Rate The Last Movie You Saw

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A Farewell to Arms (1957) - 7/10. It's good movie based by novel of Ernest Hemingway

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Synchronic, 2020 (D+)

Definitely the worst Benson and Moorhead. It starts interestingly, with a bunch of out-of-their minds junkies linked by the same designer drug. They all have very different conditions and are all presented in a cool way, with the best filmmaking in the movie being in the first half.

The second half begins with an explanation of how everything works, almost as tedious and silly as the explanation from Spring, one of their previous movies.

At that point, the way the drug works and is explored feels, both in presentation and how it affects the plot, like a video game. In a bad way. The movie starts feeling long at least 40 minutes before it's over, and from that point forward it really feels like someone telling you about the video game they're playing. It's tedious and predictable, and you have ample time to figure out how it's going to end because the entire second half is eneventful as hell, at least between the moments where it doesn't feel downright silly.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow - Haven't see Thunder Road yet so I was unfamiliar with Jim Cummings. But this turned out to be pretty good horror with some dark comedic elements mixed in. A small Utah mountain town is rocked by a series of horrific murders and the local police force is apparently ill equipped to handle it. The true nature of the murders and the perpetrator are left sort of fuzzy but anyone who's seen a horror movie will be convinced they know.


The cast does a commendable job with director and star Jim Cummings, Riki Lindhome and in his last role, the late Robert Forster among others.

Had never heard of this before Citizen Rules nominated it for the Asian HoF. It's too bad the Michael Douglas movie Black Rain came out the same year and overshadows it in places like search engines. I'd say it would be somewhat reminiscent of what the result would be if Ozu directed Threads. The bomb goes off in Hiroshima and we watch how it affects an older couple and their niece, and others. There's the obvious horrors, but also how the niece's possible exposure to radiation affects her marriage propositions. Sometimes I'll compliment an older film by saying it was ahead of it's time. This movie, despite some content that would have been questionable in the late 40's to early 50's, does an incredible job at taking the viewer back. The bombings in Japan were before my time and I've never given them much thought. I hope to not think about it too much in the future because right now the fact that it happened sickens me. On YouTube with subtitles.

Gods of the Plague, 1970

Franz (Harry Baer) has just been released from prison, and sets out to reconnect with old friends and family, including his brother, Marian (Marian Seidowsky); former girlfriend Johanna (Hanna Schygulla); old friend Gunther (Gunther Kaufmann); and new flame Margarethe (Margarethe von Tratta). But both the romantic complications and other unfortunate events put Franz on a bad trajectory.

Sometimes I really benefit from someone else--a fellow movie fan or a professional critic--giving me the right words with which to frame the way I look at a piece of film or the work of a particular artist. So hat tip here to Ebert, for the notion that in Fassbinder's films, all relationships--and especially the sexual/romantic ones--are manipulative power struggles. This lens was particularly helpful for both watching Gods of the Plague and reflecting back on Querelle.

Maybe the thing that I liked most about Gods of the Plague was just how absurd--and yet in many ways true--its portrayal of deep/passionate love was. There is an early scene in which Johanna undresses Franz while he lays passive on a bed. And that seems to set the tone for Franz, who mostly seems to float along through the narrative, inducing seemingly disproportionate reactions from those around him. I know that Franz spoke in the film, and yet weirdly it doesn't seem like he did and I already am struggling to remember anything important that he said.

I think that such a portrayal of love cuts both ways. I am trying to approach his films with a neutral point of view, but almost everything I see or read about his movies--including Ebert's positive overview of his early work--seems to include the word "misogyny". So I only medium give Fassbinder the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his female characters. It is immediately noticeable, for example, that there is a distinct difference between the droopiness of his female characters in contrast to the male characters. Even the male characters who are losers are . . . kind of hot, or at least so says the visual language of the film. They are posed and framed in ways that range from the overtly sexual to the vaguely erotic. So when Johanna begins flinging herself around and screaming in hysterics because of her feelings about Franz, part of me felt like it was kind of an eye-rolling bad take on how women can be over emotional. But I did sort of appreciate that there are people--men and women--who will seemingly go totally nuts over a romantic partner that doesn't have much going for them.

The look of the film is probably its strength. Some black and white films just look so good, and this is one of them. I continue to be impressed by Fassbinder's framing and the use of light that illuminates or shadows his characters to wonderful effect.

I also really liked the odd side plot about one of the female characters selling porn in a cute little sewing basket. Whenever she interacts with someone, out comes the basket. It's like an earlier, dirtier version of that Facebook friend who wants to tell you all about her new MLM!

The performances are good here, and Kaufmann (who also had a major role in Querelle has a strong and very human presence that contrasts a bit with the more muted characters around him, especially Franz.

The downside, as mentioned before, is that undercurrent of disdain for women. And Franz is such a sleepy character that it is hard to get your hands around him as a protagonist. There were times I was very impatient with his passivity, even if that characterization is very intentional.

I'm enjoying my little journey through Fassbinder's work.

5/5! Glad you liked it! I'll be watching this fairly soon and writing up my thoughts in the Asian HoF.

I just saw straight time and thought it was fantastic, i only watched the trailer to the other two films you mentioned are they all equal to you?

