Rate The Last Movie You Saw

I do. It is.

The Little Things - Didn't really set out to watch this but kind of drifted in and ended up staying till the end. It's about a hunt for a serial killer and set in 1990's Los Angeles. It stars Denzel Washington as Joe Deacon, a former LA County Sheriff's investigator now working in Bakersfield. He travels to LA to collect some evidence and while there accompanies LACS lead investigator Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek) on a new murder and notices similarities to a serial murder case he wasn't able to solve.

Baxter learns that Deacon's obsession with the unsolved case led to not only his divorce but also to a heart attack. Despite being advised to keep Deacon at arm's length Baxter teams up with him after Deacon uses his vacation leave to help him investigate. More bodies turn up and their search eventually leads them to Albert Sparma (Jared Leto) who works at a shop close to most of the murders.

There's some standard cat and mouse action with the two detectives attempting to surveil self-proclaimed crime buff Sparma. This all plays out while the events that led up to Deacon's departure from the LA Sheriffs Department are gradually revealed. Add in plenty of "dark night of the soul" moments and a few glimpses of the protagonists home lives and you have your prototypical investigative noir.

It all adds up to less than the sum total though. You would think that a movie featuring three Oscar winners would make more of an impression than this did but there you are. I thought Denzel was his usual dependable self and Leto did okay with an underdeveloped character. I haven't seen either Mr. Robot or the Freddie Mercury biopic so I'm not all that familiar with Malek. But this wouldn't be the first time that a weak script undermined what could have been a more nimble effort.

70/100

I had a whole bunch of great films lined up, but for some reason I watched this instead :


By The poster art can or could be obtained from the distributor., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52199062

Project X - (2012)

I don't know about elsewhere, but where I live parties like the one in Project X are a scourge that have been targeted by introducing new laws to try and curb them. They're parties where, when word gets out, uninvited hooligans arrive to fight, cause damage, hurt people, and eventually engage the police with bricks, knives and bats causing a general riot. The morning after there's damage, hospitalizations and in rare cases even death. Of course, in Project X, something pretty similar occurs, only in this movie it's meant to be awesome and cool. I was actually surprised that director Nima Nourizadeh and writers Matt Drake and Michael Bacall escalated the teen party in their movie to such an extreme. It left me with negative feelings towards all of it's characters, who are obnoxious but may have had some redeeming qualities if they didn't welcome what they wrought on their shell-shocked community. I was stunned where the father of main character Thomas (Thomas Mann) reacts in a way that says, "Wow - My teenage son is really cool," after his house and car are completely destroyed and his son has criminal charges pending against him.

I guess this film exists as some kind of teenage fantasy, involving a party that goes pretty much as far as a party can possibly go. Included in that fantasy are the plaudits the kids who organized the party get from their peers, the girls they win over and the media attention they attract. While I'm glad that the film at least acknowledged that these kids faced criminal charges, overall the message was if you manage to cause this kind of carnage you are some kind of hero. The sex, drugs and music I can accept as part of teenage rebellion - but Project X took things to a level where there needed to be some kind of balance, without which it seems to be encouraging kids to be out of control idiots. Add the extreme misogyny (female characters in this film are treated appallingly) as a cherry on top of a pretty foul tasting cake.

2/10

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Riders of Justice, 2020

Markus (Mads Mikkelsen) is a soldier who is away when his wife and daughter, Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg) are in a serious train accident. On the same train was computer program writer Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), who is convinced that the train collision was no accident. Otto and his partner, Lennart (Lars Brygmann) convey their suspicions to Markus, and the group begins investigating the accident and its connection to a motorcycle gang called the Riders of Justice.

This film is an interesting mix of dark comedy, straight-ahead comedy, thriller, drama, and action. And against all odds---mainly thanks to a group of strong performances--it mostly succeeds.

What I most enjoyed about the film was the endearing brother-husbands/found family aspect of the film. Initially Otto and Lennart are spending time with Markus and Mathilde, but soon that circle expands to include their hacker friend, Emmenthaler (Nicholas Bro), and a young Ukrainian man, Bodashka (Gustav Lindh) who they rescue from sex trafficking. A suspicious Mathilde comes to believe that the men are part of a mental health service for her and her father, and there is a genuine sweetness to the way that they quickly become like a family unit, and even Bodashka seamlessly integrates himself into the fabric of the household.

Mikkelsen is his usual solid self in the lead role as Markus, but the linchpin of the film is Gadeberg as Mathilde. It is largely out of a desire to protect her that the group forms its friendship under the guise of therapy. And Mathilde herself is grappling mightily with the loss of the person who was her primary parent. There is a clear rift between Mathilde and Markus, the latter having spent a lot of time away overseas and even openly expressing that he regrets having Mathilde.

