Rate The Last Movie You Saw

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Honestly, it's just one of those movies that's better than it should be.
I'm gonna make time for it.




The Dry 2020 Robert Connolly


G´day Mates!
Small town murder mystery movie set in Australia.
Multiple timelines and mysteries intertwined make this a solid and engaging thriller.



Another Round 2020 ‘Druk’ Thomas Vinterberg


The anomaly Nic Cage still holds the best performance in a drunk role imo but Mads Mikkelsen is not far behind.
Great film about men in a midlife crisis and their poor attempt to solve their issues through alcohol. Winner of the arthouse cinema award 2020.

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I forgot the opening line.

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47796219

Mia Madre - (2015) - (aka : My Mother)

Margherita is having a difficult time digesting her mother's illness, and the fact that her death is imminent. Complicating things is her job - directing a film with a big name actor from the United States causing a headache for all involved. A touching tribute to the heartache and psychological damage of losing a precious loved one. John Turturro kind of threatens to steal the movie at certain points, but it remains centered and grounded.

7/10


By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15642629

Plunkett & Macleane - (1999)

A very 1990s film set in the 18th Century, with Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller as Plunkett and Macleane respectively. Based on real-life highway robbers, but in no way resembling real life. I disliked it the first time I watched it, but felt it deserved a second chance and I did enjoy it much more the second time. I get the feeling that the producers expected sequels - but the film was a box office bomb, only going on later to accrue a cult following. Really interesting and enjoyable Tiger Lillies songs force themselves to the fore giving it an unusual touch.

5/10


By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52361700

Goon : The Last of the Enforcers - (2017)

I did not realise that this was actually the sequel to Goon - mostly because this film is also titled Goon. Numbering sequels is very outdated these days. I thought the humour, while pretty lowbrow, wasn't too bad. Maybe I would have liked this less if I'd seen the original. Maybe I would have like it less if I was expecting a better movie. As it was my last selection, I expected nothing, and got at least something.

5/10




Loved this movie.
It wasn't too bad. It's gone up a point or two in my estimation, just hearing that.





Have you seen the movie Burnt? I hated Burnt, and the reason I hated Burnt is the reason I loved Pig. Pig is a tale of a sensitive man who had enough. Many individuals want to be artists, and they do things, like, caring about what others think, and they shouldn't. Then, there are those that don't have any other choice, they have to create and they put everything they have into what they do, it doesn't matter if is painting, writing, cooking. The problem with this art form is a cultural problem. Meals were thought to be shared and the one who cooks them expects a feedback, just like your mother: Do you like it? Isn't the turkey a little bit dry? This man eventually noticed how people have this mentality embedded into their being, how they think just because they paid a meal they can tell the chef what they thought about it, but they didn't knew how much of himself he putted into each dish. The way this sensitive man looks after the truffle pig is also very meaningful, it's a metaphor. Truffle pigs look for truffle they won't eat. The people eating the truffles don't care about the pig. The people cooking the truffles don't care about the pig, this sensitive man cared about the tree that gives him the fruit he cooks, cares about the ground the holds the truffle he takes, a very sensitive man. This is a tale of how out of touch people are, how everything is cheap and disposable and no one takes the time to notice, because money bought, and money buys. I've always said: if you had made the chair you're sitting in, you'd give it value every time you looked at it before you sit down.





No Sudden Move (2021)

Steven Soderbergh is a great director, a man that has always loved the film noir No Sudden Move is a peak neo-noir. Telling the story of a crime gone wrong this winding tale. If I could best describe this film is it's a movie with eight endings..some perfect some not so perfect but the exercise is what makes this a special film. You have an ambiguous aspect to the film but it never feels cheap.

What I love about Soderbergh is he never hits you over the head with issues of race, class and gender. Don Cheadle and Benicio Del Toro are both revelations in this, two great actors who have been phoning it in for years but now has inspiration. The rest of the cast is filled with inspired stunt and returnee casts.






American Horror Storiesrive In

Episode 3 of AMSrive In was a step ahead of the RubberWoman double feature. The idea behind the story is that in the 1980's a film came out that was so horrifying that it caused the audience to kill each other. Years later the print gets a re-release.

My feelings about Ryan Murphy's work is always complicated. The major subplot of the story is about teenage sexuality a boy is trying to lose his virginity to a girl. But the story can't just be about a Drive-In massacre you then needed a very queer best friend which was tacked on. And then we get a climax that, is a genre flop in my eyes. Taking character to a second location which felt really out of place.

