What Was The Last Movie You Watched?

Touchofevil said:

It is one of my favorite and most watched movies. I have it on my iPad just in case I get a hankerin’ to watch it.

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Belay my last. You live another day...

Last night it was Side Street (1950) dir. by Anthony Mann, with Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell. Part-time letter carrier Granger takes crooks' money, then must deal with avoiding detection as both criminal and police intensity mounts. Lots of New York City from that year, filmed by Mann in a rough and gritty style.

A couple of days ago it was Goodnight, My Love (1972), a made for tv movie written and directed by Peter Hyams. Been looking for this for literally decades, and found it on you tube. An homage to film noir and hard-boiled detective films, Richard Boone and Michael Dunn are a private eye team, Barbara Bain is the lady in distress (or is she?), and Victor Buono is the Sidney Greenstreet character, with the inimitable name of Julius Limeway, who owns the the Top Hat club in 1946 Los Angeles.
I remember watching this the first time it was broadcast, and even at that young age I was a fanboy for old movies and especially for the tough guy noir. Here, in color, were all the cliches and tropes of those movies.
I won't say anything about the plot (involving a search for stolen crime syndicate money), but the story, the dialogue, the characters, and the whole vibe are exceptional. The viewer is as baffled as Hogan and Boyle (Boone and Dunn) until the denouement near the end.

My son and I watched Disney’s Haunted Mansion yesterday. It a fun movie.

Steven

Libel (1959) with Olivia de Havilland and Dirk Bogarde. A baronet is accused of being an imposter by a former comrade with whom he was interned as a POW during WW2. Cleverly written plot and solid acting. Worth a watch for a diverting evening.
Edit: all the recent films we have watched have been through the TCM streaming app.

MisterCairo said:

Belay my last. You live another day...

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Thank you for the stay. I should have been more clear in my appreciation of the flick.

Worf said:

"Nobody" - Sweltering without central air-conditioning. Puddin' and I scraped up enough fans to watch this 2021 shoot-em-up and beat em down. Playing against type, Bob Odenkirk plays a cross between John Wick and John Q Normal. You know the trope, ordinary guy who appears to have a spine of jello is suddenly revealed to be an unstoppable killing machine when his wife/kids/dog/barbecue grill is threatened. If this sound familiar it's because the screenwriter wrote all three John Wick films. What's makes this film more fun and "believable" is Odenkirk's casting and a supporting cast that's equally bizarre. The film also takes the time to truly establish our hero's current life of quiet desperation. His wife is bored and distant, his son thinks he's a coward and a loser. Only his young daughter seems to love him unconditionally. All of this makes us like and root for Odenkirk before his transformation into butt kicking murder machine. The other good thing about his character is that he often gets as good as he gives when fighting. He tells a busload of thugs that he's gonna stomp a mudhole in em, which he does BUT it takes way longer and is much harder than expected and in the end he almost looks worse off (as he should) than the 5 jokers he attacks.

Bottom line "Nobody" is great mindless fun that made me forget (temporarily) that I was drowning in a pool of my own sweat.

Worf

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That review cements it, I will watch Nobody. I have always enjoyed Odenkirk’s quirkiness/oddness and wondered if it was worth the watch.
Here’s to hoping the heat has left your realm and you are experiencing much cooler days.

Metropolitan from 1990


Writer and director Whit Stillman's low-budget debut film about the fears, insecurities and, maybe, hopes of a group of college-age, went-to-the-right-schools-and-have-the-right-last-names New Yorkers is enjoyable and witty even if a bit self conscious.

Like most of us, my upbringing has almost nothing in common with these upper-class kids, but the film's smart writing and sincere-if-uneven acting sympathetically draws you into their world.

It's a world these kids know is past being on the wane and is almost over. Instead of the clear advantage being of their class once offered, it is now almost a burden as the doors don't open the same way and their putative "privilege" is looked down upon, but the expectations for those within their world haven't changed.