Something that did not entirely cohere for me was the strong emphasis on a sort of "butterfly effect" notion of how events domino into one another. There are repeated conversations about the nature of events and how coincidences are just events whose cause cannot be determined, and so on. This is where you can feel the film trying to hit some more profound notes, and it just kind of fell flat for me. The theme is implicit without the glaring spotlight. Mathilde is well aware that her bike being stolen is why they were on the train in the first place. It is very obvious that Markus is processing his grief through trying to problem-solve. But every time the movie tries to highlight this theme, it just seems like too much.

And speaking of, the film makes a HUGE ask of the audience when (moderate spoilers)

Overall this was a fun film. It doesn't get everything right, but the performances are strong and the chemistry of the cast and the genuinely heartwarming domestic sequences carry it through. The poster made it look like some Taken knockoff, which it most certainly is not.

A great one-sentence summary of many of my own Friday nights.

Oh man. Me three. I’ll have some highly acclaimed film set up to watch and instead I’ll bump it for some older horror film from the 70’s or 80’s more often then not.

After 20-some Batman movies and TV shows, what's left? I guess it's to keep getting darker and more twisted. This week, it's The Batman. You know it's going to be dark because of the "The" in the title. There's nothing comical about the Riddler, who is a psycopathic serial killer, or the Penguin, a scarred survivor of some godawful beginning.

Robert Pattinson is the latest inheritor of the franchise. Between costume, a digitally altered voice and the way he's shot, the lean actor becomes a nearly invulnerable horror whose anger is directed at the psycho criminals that inhabit a Gotham that's a darker counterpart to the worst view you ever had of New York (a place I actually like), a place overrun by psycho criminals, corruption, constant rain and a masked vigilantes.

It's visually quite a spectacle. Whatever acting happens is lost behind layers of FX and costumes and it's long. I like long movies, so it's OK by me, but some might find dead air in there.

In spite of that, I liked it enough to do it again at some point, since I'm sure I missed a lot.

Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)
8/10.
Everybody falls in love with Maureen O'Hara, including me when I was a kid.
A classic.

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Boldly going.

Anyway, I did like The Batman a lot on the whole, but another thing I didn't care for was the way that it hinted at yet ANOTHER version of The...

The Batman


What if the Crow were Batman?



What if we made Riddler into a ZODIAC killer?



What if we had a JAWS type theme that sounded a bit like the first three notes of the imperial march and just pounded the s**t out of it?



What if the Penguin was Bobby Deniro?



What if Batman just welded his stuff together in a garage? You like a kit-car Batmobile? Like Peter Parker in a Bat Cave?



The answers to these questions await you at the other side of a $40 and a bucket of popcorn.

Paddleton (2019)

And probably enjoy it more than the highly acclaimedd film when you eventually watch it?

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Sometimes, yeah.

I'm not aware of Tarantino making (or producing) any film by that name. Not even sure what film you mean, regardless of Tarantino. Are you talking about Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters? Or Bad Dreams from 1988?

Wow! You look at Cronenberg's filmography and there is going to be one film that's like WTF was he doing? This is that film. It's not bad a film it's just not at all what you think of when you think of Cronenberg. It's so normal that it's weird. A big name dragster driver is forced by his sponsor to run funny cars while his dragster is being repaired. This takes the spot of a young up and coming funny car driver and creates some conflict between both drivers and the sponsors. Throw in a little BF/GF stuff and you have Fast Company. John Saxon plays the d-bag sponsor rep causing all the chaos by looking to replace his top driver for someone a little more manageable and Claudia Jennings is the star drivers love interest. Those were the two names I recognized. This is Cronenbergs The Straight Story, a little more b movie-ish than that one, but watchable.

I've actually been waiting for a negative review, I knew this movie couldn't be as good as many are saying.
I mean, rogerebert.com fairly gushed about it, particularly from a filmmaking perspective, and IGN straight-up called it a "masterpiece" and that was when I was like, "Ok, time to check yourself, it is a Batman movie", so I've been waiting to read a negative reaction to get some balance on this.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I honestly haven't been very impressed with Malek in what I've seen. To me, he's melodramatic and tends to overact. He's one of those actors who can overact without speaking or moving, you just look at him and it's so obvious he's acting.
I frankly think the Freddie Mercury Oscar was incredibly weak sauce and another example that all you gotta do to win an acting Oscar is play a disabled person or do a biopic.

Ya know, this is an area where I differ from all (at least most) of you significantly.
I will never watch a movie that hasn't been vetted positively by some source I find credible.
Thousands of movies out there and only so many thousands of hours left in my life, I cannot bear to watch a truly bad movie.

Ain't that the truth. For me, it was The Quiet Man, which is still one of my favorite films, but I will watch anything with her in it.
And I agree, this is a classic, Laughton is amazing.

I really enjoyed Sing 2...missed Seth MacFarlane as the white mouse, but it was a lot of fun.