Rate The Last Movie You Saw

1st Rewatch....This documentary follows the almost year long process of casting the 2006 Broadway revival of A Chorus Line remaining endlessly fascinating for those who like to look at the business behind show business. The film not only provides archival footage regarding the original 1975 production but a surprisingly intimate look at the joy and pain of those auditioning for the revival. Highlights for this reviewer were the plight of a talented actress named Rachelle Rak who after her final callback was asked by the director to bring something to her reading from eight months ago that she was unable to remember and the absolutely brilliant reading of the Paul monologue by a young dancer named Jason Tam.

LOVED this movie...Stanwyck was totally robbed of the Best Actress Oscar

Love this movie.

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Meet The Fockers (2004)


Barbara Streisand and a sweaty Dustin Hoffman ruin sex for everybody in purile comedy that provides few cheap chuckles but wear thin quickly. Couldn't finish it.

Yeah, Stanwyck played one of the most cold blooded femme fatales in noir. But MacMurray and E.G. Robinson knocked me out as well. Evidently Robinson was reluctant to take the role because is was used to first billing. But he agreed when he learned that he would make the same dough as the other two: $100,000. Robinson was a helluva technician. I loved his "actuarial table" speech:

Last film I saw was "How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2001)". Hmmm...7/10

Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17818346

Kind Hearts and Coronets - (1949)

Okay - a scene - Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) - (whose now deceased mother was cruelly shut out of the wealthy D'Ascoyne family) - has decided to kill the lot of them, one by one. He's befriended Young Henry, the photographer (all of the D'Ascoynes are played by Alec Guinness), whose wife is strictly against drinking. Henry keeps bottles of booze in his darkroom, so while Louis is strolling along with Henry and his wife Edith (Valerie Hobson) the young D'Ascoyne makes off to the darkroom on the pretense of developing the photographs he's just taken. We know Louis has set some kind of trap. Louis and Edith sit down and start chatting, and while they talk we hear a distant *boom* - there goes another D'Ascoyne, and when we cut to Edith we see smoke rising over the hedges in the distance behind her. Poor Henry - such an eager young man, cheerful and peppy with his hobby and upper class manners. Yes, this film is all about class distinctions, and more specifically the way Louis knocks all of them off to claim what he sees as his rightful claim to be duke. There's a delightful mix of English manners and ghastly murder which feels very specific to the films made by Ealing Studios (my favourite is still The Ladykillers - one of the best British films of all time.) Every scene has it's own comedic anatomy, with murder as a kind of punchline (such as when the boat that Ascoyne D'Ascoyne and his mistress are in goes over the edge of the falls) - added to by a wry narrated comment by Mazzini ("I was sorry about the girl, but found some relief in the reflection that she had presumably during the weekend already undergone a fate worse than death.") It actually reminded me of some of the films today which really stick it to the obnoxiously wealthy.

8/10


By Tippett Studio - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1509012.../rm3448175617/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68641636

Mad God - (2021)

Great stop-motion, surreal, horror film which I reviewed in my watchlist thread here. I hold it in very high regard.

8/10

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Knives Out, 2019

Harlan (Christopher Plummer) is the patriarch of a wildly dysfunctional, overly wealthy family. Due to unfortunate circumstances, Harlan dies and his caring medical companion, Marta (Ana de Armas), gets caught up in the investigation. Private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) must unravel various family secrets and loyalties as Harlan’s death might not be the last.

I have always loved mysteries, and it’s really nice to watch one where the violence is relatively subdued and the themes are there but not overwhelming or heavy. There’s something mellow about this movie, where there’s suspense but in a cozy way.

Just a good time all around.



Full review

1984 (Diana Ringo, 2023)

This is a true independent film, combining the Orwell novel with a 1921 Russian novel "We". Kudos has to go to Finnish filmmaker Diana Ringo, who did everything on the film. She funded the film herself, wrote the script, directed, produced, lensed, composed the score, edited, and did the visual effects. She also has the lead female role of I-330 (based on the character of Julia) while Aleksandr Obmanov is great as D-503 (based on the Winston Smith character). Running at almost 2 and a half hours, Ringo is definitely a filmmaker to look out for with her second film (her debut, Quarantine, was released in 2021).


The Whirlpool (Denis Kryuchkov, 2023)

After making the martial arts action film Russian Raid (released in 2020), Denis Kryuchkov (who also directed) and his wife Olga Loyanich wrote this tale of an unhappily married woman who goes to a weekend retreat with her friends and face her fears with the help of a local shaman (Wolfgang Cerny), who doesn't see the woman as a conquest but becomes the father figure or big brother she never had as she comes to terms with what's in store. Some great twists in the story with an excellent debut performance by lead actor Alena Mitroshina as the unhappily married woman.

