Rate The Last Movie You Saw

Pistols at dawn.

This statement is a paradox.

SF = Zzz


[Snooze Factor Ratings]:
Z = didn't nod off at all
Zz = nearly nodded off but managed to stay alert
Zzz = nodded off and missed some of the film but went back to watch what I missed
Zzzz = nodded off and missed some of the film but went back to watch what I missed but nodded off again at the same point and therefore needed to go back a number of times before I got through it...
Zzzzz = nodded off and missed some or the rest of the film but was not interested enough to go back over it

No, breakin' at dawn, Wooley. Assemble your crew.

definitely that i loved alexander who plays eric northmen on true blood 😍😍😍

Sinister (2012)

Man of Steel is the latest iteration of the Superman character. The film follows Clark, a.k.a. Kal-El (Henry Cavill) as he is sent from Krypton to Earth by his father Jor-El (Russell Crowe). Here he ends up taken by Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane), who try their best to instill in Clark a sense of goodwill. However, this clashes with his inner struggle of identity and belonging as he tries to figure out who or what he wants to be.

At one point, one of my younger brothers, a hardcore DCEU fan, told me "this is not the Superman you grew up with. You just have to accept that this is a different Superman", and maybe that made the clashes a bit more easier to swallow. And I'm OK with that. A more morally conflicted character could be more interesting, but not if you're not consistent. You can't have a character whose sole drive since childhood has been to protect people, then be so blatantly in disregard of public safety as he beats and pummels a bad guy through buildings and streets. Not when it's done for "cool looks" and not when his alleged inner struggle shifts from one scene to the other.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

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Excellent.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (1969) Lots of wacky shenanigans and madcap mischief. Good cast, but it goes on too long. For some odd reason, the back of the blu ray case lists the film's year and runtime incorrectly. It shows 1945 as the year and 72 minutes as the runtime!

Shoeshine, 1946

Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) are young friends who both come from an impoverished background. Together they have worked to save up money to buy a horse to share. When Giuseppe's older brother ropes them into a robbery, the two boys end up in a juvenile detention facility. While they pledge silence and solidarity in the face of the investigation into the robbery, the internal politics of the facility and the pressure of the investigation begins to fracture their loyalty to one another.

This is one of those Italian neorealist films that is bleak as all get-out, and yet utterly compelling until the last frame.

The two young actors at the center of the film give very strong performances, especially Interlenghi as the more sensitive Pasquale. Both boys want to be the strong silent type, and yet you can see how the different pressures weigh on them. In one particularly brutal moment, Pasquale is led to believe that Giuseppe is being badly beaten and must wrestle with whether or not to tell the police what he knows about the robbery.

And while the focus of the film is on the boys and their story, it also provides a pretty condemning look at the institutions and systems that repeatedly fail them. The men who run the juvenile facility aren't evil, but they are manipulative and it's pretty clear that the wellbeing of the boys is not their chief goal. When you consider the vulnerability of the boys in their care---the lack of resources in their families, or even the lack of a family at all--it becomes extra fraught.

All through the film the white horse--a beautiful animal purchased by the boys after the robbery--serves as a none-too-subtle image of hope. It is only fitting that the haunting final moments return the boys back to the presence of the horse.

A somber film, but a very good one.

I need to watch more Gena Rowlands movies.

By http://www.chevrolet.com/all-new-lego-batmobile.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49903959

The Lego Batman Movie - (2017)

Watched on a whim. This is cute and amusing, with many great jokes. Constantly on the move, in an explosive manner - so much so that by the end I felt absolutely exhausted just watching it. If I was a kid, these Lego movies would have been my preferred kid-friendly movies.

7/10


By IMP Awards / 2021 Movie Poster Gallery / A Quiet Place: Part II Poster (#5 of 8), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63813788


A Quiet Place Part II - (2020)

This is becoming something of a franchise, with Day One coming out soon and A Quiet Place Part III also penciled in. While I enjoyed this for the most part, when the credits were rolling I couldn't help think of how repetitive the whole formula was getting. Accidentally make a noise - everybody freeze - everybody creep around as the monster arrives - run! - kill the monster. It's always a combination of that - over and over again. Other elements are well-worn tropes from 'last-people-on-Earth' stories. John Krasinski really knows how to build tension though, and has successfully done this through the two films so far - even though many are spotting various plot holes, inconsistencies and lack of logic throughout.

7/10


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A Night at the Roxbury - (1998)

This is a film about dumb people, so you'd at least expect the filmmakers here (TV man John Fortenberry, and a whole gaggle of writers, including Will Ferrell) to be self-aware enough not to be dumb themselves, and make a dumb movie. Unfortunately, this is kind of dumb, and gets by on momentary gags that work amongst the cornucopia of rubbish. Will Ferrell has his first major role in a feature, and we hear "What is Love?" performed by Haddaway on a constant loop, which eventually sends you insane. There's a good chance you need to be blind drunk to enjoy this one.

5/10


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M - (1931)

Bought this on Criterion recently, so gave it another watch. Watching M today can't help but compare the popular culture and politics of 2022 with that of Germany in 1931 - basic issues regarding humanity and society were being argued by polarized sides, the right regarding capital punishment as necessary to protect society and the left regarding capital punishment as no better than murder, and insisting that criminal minds can be cured. When approaching a murderer, the sanctity of life becomes complex. You can stop them by killing them, but then you're doing the very thing you're trying stop. By the end of M some of us feel a kind of compassion for a horrifying monster, thanks to Peter Lorre. We also get to witness a mob of Germans mobilized into a homogenized mass demanding violence. M touches on a lot of things, including the practical as well, delivering one of the first 'procedural' crime films. A classic which allows for almost endless analysis.

