Rate The Last Movie You Saw

By Scan via Heritage Auctions. Cropped from original image., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=86209000

Wuthering Heights - (1939)

By the time this had been made there'd already been a 1920 adaptation, but I'm sure nobody saw the 15 adaptations (so far) to follow over the years. I enjoyed this one a lot - I'm already a great lover of the novel, and watching Laurence Olivier simmer in the cruel and dirty role of Heathcliff makes me think it would be hard to beat - we've had the likes of Tom Hardy, Ralph Fiennes, Timothy Dalton and Richard Burton over the years, so who knows. This was up against the likes of Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Stagecoach at the Oscars - a really tough year, so it was lucky to take out Best Cinematography, despite being nominated in many categories including Best Picture. This only runs 103 minutes, so it skips and skims through the story once Heathcliff returns a gentleman to find Cathy married. I liked the score as well, making this an all-round enjoyment experience.

8/10


Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/inde...curid=86209000

Gimme Some Truth - The Making of John Lennon's "Imagine" Album - (2000)

I'm one of those people who think it's a damn shame the Beatles couldn't get along well enough to stay together through the 70s, bringing out the best in their various music, though they still managed to be damned fine as solo artists. Watching John Lennon fart around wasn't as satisfying as listening to the various tracks that made up "Imagine" in Gimme Some Truth - I'm not particularly one who needs to see the making of albums or movies, for it breaks that immersion you get from either making them your own or believing that they just arrived out of nowhere by magic. It's something akin to learning a magicians trick. It's wonderful to see John Lennon though - as if he were still alive and enjoying life. He had his demons, but this seems to have been a stressful time for the once fab-four, making it on their own.

7/10


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Get Him to the Greek - (2010)

I've seen many Nicholas Stoller comedies, most recently Neighbors and Neighbors 2 : Sorority Rising, so something told me Get Him to the Greek might be an essential one - that's why I picked up the special limited edition nice 3D cover version of this (for $1) - despite not really liking Russel Brand all that much. Brand seems to be awfully close to the characters he plays - extremely conceited and egotistical. I might be wrong, and that just might be an image I have of him - but becoming a COVID-19 denier doesn't help. It seems that he's a complete NUT as well. The only really good thing in this film is P. Diddy's surprise comedy performance and some celebrity cameos - it starts actually getting funny at times, but overall doesn't rise to any great heights.

6/10

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i loved the casting and loved the culture and loved the music and loved it especially gave me black panther vibes also.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

I LOVE Let's Scare Jessica to Death. For me it's a perfect mix of horror and psychological thriller.

One of my favorite moments is really early on: she sees a person at the top of a stairwell and doesn't call for help because she's not sure she's really seeing someone. When her boyfriend comes over, the first thing he says is something like "I see them too", because he immediately realizes what she's afraid of.

Black Adam
7/10.
The characters seem similar to the Avengers: Dr. Fate = Dr. Strange; Hawkman = Falcon; Atom Smasher = Ant Man (Gi-Ant Man); while the titular character is a mix of Hulk and Thor.
The worst thing about the movie: the characters are shallow. The best thing: the music, all dark and intense.

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Boldly going.

Is your keyboard pink or something? Why pink?

So that was interesting. I will tell you my viewings.

Duelle(2nd time): First time here. So I seen this movie directed by Jacques Rivette a month ago, and then I saw it a second time so that I could better understand it. Did I? Yes I have. I still had a headache after watching it though. The main reasons for liking this is because of the avant-garde style, the way all of the characters are fashioned(especially Bulle Oglier), and live piano music!
Most underrated movie I have seen and I feel like I want to give it a for how it looked completely like something that was made for me.

Psycho - So this is still a really good movie, but I watched in two sittings. I feel like I would have had a better experience had I not seen Monsters Inc in between the two sittings. So yeah, when I watched Psycho, I noticed that a ton of cliches including the screeching violin came from. Some of the conversations especially the one about the stuffed birds were interesting as well. I really did not like it as I thought I would but that is probably because this movie has been parodied to death. I like Hithcock's other movie Rear Window a lot better, but Rear Window is probably in my top 10 american movies.

L'Atlante: So I did not want to push the Halloween thing on myself and felt more interested in watching this, so therefore, I did. A little dated, but very entertaining love story. My favorite part was the part where they are at the club and then the peddler causes problems there. My favorite character though was actually not the main couple but Pere Jules. Everything he said was really amusing such as when he is playing chess with Jean. I feel like I do not remember it, but I know I enjoyed it enough(maybe I am too used to complex plots to endure this simple one?).


