that (The Dig) was right for my mood yesterday. It's definitely rather procedural, but considering the way so many movies are, quiet and methodical seemed OK for the moment. I was in the mood for tweed. About 5 different British accents among the cast helped even more.

[Act III]

95432

The Phantom Menace (1999)

Too much talking, not enough action, awesome CGI, impressive indoor visuals, not enough space scenes, altogether sort of boring. The movie opens with a silver droid that looks like the gold C3P0 and this film is much the same, the silver to the gold of the original trilogy. The special effects and big screen graphics are top notch but the boring story and lack of action bring my rating down. And that comedy relief character isn't funny and actually quite annoying. You might want to watch this on mute and have your skip forward button ready.

6/10

[WHITBISSELL!]

https://i0.wp.com/peschelpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/03-reviews-Ten-Little-Indians-1989-cast.jpg?w=1280&ssl=1


Ten Little Indians - I've watched the 1965 version and the 1945 version titled And Then There Were None so when I ran across this one from 1989 I figured what the hell. The hell turned out to be a lower budget with lower tier actors for the most part. More of a made for television movie which it probably was. There were bright spots in the casting like Donald Pleasance, Herbert Lom and maybe Brenda Vaccaro but then you have Frank Stallone, 70's TV staple Warren Berlinger and the guy who played Bluto in that Popeye movie with Robin Williams.

The setting is an African safari this time with the main reason apparently being budget constraints. The direction is leaden and the acting wildly uneven depending on who is doing the emoting. I'm still not sure why they chose the African locations since, outside of the opening few minutes, they could have filmed the rest of the movie just about anywhere. Skip this and try the '65 or '45 versions. Maybe even something like Evil Under the Sun which to me has more of a Ten Little Indians vibe than this could ever muster.

40/100

[Fabulous]

Happy Together (1997)

3.5

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/2Xkd3WeAx11cHxb4Lr3wnSNDWcd.jpg

[Marco]

Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Looking_for_Mr._Goodbar_%281977_film%29_poster.jpg
Rather self obsessed film about an annoying self-obsessed person who equates having sex as personal freedom (maybe so but she doesn't have to be so irking) . It was the 70s I guess. We get a run through her partners from 1 nighters to the gigalo (also an annoying Richard Gere) to obsessed "lover".

The final scene is great and powerfulbut this doesn't make up for a rather drab navel-gazing film.

1.5

[LChimp]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMmY1ODUzZGItNDllOS00MDBhLTg4NmUtYjU4YjUxMGNlYmMwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODE5NzE3OTE@._V1_.jpg

Blue Beetle (2023)

I had 0 expectations and still got disappointed. Almost bailed out midway through

[PHOENIX74]

https://i.postimg.cc/6p5BLJWb/Princess-Mononoke.webp
By IMDb, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56309682

Princess Mononoke - (1997)

Still relevant today, or perhaps even more so, Princess Mononoke contemplates the spiritual side of the trade-off we make when we destroy entire habitats for industry. It does so with one of the most delightful and fast-paced animated stories you could ever hope to watch - there's very little down time, despite the fact that this is a pretty long Studio Ghibli film at 133-minutes in length. Prince Ashitaka (voiced in the dubbed version by Billy Crudup) finds himself on a journey when a massive demon pig attacks his village and he's cursed by it's touch. What he finds is a distant war, where Lady Eboshi (Minnie Driver), ruler of Irontown, is fighting San (Claire Danes), who is struggling on behalf of the spirits of the forest. It's human vs spirit in a complex tale which involves different clans, conspiracies and characters both spirit-wise and human. The animation is quite haunting and imaginative, and the music plays into that theme of the spiritual and ghostly. The action and narrative keeps moving forward at a very brisk pace, and it's the kind of film that will really reward multiple viewings. Next time, I'll probably try it with the original Japanese voice talent on - hearing the likes of Billy Bob Thornton as a Japanese monk and mercenary, is really quite weird. My rating might go up in time, I was really quite impressed with Princess Mononoke.

8/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/67/Whitney_%282018_film%29.jpg
By Whitney 2018 UK poster., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57438575

Whitney - (2018)

When you hear Whitney Houston's story directly from her family and friends, it's quite devastating. Cutting straight to the chase - her drug problem : it's hinted at late in the piece that members of Whitney's family were sexually abused by one amongst them (not shy, the film points the finger at Dee Dee Warwick.) As far as I'm concerned, I think her problem stemmed from a more straightforward cause. When you become the best in the world, and have money beyond your wildest imaginings along with happiness, an enjoyable relationship - everything, and then you add the intense high certain drugs can give you, I think you find yourself in a place that feels so elevated it becomes a climax you spend the rest of your life chasing. As her career stagnated, her relationship with husband Bobby Brown become abusive, and her happiness faded, that chase become a desperate daily battle just to not feel so miserable. The drink and drugs robbed her of her voice, and a person who seemed like one of the happiest in the world became a tragic figure. You learn the story from her family and friends, and it's a really heartbreaking (but familiar) tale of fame, fortune and the darkness those two particular items often bring with it. It's a good cautionary tale about drug abuse though.

7.5/10

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZTBhOTE1YmYtMzIxYy00YmQwLThjZDAtN2JiYWM5ZGZiN2FkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTUyMTgzNjY4._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg


2

[Gideon58]

Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Looking_for_Mr._Goodbar_%281977_film%29_poster.jpg
Rather self obsessed film about an annoying self-obsessed person who equates having sex as personal freedom (maybe so but she doesn't have to be so irking) . It was the 70s I guess. We get a run through her partners from 1 nighters to the gigalo (also an annoying Richard Gere) to obsessed "lover".

The final scene is great and powerfulbut this doesn't make up for a rather drab navel-gazing film.

1.5

LOVED this movie....I think Keaton should have won the Oscar for this instead of Annie Hall, which came out the same year.

[SpelingError]

Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (1984) ‐ 4

Edgar Reitz blends the scope of the political history his film spans and the sheer breadth of the characters who occupy it better than any film I've ever seen. Nothing I can think of ‐ not The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, not Little Big Man, not The Battle of Algiers, not The Travelling Players ‐ is able to match the history of a country (over 60 years worth, in this case) with an enormous, branching cast of characters quite as seamlessly as this one. As the initial family we're introduced to in the opening grows up, branches off into numerous directions, and starts their own families, the film's scope continues to increase in scale. This culminates in the final episode where we see the full outcome of how much the initial family tree in the first episode has branched out (sobering shots of gravestones and family albums in the last episode contain a strong level of emotional weight). Though billed as the main character and listed first in the credits of each episode (for the 7‐part release I watched, at least), Maria is clearly just as secondary as the next character and is often overshadowed by other characters in certain episodes. Making her a supporting character in her own film though is just a way to emphasize the film's scope by providing someone to remind you of the family's size whenever she reenters the film. Aside from the scope, the vivid personalities who occupy the film also remained fresh in my mind throughout the several days I spent with them. From the one‐eyed boy whose disability makes him a perfect sharpshooter, to the romanticized portrayal of the pedophilic relationship between Hermann and Klärchen which is born from centering that sub‐plot from both their perspectives, to the somewhat mysterious character of Paul who's unable to commit himself to Maria and spends most of his life away from her, to the elderly narrator who keeps us on top of the various stories and sub‐stories in the film, their colorful personalities contain such a wide variation of emotions which kept the film fresh, all in spite of the episodes topping 15 hours. Even the cinematography's shifts between black and white and color, though Reitz said this was done randomly to fit whichever palette would suit each scene/shot the best, add an extra layer of variation to the film (some shots also predate Sin City's visual style by several years). This isn't the easiest film to track down (it's virtually impossible to find online and some DVDs for it can be $50 or more), but if you're able to come across it, I would highly recommend giving it a go.

[Fabulous]

Marketa Lazarová (1967)

4

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/1Vbd0TVNZXlzTlyLkYnOMzpq1eH.jpg

[Stirchley]

Yeah, but that (The Dig) was right for my mood yesterday. It's definitely rather procedural, but considering the way so many movies are, quiet and methodical seemed OK for the moment. I was in the mood for tweed. About 5 different British accents among the cast helped even more.

That’s why we have subtitles. Even I as a fellow Brit can’t understand dialect now.

LOVED this movie....I think Keaton should have won the Oscar for this instead of Annie Hall, which came out the same year.

It’s a classic of American cinema.

95491

Strange movie, but I finished it. About halfway through I still hadn’t figured out how some of the characters relate to each other. Didn’t understand the final scene either.

Kidman looking tall, slender & lovely at age 27.

[Act III]

95487

Attack of the Clones (2002)

This movie is the continuation of the same middling plodding storyline. Theres more new stuff and you get a feeling its much like watching Star Trek but with Star Wars characters and with far more advance special effects. The awesome visuals are worth the price tag alone and was meant to be seen on the big screen. The ending battles are a plus considering episode 1 didnt appear to reach that high.

7/10

[Marco]

LOVED this movie....I think Keaton should have won the Oscar for this instead of Annie Hall, which came out the same year.
I just couldn't connect with the main character at all and her incessant belittling of her "conquests".

