What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

Amy Jeanne said:

Damn I started this thread 12 years ago

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Was everything in black & white back then ?

Midnight Mary 1933 with Loretta Young, Ricardo Cortez and Franchot Tone

• Orphaned early in life, Young's character, overall, tries to do right, but coincidences, circumstances and bad people bring her to - when the movie opens - being on trial for murder and looking guilty as heck

• Her one possible lifeboat comes from an honest love affair she had with wealthy, decent socialite Tone that, against his wishes, she renounces to keep his reputation clean

• While dated in style and even social conventions, adjust the dials a bit and the movie has a contemporary feel - but more like one of the many lawyer or criminal investigation shows on TV (think "The Practice") than a modern movie

• While made at MGM, the pre-code grit, feral criminals, short length and fast pace felt more Warner Bros.

• Pre-codes struck a better balance of showing life's brutality without being gratuitous than today's movies and TV shows do

• 20-yr-old Young is ridiculously lithe and beautiful. In a world with no digital enhancement, little plastic surgery, only early cosmetic dentistry and less general knowledge about it all, her looks must have shined incredibly bright to Depression-Era audiences.

I rented Bohemian Rhapsody last night. I'd already watched it in theaters, but I wanted to be able to sing along this time.

"Galveston", a new Netflix offering...Ben Cooper and Elle Fanning. A decent movie that I liked much more than I thought based on the thumbnail. Cooper is his usual workmanlike performance although in his typecasted wheelhouse.

Hickok (2017) on Netflix. Don't. Just...don't.

Zombie_61 said:

Hickok (2017) on Netflix. Don't. Just...don't.

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Yup. It's a stinker.

"We the Animals" a recent Netflix offering. A wonderful, simple, touching movie. I have posted here about my bewilderment of the buzz around Roma. This movie is one I have not read about, zero press, and yet it is the better movie. Full of heart and humanity. Nuance to the characters, wonderful pacing, minimum artifice.....it is so much better than Roma.

belfastboy said:

"Galveston", a new Netflix offering...Ben Cooper and Elle Fanning. A decent movie that I liked much more than I thought based on the thumbnail. Cooper is his usual workmanlike performance although in his typecasted wheelhouse.

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I have been wondering if it was worth watching. I read the novel some years back and found it to be entertaining. It was written by Nic Pizzolatto, the man behind HBO’s True Detective.

Touchofevil said:

I have been wondering if it was worth watching. I read the novel some years back and found it to be entertaining. It was written by Nic Pizzolatto, the man behind HBO’s True Detective.

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Yes, I did not know that but it certainly has the Pizzolatto stamp on it.

Mighty Joe Young from 1949 is a dumbed-downed version of '33's King Kong, but it does do two things better than the original. One, it brings a thoughtful-for-'49 view toward the idea of Kong as the woman who raised Mighty Joe from birth disavows the term "owner" and refers to the farm in Africa she shares with him as his home as well as her's - making a statement that he is not a pet or something she can just do with as she wants. And as she has to fight for his life at times, her arguments imperfectly aver that he is entitled to respect on his own terms and not just as the property of a human.

Secondly, Mighty Joe has reasonably well-developed facial expressions which allows him to show more nuanced and thoughtful emotions than '33's Kong. Some of the most-touching moments in the movie are watching Mighty Joe learn, go from confusion to understanding, show concern and, my favorite, display boredom (as when he is riding in the back of a truck looking like a kid tired from a long car trip). How accurate all this is to real gorillas, I'll leave to the experts, but from a movie-making perspective, anthropomorphism creates a strong connect between Mighty Joe and the audience.

Unfortunately, away from those aspects, Mighty Joe Young has little of the seriousness, sense of wonder, impending doom, drama, tragedy, sexuality and pathos of the original. King Kong is an adult movie with powerful human allegorical references; Mighty Joe Young is an all but kid's movie (but good one) with fun-for-its-time special effects, but little of the original's broader meaning and emotional impact.

Worf said:

"They Shall Not Grow Old" - I was reluctant to see this documentary in the theatre but I'm very glad I did. I've seen about every documentary on the First World War that I could get my hands on from "The Guns of August" on down. I didn't think I could learn or experience anything more but boy was I wrong. Peter Jackson did something here that I never could've dreamt of. Commissioned by The Imperial War Museum, he was given access to hundreds of hours of raw footage and hundreds of hours of recorded first hand accounts.

First he "modernized" the hand crank footage so it would play smoothly for a modern reshowing. Second, he used tech to lighten underexposed film and darken over exposed film, in doing this we now have access to footage here to for unwatchable. Third he hired lip readers to determine what was being said and then got members of the military from current units of those depicted to provide the vocals. In addition he added sound, color and narration of men who'd lived, and fought in the trenches of the Western Front. The results were stunning! There is no preaching or moralizing about this wholly unnecessary and wasteful conflict except from the mouths of those who lived through it.

In addition to all of the above he also included a half hour documentary show how and why he did what he did! If you can catch this in the theatre.

Worf

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Let me STRONGLY "second the motion" concerning seeing "They Shall Not Grow Old".
As good as Worf says it is, it's even better. To give one more example of the attention to detail, the original footage has a scene showing a Lieutenant reading something to his men before battle.
Jackson's team looked thorough the regimental records and found the specific document that he was reading. They then had a person from the proper area of England speak the *exact* words that the Lieutenant was saying to the troops (in the correct accent).

Since New Zealand accents are slightly different from British accents, he got six guys from the British Embassy to sing about 20 verses of "Mademoiselle from Armentieres" over the credits. Ooh La La!

