Rate The Last Movie You Saw

YES!!!

SF = Z



[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

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His House (2020)

Uncut Gems (2019)


Marriage Story (2019)


Shrek (2001)

Licorice Pizza (2021) A well made entertaining film with good performances, but a couple flaws. The biggest issue I had with the film is that I couldn't believe the central relationship. It seemed too unlikely. Second, the film is too long. It didn't need to be 2 hours and 13 minutes. There was a fair amount of stuff that could have been easily cut out. In spite of those flaws, I did enjoy the film overall.

I’ve kinda avoided this movie for years, partly because I felt it might be too old fashioned but then also because I thought it might be a bit grueling.
But somebody gave me a huge print of a famous picture of Elizabeth Taylor (and Richard Burton)...


framed, as a housewarming gift and then I came across CoaHTR in my queue and, the woman in the photo just has so much allure, I decided it was a good night to see her work.
And I was right on all three counts. It’s grueling. I’ve been in the middle of ugly family dynamics before (more times than I like to remember to be honest) and nobody makes ugly situations quite like Tennessee Williams.
To be honest, this is kinda harder to watch than Streetcar.
And yes it’s also kinda old-fashioned. The script was infamously reworked to exclude a major plot-point that was considered “inappropriate” at the time and would supposedly have never made it past the censors. However, if you don’t know what this plot point is, you might not notice. Also, the score is pretty melodramatic. But more on that later, let’s focus on the positive.
And what I mean is that the filmmaking of the time was just too old-fashioned for the script and the actors they had. It leans into melodrama when this isn’t melodrama this is real human drama, the kind of internal pain of the disappointment of life of family and the people you love and count on that it doesn’t matter what external factors there may be, it eats you alive. Paul Newman was up to that. His performance, for that time, is really something special. Burl Ives was up to that. Ives sure does let loose in this. Man, was he an underused talent. Helluva singer, though. Elizabeth Taylor nearly was and is in her best scenes. Tennessee Williams sure as hell was. But cinema itself, American cinema at least, wasn’t quite ready to let them do it yet in 1958. It feels like the studio told the producer and the director to dramatically change the story and soften up Williams’ dialogue with humor and sappy music (the main theme is quite good but some of the score seems there just to soften the blows) because A Streetcar Named Desire was just too intense.
And yet, when Burl Ives’ Big Daddy takes his coat off in the rain to try to drape it over his son who’s standing soaking wet in his pajamas but he brushes it away, the tears came to my eyes just the same. I had to wonder, honestly, if Brando hadn’t just raised the bar for everyone in ’51. I mean, Newman’s performance here, it feels like it comes straight from there, he’s his own actor, obviously, but this is very early in his film career and this movie makes me feel like Brando broke acting and everybody after that had to do something totally different than anything they ever saw Clark Gable or even Gary Cooper do.
It’s funny though, the twist of this script, that Taylor’s character, Maggie, who starts out seeming like three miles of bad road is really the nearest thing to a decent person in the whole show. And that’s more when Taylor starts to excel.
Three things:
The film almost uncomfortably sidesteps an obvious, major plot-point, one that was so clear that even though I have never read or seen the play it was obvious that it was where this whole story was going AND it added a major scene to turn the film in a more positive direction. And yet, I do not give a f*ck. We talked recently on the forum about film versus their source material and, while I have no doubt that an excellent screen adaptation of the actual story from the play would be amazeballz, the way the film played out pleased me in a time that is as cynical as this one is (which is by far the most cynical time I’ve lived in in my 50 years).
I am not gonna bother to comment on the racial politics of the film. There is little to comment on but it does take place on a Southern plantation and there are black servants, etc. The film is of its time and place and I happen to be from that place and not that many years removed from the time and so I know that pretty or not, it was portrayed accurately, and, if anything, I thought they did a nice job of just keeping that mostly out of the picture.
The poster, I find it almost offensive. It is an utter misrepresentation of both the character that Elizabeth Taylor portrays and of the content and themes of the film and is clearly an attempt to sensationalize the sex and scandal of a woman (because at the time there’s really only ONE scandal a MAN could be involved in that can’t just be forgiven because men) to draw viewership and I find it unfortunate, to be kind.
Finally, I have to say that, simply, I thought this was pretty great. It’s a great script. It’s a great way to film a play in that I never felt like I was watching one of those aware-it’s-a-play presentations (which I honestly don’t mind but there’s more than one way to do this) but it was also kept very, very intimate as if it was aware that it came from a play and that benefits the script. The acting is pretty superb. While I didn’t love the way some of the characters were portrayed at times it felt like that was the way they were directed rather than any deficiency among the actors, all of whom seemed like they were up to the task, at least for the time. It’s an intense piece and it asks a lot of several of the performers. Even Jack Carson, portraying the brother, Gooper, who is probably the least of the main players, had his moments when he was allowed to.
And, oddly, the film does something really unexpected. It leaves you feeling uplifted. Whether that’s what Williams wanted or not.

Great review Wooley.

Wow, this has a 100% RT rating on 119 reviews. And it's on Netflix. Huzzah!

