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Albert Nobbs 2011

Curious movie, quite sad, I kind of liked it and for me the most memorable performance I’ve seen of Glenn Close

LOVED Albert Knobbs...Close was amazing.



I forgot the opening line.

By IMP Awards U.K. quad poster, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3022377

Chariots of Fire - (1981)

Another 1980s Best Picture winner I've never seen before. Four athletes, and their journey to the 1924 Paris Olympic Games. One is Jewish, and runs to triumph over people who cast aspersions over his race. Another is Christian, and does it because he considers it a God given gift that he can - but he refuses to compete on Sundays. Of course, there's always the fun of it - along with fame and fortune. This film had a pretty rusted-on reputation for being boring, along with a very famous opening credits scene where the guys run along the shoreline to the well-known theme by Vangelis. It's a really good movie, but as is so common with these 1980s Oscar winners, it's not astonishingly great. It was up against Raiders of the Lost Ark, Reds and Atlantic City in the Oscar race - disappointing it beat them.

7/10


By www.impawards.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6756780

The Big Chill - (1983)

This went up against Terms of Endearment for Best Picture (both films should have been beaten by The Right Stuff.) The Big Chill really rubbed me up the wrong way with it's unlikeable self-absorbed characters. This ensemble cast represent a bunch of friends reacquainting themselves with each other after one of them has passed away. All they prove is that they're a bunch of shallow morons that don't care. I thought it would be a voyage of self-discovery, along with a realisation of how their previous values from the 1960s had been eroded after reaching the 1980s. But they just crack jokes the whole time and obsess over sex and who likes who the most. A great, talented cast saddled with a lousy script (which was also nominated for an Oscar.)

5/10


Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8866219

The Dam Busters - (1955)

This is a so-so film up to when the raid on the dams start - where we're treated to one of the best of it's type I've ever seen. You can see where the raid on the Death Star in Star Wars got it's inspiration from, but I'd rank this above that final assault in the sci-fi classic. It's real edge-of-your-seat stuff with effects that I didn't think were possible in the mid 1950s. A shame about Wing Commander Guy Gibson's dog called....well, never mind about the dog anyway. This is a war film well worth catching up with.

7/10


Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12266915

MacArthur - (1977)

If you like human drama, and not history, then this film really isn't for you. Douglas MacArthur only ever has one mood - "lets get the job done" and by the end of this film you realise that his tone and attitude has never shifted for the whole film. The drama comes from events - his crisis the president's (Truman) panic over MacArthur trying to run the Korean war over into a war with China when diplomatic measures are being sought. I appreciate history, but in a personal sense Douglas MacArthur isn't the kind of character that's easy to create a dramatic film around. At least Patton was an interesting human being. It's a fairly competent film (other than one scene where the rear-screen projection freezes - jeez guys) and not a horrible one. For history buffs only I'd reckon.

6/10
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The End (1978)

Tremendously fun black comedy from director/star Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise. Reynolds plays a dodgy real estate agent who discovers that he has a terminal illness with only a short time left to live. He decides to commit suicide whilst miserably trying to put his affairs in order. After a failed attempt he is sent to a mental institute where he meets another patient in Dom DeLuise, whom he enlists to give his ultimately hopeless guidance and assistance for a successful suicide.

For the most part this is a really high quality movie. The way the script matches the very serious themes throughout with outrageous comedy was expertly done I thought. So much of it could/should come close to being extremely sad and emotional if it weren't for the relentlessly funny events and dialogue. Laugh a minute stuff. So pleased to have finally seen it.

9/10
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Raven73's Avatar
Boldly going.
James Bond: No Time To Die
7.5/10.
I'm not a Bond fan, or even a spy movie fan, but I did enjoy this movie. I particularly enjoyed a one-shot fight scene near the end, and Bond's tricked-out car (oh yes, the car). There are of course no shortage of beautiful locations and gorgeous women.
WARNING: "ending" spoilers below
This may well be Daniel Craig's last time as Bond, as the character dies at the end... However, they did leave it somewhat ambiguous, as we didn't actually see the body, and he might have jumped off the island at the last second before the rockets came down, and his bullet wounds may not necessarily have been fatal (he did, for instance, have enough strength to climb a ladder, and Bond is a skilled survivor).

