Rate The Last Movie You Saw

By POV - Impawards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18574644

K-PAX - (2001)

Find the bluebird of happiness. Everyone has the power to heal themselves. All creatures in the universe know right from wrong. I'm strangling you because I'm trying to help you. Fruit tastes so good. Prot arrives from K-PAX and starts lecturing Dr. Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges) - a psychiatrist whose first instinct is to believe this guy comes from another planet and invites him to come home and play with his kids (it nearly turns into a disaster - go figure.) I don't mind the sentiment, but sometimes it's a little heavy-handed, and Prot is so smug I want to strangle him, before realising that Prot would think I'm just trying to teach him an important lesson. I know some people who really like K-PAX (although I'm not sure what they think of it now.) I don't think it's a really bad movie - and I believe that we should be treating people with mental health problems a lot differently (and no - not by strangling them) but K-PAX is a bit like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest if during every scene Jack Nicholson faced the camera and gently spelled everything out to us with a condescending smile.

6/10

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Main Queenpins characters from best to worst:
1. Ken (by Paul Walter Hauser)
2. JoJo (by Kirby Howell-Baptiste)
3. Connie (by Kristen Bell)
4. Simon (by Vince Vaughn)

Remember Me (2010)

'No Time to Die' (2021)

I had low expectations, but enjoyed the first half of the film. Then it just gets about as ridiculous as Bond can get.

Woah.

Grimy.
Nasty.
Relentless.
Filthy.
Grubby.
Deranged.

It's also an extremely well made film by German Turkish director Fatih Akin (In the Fade, Head-On) who gives us a no holes barred look at the depraved life of real life serial killer Fritz Honka, who terrorized women in the German city of Hamburg in the 1970s.

One of the most disturbing and harrowing films I've seen since I watched a Gaspar Noe film. The film should come with a warning of extreme violence, nudity and upsetting images from start to end.

7.5/10

Hm. I think it might be interesting to consider that Kirk was denying the commitments of his generation - his son - and the responsibilities inherent in that, while Khan is primarily concerned with preserving his own generation, having been devastated by his exile conditions, and trying to usurp the Genesis machine to create his own fertile world (only using it as a weapon once this became unachievable), makes a pretty compelling parallel. (The Ceti eelworms which are explicitly mentioned by Khan as representatives of the essence of generation is an important clue to his obsession.) But I feel that the contrast between Kirk's avoidance/acceptance of parenthood and Khan's familial frustration draw directly from Genesis as a central metaphor.

Also, as a possible spoiler, Search For Spock, which involves the fate of the new world created at the end of Khan, and involving the regeneration of Spock, makes for an extra layer of meaning on these themes, if not quite as satisfying.

Five Steps to Danger - This is from 1956 and it starts out as a promising enough noir. I mean, just take a gander at that poster above.

"First she lured him into her car ... Then she let him taste her lips ... and then ... THE TERROR BEGAN!" What's not to like?

The casting is certainly reassuring with Sterling Hayden playing to his strengths as tough, no nonsense John Emmett and Ruth Roman as the enigmatic Ann Nicholson. They meet in a remote section of California near the Nevada border where John Emmett's car has broken down. He's on his way to Texas to visit family after a stop at a hunting and fishing lodge and is forced to sell his car leaving him on foot. She's in a hurry to get to Santa Fe and offers him a ride if he'll help her drive. When he stops at a roadside diner a woman named Helen Bethke (Jeanne Cooper) approaches him claiming to be Nicholson's nurse. She tells him that Mrs. Nicholson has had a mental breakdown and she and a Dr. Simmons (Werner Klemperer) have been treating her. When she finds out their destination she makes arrangements to meet them and take charge of Nicholson. It's only when a pair of state troopers pull them over and tell him that she's wanted for questioning in a murder back in California that the story takes an unexpected detour into Cold War espionage.

How you take this divergence will probably affect your overall enjoyment of the movie. Some may find it off-putting, others will just roll with the punches. And the story doesn't completely lose it's footing. It just involves additional exposition in the form of a flashback in postwar Berlin. The CIA gets involved as well as the FBI but the focus remains on the characters played by Hayden and Roman and they're enough to keep the audience invested. Hayden is money in the bank as far as I'm concerned and Roman performs admirably.

80/100

I re-watched it and it's actually my second-favorite of the Craig films. Easily.

