Amph What was the last movie you saw?

No stakes! Doc's gonna friggin die!

I'm hoping to watch it tonight for the first time in a while; I really liked that it embraced a genre and TBH, it's probably one of the best Westerns of its time anyway... I think Zemeckis really wanted to make one by the looks of it. It's lovingly rendered, not like Favreau's attempt.

 

Oh, I'm jealous; I haven't seen it yet! But this review has me salivating even more than I already was. Fassbender's a perfect cast and Cotillard is a good choice as well. Can't wait.




Mistress America (2015) – Noah Baumbach

You’re funny because you don’t know you’re funny.

I know I’m funny. There’s nothing I don’t know about myself. It’s why I can’t do therapy.

So deeply negative was my experience of Baumbach’s last film, the cranky, preachy While We’re Young that even with the leavening presence of Gerwig, star of Baumbach’s best and most affectionate film, Frances Ha, I was a bit worried about this movie. No need. From now on Baumbach should really only be allowed to make movies that he co-writes with Gerwig. She provides something special to his films, a particularly light, but brilliant, ascent of hope and affection.

But this film is, thankfully, not just a glorified remake of Frances Ha. It has its own axes to grind. Lola Kirke plays Tracy, an awkward college freshman who meets Gerwig’s Brooke in New York City. The two become friends and soon Tracy has been sucked into Brooke’s insane world. While Frances Ha had a certain beauty in its worldview and in the way it viewed Frances’ journey for a place in this world with hope, Mistress America is much more about a purposely rootless person. It’s obvious pretty early on that Brooke won’t be getting that quiet moment of contentment, that moment of maturity beginning, that Frances gets at the end of her movie. If Frances is rootless and searching for a place to be, Brooke is rootless by choice and desperately so, moving at the speed of light, frantic out of fear that if she stops to think for longer than ten seconds that she’ll come to some realizations about her life, realizations that she’s desperate to outrun.

But all that makes this feel like less of a comedy than it is. It’s actually maybe Baumbach’s straight up funniest film, a kind of modern day riff on the screwball comedy. There’s a lengthy period in the film where Brooke and Tracy journey to the country to visit an old rival of Brooke’s and that sequence just builds into this bizarre, highly energetic farce, of new characters popping in and two people dashing out that door and three people saunter in this one. It’s fast, witty and absolutely hilarious. The script has a ton of great lines and Gerwig’s performance is, as always, perfection. Lola Kirke is really, really great as well; it could easily be a performance that’s overwhelmed by Gerwig’s manic energy, but it isn’t. Kirke plays the character perfectly, all awkwardness and quietness. And Kirke is an actress to watch; I had no idea while watching this film that she played the backwoods hick Amy encounters in the Ozarks in Gone Girl – the characters couldn’t be more different and she was great at both of them. Also of note is the very funny Heather Lind, as Brooke’s old enemy, the neurotic, wide-eyed, twitchy Mamie-Claire. But enough, I guess; it’s a movie that just fires on all cylinders. Like Frances Ha, it’s a character piece that’s also a clever, often hilarious comedy, packed with great moments and quotable lines. Performed to perfection, executed flawlessly, sharply written and more than just a rehash of Baumbach’s last pairing with Gerwig, Mistress America is a masterpiece. 4 stars.

tl;dr – perfectly performed, sharply written and flawlessly executed, Mistress America is the rare character study that succeeds as a hilarious comedy. 4 stars.

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You seen it yet, epic?

 

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For

 

Independence Day.

 

Spiritual Boxer (1975) The awesome opening 8 minutes of 'real' spiritual boxers performing for the Empress Dowager (just before or during the Boxer Rebellion) is one of those Shaw Brothers scenes that has not left my memory since I first saw a crude version on Youtube two-three months ago. This film is ultimately another good natured, somewhat goofy kung fu movie about a charlatan spiritual boxer (Wang Yu) and the fine messes he get into. Lin Chen-Chi is his lovely lady sidekick and what WY lacks in acting ability, she makes up for in spades. I've liked Wang Yu in only two films, most times he makes me want to skip over his scenes completely. This film is no exception. If director / fight choreographer Lau Kar Leung was attempting to tackle the theme of belief and gullibility here, it didn't quite work. I wish the scriptwriter and Lau would written Wang Yu's charlatan attempting to become a real spiritual boxer and join the opening sequence trio. They could still tackle beliefs and faith with some safe humor and a little satire, and Wang's character would have been a lot more interesting rather than just another con trying to pull the wool over locals' eyes.

Ah well. The opening is worth everything to me, including a double dip purchase-wise.
A 7 for that awesome quasi-mystical, fun opening and 2 for the rest of the film.

 

I am currently watching an HBO movie, 1998's Pentagon Wars



Oh god…I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Both seems to be the most reasonable answer.

 

I watched the Dolph Lundgren He-Man movie the other day. I was thinking it would be so bad it was good, but it turned out to be not bad at all. I was totally entertained.

Notes:

Evil Lyn looks like Saavik from Star Trek II. Teela looks like Saavik from Start Trek III.

