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

Didn't give any specifics. Questions are usually pretty reasonable, hard enough that if feels good to get it right, not so easy that it gets boring.

 

Alright well there's lots to choose from but if I'm going from the perspective of trivia night and thinking about what episodes they may get questions from I would say these are a good start:

Marge Vs. The Monorail
Last Exit To Springfield
Homer Goes To College
Bart Gets An Elephant
Who Shot Mr. Burns Part One and Two
Mother Simpson
22 Short Films About Springfield (would not be surprised if there's a question about Aurora Borealis)

And I would also second You Only Move Twice.

 

Lifeboat. Alfred Hitchcock was a great director, and he had a great concept here, with several survivors of a World War II sinking stuck on a lifeboat with the captain of the German sub that sank them. His mistake was relying on a script largely by John Steinbeck, which feels predictably one-dimensional and didactic.

There’s the usual character work around the edges, but the script keeps hammering the central conflict, which is the characters trying to figure out if they can trust the German captain, Walter Slezak, to work with them to survive. It’s an interesting dynamic, and the film comes to an atypical conclusion, which is that in wartime you can’t just trust the enemy and treat them like fellow humans, because war makes people hostile and fanatical, and you definitely can’t trust a deceitful Nazi.

The thing is, Slezak is obviously enough untrustworthy, but the characters in the film just keep ignoring it and making excuses for him. You could see it as a sort of commentary on pre-war treatment of Hitler, but this is a life-or-death situation and the behavior doesn’t ring true in this context. Steinbeck’s allegory, complete with characters’ positions on Slezak lining up by class, is pushed so hard that it negatively impacts the story.

I liked a lot of the character work, mostly between quality character actors, and thought the movie was decent overall. But I kept being annoyed at how clumsily the film handled its central conflict, and how its clumsiness limited Hitchcock’s ability to play with the tension.

 

Flow (2024)

The Academy Award winner for Best Animated Feature Film. A cat is left stranded by a flood in what I guess is meant to be a post-apocalyptic setting (no humans at all) and unites with a group of animals to set sail on an adventure. Thankfully there's no spoken language at all throughout the film; all you hear coming from the animals are their natural voices. What a concept for an animated film (looking at you, Disney). It's a visually stunning work of art for sure, and the sounds and accompanying score work beautifully. I can definitely see why this won the Oscar.

My only issue, which is a trivial one,

Spoiler

is trying to understand how several of the animals could so immediately grasp the concept of steering a boat rudder. Obviously that plays a part in some major scenes, but it shouldn't be something that comes natural. That's all. Nothing to get too crazy over though.

 

I think I would add Homer at the Bat as that's also a very trivia friendly episode between its large number of real life baseball players and iconic bits.

 

A Hatful of Rain. 1950s film adaptations of topical plays and teleplays are my jam. It’s a weird genre to love, but there’s just a consistent quality to them. In this case, Fred Zinnemann is adapting a play about drug addiction, and he does a great job.

We’re introduced to two brothers as their blustery, distant, jackass father Lloyd Nolan arrives for a visit. Korean War vet Don Murray and wife Eva Marie Saint are expecting. Anthony Franciosa is a bouncer at a bar and stays in the second bedroom of his brother’s apartment. Nolan barely attempts to hide that golden boy Murray is his favorite, and when Franciosa doesn’t have the money that Nolan came for, he graduates to open contempt. The money, however, went into Murray’s arm: he developed a morphine addiction when injured in the war. Murray, in fact, can’t hold down a job and his marriage is on the rocks, while the loyal Franciosa is the only person who knows about his addiction and is trying to help him out — but is also in love with Saint.

The film is a good, sympathetic depiction of the struggle with addiction, but it benefits greatly from the way it layers other elements on top of that. The fiercely loyal brotherly relationship contrasted with their dirtbag father’s favoritism, Saint’s struggle between the man she married and loves but who is distant and seems to be running around on her and the supportive brother who seems more like the man she married, the inversion in which Franciosa first seems like the screwup and Murray the golden boy until the reverse is revealed to be true beneath the surface. It’s intelligently written, well-acted, and wonderfully filmed by Zinnemann — who resented having to film in Cinemascope, resisting having to change the way he composed shots, but who did great work with it.