Drive My Car (2021) I watched it on demand today. Sorry to say, this didn't do a lot for me. It was far too long and dragged on. I didn't find the story very interesting or engaging. Performances are fine and I liked the cinematography. There's a few good moments here and there, but not enough for me.

Thanks, man!

Ultraviolet (2006)

I’ve had an odd relationship with this movie since I first saw it in, maybe, late 2006, early 2007.
For starters, I didn’t see it from the very beginning and that kinda matters, for another, it was just on and I had no expectations and new nothing about it, and for yet another, it was 2006/7 and so there weren’t an endless number of movies like this and Mila had not spent up all of her goodwill yet making them.
So, I actually kinda enjoyed it in its odd, low-budget, we spent all the money on the design so please forgive us for the “script”, such as it is, messy sub-glory. When I heard that people thought of it as an abysmally bad film, I was actually surprised. And then I read all about the production issues and the budget-slashing, and the studio-downgrade from an R to a PG-13, how upset Mila was about how the film came out, and I figured maybe I was happier in my ignorance. So I just never watched it again.
Until now.
And the first 5 minutes made it seem like an awful mistake and like the seemingly hyperbolic terrible reviews and comments I’d read in the past were all utterly on-point. I mean, no doubt, this movie makes Doomsday look like The Road Warrior. And I was about to turn it off. But then I just didn’t and almost immediately I was rewarded with some design that was just wonderful, actually cooler than I’d remembered, and suddenly I was connected to the exact memories I’d had when I saw it the first time: this movie is truly awful but also kinda awesome. In some weird way that I cannot describe I can only feel.
There’s no doubt that this is a truly bad film, with so many egregious shortcomings it is frequently laughable… and yet, if I can appreciate the offerings of Spookies or The Being, why can I not also enjoy Ultraviolet?
And so I did. I kinda had a ball watching it, honestly. It got a little slow in the middle, which a movie like this cannot do, and there really are some moments that are just jarringly bad, but… f*ck it.
I would watch this again, if high enough, and certainly will watch parts of it in the future. Here is some eye candy to try to explain my position.



Post script:
Had to laugh that the most obvious comparison in my mind for this film was a low-budget but even more imaginative Equilibrium and it turns out it’s the same director and they got character-actor William Fichtner to be in that one too so maybe there is some kind of cinematic kinship.

By http://filmaster.com/film/jagten/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37059101

The Hunt - (2012)

Got around to watching this Thomas Vinterberg film last night - I liked it much more than Another Round (and reckon it should have won the Best Foreign Language film Oscar.) The Great Beauty won that year, and although I think that film is pretty good - I still think The Hunt is superior. I was reminded of the documentary Capturing the Friedmans as far as accusations that start to snowball out of control goes - with Kindergarten teacher Lucas (a great Mads Mikkelsen) having his life completely destroyed when a child who is cross with him slanders the guy without knowing the horrible import of her words. It's an issue that will never go away, for if you dismiss everything children say you let paedophiles run free and if you believe everything they say innocent people are ruined. There's a rush to judgement and presumption of guilt with actress Susse Wold's character Grethe very successfully enraging us with the way she handles the issue - a little more investigation before going nuclear might not have solved the issue, but would have been more appropriate. Still, the issues this film raises have no easy answer one way or the other - I'm still debating it all in my mind. We're given the benefit of knowing the truth - unlike the characters in The Hunt. A good film does that - makes us question the film in relation to the wider world around us.

8/10

Foreign Language Countdown films seen : 78/100

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I watched the first half or so of this film and just had to turn it off, it was giving me such bad anxiety. When I first started teaching I was a special education assistant, and one day a child I was helping looked me dead in the face and said "I'm going to tell my dad that you hit me." I freaked out, of course, went straight to my supervisor and had it arranged so that I was never alone with this student again. Even now I really try to not be alone with a student. You just never know what someone might say or, honestly, how a child could non-maliciously misinterpret a moment. This movie brought all of those feelings flooding back and then some! My teammates are both men, and I know they are sensitive to this as well.

It's such a difficult arena to navigate - you don't want to dismiss what a child says, and some people often have this idea that kids don't lie (a lot of the characters in the film have this viewpoint.) Also, even if something a kid says is proven to be a lie, allegations that spread tend to stick. When I was in high school I failed my first driving test. A friend of mine thought it would be funny if he spread the rumour that I had in fact crashed the car during the test - which hadn't happened. That crash became legendary throughout the entire school, and grew to be a story of epic proportions, and nobody would even consider for a moment that it hadn't happened, even when I informed people. The lie just took on a life of it's own, and was so much more interesting than the truth that it became accepted fact, much to my frustration. Eventually it didn't bother me - but if it had of been a rumour of me doing something terrible I'd have found it hard to accept for the rest of my life.

Wait, so when you "meh'd" it in that thread, you hadn't even watched it yet?

The Missing (2003)

Never noticed before what a terrific movie poster this is. Do these poster artists ever get credit?

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

Joachim Trier’s trilogy is now complete so I wanted to try again to get through the first part of it. Quite the slog, but I made it. On to part two very soon.