Amph What was the last movie you saw? (Ver. 2)

No, I live down the road a bit and in a plat on the opposite side of the main thoroughfare it's on.

 

The Martian (2015) As usual Matt Damon nails his role. I liked how he was terra-farming on Mars...but the rescue (and constant mentions of Iron Man) felt a bit anti-climatic and fake. I suppose the novel gives a better representation of the scenario and it was nice to Benedict Wong, Chwietel and Sebastian Stan in minor roles, but not a movie I'd watch again.

 

I live near one as well. Well, actually, most movie buffs have seen the one I'm talking about. It's the drive in that Coppola used in The Outsiders, which was mostly filmed in Tulsa.



I've been for the experience. It's definitely a kind of essential Americana experience. Kids running around, going to the snack shop, people playing Frisbee, etc. But it's certainly not a good way to watch a movie.

 

Does it include the special listening devices for your car?

 

Currently, it's set up to broadcast on your radio. I say currently; it was a few years ago when I went.

 

These are the audio devices I was referring to.

 

I actually already watched Dark Fury, so now it's just the Chronicles of Riddick left in this series of films. I admit never having much interest in watching it as it always had that stigma of a bad movie. However, I'm now inturged in seeing it now as if nothing else it gives me a fun space opera, something we don't get enough of.

Anyways just saw Sin City and much to my surprise might be my favorite comic book movie. The highly stylized visuals straight out of the comic book pages are of course wonderful and also makes the obvious CGI fit in pretty well all things considered. But the characters and story are also well done and I just love that dark noir feel to the whole thing.

 

Captain America: Civil War

 

Suspicion 1941

Good movie, but I think Cary Grant got the better performance by playing a quite different character than his typical role. Joan Fontaine was amazing but her performance in Rebecca was better and should have won her Oscar with that.

 

Just came back from my third viewing of Black Panther. I’m loving it more and more each time. Amazing film.

 

I, Tonya (2017) – Craig Gillespie

I’m America’s best figure skater. I don’t want friggin’ Eskimo Pies.

I, Tonya shows its hand right from the start; at the beginning of the film, it puts it out there that it’s based on interviews that are “wildly contradictory.” And the film takes that as a set-up as well with scenes sprinkled through the movie showing the characters being interviewed, while the story we all came for plays out in flashback. The screenplay is good here. It’s surprisingly sympathetic to Tonya but it isn’t blind to her myriad flaws; she’s a tragic figure of a kind, but at the same time, she’s profoundly unlikable. That feels like a pretty real take to me. The film is at times hysterically funny and at other times deeply sad. We get glimpses of how this movie might have functioned as a cynical look at America through the lens of Tonya Harding’s story, but glimpses are all we get; this is still, at its core, a personal story, focused very much on Tonya and the people that surround her. The film really rises on a host of brilliant performances. Margot Robbie is twenty-seven, but she starts playing Tonya when she’s fifteen, but the performance is so good that you kind of applaud the movie’s decision to just go for it and not even worry about verisimilitude in terms of keeping Tonya’s actress as young as she should be because it gets Robbie on screen as quickly as possible; she’s really wonderful, actually disappearing into the role of the redneck, crude, but beautifully talented skater. Allison Janney is maybe career best as Tonya’s abusive mother; and, yes, I’m aware of Janney’s career – that’s how damn good she is here. Sebastian Stan is surprisingly excellent as well as Tonya’s loser husband; I’ve never really found him to be that compelling, but he gives a really fine performance here, showing us a man profoundly stupid and yet also surprisingly sad. And I absolutely cannot praise Paul Walter Hauser enough for his incredibly great supporting performance as the thuggish Shawn, the sociopathic, repulsive “bodyguard” who gets the ball rolling on the entire ugly plot to injure Nancy Kerrigan. It’s a broad, hilarious comedic performance that seems pretty exaggerated until you see the real guy and realize that it’s kind of dead on. Gillespie’s direction is good; some of the sequences where the characters break the fourth wall feel a little gimmicky, but that’s really the only complaint I have. And he truly handles the skating sequences brilliantly. It’s easy to admire the gracefulness and beauty of ice skating, but he makes skating feel absolutely exhilarating. The first big sequence, where Tonya skates to ZZ Top’s Sleeping Bag, is a rush of pure energy and exuberance. The film really nails the emotional & tonal shifts it has to go through to tell this story: genuine joy, weary sorrow, dark comedy. I, Tonya turns out to be wildly entertaining with never a dull moment and the details of the story may surprise you even if you think you know it. It’s a real killer. 4 stars.

