Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Ha! Well then I bet you really loved it, I didn't get half the jokes til I was older.
But the old ladies playing Scrabble!

Oh good, I was interested in this but there was so little buzz.
I feel like the movie got no promotion whatsoever.

The Harder They Fall (2021)

The Last movie I saw was Eternals. It is an action super hero movie of MARVEL . Its very intresting I think You should watch it if you are a super hero action movie lover.

well they are gonna make eternals 2 in the future to be honest

Went to the movie theater on Thursday and saw The Outfit about a tailor who overcomes some gangsters.
I give it four popcorns.
Must see for Mark Rylance's performance.

I'm with you on this one, Stirchley...I've tried a couple of times to watch Camelot, I've never gotten more than 20 minutes in....the only musical that bored me more was probably Paint Your Wagon

This film was very good and I totally agree with you regarding Lee's attention to setting up the period...everything in this movie is pure 1970's.

Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) Watched on blu ray. I enjoyed this. It was fun.

I haven't yet seen The Outfit, but in my view Rylance is at the very zenith of the best actors performing today. He's been in couple of lessor pictures, but his performances are always flawless.

Villeneuve does a masterful job with pacing. I mean it could have been a major fiasco if it had failed financially and the studio was forced to leave it unfinished. Fortunately though, the folks involved were fans of the source material and a buttload of work went in to the pre-production. Several years in the making and all that.

The sizable cast is impressive with no discernible weak spots except for Zendaya maybe. That might not be a fair assessment since she's only onscreen a few minutes with only a handful of lines. I certainly hope that's the case because part II will ride or die on the strength of Chani and Paul's dynamics. Timothée Chalamet was the keystone holding it all together and I think he does a fine job. Paul Atreides was supposed to be an unproven youngster and his evolution into Muad'Dib will also be the deciding factor in the second half.

I never watched the miniseries but it was on SyFy so I wouldn't expect much of anything at all from it. And I did like Lynch's vision of what it should have looked like even though final cut was taken from him and has basically left the guy broken hearted to this day. As expected, this was a beautiful film best enjoyed in a theater and maybe by the time part two comes out I'll be comfortable enough to go back. Looking forward to it.

90/100

Out of Africa (1985)

Starring Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Klaus Maria Brandauer. Directed by Sydney Pollack from the eponymous novel by Isak Dinesen. Cinematography by David Watkin. Music by John Barry.

I re-watched this film with some trepidation because I recalled seeing it in 1985, and I really didn't like most of it. Three-quarters of it dragged along over a not very complicated story: After arranging a marriage of convenience to a Swedish Baron, a wealthy Danish woman buys a 4000 acre cattle ranch in pre WWI Africa near Nairobi. Cattle raising doesn't work out, so she switches to coffee, which is successful.

With her husband off on commercial safari much of the year, she eventually starts seeing frequently another big game hunter, who is a free spirit. They soon become an item to where the Dane and her husband (who really only wanted access to the Dane's wealth) divorce.

A long term love affair with the current big game hunter does not sustain itself, so he moves out, leading to a surprising ending to the movie.

I came to realize on this recent watch that Out of Africa is an epic romantic drama film (161 minutes), whereas in 1985 I had been expecting more of an action film. This time I really enjoyed the story, and I think it's because I'm more mature now. Even though I was aged 41 on first viewing, I had only minimal capacity to understand the 3 main characters' well portrayed nuances in their motivations and interactions.

And what chemistry all 3 had! Streep of course could meaningfully bond with a telephone pole, and Brandauer was likewise one of the great thespians of that day. Redford follows in third place, but his portrayal was surprisingly effective and believable. I always felt that Redford was a medium weight talent, but yet I never tire of watching his Three Days of the Condor (1975), followed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), All the President's Men (1976), and even Jeremiah Johnson (1972). Very honorable mention for his work in The Great Gatsby (1974), although against a weak script.

If you enjoy drama and well performed interactions between good actors, along with beautiful scenery and photography, go back and look for this one.

Doc's rating: 7/10

The First Nudie Musical (1976) This was fun and has some good songs and some nice laughs. Definitely worth watching.

