Rate The Last Movie You Saw

It doesn't avoid it. The entire film is that conflict. It's manifested in how he treats Martin. What they fear he'll do when he finds Debbie. Why he can't fit into this new world.

Funny one Gideon, a friend raved about the book and the film (The Lovely Bones) and we know how hard it is to get the context correct in that situ. I've only seen it once and went in with great expectations so it may bear a rewatch

I've been wanting to see this again, properly. Lately, I only want to see movies I haven't seen yet, but if memory serves me correctly, the DVD skipped a few times in "The Quiet Man".. I also wish I had subtitles in the beginning!

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Thee Colours Red (1994)

The bookend of Krzysztof Kieślowski's "Three Colours" trilogy, It's quite simply amazing. Issues personal and universal. Trivial and with great weight behind them at the same time. Honesty, lies, sacrifice and love. I think that the despairing relationship Irène Jacob (the model) and Jean-Louis Trintignant (the judge) is one of the best I've seen on film and without sentiment although you can tell there is love and respect. Kieślowski was a master of his art and I hadn't watched this since 1996 but the lighting, characterization, acting, script and sheer doggedness (pun intended) makes this a very profound film.

Nuff said:

9 popcorns out of 10.

I really liked the sci-fi premise that embodies the first half of this film. Then it becomes a typical Pixar romp which isn’t so bad just not as interesting.

The Quiet Man is one of my favorite movies.

I didn't know it was Ford when I watched it, but I liked this a good bit.

Belle du Jour is one of those movies that changed the way I think about movies and their place in time. I thought it was so edgy for that time and I just had no idea going in it was gonna be anything like it was. I was so surprised it became an instant hit with me.

Django, sadly because parts of it were filmed at my friend's house so it's like a really big deal to him, is one of my least favorite Tarantinos. So self-indulgent that it makes it hard for me to enjoy what the film actually does well. Which is actually a lot. So then the disappointment over what could have been comes in on top of the the "oh boy" sighs and eye-rolls that are already going on and it just becomes a really hard movie for it's way over-long run-time.

The Double Life Of Veronique is great, though I can't exactly say why. I don't even know what the movie is about, I just know how it makes me feel.

Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death (1989) This was fun and amusing. Performances are surprisingly good. Not as trashy or smutty as you might think. Watched on Arrow streaming.

Lady Bird - Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is a 17 year old Catholic high school senior living with her parents, adoptive brother and his girlfriend in 2002 Sacramento. Her relationship with her mom Marion (Laurie Metcalf) is fraught with turmoil to say the least.

I liked the second half (or maybe the third act?) of this a lot more than the first part of it. That part had more of an indie feel to it. Or maybe it was the episodic pacing of the first two acts. Or it might have had something to do with watching with a room full of other people and then having to stop just as Lady Bird is fumbling her way to her first sexual encounter.

I finished the rest by myself and when the character's motivations finally unraveled I simply put it down to the script finding firmer footing. The two powerhouse performances by Ronan and Metcalf however had me wanting to see the two arrive at some kind consensus. Which they eventually did in as emotive and deeply felt a way as all their other interactions. But the initial conflict seemed sort of perfunctory to me for some reason. Again, I blame the crowd and the interruption for this discrepancy and really should watch the whole thing over again from start to finish. Without distractions.

Greta Gerwig's script is a heartfelt reaffirmation of her own time growing up in Sacramento. This was her first time directing and she does a stellar job. The cast also does a fine job supporting Ronan and Metcalf with Tracey Letts as Lady Bird's dad Larry and Beanie Feldstein as her best friend Julie. That last bit of casting did draw some unfair parallels from me with Booksmart, another teenage-girl-at-the-cusp-of-adulthood film. But despite some similarities, they do occupy different territory. Timothée Chalamet also turns in a memorable performance as Kyle, the object of Lady Bird's desires. He manages to highlight his character's overall loathsome qualities in a limited role.

All the accolades this has received were earned in good faith.

85/100

The Princess (2022)

Like a dumbed-down version of The Raid or Die Hard written like it was meant to be a video game and coated with some trendy girl-power.

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The Untouchables (1987)

Great cast and cinematography, but I found the script underwhelming.

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The Pale Door (2020)

An authentic piece of garbage. The scariest part of this western horror is that some people considered it worth doing.

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Incantation (2022)

A Taiwanese (almost) found footage horror. It had the potential to be really good, but I found the current events with the mother and daughter boring. Sadly the filmmakers seemed to consider them the main attraction. It should have been just an investigative cosmic horror based on eastern mythology.

