Rate The Last Movie You Saw

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Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Kenneth Branagh, 2014)

Lots more shadow would have been nice - Bourne it most certainly ain't



Winter's Bone (2010)

I didn't like this much at first but it grew on me and sucked me in. I didn't know where this was going and I liked that.

I too felt that it was a compelling and believable story. But Jennifer Lawrence was badly miscast in the role. Of all the actresses they could have gotten to play the Ree Dolly part, she was a weak choice. IMO John Hawkes steals the show as Ree's uncle, Teardrop. He's a powerful actor.

It was a bit hokey in parts, but I'd give it a strong 6/10.

~Doc



You can't win an argument just by being right!

That good huh> I've been putting it off because of franco. Does cranston make up for him>



I think I'm right in saying that The Last Seduction was first shown on TV and, therefore, wasn't eligible for the Oscars. Same with Croupier and a couple of other films in the 90's.
How interesting if true, I knew that Croupier (and a few others) had a "Channel 4 " funded feel to them so may well have appeared on TV in a graveyard slot in some form. The Last Seduction just seemed like a pucker funded film? It's not something daft like it has to have a theater (or a certain amount of theaters?) release to be considered at the Oscars? i.e. something that went "straight to video" wouldn't? Showing my ignorance...apologies!!



I too felt that it was a compelling and believable story. But Jennifer Lawrence was badly miscast in the role. Of all the actresses they could have gotten to play the Ree Dolly part, she was a weak choice. IMO John Hawkes steals the show as Ree's uncle, Teardrop. He's a powerful actor.

It was a bit hokey in parts, but I'd give it a strong 6/10.

~Doc
I saw this a few years ago before JL was as famous and, yes, she's still a bit too clean-cut for the part. Over the whole piece of the film I think she does a good job though. John Hawkes is indeed scary in this film, the scene where the Deputy pulls over Teardrop in his pick-up is extremely tense!



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I Was Born, But...- Solid 8/10.

Been working my way through Bresson's films. Last I saw was A Man Escaped, which I would give an 8/10 to as well.



matt72582's Avatar
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The Selfish Giant




Liked this alot. I could relate to it a scary amount, knew plenty of people like Arbor and Swifty growing up and could completely recognize their behaviours. The school scene for instance easily could have been one of my classes at school; Arbor has an anger and attention problem and once he was given in trouble he initially got stubborn then cocky when his classmates started laughing which to him means approval whether they were laughing at or with him, it all felt real to me in the way every character acted throughout. The troubled kids at my schools often had similar homelifes to Arbor and Swifty and these kids often had one or two friends who were similar to them while everyone else shunned them, plenty of them never finished school and i've since heard of plenty of them going to prison. Even down to the mother who cares but has a really tough situation that prevents her from providing everything she is supposed to, obviously this isn't a universal situation but it was really close to the people like this i knew growing up. Well i mean the scrapyards and horses are definitely alien to me haha, but overall it was close. I definitely didn't treat those kids well when i was a kid, won't go into it i mean i wasn't a bully but i also wasn't particularly nice to them and that's always been a regret of mine. Think stuff like this gets to me because whether it's close to reality or not it feels like an insight into the troubles those kids faced that i didn't myself and i feel really sorry about some of their situations now, stuff like this grounds me and makes me recognize how privileged i was basically. More than anything i'm a sucker for British working class films.

Good performances, was crazy seeing Paddy and Carl from Shameless in this. Very good, could have liked it more but even though the main conflict was inevitable i wasn't that into it, probably because it was so obvious it was coming.
WARNING: "Selfish" spoilers below
Think it was all too predictable: when we learned they were friends they were of course going to fall out, when Kitten was introduced it was obvious that they were going to cross him, Swifty's connection to the horses was very clearly going to be involved in both of those things and the involvement of cables and live electrical wires made one of their deaths by electrocution easy to foresee. Kind of felt like i was just waiting for it all to happen. Not sure why the hug with Swifty's mum didn't resonate with me as much as it should have either.
I did love alot about it though as i said.

+
I love working-class movies.. Would you say this is similar to an English kitchen-sink movie?



Wind River (2017)




I love murder mysteries and I certainly enjoy a crime that is tough to solve. This movie drew me in and I invested myself into something I thought would be great. Unfortunately it was only "average" . The final scenes were riveting and hard to watch, but also very enthralling.

I do recommend Wind River, - I enjoyed the acting and the suspense was on par with many similar 4+ star films.
I give this one a solid

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I love working-class movies.. Would you say this is similar to an English kitchen-sink movie?
Yes Kitchen Sink Realism will have been a direct influence on this sort of film i imagine. It's kinda similar to Loach except i dunno.,.simpler, feels very realistic. It's about two kids who start stealing stuff for a scrap metal dealer. You may like it.




Dr Strangelove (1964)

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the war room"

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Originally Posted by Iroquois
To be fair, you have to have a fairly high IQ to understand MovieForums.com.



Get Out (2017)



I was surprised to see such high ratings in the reviews section.
I was attracted to the premise of a racially-charged "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner" turned horror film.