9/10

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Passengers (2016)

Well, speak of the caped devil; yeah, I agree with most of your criticisms against the movie (as you can see here), especially the way that they tried to have it both ways with Supes, both making a darker, "grittier" version of the character who doesn't care that much about protecting those less powerful than him, but still try to have him be the same heroic figure as he was in the comics, like with this "inspirational" flashback at the end...




...shortly after he

Didn’t watch as many movies this weekend as I would have liked, although I did get some good TV in (I finally finished watching Peacemaker and made some good headway on some other shows).

The Sound of Music (1965) — I’m not usually a fan of sentimental Studio Era musicals, but I’ve always liked this one a lot. It has a great cast, the songs are all solid, it’s much more narratively arresting than these things usually are and they pepper a few standout moments throughout the proceedings for good measure (my personal favorite being when Christopher Plummer rips the Nazi flag in half). No major complaints here.

Airplane (1980) — This gag-a-minute, “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” style of comedy isn’t my preferred brand, but the gags nearly always land and it really is a very funny movie on the whole: far better than any of its imitators over the years.

A Chorus Line (1985) — As a kid, I always caught snippets of this movie’s ending that shared a tape with what I actually wanted to watch (same with Top Gun), although it wasn’t until college that I saw the movie in full. Solidly shot and a lot better than I initially thought it would be, I was surprised how much I enjoyed this one.

Dick Tracy (1990) — I don’t know if I hate or love this movie, honestly. Grotesque character designs mixed with gorgeous set designs and beautiful cinematography spent on howlingly over-the-top performances, mostly I was just kind of bored by a story that basically played out like a PG-rated Untouchables. And I say this as somebody who loved a lot of the post-Batman retro throwbacks (The Shadow, The Rocketeer and even The Phantom were hallmarks of my childhood). I’m tempted to rate it lower, but even the bad choices were kind of fascinating to watch play out.

Toy Story (1995) — Although time has not been kind to early 3D animation, the decision to focus on stiff, plasticky toy characters really is a lifesaver when coming back to it. A bit rough around some of the edges, including some truly nightmarish human character designs tucked away in the backgrounds, the screenplay is honed to a razor’s edge and the cast plays off one another perfectly.

Doom (2005) — A fun-but-terrible action-horror-sci-fi movie starring the Rock before they nailed down his winning on-screen persona and featuring some really shakey craftsmanship throughout. There’s some inventive FPS business, but not much worth coming back to in this poor man’s Resident Evil / Event Horizon mashup.

Friday the 13th (2009) — Pound for pound, this greatest-hits styled mashup of the first four movies of the franchise is probably my favorite. It has the climax of the first movie followed by a lean remake of the second movie all before the opening title card (nearly a full half hour into the film). It’s a bit more scattershot after than absolute killer opening sequence (with a group of fun-but-shallow protagonists to follow around in earnest), but nevertheless presents the best that the larger franchise has to offer distilled down into a single movie.

Dracula Untold (2014) — A bland Dracula origin story that imagines its central character as a medieval superhero rather than a tyrant or a monster. Filled with setups to an aborted franchise that will never pay off on them, possessed with a few interesting twists on the movie vampire that are nevertheless drowned in a sea of iniquities, this is an easy one to skip.

Allied (2016) — Ever since stumbling on Romancing the Stone (which I didn’t know he made until after the fact), I’ve been polishing off the last few Robert Zemeckis movies I’ve still yet to see. Although beautiful to look at, meticulously cast and telling a truly intriguing story of love and possible double crosses, I found the filmmaking coldly detached. Fun, certainly, but hardly essential viewing.

Fahrenheit 451 (2018) — Michael B. Jordan was inspired casting for the lead in this literary adaptation (he gave some life to a character that I always felt rather bored by) and I always love Michael Shanon’s off-putting / uneasy screen presence (even if, like here, it is rarely used effectively). The updates to the original text (inclusion of more recent books, commentary on the internet and Alexas, etc…) were welcome, but this movie takes some truly insane narrative swings that do not work in the slightest, almost as if the filmmakers were desperate to find some way to spice up this well-worn story. In its current form, it played out more like an imitation of Equilibrium than it did an adaptation of Fahrenheit 451.

Welcome to Marwen (2018) — Every creative decision made in service to this movie is the most viscerally off-putting thing imaginable. Ugly, uncomfortable, unbelievable, unfortunate.

Encanto (2021) — I watched it again because my kid loves it, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it’s one of my hands down favorite movies from last year (and with every rewatch is inching closer to dethroning Beauty & the Beast as my favorite animated Disney movie ever). So while I normally am not much of a rewatcher (at least when left to my druthers), I’m always happy to watch this one again.

Glad you saw this... Is this the first De Sica movie you have seen? I highly recommend "Umberto D"

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Everyone does

I've seen Bicycle Thieves, Yesterday Today and Tomorrow, The Children are Watching Us, and his entry in The Witches.

I'm slowly getting around to his work. While I do love, on one level, the neorealist style, probably about 85% of my movie watching is for escapist purposes.

Umberto D has been on my watchlist for ages.