[LChimp]

https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/S7c356af56f0d42c482bd292fa92ce5e9J/Hellraiser-2022-filme-arte-imagem-impress-o-poster-de-seda-decora-o-de-parede-para-casa.jpg

Hellraiser (2022)

[Gideon58]

https://moviesanddrinkscom.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/queen-bee-01.jpg?w=567


3.5

[Fabulous]

Bed and Board (1970)

3.5

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/rRis8WVYwiIqsirhribg9hSPCZk.jpg

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/VictoriaAndAbdulPoster.jpg
By Focus Features - Original publication: Focus FeaturesImmediate source: IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54376363

Victoria & Abdul - (2017)

He started out a humble servant but Abdul Karim (Ali Fazal), a Muslim jail clerk from Agra, India, became Queen Victoria's (Judi Dench) closest friend and confidante during the last 14 years of her reign. In fact, he became something of a son to her and she promoted him to the position of "Munshi" - her teacher of Hindustani and all things foreign which fascinated her. Victoria & Abdul is a very lighthearted, comedic look at this touching relationship and the pains all of the Queen's staff took to stop it and end it. Victoria, in this film, is portrayed as still very bright but awfully lonely and tired of all the pomp, ceremony and toadying that came with her position. This kind of movie is right down my alley - if the whitest member of the whitest country on Earth can be a maternal figure and close friend to a very brown Muslim - husband and son-in-law to two full burqa wearing ladies - then that says it all. There's obviously a bittersweet ending to all of this, but overall it's a very sweet movie that I was 100% emotionally engaged with. Eddie Izzard is finely backwards as the King in waiting, Albert and Michael Gambon features as the Prime Minister of the day, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil. Judi Dench, though, is magnificent as Queen Victoria - I think she wasn't nominated for an Oscar here because she'd already been nominated for playing her in Mrs Brown. Most of all though - this film is so very funny - all the comedic touches are sharp and very amusing. I loved it - more than most.

8.5/10

https://i.postimg.cc/T37BPK52/marbles.jpg
By Gaumont - http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=235620.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53586224

A Bag of Marbles - (2017)

Two Jewish kids are forced to flee the occupied part of France to avoid being deported to concentration camps in a very beautifully filmed movie here - the French countryside and various other picture postcard moments are so vividly colourful and bright that the one thing you'll take away from A Bag of Marbles is how it looked. The story is a little generic, but Nazis always provide you with a degree of menace that provides a narrative with a "life or death" tension. This film only needed a really big performance or bravura moment to shine, but as it is it's worth seeing once for it's visual beauty.

6.5/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/22/A_Million_Ways_to_Die_in_the_West_poster.jpg
By http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=114134, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41782492

A Million Ways to Die in the West - (2014)

There's something about Seth MacFarlane which makes him look like he doesn't belong in A Million Ways to Die in the West. I don't exactly know what it is, but he sticks out and isn't playing a part - he's just wandering around the set thinking up jokes, many of which don't land. I will grant the fact that this movie has a few moments though - like Family Guy, it simply throws 100 darts at the board, and a few are bound to hit the bullseye. I really like Ted, but AMWtDitW feels undercooked, a little too juvenile and full of cameos and references that aren't worked into the story in a clever way - but just awkwardly shoved in there. I think that if Seth and his writers had of put a bit more effort than the usual half-day brainstorm they might have had something here - but success breeds laziness, and as such I feel that this film is going to age badly.

5/10

[Nausicaä]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9b/Totally_killer_poster.jpg

3.5

SF = Z


Trailer:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vNm3VPPKEQI&pp=ygUWdG90YWxseSBraWxsZXIgdHJhaWxlcg%3D%3D



[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

[xSookieStackhouse]

3.5 i havent seen other 3 cause i cant be bothered lol but i really loved the gore and the action and great casting, i missed seeing sly on the big screen i loved his movies <3
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71O0futSwiL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BODdiMzM2YjctZmU3ZS00MzUwLWJiYTMtMmI2NzIyMTQyOTQ1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODY5NzkyMjA@._V1_.jpg

4

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71ngHq6s1pL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg


5th Rewatch...Winner of 7 Oscars, including Best Picture of 1950, still brings the giggles and often squirm worthy emotions that can have the viewer talking back to the screen. One of my favorite movie topics, the business of show business, has never been so effectively skewered as it is here. Bette Davis' Oscar nominated performance as theater diva Margo Channing and Anne Baxter's performance (also Oscar nominated) as t he seemingly innocent Eve, keep this story on sizzle, as well as George Sanders performance as the acid-tongued Addison DeWitt, which won him the Best Supporting Actor. Big shout as well to Celeste Holm, was robbed of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Karen Richards. This 73 year old movie masterpiece, directed and written by Joseph Manckiewicz, who won Oscars for both, his incredible screenplay (one of cinema's greatest screenplays), is just as entertaining today. 5

[SpelingError]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71ngHq6s1pL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg


5th Rewatch...Winner of 7 Oscars, including Best Picture of 1950, still brings the giggles and often squirm worthy emotions that can have the viewer talking back to the screen. One of my favorite movie topics, the business of show business, has never been so effectively skewered as it is here. Bette Davis' Oscar nominated performance as theater diva Margo Channing and Anne Baxter's performance (also Oscar nominated) as t he seemingly innocent Eve, keep this story on sizzle, as well as George Sanders performance as the acid-tongued Addison DeWitt, which won him the Best Supporting Actor. Big shout as well to Celeste Holm, was robbed of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as Karen Richards. This 73 year old movie masterpiece, directed and written by Joseph Manckiewicz, who won Oscars for both, his incredible screenplay (one of cinema's greatest screenplays), is just as entertaining today. 5
Yep, that's a great one.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTIzNDUyMjA4MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNDc4ODM3._V1_.jpg

1st Rewatch...This was one of the very rare occasions where I watched a movie based on a book and I actually read the book first. Director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential) did a spectacular job bringing this haunting crime drama off the page and onto the screen. This is the story of three childhood friends who seem forever linked by an incident from their childhood but they survive and eventually drift apart. The three are brought together as adults because of two separate murders. Eastwood's direction is meticulous and the Oscar winning performances by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins are heartbreakers. Powerhouse moviemaking. 4.5

[Act III]

95498

Revenge of the Sith (2005)

The better episode of the trilogy action-wise and story-wise, feeling like it belongs in the original run. Everything ties in together smoothly and naturally, you wonder why it didn't start here. Excellent special effects as usual. No complaints. Nothing out of place. My ratings are made watching the small screen, so when I re-watch this on a large sound system and big screen I will reconsider them.

9/10

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e0/Zorba_the_Greek_poster.jpg
By www.moviegoods.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7036372

Zorba the Greek - (1964)

I went into Zorba the Greek practically blind, but very interested having seen Michael Cacoyannis film A Matter of Dignity, which was brilliant. Based on nothing more than a hunch, I've gone through my life thinking it was something very different to what it is. Zorba is something like a Fellini film - at least on it's surface. A black and white film with it's finger on the pulse of the passionate side of life, love and red-blooded misadventure. Anthony Quinn is sensational in this as Zorba, his lust for living often transforming him into some kind of dervish - and he's contrasted by his newfound partner and "boss" Basil (Alan Bates) - a shy, quiet and reserved English gentleman who looks a little like a young Terry Jones. The score is incredible, the cinematography equally so, and the Michael Cacoyannis screenplay full of insight and the confronting alienness of the island of Crete, where our two characters are working on a mine - in a master and servant kind of way. My Fair Lady was in the way, so it could only win 3 of it's Oscar nominations - but it should really have won them all. Beautiful, joyful, horrifying and uniquely Greek - if you haven't seen it you should perhaps maybe reconsider. I'm glad I did.

9.5/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5b/City_by_the_sea.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8802213

City by the Sea - (2002)

It feels like Robert De Niro was cranking up the "quantity over quality" moneymaking machine by the time he appeared in City by the Sea - a tepid thriller which often gets in it's own way by relegating what's interesting to focus on familiar crime thriller beats. James Franco is pretty good in this, playing Joey LaMarca - a drug addict on his last legs who kills a dealer when attacked, and hurriedly disposes of the body. When the dealer's boss finds out what happened, Joey is in more danger from him than he is from the cops - one of whom is his father, Vincent (De Niro) - a detective who is failing his son in much the same way his father failed him. Frances McDormand, as Vincent's girlfriend Michelle, only gets crumbs and is too talented for that kind of role. This is nickel and dime thriller stuff, and beneath the mountain of talent that's up on the screen - only when Franco and De Niro are together, playing off of each other, do we get sparks and much interest - but that only happens in the film's final minutes. This was the very film that turned filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones' fortunes downwards - luke warm and so-so.

5/10

[skizzerflake]

"Originally Posted by skizzerflake

Yeah, but that (The Dig) was right for my mood yesterday. It's definitely rather procedural, but considering the way so many movies are, quiet and methodical seemed OK for the moment. I was in the mood for tweed. About 5 different British accents among the cast helped even more.

That’s why we have subtitles. Even I as a fellow Brit can’t understand dialect now. "

No problem with the various accents. As a guy who lives on the border between the North and South, as well as having lots of people with a variety of local and immigrant accents, this one was pretty easy.

[skizzerflake]

This is really terrific - Stop Making Sense. It was made in 1984, concert footage of The Talking Heads doing a show in 1983, directed by Jonathan Demme. The movie theater blurb referred to it as the greatest concert movie ever, as did a couple other movie sites. I’m reluctant to ever use the word “ever”, but damn this is good. Shot at a venue in Hollywood, it captures the Heads in a full-on performance with musicians and backing vocals and an enthusiastic crowd. The energy is infectious, the music terrific. The filming takes you in close, showing not just the performance, but the sweaty clothing and gestures of David Byrne and the band. I had forgotten that while Byrne was born in Scotland, he grew up mostly in a suburb of Baltimore and attended the Maryland Institute of Art (MICA), a well regarded art college near me that has a big local presence.

