Rate The Last Movie You Saw

By Shochiku - https://www.shochiku.co.jp/cinema/database/03208/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69840214

The Human Condition I: No Greater Love - (1959)

This was a heavy and tremendous viewing experience - a humanist drama set during World War II, where Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) tries to introduce humane treatment to a Japanese labor camp in China, where the Chinese workers are brutally beaten, overworked and underfed. He's seen as a 'leftist' by some, a traitor by others, and his work reaches a critical junction when POWs are introduced to the labor force - with specific requests pertaining to their accommodation and treatment. It's one man's fight to retain his humanity and soul in the midst of a merciless system of injustice and cruelty. Everything is more complex than it was on paper for Kaji, and he finds himself torn and deceived at every juncture. His wife yearns to know his troubles - which are too awful to share with her - but most of all she doesn't want Kaji to do something that would put himself in danger. Of course, these things often come down to a binary choice - self preservation or spiritual integrity. The acting is smooth, and the film is terribly well shot - I really loved Harakiri and Samurai Rebellion as well, so along with Ozu and Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayashi seems to have produced a prodigious amount of Japanese classics which please me.

9/10

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Rocky II (Sylvester Stallone, 1979)

Although I found the original Rocky enjoyable enough, I never had a strong desire to catch its sequels so only got round to the second instalment when I accidently flicked over to it on TV.

What's interesting about the plot is that it no longer has the out-of-nowhere plot and rise to fame from of the first, which was obviously unrealistic, and instead get something almost the opposite. After the events of the first, the contrasting fates of Rocky and Apollo Creed seem quite realistic and I enjoyed how this film focussed on simple themes to tell an enjoyable story again.

Rocky III (Sylvester Stallone, 1982)

Much like the second film the plot of the third instalment once again follows a realistic approach where following his title victory, Rocky takes on a series of easy challengers as his trainer avoids the much tougher opponent in Clubber Lang.

The most enjoyable aspect of this film is Rocky's relationship with Apollo Creed, who acts as his trainer for the big match. There's something about these films that pulls me in and keeps me entertained with a good amount of heart.

Rocky IV (Sylvester Stallone, 1985)

Perhaps the most famous sequel due to it's iconic Russian villain, this film throws any subtlety out of the window and at times borderlines on being silly.

Once you embrace its ridiculousness, its still quite enjoyable with well shot fight scenes.

Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)

Not sure what the big fuss about the visuals is because even though it obviously takes a lot of work to capture what they do, the result is something that just looks like a video game. It's not realistic in any way.

Story is decent enough but very derivative as I had heard. I found the whole affair okay. I'll probably watch the sequel when I can, I don't have much more to say.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

Finally got around to this because it topped the Sight & Sound poll and I can see why it's held in such high regard.

I was a tiny bit trepidatious going in because even though I love watching "artistic" films, long and slow stuff can be hit or miss depending on my mood.

This really blew me away, it never bored me. It really pulls you in and gets you into a trance like state where the finale becomes really powerful.

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Bridgend (2015)

Interesting dramatization of the events following a spate of young suicides that occurred in the Bridgend area of Wales in 2007/2008. It's pretty low key but an intriguing look into the outcomes that a disaffected youth in deprived areas can manifest itself. Still no answers as to why the suicides happened, no suicide notes were left from 26 cases. The performances are all good and the only let-down is the ending which tries to get all mystical where a straightforward summation of the facts would have done.

FTFY.

Watch the rest of the trilogy ASAP. It's 10/10 easily when gauged together as one work of art.

Funny I just watched a Kobayashi film myself. Beautiful Days.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Not any sort of refutation, more just an amusing footnote, but Roger Ebert actually thought Rocky II was better than Rocky. I do like the film a good bit and always thought it was much better than its apparent reputation, but it's hard to get over the joys of the OG.

One of my favorite movies. Seen it many times.

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

The first time I watched them all I preferred 2 as well.

3 is so much fun, it’s closer to an action movie though with so many fights and montages.

@Daniel M don’t sleep on the Creed movies either, they’re terrific.

I only saw the first one, which I did think was very good, the others are also good?

Blood Beat, 1983

A young man named Ted (James Fitzgibbons) brings his girlfriend Sarah (Claudia Peyton) home for Christmas. But Ted's mother, Cathy (Helen Benton) seems to sense something strange, and before long the family is under siege, attacked by the ghost of a samurai warrior.

It's not often that you think to yourself, "Boy, Things really set the bar high!", but here we are.

Shot on video in a rural Wisconsin location, there are definitely some pleasures to be had in this film. No movie that includes the subtitle "Mystical boinging" can be all bad.