They aren't facing poverty or failure in the sense of those words to you and me, but what for them is failure: a life of mediocrity. We can sneer, but you can't pick your start in life and the implied pressures and expectations these kids face are real, at least to them.

All of this comes out as we follow a small clique of Upper East Side scions during their Christmas break's march through the balls, receptions and after-parties of the "debutante" season - a symbol of their anachronistic fate.

The movie shines when these young adults informally gather before or after the formal parties in one of the ridiculously nice Park Avenue apartments of their never-present parents. Here, these smart, articulate and pseudo-worldly kids discuss their fears, sometimes mockingly, sometimes sincerely as they know their post-college world looms.

If there is a story in this slice-of-life, talkfest-analysis movie, it's the "love lives" of this group who seem to date amongst themselves, sleep with each other and, like almost all young kids everywhere, passionately feel the joys and pangs of early love and heartbreak.

There's the cocky kid who has it all figured out, the shy one, the go-along-get-along one, the "outsider," the jock, the intellectual, etc. Like Stillman as a writer and director, these were all but unknown actors at the time who had various skill levels.

Yet, it is their inchoate acting talents, a combination of hesitancy and bravura, that work perfectly for the roles of alternatively diffident and confident college kids trying to segue into adulthood.

While that well-tread territory wasn't new even back in 1990 - the 1930s and every subsequent decade have plenty of coming-of-age movies - the added fun here is the time travel to that era's much-improved-from-the-1970s New York City.

Back then, I had just moved to the city out of college. While I only tangentially knew some of these types of kids from work, Stillman captures the feel of the city and the attitude of those kids at that time incredibly well.

A chatty, almost plot-less movie about a bunch of rich kids bemoaning their fate shouldn't work, but it does because the emotions, passions and postures of the kids feel real and, well, at an hour and half in length, they don't overstay their welcome.

I dearly love this film, even though I would surely hate the characters if I met any of them in real life.

I think most (though not all) of Whit Stillman's films are fascinating, with very sharp writing and acting. Though he is the exact opposite in terms of output (only five films in thirty years), his Upper East Side denizens are just as well observed and depicted as Woody Allen's. Of course, he's two generations younger and is coming from a WASP POV very different from Woody's. Stillman's heightened dialog and situations are a bit off from reality - for example, the whole NYC debutante thing was pretty much finished when he made Metropolitan. Not all of his films are successful, and he's a bit of an acquired taste.

Other Stillman films worth seeing include The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, and - in a stunning departure from his contemporary settings - his recent Jane Austen knockoff Love & Friendship.

^ I recall Metropolitan when it premiered. I deliberately skipped it since it looked a paean
to rich college kids born with proverbial silver spoons in hand and shoved up their asses, looking
down their patrician noses at plebe students; perhaps I short-changed the flick. May give it a go.

Rise of the Krays, a low-budget, 2015 feature made locally in the East End around the same time as the much bigger-budget Legend with Tom Hardy. While Rise lacks the sheer charisma of Hardy's performance, it still turns in very respectable performances from the leads who convince as Reggie and Ronnie, and the ensemble cast. Across it's 100 minutes or so it feels truer to the reality than the more glamorised treatment in the Hardy picture. In part this will be because it takes longer to tell the Kray story (rather than try to pack it all into one film, the latter years are contained in companion picture, Fall of the Krays, which I will be watching tonight). Excellent sense of the period of fifties and sixties Britain, very impressive for its low-budget. I'd love to have seen a combination of this more 'realistic' approach and Brady's performances, especially as Ronnie. Not to take away from the two leads in this version - they are very good - but Brady just has that magnetism about him that many who encountered the Krays describe, in particular, his portrayal of Ronnie Kray's mental illness is beautifully nuanced.