Imagery of the concert is done really well, the digitized film quality and sound are completely terrific, the music itself is excellent. It’s been around for a while, but it’s a movie that really has aged well and deserves a big screen and big sound. It was rousing enough that the movie theater audience was cheering for each song. The movie got a complete restoration and re-release by my favorite studio, the makers of so many good movies, A24.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rjMwSTeVeo

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNGM0ZTU3NmItZmRmMy00YWNjLWEzMWItYzg3MzcwZmM5NjdiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDYyMDk5MTU@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg

7th Rewatch...It might be creaking a little around the edges, but the Best Picture Oscar winner of 1964 is still elegant and glorious entertainment, one of the best screen adaptations of a Broadway musical featuring the most famous score of Lerner and Lowe. Rex Harrison brilliantly recreates his Tony winning Broadway role inventing the "talk singing" method of performing song that no one did better than he did. He won the Best Actor Oscar for the performance, but was he really better than Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove? Eyebrows were raised in Hollywood when the role of Eliza went to Audrey Hepburn instead Broadway's Eliza, Julie Andrews. Andrews got sweet revenge though because she won the Best Actress Oscar that year for Mary Poppins and Hepburn wasn't even nominated. Personally, I think she was nominated because she was lovely as the transformed Eliza but completely unconvincing as the cockney flower girl Eliza. Not to mention the fact that she did not do her own singing (Marni Nixon did that). I was crushed to learn just a few years ago that Jeremy Brett didn't do his own singing as Freddy either (he was dubbed by Bill Shirley). But it's still spectacular entertainment, beautifully photographed and those Oscar winning costumes by Cecil Beaton (especially in the Ascot scene) are breathtaking. 4

[Nausicaä]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/The_French_Dispatch.jpeg

3

SF = Zzzz



[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

[Gideon58]

https://flxt.tmsimg.com/assets/p170921_p_v13_at.jpg

1st Rewatch...Reunited eleven years after Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are extraordinary in this film about a severely broken marriage during the 1950's that has brought this couple to a point where they don't know how to fix what's broken. Their original idea of chucking suburbia and moving to Paris doesn't work, causing their marriage to fall down an even deeper rabbit hole. This is noting like the romance at the center of Titanic, this has a couple trying to figure out where the romance has gone. The it's always about appearances of the 1950's is beautifully recreated here. Love all the men at the train station wearing fedoras and all the unapologetic drinking and smoking cigarettes. Winslet won the Best Actress Oscar that year for a different film, but she should have won for this one. Kathy Bates, Michael Shannon, and David Harbour are terrific too. Sam Mendes' direction deserves a shout out too. 4

[StuSmallz]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTIzNDUyMjA4MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNDc4ODM3._V1_.jpg

1st Rewatch...This was one of the very rare occasions where I watched a movie based on a book and I actually read the book first. Director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential) did a spectacular job bringing this haunting crime drama off the page and onto the screen. This is the story of three childhood friends who seem forever linked by an incident from their childhood but they survive and eventually drift apart. The three are brought together as adults because of two separate murders. Eastwood's direction is meticulous and the Oscar winning performances by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins are heartbreakers. Powerhouse moviemaking. 4.5Yay! Big fan of this one, definitely.

[Marco]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BODdiMzM2YjctZmU3ZS00MzUwLWJiYTMtMmI2NzIyMTQyOTQ1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODY5NzkyMjA@._V1_.jpg

4

I liked this too Gideon, the story was good (if a bit absurd). But big D and the setting are excellent!

[Marco]

Eraserhead (1977)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Eraserhead.jpg/330px-Eraserhead.jpg
A story of a man living in an industrial wastehole working as a printer ("on vacation") with an unloving wife and a mutant baby. It goes at a deathly slow pace. Almost to the point of valuim intake. I think this is meant. It's livened up by some cranky characters, dream sequences and body horror segments a la Cronenberg. It's not bad just painfully slow. I may not be the best of judges as I can take or leave Lynch.
2.5

[chawhee]

Scream 6 (2023)
https://lakecentralnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/scream.jpg
3
I still dont really process the tone of these movies well...so entertaining yet dumb

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYTQ4M2U1ZDQtYTM1My00MTRjLTk3M2YtNjA0MGRjMTFiZjA5XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTYxNjkxOQ@@._V1_.jpg


3rd Rewatch...Barbra Streisand gave the performance of her career in this intense courtroom drama that no one saw. She plays a $500 a night hooker who is trying to prove herself competent to stand trial for killing a john in self defense, with the aid of a legal aid attorney (Richard Dreyfuss). This film works because Streisand let go of her ego a bit and allowed veteran director, Martin Ritt, to guide her and hired a sterling supporting cast including Maureen Stapleton, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, James Whitmore, and Leslie Nielsen. Those who feel Streisand can't act need to watch this. 4

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91dfkKNBF-S._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg


4th Rewatch...I still find it hard to believe that Milos Forman was in the director's chair for this rambunctious, psychedelic valentine to the 1960's based on a ground breaking Broadway musical. With a more structured screenplay than the stage musical, Foreman scores in this story of a young farm boy named Claude (John Savage) getting ready to go into the army who meets a group of hippies and a snooty debutante who put a bit of a cramp into Claude's plans. The musical numbers just leap off the screen. "Aquarius", the "Black Boys/White Boys" number featuring the late Nell Carter and Cheryl Barnes' powerhouse rendition of "Easy to Be Hard" never get old. The late Treat Williams lights up the screen as Berger and Savage brings an undeniable sweetness to Claude. Big shout out as well to the imaginative choreography by the legendary Twyla Tharp. 4

[GulfportDoc]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/78/The_French_Dispatch.jpeg

rating_3

SF = Zzzz

[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
Heh, heh. You liked it one-half star more than I, although I thought the production quality was excellent:

The French Dispatch (2021)

Dashiell Hammett once said, “It’s the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.” One hopes that this will not be the case with Wes Anderson. But in his latest film, style over story is definitely on display. And brilliant is the style. Production designer Adam Stockhausen, set decorator Rena DeAngelo, DP Robert Yeoman, and film composer Alexandre Desplat put together a cornucopia of sight and sound that does not let up for its entire 108 minute run time. Its color palette, set framing, and off beat scene and action design fire at the viewer with such unrelenting eye candy as to be overwhelming.

Yet the story told roughly in four parts is incoherent and confusing. Reportedly Anderson was giving a nod to the magazine The New Yorker, but the link is likely recognizable only by those who are intimate with the publication’s history and personalities. And the magazine’s famous cartoons are much more droll and dry than most examples of Anderson’s eccentric wit.

The editor of The French Dispatch magazine (Bill Murray) drops dead early on, and to fulfill the orders in his will, four stories are included in a final publication. Of the four segments, “The Concrete Masterpiece” is largely the easiest to follow. A crazed artist (Benicio del Toro) who is in prison for murder, paints pictures of his nude model (Lea Seydoux), who is also his jailer. An art dealer and fellow prisoner (Adrien Brody), galvanized by the paintings, secures public presentation of them which brings international fame to the artist. Yet subsequent sales of the artist’s works becomes problematic since they were painted on walls when he was in prison. A solution is found.

The film serves as a send up of the pretentious modern art world, political revolutionaries, and Gallic nature. But the scene changes and zany confrontations come at the viewer so rapidly that one finds oneself desperately searching for some cohesion, for some narrative. In contrast Anderson’s 2014 The Grand Budapest Hotel has similar style, wackiness and design, but with a more accessible pacing and a discernible plot.

The picture featured a cast full of Anderson regulars plus a carload of bankable stars. Reportedly his next film expands the cast to a boat load size. Hopefully in that film Anderson will have gotten back on track to give us a fathomable story along with his signature eccentricity.

Doc’s rating: Production - 10/10; Story - 5/10

[Fabulous]

Love on the Run (1979)

3.5

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/7LmhNfSkSkE296AvQbLZK4jgbnp.jpg

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNDRkYjI3MzctZjkzZS00ZTEwLWFjOTYtM2YxYzVhODc2NjMyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjA3NzQyMA@@._V1_.jpg



7th Rewatch...Every time I watch this movie, it still feels like I'm watching it for the first time. Frank Pierson's Oscar-winning screenplay, Sidney Lumet's intense direction, and the amazing performances from Pacino and Cazale keep this masterpiece fresh. 4.5

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b8/Don_juan_demarco.jpg
By http://www.impawards.com/1995/don_juan_demarco.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6880793

Don Juan DeMarco - (1995)

Johnny Depp and Marlon Brando - I don't think I ever got over the fact that I was watching these two notorious actors during the entirety of Don Juan DeMarco. It's a kind of "you can create your own reality" sort of film, as someone purporting to be Don Juan (Johnny Depp) in present-day America threatens to commit suicide because, despite having bedded 1,500 women, the woman he really loves won't marry him. Enter Dr. Jack Mickler (Marlon Brando) - because someone who thinks he's Don Juan is obviously crazy. An attempt at suicide kind of seals the deal. Slowly, this guy starts to convince the psychiatrist that he really is Don Juan - it's a complex web of contagious role-playing with added benefits in the bedroom. That's despite Brando really being as big as 12 men put together - but don't panic, because Brando's one sex scene is in a pitch dark bedroom. I don't really know what to make of Don Juan DeMarco - half of everything is the reawakening of the passion in Marlon Brando's character for his wife, but I keep thinking "Did this really big guy actually fish a frog out of his swimming pool and take a bite out of it?" Depp is no less eccentric, but at least here he's young and very attractive - holding his end of the bargain up. It's an interesting take on fantasy versus reality in any event.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/15_Minutes_%28movie_poster%29.jpg
By http://impawards.com/2001/fifteen_minutes.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7614323

15 Minutes - (2001)

A detective (Robert De Niro), arson investigator (Edward Burns), two crazed Eastern European killers (Karel Roden and Oleg Taktarov) plus one smug crime show anchor (Kelsey Grammer) make up the prime movers in 15 Minutes - there's murder, stabbing, fire, much shooting and a whole lot of pontificating about the media and their role in subverting justice and exploiting victims. It's a pretty brutal film, although not at all too graphic in it's depiction of murder and mayhem. We've tried the media many, many times before in crime thrillers like this - so we don't get anything too unique or subtle here - but it's a relatively solid movie with a surprise or two up it's sleeve, moving to it's own unique dark and violent rhythms. Burns is giving us everything he has, while De Niro sleepwalks through a role that seems very easy for him. Like Harrison Ford, De Niro seemed to have his heart set on appearing in at least 20 or so films as a cop - but I love him more as a villain (his Max Cady in Cape Fear is amongst his best roles.) There's a lot of polish here, but it is what it is - a take it or leave it violent thriller.