There's something interesting about the fact that Sarah is seemingly the vessel for the evil spirit, and yet she seems totally unaware of that fact. There's a nice contrast between her innocent horror and knowing that she's intimately involved in whatever is happening.

I also enjoyed Helen Benton's Cathy, a woman who spends the entire film in a fabulous shawl and honestly very much gives off the vibe of an artist type who also believes that she's psychic.

The real insanity (and the source of the "mystical boinging") kicks in during the last 10 minutes of the film, and it is truly amazing. It gets the film to a place of sublime ridiculousness with some genuine surprises along the way.

Unfortunately, most of the film does not operate at this level of transcendent weirdness. Yes, there's that off-kilter pacing you get from a certain kind of low-budget movie. But there's a lag to the film that isn't overcome by the eccentricities of the acting or camerawork. A recurring element of Sarah experiencing some sort of sexual ecstasy during the kills never really goes anywhere thrilling.

Worth watching, I suppose, if only for the very final sequences. But it's more of a slog to get there than you'd hope.

God's Country -

Thandiwe Newton plays Sandra, a college professor who moved from New Orleans to rural Montana. With her mother dying, Christmas vacation beginning and her superior (Kai Lennox) making it clear she can't totally depend on him, Sandra feels very alone as the movie's "counting the days as they go by" structure indicates. To make matters worse, a pair of hunters are illegally parking on her property despite her asking them not to. What follows is a tense and very well acted thriller about how it feels when the systems that are there to protect us do anything but.

Sandra, like myself and a lot of us when I wrote this, is on holiday break. I was lucky to be a lot less lonely than her and unfortunately many others, which either makes this the best or worst time of the year to watch a movie like this. It helps that Newton is so good at conveying Sandra's increasing isolation with grace and subtlety. The same can be said of how she weighs the best way to handle the situation with her unwelcome guests. Also worthy of praise is Lennox, who excels at playing someone who is merely dependable up to a point. There's also Andrew Wheeler's cinematography, which captures the natural beauty of Montana as much as it does its chilliness and isolation. Oh, and hopefully not to spoil it too much, but if you're wondering why they made Sandra be from New Orleans, the answer will blindside you. Despite how good Lennox is, the movie comes close to taking his villainy over the top. The movie remains an impressive directorial debut for Julian Higgins for the ways it proves that loneliness and injustice are not exactly good bedfellows.

Wow, this does look good. Fan of hers. Do we presume the hunters are white?

Yes, but I don't think it's just riding the woke train, if you know what I mean. It feels more substantive than that. Besides referring to events that actually happened - the title refers to Manifest Destiny, for instance - it's based on a short story by James Lee Burke, who specializes in New Orleans crime stories.

I discovered this movie thanks to a "best performances of 2022" list. I wouldn't be surprised if Newton gets an Oscar nom.

No, I never thought it would be woke. I was basing it on North Montana hunters parking illegally & trespassing most likely would be white drifters. Which would be more than scary for a black woman. Anyway, it’s in my Netflix Q. Thanks!

I rewatched four version's of A Christmas Carol like I did last year but this time didn't rely on half formed memories from previous viewings. Front to back, all the way through. The 1939 version with Reginald Owen as Scrooge, the 1951 release with Alastair Sim in the role, 1984's version starring George C. Scott and lastly, 1999's with Patrick Stewart.

1951's with Sim still holds up as the best IMO. Darker than 'the 39 entry in which Owen's Scrooge was but a shadow of his unreservedly misanthropic character. He was apparently reformed before The Ghost of Christmas Present had time to finish his spiel. But points to Owen's portrayal.

Scott's '84 take was more of an actor's clinic, with a rueful Ebenezer's everlasting regrets always simmering near the surface. It's the most naturalistic of all the portrayals but I think the role calls for a little over top grandiloquence. Scott's pragmatic depiction doesn't fully mesh with Dickens' theatricality.

And as much as I like Patrick Stewart as an actor his turn at the role doesn't really add anything new to the narrative. It's not so much that's it's a bad entry, because it certainly isn't. It's just adequate.

So this was my rating breakdown last year

1938 (Reginald Owen) 75/100
1951 (Alastair Sim) 88/100
1984 (George C. Scott) 75/100
1999 (Patrick Stewart) 85/100

This time I rearrange it somewhat with Sim (88/100) still coming in first. His gimlet eyed Scrooge is still the meridian as far as I'm concerned. He's followed by Owen and Scott tied at 80/100 and Stewart at 75/100. I don't know if I'll attempt a rewatch next year but my order might change again. Oh and I stayed away from the FX version with Guy Pearce. Once bitten twice shy.