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Please Quote/Tag Or I'll Miss Your Responses
Dave Chappelle - The Closer
A re-review... The reactions to my opinions usually cause me stress, but it's better than speaking with the disclaimer, "My opinions might not be my own"..
I didn't think Dave Chappelle's special was very funny, but there was nothing offensive about it. It was still enjoyable because he has cache and said some things needed to be heard by millions. And even if I were offended, who gives a ****? Artistic license? Freedom of speech?




I should say when I first saw this, it was very late at night. I was tired, and a bit buzzed. My video kept lagging (just like the one I just watched) because 720 will not play well on my very old and slow laptop that I'm typing on (which can't even keep up with my typing). The picture would freeze every 20 seconds, but the audio never froze - the best I'm going to get.




Anyway, this time I was able to watch and paid strong attention not only to what was being said, but also the audience. Detroit is a city with a black majority, with a black performer, but the audience probably had more whites. And during those many times the video froze, I would look at everyone in the audience. They were all laughing. I didn't see a frown.




One of his first jokes was basically calling Mike Pence gay. But I don't remember any conservatives crying about this. I'm not a conservative, so a minute ago, I did a quick google search. I found one article (I won't name it, because I don't want to advertise garbage) from a pretty large site. This "author" found it funny to call Mike Pence gay, and how he's praying to not be attracted to buttholes. Funny? Na, but this "author" had his own agenda, and would never go against "his" tribe. I hate tribes/groups - I rather be an individual, which is probably much more difficult.




“In my movie idea, we find out that these aliens are originally from earth — that they’re from an ancient civilization that achieved interstellar travel and left the earth thousands of years ago,” he says. “Some other planet they go to, and things go terrible for them on the other planet, so they come back to earth, [and] decide that they want to claim the earth for their very own. It’s a pretty good plotline, huh? I call it ‘Space Jews.'”




What's funny is that even a self-described Democrat who thinks the biggest problem on Earth are pronouns would use homosexuality as a pejorative. Think about that... But it's too bad that was what he mentioned, because what came after was funny and I'll paraphrase. "Gays are a minority group until they have to call the police. Then they become white". If you walk past a black man on the street, he can't hide that. A gay man can. And so can a "space jew", which might have been the funniest bit. When I first saw this, I thought he said "Space JUICE". And then later when he talked about how a slave became a horrible slavemaster.. "It's a movie idea called SPACE JEWS" -- -hilarious.




I guess I love dissidents. It's boring when people do the fake controversy bit just to make noise. I prefer sincerity and fangs, which is satire. It has to draw blood. It has to be a literate and humorous x-ray into society.




"You can shoot and kill a guy and not have on effect on your career, but don't dare hurt a gay person's feelings" -- how can anyone argue with that? The hypocrisy.




20 yrs ago, I was saying that if we're all equal in The Constitution, then gays should be allowed to marry. The same Democrats were all against it. They would even quote Clinton, Obama, etc., "I believe it is between a man and woman" but would throw the diplomatic and wimpy, "I believe in civil unions"..






26th Hall of Fame (REWATCH)

Last Year At Marienbad (1961) -


This is a difficult film to talk about since it appears to resist any attempts to interpret it. We get a handful of set pieces and the significance of some characters are hinted at, but other than that, you're pretty much on your own. What stood out the most to me were the second man and the card game. It's implied that the second man might be the woman's husband, but the occasional touches of surrealism sprinkled throughout the film hint that there's something greater at play. Possibly. The Nim game the second man plays with several people in the palace is a possible hint that he holds power over them and might be preventing them from leaving. That he wins the game every time he plays it adds more to this interpretation. In spite of this, however, the film doesn't provide enough evidence for you to draw any definitive conclusions for these details and instead chooses to leave its meaning ambiguous. And while I'm not opposed to ambiguity by any means, I felt the ambiguity prevented me from connecting to the film as much as I was hoping. The second man and the Nim game were promising concepts, but due to the ambiguity, I couldn't decide what I was supposed to feel towards those aspects as I watched the film. Technically speaking though, the film is excellent. One could criticize the narration for being hard to follow, but I think the film found the right balance between being comprehensible and disorienting and I think this approach matched the surrealism of the film pretty well. Also, the cinematography ranks amongst the best I've ever seen in a film. Resnais finds the right camera angles and lighting to capture the artistic beauty of the palaces this film was shot in really well. While this is my least favorite of the three films I've seen from Resnais, I still enjoyed it enough to recommend it and I might rewatch it again sometime down the road.
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Ha! Good movie. This is one of several where Crawford plays a character very much like her real persona: a selfish, manipulative, bee-itch. And that's leaving out some of the other stuff...