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Valley of the Dead (2020)

A zombie film set during the Spanish civil war. It's pretty light on horror and leans more towards comedy than I usually like, but I found it quite entertaining.

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Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

I wouldn't call this the worst film ever but it's definitely bad. At some point, I was planning a higher rating, but the bickering wives bored me out of those ideas. That Torgo dude did quite a lot of LSD performance, though.

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Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

The worst film of the franchise. Why would you make a 2.5-hour epic finale to a film trilogy about dinosaurs only to demote them to a side-plot? Even the effects seemed worse than before.

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The Black Phone (2022)

Kind of OK horror-lite. I don't know how long the original short story is but it felt like there wasn't enough for a full-length feature film. It feels more like a series pilot than a stand-alone movie.

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Wanda Nevada (1979)

That's an odd one, I give it that. Peter Fonda searching gold in a Death Valley with jailbait (before Yoda wants to delete this one, I'm just quoting the movie with that description) Brooke Shields with almost Gaiman-like killers after them. Oh, and there's an Apache ghost too. The film's all over the place and not entirely in a good way. It's still somewhat amusing.

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Ex Machina - (2014)

What would stop a machine from becoming sentient, no matter how complex it is? Where does consciousness begin and end? These questions are a little less of the focus for Ex Machina, and instead (or as well) Alex Garland makes an interesting observation that the very first thing men want to do with the complex AI machines of the future is sexualize them and then exploit them. Added to all of this is a tense thriller which involves three characters - the eccentric and brilliant billionaire Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), the man he's brought in to test if his creations are indeed self-aware, Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) and the creepy, possibly sentient and aware robot Ava (Alicia Vikander). I love the cast, and I'm a big fan of Gleeson, so this was an easy, enjoyable 108 minutes and probably an essential 21st century science fiction film.

8/10


By [1], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47613138

The Final Girls - (2015)

The humour in The Final Girls is spot-on, and saves it from becoming a second-tier waste of time, and something I wouldn't mind watching again if I had to. What can I say, I laughed. It's a bit of fun, with a group of friends sucked into a famous horror film (modelled on Friday the 13th and it's sequels) and trying to make it to the end. It definitely strives for laughs, and mostly delivers, so I give it a tick of approval. It also ends with it's best joke, and thus leaves a lasting memory. Not sure what to rate it though, because aside from the laughter it's a little thin, even with it's attempts to get us to care with the mother-daughter relationship shared by Taissa Farmiga and Malin Åkerman's characters.

6.5/10

The rest are some very old films I watched after reading an article on the very early Western genre - especially it's villains

The Life of a Cowboy - (1906) - Really fascinating to see something so old. Lots of long shots, with multiple things happening within the frame so you can easily lose track of what's important to the plot - and confusing matters further is the lack of title cards. But apart from that, it's quite good - 6/10

The Battle at Elderbush Gulch - (1913) - Early D.W. Griffith film which follows the old formula of 'Cowboys vs Indians', with the cavalry coming in late to save the town. Paints native Americans in a pretty poor light, but the camera-work, acting and the way the scenes are set out are surprisingly excellent. On a technical level this is brilliant, but on a moral level it's pretty low. Still - for 1913, it's a real 8/10 film.

The Squaw's Love - (1911) - Another D.W. Griffith film film, and this time it's all Native American - but there are very few of these actual people in it, and instead there's Mabel Normand and other white actors with blackening make-up on, which I find pretty reprehensible. To top it all off, it's action over story, so it bored me. - 4/10

Life of an American Fireman - (1903) - There were so few of the old Westerns I was reading about available to watch that I settled on this to round out my viewing - this is a film which features in a future article I want to read, so I got it under my belt. Does interesting things considering how old it is - such as alternating points of view from inside and outside a burning building. Something clever for it's time - 6/10

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It's been a while since I've seen this, but I seem to recall more weight being hinted at with the machine's sentience, but rather than where it starts and ends, but rather, challenging the usual assumption that it would necessarily be human-like in the underlying goals and motivations. The old Solarys idea of it being something alien to our way of thought, though in this case, not so much because it's alien, but because the fundamental hardware (or wetware in this case) with the world is different. Granted, maybe that's just me reading into it, but Garland seems to be pulling from similar sources when you get the personification of the alien life form at the end of Annihilation.
Just my two half remembered cents.




