Rate The Last Movie You Saw

First off; CONGRATS!
YAYY

Secondly, no, no you shouldn't.
It'll be worth the wait to a smaller screen and just as visually impressive.
When that time comes, hope you enjoy it. I very much did and will, most likely/hopefully revisiting on a similar-sized screen as well.

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What I actually said to win MovieGal's heart:
- I might not be a real King of Kinkiness, but I make good pancakes

~Mr Minio

Thanks! I'm sure I will! The list of great Arthurian movies is pretty short, with the last one probably being Excalibur. It's about time we got another.

Oh so true.
The French Lancelot du Lac is lacking from my Seen It list and I have heard pretty goods about it. . .

the yellow monkey is so cute tho

Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967)



Goro Hanada, the number 3 rated hitman in the Japanese underworld, accepts an impossible job from a beautiful woman (because he's fallen in love with her), but a butterfly lands on his gun and causes him to completely botch it. He then finds himself on the run from the other highly rated hitman in the area.

This movie is completely insane. Like bat**** crazy incomprehensible insane. Like if crack cocaine was a person and Mr. Crack Cocaine made a movie, I think this is what Crack Cocaine would make. And you know what? Mr. Crack Cocaine would make a pretty ****ing awesome movie. Mr. Crack Cocaine is actually Seijun Suzuki, and without him, this movie would have been just another b-movie, but what he created instead was a stylish, genre-bending, sexploitative, satirical, and absurd work of art.

Take Goro Hanada. He's the number 3 hitman in all of Japan, and we are definitely shown evidence of this during the first job he takes escorting an important man across the city. When things go awry he immediately takes control of the situation and handles the threats with skillful precision. Now this is all very cool and gritty, bad ass even, but what about rice? Have you ever even smelled boiling rice? Have you ever required the sweet aroma of rice boiling to get sufficiently turned on for a night of beastial sex? No? Weird. Goro Hanada loves the smell of boiling rice, it's just what gets his groove on, and while watching this I quickly decided to assume that that has to be why his cheeks are so puffy. He just likes to keep a little extra in there to snack on throughout the day. Hanada is the perfect mixture of cool and ridiculous. He's equal parts effortless hitman and satirical clown, and the perfect protagonist in a plot so imbedded in the absurd.

I called this movie incomprehensible but that was a bit of hyperbole, it's nearly incomprehensible. There's a lot of interesting stuff bouncing around and it actually can be pretty fun to try to piece it all together. Like the two woman featured in the film. You have Hanada's over-the-top wild wife, who is nearly always either attempting to have sex with him (boil the rice), or have sex with another deadly Yakuza (gotta keep her options open), but then Hanada doesn't really love her, so who cares? Then you have Misako, the nihilistic unemotional mistress that Hanada is in love with, but she is obsessed with death and will refuse all advances unless he kills her. She also has an home that is full of dead butterflies, which also happens to be the insect that caused all of Hanada's misfortune, coincidence? It's just all another surreal layer in this absurd stack of pancakes of a movie and plenty fun to ponder the significance of. You truly never know where this film is going to take you, which makes it easy to see how filmmakers like Tarantino, Jarmusch, and probably Guy Ritchie (at least his early work) were heavily influenced by it.

I would be lying though if I didn't admit that the movie could stand to be a little less incoherent. There were plenty of times throughout the film that I really had to strain to figure out what exactly was going on, and while this is part of the film's charm, at times it took me out of the movie in a way that was less playful and more aggravating. The most important thing about this film, to me, though is how ******* fun it is to watch. It just flew by. And even though It might not make a whole lot of sense, hell it might even try it's hardest to make the least amount of sense that it can, it's over-the-top action, abundance of style, and absurd sense of humor really make it a film that is absolutely worth watching.

That's definitely one of the good ones.

Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood

Just in case you didn't know that Quentin Tarantino likes old movies, pop culture, people driving around in cars, feet and a bit of the old ultraviolence, here is two hours and 41 minutes of all of those things.

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My IMDb page

5/10

American Made
7.5/10
Fascinating 'based-on-a-true story' movie.

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Boldly going.

Moby Dick - It's a shame that Melville's dense, allegorical novel is my own personal white whale. I've tried diving into it on numerous occasions only to lose interest and have my enthusiasm peter out. I've got a copy somewhere on a bookshelf so I'll probably keep trying though. I think a certain familiarity would have lent this 1956 John Huston adaptation an immediacy that it was otherwise lacking. It is of course a fine film with Huston's sure hand at the helm and featuring a marvelous cast. Gregory Peck is on record as having misgivings about his performance, considering himself miscast. I think he does fine as the bedeviled Ahab and whatever shortcomings could have been tweaked with a deeper dive into the character. But then I'm also assuming time constraints were the bottom line. Assuming because, again, I haven't read the novel.

