Rate The Last Movie You Saw

I liked Last Night in Soho a lot (gave it 4/5 and it shares my best film of 2021 title with The Innocents). Personally, I've never been a fan of Wright (I've skipped some of his films mostly because he directed them) but Soho showed a lot of promise.

As someone who considers himself extremely "non-woke," I mostly agree with this criticism. This silly empowering trope and one of the best examples of a token black character (and a general lack of sleaze) were my main issues with it. I may consider them as issues for (at least partially) different reasons but in any case, that's the stuff that slightly held it down.

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Don't think anything of it. One of the reasons I watched it was because it appeared to be well received. I didn't actually have any issue with the movie other than it wasn't my taste. It's well made and I liked the technical aspects.

rewatched

Experimental and somehow fresh (for the early 2000 sci-fi). The colors are really interesting to see.



Interesting world building. I was involved in the concept of the universe. I really appreciate the effort to make something original - by original I mean it wasn't an adaptation.

Wait, I missed the racist part (or maybe just forgot about it), what happened?

Gasp!
I thought McKenzie was absolute aces, as good as or better than her performance in JoJo Rabbit.
But that's just me.

Basically, the flick casts a black love interest but 1) only allows him to be defined by his relationship with the lead and 2) has a scene that lacks an honest POC lens to an astounding degree:



Is it Birth of a Nation? No. But when a film is desperately trying to modernize and be progressive, the bar is higher and the failures are more embarrassing. It has STRONG “let’s have our business woman run around in heels the whole movie and learn to be a mom” vibes ala the feminism of Jurassic World.

Of the ones that you listed, I'd put The Paradine Case and The Man Who Knew Too Much at the top. Both very fine films. Topaz was very suspenseful and well acted, and was also one of Roscoe Lee Brown's big film breakouts.

I think that, overall, his 40s and 50s stuff is what I have at the top of my queue, with his early 30s stuff at the bottom. I think the latter is mostly agreed on as his "weakest" era.

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Elephant Song 2014 Canadian film.


It's about a young mental patient and the head games he plays with a psychiatrist. The head nurse and others keep warning the doctor about how cagey the young man is, but he ignore them. What could go wrong?


The first half of the film is pretty tired. I think that is due to the rather bland acting style of Bruce Greenwood, who plays the psychiatrist. His nemesis, Xavier Dolan does a decent job as the young patient. The film picks up when the young man starts to confide in the doctor. The ending is quite surprising.


I would give this a 2.5- 3 out of 5. I enjoyed it but didn't think it was that great.

Blood red sky
Netflix
8/10.
Excellent, fresh, gripping vampire film, with a rare vampire protagonist. Easily the best vampire movie I've seen in years.

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Boldly going.

Trouble in Mind, 1985

Hawk (Kris Kristofferson) is released from prison right around the time that Coop (Keith Carradine) and his wife Georgia (Lori Singer) move to town. Coop soon falls in with a criminal named Solo (Joe Morton) and as his relationship with Georgia gets more and more fractured, Hawk starts to romance her.

I'm sure that there are people who love this movie. It certainly has, um, personality. I found it annoying and boring in turn, and some strong visuals or impactful moments did not do enough to get me on its side.

Positives? Well, there are some funny moments. The movie is styled as a noir with rainy streets and a jazzy score. At certain points the take on the genre is fun, such as when a dying man tells his lover "It's all yours . . . the cash . . . the house . . . the yachts," before expiring. In a non-drag role, Divine plays sneering crime boss Hilly Blue. There's a visual moment that, for me, had neat echoes with a certain moment from The Last Wave. I enjoyed Joe Morton's turn as Solo and also Geneviève Bujold as Wanda, Hawk's former flame who now runs a diner and ends up employing Georgia as a waitress.

The problem for me, though, was this: everyone in this movie is the worst. There are some movies that cast a cynical eye on almost its entire cast of characters. That itself is not a flaw. The problem here is that these people are the worst and we the audience are expected to root for Hawk.