I have heard of this one and have seen some brief clips of it, appropriately as part of a documentary on the history of film. I believe it was notable as part of the early evolution of editing. I think it was relevant as an example of camera angle to convey a continuous story across cuts, but I can't say for sure.
I don't really remember anything else about it. I suspect there isn't much to it other than that, but I could be wrong.

Just to take a summary of the article I'm going to read - it's called 'French and British Influences in Porter's American Fireman' - he's trying to prove the influence of Georges Méliès (who had made over 300 short films by 1903) and James Williamson (who was less prolific, but still had made plenty of films) in the film. After reading it, I'll probably be fruitlessly searching for Méliès and Williamson films to watch. So many of these films no longer exist.

For those interested, here's the film in question :

Caligula and Messaline (1981) Watched the extended x-rated Italian cut on blu ray. This was quite something. Lots of nudity and sex scenes. I enjoyed it. The costumes and sets were pretty good too. Score was nice as well. This is a film that knows exactly what it is and what the audience wants and delivers it in a satisfying and entertaining way.

A classic of British Cinema from Ken Loach. As relevant today as it was in 1966.



Lucky to have found this dvd before this wonderful movie adaptation disappeared into the ether. Re-watch & it’s so perfect.

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South Park: The Streaming Wars Part 1/2

South Park is basically splitting itself up between Paramount Plus and Comedy Central. The issue is you don't get a proper season of either. Paramount seems to be winning as they've gotten 4 hour long episodes and three of them have been bangers with this fourth one being just okay. In the first Streaming Wars we get the meta story of streaming services and droughts...basically China Town. The central figures of the story are ManBearPig and PiPi...PiPi was a one note joke that was never really funny to begin with so giving him the movie treatment kinda sucks.

The strongest and really the only good part of part 2 is the use of celebrities who were hawking Crypto...now they are hawking pee. It's a solid joke and bit that keeps the story moving along. We also get perhaps the ending of Randy and his weed farm but with Randy who knows.

Part One
Part Two

Umberto D, 1952

Umberto (Carlo Battisti) is an elderly pensioner living with his beloved dog, Flike, in a house run by a landlady who is looking for any excuse to kick them to the curb. Umberto is friendly with the household's maid, Maria (Maria Pia Casilio), who is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy. Umberto scrambles to find enough money to pay his rent in an environment that seems like it would be more than happy to discard him entirely.

I have avoided this classic for many, many years. (It's literally on a handwritten movie watchlist that I made back in 2004, for context.) A sad movie about an elderly person and his dog? Why not just chemically engineer something to shred my heart into pieces?

But today was the day, and I'm glad that I watched it. While it was very sad in parts, it made me think a bit of Ikiru, a movie whose literal plot description sounds sad, but which contains more hope and bittersweet joy than you'd expect.

Battisti--who was apparently an amateur and this was his only film role!--is a compelling center to the film. It might sound a bit trite, but that cliche about the stages of grief are kind of what we end up seeing. Umberto tries bargaining. We see his anger and depression. We see acceptance in two very different forms. Umberto knows that the way he is being treated by his society is wrong. But knowing that you are right doesn't have any power. Umberto has lived his life in a decent way, and in turn expects to be treated with decency.

Casillio, playing Maria, is also an interesting figure. In many films, she'd be made a bit too saintly. The Maria here feels very real. She is sympathetic toward Umberto, but in one scene you can see her irritation when Umberto blames her for letting Flike out of the apartment. Written all over her face is Hello?! I am about to have a baby with no husband and I am TRYING to sort my life out before my pregnancy becomes visible and loses me my job as well as my social respectability. In fact, I think that Maria's character shows something very insightful: a lot of the time what keeps us from really connecting with others is the weight of our own issues and problems.

I won't go as far as to say something like "Flike is the real star of the film!", but it's the irrepressible spirit of the little dog that grounds Umberto and forces him to consider building a stable future. The dog is adorable, and Umberto's affection for him is immensely relatable.

If you are a dog/animal lover, there is some rough stuff here. There's a sequence at a dog pound that's pretty awful and harrowing. But if, like me, worries about the dog are what have kept you from watching it, I'd encourage you to give it a go.

Simple and excellent.

RRR (2022)

Finally, this came to Finnish Netflix. I must admit that I don't particularly like those compulsory dance scenes that haunt most Indian cinema but otherwise, this was extremely entertaining nonsense. The action sequences were better than anything Marvel has done during the whole of the MCU and the combination of patriotic pathos, ever-escalating capabilities of the heroes, and just over-the-top everything made me smile and chuckle like an idiot while watching. Easily the best film of 2022 this far.