 

The Out-of-Towners. Jack Lemmon is the ideal protagonist for Neil Simon, playing high-strung and frustrated to great comic effect. Simon’s script follows a Midwestern couple who go to New York for an interview for a big promotion, only for everything that could possibly go wrong to go disastrously wrong. It’s silly fun, lots of jokes on travel and the big city. If many of the jokes are fairly standard stuff, they’re at least delivered well. It helps that instead of being the usual sympathetic protagonists, Lemmon is a babbling neurotic who immediately starts flipping his lid and keeps a running list of the names of everyone he’s interacting with so he can sue them later, and wife Sandy Dennis is a reasonable but meek, mousy nonentity who just sort of shrinks her way through the film. They create an unconventional, good comedy dynamic, and the fact that they’re the worst possible people to deal with all this chaos ups the humor. It’s not the best work Simon has done, but it’s a good time.

 

THE GIANT BEHEMOTH (1959)

As I watched this one, I was struck by how it managed to elevate itself, despite being extremely "by the numbers" and formulaic, by executing the formula pretty well. That kind of surprised me, as it is EXTREMELY "follow the standard formula". The director also made BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS and some have suggested he told the screenwriters to basically copy that - and the story IS extremely similar. Nonetheless, if you like this sort of thing, you'll enjoy it (a bit on why follows!).

A scientist is expounding on his theory that concentrations of radioactivity from nuclear tests will begin to reach dangerous levels as the chain of predation is followed - as in, plankton consume tiny amounts of radioactive particles, they are consumed by bigger life, which is consumed by still bigger, etc, etc, until the concentration of radioactive materials is at dangerous levels. This is an example of what I mean about the formula being done pretty well -- if that is pseudoscience it has a ring of plausibility to it; I am pretty sure I have heard similar claims about pesticides and dangerous chemicals in the natural environment. As tends to happen in such movies, his timing is spot on, as a fish kill washes up at a remote English fishing village, and a fisherman there is killed, evidencing radioactive burns. Uh oh.

A couple of things make this better than it has any reason to be...

For one, having a giant monster movie set in Great Britain, and London, is a bit of a novelty, given how often the setting is Japan. Apart from GORGO and KONGA, can't think of other examples.

For another, while the monster is at times portrayed with a pretty obvious model/puppet, it at other times is a stop-motion creation of the amazing Willis O'Brien (of KING KONG fame). The creature is very well done and there is just something about stop-motion that has a charm that CGI often doesn't duplicate (or even try to) -- the personality of the creatures, being communicated by the animators. The stop motion monster sequences here are terrific, if a bit "lower key" than the mass destruction of, say, Godzilla.

Worth a look? Yes, if you enjoy this kind of fare, especially for the (admittedly fairly brief) monster scenes towards the end. It moves along, hits all the right notes, and delivers a solid if predictable "giant monster" movie of the era.

 

Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtis, 1942) 4k

I was shocked, SHOCKED, to find that my partner hadn't seen this one, so I showed it to her. It's a movie about the importance of not being isolationist and about resisting fascism.

 

Was prompted by Val Kilmer's death to revisit Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Still holds up. Very funny and an interesting neo noir mystery is mixed in.

 

Gladiator II (2024)

Ridley Scott is back with a follow up to his Academy Award winning film glorifying the Roman Empire; this time the events take place some twenty years or so after the end of the original. A couple of familiar faces return; but for the most part you see new featured characters. If you've already seen the trailers, you'll have guessed that Denzel Washington has a big role to play. He plays.....well he plays Denzel Washington (that's really the best way I can describe this new character). Connie Nielsen reprises her role as Lucilla; daughter or Marcus Aurelius and mother to Lucious. The film opens up in a massive battle that isn't too well explained; and that's what I feel like this film suffers from - where you have to wait to get things explained to understand what's really going on. It doesn't carry the drama at all that the original film had. I saw the original Gladiator twice in theaters, and I really don't see ANY movies twice in theaters. This movie just suffers from the typical sequel trope of attempting to match and even one-up the original in almost every scene but that's where it draws you back. I know there's a bit of a history lesson to be told in these films, but you can't tell me Scott couldn't come up with Caesars who were more interesting than the twin emperors in this film. Phoenix's Commodus neither of them were, that's for sure. You're going to say that they were meant to be like that so that the real antagonist will get his time to shine (dum dum dummmmmmm....). Yeah, it was all too predictable. And the predictable parts would carry on in terms of who lives and who dies in the movie; if only by process of elimination. In a nutshell, I didn't particularly care for this movie and I'm glad that I waited until I could borrow the Ultra HD disk from my local library rather than having seen it at the cinema. Sure you can suggest it's fine for a popcorn movie. But in terms of drama with characters you can relate to and above all care about, this one's not for me. I'd watch the original back at the cinema three weeks in a row before caring to see this sequel again on the smaller screen.

