Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Yep. I agree, in addition to my feeling that someone in the writing department was half asleep. This was especially obvious early on when it seemed like the writers wrote some scenes that filmed like puzzle pieces and then the whole thing was pasted together without much continuity. The failed suicide attempts seemed like pasted-in elements meant to crank up the angst level.

I randomly came across this 80 minute Polish film and watched it because I saw it described as surprisingly shocking. It reminded me a little of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, in that the majority of the film is unremarkable at first glimpse. This film is based upon a real life horror story that happened in England. The first hour spotlights 3 kids on the last day of school, but I never knew exactly where it was going. There were strong hints of darkness among the normalcy, but once it got to the finale I just said, oh no. On Tubi.

I think they meant Gran Torino.

Sorry, Gran Torino, fixed.

The Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982

In a small Italian village during WW2, the residents receive word that the German army is on the run and leaving a trail of destruction behind them as they retreat. Aware that their homes have been stacked with explosives, some of the villagers seek refuge in the local church, while others strike out in a group to find the American soldiers they hope will liberate them. Cecilia (Micol Guidelli), who is telling the story in a flashback, is a young girl who leaves with her family in hopes of salvation.

This movie, which mixes war-time drama with moments of overt magic/fantasy, is marked by a striking number of sequences in which innocence and playfulness are brutally contrasted with the bloody realities of war and civil division.

The movie doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the decisions that the villagers must make. Even in the opening act, the villagers realize that they cannot bring their dogs with them, as the animals would make too much noise. As the group leaves the village at night, dressed in black so as not to be seen by planes overhead, one couple hears their confused dog barking from where he has been locked in the church basement. In the scheme of things it might seem minor, but it's just one of many heartbreaks that will attend their journey.

The middle act is largely taken up with the conflicts and conversations as the group continues on its way to what they hope will be freedom. Along the way they are at times hunted by a young Fascist soldier called Bruno (Mario Spallino) and Bruno's father. Bruno is a beautiful, feminine young man (I thought he was played by a young woman), and he bumbles uncertainly through the threats that he shouts at the group. At the same time, he doesn't hesitate to engage in violence against the elderly and the helpless.

In the last act, things come to a head as the wandering group runs headlong into a group of fascists. It's in this final large setpiece that the juxtaposition between the beautiful and the innocent really comes to a head. It is hard not to see a kind of child-like element in the way that the fascists and the villagers pop up and down from a field of wheat. It's a neat visual trick that the film uses to great effect, as characters vanish into the crops, sometimes for someone else to emerge. At one point, two friends (one a fascist, the other a villager), find themselves in a kind of grappling dance, each telling the other to surrender. It seems innocent and, again, child-like. Until one of them fires a gun into the other. Even among friends and family, there is little mercy to be found in this final confrontation.

The last act of this film is a real stand-out. I have a client who was a young boy during WW2 in Italy, and he has spoken of me a few times about waiting for American soldiers to arrive, and of begging them for food because he was starving. This film feels very personal in many ways, and the fact that Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (who wrote and directed the film) were children at the time of WW2 makes a lot of sense. I loved the short little sequences we got where, knowing their homes were soon to be blown up, the villagers would indulge in a short memory of a moment in their homes.

One element that does come off a bit weird is the intersection of some male gaze nonsense with the use of the young girl child protagonist. Cecilia is our main point of view character (though at times it does wander over to other characters), but the dominant sense of the camera is very male. We watch a woman pulling up her dress to use the bathroom, we watch a woman pulling up her nightgown to look at herself in the mirror, we watch a woman (inexplicably) rubbing watermelon all over her chest. If the protagonist was a young man, this one-sided gaze might make more sense. As it stands, it's like the filmmakers couldn't actually center themselves in their female protagonist.

This is a solid drama, interspersed with moments of fantasy, that builds to a very strong final act.

