What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

2jakes said:

The one time that Greta Garbo hit a home run for me was in
a scene where she is looking around the bedroom and then with
no dialog....she simply gives a delicate sigh.
It was so natural, I always get emotional when I see it....
a lost love from long ago that now lives only in my memories.

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Fading Fast said:

It's been a pretty long time since I've seen that one, but if memory serves, she's basically up there having a sexual marathon and the sigh, which I hate to admit I think I remember, is delicate because it expresses her deep satisfaction and happy exhaustion (today, we crudely refer to her state and look as a FFG). Even in pre-code world, they didn't show what they do today, but they weren't shy about sending a sentient person all the clues needed to piece it together.

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3fingers said:

OK Fading Fast. I couldn't stand the pressure and had to look it up.

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Fading Fast said:

"Friends with Kids" 2011

If artificial intelligence ever starts writing movies, movies like this will be the result.

They are formulaic blends of "The Big Chill," "Definitely, Maybe" and "Must Love Dogs" and all the other movies of upper-middle-class people with more money than brains who spend inordinate amounts of time analyzing their own lives and making normal life challenges existential crises because they are happening to them.

The AI program will call for finding good looking actors with middling acting careers (you know them, but don't know all their names), put them in a hip city (or just use New York, 'cause it's always hip), show their pretty lifestyles with all their nice clothes, cars, homes, etc., find some current social issue (tilt liberal in viewpoint), create a few personal crisis to highlight it - but where the audience can feel smart because it can see the resolution before the characters - throw in some sex and a feel-good resolution and you're good to go.

As computing costs come down and AI capabilities increase rapidly, it seems silly to pay a writer to spit out these formulaic fluff pieces that must do well economically as they keep making them.

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LizzieMaine said:

Just previewed "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri," starring Frances MacDormand as a hard-bitten working-class woman consumed with rage over the unsolved rape/murder of her daughter, Woody Harrelson as the good-ole-boy small-town police chief who hasn't solved the case, and Sam Rockwell as a dumb, violent, comic-book-reading cop who may not be all he seems on the surface. This is, believe it or not, something of a black comedy, or so the reviews say -- but it came across to me as one of the best Westerns I've ever seen. There is no prairie, no sagebrush, the only horses only make cameo appearances, and it's set in the present day -- but it is, nevertheless, a Western in mood, in point of view, and in spirit. Highly recommended.

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• A crotchety, old-school, poor-neighborhood general practitioner - caring, cranky, doesn't get paid / doesn't ask to half the time, yells at his patients (you get the picture, hard on the outside, soft...) - is picked by a slick, but struggling, TV producer as a subject for a human interest documentary sponsored by a drug company

• This sets the framework for a bunch of speeches on morals versus money masquerading as dialogue - the doctor comes off as the best (no surprise), the drug company okay (and it didn't feel manipulated) and the TV industry as the absolute worst (the writer, director and / or producer was sending a message out about his / her industry)

• If you can take the aborning early-'60s-style, wide-eyed idealism, it's fun time-travel to late-'50s Brooklyn and Manhattan and the TV production business (Lizzie, you can tell us what's fake an what's real) with wonderful of-the-period clothes, cars, architecture, etc. everywhere (and it's all filmed in incredibly crisp B&W). Since it's not a period piece, you'll notice the mix of items from the prior forty or so years (cars, appliances, etc.) versus what you see in a lot of period pieces where all of those are - not accurately - form the period (i.e., all cars are 1950s models)

• Paul Muni - who I love as an actor - overacts a bit in this one (and I hate to say that) as the doctor, but still out-acts most while David Wayne, as the desperate producer, gives the best performance of his that I've seen (while wearing Ivy perfect sack suits, button-down shirts, knit ties and a Burberry overcoat)

• Another example of TCM's greatness is that movies like these just pop up. They aren't "big" enough to be in the league of "Casablanca" and the subject matter and style are not mass-market enough for them to make it to the small-time old movie channels; so without TCM, they might just disappear

LizzieMaine said:

God, I hated that movie. We had it here for the longest six days of my life, and all I could do was fixate on Jennifer Westfeldt's Botoxed smirk. What a load of petit-bourgeois BS.

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Trenchfriend said:

German synchronization kills it, as often happens.

I would watch original-tone.

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LizzieMaine said:

If you liked "Last Angry Man" -- which is an excellent portrait of the sleazy manipulativeness of late-fifties television -- you need to see "A Face In The Crowd," which is an even more disturbing look at the Boys and their manipulation of mass media. Anyone who has an image of Andy Griffith as a lovable salt-of-the-earth type will be astounded by his performance in that film -- and keep in mind that he made it *before* he became the "Andy Griffith" everybody remembers today.

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LizzieMaine said:

God, I hated that movie. We had it here for the longest six days of my life, and all I could do was fixate on Jennifer Westfeldt's Botoxed smirk. What a load of petit-bourgeois BS.

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