Movies On My Queue: La Dolce Vita, Out 1, Playtime?, Casablanca, Band of Outsiders, etc.

Interstellar, 2014

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) lives on a near-future Earth where the planet is slowly dying. Cooper and his daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy) encounter a strange anomaly in Murph's room that leads them to a NASA team that is trying to find a new planet for humanity. Cooper ends up drafted to assist with the mission, along with doctors Brand (Anne Hathaway), Romilly (David Gyasi), and Doyle (Wes Bentley). But their exploration involves close encounters with time-distorting wormholes and black holes, meaning that the time they spend in their exploration is costing them years worth of time back on Earth.

So this film has obviously been discussed to pieces, and I know that it has both lovers and haters, and I think I land somewhere in the middle.

Right off the bat, stories about parents and children always get me, and so do stories about space travel. This means that just on premise alone, this one was guaranteed to make me feel some strong emotions.

In terms of execution, though, the marriage of these two plots comes off a bit clumsy, and this is down to both the writing itself (which at its best is discussion-y and exposition-y, and at its worst is ham-handed and obvious) and the attempt to push together themes like the power of love with the science of relativity and living in different dimensions. It's the kind of movie where you get the equivalent of someone needing to disarm a bomb, another character asking "How will you know which wire to cut?!" and the first character responding with a benevolent look on their face, "The power of love." It is a bit . . . yikes.

Performance wise, I was fine with everyone. McConaughey does a good job as a man who is choosing between actions that will benefit the entire human race and the risk of not seeing his children again or getting home so late that they will be elderly or even long-dead. There are solid performances from the other actors playing the scientists, and also from people like John Lithgow as Cooper's father and Michael Caine as Dr. Brand's father. I liked Foy as Cooper's headstrong daughter.

I also liked a lot of the visuals. I bet this was pretty stunning on the big screen, and I particularly liked the visualization of the wormhole and the black hole.

In the end, though, most of the elements of this film made me think of other movies that I feel did those moments better. Specifically the space-based father-child character dramas of Ad Astra and The High Life. Despite its very long run time, it doesn't seem like there's quite as much depth to the character relationships as I would like.

There were also some moments that felt so incredibly scripted. Maybe the worst was a sequence where Brand is in serious danger because she's trying to retrieve a piece of equipment. But a moment later the ship's strong and fast robot goes to rescue her. Like, why was the robot not retrieving the equipment in the first place?

Definitely not bad, but there's a produced, overly-slick quality that keeps it from feeling much more than skin deep. I enjoyed it, but am surprised by its high rating on IMDb.

By AVCO Embassy Pictures / Universal Pictures / Studio Canal - http://www.impawards.com/1970/soldier_blue_ver2.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40369064

Soldier Blue - (1970)

Soldier Blue was only known to me via it's more famous image - that of an Indian squaw, naked, facing away from us and with her hands tied behind her back. I knew nothing of the film before watching it last night, so I was shocked and surprised by it's final massacre scene - despite the up-front warning you get when the film starts. It's based on a real event - the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. It was one of the most barbaric events in modern history - and at one stage Soldier Blue had a much more graphic ending which was eased after disastrous test screenings. Let me tell you, it's bad enough in it's current form - and if you want to know what is missing, you can read about it online. The movie's middle section lulls you - it involves Kathy Lee (Candice Bergen) and soldier Honus Gant (Peter Strauss) making their way through the wilderness after an Indian attack on their group leaves them as the only two survivors. Kathy was once married to an Indian chief, and knows the ways of survival, while Honus is quite green, reserved and clumsy. Donald Pleasence shows up as a death-dealing dodgy trader who the pair find themselves pitted against.

The massacre itself kind of makes you forget about the entire film's body, with Bergen and Strauss developing a bond through their many hardships. It also kind of messes around with some assumptions you have earlier in the film. Pleasence's Isaac Q. Cumber (his father added the "Q" as a joke) is a villain until you watch the defenseless Cheyenne and Arapaho tortured, raped, cut limb from limb, gutted etc - it's only then that you wish Cumber's rifles had of reached them. It's worth reading about the event itself, if you have a strong stomach - soldiers did unspeakable things in their quest to revisit savagery on those they hated. In Gant you kind of have a soldier that's had his eyes opened - and we watch through those eyes. I think it could do with a restoration - even if the ending disturbs the hell out of you, it was meant to. What happened should be common knowledge - and it should be prevented from ever happening again. Overall, it's not a cinematic masterpiece, but it's good enough and important enough for me to rate it highly.