That is unless you live in Pig Sty Alley, where it seems kung fu geniuses come from where you least expect them. But even the resident kung fu geniuses can't stop the fury of the Axe Gang! Kung Fu Hustle follows the attempts of the humble residents to do so. Meanwhile, wannabe bad guy Sing (Stephen Chow) and his dumb friend Bone (Lam Chi-chung) try to find their true self in order to help the village.

Kung Fu Hustle is a bit of a bizarre mish-mash of genres that go from action and comedy to surreal and outlandish. It is in trying to acclimate myself to that absurdity that I found the film to be more fun. I really didn't know much about it, so it took me a while to adjust my bearings to the tone of it, but I laughed all the way through that while.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

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By The cover art can be obtained from the following website: IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32468543

Take Shelter - (2011)

I found Take Shelter to be extremely good, but as always a victim of unrealistic expectations for me, because it made the Best of the 2010s Countdown and I was very geared up to watch it. Michael Shannon, who often works best as a villain, has the whole movie thrust upon his skills as an actor and he does a tremendously good job of playing a man struck down with mental illness. Curtis (Shannon) knows very well his family history when it comes to schizophrenia, but the nightmares and hallucinations he's having feel so much like signs of an impending disaster he feels compelled to take measures to protect himself and his family, which opens a rift in the relationship he has with his wife (played by Jessica Chastain) - and it's this connection that provides the crux of the drama and psychological thriller elements. The atmosphere that's lent to the hallucinatory and dream aspects infects the film as a whole - to the point where we're also questioning the veracity of what's happening, and this uneasiness is what we walk away from the film with. If you're worried about climate change and other environmental challenges of the future - this film might just terrify you.

7/10

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Thinner (1996)

I looooooooove Kung Fu Hustle. The sequence with the snakes makes me laugh so hard it hurts.

The Dead is John Huston's final film, with a script written by his son Tony, based on a short story from James Joyce. Being a fan of classic literature, Huston's daughter Anjelica, has said that "it was very important for my father to make that film." Anjelica herself stars as Gabriel's wife, Gretta. The director died a couple of months before release, which makes of it a rather haunting look at life and death.

You gotta admire a film that doesn't really show its cards until the last 10-15 minutes. Because, for most of its duration, the film dwells in the mundane conversations between the assorted characters that meet for this dinner party, without really showing us what the deal is. Still, it manages to keep you engaged and captivated by sheer dialogue and performances. Conroy, Huston, and Dan O'Herlihy stand out from a great ensemble cast.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

I ought to watch that one again. I recall the conflict, possibly a product of Curtis' mind, being a strange mix of paranoia, delusion and realistic fear of climate change. Which one was actually happening was not clear. That's what made the movie unsettling.

Ah....yeah. It definitely had that element.

Tonight, it was M3GAN - A product of James Wan, it's also the umpteenth permutation on Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein novel. Once again, someone disobeys several cardinal rules of invention, especially horror movie inventions -

*Never make something stronger than you;
*Never make something smarter than you;
*Never make a device that wants to survive.

GOK how many inventors in the history of movies never read these rules and how many iterations of monsters have come from that disobedience. Another bunch of them does it again.

This time a young girl, Cady, has been orphaned and goes to live with her aunt, who works for a company developing AI automatons. The aunt makes a companion for Cady. Now what could possibly go wrong with that? Yeah, a lot can go wrong with that resulting in a rising body count.

As you can guess, there will be running, chasing, screaming and all of those loud drum sounds that are used as sonic punctuations and jump scares. It's all fairly predictable, including the ending, which I won't reveal, but that you have probably already guessed. It's not bad, but it won't re-write the history of horror-sci-fi.

I can't help but think that an occupational qualification for anybody who invents stuff is to read that short, pithy, intelligent book by Mary Shelley who said all that needed to be said in 1818.

The Ascent, 1977

During WW2, two Russian partisans, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) go on an ill-fated mission to find food for their group. During a skirmish with some German officers, Sotnikov is wounded and the two must seek safety and shelter. But due to the complex political situation between the partisans, the German army, and the citizens in the countryside, every action they take threatens to have consequences they did not anticipate.