Hawk as a character is framed for most of the film as a borderline Mary Sue character, despite the fact that our first real scene with him involves him sexually assaulting Wanda (or, to give a VERY charitable reading, starting to sexually assault her and then wearing her down with pathetic whining). But for the rest of the film wowie! He's really great at punching people! He's so funny and sassy as he harasses Gloria by stalking her in her trailer after she repeatedly asks him to leave! Is there nuance to why he was in jail? Of course not!

Coop's descent into criminality is mainly portrayed through the evolving ridiculousness of his hairstyle. Wanda just looks over everything as if it's wryly amusing to her. The whole thing feels like an exercise in nostalgia, trying to mold noir memories with 80s sensibilities with weird near-future trappings. But it's all too cutesy to ever be immersive. It's not dreamy, just annoyingly slow-paced. Every word of Singer's baby-doll whisper voice made me want to mute the darn thing and just read the subtitles instead.

By the end I just couldn't with this movie. Normally when I dislike something this way, I go read a few positive reviews to see why some people like/love it. I can't right now. I'm too annoyed. I feel like people with real talent just wasted two hours of my time.

I recently watched this as well, and also didn’t care for it. Like….at all.

Only positive I had was Divine, out of drag, actually turning out the only believable performance in the whole film.

Can you believe this film is so highly rated?

Nash Bridges (T.V. Movie, 2021)

I didn't even know this existed until a couple of days ago, when a friend of mine told me about it. I was a big fan of the show Nash Bridges back in the 90s when it was on the air. I watched it religiously and loved every minute of it (well, maybe not so much the minutes with Yasmine Bleeth, but the rest of it). So I was pretty excited when my friend told me about this.

Now that I've watched it, I'm... a bit torn. I didn't care at all for any of the new characters and the story was a bit far fetched, but overall it felt kind of like watching an overly long Nash Bridges episode. I got a kick out of seeing Nash and Joe back at it - even if it was a stretch trying to buy the idea of these 70-somethings doing what they were doing - and it struck all the right nostalgic cords. But I really wished for more. I also wish they hadn't done what they did with Jeff Perry's Harvey Leek. Harvey was always my favorite character and I was really excited when I saw Perry's name in the cast list for this, so it really irked me to see him turned into a ridiculous buffoon.

Oh well, it was entertaining enough for what it was and now I've got an itch to revisit the series.

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By http://www.movieposterdb.com/poster/fca44a52, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20418173

House - (1977)

Okay, so you mix Poltergeist with Evil Dead in a bowl with light-hearted Japanese sentiments, add a dash of witchy fantasy and absurdity and put it in an oven set to maximum weird and you've got House - a film that really surprised me by being more horror than comedy, because it just showed up on the Comedy Countdown thread unexpectedly. But really, every scene is kind of surprising in House, which is a cornucopia of experimentation in film effects and fantastical ideas. A group of schoolgirls visit a friend's aunt, but find that the house she lives in wants to eat them alive - but most of it is so silly it charms more than scares, and I never really laughed, so it's comedic aspect just doesn't engage me in that way. But it's not a boring watch - Nobuhiko Obayashi is always on the verge of trying something new, most of which are things you may have never seen before.

7/10

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Baahubali: The Beginning (S. S. Rajamouli, 2015)

i'm slowly working through Rajamouli's filmography now and so far this is my least favourite, though that's partly just because period epics aren't super my thing. I really do love the just go for it attitude big budget masala films have but admittedly this one bites off more than it can chew at points most notably here is whatever that avalanche scene is supposed to be. That being said, when this shit hits it hits hard and there's a few big pop off moments that you can't help just yell "yoooooooooooooo" and that cliffhanger ending got me good. On top of that the songs are A+.

I much preferred the second one, though the first was enjoyable enough.

i'm stoked!!!

I had to read most of your review before I remembered actually watching this. It was your take on Carradine's increasingly ridiculous hair that finally jogged my memory. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to signify his growing success or his burgeoning slide into criminality. I also remember the campy fashion and the film in general being somewhat stilted. I felt it was something you got through but not necessarily enjoyed.

final episode 5 was so good i loved the music and omg loved post credit scene and its a special scene one of the original character from previous marvel movies is in it . make sure to watch ms marvel cause its before the marvels that release next year