6/10

[Fabulous]

Home from the Hill (1960)

3.5

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/aMnmFAzwM9OD1f2PevCfn9Ht3wn.jpg

[wositelec]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/87/The_Enforcer_1951.JPG


9 / 10 - excellent movie!

[Stirchley]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNDRkYjI3MzctZjkzZS00ZTEwLWFjOTYtM2YxYzVhODc2NjMyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjA3NzQyMA@@._V1_.jpg



7th Rewatch...Every time I watch this movie, it still feels like I'm watching it for the first time. Frank Pierson's Oscar-winning screenplay, Sidney Lumet's intense direction, and the amazing performances from Pacino and Cazale keep this masterpiece fresh. 4.5

Brilliant movie. As a Catholic my fave line is “I'm a Catholic. I don't wanna hurt anybody, understand?” Cracks me up every time.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BYjMyODlmYjMtMTJkMi00MjZmLTgzYmMtYzllM2FhZWJmOTRkXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTUzMDUzNTI3._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.j pg



3.5

[Darth Pazuzu]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/36/ExorcistBelieverPoster.jpg/220px-ExorcistBelieverPoster.jpg

A couple years ago, legendary director Martin Scorsese made a controversial statement about comic book franchise movies not being true cinema. When pressed to elaborate, he would clarify that statement by saying something to the effect that those kinds of movies felt more like theme park rides rather than genuine cinematic storytelling. Granted, I'm not giving an exact quote here, but I think that's the gist of what Scorsese said.

However, if you think about it, the so-called "theme park principle" has been with us since the dawn of cinema itself. The movies have always been about entertainment and spectacle. They're capable of being so much more than that, of course. And when it does become more, we perhaps unreasonably measure everything else according to some yardstick of "Great Art." Granted, I certainly believe in the idea of Art, but I also am reasonable and pragmatic enough to accept that Great Art is often the exception to the rule. The movie lover needs to temper his or her expectations. The legendary critic Pauline Kael once said, "Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them."

And if there's one aspect of movie-making in which it truly pays to temper one's expectations, it's definitely sequels!

In the realm of the printed word, whenever a writer or novelist creates a sequel or follow-up to one of his or her previous stories, we don't necessarily expect the writer to go out of his or her way to remind us that we are in the same world as the one we had enjoyed in the previous story. Once we get absorbed in the world the author creates, and we get a feel for that author's individual prose style, we accept the fact that we are indeed in the same territory. We are dealing with characters that we've come to know and love in the past, because the author has given them very distinctive identities. And we accept that this is a legitimate continuation of a continuing story of a particular group of characters, or yet another scenario spun out in the same fictional world. Cinematic sequels, on the other hand, would appear to have an additional burden to contend with. To put it simply, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his continuing adventures of Sherlock Holmes, he probably didn't have to worry about callbacks or fan service!

To show what I mean by that, let me explain: I remember when I was a kid, in 1986, I saw the ads for David Cronenberg's The Fly on TV. And the thing I remember most from that TV ad was Brundlefly smashing through the plate glass window of the doctor's office. I mean, even before seeing the actual movie itself (not for a few more years), that moment got permanently imprinted on my psyche. Over two years later, audiences saw Chris Walas' sequel, The Fly II, and what did we see in the film's climax? Brundlefly Jr. smashing through a plate glass window and landing in the Bartok Industries science laboratory! This is an example of a callback, or a piece of fan service. And this is where the "theme park principle" comes back into play. The makers of the sequel are trying to replicate the "ride" based on what audiences had most strongly responded to in the previous film. And in the case of The Fly II, that's only one example. And The Fly II itself is yet one example of a cinematic sequel geared towards revisiting the triumphs of its predecessor. Does this make for a good film or a bad film? Well, that's kind of the wrong question. But it does demonstrate the sorts of limitations that the maker of a cinematic sequel is up against when creating a follow-up to a well-loved story. I guess it's worth asking whether these limitations are inherent in the medium of cinema itself as opposed to the printed word, or whether these are in fact artificial limitations imposed by studio concerns.

Tellingly enough, my favorite sequel - nay, my actual favorite film! - of all time is John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). The fact of the matter is, it is an abject failure in terms of functioning as a sequel in the "theme park ride" sense. For years, it has been derided as the worst cinematic sequel of all time, in spite of the fact that there has been a plethora of lousy and opportunistic follow-ups and cash-ins to all manner of films since then. To this day, and quite unaccountably, The Heretic remains one of cinema's All-Time Great Unforgivens. But in my humble opinion, its "failure" as a sequel is its artistic triumph and its ultimate salvation. The fact of the matter is, John Boorman was offered the job of directing the original The Exorcist (1973) before the job ultimately went to William Friedkin, and Boorman turned it down. He did so because he had young daughters who were the same age as the character of Regan MacNeil, and he found the horrific depiction of the phenomenon of possession to be extremely distasteful. But when he was given the opportunity to direct The Heretic, he was very much intrigued by William Goodhart's screenplay and saw the film as an opportunity. First of all, he somewhat presumptuously felt that he could "repair the damage" created by the original Exorcist, and that he'd have a ready-made audience who would be onboard right from the start, who would be familiar with the characters and the situation and would be prepared to leap into whatever great unknown Boorman would lead them. Wrong!! What audiences actually wanted (or thought they wanted) was for a spectacle even more horrific and shocking than that of the original Exorcist! In Boorman's words, he had created the equivalent of a huge Roman arena, and he had neglected to throw any Christians to the lions. When Boorman discussed the prospect of directing a sequel to The Exorcist with his friend Stanley Kubrick, Kubrick warned him that the only way he could possibly pull it off was by having Regan vomiting in rainbow colors! :lol: For a man who often had the unfair reputation for being an out-of-touch recluse, Kubrick definitely had a good grasp on certain uncomfortable realities about his chosen profession...

Anyway, the damage was done. Any future follow-up or sequel to The Exorcist would have to contend with - and get out from under - the shadow of The Heretic's (perceived) failure. And the films that followed, William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist III (1990) and Paul Schrader's Dominion (2004), would have to put up with a lot of corporate interference and second-guessing, as the heads of Morgan Creek Studios desperately attempted to resurrect the "ride" of William Friedkin's 1973 classic. To that end, they would order Blatty to film a climactic exorcism scene with Nicol Williamson for The Exorcist III (whereas there hadn't been an exorcism in his original source novel Legion) and Paul Schrader's original prequel would be scrapped entirely to make way for the over-the-top pandering of Renny Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning. (Granted, there are a few things that I like about Harlin's film, but I ultimately prefer Schrader's by a very wide margin!)

Which brings us - in my usual roundabout fashion - to David Gordon Green and the present day! :D

I saw The Exorcist: Believer last Friday evening at 6:30 PM at my local theater - and on the UltraScreen, no less! When I went to see it, I decided I would temper my expectations and keep an open mind. I was hoping that David Gordon Green would at the very least make a decent film about yet other possession case 50 years later. I knew that Ellen Burstyn was in it, and even though I'd heard that her reprising the role of Chris MacNeil was motivated primarily by her desire to raise money for a pet project of hers, I hoped that her mere presence would lend the film a little class.

You know something? I thought that The Exorcist: Believer was actually rather good.

Granted, let's not lose our minds here! It isn't anywhere near as great as Friedkin's original The Exorcist, and I feel that almost all the other sequels and prequels are superior to it... with the exception of Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning from 2004. Yes, that's right! I felt like the film had one job, and that was to be better than the prequel remake! That's not a very big hurdle to jump, and I felt that Green's film had cleared it rather easily! Believer doesn't really go out of its way to take any major chances, and the plot developments are somewhat predictable. And just to let audiences know we're keeping on the safe side, the credits actually replicate the font of the original film's. Whenever the name of a particular location is given onscreen, such as "Haiti" or "Georgia," the words are in the same white font that was used in the original for the names of "Iraq" and "Georgetown." And of course, the end titles of the film are in red!

So what happens is this:

Photographer Victor Fielding (a very effective Leslie Odom Jr.) has a daughter named Angela (Lidya Jewett). Thirteen years before, Victor's pregnant wife had perished in an earthquake during a visit to Haiti. She didn't survive, but her child did. After his wife's death, Victor lost his faith in God. Anyway, Angela and her best friend from school Katherine (Olivia Marcum) go into the woods to perform a ritual ceremony to conjure up Angela's mother. However, the two of them disappear and are declared missing. They turn up three days later in a barn some thirty miles or so away. The parents are relieved to find their children in one piece and apparently unharmed. However, the two girls gradually show signs of an apparent mental illness, at first minor... and then quite horrifyingly major. If you've seen your share of films about exorcism and possession, you - and most audience members - will quickly figure out what's really going on!

