Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Yeah, huge letdown, coming off of The Endless.(

I hoped it would be just that, but the movie gives about 40% of the film over to non-Theron elements and they totally sink the picture.

I read afterward that Theron was a huge part of making this film happen, which is all the more disappointing, but does explain why she was so good in it. It just tries to hit too many cool beats (with the music, with certain acting choices, with the graffiti text) and ends up feeling lame.

If they had just stuck with one single objective (ie get this informant and his family out of the city alive) it would have been so much better.

You'd have to be more specific, because there were several shots that do this (which stand in contrast to the decent opening sequence where she is in the ice bath and it's a more "objective" look at her injuries which was fine and even kind of evoked that infamous Perfect Blue bathtub shot).

Well, one of those elements was Sofia Boutella, who I will absolutely watch darn socks.

I found her to be charming but the character deeply underwhelming.

And the fact that she mostly seems to exist to .

Again, meh.

Hm.
I thought she existed to show the human side of Charlize's character. Which is the point of most supporting characters in films, as we know, to further develop the main character and/or their arc.

Ok, that might actually be the scene I was thinking of.*I dunno, maybe it plays better with the Perfect Blue reference in mind (which I haven't seen), but I remember it being strangely leery.*

They Call Me Trinity (1970) - 8/10 in my opinion. It's very good plot and excellent actors!

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I would have been fine with that if it wasn't crowded out by so much other loud junk and if the camera didn't feel the need to literally look down her shirt several times.

I feel like there were interesting ideas in there for characters (including having a gay or bisexual female action lead!) but the execution was so off-putting and kept giving into the worst kind of impulses when it comes to modern "brainless" action.

Rock's comparison to John Wick is an interesting one, because there is also a film that seems to unabashedly be chasing a sort of fan-service. But in Atomic Blonde everything outside of a few performances felt incredibly contrived. The movie even at times seems to forget the "big question" (who is the mole?) until the last 20 or so minutes.

And to top it off, the resolution made zero sense. At the end, Lorraine

I think there's a really cool version of this story that could have been made with these actors and even with the same plot. But this film just was not it.

Nightmare City, 1980 (C)

For a minute there, this is the quintessential Italian zombie movie. People behave the way people in medieval paintings look, no one know how to exist anymore and the gore is as stupid as it is present.

It loses steam in the second half, like some of these tend to do, after everyone moves out of the city and into whatever remote or abandonned buildings they find.

Blithe Spirit - Based on a play by Noel Coward and with his screenplay adaptation this is a very British 1945 production. Rex Harrison plays mystery novelist Charles Condomine who's looking to do some research on his latest work. With jaundiced eye and a healthy dose of skepticism he arranges for a seance with local medium Madame Arcati. She's played by the wonderful Margaret Rutherford and she really sinks her teeth into the role of the eccentric and slightly ditzy spiritualist. Whilst communing with the great beyond however she inadvertently contacts the spirit of Condomine's first wife Elvira (Kay Hammond) who refuses to or is unable to leave. The fact that only he can see Elvira leads to a major disruption in the household. Condomine's second wife Ruth (Constance Cummings) at first demands answers as to Charles' strange behavior and then, once having seen physical manifestations of Elvira's presence, sets to work trying to get rid of her. Harrison is his usual cultivated self and this being a Coward dissertation the humor is bone dry and acerbic. The costars are exemplary with Dame Rutherford stealing the show as Arcati.

The New Mutants - There's no getting around it. This is a terrible movie. I suppose if you're a tween or an intransigent fan of the X-Men franchise you could find some redeeming qualities in this. But for everyone else it's to be steadfastly avoided. I'm not even sure if I should bother with a synopsis but Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) a Native American girl, wakes up in an abandoned and rundown facility after losing her father and her entire reservation to a tornado. At least that's what sole staff member and clearly nefarious Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga) tells her. She eventually meets the rest of the patients who, like Dani, have mutant powers. The older brother from Stranger Things is in this and Arya Stark from Game of Thrones along with Anya Taylor-Joy. There's also a nondescript young mutant from Brazil but that's the entire cast. Things move sluggishly and cheerlessly until it's time for the absurd and overblown CGI wrapup. I don't think the pandemic had anything to do with this tanking at the box office.

I thought the whole movie was strangely leery. And a single shot of McAvoy wearing a low-slung bedsheet for like 2 seconds felt like it was meant to balance things out which it did not.

I was really disappointed with Blithe Spirit. I just really didn't care for any of the main characters, aside from Rutherford's medium. Some of the banter was fun, of course, but it was hard to be engaged when everyone was so annoying.

Eh, I think Fury Road already did all the salvaging the Action movie side of her career needed, and then some.

From the looks of it Coward set out to write his characters that way. I thought Harrison's character was the most sympathetic but that was mostly in comparison with his two wives.


Rutherford's energetic take on her character makes the movie though.

The Father (2020)

It’s hard to recall in many years ever having been so taken by a film. It’s production brought together heavyweights in each aspect of movie making: writer, director, actors, cinematographer, editor, and composer. Their collaboration resulted in an astonishing and unique portrayal of an old man’s descent into dementia, his daughter’s journey in living with him, and its outcome.

