Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Shaft's Big Score! - This is the 1972 followup to 1971's popular and gritty private detective flick starring Richard Roundtree as the bad mofo himself. But even though Shaft would certainly be considered the definitive blaxploitation film it wasn't the first as some would assume. That honorarium would probably belong to 1970's Cotton Comes To Harlem or maybe 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which was released a few months before Shaft. I don't think 1968's Uptight can be considered blaxploitation.

SBS! isn't as good as Shaft of course even though Roundtree, director Gordon Parks and writer Ernest Tidyman are all back. But it's a competent enough sequel I suppose. The movie opens with Harlem businessman Cal Asby emptying the safe at his combination insurance office and funeral parlor. He hides the money in a coffin and calls his friend John Shaft and tells the PI that he's in deep trouble and needs his help. When John pulls up outside the business a bomb goes off and Asby is killed. John is determined to find out who killed his friend while also protecting Asby's sister Arna (Rosalind Miles). He quickly learns that Asby and his business partner Johnny Kelly (Wally Taylor) had been running a numbers racket and that Kelly is in debt to gangster Gus Mascola (Joseph Mascolo) to the tune of 250,000 dollars. While Asby had been using his share of the illicit profits to bankroll Harlem charities Kelly had been running up huge gambling debts. Asby had offered to buy his partner out but Kelly got greedy and, not knowing the money was missing, had him killed instead.

There are good performances here from Julius Harris as Police Captain Bollin and Moses Gunn and Drew Bundini Brown, who return as Bumpy Jonas and Willy. Veteran character actor Joe Santos plays Mascola's right hand man Pascal. The story as well as the action aren't as tight and concise as they were in Shaft and there's a climactic chase scene at the end that just keeps going and going to the point of incredulity. But it's a worthy enough watch, especially for fans of Roundtree's indelible character.

65/100

I quite like Splinter. It was a random watch for me when it first came out, and it was a really pleasant surprise. I thought the actors were all really solid.

This is probably a good example of a film that benefits from how I watch movies, which is to say that I just sort of tune out when a movie isn't that great and then tune back in when something interesting is happening. It means I tend to get the good stuff and I'm not as bothered by the bad stuff. It also benefited from me watching it in like three or four viewings. If I'd watched it all in one go, my rating would be a lot lower.

The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967

In this musical that involves multiple, overlapping narratives, twins Solange (Francoise Dorleac) and Delphine (Catherine Deneauve) want to find romance and make their way out of the town of Rochefort. Along the way they cross paths with various characters, including a recently discharged navy man (Jacques Perrin), their mother's former flame (Michel Piccoli), and an American composer (Gene Kelly).

This w as a delightful little confection of a film, and it echoed everything that I really enjoyed about Umbrellas of Cherbourg. So much so, in fact, that I feel like this review might be something of a retread of my review of Umbrellas.

The colors, Duke, the colors! The action of Young Girls of Rochefort is taken outside far more often than that in Umbrellas, but the candy-bright color scheme remains the same. Deneuve darts across the front of a building that is the exact bright shade of yellow as her dress. The characters leap and twirl in primary colored outfits. The larger spaces allow for big-time choreographed numbers, which the film pulls off very well.

The stories themselves are also fun. In keeping with the structure of Demy's other films, there aren't really bad guys. Just a lot of people out there looking for love, some of whom will find it, some of whom won't. The relationships between the characters, and the way that they intersect or don't intersect, exists in a kind of soap-opera/farce level. It all works, of course, because the tone of the film is consistent throughout.

There were two little nitpicks I had with this film. The first was that the age gap between Kelly and Dorleac was just a bit too much. He's 30 years older than her. He looks 30 years older than her. They are both charming presences, but the romance felt like a stretch.

The other was the weird subplot about the man who killed a woman because she didn't return his affections. Like . . . why was this in this film? And at the end two of the characters are reading about it in the newspaper and he's like "Guess he cut her down to size LOL!" and I was like "WHAT IS HAPPENING?!". For me it was actually kind of a sour note to hit near the end of the film.

