Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Tools    





The Seven-Ups -


A very solid police thriller from the crew and featuring some of the cast of The French Connection. A tale involving a mob kidnapping and ransom scheme and its pursuing Strike Team-like detective squad, it has clandestine meetings with informants, shakedowns, gunfights, a dynamite car chase and pretty much everything else that make '70s police thrillers so reliably entertaining and they're all done very well. Speaking of reliable, Roy Scheider is at his world-weary best as the lead detective and Richard Lynch is downright scary as the most vicious of his targets. Not to mention, the depiction of New York City from the avenues of Manhattan to its most unkempt docks is beautiful. The movie is not the game changer that The French Connection is, but it's still an ideal choice if you're in the mood for a movie like this one.

Unfortunately, it's not on VOD, so keep an eye out for it on TCM or on used DVD racks.
A great and underappreciated movie. One of my favorites.



@Wooley,

I should also reiterate that the male-gaze stuff was not really my biggest problem with the film. I would rank my issues thus:

1. The choppiness of the storytelling (constantly cutting back to the interview room, like, WHY?)
2. The lack of character development
3. The overall "try-hard" vibe of the film
4. The male-gaze
5. The intrusive soundtrack



Night in Paradise (2020)

A pretty typical (for the most part) Korean action thriller. It also adds a tiny hint of Takeshi Kitano in the mix. As usual, it's quite a bit too long, and the protagonist is so cool that it looks like he's falling asleep. I rounded up my rating because of the ending, which I really liked.
__________________



Victim of The Night
I don't have a problem with sex or sexiness. The problem I had was really twofold:

1) I felt like the relationship between the two women was underdeveloped. Partly this is because the film is so chopped up due to the multiple storylines, but there was just no flow to their scenes together. They had good chemistry, but at the end of the day it felt like Boutella's character was there to
WARNING: spoilers below
be in a sex scene and get fridged (again, wearing lingerie as she is strangled from behind because . . . ?)
. If the movie had taken more time to show the relationship developing, helping us understand what makes Lorraine click with her, or just giving us more screen time of them together, it might have been better.

2) Understanding the lust between the characters . . . fine. But the rest of the film drops female nudity (the anonymous naked prostitutes, the women in the sex club) constantly when it isn't necessary. The camera was constantly, it seemed, panning up/down/across the female bodies, while the male characters literally wear multiple-layered outfits at all times. I thought that the contrived staging of the sex scene was cringy and made it actually un-sexy because it was so "audience aware".

If there was a female-led action film with a solid gay romance at its heart, believe me, I would be there for it. I felt as though, despite good performances and some decent chemistry between the actors, their relationship was poorly defined. Much like the musical selections, it felt like something that was put in the film to make it "edgy" and not something that flowed naturally from the story. Apparently Boutella's character was male in the novel and both the gender flip and the explicit sex scene were added for the film. Per the director, "The relationship was flipped before I came onboard. It was a great idea. You always have to find ways to contemporize these stories, reach bigger audiences and be provocative in your storytelling." Sorry, but there's nothing provocative about filming a lesbian sex scene that looks like it came out of a porn film intended for straight men. Using queerness as edgy signaling is off-putting to me.

Also consider this quote from McAvoy, one of the people who was actually in the movie: "I wanted to make [my character] a gay man as well, but they wouldn't let me, because Charlize is gay in it--or at least she's bi in it. I don't know. Or maybe she's doing it just for a job? I'm not quite sure."

Again: fine idea. Poorly executed.
Yeah, it sounds like I need to take another look at it. The truth is if you had asked me if there was any nudity in the film at all, I would have said no, all I remember was that there was a sexual relationship between Theron and Boutella. Don't remember the prostitutes or any other nudity. I guess I would say then that I'm really not qualified to comment about it as I'm really talking about the impression the movie left on me rather than the actual events of the movie. If you asked me if I got any kind of male-gazey vibe from the movie, I can say that I did not at the time that I saw it. But if you asked me to back that up with specifics from the movie, I clearly can't. So I will take your word for it on this one.

By the way, I in no way meant to imply that you had a problem with sex or sexiness, if that was how it was taken. I was just trying to parse the difference between a movie that has nudity and sexuality because it is part of the plot or characters or vibe of the movie and one that has it to sell tickets to men. But again, in this case, I may be wrong as I do not remember the sexy bits of the movie all that well.



