Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Sonic The Hedgehog, 2020 (C-)

Not great at all. It's a mess of adults who grew up in the 70s or 80s writing stuff for kids about, say, baseball. Jim Carrey's improv isn't terribly funny either. It's this weird inbetween of jokes that adults would get but not laugh at and not much humor for kids at all. There's also some relationship drama, because why not. And there's a bar fight, because kids like that, I guess. It's not funny and the story isn't good. The action scenes are pretty underwhelming as well. Couple pop songs, but not current ones. It really feels like a movie made for adults that never met kids.

Fanny is a very passive character in the mini-series as well. She’s there primarily to share Alexander’s experiences and bear witness to his abuse at the hands of the bishop. I just thought she would feel relatively more important in the theatrical given that there were fewer characters for her to be overshadowed by. Though I read a piece of trivia that while her name is the first word spoken in the mini series, she isn’t mentioned by name until an hour into the film.

The mini-series operates with the same sense of magical realism and gradually becomes more surreal as it goes (mirroring Bergman's trajectory as a filmmaker). It really embodies everything that Bergman approached throughout his career, from the realistic, to the melodramatic, to the metaphysical and the conflation of the spiritual and psychological. I don't think it's my favorite Bergman (he's among my absolute favorites and perhaps my favorite from the vangard of canonized "art film" directors) but it is definitely the MOST Bergman.

I watched it a few months ago and my reaction was largely positive.

One negative that has lingered (MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS YA'LL!!).

Alien from L.A. -

Wanda (Kathy Ireland), an oddly squeaky-voiced waitress, receives a letter that her archaeologist father is missing. Her search leads her to a secret and xenophobic underground world that's part Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, part Blade Runner and part Patrick Nagel painting. This premise may sound interesting, but there's next to nothing to write home about here. The most glaring issue is that seemingly 99% of the movie consists of Wanda running away from the underground world's authorities. It attempts to have a message about taking chances and expanding your horizons - Wanda's very smug and unlikeable boyfriend in fact dumps her for how unwilling she is to do these things - but the attempt falls flat because Wanda likely would not have signed up for her adventure if she knew what she was in for.

If you still want to watch this, I recommend watching the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, but if there are other episodes of that series you are interested in, you should probably watch them first. Even Mike and the Bots strain to spin gold from this meager pile of straw. As you may have assumed, a lot of their riffs are about Wanda's odd voice, which I didn't mind because it's one of the few attempts by anyone in the movie to do something memorable.

Manchester by the sea (2017) **9.1/10**

Casey Affleck is supreme in this character study as are the rest of the cast. A truly heartbreaking movie that doesn’t use action set-pieces to evoke emotion just excellent writing and performances from the actors.

Sleepaway camp (1983) **6.9/10**

The kills are shockingly bad but the mystery and the location keep the film bearable to watch. The notorious twist ending is actually well written and again I like that the credits basically rolled upon the reveal.

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"If you're good at something never do it for free".

Cleo from 5 to 7, 1962

The Varda march carries on!!

This was just fantastic.

The film opens with a young woman named Cleo (Corinne Marchand) receiving an incredibly specific tarot card reading. The news in the cards is not good. We learn that Cleo is waiting for the results of medical testing that will tell her whether or not she has cancer. Over the next two hours (just a little bit short of "real time"), we watch as Cleo interacts with various people in her life and reflects on her own feelings about her life and her diagnosis.

I thought that this film was really wonderful in terms of how it explored the relationship between our external and internal lives, and how they feed off of one another. The Cleo of the beginning of the film seems incredibly superficial. She comforts herself by declaring that as long as she is beautiful, she is alive. But Cleo's superficiality is not necessarily an innate characteristic. The movie makes us very aware of how Cleo is viewed by both strangers (especially men) and the people in her own life. At times there's this fabulous duality, such as when Cleo enters an art studio full of mottled, craggy humanoid sculpture, only to come into a room where a beautiful nude woman is being sculpted by an entire class of students. What the world tells us is valuable is what we come to value in ourselves.