Teeth (2007)

Anima persa (1977)
aka Lost Soul, The Forbidden Room

It is a bit different Italian mystery that doesn't go the Giallo route but builds on Gothic foundations. The combination of an old house falling into ruin, secrets hidden behind closed doors and untrue words, and the specter of love long lost seem more Anglo-American to me, but still, the film is unmistakenly Italian. The pace is a little sluggish at times, but the ending is good (both provocative and sad).

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Atomic Blonde, 2017

In 1989, an undercover agent named Lorraine (Charlize Theron) returns battered and bloodied from a mission and is summoned to a debriefing with two intelligence officials (Toby Jones, John Goodman). There she recounts her mission to East Berlin, where she was to work with an agent named Percival (James McAvoy) to retrieve a highly-sensitive list of undercover agents.

I had been looking forward to this film ever since it came out, with its promise of big, dumb, colorful action fun.

Meh.

First of all, Theron is too good for this movie. She's basically the reason I stuck with it, and she is operating on a different level than the film around her. She looks cool, she is plenty convincing in her action sequences, and she finds just the right note of the hardcore assassin who just might have a beating human heart inside.

I will also say that the action scenes were fine. While I did not care for the use of the old "slow motion than fast motion" thing, the action was easy to follow and there was some fun choreography.

But the downsides, man, where do I even begin?

The film is packed with quality actors (Jones, Goodman, Eddie Marsan, etc), but the writing is often clunky or overly cutesy. Marsan's character--the man who knows the names on the list and wants to escape East Berlin)--is probably the most recognizably human, but I felt as if most of the other characters bordered on caricature. McAvoy spends most of the movie Acting, and the contrast between his performance and Theron's is jarring.

I think that the film was aiming for a hyper-stylized tone, but to me it was a miss. There are lots of scenes of fast cars zipping around the streets and lots of crazy zooms. But there isn't a natural feel to these elements. It's more like someone took a bunch of stuff that they thought was cool from other movies and just shoved it in this one. And what really makes it hard is that these elements have no organization or cohesion to them. Like, at one point a character just starts delivering a monologue to the camera! Something that does not happen at any other point in the film! This is supposed to be a sort of graphic novel type world, but it is so inconsistent that the internal world of the film never seems even remotely real.

The movie is also inescapably, and artlessly, male-gazey. There are only two featured female characters, and boy do they seem to spend a lot of time in sexy lingerie! And boy does the camera spend a lot of time lovingly panning up or down their bodies! The climax (PUN! INTENDED!) of this absurdity is a lesbian sex scene, where, well, you know how when women have sex they make sure to have their bodies facing the same way so that the camera can get a good look at both of them? Like, just spend an inordinate amount of time not looking at each other?

I also had a very mixed reaction to the at-times intrusive, and relentless use of 80s music or covers of 80s music, most of which seems there to evoke a "Oh, hey! It's this song!!" reaction as opposed to actually fitting the scene.

When it comes down to it, I just didn't click with this one. I actually really liked Theron in the lead role (as I almost always do) and I was excited watching the actors' named scrolling by in the opening credits. I was hoping for some "turn your brain off" dumb fun, and just didn't get it. By the last 30 minutes I had pretty much tuned out, only to discover that this movie, like some horrible Lord of the Rings homage, had decided that it just did not know how to end. Seriously, there were like 5 different moments where I was like "And that's the end. . . or not." The off-putting objectification (scene with anonymous-but-naked prostitutes? Check. Scene that takes place in a strip club for no reason? Check. Innumerable scenes of female characters getting dressed/undressed? Check) was just the last nail in the coffin and turned indifference into slight dislike.

I had the bar set so low for a frivolous Saturday night movie!

It may have been that I was just starved for any decent horror these days but I thought this film way out-punched its weight.
It ultimately went exactly where I thought it was gonna go yet it kept me wondering until the moment if it was gonna try something else without ever really laying out red-herrings or anything. I thought this was well-written, well-acted, well-directed, just well-crafted overall and quite satisfying.

Hmmm... I just loved it as a "turn Charlize on and let her go"-fest. I'm a big fan. You gimme a movie where it's just like "this is just gonna be all Charlize doing what she can do" and Ima be happy. The rest, eh, it was there I suppose but everything was just window-dressing around her salvaging Aeon Flux.

I had a similar reaction. It's weird that the John Wick movies work and this one doesn't as they're very similar on paper (and share a director), but I think the plot here was a tad too convoluted to carry any real stakes. The movie became too transparent an excuse to find the next '80s hit to score a cool looking action scene too, whereas I found that the John Wick movies managed to give some level of consequence to all of their action scenes. These things generally work better when they're streamlined and easy to follow, unless they actually put effort into making you care about the plot (which this one didn't).



I also remember being bothered by a weirdly sexualized shot of Theron's bruises in one scene, not sure if I'm misremembering.

I positively detested that.

The Body (2012, Oriol Paulo)

Too much reliance on plot twists, not enough cinematic subtlety - but still entertaining enough to keep you interested. The movie keeps saying to you, "Look how smart I am, are you sufficiently in awe?" Well it is smart, and it is brilliantly conceived, but at the end of the day it still feels like it's a little bit too aware of its own artifice. But credit where credit is due: I did not see that final twist coming. Good job. And a good movie if you're in the mood for a detective mystery thriller with a few surprises up its sleeve.

I think The Invisible Guest by the same director, while still not exactly my cup of tea, was a touch better... maybe.

i heard they making the 2nd