First of all, the acting is solid all down the line. Leslie Odom Jr. turns in an effective performance as the father, and Jewett and Marcum are very good as the afflicted girls. Ann Dowd is also good in the role of Ann, a hospital nurse who had previously trained to be a nun and had ultimately broken her vows and gotten pregnant. She delivers a wonderful speech at the end which I feel quite effectively sums up the struggle we all have to maintain our sense of hope and optimism in the face of life's horrors. Even if you're not necessarily a believer in God or in organized religion, what she says truly does resonates - at least for me. And I would be remiss if I did not again mention the presence of Ellen Burstyn reprising the role of Chris MacNeil. At the risk of sounding very repetitive, she also turns in a very good performance as well. As the character that audiences and fans of the original film will be most familiar with, she is in effect our surrogate. She responds with sympathetic horror, reliving the trauma of her own daughter Regan's possession, and her feelings are ultimately ours. And not to give spoilers or anything, but something truly terrible happens to Chris in the movie which I did not see coming and which genuinely shocked me. And at the very end of the film, we get a cameo from another important character from Blatty's original story. No prizes for guessing who it is, but once again... No spoilers! ;) I also like the fact that, while in the original Exorcist, Regan's possession was kept secret from the outside world and not involving anyone other than the exorcising priests, the attempt to liberate Angela and Katherine from the demon's grip is a communal effort, involving friends and family members and the local pastor. (The Star Trek fan in me was extremely gratified to see the pastor being portrayed by Raphael Sbarge, the traitorous Michael Jonas on Voyager!) And I also liked the idea that the two girls' heartbeats would be "in sync" during the possession. The very notion of synchronization is quite possibly a callback to The Heretic, and it was gratifying to see it used as a plot element.

To sum up, I guess you could say that The Exorcist: Believer is ultimately an effective sequel. Unfortunately, as I have pointed out in my comments above, being an "effective" cinematic sequel primarily consists in the ability to more or less replicate the "theme park ride" and to replay all the major beats from the original film. So the film is basically operating within a certain set of self-imposed limitations. There is absolutely nothing disgracefully awful about this film, but the film ultimately limits itself to doing what was expected of it, aside from a certain amount of variation which I've already gone into. And therein lies the ultimate "double-bind" of movie sequels: 1) We want to relive the experience - or the "theme park ride" - of the original film, but 2) We're ultimately disappointed when it's unable or unwilling to risk being anything more. It's the ultimate case of not being able to go home again.

But maybe that's being overly pessimistic of me. While Believer is not as good a sequel to The Exorcist as Mike Flanagan's Doctor Sleep is to Kubrick's original The Shining (and I personally feel that Doctor Sleep is the Gold Standard as far as long-delayed follow-ups to classic horror films go), I think its inevitable callbacks and fan service elements are integrated in a reasonably satisfying way that avoids being overly obvious, even if one can spot them with a little effort. Also, this is only the first in a trilogy, right? Maybe Believer is the one film that's meant to perform the Star Wars: The Force Awakens task of getting long-time fans "back in the saddle," and hopefully the two later films will take more interesting chances. I mean, we can always hope, right? (Apparently the second one is to be called Deceiver. And for the finale, how about... Redeemer? Just a thought...)

Anyway, great or not, you know that I'm definitely going to get The Exorcist: Believer when it comes out on 4K and Blu-ray. I mean, I've got to keep my collection complete, right? :)

P.S. I watched all the other Exorcist movies in a marathon viewing this past weekend. I kept to a chronological order, in terms of onscreen events:

1) Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist (Paul Schrader / 2004)
2) The Exorcist (William Friedkin / 1973)
3) The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty / 1980)
4) Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman / 1977)
5) The Exorcist III: Legion (William Peter Blatty / 1990)

(The Ninth Configuration may not involve the subject of demonic possession or exorcism, but it absolutely takes place in the Exorcist Universe, for lack of a better way or putting it. Blatty wrote and directed it himself, adapting it from his own novel, and thematically it's very much of a piece with The Exorcist and Legion. The lead character is an astronaut named Billy Cutshaw, and he was apparently one of the guests at Chris MacNeil's party in The Exorcist - played by a different actor, of course. He's the one whom Regan addresses, saying "You're gonna die up there" to him just before urinating on the carpet. I guess you could make the argument that Cutshaw's frayed mental state in The Ninth Configuration is a kind of collateral damage from the events of The Exorcist.)

P.P.S. I thought that Dominion and Legion made for perfect bookends to this sequence. The reason for this is that in the horrific opening scene of Dominion, the Nazi lieutenant named Kessel forces Father Merrin to single out ten citizens from the Dutch village to be executed. As a frightened Merrin kneels down to pray, Kessel mocks him, saying "God is not here today!" Toward the very end of The Exorcist III: Legion, when Lieutenant Kinderman calls out to God, the demon inhabiting Father Karras mocks him, saying "You grow tiresome, Lieutenant. And foolish. Save your prayers. God is not here with us now. There is only the darkness here. And your death!" But of course, the very opposite is ultimately shown to be the truth. And, whether you're religious or not, that is the whole point of these stories...

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZGY2ODY4ZTItZDAwYS00OTkzLTlmZTYtMDQzZjM2MGQ3Nzc3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODE5NzE3OTE@._V1_.jpg



4.5

[skizzerflake]

Eraserhead (1977)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/Eraserhead.jpg/330px-Eraserhead.jpg
A story of a man living in an industrial wastehole working as a printer ("on vacation") with an unloving wife and a mutant baby. It goes at a deathly slow pace. Almost to the point of valuim intake. I think this is meant. It's livened up by some cranky characters, dream sequences and body horror segments a la Cronenberg. It's not bad just painfully slow. I may not be the best of judges as I can take or leave Lynch.
2.5

Yeah....I recall seeing it some years after it's release, accompanied by lots of "weirdest movie ever" hype, after hearing about it for a while before that. It was definitely weird, but there didn't seem to be much of a point to the weirdness. I was less creeped-out than bored.

[Fabulous]

The Milagro Beanfield War (1988)

3

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/lbD7ZI5jLSfbsJ8X75ZwxxPjoPR.jpg

[xSookieStackhouse]

2.5 it was okay but it was boring but glad they bought back the 2 original cast back from original the exorcist**
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/ExorcistBelieverPoster.jpg

[PHOENIX74]

https://i.postimg.cc/vmWHsBQz/sick-of-myself.png
By https://www.vl.no/resizer/p2N3MYsvArxGR_INimfz0Et0V-I=/arc-photo-mentormedier/eu-central-1-prod/public/2CQ2I5OHHZEY7C4RXIWP56TX4M.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73567547

Sick of Myself - (2022)

Sick of Myself is one very dark comedy - and although it exposes the heart of a woman, Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), who's clearly very mentally ill, it's a movie I couldn't look away from for a second - and one I found extremely funny. It's also one that had me putting away my cinema snacks - you need a very strong stomach to watch it. Signe is, for the most part, an attention seeker of the worst kind. She feigns allergies and fits, tortures a dog in the hopes it'll lose it and bite her (after witnessing a similar incident) and mutilates herself. Her boyfriend, Thomas (Eirik Sæther) is a kindred spirit of a sort, an artist, he seeks attention in more normal kinds of ways - but he still constantly seeks adulation. The road they travel down is tragic, but framed in such a way that'll exasperate anyone who might sympathise with it's protagonist. Signe hurts people along the way, and lives in a fantasy world hopelessly removed from friends and family. Kristoffer Borgli's movie, though, is extraordinary - one of the funniest original films I've watched this year, and one of the most straightforward and painful. As bizarre as the events are in it, I can see all of this happening to a real person - although I'd expect they'd be stopped and saved from themselves at some point. I don't know if it reflects on me, liking these really sick dark movies - but wow. It's the best time I've had at the movies in 2023.

9/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/Cop_land_movie_poster.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5886157

Cop Land - (1997)

James Mangold's Cop Land is a measure above most crime films - and not only because it has a dream cast of actors you'd rarely see in the same film together. It's sets up a real Goliath - a whole precinct full of dirty cops in league with the mob - and gives us one placid, timid, cop-worshipping sheriff, Freddy Heflin (Sylvester Stallone), who initially protects and shields his buddies from any law-breaking consequences. When the murder of one of their own makes this a bridge too far, he's going to be alone against the likes of bad boys Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel), Jack Rucker (Robert Patrick) and the mafia. In the meantime there's a coke-snorting officer who burns his own house down for the insurance money (and accidentally fries his own girlfriend), Figgsy (Ray Liotta) and an Internal Affairs investigator who's just about had enough of the whole sorry saga, Moe Tilden (Robert De Niro). Every scene really hammers home the hopelessness, plus the size and strength of the boys club - cops looking after each other. Who's going to police the police? Makes for an interesting and exciting noir thriller with no end of enjoyable performances. Really great entertainment.

8/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/12/Labor_Day_Poster.jpg
By May be found at the following website: IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45669640

Labor Day - (2013)

I've read comments on this film - it irks some that the main female character in it, Adele Wheeler (Kate Winslet), is very fragile and weak, while the male love interest, Frank Chambers (Josh Brolin) just barges his way into her life (a macho, masculine escapee from prison) and fixes everything as if that's all she needed. I don't look at it as being quite so representative about everyone. I kinda like it - it's a fraught love story from the perspective of Adele's son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) who never had much of a role model growing up, and wanted to be his mother's strong support. The fact that his mother's ideal man just arrives out of nowhere, in such a terrifying way - well, that's much like life in general. How random it is, meeting those people in our lives - and how often the quiet ones that look nice turn out awful as much as the inverse. I like Labor Day, and I don't read too much into it. I'd be equally charmed by a film where a fragile guy meets a strong supportive woman. Or all the other combinations. The people that complete us and our family are never (or rarely) recognized on first contact.