Fall of the Krays did not disappoint; retains the same, gritty air of realism. This covers a much shorter period, from circa 1965 (a key event in the first act is Reggie's marriage to the ill-fated Frances) until their convictions in 1969 for the murders of Frank Mitchell, George Cornell and Jack McVitie. Notably, both films mention (through don't over-emphasise) Ronnie's hero-worship of Winston Churchill, something often left out of the popular mythology. It's a very astute rendering in particular of how Ronnie's dominant personality and Reggie's misplaced loyalty were ultimately their downfall, especially after (this event covered in the closing acts of the first film) Ronnie sabotages Reggie's plans to go legit following the legalisation of gambling clubs in 1960. It's fascinating to think that there was a point where, had they chosen to go down a different path, the Krays could have been a legitimated fixture of London nightlife, their criminal past the subject of only the occasional tabloid piece (doubtless followed by the occasional Darius Guppy-style phone call). Ronnie's mental illness is more explicitly covered in the Brady picture. It's not forgotten here (though more might have been made of Ronnie largely failing to get the 'help' he needed - such as it was back then - owing to the stigma of mental illness in the community at the time), but clearly the writers wanted to concentrate on the twins' culpability for their actions, so clearly this is why it was not emphasised lest it be seen as an excuse.

There remains to be made a solid picture about their prison years, during which time, among other things, along with brother Charlie Kray they ran Krayleigh Security, a bodyguard/ security agency aimed at attracting Hollywood customers. In 1985, Krayleigh Security provided fifteen bodyguards for Frank Sinatra when he visited Wimbledon. The company was well known about by the Home Office and Scotland Yard, but they could find no legal reason to shut it down. It has often been claimed that the Twins' business empire was bigger after they went inside than ever it was before the convictions. There has, of course, already been one quasi-representation of Ronnie Kray's prison years on British mainstream television: 'Genial' Harry Grout, an inmate feared by all in BBC sitcom Porridge, is said to have been largely based on Ronnie.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar from 1977 with Diane Keaton, Tuesday Weld, Richard Gere and William Atherton


Looking for Mr. Goodbar is definitely an entry in "The Most 1970s Movie Ever" contest with its pot, drugs, porn, orgies, cigarette smoking, Ruffino, Jimmy Carter, muggings, disco, battleground New York City and lots of hair.

Diane Keaton's young school-teacher character is torn trying to reconcile her traditional Irish Catholic upbringing with the new freedom of the 1970s. Fair or not, many in that era dealt with a lot of guilt attempting to jettison all they were taught growing up while working (and that seems like what it was for many) to enjoy the new culture around them.

It's hard to appreciate today, but the gap between that generation's parents and kids, owing to the late 1960s cultural revolution, was massive. Today's gap is an inch wide compared to what happened back then.

Parents who believed in religion, sexual abstinence before marriage, not using drugs, etc. - even if they fell short of these ideals, they were still their strived-for values - saw their kids, not just break these taboos in the shadows, but openly and gleefully flaunt them. The intergenerational stress was off the charts.

Keaton's character represents all of this when she moves out of her parent's house (no more "our house, our rules") into a dive apartment in NYC where she tries to embrace the sex, drugs and disco nightlife of the era.

Greatly complicating matters for Keaton psychologically is that she has congenital spinal scoliosis (painfully corrected in childhood with surgery and a year spent in a body cast), which has convinced her she shouldn't have children.

Perhaps lost in all the 1970s excess of the movie, that disease seems - more than free love and more than giving a big middle finger to her father and the Catholic Church - the real reason Keaton is almost always angry when it appears she should be happy. All her emotions are off as even her fun appears joyless (like many experienced in the 1970s).

While the dominant narrative around the movie is women's sexual (and other) liberation, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is also about a woman living dangerously on the edge. I'll stand shoulder to shoulder with anyone fighting for freedom for women to have equal opportunities in every single thing, but when men or women choose to exercise those freedoms in personally dangerous and, honestly, stupid ways, they risk paying a price.

