Rate The Last Movie You Saw

The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)





It's been decades since I saw this movie last, but it's certainly not going to take me that long the next time. For me, it's the funniest of the Pink Panther movies. Very few movies will get me to literally laugh out loud, but this is one of them.

Obsession (1976)

A Brian De Palma film with Cliff Robertson, Genevieve Bujold, John Lithgow.

Re-watching it after many years, it was newly surprising at what a Hitchcock knock-off the production was. Both De Palma and writer Paul Schrader did state that they were "inspired" by Vertigo, however the picture seemed at least to be an homage.

A wealthy New Orleans real estate developer loses his wife and daughter to kidnappers. Years later the man runs across a dead ringer for his wife in Italy, who he is immediately smitten with, and presently starts to court her, soon bringing her back to New Orleans to get married. But his fiancee is herself kidnapped, and the ransom note is the same as the one he received years prior. The man decides to pay the ransom, borrowing heavily from his business associate. When he shows up at the transfer site the woman is there to be exchanged, but an accident at the scene brings up a surprise ending. A certain sexual taboo had to be repurposed in order to soften the public's shock and controversy.

The film was well received in 1976. However there were two glaring deficits in my opinion. The first was the absolutely wooden Cliff Robertson. He pretty much glared his way through the movie, seemingly as though he were on phenobarbital. He was evidently very difficult to work with during filming, and it shows.

Second, although Bernard Herrmann is my favorite film composer, this score was overdone-- there was too much of it, and also a bit repetitive, although the musical quality of the cues were well composed. Reportedly Herrmann believed this to be his finest film, yet one wonders if he wasn't sticking it to Hitch a little. In my view North By Northwest had Herrmann at the pinnacle of his mastery.

In the main it was a good story and production. Also it was likely John Lithgow's break out role.

Doc's rating: 6/10

I was rooting for Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone, but I'm also fine with the win. She totally convinces as someone who knows what she's doing is a lie, but does it anyway because money, and her American accent is superb.

It looks like you gave it zero popcorns?

He gave it 5.5 so that's how it showed up.

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

It was supposed to be 5 of 5, but that didn't work. I dropped it to 4/5 and now it looks like I gave it 4 and a half.

You have to put just the numerator in the tag.


Like this (using different brackets to demonstrate): (rating)4(/rating)

I agree with most of this; I mean, its storytelling is about as scattershot as you'd expect from Lee (with "Patrice" disappearing at one point for what felt like half the film), but that's partly because there's so much he wants to say, because there's so much he needs to say about racism in America, and he does so in a blunt, potent manner that leaves an impression above all else.

5/10
I like the style and the acting felt authentic but felt like the end was forced so i probably rated lower just for that.

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“When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake. With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.” ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Definitely, Maybe (2008)

rewatched

White Lightnin’- 9/10

This movie was definitely interesting. It was strangely familiar, maybe I’ve seen it before many years ago and forgot about it.

I think most of De Palma's films during this early period contained their fair share of inspiration from Hitchcock's films. It was something of an obsession for him.


By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56904869

Under the Silver Lake - (2018)

I usually love weird films. Really loved Inland Empire, which was bonkers and inscrutable. Under the Silver Lake was very similar, but there's a sense the film is too clever for it's own good - leaving us with hundreds of hidden meanings and messages that we'll never get around to interpreting. The dark humour works sometimes, quite well. I don't think it's understood clearly enough why Sam (Andrew Garfield) spends so much time and energy trying to find someone he's just met. Garfield reminds me so much of a young Anthony Perkins.

Overall though, I don't think we're expected to take it all too seriously. So much of it's 139 minutes (could easily be under two hours) is played purely for fun. So much so that a lot of the deeper meaning inside is too easy to overlook. This could be one for me to watch again - this time knowing what to expect. If you love surreal, dream-like movies it might be for you. Especially liked Patrick Fischler as the paranoid comic author whose incredible tales and characters keep coming to life.

6.5/10


Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14176945

The Medusa Touch - (1978) - DVD

What a surprising oddity this was. Stars Richard Burton during his Exorcist II : The Heretic slumming days, and his performance here was identical to that famous acting job - with a similar bent towards the supernatural. But here it works! Director Jack Gold says that he chose Burton because he seemed to fit the material at the time.

Based on a novel by Peter Van Greenaway (shown above) it's a Hammer Horror-like supernatural thriller which starts as someone tries to kill author John Morlar (Burton) - a man who thinks he can cause disasters by sheer willpower alone. A 747 has just crashed into a building in London, killing hundreds and a U.S. attempt to build a permanent outpost on the moon has ended in disaster. An Inspector Brunel and Morlar's psychiatrist Dr. Zonfeld try to unravel the mystery. Will they be able to before even more horrific disasters befall us?