Rampant product placement from Fender - lots of guitars and amps, some Rhodes keyboards, a Rogers drumset. I used to have a Rhodes Chroma Polaris synth like the main guy character plays in the gym. I threw it in a dumpster. Also, somebody snuck a Peavey amp into that gym scene.

Man-At-Arms and Teela observe a couple making out. M-A-A to T-La: "I was doing that before you were even born!"

I think the henchman with the big '80s hair has more lines than He-Man.

Reptilian dude Sarod is the coolest looking henchman, so naturally you want to eliminate that guy immediately and let goofy ass Blade hang around all movie.

Courtney Cox has some seriously wholesome bedroom attire.

 

Just finished the 220 mins full version of Kingdoms of Heaven.

Overall I think it was fine, not as good as LotR. Most of the cast were really nice other than Orlando Bloom. I don't think his acting could handle such a role nor did he fit the characters. Eric Bana would have been a much better choice.

 

More Liam Neeson is always good.

We can still get hoverboards on time, we still have a few months!

Make it happen, Obama.

 

WOW! That was full on Emperor Palpatine.

EDIT: Apparently Skeletor is Frank Langella's favorite role and boy does it show. He's clearly having a ball.

 

Yeah, it really humanized him. You could argue that BTTF3 is as much Doc's movie as it is Marty's, and I find his arc much more satisfying than Marty's struggles with being thought a chicken.

Love BTTF3 BTW. Original is perfect, second is fun but flawed, the third has the most heart and ends it on just the right note.

Amen to that. Most actors of his caliber in a role like that would simply ham it up. Instead Langella said "I'm gonna take your checkers and play chess with them.".

Yeah, director Gary Goddard has talked at length about how the studio slashed his original budget late in the pre-production process, forced Lundgren on him etc. There are all kinds of interesting tid-bits about this movie. - A young boy named Richard Szponder won a contest to have a cameo in the film, ultimately made up and cast as "Pigboy", which has made him a bit of a celeb amongst the Gen-X nostalgia site crowd. - There was going to be a very low budget sequel to be directed by B-movie schlockmaster Albert Pyun, but it was abandoned. The studio then used the costumes and sets already built for the Pyun helmed Jean Claude Van Damme flick Cyborg.

Yeah, he always talks about it fondly and enthusiastically. This, along with his performance, have made him a God amongst MOTU fans. Kind of ironic, given that posted clip .

Army Of Darkness (1993) - One of the most quotable movies of all-time, this incredibly efficient and joyous romp rests solely on the mighty chin of the one and only Bruce Campbell. - 8/10

 

Kids .

We know Langella would be up for it! Unfortunately, they can't even seem to get this new MOTU live-action movie off the ground. It's been passed from one writer to another, one director to another and even one studio to another.

 

That was probably from when Mattel was calling the shots, because early on Mattel was giving the filmmakers some rather draconian mandates, like they couldn't have He-Man kill bad guys, etc., but then half way through filming the toy line was starting to decline and Mattel was like, "**** it, do whatever you want or think you need to do to make this film a hit".

 

Red-Headed Woman (1932) – Jack Conway

So, we’re in the hey-day of Pre-Code Hollywood and here’s one of the movies that was very influential in getting the Code enforced. In it, Jean Harlow plays a woman that gains wealth, power and a great deal of satisfaction apparently from sleeping around with almost every named male character in the movie. It’s the first movie I’ve seen with Jean Harlow and, um, she has not aged well. She’s often really shrill and annoying and just plain bad, really. And the script does no one any favors; it’s filled with just stupidity after stupidity and it climaxes when a character who has never shown any violent tendencies before pulls out a gun (that they just happen to be carrying, I guess, despite their non-violent tendencies) and just starts ******* blazing away. At that point, the movie had basically broken my will and I just started laughing hysterically. At not even ninety minutes, this movie was painfully interminable. Avoid this one at all costs. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen; a non-stop parade of stupidities and annoyances. If it isn’t entirely without merit, it’s about as close as it could come. ½ star.

tl;dr – painfully bad performances, especially from lead Jean Harlow, and an idiotic script; eighty minutes, but seems eternity; one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. ½ stars.

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Yup, agreed.

Back to the Future Part III (1990)
Dir. Robert Zemeckis

Rousing, light fun with a really wonderful performance from Christopher Lloyd. I also neglected to mention in the other ones how much fun Thomas F. Wilson is in these as well. As mentioned previously, I think Zemeckis and Silvestri and Dean Cudney all really took to this setting and they make a very genuine, hearty sort of western with atypical characters but a welcome sense of familiarity at the same time. It's a great wrap-up to a great series of films, and you don't really feel as though you need "more" from them. Also props to Steenburgen who is a very organic addition to that universe and critically has good chemistry with Lloyd.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)
Dir. Robert Zemeckis

Zemeckis's true masterpiece and one of the great films of the 1980s. I can't get over how savvy the casting of Bob Hoskins is - get the "toughest" guy in Hollywood at the time who you could believably have as a gumshoe and put him in a truly insane, daffy world - it's the beating heart of the picture and without it it'd be a technically impressive experiment, nothing more. I suppose in retrospect this is kinda the swan-song for genuinely, ruthlessly, gloriously un-PC lunatic animation (although one demerit might be that there's simply not enough Mel Blanc in there) before the great Disney Rennaisance and before cartoons really had to be, well, nice. I'll sound like a broken record but Christopher Lloyd is again really exceptional, the total antithesis for Doc Brown and really one of the most unpleasantly malevolent villains you could have - the reveal at the end is the stuff of nightmares. Also I've never felt so sorry for a shoe.

