Rate The Last Movie You Saw

__________________
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
My IMDb page

I haven't posted here since august, and I'm not going to flood this post with all the movies I've seen since then, so I'll just quickly post my ratings and initial thoughts on the last five films I've seen for the first time.

Memento -

This was on my list of films I had not seen until just recently, and it was pretty good!

Cabaret -

I really like this film, and the "While Rome Burns" feeling that it has as it goes on. This movie was on my radar since I watched All That Jazz, and while I liked that movie somewhat better, this one was also really good.

Prince - Sign o' the Times -

Great concert film. Not all songs off the album made the cut, sadly, but it's still full of energy, and most of the songs I liked are there, so...

The Guilty (2018) -

I liked it! This film's concept is fascinating to me, And for my money, it's executed pretty well!

Alien³ (Assembly Cut) -

I don't consider it a bad film, but some of the special effects (notably with this film's alien), and the pacing (particularly at the climax) killed it for me a little bit. Some of the themes, the grim atmosphere, and a few other things redeem it somewhat in my eyes.

Glad I'm not the only person who's seen this film...I rated it about the same as you did. I agree with just about everything you said. It's a very squirm-worthy film experience.

Love this movie...don't see how a movie that won him an Oscar could get lost in his filmography though.

A bunch of us have already reviewed it in the 27th HoF, in fact. It's interesting seeing all the reactions to it.

Sicario (2015)


Another rewatch of a favorite of mine, and it still remains a (all too real) harrowing story. Del Toro is remarkable, as is the whole cast. Too bad the sequel was considerably inferior...(no Villeneuve)

The social network was the last movie, I give it a 8/10

I just finished rewatching The Power of the Dog. I was underwhelmed the first time I watched it, but I liked it quite a bit more this time. I'm bumping up my rating to a and would now rank it 4th of this year's best picture nominees.

1st Re-watch...This creepy psycho-sexual thriller is worth watching for the extraordinary and bone-chilling performance by Carey Mulligan alone. Francis McDormand was superb in Nomadland, but she already had two Oscars...Mulligan should have won for this.

Yeah, it makes me wonder if it came from something in the book and was just reduced to something more superficial, or if it was pushed in there because you can't have a movie with a single lead without a romance angle!

I think it’s my #1 of the BP noms but I need to rewatch Licorice Pizza and Nightmare Alley

I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore. (2017)

Broken Hallelujah - (2014)

Oops. I made a wrong turn into Broken Hallelujah - one of those independent, low budget passion-projects where the professionalism you usually see in modern films is missing and you start to notice many off things, even apart from the acting and direction. Alastair Riddle directed this, and he also provided the score, and he also provided the cinematography - and of course he also produced (with some help from a windfall - these dead relatives are thanked in the end credits.) You can imagine what this is like, especially with Alastair's wife Vanessa in the lead role (she also apparently wrote the screenplay.) I've never seen a more disjointed story - characters just come out of nowhere and entire story arcs appear suddenly making it feel like we've just crossed over into a different film entirely. Of course the acting is poor also - and the entire thing runs for an insane 135 minutes - usually these Edward D. Wood Jnr-type projects have short running times, but Riddle appears to have been in love with everything he shot - so we get the lot.

Broken Hallelujah has a pretty good ending, and by that I mean the last couple of shots and lines leading into the credits. A lot of effort was put into those final few seconds of the film, but the rest is just day-time TV soap opera type stuff, with various characters and families going through marital troubles (the film will suddenly introduce new characters with marital problems a full hour and a half in) - there's no steady focus, but Venessa Riddell gets the most screen time. The connections between characters are so tenuous that there's no cohesion to anything. The cinematography doesn't always match - it almost feels like several different types of camera were used to shoot footage. It's almost interesting - seeing something so far off the beaten track after watching hundreds of professionally handled films. What do the filmmakers get for all their effort and money? 46 people have voted on the IMDb, 3 people have on letterboxd - never to be noticed, and quickly forgotten, Alastair and Venessa Riddle's feature film must have been an adventure for them, but now they face a future that's probably outside show business.

2/10

__________________

The.Ice.Age.Adventures.of.Buck.Wild
4/10

Yeah, I couldn’t get through the sequel. Emily Blunt was good in Sicario, which somewhat surprised me.

I liked my 2nd viewing better because there were little things I missed first time around.

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

The Producers - Mel Brooks' first crack at directing a movie and it's a four bagger. Zero Mostel plays Max Bialystock, a once successful Broadway producer now reduced to seducing elderly women in his seedy office in return for "checkies" ostensibly for backing one of his plays. In walks the riotously neurotic Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), an accountant assigned to audit Max's finances. While pouring over Bialystock's books Leo off-handedly muses that the most profitable way to stage a play is to have it flop so that the producer can keep all the investors money.