Regularly bringing random men you just met in bars in NYC back to your apartment, many who are drunk and on drugs, late at night is not a statement of freedom, but of (choose) stupidity, a pathological need for risk or some suicidal tendency. Ditto constantly taking random drugs given to you from strangers at parties or bought from unknown dealers in bars or on the street.

Despite all that, Keaton's character is engaging and sympathetic. Her passion as a teacher for hearing-impaired children seems so much more real to her true self than her touching-a-hot-stove nightlife. When you see her falling into the 1970s sex-drug vortex, you hope she'll eventually spin out to something stable.

(Spoiler alert). But it's not to be. It's been argued that her gruesome murder at the end was "punishment" for a woman attempting sexual freedom. Maybe it felt that way at the time, but at least today, that looks like a politicized reification of a complex character in a complex time. I saw it more as a warning about a dumb and dangerous lifestyle; more a coda for the excesses of the 1970s than a rebuke of sexual and other liberations.


Nota Bene section:

N.B. #1 How many cigarettes must Keaton have smoked that even her Hollywood-capped-and-cared-for teeth have a yellowish tint?

N.B. #2 It turns out Richard Gere wasn't born the day he starred in American Gigolo as there is an even younger Gere here playing a similar character.

N.B. #3 I met Richard Gere about ten years ago at a small business breakfast. He came across as a genuinely nice guy.

N.B. #4 Annie Hall would be horrified with Keaton's character in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

N.B. #5 What sort of meta time warp is it that seeing NYC in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, with all its street grit and hustle, reminded me of the NYC presented in HBO's recent 1970s period show The Deuce?

Another landmark film I missed but knew about because the word was out; lotsza buzz this flick.

I was in college in the 70s and met some girls living along the edge, told them to be careful
and skip the bar scene entirely, and some of the guys were also fools, heading off a cliff downtown
and around Chicago. A few years back ran into a guy from those days and he recounted how one of girls
died after taking a stranger home. Life imitated art.

Song of the Islands
1942
80 years later its still funny, fun and adorable… Betty Grable at her best!
I mean, who else can pull off the Hula-Irish Stepdance mashup?

I just watched "The Road to Hong Kong" (1962), the last of the seven "Road To" movies with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, and have now seen all of them. I love these movies so much! They are all excellent comedies. In order, they are "The Road to Singapore" (1940), "The Road to Zanzibar" (1941), "The Road to Morocco" (1942), "The Road to Utopia" (1945), "The Road to Rio" (1947), "The Road to Bali" (1952), and "The Road to Hong Kong" (1962). The stories aren't actually related, and their characters have different names, but the plots and characters they play are all pretty similar, and it's always fun to see Bing use Bob in his elaborate (and dangerous) money-making schemes, the trouble they get into, the song-and-dance numbers, and how they fight over Dorothy Lamour. My personal favorite is "The Road to Rio." If you haven't seen any of these, it's a really great series- definitely one of my favorites!

Swing Girl said:

I just watched "The Road to Hong Kong" (1962), the last of the seven "Road To" movies with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, and have now seen all of them. I love these movies so much! They are all excellent comedies. In order, they are "The Road to Singapore" (1940), "The Road to Zanzibar" (1941), "The Road to Morocco" (1942), "The Road to Utopia" (1945), "The Road to Rio" (1947), "The Road to Bali" (1952), and "The Road to Hong Kong" (1962). The stories aren't actually related, and their characters have different names, but the plots and characters they play are all pretty similar, and it's always fun to see Bing use Bob in his elaborate (and dangerous) money-making schemes, the trouble they get into, the song-and-dance numbers, and how they fight over Dorothy Lamour. My personal favorite is "The Road to Rio." If you haven't seen any of these, it's a really great series- definitely one of my favorites!