Victim of The Night
@Wooley,

I should also reiterate that the male-gaze stuff was not really my biggest problem with the film. I would rank my issues thus:

1. The choppiness of the storytelling (constantly cutting back to the interview room, like, WHY?)
2. The lack of character development
3. The overall "try-hard" vibe of the film
4. The male-gaze
5. The intrusive soundtrack
No, I didn't take away from what you wrote that it was your biggest problem with it, it was just something you said that jumped out at me because I didn't feel it when I saw it and I've been paying a lot of attention for it the last few years so I was surprised that it passed my barometer but stuck out to you. Made me want to explore that point and then maybe go re-visit the movie.
However, due to all your other points, maybe I don't want to revisit it since I liked the movie when I saw it and I don't necessarily want to ruin the memory.



No, I didn't take away from what you wrote that it was your biggest problem with it, it was just something you said that jumped out at me because I didn't feel it when I saw it and I've been paying a lot of attention for it the last few years so I was surprised that it passed my barometer but stuck out to you.
So is it fair to say you've been gazing intently lately?



By the way, I in no way meant to imply that you had a problem with sex or sexiness, if that was how it was taken. I was just trying to parse the difference between a movie that has nudity and sexuality because it is part of the plot or characters or vibe of the movie and one that has it to sell tickets to men. But again, in this case, I may be wrong as I do not remember the sexy bits of the movie all that well.
Not at all. And I know that I'm more likely to call out problematic sex/nudity than I am to praise the stuff I think is strong.

This isn't a movie that I found offensive/problematic so much as just not executed well. And this made all of the elements (including the sex/nudity) stand out in a bad way.

I honestly think that the film probably had good intentions and wanted to be bold by presenting a gay/bi female action lead who was still traditionally sexy and subvert the expected narrative (ie that she would fall in love with the roguish McAvoy character). I read that Theron was excited for years about getting the film made. But I think the way that it was done was incredibly flawed on multiple levels.



2) Understanding the lust between the characters . . . fine. But the rest of the film drops female nudity (the anonymous naked prostitutes, the women in the sex club) constantly when it isn't necessary. The camera was constantly, it seemed, panning up/down/across the female bodies, while the male characters literally wear multiple-layered outfits at all times. I thought that the contrived staging of the sex scene was cringy and made it actually un-sexy because it was so "audience aware".
While I haven't seen Atomic Blonde yet, I have felt similarly about certain other films, like the way that the constant objectification of women in the original Fast & The Furious left a significantly negative impression on me in a movie I otherwise would've been indifferent to (since, unlike Cowboy Bebop, it didn't have much of anything worthwhile going for it on the whole). That being said, while they're extremely rare, there are examples of a "gendered gaze" contributing something meaningful to films, like in (at the risk of repeating myself) the scene in Batman Returns when Catwoman makes her alliance with The Penguin:



On the one hand, the camera's initial push-in to her lying on the bed seems to be just another classic example of the "male gaze", but it makes perfect sense in the context of the scene, since the whole point of it is that Catwoman knows how much The Penguin is controlled by his libido, so she manipulates him by leading him on with the idea that she might possibly sleep with him (an idea she completely shuts down later), so the shot makes sense, since it's conveying her intent by putting us in his perverted headspace temporarily. It also makes sense in the context of Catwoman's overall arc, since she starts the film out as a socially-awkward, sexually-repressed character, but when she gets "liberated" later on by taking on the mantle of
Catwoman,
she doesn't become so in order to please men (like the Ice Princess did, for example), but in order to weaponize her sexuality to lash out at the sexist society that kept her down, making her a extremely well-developed, three-dimensional female character whose sexuality is just one facet of her characterization, and not the sole defining one, so there's a world of difference between that and the lingering shot of Jason Momoa taking his shirt off in the Snyder cut of Justice League, you know?




Here Comes Mr. Jordan - This had been on my radar for years or probably decades. I had of course seen Warren Beatty's 1978 remake Heaven Can Wait but had somehow never gotten around to watching this. I'd heard plenty of favorable things about it and they turned out to be true for the most part. Sometimes there are deficiencies to earlier versions because of technological limitations or the Hays code or the stilted acting of the era but this was an especially charming movie. The performances are winning across the board with Robert Mongomery as boxer Joe Pendleton, Claude Rains as heavenly overseer Mr. Jordan, James Gleason as Pendleton's manager Max Corkle and Edward Everett Horton as the neophyte messenger 7013. It's his gaffe that brings about the carousel of body switching and predestination that Joe finds himself on. Anyone who's seen the '78 version will be familiar with this given that outside of Pendleton's vocation it's nearly identical. This is a fitting companion piece to that and vice versa.