The rest of the cast is first-rate with Richard Basehart as Ishmael, Leo Genn as Starbuck and Austrian actor Friedrich von Ledebur as Queequeg. Orson Welles is also prominently billed as Father Mapple but after an impassioned and eloquent sermon on Jonah right before the Pequod sets sail the good Father and Welles essentially disappear from the film. The screenplay by Huston and Ray Bradbury of all people (with an uncredited assist by Norman Corwin) takes on the near impossible task of boiling down Melville's weighty and philosophical tome. The set pieces involving the actual whale hunting along with the everyday life on the Pequod are solidly depicted by Huston. And the sort of washed-out, subdued look to the cinematography was listed in the credits as having been created by Huston (and maybe cinematographer Oswald Morris).

Not having seen the 1998 miniseries with Patrick Stewart in the lead role I'm still not sure if the definitive Moby-Dick adaptation is yet to be filmed.

I agree. Great film, with a surprising and outstanding performance by Andy Griffith. I've always felt that comedians usually made for very good actors.

And Patricia Neal. Oh, man. I don't think she EVER gave a bad performance.

Probably one of the few movies I would give an outright 10/10 if I rated movies.

I absolutely loved it when I first saw it and have seen it at least half a dozen times, though not in a while. Maybe I wouldn't like it now, I dunno. At the time I thought it was a special film for a budget/theater film. Not some masterpiece, but special. It moved me.

I just finished watching CODA. Written and directed by Sian Heder, the film stars the wonderful and charming Emilia Jones as Ruby, a teenage girl who is the only hearing person in her family. She wants to go to college and pursue music, but is unsure if her parents (the terrific Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur) can run their fishing business without her. This is a beautiful, delightful, and truly enjoyable gem. CODA is sweet, funny and touching. Emilia Jones is fantastic and deserves an Oscar nomination for her performance. I really loved the whole cast in this. I hope this film can get some awards attention, including a best picture nomination at next year's Oscars, because it deserves it. CODA is currently my pick for best film of 2021 and my rating is a .

I mean, I will concede that there were some decent emotional moments (like the children not wanting to leave the house because it's where they lived with their mother), but I felt like it was taken to such an extreme that it became--unintentionally--comical.

I'm sure I was supposed to feel . . . something positive at the end, but was literally laughable to me.

Or the kids getting literally the only book in the whole town on aliens, and it just happens to be so accurate that the son can confidently declare "They are hostile, and they are in the first stage of an attack formation".

I can definitely say that I felt the writing was weak, but I also didn't feel any suspense or tension.

It's been a long time since I've watched it, but I've seen it a few times. I think the (intentional) humor is probably my favorite that MNS has done, I remember a few tense/suspenseful scenes, the dinner scene made me cry, the birthday party footage was fun, etc.

I also hated the "message", or rather the delivery of it ("swing away", ugh), but there was enough good stuff in there that I am willing to overlook that.

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Captain's Log
My Collection

The problem for me, is that the film seemed to want to take the message seriously, while having these really camp sequences (like the dinner scene you said made you cry, but I thought it was maybe the second-most over-the-top sequence aside from the one I quoted above).

If the whole thing had been intentionally over the top, I could have maybe enjoyed it in the same vein as The Visit.

I just thought it was such a mess. I am genuinely trying--and failing--to imagine loving it, let alone putting it on any kind of "best of" list.

The context surrounding the film was much different when I saw it in the theater. I was a huge Night fan thanks to 6th Sense and Unbreakable, so I was going into it with a lot of good will. He hadn't made a stinker yet, and we still liked Mel Gibson back then. I know my first impression was that I wasn't crazy about the decision to be "funnier" than his previous films, and I thought the resolution was heavy-handed and cringe-inducing. This film was the first sign (heh) that Night wasn't infallible.
However, when I rented it a year or so later, and now knowing what to expect, I still hated the end but was more in tune with the humor.
Hard to believe this film is 20 years old already, but that's how I felt at the time. Maybe I'll feel differently when I watch it again. Because my tastes have matured SO MUCH since then.

I went into the film with medium-high expectations, because my memory is of the film being well-regarded and the only real complaint being the .

There were just so many things--big and small--that undercut my enjoyment. I think that I was done when

Having the director himself, in a (poorly judged) extended cameo, tell us the theme . . . nope.

And don't even get me started on the idea of passing someone a flashlight by throwing it down on a stone floor.

Fundamentally, there was never enough time without something stupid or annoying interrupting the flow of the film for me to actually vibe with it. Throw in the discordance between the tone of certain sequences and the over-wrought theme, and it was just impossible for me to get any traction with it.