And yet. Some part of Cleo chafes under this way of constructing herself. She wants to be recognized for her music. She is put off by the condescension of her lover and her musical collaborators. No one in the film, until the end, seems to take her illness seriously. (Question: the IMDb summary says that Cleo is a "hypochondriac"--but is she? Did I miss something in the film that she always thinks she is sick?). Cleo is constantly looking for signs in the world--and in particular she seems to have an eye for bad omens. In this way we can feel the lack of control that torments her.

The imagery in the film was just great. I loved the many POV shots that put us in Cleo's point of view. I also loved the progression of the costumes. Cleo appears early in the film in an ethereal white outfit--she looks like she is floating. But by the end her clothing and her mannerisms are borderline funereal. In one scene later in the film, she sits on a bench to talk with someone and you can see an entire sunny field stretched out behind them--while Cleo herself is on the bench in a strip of shadow.

It's interesting to watch this film so close on the heels of watching Sound of Metal. Both films deal with protagonists who are confronting medical issues out of their control and being forced to reconsider their lives and priorities.

This is definitely my favorite of the Varda films I've seen thus far.

"Fatman"

Damn entertaining with some nice curves slid in. Unique angle at the story that does both hit and miss. Aside from Gibson being a poop on the outside, there's no denying his persona as a directer/actor.


This output is mid-tier but might grow on me after another viewing or two. Enough serpentine for me. I liked it.


7/10

Arsenic and Old Lace



A new favorite. A perfect dark comedy. It is significantly darker than anything I expected from Capra. Wilder, sure. But Capra? Does he have anything else like this out there? It’s his Monsieur Verdoux.

Grant may have finally topped his comedic performance in Bringing Up Baby in my eyes. There’s a shriek he does midway through that had me in stitches.

It also has a dose of meta-fiction to it that seems the be a precursor to Scream, with a scene that feels so ingrained in the DNA of Randy obliviously yelling “turn around” to the TV that Craven may owe Capra kudos for his success.

Hunter Hunter (2020)

A thriller about a family living in the wilderness, hunting and selling furs for a meager living. A rogue wolf is causing them some troubles, but obviously, there's something more sinister afoot as well. There's nothing seriously wrong with the film, but it's just so very predictable and too obviously building up to its last 10 minutes or so. Despite good acting and a nice overall look, the foremost feeling is a mediocre Bergman ripoff (again) aimed more for the horror fans (which I obviously am, but still).

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And when she pours the V8 juice down her chest for the dude to drink off of her body?
Yeah that was awkward for Mom and two 12 year-old boys.

Oh yeah, Franco Nero's white ninja needs to be seen first (it was running on HBO at the time).

My parents brought me along to see this movie when I was 10 years old.
I didn't get it and I'm pretty sure neither of them did either.
Someday I hope to see it again.

Another one I really liked having just rewatched it a couple years ago after not seeing it since I was a child. Made a lot more sense this time. I thought for short-form they told the story pretty well even if it doesn't go so much into the territory that the series does.

I often found Snipes so corny that I am actually really looking forward to Ali's performance.
I was actually surprised to see how good Snipes was in My Name Is Dolemite.

I feel like you have overlooked the most important feature of the film... Kathy Ireland's... acting.
The movie is almost worth seeing just for that, IMO.

Man, I been meaning to watch this movie for over a decade and for some reason it's just never the one I pull the trigger on. I think I'm gonna make it one of my New Year's resolutions not to get out of January without getting this one done.

Yeah, this is, in my opinion, one of the great comedies... Of All Time!
Really, some of Grant's best work ever, even though so many of the supporting characters are really amusing, it still often seems like a one-man show because Grant is so perfect here.

It's pretty fabulous.

I had it mentally filed under "serious films", but honestly I was gripped from the very first sequence.