Night of the Demon (1957, Jacques Tourneur)

Let's face it, this is not scary at all by today's standards, and the demon is more amusing than actually frightening, but... You can't help but appreciate the visual aspect: the beautiful locations, the black-and-white cinematography, the lighting, the special effects - all those things that combine to create the charm of those early 1950s horror classics.
Cool movie.



Here Comes Mr. Jordan
Glad you liked it. I think it's tremendously enjoyable and it's certainly one of my favourite films from the 1940s. Likewise I thought everyone played a great part, and for me the best has got to be the manager character played by James Gleason, whose comedic expressions of bewilderment throughout are simply priceless.

There's also a small and funny coincidence in the script too, which you'd probably only be conscious if you came from Australia. The pair of characters of the murderous wife and secretary share the names of a couple of recent Australian Prime Ministers, Tony Abbott and Julia (Gillard). They were fierce political rivals but also at times rather hilarious around each other. Never fails to crack me up whenever I watch this.



Victim of The Night
So is it fair to say you've been gazing intently lately?
Ha! Yes, that exactly.



Victim of The Night

Night of the Demon (1957, Jacques Tourneur)

Let's face it, this is not scary at all by today's standards, and the demon is more amusing than actually frightening, but... You can't help but appreciate the visual aspect: the beautiful locations, the black-and-white cinematography, the lighting, the special effects - all those things that combine to create the charm of those early 1950s horror classics.
Cool movie.
Big fan, here.



The Seven-Ups -


A very solid police thriller from the crew and featuring some of the cast of The French Connection. A tale involving a mob kidnapping and ransom scheme and its pursuing Strike Team-like detective squad, it has clandestine meetings with informants, shakedowns, gunfights, a dynamite car chase and pretty much everything else that make '70s police thrillers so reliably entertaining and they're all done very well. Speaking of reliable, Roy Scheider is at his world-weary best as the lead detective and Richard Lynch is downright scary as the most vicious of his targets. Not to mention, the depiction of New York City from the avenues of Manhattan to its most unkempt docks is beautiful. The movie is not the game changer that The French Connection is, but it's still an ideal choice if you're in the mood for a movie like this one.

Unfortunately, it's not on VOD, so keep an eye out for it on TCM or on used DVD racks.
Love the grittiness of this movie, in many ways, more impressive than the French Connection for me although not much between them.



Love the grittiness of this movie, in many ways, more impressive than the French Connection for me although not much between them.
I actually have you to thank for making me aware of this movie. Again, thanks!

I give the edge to The French Connection because I love Friedkin's direction in it and Hackman's performance. Don't get me wrong, D'Antoni's direction is very good and so is Roy Scheider, but they're just not on the same level. Still, great stuff.

Also what is it about the grittiness that is so satisfying? Those locations by the docks and the trainyards are so compelling and satisfying to look at even though they're essentially dumps. I guess it's because they're so real and unaffected.





Re-watch of an excellent movie. Huge fan of both leads.



Re-watch. Terrifying movie based on real events. Can’t even imagine.
__________________
I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.



UNDER THE SHADOW
(2016, Anvari)
A film from Iran



"The winds refer to mysterious, ethereal and magical forces which can be anywhere... Where there is fear and anxiety, the winds blow."

Set in 1980s Iran, in the middle of the war with Iraq, Under the Shadow follows Shideh (Narges Rashidi), a young woman that is forbidden from resuming her medical studies after being involved in leftist groups during the revolution. As war intensifies and her husband is called to service, Shideh has to take care of their daughter, Dorsa (Avin Manshadi), while also dealing with a mysterious presence that starts haunting them as well as her own fears and insecurities.

There are a couple of jumpscares in the film that I thought were effective, but they are few and far apart. Most of the film is a slow build as we see how the manifestations get worse. It isn't a typical edge-of-your-seat thriller where characters constantly scream and run for their lives, even if there are a few instances of that. The dread is more subtle, the fear is more psychological, and I felt it was more character driven than other similar films. There's also an obvious subtext about the cultural and socio-political status of the country, whose mileage with the viewer may vary.

Grade:



Full review on my Movie Loot
__________________
Check out my podcast: The Movie Loot!