7/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/Without_limits.jpg
By impawards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11494066

Without Limits - (1998)

I have to give this to Without Limits - it straddles a couple of genres that are usually pretty predictable, but it's really not predictable. It's a biographical sports movie - and I'd never heard of Steve Prefontaine, so I really didn't know anything about his life or career. Therefore, I was in for some pretty big "knock-me-down-with-a-feather" surprises. The content itself is a little 'midday movie' in feel and quality - I wouldn't go out of my way to see it, but I do feel just slightly richer knowing about this particular athlete, and his story. Billy Crudup looks just like him, and acquits himself well. Donald Sutherland fills his role very easily. It got me in the end, but oh boy - this is as slow as a slug getting going.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Poster_of_Stone_%282010_film%29.jpg
By Derived from a digital capture (photo/scan) of the Film Poster (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party). Copyright held by the film company or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28649933

Stone - (2010)

Sometimes I feel an urge to go out to bat for a film that got through much of the audition okay, but flubbed it's lines two-thirds of the way through and froze. Stone sets up it's four main characters marvelously, along with the situations they're in, but then proceeds to go absolutely nowhere. Two bookends, grand empty threats by main character, parole officer and SOB Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro), aren't enough to provide us with any catharsis or closure to the drama that goes between. There's nothing worse than a film that raises your hopes and then lets them freefall all the way to the ground - and with two interesting characters being played with conviction by De Niro and Edward Norton, I'd think we'd see something a little more powerful. Originally this was going to be a play, written by Angus MacLachlan - and considering all of what happens outside the prison parole officer's office is flat, I reckon it was simply expanded when it looked set to become a film. An expansion devoid of any reason or need - just to fill a picture.

5/10

[Thief]

THE MEG
(2018, Turteltaub)

https://i.imgur.com/HW8Frzs.jpg


"Meg versus man isn't a fight... it's a slaughter."



The Meg follows Jonas Taylor (Statham), a rescue diver that has gone into exile after a previous mission resulted in the death of two crew members. But when a team of researchers led by some of Taylor's former co-workers stumble upon a living megalodon, Taylor has to jump back into action mode to kick some shark's ass.

That's more or less the amount of thought you can expect was put into the film. Just a bunch of people trying to stop a big shark from eating a bunch of people. Sadly, the film doesn't seem to fully commit neither to the serious biological aspects of the premise, nor to the chomp-chomp, silly angle it could've gone with, which leaves the film in a weird middle ground that's not very satisfying.

Grade: 2.5


Full review on my Movie Loot (https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2416765#post2416765)

[Tugg]

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) 4
What a ride. It finds right balance between incredible action, emotionality and jokes. One of the best, if not the best, of the franchise. I hope part two succeeds too.
https://flaszonfilm.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/mi7.jpg?w=1024

[Darth Pazuzu]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/36/ExorcistBelieverPoster.jpg/220px-ExorcistBelieverPoster.jpg

Just a few more thoughts regarding my recent UltraScreen viewing of The Exorcist: Believer last Friday:

To sum up: I liked it, thought it was decent, but wasn't exactly bowled over by it. It managed to be better than Renny Harlin's prequel remake Exorcist: The Beginning (2004) by a very wide margin, but other than that it was what I would call a dutiful sequel, one that ticked off all the right boxes and fulfilled its commercial mandate, but didn't really do anything particularly daring. (Not that I won't get the Blu-ray/4K pack to complete my collection... :lol:)

But what really can be done?

I mean, out of all the possible films that could serve as the basis for a franchise, The Exorcist (1973) quite possibly qualifies as the least likely. Because it's not like James Bond or Indiana Jones, where you've got an ongoing series of adventures. William Peter Blatty's original novel is a very self-contained story about a very particular group of characters in a very particular set of circumstances dealing with a very particular series of inexplicable and horrific events, as follows:

An elderly priest working in Iraq prepares for his final battle with an evil adversary. A famous actress works on a film in Georgetown. A younger priest working as a psychologist on the campus at Georgetown University experiences grief, loss and guilt after the death of his mother. The actress' young daughter manifests violent symptoms of what first appears to be a physiological, and then psychological, disturbance. The actress' director is killed in or near her house in what initially looks like a violent freak accident, but a local detective suspects foul play, and further suspects the disturbed young child. Meanwhile, doctors are at a loss to explain the girl's illness, so the mother enlists the aid of the troubled young priest / psychologist. Eventually, the elder priest arrives and the two clerics attempt to exorcise an evil spirit from the body of the girl. The older one dies, while the younger gets into a physical struggle with the possessed child, after which he jumps out the bedroom window and plunges to his death. The younger man's best friend arrives on the scene to perform the last rites. The family moves out of the house, while the detective and the friend of the younger priest begin to establish a close friendship. [That last part is in the novel and the Extended Version of the film only.]

And that's it, really! If you think about it, there are not many viable avenues of expanding or extrapolating upon those very basic story elements. At least not in such a way as would function as a successful "theme park ride" replicating the thrills of the original, while simultaneously taking things in a different direction. Director John Boorman and screenwriter William Goodhart thought that they could take Blatty's basic premise into a very different direction with the wildly underrated Exorcist II: The Heretic, but by and large audiences rejected the vision. Blatty himself wrote a follow-up novel called Legion which dealt primarily with events connected with the original story, but was unable to get a movie version produced unless he compromised and reworked the story into something more strongly resembling the original Exorcist. Director Paul Schrader and screenwriters William Wisher and Caleb Carr told a very unique tale dealing with events which took place decades before the original The Exorcist, but again... since the studio didn't perceive it as being enough like the original film, they rejected the vision and brought in Renny Harlin to deliver a more conventional shockfest.

I remember something that the writer Kim Newman said in his book Nightmare Movies. I'm kind of paraphrasing here, but I'll try to sum up what he said. He felt that for all its success, The Exorcist represented a kind of dead end in terms of being a viable influence on other films. He felt that most cash-ins and clones of The Exorcist such as Abby (1974) and Italian knockoffs such as The Antichrist and Beyond the Door (also 1974) could not develop or expand on the ideas of the original in the fruitful way that John Hancock's Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971), David Cronenberg's Shivers (1974) or John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) all managed to expand upon and develop the ideas of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). As a result of this, he feels that Romero's film has had the more positive influence overall. He also adds that big-budget Hollywood Exorcist cash-ins such as The Omen (1976), The Sentinel (1977) and The Manitou (1978) ultimately find so little worth stealing from the Friedkin / Blatty film that they go back to Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and pilfer elements of its plot instead!

All of which does not mean that The Exorcist - novel or film - is a bad story. It's just that it doesn't seem to make for a very viable template in terms of influencing other films or serving as something to build a franchise upon. As I've stated before, the whole process of trying to exploit the success of the original classic has been a very fitful and painful tug-of-war between the forces of art and commerce. Between giving the people what (they think) they want and giving them what the writer and director wants, which is something new and which fails the "theme park ride" test.

Like I said in my previous post, I'm hoping that David Gordon Green and the producers manage to do something much more interesting with the next two installments. I hope a good balance can be struck between taking the franchise into new territory (such as the whole process of spiritual synchronization and the Teilhard de Chardin "world mind" theory that was touched upon in The Heretic) and maintaining the fright factor and sense of fearful confrontation with unknown forces which made the original film so effective.

We can only hope, right...? ;)

[Raven73]

In the tall grass
7.5/10.
A bizarre and terrifying movie based on a novella by father-son duo Stephen King and Joe Hill.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZjA2ZWU3N2MtY2JkYy00YjFjLWEyZWQtMjQ0MTU0NDk1ZTZmXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTkxNjUyNQ@@._V1_.jpg

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTk2OTczMDcxN15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTA4NjAzMQ@@._V1_.jpg


4

[PHOENIX74]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/11/Ghost_in_the_Shell_%282017_film%29.png
By http://www.impawards.com/2017/ghost_in_the_shell_ver2.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52233222

Ghost in the Shell - (2017)

I didn't want to bother too much with being outraged about whitewashing, or even the fact that there will be inevitable criticism about this compared to the original source (which I haven't read/seen yet.) I just wanted to see if I could enjoy this on it's own merits, those two factors put aside for now. This was a a huge production for Paramount, with a budget alone of over $100 million, and as such was thought of as being a big deal - but the original animated version of the 1989-1991 Manga, which came out in 1995, is still thought of as the true touchstone. I actually really liked the visuals in this, but I don't exactly know where credit goes to in such a case as this - I figure half to the original for providing inspiration and half to the talented artists that worked on this version. It provided me the amount of escapism I demand from my movies and no more - I've seen so much science-fiction which deals with stolen identities (Total Recall), cyborg advancement (Robocop) and virtual worlds (The Matrix) - this is where it mixes with the big themes of 1980s/1990s sci-fi, so once it is adapted in this era, it doesn't feel as original as it used to be. The pretty sights are something to behold though - and that's what kept me going to the end.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f1/Mirrorsposter08.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18035985

Mirrors - (2008)

So, every now and then I poke my head into the trash can and watch a grubby horror movie for my inner child - Mirrors is pretty bad, but it gets an extra point on my rating just for delivering the goods as far as gory shocks go (even though I have to repress my rage when it comes to lazy CGI horror effects in one instance, which look absolutely fake - way faker than practical effects.) You should be able to guess what it's about by it's one-word title. Ghosts in the mirrors. Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) - a rage-a-holic (it's hilarious how quickly this character becomes enraged by something) is a security guard at a burned down department store (I have no idea why a burned, abandoned building needs a security guard) - but there's something in the mirrors, as he soon finds out. Cue lots of people not believing him, and his family thinking he's gone bonkers when he rids the family home of mirrors (these guys are nuts - they have about 80 mirrors in their house.) Would be a lot of fun on a drunken riff-the-movie night. I mean, it's a terrible movie, but it's silly enough to never get boring.

