Rate The Last Movie You Saw

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Army of Darkness - (1992)

Rounding out the Evil Dead trilogy is a film pointedly unlike the rest (each of the three films stood alone in this regard, and as such had self-contained prologues.) It at least runs with the interesting premise the second ended with - Ash stranded in 1300 A.D. and becoming a prophesized hero, fighting the demons he's been plagued with in the previous two films. The comedic aspect of the second film is maintained (even enhanced), but the horror has been further toned down in favour of sword and wizardry fantasy. I find this the funniest of the trilogy, but I miss what I loved so much in the first film - the no-holds-barred horror and inventive cinematic craft. I wouldn't get what I was really looking for until we got the television series which ran from 2016 to 2018. It's not bad though.

7/10


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Big Stan - (2007)

Okay, so obviously Big Stan is really bad, and insulting. But I was expecting a comedy which would land in my "worst ever" bracket of comedies - and it avoided that ignominy. For starters, David Carradine is great in this, and I enjoyed every scene he was in (even if in some he should embarrassed by the material.) Also, unlike some of my least favourite comedies, a few of the jokes actually landed. The rest is pretty awful, and aggrandizing for Schneider, who is making his directorial debut - being a prison movie there are so many rape and race jokes you actually feel bad for watching it - but Schneider's character manages to end prison violence, rape and racism just by talking to everyone. Somehow though, even with it's anti-racism stance, it manages to be horribly racist.

4/10


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A Good Year - (2006)

Managed to squeeze in a couple of Ridley Scott films last night. This one is okay, but painfully average. My friend messaged me - "A Good Year. A film in which Russell Crowe has to choose between a rich partnership in a prestigious trading film, or living in bucolic splendour in a French winery with a scorchingly sensuous Marion Cotillard. It wasn't exactly Sophies Choice." Heh. I might just employ him to write my reviews.

6/10


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1492 : Conquest of Paradise - (1992)

This film has some great scenes - it's full of action, and has impressive sets and production design. Where it fell down a bit for me was in trying to tell too much of a story in it's 156 minutes - it felt like there was a lot of footage lost simply because the producers desperately wanted this film to run below 160 min. So events of huge consequence get a single scene, and we're continually thrust forward months and years without a chance to digest anything or draw a neat narrative line in our minds. It also had the crucial part of Christopher Columbus miscast somewhat, with a barely comprehensible Gérard Depardieu given a monumental task that seemed a little beyond him. Perhaps I need to see this again one day, but for the moment I was both impressed and a little let down.

6/10

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I've read reactions of people who really liked it, and people who didn't. I was hoping I could sink into it, but it did not work out that way.

Also, watching it seemed to really

Varsity Blood (2014) 4/10

I finally just saw Nope today, and there's plenty of things I could criticize about it...



Final Score: 8

Swinton was the only thing I really enjoyed about this. The movie otherwise seemed to play a bit too slowly for me to gel to it (I get that's Jarmusch's thing, but it really did not work for me here). I must in the interest of journalistic objectivity note that I watched this on a brutally hot day and the AC in the theatre was not working nearly as well as it should have, and that my lunch (a delicious torta sandwich from a Mexican place that Crumbsroom regretfully informed me has since closed down) was going down horrendously after I powerwalked in the heat. So perhaps I was not in the best frame of mind to enjoy this.

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Disagree on those being flaws. Glad you dug it though.

Not an unfair reaction, as I link similar to Greasy Strangler or even Funny Games, the movie feels antagonistic to its audience. More playfully than the latter and less insane and gross than the former, but there’s a self aware meta vibe that seems to only enhance its awkwardness rather than alleviate the tension.

You didn't think that...

In a word… Nope.

Boomerang! (1947)

Yeah I kinda hope Ti West continues this by making a Max film and then another sequel (XXX?). He's got a pretty good horror epic on his hands if he want's it.

12 Years a Slave (2013)

9/10

I enjoyed this movie a good bit, though not as much, I think as one of my friends and more than another.
I felt like a lot of the social commentary it was trying to make was really redundant. We had already seen it in Dawn Of The Dead ('78) and we've been seeing it over and over again ever since and yet this film seemed to act like this was a new idea. And that kept taking me out of the film.
On the other hand, I thought all of the performances were first rate, I thought the dialogue was really snappy and enjoyable, and I thought it was a really good-looking film most of the time.