 

Mad Max

 

Revenge of the Corpse (1981) Made at the beginning of the Chinese ghost / hopping vampire boom, this Sun Chung film about a wrongly murdered constable's afterlife revenge gets unintentionally funny once he comes back from the grave. As per usual with Sun Chung, you see how awful people can be to each other (in this case, a scheming wife and the constables' associates want to bump him off so she can run off with her lover and the town can be lawless.) I suppose I was expecting something as unnerving as Human Lanterns and instead got something more akin to the goofy ghost / hopping vampire stuff (although nowhere near as hilarious as Mr. Vampire.) While it's now the worst Sun Chung film I've seen, I had fun. Lo Lieh, Chan Shen and Pia Piao are having way too much of a good time with a really crappy script. People may rag on The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (which I love), but that's because they haven't seen this goofy bit of ghostly Shaw Brothers hijinks. Strangely, this was Sun Chung's biggest hit. Figures. 0 for the film, but 5 for the escapist belly laughs starting at the 45 minute mark.

 

Lethal Weapon 3: Retirement/aging uncertainty and bonding are at the core but the series continues getting more comedic. There are a couple of incidents and action sequences that start by the leads coincidentally being nearby, with the then-topical gangs and guns subject shoehorned into the movie. The bad guys don't stand out and Leo Getz's part is forced. My favorite of the series is the second one, which I saw before seeing the first one.

 

Phoenix (2014) – Christian Petzold

Speak low, my darling, speak low
Love is a spark lost in the dark

In Phoenix, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps seeks to rebuild her life in post-war Germany and also discover the truth about her husband: did he betray her to the Nazis or not? I’m just going to tip my hand here; this movie is unbelievably great. This movie is a full-on classic for all time. Okay? Nina Hoss is phenomenal in the lead role; she’s been disfigured in the concentration camp and received reconstructive surgery – she looks like herself, but not herself if that makes any sense and this is symbolic in a big, big way of her attempts to journey back to being the woman she was before the war. That woman is, in a way, lost forever, but if she is gone forever who is this woman living inside her body? Is there a way for her to reclaim anything of her identity or has she been forever and irrevocably altered by the war? Playing into this incredible drama/mystery is her husband and he’s played, in another astoundingly great performance, by Ronald Zehrfeld and the film makes him so much more than he might have been. When the film begins, it seems that his fate is to be a binary character: was he true to his wife or did he betray her? But as the movie unfolds, Zehrfeld lets us see the man behind that question and we begin to understand his struggle as well, in a strange way a struggle that is somehow both like his wife’s and the exact opposite; he’s deeply torn between his desire to recover what he’s lost in the war and his desire to hide and forget that past. The plot has some great twists – this movie isn’t fast-paced or anything, but it’s still a kind of sedate thriller, a film where I was literally swept up with the characters in a story that, and this is a real rarity these days, I had NO idea about where it was going. It’s more than a bit reminiscent of Vertigo in ways that I won’t spoil (and, by the way, don’t watch the trailer as it does spoil one really great plot twist that comes early in the film, but is still so good that you really should let it catch you by surprise). But it’s testament to this film’s greatness that the comparison to Vertigo isn’t ludicrously one-sided. This film too is a classic, an unforgettable meditation on memory, identity, recovery, the wounds we bear and the lies we tell to hide those wounds. I really cannot recommend this movie highly enough; at the time of this writing, it is not available in Region 1 DVD or Blu-Ray, so if you missed it in the handful of theaters that it played in (once again, thank Christ for my local arthouse theater) then you’re out of luck for a bit if you live in America. It’s really an absolutely perfect movie, so put it on your list and prioritize it once it’s out where you live. It’s an atmospheric noir homage, a twisted psychological thriller, a deep character study and I simply can’t heap enough praise on the final scene, which will . . . well, I can’t even, a couple of weeks after seeing the movie, begin to sum up my emotional reaction to the scene. That should speak to the depth and complexity of this film. It’s an absolute must-see, as much a must-see as any film of this year. 4 stars.

tl;dr – beautiful noir thriller about prison camp survivor is slow, methodical with psychological cues from Vertigo, but it has its own things to say about identity, recovery & memory. 4 stars.

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It is stunning. Kurzel really makes full use of the cinematic medium, sticking close to the story and text (albeit abridged) but adding so much that could only be achieved in film. The choice for Birnam Wood was wonderful. I believed every word spoken.

You put it well with "Macbeth's madness". I haven't watched other film versions, but that madness felt more pronounced here than in the play, and Lady Macbeth's influence wasn't quite the same (though this does not diminish her as a character, and Cotillard is excellent). The explicit depiction of some things that might otherwise be imagined definitely adds to this - not to mention the relentlessly bleak visuals and score.