7.5/10


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Rosa's Wedding - (2020)

Ey-ey-ey, Rosa's family gave me a headache. That's the whole reason she's decided to run off and elope, with herself. She's the kind of sister/mother/daughter that does anything for any member of her family - she looks after her father, babysits her brother's kids and works a demanding job. One day her father arrives on her doorstep announcing he's going to move in with her and she breaks. Before you know it she's planning a wedding - to herself. She tells her family about the wedding part, but can't bring herself to announce the more unusual part. Before you know it her simple ceremony on the beach has been hijacked by her brother, who books a big church, and invites nearly all of Spain. Rosa's Wedding was weird in one way that I can find no other person talking about. The Spanish dubbing is all crazy. Characters talk with their mouths closed, and are silent when their lips are moving. This isn't as if it's been dubbed into English - I was watching the Spanish version, with English subtitles. Was it just badly dubbed? Was there something wrong with my version? Anyway, the movie was okay - even though the main character's stress kind of leaked into me in an empathetic way. Candela Peña is gorgeous, and great as Rosa - I enjoyed her performance in All About My Mother as well.

6/10


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Pitch Perfect - (2012)

Pitch Perfect wasn't quite as funny as I thought it was going to be. That said, there were some great characters - I especially liked Hana Mae Lee as Lilly and my very own Rebel Wilson as "Fat Amy". Rebel started on Australian TV, so it always felt strange for her to have moved on from the intimate kind of Rebel who was only ever known over here to a bigger kind of personality featuring in films like Jojo Rabbit. Aside from the singing, this was predictable teen comedy stuff - with enough quality to just keep the bar high enough.

6.5/10

Prey for the Devil (2022)


I'm kind of sick of exorcist movies at this point, but my girl loves them and wanted to see something scary for Halloween. This one takes a relatively different approach by taking us deep inside the church system that houses multiple possessed people, and it shows us the classroom setting where priests learn how to conduct exorcisms.

It works, but just barely. Very predictable, and the lead actress was lackluster in my opinion.

Bros (2022)

When I saw this film it was prefaced with a little self-satisfied clip of Billy Eichner talking about how it is the first major studio gay romcom with an lgbtq+ cast... I think this sense of self-importance sinks the film a little before it even starts. There were gay rom coms 25 years ago, it's really not as ground breaking as it thinks it is. I have no idea if a film is made by a major studio or not... it really is the sort of thing that only people in Hollywood really care about. Fire Island was on Disney+, does that not count? Who knows.

Anyway, Eichner stars as the main character, Bobby, a misanthropic podcaster who thinks he is cleverer than everyone around him. He is trying to open an lgbtq+ history museum and has never really had a relationship. He then meets Aaron, a hot guy who is unhappy in his job. A combination of dating montages and awkward raunchy comedy moments involving foursomes ensue.

The film seems to embrace some of the worst parts of rom-coms - the montages, the music, the collection of diverse friends/colleagues who pop up in the background and basically exist to make the white main character look cool - and not bother with essential elements like any chemistry between the leads at all. Luke MacFarlane does a valiant job as Aaron, but it's a stretch to think he would fall for Eichner's Bobby who is mean, superior and frankly exhausting spending time with. I felt as though the film tried too much to make him right - like the scene at dinner with Aaron's parents when he won't let something go and just basically shows no awareness of other people at all. I wanted someone to shout, 'it's not all about you!' at him on several occasions, but instead the film gives us an epilogue in which he is told he was right all along. There are also a few places where it treads a fine line between laughing at stereotypes and perpetuating them.

It is funny in places, I laughed out loud a couple of times and smiled a good few more, but it is balanced out by cringy moments. Altogether, while not disastrous, I didn't feel like watching this was two hours well spent.

DC should slow down their movies, they making their movies too fast :/

Didn't know anything about this except that it won the best foreign language Oscar and that a transgender actress played the lead role. I was very curious if she was going to play a transgender character and that answer was yes. I don't know a lot about this, but I was wondering if this was looked at as a positive. Of course it's a positive to cast that actress and portray that character, but doesn't a transgender woman want to be known as just a woman? I would think a transgender actress playing a woman who isn't a transgender woman would be the ultimate goal, but again it's not something I know much about. Anyway, this was a very good but not quite great look at the adversity this character faces because of who she is after she deals with a great loss. I think it's normal for some people to have some confusion when dealing with a person who's a little different than they are, or someone they don't quite understand, but to treat them as less than is inexcusably awful. This film does a great job at showing this poor woman dealing with that and persevering. I felt that there were some things that went nowhere, but otherwise this was a rewarding film.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

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[ J ] - [ S ] - [ F ]

1st Re-watch...I think I enjoyed this melding of musical fantasy and biopic even more the second time. Like Rocketman,it doesn't follow the typical musical biopic blueprint and lets the music become story elements not just interludes. Broadway genius Lin Manuel Miranda made an impressive screen debut as a director, bringing the same imagination to the screen that he has to the stage. Andrew Garfield's breathtaking performance as Jonathan Larson beautifully anchors the proceeding and the music...my God, that "Sunday" number brings tears to my eyes and is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Trying desperately to catch up with the MCU, it's almost comical..

