Rate The Last Movie You Saw

I agree. I'd hate to be somebody who dislikes a film, but heralds it as awesome just because most other people love it.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Fantastic Planet

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit dropping acid. On a strange planet, people are wild animals and sometimes pets but there comes a time when they must be destroyed. Apparently, we would not make great pets. Really liked everything about this except the ending. It was over too quick. Loved the animation style and the music was...nice.

Good intro into the Bruce Wayne psyche and the Bat myth. But terrible action and story feels rushed. Mix bag!

Ray and Liz (2018)

Autobiographical film about growing up in the Thatcher era on a midlands (Black country) estate with 2 feckless parents.

Powerful and well written, some sequences are absolutely abject of hope (phone-box, brother asking whether he can be fostered) but it sticks to it's guns.

Yep. Pretty much agree with this.

__________________

This is exciting. I have never heard of this, but have just put it in my Prime watchlist. Set outside of Birmingham, which just happens to be my hometown.

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

Re-watch. Very powerful. Surely the best thing Naomi Watts has ever done.



Excellent movie with an original storyline.

Breathless follows Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a small-time but dangerous criminal who is on the run after shooting a cop. Desperate, he seeks refuge with Patricia (Jean Seberg), a former love interest that is an aspiring journalist in Paris. Even though she doesn't know much about Michel, his past, or even that he's on the run, she still spends most of the film resisting his romantic advances or dancing around the idea of being with him, as they wander carefree around Paris.

Overall, I can appreciate Breathless place in film history as well as some of its technical aspects, and it's a good checkbox to tick off my list. But to be honest, if you ask me to say something nice about it, I don't know.

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot and the PR HOF3.

⬆️ Breathless is a masterpiece of French cinema.

The Virtuoso (2021)
This one was quite a great movie for a Wednesday night. Too bad I can't rate it just after 2 days 7/10

__________________

/\ Interesting trailer, gonna check this out next week.

It really was a good movie..... nothing sophisticated, but had a cool story and I felt pleasure watching it

I've lived in the West Midlands for years and still don't know what the **** they mean by yam-yams and the Black Country...I am from Glasgow though

Little Caesar - A rewatch of this 1932 gangster classic starring Edward G. Robinson as Caesar Enrico "Rico" Bandello. Still an essential and commanding performance by Robinson. Still plenty of homoerotic subtext. I thought I was imagining it the first time I watched this but almost every article I've read alludes to it. It doesn't detract from the movie at all of course but it's still injects a bit of WTF? to the proceedings.

This was basically the first of it's kind in that it started a craze for "gangster" films and was largely borrowed from in subsequent movies. The "rise and fall" storyline has also been used to great effect. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. costars as Joe Massara, Rico's partner in crime and maybe other things. He leaves the thug life to pursue his dream of being a dancer. He also takes up with his new dance partner Olga Stasoff (Glenda Farrell). Rico doesn't take it well, calling him a softie and a sissy. Putting aside all that as well as Rico's gleefully fawning henchman Otero (George E. Stone) you still have a concise 79 minutes of OG gold.

I’ve never heard of yam-yams.

Being from the Black Country was considered, I suppose, as being rather low-class. I do know that the people I knew from there had terrifically strong accents. People would hide it & say they lived someplace else.

“The Black Country is an area of the English West Midlands, covering most of the Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, and only some minor parts of Walsall and Wolverhampton. Dudley and Tipton are generally considered to be the centre. It became industrialised in the Industrial Revolution, with coal mines, coking, iron foundries, glass factories, brickworks and steel mills, producing a high level of air pollution.”

One thing I hope from Ray & Liz is that we all don’t go slumming with these people & caricature them in some negative way. I hope the movie is more than this.

Sounds promising-- especially with A. Hopkins. Will check it out when it's available.

Mank -

First of all, this movie is very much in my wheelhouse. I love anything associated with old Hollywood, Orson Welles and Citizen Kane. Still, a quality of good movies is that they make you invested in their subjects regardless of your interest level before you push play. If the equally impressed reaction of my fellow movie lover wife - who was indifferent to these subjects - is of any indication, it succeeds on that front. With that said, this is not just a making-of dramatization. It's a story, and a well-told one, about how hard it is for artists - even those who have Herman "Mank" Mankiewicz's clout - to convince their higher-ups to mean what they say.

With its clever "funnel" flashback structure, i.e. present and past begin far apart and eventually collide, we learn that Mank's inspiration for the Kane script was not only fueled by his issues with Hearst, but also those he had with MGM and California GOP head Louis B. Mayer. Brilliantly played by Arliss Howard, he's a man who's not beneath reneging on fully compensating his employees or producing fake campaign ads and is thus against everything for which the socialist and truth-loving Mank stands. He's not alone in his battle, though: while sequestered in the famous (and actual) Victorville ranch that was his writing den, Mank is visited by family and acquaintances, most notably brother Joseph and unlikely ally and Hearst mistress Marion Davies (a very good Amanda Seyfried), and each of them entertainingly encourage and remind him what he's up against. Speaking of the ranch, filming at it and other actual locations surely has a lot to do with this, but it's a beautiful movie, especially for how it captures a '30s-'40s look and feel that has just the right blend of romantic and authentic.

The movie is not without its flaws: like Anthony Hopkins in Nixon, Oldman is award-worthy as Mank, but I'm not sure if he was ideal for the role. I couldn't help but side-eye during moments like when he mentions that he's 43 or whenever he's with his wife, who I'm ashamed to have mistook for his daughter. Also, it's barely worth mentioning since it's an issue with nearly every historical drama, but the accuracy is questionable from time to time. While I appreciate what the movie taught me about Mank's involvement with Kane, the movie diminishes Orson Welles' contributions a bit. I still consider this to be one of 2020's best movies, especially for how it reminded me that Citizen Kane is not only a great movie for its story and innovations, but also for how and what it said about those who thankfully failed to quash it. Oh, and for all of you comic book fans out there, with his penchants for seeking the truth, standing up for the common laborer and, well, drinking, was Mank the Spider Jerusalem of his day? Whether he was or not, this may be the closest thing to a Transmetropolitan adaptation we're likely to get.