Dave Chappelle - The Closer
A re-review... The reactions to my opinions usually cause me stress, but it's better than speaking with the disclaimer, "My opinions might not be my own"..
I didn't think Dave Chappelle's special was very funny, but there was nothing offensive about it. It was still enjoyable because he has cache and said some things needed to be heard by millions. And even if I were offended, who gives a ****? Artistic license? Freedom of speech?
...
Yeah, Chappelle himself is a funny guy, with a good delivery, but I don't like his material for the most part, especially in this one. I think his audience laughs because they think that they're supposed to laugh. Either that or they're easy to please. How many times can you say suck my ___ and expect to get a laugh?

Based upon this one he needs some new writers.



COHERENCE
(2013, Byrkit)



"This whole night we've been worrying... there's some dark version of us out there somewhere. What if we're the dark version?"

Coherence follows a group of friends meeting for a dinner party the night of the passing of a comet. As the night progresses, a series of weird and unexplainable events start to unfold that make them all question the decisions of their past, as well as the nature of themselves and who they are. But the events of the night might also put them or others in danger.

This film was recommended to me by a couple of people, so I was looking forward to it. I was happy to see it delivered as far as "mind****ery" goes. Director and co-writer Byrkit makes the most of his extremely low budget ($50K) by relying in a solid script, weird occurrences, and solid performances to build this dread about what's happening.

I'm trying to avoid too much details here cause it's definitely a film worth seeing without spoiling, and maybe even with as little knowledge as possible, but reading about the production and filming details, and how Byrkit and co-writer Alex Manugian would only give the actors some pointers about the characters and the beats of the story, while allowing them to improvise, and then see the end result, it's impressive.

Grade:



Full review on my Movie Loot
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Lamb (Johansson, 2021)

I can't say I'm very impressed with this movie regardless of the lense I take. Whether I view it as a horror or try to interpret the film as a metaphorical art house film to dissect, there's just not much there. Johansson gives the audience very little, and expects them to do a lot. Lamb gives you a decent, but not overly intense landscape. Three extremely one-dimensional characters, with immediately clear vices. & a kinda funny looking chimeras. After that you're on your own, and I couldn't muster the interest.

-
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I forgot the opening line.


The Adventures of Errol Flynn - (2005)

Watched this to get me in the mood for a day of Errol Flynn movies. What can I say? It's one of those competent, good enough documentaries that does it's job but doesn't strive to be anything more than biographical info from people who knew the subject. I got to place all the films I was about to watch in context.

6/10


Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7204891

Captain Blood - (1935)

The quintessential Errol Flynn movie - Captain Blood was his big break, and it's the best out of the ones I watched. Genuinely exciting, with an involving story about King James II, the Monmouth Rebellion, white slavery and piracy. Flynn is Dr. Peter Blood, who is unjustly sentenced to death before being reprieved when the Jamaican colony needs slaves. He ends up stealing a ship - but not before starting something with Olivia de Havilland's character. She'd go on to appear as his romantic interest in another 7 films. Fine performances, great use of miniatures, a rousing score and heaps of charm. Director Michael Curtiz (who Flynn hated working for) would try to recapture the spirit of this in every film he'd do with Flynn and de Havilland. Errol Flynn is magnetic and inspirational.