I also especially enjoyed the film repeatedly toying with the idea not only that it was a movie and some of the characters knew they were in a movie, but the way that there was sort of a spectrum of how much each character knew they were in a movie. And so certain characters were actually both the character caught up in the narrative and the actor living out the script and some more than others. I thought it was hilarious that Murray was kinda low-key hurt that Driver had been allowed to read the entire script and therefore knew what was going to happen next when he, whom he thinks of as the bigger star, had not seen the whole script and was therefore in the dark about where things were going. Even though he knew he was acting in a movie. And then the fact that, despite knowing they were in a movie, they could actually still die because they were the character in the movie too. I found that particularly clever, and I have seen something similar done once or twice before but not to that effect.

And finally, there was Tilda Swinton, just elevating the whole thing, not only with her performance but the character itself and the story around her character were, as Tak has already said, the best part of the film and the part you kept wanting more of. But yeah, her performance made it special.


In short, it's a Jarmusch movie that probably should have been a little better than it was but still had enough treats for me to not only recommend it but to go back to it from time to time for those treats.

Tenet (2020)



This was really good. It has an intriguing plot, very good cast, excellent directing and truly superb utilisation of music. I wanna emphasise the use of the music, as the rhythmically driven tunes really were configured masterfully here which proportions the tension and designates the pace of the movie. Nolan redeemed himself with this movie for me, given that I had colossally been disappointed with his Batmans and Inception.

8/10

Dog Soldiers - For the longest time I had director Neil Marshall confused with director Neil Jordan. I often wondered how the guy who did The Crying Game and Mona Lisa got started with a werewolf flick. Maybe Jordan doing In the Company of Wolves is what threw me? Anyway, he didn't direct this. This Neil specializes in pulpy, up-tempo sort of films like this and Doomsday and The Descent.

I watched like the last half of this years and years ago and found it quite memorable. Never got around to seeing it start to finish though. There's a prologue with some campers being attacked in their tent while somewhere in Wales recruit Private Lawrence Cooper (Kevin McKidd) is vying for a spot on a Special Forces unit run by the hard nosed Captain Ryan (Liam Cunningham). After refusing an order to shoot a dog he is summarily dismissed by Ryan.

Flash forward weeks later to a squad (section?) of soldiers dropped off by helicopter somewhere in the Scottish highlands on some kind of training exercise. They're to engage an SAS unit and eventually find the men's forward base of operations with no one there. Nothing but copious amounts of blood and gore and eventually one survivor. It so happens to be Ryan and he's wounded and raving about "them" coming back. With daylight rapidly fading the spooked squad is forced to withdraw while surrounded on all sides by guttural howls and indistinct shapes in the woods. They're eventually picked up by Megan (Emma Cleasby), a lone woman in a Land Rover. The group eventually takes shelter in a nearby cabin. The rest of the movie plays out within the claustrophobic confines of the house while the squad, Ryan and the woman try to survive the night.

Marshal doesn't give the audience much time to breathe let alone ruminate on plot holes and inaccuracies. He does however take time to setup the soldiers easy camaraderie and give each of the six men distinct and conceivable character traits. It's a quick and dirty exercise in suspenseful horror that achieves what it's attempting. You can't ask for more than that.

80/100

It's a bummer that it feels like Marshal seemed to peak with Dog Soldiers and then The Descent. I think he did a few of the big Game of Thrones episodes in the early seasons, so there is that.

Yeah, that and a couple of Lost In Space episodes and one Westworld and a Hannibal. But Doomsday was a confused mess and Hellboy a trainwreck.

SF = Z



[Snooze Factor Ratings]:
Z = didn't nod off at all
Zz = nearly nodded off but managed to stay alert
Zzz = nodded off and missed some of the film but went back to watch what I missed
Zzzz = nodded off and missed some of the film but went back to watch what I missed but nodded off again at the same point and therefore needed to go back a number of times before I got through it...
Zzzzz = nodded off and missed some or the rest of the film but was not interested enough to go back over it

Doomsday is still quite fine, in my opinion. But overall, it's an unfortunate mystery how he's lost his touch with movies completely. His latest output, The Reckoning, was amateurish garbage with none of his former glory visible. It seems he's trying to go back to his roots with the next movie, but I'm not holding my breath.

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