The dance numbers were great, and the performances were a lot of fun. I'd probably still give the edge to Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

Ankle Biters (2021). A Canadian horror/comedy about four adorable little girls who plan to kill their mom's new hockey player boyfriend. The four girls are played by real life sisters and they are the highlight of the film. They are little psychos, but darn are they cute! I had fun with this one. It is dark and has some funny moments. Worth checking out.

It also improves with rewatches. With my first viewing, I enjoyed it quite a bit, but with my second viewing, I was blown away.

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A Slightly Pregnant Man, 1973

When Marco (Marcello Mastroiannni) begins to feel ill, his wife Irene (Catherine Deneuve) insists that he go to the doctor. Marco is shocked to be diagnosed as being pregnant, something that causes waves in their town and eventually the world as everyone from scientists to fashion houses want to get in on the unique medical event.

This is one of those films that, while not terrible, is also not that great. It honestly feels like someone filmed a wry conversation between two people about what it would be like if men could get pregnant.

Most of the humor is very subdued: Marco checking out his belly in the mirror. A group of female friends discussing it, observing that men being pregnant would mean birth control pills everywhere and an end to the abortion ban.

One sequence that I thought was very funny--sold by the style of the film and Mastroianni's physical performance--was a part where a clothing company decides to create a line of clothing for pregnant men.

But overall, the film doesn't quite seem to have a focused point. Pregnancy is something that is incredibly common, of course, and yet it is something really out of the realm of understanding for people who have not personally experienced it. But where you'd expect to mainly focus on how this new perspective changes how Marco thinks about himself (and about his wife, who has already birthed a child), that arc never really materializes.

Fine, but not more than fine.

Range Runners, 2019

Mel (Celeste Cooper) is a former Olympic hopeful working through some issues related to her complicated relationship with her father. Running solo through an isolated wooded area, Mel encounters two criminals, Wayland (Sean Patrick Leonard) and Jared (Michael B Woods), who are on the run after some sketchy business gone wrong. The men steal Mel's pack for the food and medical supplies inside. In an impulsive, anger-driven decision, Mel decides to pursue the men to get her pack back.

It is a very well worn horror trope that you watch a character do something and yell, "What are you doing you idiot?!". What I liked about this film---admittedly a thriller, not horror--is that it's very clear up front that Mel's decisions are driven by her emotions and very specifically her anger. Mel is on edge and working through some stuff before she ever sets eyes on the two bad dudes. By the time they've manhandled her, stolen her possessions, and tied her to a camping shelter, she's nowhere near making rational decisions.

And I also liked Cooper's approach to the main character. She is unabashedly an angry woman. This is not a glamorous female victim, staring wide-eyed out of perfectly mascara-enhanced lashes. Mel is all scowls and gritted teeth. She starts the film mad and only gets madder.

Despite liking these two aspects of the film, the rest is a bit of a let down. Wayland and Jared are the same criminals we've been seeing since the dawn of time: the Sadistic One and the Sort-Of Nice One. The film gets a little friction out of the two of them butting heads, but Wayland is such a dominant personality that it never hits that hard. There were also a few moments of bad choices on Mel's part that were just too beyond the pale. So there is definitely a "survival tactic"/coping mechanism when you are in a dangerous situation which is to act as if everything is normal in the hope that everything will continue to be okay. But there's a part where one of the criminals admires her knife and she just hands it to him! I'm sorry, but you're a woman alone in the woods and you come across two male strangers who are acting twitchy and you hand over your only weapon? No ma'am. Moments like that were frustrating.

The film is also really, really heavy with flashbacks to Mel's childhood, specifically her training with her father (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), a former military man who pushes, berates, and lectures her as she sprints her little heart out. These scenes drag the film's pace down and there's also a lack of real vision to them. Is the father's behavior tough love or abuse? The film can't seem to decide if his actions are not cool, or just the kind of toughness training that a girl needs to prepare her for the big nasty world. Mel processing her childhood and how it has impacted her and her relationship with her sister is a valuable part of the film and fleshes out the character, but I just feel as though the film had twice the flashback content that it needed. Aside from Cooper, Woods is the strongest actor in the bunch, and I wish they'd found a way to have more of their interactions.

I've been watching this film to fall asleep to for like two weeks and finally finished it last night. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but I thought it had some good points.

I don't know what you're talking about. Those are all very clearly slightly pregnant men.

Short film: The Dentist.