By May be found at the following website: IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18738730

Battle in Seattle - (2007)

Another rewatch of a film I've seen - this one really doesn't stick in your memory for long. Perhaps it's a little too fragmented, trying to tell one or two too many tales about the protest that came to town when the WTO held it's conference in Seattle in 1999. I have to admit, I didn't think these huge protests really became a thing until the 21st Century. We've got Woody Harrelson, Jennifer Carpenter, The Ring's Martin Henderson, Ray Liotta, Rade Serbedzija, Charlize Theron, André 3000, Channing Tatum, Michelle Rodriguez and many more having their characters' individual stories being told - and they kind of all get lost in the maelstrom which leaves us with a diluted story without a really strong main focus. An epilogue that fills us in about subsequent protests and dodgy actions by the WTO filled me with equal amounts hope and despair - but overall I have the feeling that in a couple of months this film will once more be a very faint memory. Serviceable, but not great.

6/10

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Big Fish and Begonia, 2016

Chun is a girl living in some sort of spiritual realm underneath the Earth who has reached the age where she gets to travel to the surface for a short time in the form of a dolphin. But when she is trapped in a net in her dolphin form, a human boy dives into the water to save her, only to drown in the process. Grief-stricken, Chun makes a bargain with a soul collector, discovering that she must care for the boy's soul in the form of an ever-growing fish that she names Kun. Chun's actions, though, have serious consequences for her world and only a young man named Qiu is willing to help her in her quest.

If I had seen this movie when I was a kid, it probably would have bowled me over. The story is intense and complicated, and the visuals are really fantastic.

Coming at it now, though, as someone who has seen a decent amount of animation, I was a bit underwhelmed by this film. I found the narrative and character development a bit scattershot and much of the animation felt derivative of other movies.

Something that is fundamentally striking about this film is the way that its narrative focus kind of turns out to be in the wrong place. Surely, you think, the focus is on Chun and the big fish. You know, like in the title? But the most compelling character stuff comes from Qiu, who is secretly in love with Chun and, unbeknownst to her, goes to tremendous lengths to protect her and help her succeed in her mission. It's a movie full of sacrifice, but largely from characters around the main figures.

I found myself repeatedly wishing that Kun had more of a personality. Yes, he gets a lot of the usual anthropomorphic cute animal beats. But at the end of the day, he's just kind of a big fish. We know that Chun wants to save him. And we understand that he was selfless in giving his life to rescue what he simply believed to be a dolphin in distress. But I was never entirely clear on whether the big fish WAS the boy, or just some manifestation of his spirit. Chun herself also didn't entirely grip me as a character. She was too often frustratingly passive or hesitant, and I didn't feel that she grew as the film went on.

And while this may be a matter of cultural ignorance on my part, I found some of the world-building a bit confusing. There are human-looking spirits who aren't human, but they live with non-human-looking spirits. Then there are souls of humans, only they can only be in certain places. The good people go this way, the bad people turn into . . . spirit rats?

From a visual standpoint, the film has a lot to offer. I really loved a sequence in the soul keeper's house where it turns out that many of his items are actually transformed cats, so that with a wave of his hand a chair suddenly dissolves into five or six irritated cats. There's also some lovely imagery, like a whirlpool that is made of two water dragons.

But something that kept bothering me as I watched was the sense that many of the images were things I'd seen before. An image of flying whales that came right out of Fantasia, or creature design that seemed to owe a lot to certain sequences of Spirited Away. Again, the animation looks really good, but just felt overly familiar.

A good film, but not as strong or original as I'd hoped going in.

Ya know what? You're not nice.

I just re-watched it not that long ago, in no way intending to watch the whole thing, but I got sucked in again and ended up being as impressed with it as I ever was.

Worth (2020)

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021, Alexandre Koberidze)

A very intriguing and enigmatic take on the romantic fantasy genre. Set in the Georgian city of Kutaisi (one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world - thanks Google), it follows a story of a newly met young couple who set their first date at a cafe but are prevented from meeting each other due to supernatural circumstances. It's a very long film with next to nothing going on in terms of plot but plot is not really the point — it's the odd charm and uniqueness of its cinematic language that are the highlight here (the film even gets interactive with the audience at some point). There was just something about it that drew me in and kept me watching. I found the general vibe somewhat reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul — that meditative, transcendent serenity hovering over everything. There were other filmmakers that came to mind, such as Parajanov, Bresson, as well as Kiarostami— the latter mostly due to the incorporation of a sub-plot with a film director in the process of finishing a movie, who ends up miraculously saving the two lead characters from their predicament (very meta, Kiarostami style!). Interesting editing choices and camerawork as well, often focusing and lingering on inanimate objects, parts of the body rather than the whole; the use of long shots, as well. A fascinating film and one that will divide viewers for sure, but, even though not all of it works equally well, I still appreciated it a lot for its own unique personality and vision of what cinema could be and do.