tl;dr – perfectly acted dark comedy has a surprising depth to its tragic elements; wildly entertaining and enthralling. 4 stars.

 

I think at least part of the negative reaction toward Chronicles was the hard left turn it takes from Pitch Black. We've become conditioned to expect more of the same from sequels, but Chronicles is rather audacious in how it thumbs its nose at such logic. To be sure Chronicles has its problems, and its ambition outstretches it means at times, but I think it delivers a reasonably entertaining B-level... something .

 

Letter from an Unknown Woman 1947

Wow, such a beautiful story and great performance by Joan Fontaine. The pianist was such a fool to miss such a great woman who dedicated her whole life to him. Sad sad fool.

 

Rules Don't Apply

I watched this to start getting a better feel for Alden Ehrenreich in preparation for Solo. The film alternates between Ehrenreich and Lily Collins story of budding romance, how they interact with Howard Hughes (Warren Beatty) and how Hughes interacts with other people. It's an odd film that has some good scenes and then really strange ones. It's set in Hollywood in the 1960's and intersperses Hughes' weird way of dealing with contract actresses, his father's business and his aviation interests. I felt like Ehrenreich did a good job but the only drawback is that his character was very serious for much of the movie. I am definitely looking foward to seeing him in some of Han's humorous, lighter moments in Solo.

 

I have to disagree with you there. I felt like the fourth wall breaks were a great and clever way to keep the interview style of the film going without having to constantly go back to them sitting in front of the camera, which could get a bit repetitive. The scene where Tonya chased her boyfriend out of the house with the gun and said “This never happened” to the camera was one of my favourite scenes in the film. Otherwise I totally agree. Great film. I’m surprised it didn’t get a best picture nomination.

 

Titanic (1953)

Solid if unspectacular and historically inaccurate (who cares) story of the doomed ship. It understands that it is a tragedy and that lives are being cut short, but not even Stanwyck can give it much more than that. Apparently they used a 20 foot model for the sinking and it looked pretty good for its time.

Cameron used this version as the basis for his own, so if you've seen Cameron's version you'll recognize plenty of things here...but if you've seen Cameron's version, there's not much here worth seeing.

Trivia: Barbara Stanwyck's character was from Mackinac, Michigan, which her husband pronounces as "Mackinack". It is pronounced "Mackinaw". The more you know.

 

AFAIK, he took a lot more from A Night to Remember than the 1953 movie. Interesting that Barbara Stanwyck was in it, I didn't realize that.

 

The Third Man How have I gone through my 40+ years without seeing this? Wow what a great movie. The perfect Saturday afternoon matinee black and white film noir.

I’m sure many are aware of the plot, American writer Holly Martins arrives in post war Vienna at the request of his friend Harry Lime, but as soon as he goes to see him he’s told that Lime died after being run over by a car. He goes to the funeral and gets picked up the British military police, who tell him that Lime was a racketeer. What follows is Martins speaking to all of Limes associates who were with him on the day of the death and at the accident, and who was the mysterious third man seen with Limes body at the scene? As time goes on he believes that Limes death wasn’t an accident and someone wants to prevent him finding out the truth. All the while he’s juggling his loyalties with Limes girlfriend and the British military police, leading to huge twist halfway through.