9/10

Can't wait to find more of this.

Tak, he's Hollywood actor Gene Kelly. Accept it.

Stu, they're celebrating his pregnancy. Accept it.

I did not realize that Gene Kelly was going to be in this film.

Thus he first appears and I was like "Wow! Who is this French performer who looks and dances just like Gene Kelly?! This is an AMAZING homage!". Then "Oh, it's . . . Gene Kelly!".

That is interesting - I just assumed the music was the same (oldies from the era) in the original version, so now I wonder if symphonic background music would have changed my perception of the film.

I don't know if they left any of the original background music in the extended version (of course, we're not really paying attention... until you hear an oldie you recognize). So I can't speculate as to if it might have been better with a mix of oldies & music written for the movie.

I still long for someone to produce a symphony background for Forbidden Planet instead of that awful incessant Moog!

Une Chambre en Ville, 1982

In the midst of a metal workers' strike, Francois (Richard Barry) splits with his pregnant girlfriend, Violette (Fabienne Guyon). He ends up meeting Edith (Dominique Sanda), who is feuding with her husband, Edmond (Michel Piccoli). The two begin a passionate affair, but tensions rise in the form of the strike and the lovers' abandoned halves.

As with Umbrellas of Cherbourg, this is a sung-through musical. Unlike that film, however, this one is a lot more bleak. Today has been really rough for several reasons, and I thought another Demy musical would be the ticket. Friends, I done goofed.

This is not to say that I disliked the film, far from it. I wrote in several of my other reviews of Demy's films that I'd seen a thematic trend of "That's how life is sometimes"--a mix of characters with sometimes conflicting interests, not always getting their first choice of outcomes but still finding a way. Here, however, that idea that the world keeps turning is a bit upended.

The sung-through aspect of this film was really interesting with the more serious, intense subject matter. It creates a far more jarring contrast between the format and the content, such as when Edmond threatens Edith with a straight razor: he's singing threats at her as she sings her own rejoinders. One of my favorite examples of this was the very opening scene: a large scale showdown between the striking workers and the very armed police. The whole film was this way, treading the line between realism and big-budget musical vibes. I really liked the strangeness of the combination.

Francois, a man who is pretty unashamed about abandoning his pregnant partner, is perhaps the most challenging lead character I've encountered in a Demy film. Edith's plight is much more sympathetic. The film is not without sympathy for Violette, but she's definitely given a lot less screen time and so the film seems inherently to be siding with Francois.

On the other hand, though, the relationship between Edith and Francois is pretty electric. Their scenes together have a great combination of sexiness and affection that convincingly sells the instant attraction nature of their hookup. Edith roams the film wearing nothing but a fur coat, from time to time offering a glimpse of her nude body underneath. A post-sex conversation between the two of them features both characters in the nude, Edith partially wrapped in her fur coat, and this stretch of the film hits on a nerve of visceral sensuality that I often find really lacking in sex scenes or scenes that are meant to show sexual compatibility. The blocking, including *gasp* near nudity from the male character, achieves a kind of comfortable, lazy intimacy.

I don't hold the film's more bleak outlook against it, but it was a bit jarring after the relative lightness of the other Demy films I've watched in the last few days. On the other hand, it was kind of neat seeing the same style applied to a much more serious, downbeat narrative.

I would love it if they made another Wall-E movie, but I haven't heard any plans for one.

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OPEN FLOOR.

It's been a while since I saw the original version, and I only saw the extended version once, (recently when it aired on TCM), so I don't know if there was any music overlap. But I think I remember reading somewhere that they were supposed to release a DVD, (I think it might have been a BluRay), of both versions in the same set.

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The message is colonialism = rape/exploitation. Which isn't something I disagree with, but it also isn't exactly a revelation at this point, and ultimately I need to have some flesh and blood characters to engage with. The film is ultimately dehumanized, its avian spirit clipped and roosted and rendered lame. The film opens by mimicking the final scene of Paths of Glory, which makes an unfortunate comparison, and inversion. Paths is probably an insurmountable example of a film that can portray human cruelty and exploitation without sacrificing the "song" of what it means to be human. It's an unfair comparison, but Kent openly courted it. It only enhances her own film's failure in this regard.