Perhaps my disappointment was because I watched this movie in 3 sittings as opposed to a single sitting (never a good idea for the "flow" of a movie). But man, I thought this was one of THE most awful movies I've seen in awhile.
My disappointment may also be over all the hype I heard about this (how Jordan Peele was going to be the new Wes Craven or John Carpenter).

The build up of the first half of the movie was pretty good as far as suspense goes, but as it nears its conclusion it seems to turn into a disjointed story made up of random elements that don't make much sense, and very few surprises (see spoilers below).

This film felt like it would've made a decent installment of a half-hour, modern-day Twilight Zone, but as a feature film it felt hackneyed and unoriginal with a very unfulfilling ending.

WARNING: "Spoilers" spoilers below
I didn't mind the use of hypnotism - although that's kind of boring, but when the story takes a turn to being about brain transplants... well, that's a bit more interesting, but they don't explore nor really explain it. A laughable scene was the dad cutting blind Stephen Root's head open and removing his skull cap before he even had the other "patient" in the same room - I'm pretty sure brain surgeons do go around leaving brains exposed while they leisurely go looking for other patients who aren't even close to being prepped - it defies the whole sterility of the surgical suite concept. We learn that "grandma and grandpa" had their brains put into other black victims who now serve the family as household servants - first, if these white folks had such a low opinion of blacks as the film suggests, why would they want to live out their lives in a black body, no less spend their renewed lives as servants? Seems, if they were racists, they'd try to find young healthy whites to put their brains into so they could be rejuvenated with an upwardly mobile future ahead of them full of all the amenities that white privilege could supply. It seems like they started to explain some things, but none of it made sense - like part of the victim's personality is still in the body while the transplanted brain is dominant... but how would that work with a brain transplant?


The movie might have worked a little better if some of the arbitrary mad science had been explained a bit more.

Any stars I give it are for the suspense of the first half and the TSA friend - the only enjoyable character in the movie who lent a few chuckles.




As an addendum, for those who'd like a racially-charged action / thriller with a simpler but more realistic plot, I recommend "Surviving The Game" (1994).

A homeless man (Ice-T) is hired as a survival guide for a group of wealthy businessmen on a hunting trip in the mountains, unaware that they are killers who hunt humans for sport, and that he is their new prey.



Welcome to the human race...
Steel:

WARNING: "Get Out" spoilers below
The idea is that the white characters aren't the stereotypically hate-all-black-people-no-matter-what kind of racist - it's more of a "liberal" kind of racism where they superficially appreciate black people's personal attributes but ultimately don't care about them as autonomous human beings. It's implied that Grandma and Grandpa only pretend to be servants while a new victim like Chris is around and that they go back to "normal" in the meantime. The reason they transplant into black people instead of white people is because they think of black people as being expendable compared to whites, plus missing white people would draw more attention than missing black people. As for why part of the victim's personality remains, I think the idea is that they can't remove the victim's entire brain (guessing they leave the part that regulates bodily functions) so they use "the sunken place" to keep it dormant.

The surgery aspect - my guess is that they've done it so many times by this point (as evidenced by the collection of photographs) that they're starting to get a little sloppy and also underestimate how much Chris himself is able to resist their methods.
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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0



Steel:

WARNING: "Get Out" spoilers below
The idea is that the white characters aren't the stereotypically hate-all-black-people-no-matter-what kind of racist - it's more of a "liberal" kind of racism where they superficially appreciate black people's personal attributes but ultimately don't care about them as autonomous human beings. It's implied that Grandma and Grandpa only pretend to be servants while a new victim like Chris is around and that they go back to "normal" in the meantime. The reason they transplant into black people instead of white people is because they think of black people as being expendable compared to whites, plus missing white people would draw more attention than missing black people. As for why part of the victim's personality remains, I think the idea is that they can't remove the victim's entire brain (guessing they leave the part that regulates bodily functions) so they use "the sunken place" to keep it dormant.

The surgery aspect - my guess is that they've done it so many times by this point (as evidenced by the collection of photographs) that they're starting to get a little sloppy and also underestimate how much Chris himself is able to resist their methods.
All good explanations, Iro! And most of them occurred to me with a bit of afterthought. I'm not big on exposition, but maybe this movie needed a bit more of it to give it more rationale. All in all, I didn't like it - mostly due to the ending. Like a lot of movies, I was pulled in by the first two acts, but ultimately let down by what felt like a poor or just lazy ending.

WARNING: "Ending?" spoilers below
I was almost anticipating Chris being arrested by cops with headlines of "black man slays entire white family." Or just shot on site by police (making a statement about a lot of modern social issues) which would also be reminiscent of films like Night of the Living Dead where the hero (also a black man) is unceremoniously shot in the head, being mistaken for a zombie - or that just being an excuse for rednecks to shoot a black man. I'm not saying these would be great endings either, but maybe better than what we got, which didn't even feel like an ending.


What I really don't understand is why so many people thought this was such a great horror movie - it wasn't scary, it was kind of corny, most of the turns were predictable, I enjoyed Chris' friend more than Chris (i.e. I didn't really feel for the protagonist), etc. It reminded me of one of those revamped Twilight Zone type TV series of the 1990's.