I agree with every word of this, though I liked it even less than you did.

Rififi follows Tony (Jean Servais), a tough but aging criminal that sets out to commit a risky diamond theft. He is joined by his best friend Jo (Carl Möhner), a mutual friend called Mario (Robert Manuel), and a safe-cracker called César (Jules Dassin). The four come up with a plan to break into the store at night, disable the alarms, crack the safe, and walk out in the morning without being seen. But can they succeed?

This is a film of which I had heard countless good things, so it was great to see it deliver. You gotta hand it to Dassin for putting in the lead a man that's not only a criminal, but who we see brutally abusing of his former girlfriend within the first act. Tony is a no-nonsense thief that seems to have nothing to lose, and lives his life in such a way. He's not particularly charismatic and yet we want to see him and his friends succeed.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

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Yeah, I watched this for the Halloween challenge. The lead actor's look is, um, quite the transformation!



I mean, I get it, I just didn't find it that satisfying or interesting. The contrast between Kirk and Khan was solid, but the Genesis piece didn't interest me that much, despite serving as an element of the overall theme.

By IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65348621

Judas and the Black Messiah - (2021)

Well, that shocked me. And saddened me, as well as frustrated and maddened me. It's a tale about Fred Hampton, an activist who scared J. Edgar Hoover who used his FBI to take him down - first getting him arrested for 'stealing ice-cream' and put away for years and then just outright assassinating him. He was 21 years old. Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as FBI informant Bill O'Neal stand out and give us towering portrayals of a man inspired and a man afraid. It's just about a war movie, with power and influence at stake in a shaky, repressed society. That's 5/8 Best Picture Oscar nominated films I've seen so far - and I've found just about all of them 7/10 good. I'm still leaning a little towards The Father out of the films I've seen.

7/10

Ugh. This film has stuck in my memory over the years for some reason. It's one where the filmmakers pretty much felt that yelling was funny, so characters are constantly shouting and screaming. Even the film's title is shouting. Shelley Winters was really something back then though.

I'm definitely going to watch this, but I decided I'm going to read the book first. Give me a month or so haha

Disconnect (2012)

It's surprisingly good.

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May those who accept their fate be granted happiness.
May those who defy their fate be granted glory.💜

I will say this for Khan's treatment of the Genesis Device at least, it did do a good job of both explaining the general function of it to us, while also letting us experience the effects of it for ourselves; I mean, sure you've got the exposition dump of the proposal video for the project, but you also have the visual accompaniment of the process through that awesome, old-school CGI, along with the beautiful sight of the transformed cave later on to marvel at. It really does feel like a nice midpoint between the approach of 2001 and a work of older-school Sci-Fi like Forbidden Planet, where the former explains almost nothing to us (which is part of that movie's appeal, mind you), while the latter explains too much, pretty much stopping for fifteen minutes in the middle to give us a literal guided tour of all this leftover alien technology; it's like, let us experience some wonder at all this stuff for ourselves, would you movie?

A fine Samuel Fuller film. Journalist attempts to win the pullitzer prize by entering a mental hospital pretending to be a patient in the effort to solve a murder then writing an article about it. What I like was that the plot has an air of predictability about it, but Fuller is still able to weave subplots in and out to make it interesting and not a foregone conclusion.

7.7/10

Been on a rewatch kick since the boy has moved back waiting for his apartment to become available. His taste in movies and mine are miles apart. He likes love stories and silly comedies and I don't. Growing up he hated horror movies but my house, my rules. He won't watch b&w or foreign films....yet. I'm working on it. Knowing that we've watched:
The Return of the Living Dead
Hereditary
Martyrs
Event Horizon
Dead Alive
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The Night of Something Strange
Heathers
When Harry Met Sally
and
Three Men and a Baby

I have fun watching him get uneasy at some of them, especially Dead Alive and Night of Something Strange, which are obviously gore-fest comedies. So far he has liked them all. Moon, Mystic River and Frailty are next up. Last House on the Left is one he wants to see (just because of its rep) but I told him he'd probably be better off watching A Virgin Spring first. Hoping that one piques his interest in foreign films.

What? Why not? Why would you dictate what films you watch by going only on what colours are on the screen?

I have a friend who doesn't wanna watch any movies filmed on... film.
No joke.
She says they're just "too grainy".

So, like, I can't even get her to watch The Princess Bride.