Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Happy as Lazzaro (2018)

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“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard ya hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done!” ~ Rocky Balboa

Tank Girl (1995, first watch)

Is there anything as heartbreaking as a movie that's not so good but really could have been something?

I was really sad to read the stories of all of the ways that this film didn't live up to its potential. It's an all-too-classic case of a property that is meant to be edgy and strange getting totally neutered in the process. Everything from scenes being mangled in editing because the main character looked "too unattractive" (while her character was being tortured! WHAT?!) to spending $5000 on a nude prosthetic for a male character only to have the studio get cold feet and film the scene with both characters fully clothed. According to some involved, there were entire sequences that were simply never shot and had to be portrayed with animated sequences.

The story is a comic book adaptation. Tank Girl/Rebecca is a irreverent, smart-mouthed woman who lives in a post-apocalyptic world where water is a rare resource. Rebecca runs afoul of an evil conglomerate, run by the super-evil Kesslee, who use slave labor to mine resources. Along the way Tank Girl meets up with Jet Girl (a super-young Naomi Watts) and a herd of half-men/half-kangaroo mutants called Rippers.

I feel bad trashing a film when so many of its problems are out of its control. The heavy hand of studio interference weighs heavily on this film.

So what are its strengths? Well, for starters I really liked Lori Petty's lead performance as Tank Girl. Her line deliveries are good, and it's one of the best "comic book character brought to life" performances I've seen. Along with this I have to give a hat tip to the hair and costume people, who give Tank Girl a different hair color/style in each new scene. There's something immensely appealing about the blatant and goofy sexuality of Tank Girl. Frankly her flirting with Jet Girl feels ahead of its time, and her utter refusal to take the bad guys seriously keeps her from ever falling into damsel-in-distress territory.

There are also just some wonderfully over-the-top elements (like a device that sucks the water out of the bodies of its victims), and it really makes me wonder what the film would be like it the creators had been allowed to go all-in.

I had only ever heard horrible things about this film, so I had set the bar pretty low. I was really surprised to watch something that wasn't so much bad as it was squandered potential. Can I recommend this movie as some sort of lost gem? Unfortunately no. It's not good. The editing and the way that it's been twisted to make it more "mainstream" left unfixable scars and gaps in the narrative.

But if you're the kind of person who can appreciate potential and enjoy some fun elements in an otherwise seriously flawed film, you might consider checking this one out.

Vivarium

another surreal an artsy film with Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg after The Art Of Self Defence



Dumb and Dumber

I like it, I like it a lot..



Bloodshot

Soooo predictable

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Do you know what a roller pigeon is, Barney? They climb high and fast, then roll over and fall just as fast toward the earth. There are shallow rollers and deep rollers. You can’t breed two deep rollers, or their young will roll all the way down, hit, and die. Officer Starling is a deep roller, Barney. We should hope one of her parents was not.

It took about 3 minutes until I was fighting back tears. The whole last hour was practically unbearable to watch and I even had to close my eyes for a second. When it was finally over my shirt was wet. I looked at my wife and she was a disaster. I have no idea how good it actually is and who cares anyway.

Now I want to see it. I’m a sucker for these films.

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Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

-Stan Brakhage

KINKY!!!

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Shoot the Moon (1982)

As an historical document, this film is a pleasure to watch. Not only is Jazz and amalgamation of different musical movements, but cinematically the film seems to achieve this as well. King of Jazz borrows from different cinematic movements and makes a "scrapbook" collage of them. It is very interesting to see where they are taking their influence from. But, what I will say, outside of a historical document I find the film falls a little short. There's "too much" "scrapbooking/collaging" for the film to have a clear direction. Although the film is about "Jazz" it doesn't always neatly stick to this premise and seems to veer of into comedy bits and some might "mindless" sketches. It's a fascinating film, yes, but not my favorite musical by any stretch.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
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Terror Train (1980)

While this rating is . . . exactly what I expected, I'd probably go closer to a 3 or 3.5, if only for the opening sequence and the audacity to have a cast of characters unlikable enough that you find yourself halfway to rooting for the killer. I also tend to enjoy films that take place on trains (yeah, it's a really specific subgenre) because they have that interesting combination of being kind of claustrophobic and at the same time can have a range of different spaces.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)


A slow and kind of mellow horror from the 70s. A woman with a history of mental issues moves to an old farm with her husband and his friend. The place has a haunted reputation but is it for a reason or is her mind just failing again. The film does the atmosphere of dread quite well and thanks to its name (which I kinda hate but also kinda like) maintains its mystery until the end. Funny fact, this used to be banned in Finland for "inspiring fear that may be harmful to mental health (yes, our censorship back then was a joke).

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The Turning (2020)


Oh boy. This is by far the worst filming of The Turn of the Screw I've seen. It's like they tried to turn the story into horror-lite with young teens as a target audience (like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark but much worse); all the subtlety is gone, there are multiple lame jump scares, and we have these cliched horror scenes sprinkled every few minutes. The script is bad, directing is bad, and thanks to these dreadful circumstances even the acting feels bad.

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French Dressing (1964)


Ken Russell's debut movie is surprisingly light comedy. A small English seaside town holds a film festival and they get a French pin-up girl and actress to be their attending star. It reminds me a little of The Benny Hill Show (I'm sure the sped-up chase and running scenes are a major cause for that, but it's not limited to that). It obviously centers a lot around sex (and English weather), and I guess some hints of Russell's latter iconoclasm can be seen while the film itself is rather clean and timid fun. And man, is Anita Laughton pretty? Unfortunately, she didn't have much of a career.

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I love Let's Scare Jessica to Death. The whole thing of starting after she's had a breakdown so that from the very get-go she doesn't know what's real and what isn't is a bold move. One of my favorite parts is at the beginning when they go into the house and (mild spoilers). I felt like half of the dread of the film just comes from Jessica's desperate desire to know that she is sane in the face of slowly mounting strangeness around her.

Wow! For a first film from Sam Fuller this is surprisingly decent. In his own words, "Film is a battleground. Love, hate, violence, action, death . . . In a word, emotion." Really enjoyed this film and now it's up on my "to keep" shelf of films.

My Happy Family (2017)

Wira (2019)

Pretty weak martial arts action from Malaysia. The story is a childish pile of cliches, and the action is ruined by the lack of violence (the main character fights half of the time with a machete in his hand but never even cuts anyone). Not every action film needs to be like The Night Comes for Us but here the lack of blood and kills was really annoying. Maybe this is martial arts action lite for kids?

This film is a riot. No wonder it was lampooned by Abrahams and the Zucker Brothers.

Oh cool! glad you could watch this.

Yeah! I love this film, it's so damn funny, especially Sterling Hayden. And the thing is I really don't like Airplane! (1980) it's not my style of comedy.