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

Odds Against Tomorrow. In this racial-issues noir, disgraced ex-cop Ed Begley puts together a team to rob a bank: hot-tempered, violent, virulent racist Robert Ryan and laid-back but proud gambling addict Harry Belafonte. Racial sparks immediately fly, leading to a wonderfully grim, dark-joke ending. It’s an excellent film all around. Belafonte is cool but wound up underneath, and Ryan is just magnificently poisonous. Robert Wise’s direction is fantastic, creating a gorgeous, jazzy film with the beautiful crisp, clear, luminescent look of the best black-and-white cinematography. It’s just a pleasure to watch.

 

Son of the South

About Bob Zellner's involvement with the SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement. It was good.

 

Robert Ryan, for a notably liberal guy, is remarkably great at playing vicious racists. Or just vicious thugs in general.

 

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)
The multi-talented Danny Kaye is at his comedic best, playing the hapless daydreamer with delusions of adequacy. Virginia Mayo has great chemistry as the glamorous girl of his dreams, and plays a fine straight man to his antics. Boris Karloff uses his image for hilarious self-parody. The Goldwyn Girls do what they do. But it's all about Danny, especially in the dream sequences, which are fearlessly ridiculous. As for the airplanes, they were appropriately and eye-rollingly fake, which was perfect for this film.

Pocketa pocketa pocketa...

 

"Himmel! It's Walter Mitty! I'm a lost man."

 

"Could use a little more blood on the axe."

 

Framing Britney Spears


In an emoji:

I found Framing Britney Spears quite interesting on several different levels. One of course, she's a pop icon and she did leave an indelible mark in the late 90s and early 2000s. Secondly, the documents does provide some behind the scenes footage and insight to the rise and peak of Britney Spears. And the documentary features certain the aspects of a conservatorship; how it's put into place and how it's removed.

The documentary opens with a motely crew of Britney Spears fans ranting and rallying to #freebritney. Yes, it was hard to take these fans seriously in light of other protests and riots that have occurred over the past year, but they do have passion, misguided as some may think it is.

 

I don't remember where I saw that movie the first time; maybe it was on TV somewhere - I had seen Kon's Tokyo Godfathers and own the DVD but wasn't really familiar with his other work. Then a few years later the IFC Center in New York City held a special event showing animated feature films and I went to see it on the big screen. I described it to my FB friends and family as, "think of the DeCaprio movie Inception on heavy acid". Aside from the visuals and mind-bending story, the soundtrack is pretty catchy. Just don't ask me what it means.

Spoiler: Meditation Field

 

I bought Meditation Field off of iTunes. I didn't even realize the composer also worked on Satoshi Kon's Millenium Actress.

 

Poltergeist

One of the few horror films that can be both frightening and heartwarming at the same time, achieving this with a PG-13 rating and with no deaths or gore effects surprisingly. The formula of a normal family haunted by specters and the medium and her ghost busters rolling in is practically perfected in this film. Zelda Rubinstein is also a complete gem in this movie, excellent casting there.

 

Judas and the Black Messiah

About the FBI using William O'Neal to infiltrate the Black Panthers to take down Fred Hampton. It was good.

 

True, missed the edit window on that as I just remembered that scene.

 

John Wick 3.
It's good action, but I liked the first 2 better. Unlikely franchise with some very creative/stylish gunplay. Keanu just gets better with age.

 

Tomb Raider (2001)
That was mindless. About as interesting as watching someone else play a video game. Lara Croft was totally unlikeable, and Angelina Jolie played the whole movie with maybe one and a half facial expressions. How did this do well enough at the box office to get a sequel?

 

It would probably be more fun watching someone play the ps one Tomb Raider.

 

Solaris. A strange sci-fi journey into the psyche, this is the kind of film I’d like to like much more than I did. It’s got an intriguing premise, with a psychologist sent to evaluate the tiny band of scientists on a space station over the titular planet, where the sentient ocean is driving them mad by incarnating their dreams. This is interesting material, and the Tarkovsky goes for an arty, rhythmic approach that could work, but it feels like he goes too far. The end result is glacial and opaque, a film that drags itself out endlessly but seems to pack what little it has to say into only a few conversations. This is exacerbated by the film having no sense of urgency or interest in itself. The lead trudges through the film with dead eyes; he’s supposed to be profoundly affected by the planet’s facsimile of his dead wife reappearing in his life, but the actor is just sleepwalking with minimal reaction to everything; no emotion ever seems to reach his face. The wife is fantastic, an apparition becoming increasingly human, but she’s the only thing in the film with any life. The other two scientists are all over the place and feel more like devices than characters, stumbling in and out of the film to deliver unprompted monologues. I really want to like it, but it’s just too lifeless, plodding, and disjointed for me.

 

Did you see the Soderbergh remake with George Clooney?

 

Nope. I remember it being poorly received, but I wonder if a tighter remake wouldn’t have been better.

 

Alone in Berlin (2016)
Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleesan star in this true story about an older couple who after having received news of their only son being killed in the fighting for Germany, take it upon themselves to engage in an act of resistance in leaving cards with anti-fascist sentiments on them. I didn't even know anything about the movie at all; but as I browsed on Netflix for movies to watch tonight I saw that this one was leaving the channel tomorrow so I figured I might as well catch it. The movie was all right; it kind of dragged for awhile until the plot picked up and you can understand what was going on. The movie takes place in early 1940s Berlin, and all Germans speak fluent English and yet the resistance cards and all other printings in the movie were in German. Just strange to me.

 

The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

This had been on my I'll-get-around-to-watching-it-someday-list for a while, and I finally did. It opens quite charmingly; Tintin is being drawn by a street artist, who is made to look like Hergé. I thought this was a nice touch. After that, though, the thing becomes a mess.

I don't know what ppl unfamiliar with the comics thought of this, but I didn't like it at all. It was a weird mixup of "The crab with the golden claws" and "The secret of the Unicorn" (with, for some bizarre reason, a bit of Bianca Castafiore thrown in); all they needed to have done was stick to the page and they'd have been fine. But nooooooo, they needed to mix-things-up-for mixing-things-up's-sake. Worse yet, every 3-5 minutes, a weird, unexciting action sequence was interspersed (with completely generic, uninspired action-chase music). Some of these action sequences reminded me of the barrel fiasco from the "Hobbit" movies.

The film's oddest decision (to my mind) was to take a character from the book who appears on 3 or so pages--an at first seemingly suspicious character who turns out to be completely innocent and then becomes a victim himself--and turn him into the story's major villain. Also, something about Haddock's family being "cursed."

Read the comics. Or watch the old animated cartoons.

 

Take a Giant Step. Well, that was amazing. A 1950s film with an almost all-black cast would be remarkable enough, but this film is an absolute knockout. It follows an excellent young Johnny Nash as a black teen living in a white neighborhood who’s expelled after blowing up at a racist teacher. He argues with his loving but hilariously feisty grandmother and kicks around town, trying to avoid his parents (allowing him to deliver the all-time classic line, “Excuse me, but are you ladies prostitutes or something?”). He’s struggling with the typical issues of teenagers — feeling like he doesn’t fit in, longing for a girlfriend, clashing with his parents, trying to grow up too soon, trying to avoid growing up, wanting respect — all exacerbated by the shadow of racism, by having to negotiate a society where he’s made to feel different, where his parents deliver conflicting messages to take pride in himself and to keep his head down. The film is an incredibly powerful, brilliant exploration of all these issues, with spectacular dialogue and great performances. An absolute classic that everyone should see.

I recorded this off TCM a couple months ago; I think I saw they’re showing it again soon. Don’t miss it.