8/10


By Illustrator unknown. Distributed by Warner Bros. - Scan via Heritage Auctions. Cropped from the original image., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=86849427

The Adventures of Robin Hood - (1938)

This is a great film, full of Errol Flynn's charm and natural confidence. The technicolor is gorgeous. The frivolity a lot of fun. Basil Rathbone and Claude Rains great villains. Flynn's Robin Hood is a character who will just stroll into the castle of his greatest enemy alone, surrounded by soldiers and swordsmen, and mock everyone. He has the biggest pair of watchamacallits I've ever seen a bow and arrow wielding man in tights ever have. Now, this isn't a particularly serious film - it's more like a colourful dance, choreographed with fighting, witty repartee, inventive cinematography and great costumes. Curtiz directs again. Olivia de Havilland appears again as Marion, and that Erich Wolfgang Korngold can really tie everything up with a remarkable score. So why only 7/10? Well, I've never really liked Robin Hood. If I could suppress my Robinophobia the score would go up a few notches.

7/10


By Warner Bros. - http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Dodge-...amp;DestType=7, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38745963

Dodge City - (1939)

As Westerns came back into vogue it was inevitable the Warner Bros would use Errol Flynn in them. My beef with this is that the swashbuckling Flynn seems pretty smooth-faced, softly spoken and too gentle to be a real Western star. Just as I find it hard to picture John Wayne swinging on ropes with a cutlass (but I'm sure he did - at one stage he played Genghis Khan) - I find it hard to believe such a soft, clean man would be roughing it and mixing with the characters he mixes with. But this has a great climax with a burning train that's out of this world. Not bad, but not in the same league as Robin Hood and Captain Blood.

6/10



Sons of Liberty - (1939)

Included as an extra on the Dodge City DVD, this won an Oscar for Best Short and I figured I may as well knock it off my Oscar list. Claude Rains appears as Haym Salomon, a man who helped finance the American Revolution. It starts when he joins a group known as the Sons of Liberty and skips through to his death in a very rushed manner, touching on a few incidents during that particular war. Felt like excerpts from a much longer tale. What we do get is impressive for a short film though.

6/10



Captain Blood is sooo good. I'm always surprised that film doesn't get mentioned more often.



Maybe? But I think there are still differences in terms of goals, approach, and execution.

WARNING: spoilers below

After all, in L.A. Confidential, we know from the get-go that the black men are indeed criminals, which is precisely why they pinned the Nite Owl murders on them. The big "a-ha!" moment for Exley/White AND the audience comes when we all realize that despite being guilty of kidnap/rape, they are indeed innocent of the murders. So in this case, I think the commentary of institutional racism is not weakened. They were framed because of it.

However, in Touch of Evil, we're led to believe in Sanchez' innocence from the get-go. After all, he's apparently not a criminal, he's claiming innocence, and the evidence we discover along with Vargas (the empty dynamite box) leads us to believe him, and that Quinlan's motivations are corrupt and, like with the Black men in L.A. Confidential, probably racist (pinning a crime on a minority, which will probably make it more believable).

So when Quinlan's right-hand man brings back the dynamite, we're as surprised and suspicious as Vargas cause we all know that wasn't in the box. But the line in the end revealing that Sanchez had confessed feels more like a validation of Quinlan's racist instincts and even methods than anything else. Add to that, the fact that it's a throwaway line in the very ending of the film. It wasn't necessary cause at this point, the car bombing is more or less a Macguffin.


So, again, I think there's a considerable difference in terms of how both examples are played out.
The situation in Confidential isn't 100% the same as the one as in Touch, but I still don't think they're that different; I mean, in the former,
WARNING: spoilers below
the initial suspicion for the Nite Owl murders was planted by a corrupt, murderous police captain, one who we later learn likely helped commit the murders himself, so it's entirely plausible that he choose to drive a Mercury Coupe to the scene because he had already picked this specific group of Black men out as the "fall guys" for the crime, due to a combination of their criminal records and their race. However, as far as we know, the captain didn't plant that suspicion because he had any idea that they were currently involved in holding a woman hostage to sexually assault her (since there was zero indication of that initially), so having that as a plot point still undermines the point about insitutional racism that was being made, since, regardless of it being originally intended to frame a group of Black men who were innocent of one particular crime, that racism still ended up stopping them from committing another serious crime, so it ended up achieving something positive in the end, which unintentionally fits into racist narratives that if Black people aren't guilty of one crime they're suspected of, they'll inevitably be guilty of another (sort of like with Sanchez's guilt in Touch).