The Stranger 2022

"I have a black lake in my eye!"

Rather odd film to go in without having the slightest idea what it's all about, all I knew from this movie was a still image of Sean Harris and Joel Edgerton. Slow burn with the emphasis on slow, dark brooding and strange.. the basic summary of the film which I do recommend - A cop (Edgerton) goes undercover to try an coax a confession out of a suspected child murderer (Harris) This has no violence in it whatsoever but is disturbing none the less and based on a fascinating real case in Australia. Sean Harris gives a truly haunting performance (not saying he committed the crime btw) Dont look for one smile here, you won't find it. If you like true crime and have some patience you may well like it as I did

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Goin' South - (1978)

In between One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Shining Jack Nicholson starred in 3 flops that you don't hear much about these days. One of them happened to be a rare directorial effort - Goin' South, which featured Cuckoo's Nest co-stars Christopher Lloyd and Danny DeVito. Along with them came Mary Steenburgen (both Lloyd and Steenburgen would be love interests in Back to the Future Part III later on) and John Belushi. Obviously, this film isn't great, but it was darn interesting to watch all of these actors buying in to their kind of "wacky" roles, including Nicholson who gives his a whole lot of energy. I tell you, in every scene he's jumping up and down, playing the most rambunctious and half-crazed outlaw you'll ever see onscreen. (One wonders if there'd been a different director he'd have been told to reign it in a little.) The film starts with Henry Lloyd Moon (Nicholson) being caught and dragged to a hangman's noose for being a horse thief. There's a law that states if a woman from the town is willing to marry him, he won't hang (it's due to the lack of men after the civil war.) Julia Tate (Steenburgen) agrees to marry him, and from that moment on Henry lusts after her, while Julia wants him to help her out digging an ill-conceived gold mine. There are sub-plots involving Henry's old gang and a deputy sheriff (Lloyd) who hates him for stealing Julia - plus his Mexican partner (Belushi).

This film doesn't really work too well as a comedy - there just isn't much comedic material in the screenplay that works - so the actors themselves try and inject levity with zeal, enthusiasm and vibrancy. Despite that, I really got a kick out of seeing these big names try their best to pull it off - although the love story at the heart of the film, which takes a long time to develop, lacked a little chemistry when all is said and done. Also - Nicholson was great - he fearlessly injects a kind of pathetic lowliness into his character, while deep down giving us a sense of someone warm-hearted underneath a tough exterior. I don't recommend Goin' South to anyone except those willing to endure a second-rate feature to see these stars in action.

6/10


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The Odd Angry Shot - (1979)

I have to admit to loving the title of this film, despite never having seen it until last night. It comes from a book which detailed the experiences Australian soldiers went though during the Vietnam war, and is interesting considering it was made not long after said war ended. Although there are set characters the film feels like a series of anecdotes that come from a wide group of Vietnam vets. It also has an interesting cast - John Jarratt, Bryan Brown, Graeme Blundell, Graham Kennedy and just about every Australian actor that was active at the time. It doesn't pontificate on the war itself, but it does mention the way the soldiers were being treated when they got back home. A lot of the younger ones weren't aware that the tide of public opinion was swinging dramatically to anti-war - making their suffering many times worse, for they were suffering doing something that they'd be hated for.

It's interesting how much 'laughing' is highlighted in the promotion of the film - but it has a sense of humour that's very time-specific and culture-specific. Much of the levity seems pretty harsh, and amounts to gallows humour a lot of the time. The film isn't bad though, and is a very different and unique take on the Vietnam War.

7/10


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Pitch Perfect 2 - (2015)

Hana Mae Lee's role is greatly diminished in Pitch Perfect 2, and I wonder if the reason I liked it so much in the first one is the fact that I had the subtitles on and so could hear all of her funny lines, spoken in a voice so soft it's nearly inaudible. Anyway, this isn't quite as good as the first film, and I wasn't fully glued to the screen - so it just seems these movies aren't for me.

5/10

Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told (1967)