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I LOVE those films!!!!! Last year I did a marathon of them all! I did a double feature every weekend for the month of April!
As a kid in the late 1970s I would occasionally catch one late night on television and just loved them... back then I probably only ever saw maybe 2 of them... until last year. I love Bob Hope movies and the Road To movies are delightfully fun especially when Bob breaks the 4th barrier and looks at you to say something as an aside... somehow it isn't just a gag but involves you into their world which is what I liked about it when I was a child. If you get a chance watch Nothing but the Truth (1941) Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard. its free on YouTube.

Watched a couple of films on Netflix this weekend. The first part of Netflix's new trilogy of horrors under the Fear Street banner, Fear Street 1994 being the first. It's received bad reviews from people whom I suspect were big fans of the much-overrated Scream series, but it's a fun enough little take on the mid-90s era of teen-slasher-horror flicks, with a lot more fun to be had in spotting the tropes and reference points in its pastiche than there ever was in Scream's barking-seal like self-awareness. It sets up nicely the other two parts, which look poised to take on 1970s slasher pictures and Hammer Horror, sixties type (British) horror. I enjoyed it enough to be actively watching for the other parts. It very much captured a sense of the mid 90s with good use of music, and other tell-tales (like none of the kids having a mobile phone). The one thing that doesn't fit with the material being pastiched is, of course, the much-better queer representation, though that said it doesn't feel shoe-horned or jarring as while a same sex relationship would never have happened, certainly not as the leads, in the films of the era in which it was set, Buffy was pioneering that sort of thing in the 90s, and they do portray well how it would have been seen. (Very different to the inclusion of a gay character in Stranger Things - or, more to the point, the broad acceptance by the others of the same in the 1980s.)

I also watched the Depp Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Entertaining enough, though more by way of the whole adventure being so tedious and sordid, and, really, quite pathetic rather than the Great Freedom Warrior Libertarian type hero worship Thompson sometimes receives. Strangely more effective than the book in conveying that aspect of it all, albeit that - perhaps for that very reason - the book is a less uncomfortable experience. Impressive performance by Depp as an acting piece. One big disappointment was the end-monologue being cut short, ending at "just another freak, in the freak kingdom." Presumably to avoid the fact that Horatio Alger isn't a reference they assumed most of the audience would get, but "I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident." just caps the whole thing so well... Of course, I'll always hear that in Jello Biafra's voice, after the Dead Kennedys definitive recording of Viva Las Vegas, which opens with a monologue composed of some of the best lines from Thompson's book. I did wonder why that doesn't appear on the soundtrack - it's such a perfect fit for the film - but presumably there was either a refusal or "rights issues".

Edward Reed said:

I LOVE those films!!!!! Last year I did a marathon of them all! I did a double feature every weekend for the month of April!
As a kid in the late 1970s I would occasionally catch one late night on television and just loved them... back then I probably only ever saw maybe 2 of them... until last year. I love Bob Hope movies and the Road To movies are delightfully fun especially when Bob breaks the 4th barrier and looks at you to say something as an aside... somehow it isn't just a gag but involves you into their world which is what I liked about it when I was a child. If you get a chance watch Nothing but the Truth (1941) Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard. its free on YouTube.

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I saw "Nothing but the Truth" a few weeks ago, and I loved it! I've been watching a lot of Bob Hope movies recently, and love all of them. I also watched "Caught in the Draft" (1941) last week, and "Bachelor in Paradise" (1961) yesterday. We just got "My Favorite Blonde," "My Favorite Spy," and "My Favorite Brunette" on disc, and I'm really excited to watch them soon!

Swing Girl said:

I saw "Nothing but the Truth" a few weeks ago, and I loved it! I've been watching a lot of Bob Hope movies recently, and love all of them. I also watched "Caught in the Draft" (1941) last week, and "Bachelor in Paradise" (1961) yesterday. We just got "My Favorite Blonde," "My Favorite Spy," and "My Favorite Brunette" on disc, and I'm really excited to watch them soon!

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AWESOME! coincidentally I have Caught in the Draft on cue for next Saturday! (you have great taste in films! )