4/10

[PHOENIX74]

Tellingly enough, my favorite sequel - nay, my actual favorite film! - of all time is John Boorman's Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). The fact of the matter is, it is an abject failure in terms of functioning as a sequel in the "theme park ride" sense. For years, it has been derided as the worst cinematic sequel of all time, in spite of the fact that there has been a plethora of lousy and opportunistic follow-ups and cash-ins to all manner of films since then. To this day, and quite unaccountably, The Heretic remains one of cinema's All-Time Great Unforgivens.

https://www.booktopia.com.au/covers/big/9781629339498/2108/horrible-and-fascinating-john-boorman-s-exorcist-ii-hardback-.jpg

That gives me another very good opportunity to plug my good friend's new book, Horrible and Fascinating : John Boorman's Exorcist II : The Heretic by Declan Neil Fernandez. After years of intense research and much effort, it's received some high praise. Both him and I both have been interested in that film for a long time.

[Gideon58]

https://i.postimg.cc/vmWHsBQz/sick-of-myself.png
By https://www.vl.no/resizer/p2N3MYsvArxGR_INimfz0Et0V-I=/arc-photo-mentormedier/eu-central-1-prod/public/2CQ2I5OHHZEY7C4RXIWP56TX4M.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73567547

Sick of Myself - (2022)

Sick of Myself is one very dark comedy - and although it exposes the heart of a woman, Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), who's clearly very mentally ill, it's a movie I couldn't look away from for a second - and one I found extremely funny. It's also one that had me putting away my cinema snacks - you need a very strong stomach to watch it. Signe is, for the most part, an attention seeker of the worst kind. She feigns allergies and fits, tortures a dog in the hopes it'll lose it and bite her (after witnessing a similar incident) and mutilates herself. Her boyfriend, Thomas (Eirik Sæther) is a kindred spirit of a sort, an artist, he seeks attention in more normal kinds of ways - but he still constantly seeks adulation. The road they travel down is tragic, but framed in such a way that'll exasperate anyone who might sympathise with it's protagonist. Signe hurts people along the way, and lives in a fantasy world hopelessly removed from friends and family. Kristoffer Borgli's movie, though, is extraordinary - one of the funniest original films I've watched this year, and one of the most straightforward and painful. As bizarre as the events are in it, I can see all of this happening to a real person - although I'd expect they'd be stopped and saved from themselves at some point. I don't know if it reflects on me, liking these really sick dark movies - but wow. It's the best time I've had at the movies in 2023.

9/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5c/Cop_land_movie_poster.jpg
Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5886157

Cop Land - (1997)

James Mangold's Cop Land is a measure above most crime films - and not only because it has a dream cast of actors you'd rarely see in the same film together. It's sets up a real Goliath - a whole precinct full of dirty cops in league with the mob - and gives us one placid, timid, cop-worshipping sheriff, Freddy Heflin (Sylvester Stallone), who initially protects and shields his buddies from any law-breaking consequences. When the murder of one of their own makes this a bridge too far, he's going to be alone against the likes of bad boys Ray Donlan (Harvey Keitel), Jack Rucker (Robert Patrick) and the mafia. In the meantime there's a coke-snorting officer who burns his own house down for the insurance money (and accidentally fries his own girlfriend), Figgsy (Ray Liotta) and an Internal Affairs investigator who's just about had enough of the whole sorry saga, Moe Tilden (Robert De Niro). Every scene really hammers home the hopelessness, plus the size and strength of the boys club - cops looking after each other. Who's going to police the police? Makes for an interesting and exciting noir thriller with no end of enjoyable performances. Really great entertainment.

8/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/12/Labor_Day_Poster.jpg
By May be found at the following website: IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45669640

Labor Day - (2013)

I've read comments on this film - it irks some that the main female character in it, Adele Wheeler (Kate Winslet), is very fragile and weak, while the male love interest, Frank Chambers (Josh Brolin) just barges his way into her life (a macho, masculine escapee from prison) and fixes everything as if that's all she needed. I don't look at it as being quite so representative about everyone. I kinda like it - it's a fraught love story from the perspective of Adele's son Henry (Gattlin Griffith) who never had much of a role model growing up, and wanted to be his mother's strong support. The fact that his mother's ideal man just arrives out of nowhere, in such a terrifying way - well, that's much like life in general. How random it is, meeting those people in our lives - and how often the quiet ones that look nice turn out awful as much as the inverse. I like Labor Day, and I don't read too much into it. I'd be equally charmed by a film where a fragile guy meets a strong supportive woman. Or all the other combinations. The people that complete us and our family are never (or rarely) recognized on first contact.

7/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/Without_limits.jpg
By impawards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11494066

Without Limits - (1998)

I have to give this to Without Limits - it straddles a couple of genres that are usually pretty predictable, but it's really not predictable. It's a biographical sports movie - and I'd never heard of Steve Prefontaine, so I really didn't know anything about his life or career. Therefore, I was in for some pretty big "knock-me-down-with-a-feather" surprises. The content itself is a little 'midday movie' in feel and quality - I wouldn't go out of my way to see it, but I do feel just slightly richer knowing about this particular athlete, and his story. Billy Crudup looks just like him, and acquits himself well. Donald Sutherland fills his role very easily. It got me in the end, but oh boy - this is as slow as a slug getting going.

6/10

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Poster_of_Stone_%282010_film%29.jpg
By Derived from a digital capture (photo/scan) of the Film Poster (creator of this digital version is irrelevant as the copyright in all equivalent images is still held by the same party). Copyright held by the film company or the artist. Claimed as fair use regardless., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28649933

Stone - (2010)

Sometimes I feel an urge to go out to bat for a film that got through much of the audition okay, but flubbed it's lines two-thirds of the way through and froze. Stone sets up it's four main characters marvelously, along with the situations they're in, but then proceeds to go absolutely nowhere. Two bookends, grand empty threats by main character, parole officer and SOB Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro), aren't enough to provide us with any catharsis or closure to the drama that goes between. There's nothing worse than a film that raises your hopes and then lets them freefall all the way to the ground - and with two interesting characters being played with conviction by De Niro and Edward Norton, I'd think we'd see something a little more powerful. Originally this was going to be a play, written by Angus MacLachlan - and considering all of what happens outside the prison parole officer's office is flat, I reckon it was simply expanded when it looked set to become a film. An expansion devoid of any reason or need - just to fill a picture.

5/10

LOVED Labor Day and Cop Land

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNmQzZWM3NmMtNGYyNi00NjUyLWE1ZTAtYWM4MmEwYmIwZjM4XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjM5NDQzNTk@._V1_.jpg


1st Rewatch...Television in the 1980's was all about miniseries based on novels and this was one of my favorites, which I recently discovered on You Tube. This was the story of a publishing magnate named Zachary Amberville (Barry Bostwick) and his lifelong rivalry with his nasty younger brother Cutter (Perry King). As the story opens Zachary is found dead on a Canadian mountain and through flashbacks we meet his first true love (Jane Kaczmareck), the duplicitous witch he actually marries (Francesca Annis) and his three children: Maxie (Valerie Bertinelli) is a flighty playgirl who goes through three
marriages and has a child; Toby (Tim Daly),a blind gourmet chef and Justin (Adam Storke) a gay photographer. This handsomely mounted miniseries is a bit of a time commitment, but if you were a fan of shows like Dynasty or Knots Landing, you'll love this. The film also features Jack Scalia, Paul Hect, Ken Olin, Kate Vernon, and an actress you might have heard of named Julianne Moore. Not for all tastes, but if you like watching pretty people having pretty problems, this is right up your alley. 3.5

[ScarletLion]

https://i.postimg.cc/vmWHsBQz/sick-of-myself.png
By https://www.vl.no/resizer/p2N3MYsvArxGR_INimfz0Et0V-I=/arc-photo-mentormedier/eu-central-1-prod/public/2CQ2I5OHHZEY7C4RXIWP56TX4M.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73567547

Sick of Myself - (2022)

Sick of Myself is one very dark comedy - and although it exposes the heart of a woman, Signe (Kristine Kujath Thorp), who's clearly very mentally ill, it's a movie I couldn't look away from for a second - and one I found extremely funny. It's also one that had me putting away my cinema snacks - you need a very strong stomach to watch it. Signe is, for the most part, an attention seeker of the worst kind. She feigns allergies and fits, tortures a dog in the hopes it'll lose it and bite her (after witnessing a similar incident) and mutilates herself. Her boyfriend, Thomas (Eirik Sæther) is a kindred spirit of a sort, an artist, he seeks attention in more normal kinds of ways - but he still constantly seeks adulation. The road they travel down is tragic, but framed in such a way that'll exasperate anyone who might sympathise with it's protagonist. Signe hurts people along the way, and lives in a fantasy world hopelessly removed from friends and family. Kristoffer Borgli's movie, though, is extraordinary - one of the funniest original films I've watched this year, and one of the most straightforward and painful. As bizarre as the events are in it, I can see all of this happening to a real person - although I'd expect they'd be stopped and saved from themselves at some point. I don't know if it reflects on me, liking these really sick dark movies - but wow. It's the best time I've had at the movies in 2023.

9/10


Glad you enjoyed this, it's a good film, very dark comedy about narcissism, ADHD, jealousy and traits that are seemingly on the increase in today's messed up world. Very Ruben Ostlund, which is a good thing.

[Act III]

95569

Things To Come (1936)

This movie doesn't quite hit the mark. You'd say it was ultimately forgettable had you seen it in theaters. There were many movies like this in the 30s-50s, but what makes this stand out is its foretelling of WWII, space technology and video communications/thin screen monitors. I would add this to my collection but not see it often.