So, for me, the commentary on institutional racism in Confidential wouldn't have been undermined at all if those "suspects" hadn't been guilty of the kidnapping; I mean, the movie could've still had the finger pointed at them just because of their race, or maybe one of 'em had a record or was currently engaged in criminal activities, and the rest of the group was implicated by a racist guilt by association, or maybe they all had some sort of record, but they had still cleaned up their acts since; any of these options would've made that commentary much stronger than it was, and been preferrable to what the movie did end up doing, in my opinion. It's sort of like how Resident Evil 5 intially put some effort into presenting a realistic portrayal of modern Africa, only for the game to later wind up in a series of mudhuts, with you having to fight hordes of jabbering tribesman literally throwing spears at you;
"talk about side-stepping a pothole only to fall off a bridge",
as they say.



Victim of The Night
26th Hall of Fame (REWATCH)

Last Year At Marienbad (1961) -


This is a difficult film to talk about since it appears to resist any attempts to interpret it. We get a handful of set pieces and the significance of some characters are hinted at, but other than that, you're pretty much on your own. What stood out the most to me were the second man and the card game. It's implied that the second man might be the woman's husband, but the occasional touches of surrealism sprinkled throughout the film hint that there's something greater at play. Possibly. The Nim game the second man plays with several people in the palace is a possible hint that he holds power over them and might be preventing them from leaving. That he wins the game every time he plays it adds more to this interpretation. In spite of this, however, the film doesn't provide enough evidence for you to draw any definitive conclusions for these details and instead chooses to leave its meaning ambiguous. And while I'm not opposed to ambiguity by any means, I felt the ambiguity prevented me from connecting to the film as much as I was hoping. The second man and the Nim game were promising concepts, but due to the ambiguity, I couldn't decide what I was supposed to feel towards those aspects as I watched the film. Technically speaking though, the film is excellent. One could criticize the narration for being hard to follow, but I think the film found the right balance between being comprehensible and disorienting and I think this approach matched the surrealism of the film pretty well. Also, the cinematography ranks amongst the best I've ever seen in a film. Resnais finds the right camera angles and lighting to capture the artistic beauty of the palaces this film was shot in really well. While this is my least favorite of the three films I've seen from Resnais, I still enjoyed it enough to recommend it and I might rewatch it again sometime down the road.
I have only seen this film once (fairly rencetly) but I loved it.





So bad, it's good. The acting is specially bad, unintentional laughs are the best
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COHERENCE
(2013, Byrkit)





Coherence follows a group of friends meeting for a dinner party the night of the passing of a comet. As the night progresses, a series of weird and unexplainable events start to unfold that make them all question the decisions of their past, as well as the nature of themselves and who they are. But the events of the night might also put them or others in danger.

This film was recommended to me by a couple of people, so I was looking forward to it. I was happy to see it delivered as far as "mind****ery" goes. Director and co-writer Byrkit makes the most of his extremely low budget ($50K) by relying in a solid script, weird occurrences, and solid performances to build this dread about what's happening.

I'm trying to avoid too much details here cause it's definitely a film worth seeing without spoiling, and maybe even with as little knowledge as possible, but reading about the production and filming details, and how Byrkit and co-writer Alex Manugian would only give the actors some pointers about the characters and the beats of the story, while allowing them to improvise, and then see the end result, it's impressive.

Grade:



Full review on my Movie Loot
Love that film. They announced a sequel last week....that will be in the form of a TV Miniseries.



I have only seen this film once (fairly rencetly) but I loved it.
While I wouldn't say I loved it, I did enjoy it quite a bit. As far as Resnais goes, I like Hiroshima Mon Amour and Night and Fog more.





Never understood the acclaim for this movie. Re-watch & it’s not bad by any means. The kid who played young Cameron Crowe was very good.



Re-watch. Fluffy rom-com. Not bad.



Re-watch from a long time ago. Two leads very good. Most gratuitous scene in the cinema: Angelica Huston briefly appearing as a trainer of big cats. WTH!



Re-watch of the very first Almodóvar movie I ever saw. Still my favorite.
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