This is a harrowing film about morality and solidarity, and the difference between wanting to live and not wanting to die. At the center of the film is the contrast between Sotnikov, who has accepted the possibility of his death and wants only the comfort of companionship and knowing he did the right thing, and Rybak who is more willing to compromise his loyalties in the name of surviving.

The film makes the most of a bleak, snowy country landscape. In certain sequences it feels as if the characters have died already and are afloat in some kind of purgatory. While the film begins with more thrilling elements--like the encounter with the Germans and Sotnikov and Rybak's attempts to evade the Germans--it later settles into a deeper drama that examines what people are willing to do when presented with almost certain death.

As with many great films about the cost of war, The Ascent keeps the question of "everyday people" always on its radar. There is no such thing as neutrality for the citizens in this situation. When someone arrives in your home unexpectedly, you must either hide them or report them. And each of those acts involves taking a side. Later in the film, the two partisans arrive in the home of a single mother named Demchikha (Lyudmila Polyakova). In her despair and conflict over what to do about her new arrivals, we see a woman who is being pulled apart by both sides of the conflict.

Plotnikov and Gostyukhin make for a great pair as the leads. Plotnikov manages to convey a character who is at once haunted by what may happen to him and yet firm in his own sense of morality. Sotnikov seems to have accepted death in the first ten or fifteen minutes of the film, merely waiting for exactly when and how. Gostyukhin's Rybak is haunted in a different way. We see in him a much more animal desire to live, possibly at any cost. And yet Rybak does clearly have a great affection for his companion. In one sequence, a wounded Sotnikov leans too long against a tree and becomes frozen to it. Rybak must use his breath to warm the space between the man and the tree to free his friend. The two experience a degree of physical and emotional intimacy, making their divergent choices in the last act all the more impactful.

While the film certainly has a very distinct political context, its themes about morality and survival are the kind that can translate to someone who isn't very familiar with this particular historical situation. In fact, the movie frequently leans into being almost more of a religious piece (a character is literally called "Judas" at one point, in case certain parallels weren't clear enough).

I was very interested to read more about the woman who made this film, Larysa Shepitko, and very sorry to hear that she died at a young age in a car accident. Also, she was married to Elem Klimov, who made Come and See. What a talented pair!

Definitely a top 10 war film for me.

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It's crazy to me to think that two of the best anti-war films I've seen were made by a married couple!

This is kind of an odd movie. Rian Johnson is almost trying to see what he can get away with in a mainstream movie here, playing with the structure of the film, and he kinda gets away with it in that that part of the film actually works just fine.
For the first hour of the movie, this seems like an intentionally sillier version of the first film. While fun enough, it borders on parody at every turn. Aside from the lighter, goofier tone, every character being a caricature of an archetype feels a bit much. And, while I like Craig’s acting overall in this very much (particularly the physical part), it also seems like a caricature or parody of the Benoit Blanc from the previous film. And it seemed really obvious where everything was going and it was just gonna be the usual matter of figuring out whodunnit, in classic Agatha Christie, which Johnson has cited as his main influence for these films (which he intends to make more of), where everyone has the motive and everyone has the opportunity, but who actually did it. Too simple. All of which had me scratching my head wondering what the impetus was to go this route.
And then If you can pull it off, Rian, then good for you.
So, did it work for me? Eh, probably just enough to give it a pass.
The mystery does technically hold together and ties together a lot of things we are shown throughout the film and the film is mostly pretty fun with enjoyable if somewhat over the top performances all around. However, the resolution of the mystery still requires new information that takes place well outside of the boundaries of what we've seen prior to the explanation and that is always a pet-peeve for me in mysteries. And the ending is bizarre. Not nearly as satisfying as I might have liked.
A few notes:
The Mona Lisa gag was already used in The Freshman. That may be okay but I found it distracting.
I actually like Janelle Monae more than I thought I would. She did seem a little flat when and she hasn’t had that much practice yet and I think she’s doing alright.
I like the way they played Whiskey out. “Expeditious” may have been a bit much.
"It’s so dumb, it’s brilliant!"
"No, it’s just DUMB!"
One wonders how meta Rian was trying to be there.

