Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Casablanca - 8/10
Saw this a handful of times many years ago. Saw it for the first time in over a decade, and picked up a few things. Very subtle; taking .0001 seconds, but said a lot. Probably not a movie I'll see again - not wanting to get burned out, and have a lesser memory of this movie.

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Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)



Order versus chaos, the desire to succeed in our ambitions. Making sense of our place in this vast universe. “The time is always wrong”, there are no easy answers, human relationships can’t be reduced to rules and structures however hard we try manage them. A poignant, beautiful movie on human expression and endeavour.

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Rocky, 1976

Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) is a small-time boxer who against all odds gets offered the opportunity to fight ace boxer Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in a heavyweight championship bout. While training for the fight, Rocky strikes up a romance with the shy Adrian (Talie Shire), who lives under the abusive thumb of her brother Paulie (Burt Young), Rocky’s friend.

Full of heart and great character work, this is an incredibly endearing drama-romance.



Full review

Winchester '73 (1950)

Born On The Fourth Of July (1989)

Vietnam era film based on a true story. Some parts are hard to watch as you see the struggle of the main character. Has some charming scenes and bits but overall not my sort of thing. The drama doesn't get unbearable though and you get a reality check on how fortunate you really are.

6/10

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny - (2023)

I guess it's fair to say you have to do a fair bit of suspending disbelief with Indiana Jones and everything which comes with that particular franchise - more so as he approaches extreme old age, although I have to admit that Harrison Ford looks good for however old he is in this. For me, this movie was the proverbial mixed bag - a bag filled with candy, some sweet and delicious, and some I have to psychologically spit out. I'm a lover of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. After that, the franchise became cartoonish - including Last Crusade. This extraordinarily belated adventure has both moments of intense nostalgia, and action payoffs that actually work. It also has it's fair number of moments which didn't sit so well with me. I'm not going to go into any detail, because I'm sure most people who are looking forward to it want to be surprised about where it goes and what happens. All I can say is that the climax really worked for me - and although the rest of the film is middling at best, that crazy last act was perhaps the best in the series since Raiders. A bit of a shame the rest of the film didn't match it. Enjoyed watching it nevertheless, which is more than I can say for Crystal Skull as far as my memory serves.

6/10


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Mermaids - (1990)

In 1990 I was of an age to be completely plugged in to all the music videos going around at the time - no matter if I liked them or not, I'd watch the countdown. As such, I probably saw the video to Cher's "The Shoop Shoop Song (It's in His Kiss)" six million times, and despite that (or perhaps because of it) I never saw Mermaids - until now. Richard Benjamin is a very middle-of-the-road director in my eyes, and this is a drama which befits his status. He was a replacement of a replacement to a film that was going to be much darker. A mother (played by Cher) and her two daughters (played by Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci) move to a new town. All three are eccentric in their own way, and Cher's character, Rachel, who often moves them around, meets Lou Landsky (Bob Hoskins), who will have a hard time convincing her to commit to him. Meanwhile, Charlotte (Ryder) becomes zealous about religion and a local, good looking guy, Joe (Michael Schoeffling) despite the whole "she's only a schoolgirl" thing, which isn't really brought up in the film, surprisingly. Anyway, it's okay but I doubt I'll ever go back to see it again, or recommend it too strongly - though Ryder has many really funny moments. Sometimes a movie has bad things that happen - called drama - and sometimes studios balk at the idea of presenting the audience with anything challenging or troublesome, which is when they'll excise the drama and Mermaids is what we're left with.

6/10

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The late Bill Paxton’s directorial debut. A lot to unpack here. It’s way more dark and disturbing than I’d have thought. Fenton (Matthew McConaughey) turns up at the doors of the FBI claiming to know the culprit of the ‘God’s Hands’ serial killer, a case which was never solved. The lead detective Doyle (Powers Booth) is sceptical but listens, and we go on an unreliable narrator type of journey through history.

Paxton plays the dad who starts to unravel mentally and see visions telling him to do dark things. There are twists and turns (some a lot more predictable than others), and although it’s dated, there are some massively creepy moments and it’s pretty well written given the screenwriter Brent Hanley has barely done anything before or since.

Not a world-beater but a solid bit of entertainment.