6/10

[Stirchley]

95575

Utterly delightful.

[Fabulous]

The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968)

3

https://www.themoviedb.org/t/p/original/w1V3OP4l2WRKPqo4x87hjzKgP6r.jpg

[Darth Pazuzu]

https://www.booktopia.com.au/covers/big/9781629339498/2108/horrible-and-fascinating-john-boorman-s-exorcist-ii-hardback-.jpg

That gives me another very good opportunity to plug my good friend's new book, Horrible and Fascinating : John Boorman's Exorcist II : The Heretic by Declan Neil Fernandez. After years of intense research and much effort, it's received some high praise. Both him and I both have been interested in that film for a long time.

I've got it already! :D :up:

Very interesting book, and very informative as well. But as its title indicates (it comes from one of Richard Burton's lines), it still falls a little bit on the negative side in its assessment. Granted, I didn't expect a lot of fawning and proclamations of "misunderstood masterpiece," because I know perfectly well that The Heretic is flawed. (A "smudged masterpiece," perhaps...) But to my mind, there's still a greater emphasis on "what went wrong" than there is on what's unique, distinctive and sui generis about it. After almost 50 years of ridicule and snickers and bad jokes about James Earl Jones dressed as a locust, I think The Heretic probably deserves a little better. (I'm also reminded of a lot of the ridicule and snickers and bad jokes about Sean Connery's skimpy briefs and "hooker boots" in Zardoz. Boorman haters have weird hangups in terms of what they fixate on, in my opinion...)

But Horrible and Fascinating is still a recommended read, regardless. :)

[LChimp]

https://posterspy.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/FInal_ScreamVI_LineageStudiosFASHOPS__JCG_102BB.jpg

Scream VI (2023)

[Act III]

95570

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Not as fascinating as when I saw this in the 80s/90s. This was the first big picture drama of its kind that was anything near realistic and serious. I love the color schemes of a dark background with often glowing bold and amusement-park-at-night style colors on film. Reminds me of Journey album covers and neon gaslights you see at taverns and strip joints. The guy abandons his family in the end and that makes me want to knock it down a notch, but its a top shelf classic.

10/10

[Act III]

95593

[Stirchley]

95575

Utterly delightful.

I remember Miss Vicky reviewing this movie & I’ve looked for her review, but can’t find it. Wondering if it would be easy for her to send me a link.

[GulfportDoc]

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Not as fascinating as when I saw this in the 80s/90s. This was the first big picture drama of its kind that was anything near realistic and serious. I love the color schemes of a dark background with often glowing bold and amusement-park-at-night style colors on film. Reminds me of Journey album covers and neon gaslights you see at taverns and strip joints. The guy abandons his family in the end and that makes me want to knock it down a notch, but its a top shelf classic.

10/10
I agree. It's a wonderful movie, and was absolutely fascinating when it came out. On re-watches though, IMO the build up to the final scene on the Devil's Tower butte could have been easily cut by 10-15 minutes. Too much time was spent having Dreyfuss making mockups of the encounter site. The movie wouldn't have lost anything if the run time had been cut to 2 hours. Great film though.

[Miss Vicky]

I remember Miss Vicky reviewing this movie & I’ve looked for her review, but can’t find it. Wondering if it would be easy for her to send me a link.

Here you go:
https://www.movieforums.com/community/showthread.php?anchor=1&p=2332349#post2332349

[Act III]

95595

Locke (2014)

A movie for people that enjoy tradional storytellers. Leaving everything to your imagination, this has got to be one of the best well done low budget films ever made. In a niche all its own there isn't a movie I've seen like this. A man driving long distance and trying to keep his life together through his carphone, he's the only character you see. Sounds terrible? It should be, but isn't.

7/10

[Act III]

I agree. It's a wonderful movie, and was absolutely fascinating when it came out. On re-watches though, IMO the build up to the final scene on the Devil's Tower butte could have been easily cut by 10-15 minutes. Too much time was spent having Dreyfuss making mockups of the encounter site. The movie wouldn't have lost anything if the run time had been cut to 2 hours. Great film though.

Yeah, but, seeing a supposedly realistic space alien was a huge deal back then and the selling point of the movie. They put in all the stops right up to the end, stalling everything to the last minute.

[Gideon58]

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BZWZkZjE2OGYtN2RiMS00ZDE5LWFlZGQtYzI1OTNhZDZkYzM3XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyODk2NDQ3MTA@._V1_.jpg


4

[Gideon58]

95595

Locke (2014)

A movie for people that enjoy tradional storytellers. Leaving everything to your imagination, this has got to be one of the best well done low budget films ever made. In a niche all its own there isn't a movie I've seen like this. A man driving long distance and trying to keep his life together through his carphone, he's the only character you see. Sounds terrible? It should be, but isn't.

7/10

LOVED this movie...the fact that I think Tom Hardy is incapable of giving a bad performance had a lot to do with it and him being the only one on screen....

[Act III]

95596

Ford v Ferrari (2019)

A biopic about Ken Miles, race car driver, and Caroll Shelby, motorsport engineer, who together with their team were the only Americans to win the 24 hours of Le Mans competition. They were hired by Henry Ford II who paid top dollar to add a racing division to his family car company.

Good movie. 2 & 1/2 hours long. Nothing bad to say here about this film.

8.5/10

[EndlessDream]

Catching up on my horror marathon posting.

5. Invaders From Mars (1953/DVD)

https://i.imgur.com/15UH2OM.jpg

Invaders From Mars begins with a kid named David witnessing a UFO crash land in the dirt outside his house. Everyone who investigates his story gets sucked into the dirt and eventually re-appears emotionless and with a strange wound on the back of their neck. David manages to convince authority figures that he's telling the truth, but is it too late to stop the mind-controlling Martians?

I really enjoyed the beginning and the ending of this movie, but it sags in the middle. David is easy to root for and I liked seeing a '50s sci-fi movie from a kid's perspective. I thought it was smart to have some of the adults who know him best give him a chance and not dismiss him outright. Unfortunately, David takes a backseat in the movie once the military gets involved.

The middle portion is where we get scenes of scientists and military men standing around explaining the invasion and how they're going to handle it. There is also a lot of stock footage of tanks and an oddly sensual scene of a giant telescope. I started to tune out during these parts.

Thankfully, Invaders From Mars ends on a high note when the humans come face-to-face with the aliens on the Martian spaceship. The aliens are bug-eyed furry humanoids who follow the command of a human-faced squid in a crystal ball. It's a fun, campy conclusion to a pretty good movie.

6. Phantasm (1979/Blu Ray/Rewatch)

https://i.imgur.com/TksullX.jpg

I watched this last October, but my friend wanted to see it, so I obliged. It's a really creative, but confusing movie that I highly recommend.

7. Invaders From Mars (1983/Tubi)

https://i.imgur.com/HdGvwl5.png

A kid sees a UFO crash land by his house, Martians use mind control devices on humans, etc. Same basic plot as the original.

The remake of Invaders From Mars does what a good remake does and smoothes out the rough edges of the original, while updating things for modern audiences. David has more to do here and his relationship with the school nurse is fleshed out in a nice way. The military general is played by James Karen, who is always a delight. And the Martians look spectacular unsurprisingly, as Stan Winston designed them.

Overall, the remake is the better Invaders From Mars film. Tobe Hooper did good work.

[EndlessDream]

8. Trilogy of Terror (1975/MeTV/Rewatch)

https://i.imgur.com/8wPb3TS.jpg

Trilogy of Terror is a horror anthology starring Karen Black and written by Richard Matheson. The first story, Julie, is about a college student aggressively pursuing his teacher. The second, Millicent and Therese, is about a woman so scared of her sister that she plans to kill her. And the third, Amelia, is about a woman who buys an aboriginal warrior doll that comes to life.

This TV movie is known only for its third segment and for good reason. It's a fun story about a woman fighting a killer doll. It reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode The Invaders, also written by Richard Matheson. The first segment is uncomfortable and disturbing with a twist that doesn't really help it. The second segment is pretty dull and also has a lame twist. I would recommend just watching Amelia.

9. The Black Cat (1981/YouTube)

https://i.imgur.com/07zCIgQ.png

This is a Lucio Fulci film about a psychic man and his evil cat. It's not as violent as his other work, but it has the wooden acting and confusing storytelling I expected. I was mostly interested in this for the scenes of a cat murdering people and it delivers in that regard. I was amused by the supposedly evil cat looking cute.

10. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983/DVD)

https://i.imgur.com/RENJ9N3.jpg

This is based on a Ray Bradbury story about an evil carnival that arrives in a wholesome midwestern town. The carnival offers attractions that seem normal at first, but are sinister underneath. Two young boys are lured by the new development in town and witness some darker aspects of it that they weren't meant to see.

Despite a notoriously troubled production, this movie mostly succeeds in adapting the dark children's novel. It gets the sentimentality of Bradbury's work right and doesn't skimp on the creepiness or violence. Jonathan Pryce plays Mr. Dark, the leader of the carnival, and he does a wonderful job as the villain. My favorite scene is when he confronts Mr. Holloway in the library and makes him a really difficult offer to refuse. He hooks people in with promises of their biggest desires and gives it to them for a hefty cost.

Not everything works well in Something Wicked. The ending is very sappy. There are quite a few dated special effects that apparently Bradbury and the director Jack Clayton weren't happy about. My biggest issue is that the story feels very truncated. The supporting characters don't get to do much. I especially wanted more from the other carnival performers.

Something Wicked This Way Comes doesn't fully live up to the book it's based on, but it still holds up as a dark and creative children's movie.