Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Both of them are not too bad.

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

Agree with you 100% on the bolded.
I never gave Leo much credit for What's Eating Gilbert Grape and I never thought this was one of Hoffman's great performances except maybe when held against the diversity of other work he has done. It's like Hook just in the other direction.
As for Charlie I thought this was just another Cruise Role where a headstrong and self-centered young man goes through a modest personal journey and comes out a better man, in a plane, in a race-car, on a football field, in the court-room, on a road-trip, as a sports agent, whatever. Which, in retrospect, makes Lestat one of his better roles.

Definitely skipping this in favor of Del Toro's. Which probably won't be great either, honestly, I've kinda lost faith in him, but at least it'll be imaginative.

Yeah, cuz I think of it as a plucky little film that, like I said, punches way above its weight and you got stuck thinking it didn't deliver as much as you were set up to expect. That's a drag.

Actually, that was the best thing I liked about the movie...the fact that the central character was a piece of sh*t who deserved none of the sympathy the story attempts to give him, but more importantly, by the end of the movie, he has gotten exactly what he deserves, something you don't see too often at the movies these days.

just curious as to what you mean by the songs being "a bit much."

A couple of them didn't contribute much to the movie for me, but a couple of them were great. Its just generally not my thing (which I understand can make me seem a bit shallow from an appreciation perspective)

To Die For is my favorite Nicole Kidman performance. I think she was robbed of an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. On my list of sexiest female movie characters, Susanne Stone Maretto clocked in at #1.

When did you start losing faith in Del Toro?

By [1], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35013248

The Good Thief - (2002)

I'll just say at the outset here, I haven't seen Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob le flambeur (I will one day, I really like Melville's movies) - so I walked into The Good Thief with no idea where it would head. Principally, it's a heist film - and a complex one at that, with a good many characters to keep your eyes on. At the center of it all, a role that perfectly suits Nick Nolte - a heroin and gambling addict who haunts the French Riviera. He's a thief that still has a very upstanding moral compass, and as such French cop Roger (Tchéky Karyo) looks out for him as much as he keeps tabs on him. When he learns of an expensive art collection a casino owns, he gets himself clean and starts recruiting his crew. So begins an intricate plan - and if you know heist movies, you know that there's a plan behind the plan and then a twist. I love this film's style, and Nolte is better here than in just about any other film I've seen him in - but I felt a little left out in the cold by the film's end, where I ended up questioning every false direction we'd gone in. I'm going to watch the original, then rewatch this - because I think it's worth it, and this film is just such a pleasure to take in, no matter where it loses you. My rating will probably go up in time.

6.5/10


By The poster art can or could be obtained from 20th Century Fox., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10680937

The Vanishing - (1993)

I'm really unsure what to say about watching this. I've seen the original several times and have it on Criterion. I'd seen this version once before as well, and remembered how inferior it was - but having seen the original again recently, I wanted to go back again and see just what Sluizer and 20th Century Fox had done to upset me. I remembered that the ending had been completely hijacked, with an unlikely happy conclusion really stealing all of the power the original ending had. Apart from that, the middle section of this remake drags a little. But when you look at it in isolation, and not in comparison with the great 1988 version (Spoorloos) then it's not a bad movie. It just drops back into the pack and doesn't distinguish itself enough to be worth remembering, apart from a memorable turn from Jeff Bridges - one so crazy that I'm not quite sure what he's trying to do. Whenever he's not onscreen though, this movie really grinds. I can see some people who are invested in these characters really ride this film to the end, and like it - but not those who loved what the original did.

5/10

__________________

Short on choices, tonight was horror movie night - Barbarian, to be specific. No matter how many times this happens, when we, the movie audience, knows for sure that the star should never go into THAT house, they always do. It's Detroit, a bombed out area, and Tess has rented a house for the night, only to find that someone else is already there. She stays anyway, and, to make a long story short, the next day things go bad. It's not the other tenant, but that creepy stairway that goes down to the netherworld. There's screams and indications that someone was held captive there. Tess goes down the creepy stairs anyway. There's a "creature"....a zombie-like naked woman down there in this labyrinth of stone stairways underneath this place. There's lots of chasing, screaming and running by various characters, monsters popping out of dark passageways until it's over and all of those usual horror movie tropes like the big noises, bass drum crashes and flashing lights. I'm not saying who gets out alive (not everybody) and why this place is so awful, so beware.....if you dare.

Personally, I generally do NOT spend much time in bombed out neighborhoods in Detroit, just like I don't go into the spooky castle, or the abandoned coal mine or the boarded up house or the long closed store where the butcher butchered his family and customers. Sometimes I DO go to movies like this, however, and, if you like horror movies, you could do worse.

The cast is as good as they need to be (mainly running and screaming) and nobody will come to save you.

I really don't know what the title Barbarian, has to do with anything, but it's OK too.

I liked Pacific Rim but didn't think it was anywhere near things like Cronos, The Devil's Backbone, or Pan's Labyrinth. Then Crimson Peak I thought was a terrible miss and it looked like a filmmaker who got too much weight and nobody to reign him in (which we all need). Then I saw The Shape Of Water which was better than CP to be sure but still just felt like compared to something like Cronos or tDB, the magic was missing. I think this normal, I think most artists really have a period when they are most fruitful and it frequently fades once they have major success.
But then I also look at, ok, what is the production over the last 5 years or so? Even 7 or 8 years, has there been a work that truly says, "Yes, this guy is a master?"
I'm not saying he makes bad movies now, I'm just saying I've stopped banking on him doing something special.

I saw this movie on TV when I was like 11 years old, and even then I realized that the ending

Once I saw the original, many years later, the difference in the films was so stark.

I have a funny relationship with this movie in that I was in college and I was willing to see a good foreign film even if they weren't really my thing yet, and I saw this film and decided that there was just no way that any version of this could really be that compelling. So I never saw the original.
And then at pretty much the same time, I guess a month or two later, I saw Point Of No Return and I was a pretty big fan of Nikita and I realized how badly Hollywood remade European films.
But for poor Spoorloos, the damage had been done. I mean, it's been almost 30 years and I've still never given it a shot because of how totally unremarkable The Vanishing is.

Lilting (Hong Khaou, 2014)

This is another movie I saw being suggested in GBG's 2010's Recommendations thread. I hadn't even heard of it before then,

Although it's rather short, this is definitely a movie that requires patience and full engagement. It's a slow meditation on grief, guilt, obligation, and understanding. Ben Whishaw gives a particularly strong performance as a young man trying to connect with his dead boyfriend's Chinese-Cambodian mother - who doesn't like him, speaks no English, and doesn't know that her son was gay. Cheng Pei Pei is also excellent as the dead man's mother and gives a lot of humanity to a character that might otherwise have come off as cold, particularly in the film's earlier scenes.

It's a very moving film and one that I'll probably watch again, but my shortlist for the 2010s countdown is now at 82 films so its chances of making the final cut are pretty slim.

__________________

You can see why I might have been so angry. I mean, it's one thing to remake your film and for it to have simply lost some of it's shine - but to turn it into something so off-putting was a shame.

They are completely different films, and you'll know it 5 minutes in. Highly recommended.

No bueno. Has too much silliness for my taste, which made it kinda boring midway through. Story is as basic as they come, the ending is very predictable and I only endure it for the post credits scenes.

__________________
There has been an awekening.... have you felt it?