But even though it's not a great episode it's still a very good one. Adrienne Barbeau has a nice small meaty part that really should have played throughout the episode. John Carroll Lynch is also in this and he sells the hell out of Murphy's flawed character. Still I didn't find the kids annoying and I liked the middle part of the episode.




The Loveless -


I went in to this movie thinking it would be a slice of life in southern small-town America and what happens when a biker gang visits. The description fits, but I also didn't think it would be such a masterclass of suspense. From observing the grip that the constantly sweaty and flustered gas man Tarver has on the place to the bikers' knife-throwing game to of course the centerpiece drama of Vance's (Willem Dafoe) dalliance with local heartbreaker Telena (Marin Kanter), you just know the gang's little stop won't end well. The artful editing has a lot to do with this for how pretty much every cut builds tension. There's also the several moments where what we see says more than words ever could, whether it's Davis stabbing the diner seat to the footage of real or staged violence on the television. What anchors everything, though, is Dafoe's performance, whose facial expressions pretty much tell the entire story. Story, however, does not seem to be what directors Kathryn Bigelow (in her debut) and Monty Montgomery are wholly interested in. This is hardly a fault, though, because in addition to all the suspense, it works very well as a mood piece, namely of the ennui, idleness and the resentment of neglected youth found in small town America, which they apparently have much more of than charm. All in all, it's an impressive debut for Bigelow to a career that has had very few missteps.





Chris Rock's "serious" face is more frightining than anything this movie had to offer.
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AMERICAN ME
(1992, Olmos)
A film with the word "America" in its title



"Coming to terms with the lessons one learns through the choices one makes is not easy."

American Me follows Montoya Santana (Edward James Olmos) as he goes from troublesome teenager to head of the Mexican Mafia within the American prison system. When we meet Santana, he's a middle age man in prison, reminiscing of the past as the film flashes back to how he grew up and ended up in prison in the first place.

The above quote is said pretty early in the film by Montoya himself, and seems to be a kind of mantra for the character as he learns to accept whatever comes his way, whether through fate or personal choice. Montoya is not a good guy, but it's certainly a man that's trying to figure out the world and how to survive in it, and Olmos manages to create a complex, layered character, instilling him with the necessary mixture of poise and menace in order to make you feel some empathy for him while still acknowledging the errors in his ways.

Grade:



Full review on my Movie Loot
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Definitely a shame that he didn’t get the Stones at the top of their game. Would’ve been one to look out for. I knew something was amiss when they never played Gimme Shelter. How do you do that when Scorsese is directing?

It reminds me of when I saw Bob Dylan live. It was a good show and well worth seeing, but it wasn’t the Bob Dylan of No Direction Home.
That Bob died in 1966.


I wish they had just given Scorsese all of the 1972 tour footage and let him spin gold from that. After all, Crossfire Hurricane (heavily dependant on that '72 footage) is still the most Scorsese-esque Stones doc. But really, they should just go ahead and properly release ****sucker's Blues already.



BUTTERFLY KISSES
(2018, Myers)
A film with the word "Kiss" in its title



"When you make a film that is presenting itself as roughly cut together found footage, you are building in your excuse for anything that's wrong with it."

Butterfly Kisses is, perhaps, one of the lesser known films within this wave. But if I open this write-up by mentioning The Blair Witch Project, it's not only because they're both "found footage" films, but rather because the film itself does so, in more ways than one. Butterfly Kisses is an odd duck in that it presents itself as a documentary-within-documentary-within-documentary. There are three "filmmakers" involved in the process which, at the very least, sets it apart.

The film follows Gavin York (Seth Adam Kallick), a struggling filmmaker that stumbles upon some tapes recorded some 15 years before by Sophia Crane (Rachel Armiger), a film student that, along with her partner, wanted to document the alleged appearances of a local entity called "Peeping Tom". York intends to clean and spruce up the footage to present it as a feature film, and in order to validate the process, he hires Erik Kristopher Myers (Erik Kristopher Myers) to document it. As we follow the process, the intentions and motivations of everybody involved, from Sophia to York to Myers himself, come into question, as well as the real nature behind "Peeping Tom".

Grade:



Full review on my Movie Loot



Now You see me - 7/10