So many great actors in this. Derek Jacobi (Claudius! Emperor! Hurrah!), Philip Stone (Grady from the Overlook Hotel), Lee Remick, Harry Andrews. Because it was a co-French production Inspector Morlar is played by French actor Lino Ventura. They try to explain that, but it still makes little sense. But overall it really works - the effects are marvelous for 1978. Better than CGI. Especially plane crash and the collapse of a cathedral. It's a neat little horror/thriller - not trying to be too much, but way more than I was expecting given this film's age and obscurity. Definitely recommended.

Special Features - A tiring 20 minutes of footage from the collapsing cathedral shoot, a good trailer, pretty useless screenshots of the film in the image gallery. The thing that makes it really worth getting is the commentary from director Jack Gold (he passed away in 2015) and film critics who expound on everything you might want to know about the film. When they muse about how the film looks so much better today than it did when released they're not kidding. Gene Siskel named this picture "The Worst Movie of 1978"! Deserves another look.

7/10

One of those films where you really admire what the director Chino Moya is trying to do, but they just don't manage to pull it off. It's a story set in a dystopian version of Earth with inter-weaving tales built in (with messages about family / marriage and the breakup of morals in society). Very ambitious with some stark visuals, there are some great uses of location, then there are also times where the low budget really shows.

With a better script, cast and bigger budget the director could really achieve something but this just felt al little to cold and lifeless.


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'Viridiana' (1961)

This on the other hand was something completely different. A really interesting Bunel film about a nun who has a crisis of faith, leaves a convent and sets up home in her uncle's house. The people around her react in different ways. Bunel seems to have something to say about how religion is not the answer to every problem and can cause fallacies and in the human condition and general society.
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Extraordinary pseudo-documentary by Guy Maddin about his hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. It's as funny as it is moving. Some segments are beautifully realised in lovely black and white, with some very clever animation / effects

Couple quick hits from the past month or so....

Logan (2010)


Finally saw this for the first time, and I certainly wasn't disappointed. It was darker than I thought it would be, even after hearing so much about it. I'm not a big gore or superhero fan, so the movie had its work cut out, but the plot and themes were enjoyable to experience.

Willy's Wonderland (2021)


Mindless, stupid, but not altogether a waste of time I suppose.

The Women in the Window
This is new on Netflix and has a lot of good actors collecting a paycheck.
The first three-quarters of the movie kept my interest and did a pretty good job of showing what psychological decompensation would look and feel like.
The end of the movie is dopey and is supposed to give you your "thrills"
Watchable. I give it out of five.

when i saw logan when it first release it reminds me of joel and ellie from the last of us

In The Earth (2021)


I always look forward to a Ben Wheatley release, especially if it a horror. This one has went under the radar quite a bit, even with a global pandemic. Which brings me on to the subject of the film, a virus has hit the planet and we are still looking at ways and means of a possible cure. A scientist is sent to a fertile forest in England to study the possibilities of said cure, where his ex girlfiend is also currently working.


I'll not spoil anything but it was a bit frustrating to watch. The acting was pretty poor apart from Reece Shearsmith who was pretty great. Some of the dialogue was excrutiatingly bad, in particular the bits about the experiments etc very boring and quite obviously waffle.


I did like the psychedelic scenes and some of the gorier scenes were pretty cool also, although there were not enough.
Overall, it felt like a bit of a pointles environmental horror, with some crazy flashing cinematography that probably requires a warning for!


Shame.

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Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

This film raised an interesting question for me. How should you rate a biopic? Should it be based solely on the portrayal that is presented on screen, how accurately it captures the life and essence of the person it's chronicling, or some mixture of the two? I suppose the more you know about the person yourself, the more you accurate you will want the depiction to be.



Anyway, whatever the answer, undoubtedly the two best things about this biography were: 1. Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf - she was absolutely fantastic and thoroughly deserved the Oscar she won. 2. The music - and seeing as it's a biopic about one of the most celebrated musicians of the last century, it would be a bad sign if the music wasn't a highlight.



However, seeing as I do know a bit about Edith Piaf, I did feel that it failed to do her justice in some respects. It really seemed to go out of its way to portray her as a sort of femme fatale, brilliantly talented but wildly erratic as well as being alcohol and drug dependent. While all of this is true, it never focused on, for example, her active role both in France and worldwide in keeping the cabaret, music hall culture alive as it suffered following the war and with the onset of rock. Moreover, from this film's depiction of her, I wouldn't even get the impression that she was capable of doing that.



Still, it wasn't bad by any means, just not what it might have been.

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"Knowledge may be power, but it is not resilience, or resourcefulness, or adaptability to life, still less is it instinctive sympathy with human nature."

Revenge (2017)

(Rewatch)





Thanks to @Wyldesyde19.

Love this one. Perhaps a bit unrealistic in terms of the level of injury everybody survives and, , but it’s so stylish I don’t mind. Much prefer it to things like Mandy as it remains grounded throughout, knows what it’s doing and doesn’t overdo the hallucinogenic aesthetic.