I can’t believe how good this film is, firstly the score is strange and haunting, I’m not sure of the instrument, some kind of folk guitar but it makes for a really unsettling feeling at times as it builds to a crescendo.

The cinematography is fantastic, lots of close ups of the locals makes for a feeling of being watched and everyone looking suspicious of Martins, plenty of odd camera angles too with the camera at a slanted angle makes this stand out as something different.

The location in Vienna is amazing as it’s still a city recovering from the war with lots of bomb damage, some of the shots they got in the streets and the lighting they used is amazing, the final chase scene in the sewers was a great climax to the film. The use of shadows is the best I’ve ever seen in a film, it adds so much to the atmosphere in the chase scenes around the cobbled alleys of the city and in the aforementioned sewers.

The performances are all top notch, it even feature 2 actors who played M in Bond. The leads are excellent.

The story is riveting.

I can’t say enough good things about this. I put it on again as soon as I’d finished watching it.

 

Yep, a top classic.

 

LBJ (2017)
It was a good movie. Not a great movie; but not a bad one either. Just a good movie. Woody Harrelson obviously had some heavy makeup on; and it still seemed very inauthentic. It was a relatively short movie. You'd assume that a movie about LBJ would cover both the highs and lows of his presidency; but it barely touched the surface. It begins with the Kennedy assassination; with several flashbacks of LBJ both as Senator and VP with Kennedy. I guess the main point of the movie was to show how the Southern Democrats did a complete 180 on the party upon the passage of the Civil Rights Bill.

 

Just got back from seeing Annihilation. It's not gonna be everyone's cup of tea but it's definitely my type of movie (pretty sure I said this exact same thing about Ex Machina....Alex Garland knows what I want I guess ). The last 15-20 minutes in particular were great.

 

The Front Page. The Criterion blu-ray of His Girl Friday also came with a restored version of this previous adaptation of the same play. It lacks Hawks’s twist of turning the Hildy character into a woman. While I thought that wouldn’t matter too much going in, given how perfunctory the actual romantic reconciliation is in HGF, it turns out that it’s mostly just an employer/employee relationship, lacking the personal intensity and zip of the Grant/Russell relationship and pushing the editor much more to the side. It’s still funny and full of great patter, including some amusing pre-Code double entendre, but it’s clear from this just what a great job the remake did of punching it up and taking the dialogue up to a zany, zippy, rapid-fire eleven with a much stronger dynamic. I liked the energy of this take as well, though, and Milestone got in some great, showy shots and interesting cuts. Without HGF it’s a great, dark comedy; but since HGF exists it mostly just shows what an insanely high level that movie was working at, that it somehow managed to top this.

 

Is there an accompanying power ballad by Patsy Cline ?

I'm among the apparent minority that isn't in love w/Cameron's take. I found it to be a technically impressive, but turgid melodrama.

James Cameron: "I'm sorry I couldn't hear you. I was over here polishing my Oscars. Oh well, time to go swim a few laps though my giant vault of cash. Cheerio!".

No surprise there've been a whole host of films about the tragedy, but I was shocked to learn a few went into production less than a month after it sank! Saved from the Titanic is believed to be the first dramatization about the story, starring actress Dorothy Gibson, who had survived the sinking. It debuted less than a month after the events. Comig in at a lean 10 minutes (standard for the time) it's believe to be lost. Gibson's life thereafter is interesting, but sad.

There was also a German film titled In Nacht und Eis (In Night and Ice). It began filming within a month of the sinking and debuted three months later. It clocked in @ just over 30 minutes, which was epic for the time. It was believed lost until 1998. It's now available to watch on YouTube.

 

I've never loved Cameron's Titanic myself. It's not bad, I just don't love it or particularly like it. Looks great, some thrills and chills, but I was never blown away by it, not even the first time I saw it.

James Cameron: Excuse me while I dive to the bottom of the ocean because my life is dope and I do dope ****.

Tbf I haven't seen it probably since before 2000, when I was right in the middle of puberty.