And that's the premise which launches this indisputably hilarious movie. It takes some convincing for the straight laced Leo to come on board but once the actual preparations get underway it allows the introduction of a whole cast of Brooks inspired loonies. From cross dressing director Roger De Bris (Christopher Hewitt), his flamboyant assistant Carmen Ghia (Andréas Voutsinas) and Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars), the clearly unhinged author of Max's intended bomb. It's a paean to the Third Reich and it's leader called Springtime for Hitler.

This 90 minute movie flies by and there are no dead spots. Brooks was shocked to be nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar and completely unprepared when he actually won. It was widely panned by older, more traditional critics while youngsters like Roger Ebert loved it. Which in turn ushered in a changing of the guard of sorts when it came to film making. Not bad for what many thought was an unfunny and vulgar movie.

90/100

Belfast (2021) I liked this even more on rewatch. Great cinematography, wonderful performances, and a lot of charm and heart.

Cairo Station, 1958

Qinawi (Youssef Chahine, who also directed the film) is a young man with some physical disabilities and also some mental health problems. Getting a job at a train station selling newspapers, he is sexually frustrated and becomes fixated on the beautiful drink seller Hanuma (Hind Rustum), who is engaged to hunky union organizer Abu Siri (Farid Shawqi).

Given their utter dearth of classics, I was surprised to see this 1958 Egyptian film pop up on Netflix. So surprised that I added it to my watchlist just on that basis alone. As it turns out, it's a pretty compelling little film.

Apparently this film was made in a brief window of political transition in Egypt, after the overthrow of the monarchy but before the film industry was nationalized. Much like it's surprising to see certain sexual or violent content in pre-Code films, I was a bit shocked at the intensity of the content and themes---in a good way.

This is a really perceptive (I'm crediting the film with being intentional with these elements) portrayal of how gender-based violence manifests in a strongly patriarchal society, with almost all of the male characters participating in physical aggression toward women. Some of it is "acceptable," while other actions are seen as wrong.

In one scene, Abu Siri tells Hanuma not to go and sell drinks on the train. Her doing so is illegal, and she risks arrest every time she does it. When she decides to go make a few sales, he drags her off of the train by the hair and, with the enthusiastic encouragement of some male bystanders, takes her into a storage room and beats her. Qinawi watches this with horror, but his horror is deepened when Hanuma finally declares "Enough!" and then turns the interaction flirty. It is doubly disturbing to see both the normalization of domestic abuse between the Abu Siri and Hanuma, and the fact that Qinawi is more upset by his jealousy than by seeing a woman beaten up.

Chahine's performance as Qinawi is really strong, as are the supporting performances by the other actors. All of the characters are complicated, to say the least. There are no straightforward good guys or bad guys here (okay, the random dude chanting "Beat her! Beat her!" seems like a real piece of work), and there's an implicit criticism of the system that leads them to their different behaviors. In one scene, Qinawi stares at a woman, whose husband then takes offense. But when the police won't let the husband go after Qinawi, the man turns his anger on his wife, berating her for having lifted her veil and thus enticed the harassment.

Chahine's direction is also worth of a lot of praise, with some really captivating images, like a shot of Qinawi watching a train's wheels bend the train track as it passes almost in a trance, or a horrific sequence in which Qinawi emulates the behavior of a murderer on a woman, or just a shot of one man taking a knife from another, blood running down his arm as he grips the blade. Everything in Cairo Station feels like it has tension and the potential for violence brewing under it.

It is true that some of the gender politics feel a bit dated. Abu Siri, because of his union-organizing and as a non-murderer, comes out looking a lot better than Qinawi, and it feels a bit as if his treatment of Hanuma is being excused, or at least getting the "but it isn't so bad!" treatment. Hanuma's character is handled with the sense that "she knows what she's doing". I'm sure that it's true to the time period and setting that this kind of relationship would not only exist but even be seen as romantic. From a modern perspective it's a bit hard to take. There's also a whiff of victim-blaming in the idea that Qinawi is driven to violence in part by the rejection of women. But, dude, his interaction with many women is voyeuristically staring at them from hiding places. It must be said, however, that the visual of his shack---filled wall-to-wall with cut-out sexualized images of women--is pretty chilling.

There were a lot of plot developments that surprised me, and this was a concise drama/thriller that made a big impact.

I actually saw some fellow posters talking about this on another forum recently: http://matchcut.artboiled.com/showth...l=1#post648222

I don't think it's a film I've heard mentioned before (though my ability to retain titles is . . . not good). I would highly recommend it. Both the story and the style are really solid. And it's on Netflix!