Yeah 2 is good, some say better than the first. 3 is not out yet but there’s a trailer.

On Moonlight Bay (1951)

Well.
I just enjoyed the hell outta this. One of my favorite watches of the year, possibly No.1.
I had seen one scene of this before and liked the cut of its jib but just never felt like it was the right time to watch it. Then a friend said, "Hey, why don't you hang around and smoke this joint and watch Rockers with me?" And I said, "Ok."

This is a takeover, mon!


Remove ya!

Anyway, the short-version of the story is that Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace, a drummer living in the slums of Kingston, has decided to borrow money to buy a motorcycle so that he can drive to all the dancehalls and sell the new records being pressed in order to support his family. To my surprise, pretty much everyone he asks agrees to help him.


This is the first really cool thing about this movie. Everybody helps everybody. He gets the motorcycle and has a Lion of Judah painted on it and sets about his task, which immediately goes well because everybody helps everybody. But then someone steals it and now Leroy has lost his means of making money and the thing which he owes many people money for. What will he do?
Well, this is Jamaica (mon), and I just got back from there and this was kinda my experience too... he just asks a bunch of Rastas for help and they all say "yes". Because everybody helps everybody. Even when Jacob Miller pulls a knife on Leroy for stealing his food (literally while he was eating it) it's all just laughed off and they dap it out and then Miller sings a song and they go get the motherf*ckers who stole his bike. It suddenly turns into a 70s Blaxploitation movie where all the hard-hitters in the community band together (to Peter Tosh's "Stepping Razor") to go get The Man (oh yeah, it turns out The Man stole Leroy's bike).
The movie is so guerrilla in a lot of ways (made for $40,000) and yet there are so many little joys to it. You start out thinking Leroy is kind of a deadbeat but then he actually makes good on what he says he's gonna do and you see that people like him and he really is a good drummer, he just lives in a slum in the Third World and this is his life. All the people you meet, they're just people like Leroy trying to do their best. But what penetrates is the joy and camaraderie they all seem to find in life despite the hardships. I swear, these amazing characters don't even seem to notice they are living in abject poverty. They absolutely shine.


And, ultimately, the good feels are not the only things this movie has to offer. There is surprisingly good craft here for the budget. I mean, no one in the movie is actually an actor, they're all just real Rastas, mostly reggae-musicians, and hell, Leroy's wife is actually played by... Leroy's wife. But they make it all work. And the direction, cinematography, and editing are all quite professional considering the money, at times actually really eye-catching. There's a great tracking-shot that I was really impressed by, for example. But they really manage to transport you and it was a really, really nice ride to take. In a lot of ways, I came away from it wanting to make sure I treated people in my community the way these people did in theirs. And go get The Man too!



I'll leave you with the opening of the movie, just for a little more of the flavor:

Everyone I tried to introduce this film to back in the early 90s hardly saw the fun in it. Even some who laughed through the whole thing considered it a miserable experience. Which to me is baffling but at the same time understandable because....what is Things even?


The whole film is a derangement of the senses. It resists being watched in any normal sense. There is not a scene that goes by where we don't question some fundamental thing about its reality. Hardly a line of dialogue where we don't have to step back and wonder what they were trying to say, or why they said anything at all. We frequently can't see what is going on. We don't understand why they won't just leave. Are those monsters even in the same house where they are dumbly drinking beer after beer in the kitchen. Maybe, we assume, but maybe not. Absolutely nothing can be taken for granted. We can't even trust the audio, which seems as if it is transmitting the voices of the characters and the score running behind them from two competing alien transmissions. Are these even the actual voices of the actors. Absolutely nothing is certain.


The only thing we really can be sure of is these guys like to drink beer, and they have a movie camera, and they made some papier machete bug monsters. And that kind of blurry half drunken headspace that the movie was clearly made in, is sort of the perspective we have to look at the movie through. And I don't think, even for a lot of my friends who laughed at it and who I thought were enjoying it, are really too eager to do such a thing. When the film ends it seemed they were just left with the niggling anger that they spent their time watching two seemingly stupid as dirt drunks videotape their weekend and they resent having to accept such a thing as a 'movie'. As if this would justify such a negligent waste of artistic license.


Of course my response was 'I guess I need to start redefining what I am willing to call a movie and what I legitimately enjoy'. And there was no looking back.

I can't see how this one would be considered miserable. It does move along at a decent pace. For me, it also lacks any kind of maliciousness that would make it unpleasant to sit through.