Pretty extraordinary Polish film depicting the lives of a few thousand people living in a huge dome, after a nuclear holocaust. Szulkin seems to have got a lot out of a huge warehouse / aircraft hangar and a couple of fluorescent blue lights, in some scenes the lighting is reminiscent of the Ridley Scott’s noiry blue Blade Runner world…..but Szulkin managed it with a presumably tiny budget. The people are slowly dying, they are running out of food and to top it off the big dome they are living in is cracking.

The big hope these people are clinging on to is that one day soon, an ‘ark’ will arrive and rescue them. Our lead character ‘Soft’ (Jerzy Stuhr) is high up in whatever faux rankings these people trust in, and he’s ordered to find an engineer to fix all the cracks in the dome. Meanwhile, his lover ‘Gea’ and her friends who appear to be prostitutes, practice tightrope walking in a secluded area of the dome in order to be first on the ark when the day comes, as they’ll walk over all the other common people. Oh and one guy mashes up loads of books in order to feed the resulting pulp to the people to keep them alive.

The film is perhaps a commentary on the way the world is going, and the way religion can provide hope / false hope for many. It is a remarkable achievement though.

It’s bleak but beautiful.

Frailty was such an amazing surprise when it came out and when I first watched it. I don't remember what I was expecting (maybe more of a generic serial killer thriller?), but I was really blown away. And I think that the performances are absolutely fantastic.

Exactly. I was expecting something alot more generic too. But there are shocks:

Agreed. It's full of unexpected moments and it's also a lot more nuanced and uncomfortable, especially in the relationship between the brothers and how that evolves.

Braindead/Dead Alive (1992) I thought this was too gory and it was just being icky and gross for the sake of it. I want more in a film than just gore. There were a couple moderately amusing scenes, but I didn't find it that funny or entertaining. It also felt longer than it was and I wasn't impressed with most of the performances.

Frailty is a fun, wild ride. I've seen it a few times and I think I need to watch it at least once more.

Yeah, Frailty is fantastic. I've only seen it once, but I liked it a lot.

Convinced! I'll rewatch it before War countdown deadline.

Frailty is great, I don’t know who is on that poster.

LOL.

Frailty is very strong.

I actually regret describing it as "fun" and "wild" above, because it also feels serious, disturbing, and foreboding. It never turns its subject matter into some kind of cheap excuse for what it wants to do (IE: another exorcist movie that's about exorcisms just so it can have girls walk like spiders and say shocking things, or whatever, and not because it's actually interested in the idea). The characters play it really straight, with genuine conviction (because all the principals are really good actors), and it helps the film straddle that "what's actually happening here?" vibe that it's going for in a way it wouldn't if the actors weren't as good.

So yeah, it's fun, but it's fun because I find it fun when a film can walk those lines, and does audacious things like that. Lest I inadvertently persuade someone reading that Frailty is a summer comedy romp or something.

Deep Cover -

It's always nice to discover a hidden gem, especially one in a genre '90s cinema did right more often than not: the crime thriller. Clearly inspired by that decade's notorious drug war, it finds Cincinnatti cop Stevens (Fishburne) working an entirely different beat: the drug smuggling underworld of L.A. A man whose addict father died in his arms as a child, he has always been adamant about not wanting to turn out the same way. However, when things don't go according to plan and he becomes unsure about who to trust, it's not the only one of his vows he starts questioning.

If the synopsis sounds like one you've heard many times before, I don't blame you, but it does many things to stand out from this crowd. For one, it has guts in the way it calls out those who have made the drug war seemingly unwinnable on both sides of the law. In other words, it makes Traffic seem like a light slap in the face in this regard. Also, if action is what makes you seek out movies like this, I'll warn you that there are only a few such scenes, but their quality outweighs the quantity. Even a slap fight between Goldblum's lawyer/trafficker David and Greg Sierra's Gallegos gave me chills and made me wince. I also must give credit to the sharp and poetic writing - it even has actual poetry, I might add - the highlights being whenever Stevens and David are one-upping each other and when Stevens trades barbs with his superior (a delightfully smug Charles Martin Smith). Your mileage may vary when it comes to the movie's look and feel. I never tire of L.A.'s vibes regardless of the movie's age, but if you wouldn't say the same, you may be disaatisfied in this regard since I recognized many of the filming locations. With that said, if you enjoy this genre as much as I do, especially when the hero has divided loyalties and there is a historical context, it's worth seeking out. What's more, it also has the guts to directly ask you what you would do in Stevens' situation.