Lady Killer from 1933 with James Cagney, Mae Clarke and Margaret Lindsay

• Cagney is still refining his screen persona here, but his power and presence comes through his uneven performance

• Much suspension of belief is needed to accept the story of a movie-theater usher quickly taking over a graft/theft ring and, then, when the "heat's on" bolts NYC for Hollywood where he all but stumbles into becoming a star
  • Didn't Edward G. Robinson star in a movie with a somewhat similar plot (I can't quite remember it)?

• The two female leads - Clarke and Lindsay - do an outstanding job (they hold the bumpy story together as much as Cagney does), look wonderful and make me wonder why they didn't have bigger careers

• While not a straight forward gangster movie - I enjoyed the twist on the formula - it still has some of that Warner Bros gritty feel and all of its speed-story telling powers (76 minutes long and it never breathes in)

Gringo 2018

If you've ever wondered what a Tarantino movie would be like without Tarantino directing, then this is the movie for you. Gringo has all the Tarantino elements - how corrupt people deal with life's day-to-day issues, the complete moral agnosticism of some corrupt people, dialogue that, sometimes, comes fast and furious, over-the-top violence that still feels personal and not video-game removed, at least one Mexican standoff and the astonishment normal people feel when drawn or forced into a crazy world of gangsters, criminals and abject corruption - but with Nash Edgerton, not Tarantino, at the helm.

A corrupt drug company CEO (gee, how original and politically courageous) installs his sincerely honest friend, Harold, as the headquarter's liaison to the company's Mexican production facility, which is illegally selling some of its output to a Mexican drug cartel. Harold, who unwittingly advances and covers up the corruption, while thinking he's doing honest work, also struggles to support his I-want-a-lot-of-stuff wife (who, in movie fashion, is sleeping with his friend, the company's CEO). And it is all coming to a head as the CEO is trying to sell the company and cash out, which necessitates an in-person meeting in Mexico to keep the cooking-of-the-books secret during the merger's audit.

As in Tarantino fashion, all hell breaks lose in Mexico - the drug cartel ruler refuses to have his supply cut off / Harold is confused for the company's mastermind by the cartel ruler / the CEO hires his soldier of fortune brother to rescue or kill Harold (it varies depending on the shifting insurance and merger situations), while the scales fall from innocent Harold's eyes as he tries to work an angle for himself. As the movie races to its climax amidst gun battles and car chases, it feels more-and-more Tarantino like, but the plodding pace of the first two-thirds of the movie, the slow dialogue of some scenes and too many characters who never fully gel are all things that would never happen in a Tarantino movie, which are more like being tossed onto an all but out-of-control roller coaster from the first scene to the last.

Gringo is modestly entertaining, but I'd wait for it to pop up on streaming or cable and only watch it if nothing else is on. That said, a shout out is required to David Oyelowo who plays Harold, early on, with an endearing combination of innocence and decency that, after life keeps kicking him in the head - hard - believably develops a complex view of morality and people that is the standout performance of the movie - and the one character you'll be rooting for by the end.

Just finished a prescreening of "On The Basis of Sex," the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic starring Felicity Jones as two-fisted young RBG and Armie Hammer as husband Marty.

If there was ever a typical Hollywood "great man" biopic about a great woman, this would be it. It's slick, it's snappy, and it's there for two hours, and it'll send you to reliable sources to see what they compressed, what they left out, and what they made up out of whole cloth. As a movie, it bounces right along, from RBG's hardnosed days at Harvard Law School to Marty's health crisis, to RBG's days as a frustrated professor at Rutgers to her breakthru representing a landmark sex-discrimination case in the 1970s. It's all very linear and predictable, and Jones is by turns perky, energetic, and steely as the story requires, although her Brooklyn accent comes and goes a bit more unpredictably than it ought to. Either do it right, and consistently, or fuggeddaboudit. Armie Hammer is an actor I've never warmed to even when he's in a sympathetic role -- he always comes across as a glib phony who needs to be punched in the face -- but he's better, I guess, than I'd have expected as Marty. Other characters are basically just there, hitting their marks and delivering their lines as expected.

Period detail is about what you'd expect for a mid-level Hollywood product -- everything just-so, but without the edge of lived-in dinginess that the real world has and movie recreations always miss. The opening scene, of young RBG lost in a vast crowd of identically-suited young men with briefcases heading to class, is cinematically interesting, but when you zoom in on various faces in the crowd, they all look like 2018 college boys dressed up in their grandfathers' old clothes for a costume party. Never has "the suit wears you" been more obvious.

I am, as you might expect, an RBG fan, but as a picture this is "meh." I'm sorry we've got it for only four days, because it zeros right in on an important segment of our demographic breadbasket -- elderly middle-class white women who bring their granddaughters to see something inspirational -- and it'll do well at the BO. But the "RBG" documentary from last summer was a better, and more interesting film.

We are on a roll of choosing very good 'little' films these day. "Electricity" a Brit Netflix feature about a young epileptic woman. Then last night 'Outside In" a US indie film with Edie Falco. She was great. Both simple human stories, well acted, good script.....nothing gets blown up, no one gets shot, okay a bit of sex but these days it is a given.

Dracula 1931 with Bela Lugosi. I had not watched this in over 25 years. I noticed that the movie was made up of very distinct scenes mashed together. Seemed like a play in movie form. I enjoyed the movie. I liked how the actual biting of the neck is not shown but left to the viewers imagination.

Lawrence of Arabia. I've never actually seen it, and it was on TCM one night so I DVRed it.

Bushman said:

Lawrence of Arabia. I've never actually seen it, and it was on TCM one night so I DVRed it.

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One of my all time favourite movies.