Anthony Hopkins, in one of his greatest performances, introduces us into the mind of a gentleman who does not quite realize that his mind is failing, or what his circumstances are. He shows us every emotion-- sometimes overtly, others with nuance. The story disguises itself by presenting his awareness from several points of view, although the audience does not realize it at first, which introduces a feel of mystery and mild surrealism. Each perception melds together in the end, leading to a moving but sympathetic conclusion.

So too does Olivia Colman --as the daughter-- let out all the stops. Her large limpid eyes express her innermost thoughts, and lead us through sadness, irony, and determination. She is the perfect accompaniment to her father’s befuddlement and confabulation. Olivia Williams shines as a compassionate nurse, and Imogene Poots impresses as an in-home care worker. The veteran Rufus Sewell is believable as the daughter’s mate who tries to convince her to put her father in a home.

Reportedly French writer/director Florian Zeller had Anthony Hopkins directly in mind as Zeller was writing the screenplay-- so much so that he stated that if Hopkins did not accept the role, Zeller would have made the film in the French language. We are grateful that Hopkins accepted. There simply was not a better acting performance this year, and one would hope he deservedly wins awards.

The production was instantly absorbing, and drew me in with concentration to the point that when it ended I felt as if I came to. Everything and everybody came together perfectly in this film, and it will be one for the ages.

Rating: 10/10

I get that it was sort of intentional, and that they largely put themselves into various corners. But there's a way of writing upper class morons where you enjoy spending time with them, and that mostly wasn't the case with Blithe Spirit. And I thought that the ending was a real downer, as you say, in its own way.

Yeah, it's tricky. Sometimes there's gonna be sexy stuff in movies and sometimes characters need to be sexy and sometimes the audience needs to see characters the way the protagonist sees them and Charlize was see Sofia (in the context of the film) as sex on two feet until there seems to be a little more. I'm not gonna sit here and say that I don't find Boutella (and Theron for that matter) sexy as hell but I was not watching any of that like someone getting his skin flick on nor did I feel like that's what the filmmakers were intending. Not in this case. Plenty of cases, obviously, where that is the intent but here I though the sexiness was very much in the context of the film. It's a sexy film, frankly.
As for everything else, and well, that too, maybe I just need to rewatch it. It's been since theaters and I thought it played really well when I saw it but maybe all of your complaints are valid. I remember thinking the story was just ok but that wasn't what we were there for, we were there for a highly stylized action movie with a spy-thing draped over it and that was fine with me. As for skeeviness, like I said, I didn't feel it but because it was both stylized and sexy maybe I just wasn't in tune that way. I'll revisit all points when I see it again.

I hear what you're saying but Atomic Blonde feels like more of the direct response to Aeon Flux because it is another highly stylized actioner and there is no pretense of Max in it.

The Seven-Ups -

A very solid police thriller from the crew and featuring some of the cast of The French Connection. A tale involving a mob kidnapping and ransom scheme and its pursuing Strike Team-like detective squad, it has clandestine meetings with informants, shakedowns, gunfights, a dynamite car chase and pretty much everything else that make '70s police thrillers so reliably entertaining and they're all done very well. Speaking of reliable, Roy Scheider is at his world-weary best as the lead detective and Richard Lynch is downright scary as the most vicious of his targets. Not to mention, the depiction of New York City from the avenues of Manhattan to its most unkempt docks is beautiful. The movie is not the game changer that The French Connection is, but it's still an ideal choice if you're in the mood for a movie like this one.

Unfortunately, it's not on VOD, so keep an eye out for it on TCM or on used DVD racks.

I don't have a problem with sex or sexiness. The problem I had was really twofold:

1) I felt like the relationship between the two women was underdeveloped. Partly this is because the film is so chopped up due to the multiple storylines, but there was just no flow to their scenes together. They had good chemistry, but at the end of the day it felt like Boutella's character was there to . If the movie had taken more time to show the relationship developing, helping us understand what makes Lorraine click with her, or just giving us more screen time of them together, it might have been better.

2) Understanding the lust between the characters . . . fine. But the rest of the film drops female nudity (the anonymous naked prostitutes, the women in the sex club) constantly when it isn't necessary. The camera was constantly, it seemed, panning up/down/across the female bodies, while the male characters literally wear multiple-layered outfits at all times. I thought that the contrived staging of the sex scene was cringy and made it actually un-sexy because it was so "audience aware".

If there was a female-led action film with a solid gay romance at its heart, believe me, I would be there for it. I felt as though, despite good performances and some decent chemistry between the actors, their relationship was poorly defined. Much like the musical selections, it felt like something that was put in the film to make it "edgy" and not something that flowed naturally from the story. Apparently Boutella's character was male in the novel and both the gender flip and the explicit sex scene were added for the film. Per the director, "The relationship was flipped before I came onboard. It was a great idea. You always have to find ways to contemporize these stories, reach bigger audiences and be provocative in your storytelling." Sorry, but there's nothing provocative about filming a lesbian sex scene that looks like it came out of a porn film intended for straight men. Using queerness as edgy signaling is off-putting to me.

Also consider this quote from McAvoy, one of the people who was actually in the movie: "I wanted to make [my character] a gay man as well, but they wouldn't let me, because Charlize is gay in it--or at least she's bi in it. I don't know. Or maybe she's doing it just for a job? I'm not quite sure."

Again: fine idea. Poorly executed.