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The Flash
4/10.

It's like a parody of a superhero movie.
Unbelievably bad.
It's no wonder they want to reboot the DCU.

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Boldly going.

1st Rewatch...this explosive and emotionally charged docudrama still packs a wallop. This is the story of a car thief named Bill O'Neill, who is offered a way out of doing some serious jail time by going undercover with the Black Panthers in order to gather information for the feds on Fred Hampton, the charismatic leader of the panthers who organized the Rainbow Coalition. We watch O'Neill put himself in a very dangerous double agent situation much like Leonardo DiCaprio's character in The Departed and finds himself a pawn in the FBI's plan to have Hampton eliminated. Daniel Kaluuya won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his Fred Hampton and as much he loses himself inside this character and I understand the win, I personally had an issue with a technical aspect of his performance. I thought I had imagined it the first time I watched it but it was there again in this rewatch. I had a real issue with Kaluuya's diction and there are more than one scene where I actually had trouble understanding what he was saying. Personally, I think that Oscar should have gone to Sasha Baron Cohen for The Trial of the Chicago 7, but I think I'm the only one. Lakeith Sanford gives the performance of his career as O'Neill and Jesse Plemmons is rock solid as FBI agent Roy Mitchell. Shout out to an unrecognizable Martin Sheen as J Edgar Hoover as well. This also might be the only film I have ever seen where I found myself talking back to the epilogue.

Yesterday, I watched the Australian fantasy flick entitled The Portable Door. Well, like the D&D movie (Honor Among Thieves), this one is also a fun fantasy film of this year, I think. Whilst, D&D was darker than this one and its main target audience is probably different, i.e., young adults. The Portable Door could be a great portal for an adolescent, or maybe even a kid to step into the fantastical realms. As a person verging on my middle-ages, I still enjoyed it to a good degree. 7/10

Tales of Ordinary Madness - 8/10
I heard Pauline Kael mention this movie during an interview, and for some reason, I stopped to type in the few she did mention onto my IMDB watchlist. When I looked this one up, I had to check it, being a fan of Ben Gazzarra, and I was hooked. This movie hit close to home.

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Dead Man's Letters (1986) - 5/5 -- i guess to spread the word more i'll keep using this thread to share my thoughts on the films i've seen, this was an exceptional experience, about the end of civilization due to nuclear bombs, these poor souls are in underground bunkers and so on, very grim subject matter matched with the visual style. I'd want our world leaders to see it, or something like it, just to keep them thinking clearly, we don't want to end up like that, what kind of species are we that we come to where we are right now even, and this film shows that one small step to the end, farewell humanity it says essentially, we were a tragic people, the experiment is over, nice try. Sobering, and cautionary, is it too late, one would like to think we could still salvage something, make advances in science and whatnot. But more and more as time marches forth, pessimism looks like realism.

Hair (1979)

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[ J ] - [ S ] - [ F ]

Had the day off so took my girls to see 'Migration' even though they're both older (18 and 16). Was pleasantly surprised. Good, solid movie that's great for the entire family.

3/5

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Tracks (2013)


A young lady decides to trek 1,700 miles across the deserts of western Australia with 4 camels and her faithful dog in desire for solitude. With no experience of camels she sets off on her journey and soon becomes known as the "camel lady" in this incredible and moving true story. Mia Wasikowska slays the role and Adam Driver is brill and you'll love camels by the end of this movie and dogs (even more) very nice movie

Tonight, it was The Boys in the Boat - It's a feel-good, true, athletic challenge movie. It's 1936, time for the infamous Berlin Olympics, a showcase for Hitler and the nazis and "aryan" supremacy. A gritty team from the University of Washington (state) enters the 8 man rowing team. They manage to row their way to the top of the American heap, in time to get a serious coach, and serious training, and in time to be sent to Berlin. The sympathetic hero is a guy named Joe Rantz, an impoverished guy, living in a junkyard and abandoned by his family. Will they win against the nazi juggernaut?

I have to admit an eye-rolling attitude toward feel-good sports movies. Nevertheless, this is pretty good. The athletic drama as well as the political drama are compelling and mainly fairly accurate. The FX people did a decent job of recreating the huge athletic venue that could seat 100,000. Minimal run-time is expended on Hitler rants. Thankfully, he's a minor character, mainly appearing in a couple of ceremonies. I had to check to see who wanted work bad enough to play Hitler in this movie. It's a guy named Daniel Philpott. I have to admit that, if my only movie work was to play Hitler, I'd get a job in Burger King instead.