In the end, I actually liked the structure of the film a good bit. Johnson is a craftsman and it shows everywhere, from the color palette to the blocking (the physical position of characters in different shots actually really matters and means something), to the call-backs in the script, but sometimes he just overdoes it.
Ultimately, I found this amusing enough that I was not sorry I watched it. Whether or not I would watch it again or just re-watch Evil Under The Sun instead, hard to say.



Post-script:
And I must say, having been born in, grown up in, and spent nearly all my life in The South, from Virginia through Louisiana and every Southern state in between (no True Southerner considers Texas to be part of The South, though I have also spent a good bit of time there), I have never heard an accent like Craig's Blanc outside of movies. There are times when he seems to lilt into Kentucky (which I feel he’s probably closest to overall). Obviously he's hamming it up early on in the film but his accent in both films... I dunno, maybe there are some rich people in Savannah I haven't met yet (as this is very similar to the hilarious accent Kevin Spacey employed in Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil). Both (and most of these movie Southern accents) seem like a Bugs Bunny cartoon.


And it amuses me no end that people will get up in arms over whether a Brooklyn accent sounds authentic or sounds like Jersey or Queens but it’s just fine to lump a fourth of the country into some ridiculous, borderline mocking, drawl. Typical.

The Glass Wall, 1953

Peter (Vittorio Gassman) has escaped a concentration camp and smuggled himself aboard a ship bound for New York. But once he arrives in the city, he is discovered. Though he pleads that he qualifies for asylum because he aided the Allies during the war, he cannot give the exact name or address of the soldier, Tom (Jerry Paris), he assisted. Faced with deportation, Peter makes a run for it and begins a desperate search of the city for Tom, encountering the down-and-out Maggie (Gloria Grahame) who has problems of her own.

This was a very engaging thriller/drama, utilizing a plot with multiple moving parts and a range of sympathetic characters.

Peter is very easy to root for. In addition to his own personal dramatic circumstances, he is respectful of others and grateful for any kindnesses shown to him. But what keeps him from feeling like a Mary Sue is the streak of panic and desperation that propels him through the city streets, despite serious injuries he sustained in his initial escape from the boat. At times he does things that frighten others--such as when he forces Maggie to take him back to her apartment, despite her fears about his intentions--and it's clear that he would rather die in the attempt to prove his merits than go back to where he came from.

Maggie is also a sympathetic character. We first meet her when she's stealing a coat from a nightclub, then learn about the life she leads trying to scrape together enough money to pay her imposing landlord and the landlord's lecherous, threatening son. In one standout sequence, Maggie describes what it was like to work in a shoelace factory, and why she couldn't take it anymore. Peter struggles to reconcile this with his notions of America, where there is meaningful work for everyone. Later, we meet a woman named
Tanya (Robin Raymond), who is also sympathetic to Peter because her parents are immigrants. Likewise, Tom receives news of Peter's escape and feels compelled to help the man who saved his life during the war.

The New York in this film is a place both welcoming and threatening. Wherever Peter goes, there are people who are willing to help him, or at least to look the other way. At the same time, there are plenty of those who are predatory, willing to take advantage of the power they have over others. This is reflected in the way that the film is shot, with spaces that alternate between being claustrophobic and cozy.

It is true that the film depends on some coincidences that may seem a little far-fetched to some viewers. But none of these bothered me. This is an interesting movie that uses America's complicated relationship with immigrants and asylum seekers as the context for an engaging thriller/drama.

SF = Zzzz

The Duke of Burgundy is one of my favourites but for some reason haven't been able to get into any of his other films including this. Think I will have to try Flux Gourmet again.



[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