 

New York, New York. Even the greats sometimes produce a dud. Especially when they’re drugged out of their minds. Martin Scorsese is going for this sort of tribute to the New York of his youth and the movies of his youth, with a self-consciously retro style, with this story of a troubled relationship. But the movie is a glacial, soggy, under-edited mess that just sort of drifts along, and crucially, it doesn’t really encourage investing in the story.

It’s got Robert De Niro as a saxophonist who gets into a turbulent, abusive relationship with singer Liza Minnelli, and they both get successful but drift apart. The problem is that the movie never really sells us on why these two are together. What makes De Niro so obsessed with Minnelli? What makes Minnelli so drawn to De Niro? De Niro is an egotistical, selfish, abusive, bellicose jackass without any redeeming qualities — not even his passion for his music really comes through as an appealing feature — and it’s impossible to root for him or even particularly care what happens to him. Minnelli is a doe-eyed nonentity who seems to exist mostly as a vehicle for De Niro’s obsession. I couldn’t care about such a thinly sketched character, either.

It’s a movie that doesn’t seem to know where it’s going or what it’s doing. It’s got the outline of this sort of relationship story, but the characters are underthought and the whole movie is a half-improvised mess that just sort of swirls around this unappealing, unconvincing, not particularly interesting lousy relationship. It’s not great work from Scorsese, but at least he’s got cocaine as an excuse.

 

There are films that we spot on the TV schedules and think 'I have to watch that', irrespective of how many times you've seen it. This weekend I spotted Outland and thought I'd record it. It must only be 6 months since it was last on, but I like this film so much that I watched it again over the weekend. Its High Noon in space with Sean Connery playing a marshall on a remote moons mining colony trying to stamp out the drugs trade. It becomes a race against time when he finds out assassins are due to land on the next shuttle. This is so gritty, with a look akin to Alien in the design of the mining facility. Funniy enough its a film I don't remember at all from the 80's and don't recall seeing it on TV until well into the 2000's. Well worth a look for any Connery fans out there who might not have seen it before.

 

I walked out of the Minecraft movie.

But my brothers enjoyed it; it honestly wasn't that bad, according to them.

I walked out after the first 10 minutes because I was weirded out.

Frankly, I regret walking out.

 

I couldn't even get through the trailer.

 

From this past weekend...

"Attack of the 50-Foot Woman" on Svengoolie this past Saturday. The abused, alcoholic wife of a total sleazeball gold-digger goes out driving in the CA desert, and meets up with a UFO piloted by a very tall alien. She escapes, reports what happened, and is publicly ridiculed when no traces are found. Her cheating jerk husband drives her back to the area to prove that she's crazy, only to meet up with the UFO & alien. She's grabbed by the alien, and he drives off. Later, she's found unconscious back home, and traces found nearby lead the local sheriff & the wife's faithful butler to the UFO, which quickly departs. Meanwhile, due to some sort of radiation exposure, the wife is now 50-feet tall...and out for revenge.
Surprisingly, Bert I. Gordon, who specialized in giant monster flicks, didn't make this one. It's generally OK, if you can stand the male chauvinist abuse the wife endures from nearly everybody (even the town's weaselly deputy) except her butler. That makes her later rampage pretty satisfying, though I didn't like the ending. The VFX are variable; some are OK and other shots use near-transparent superimposed shots. But I'm sure the main attraction for many viewers is the presence of female co-stars Allison Hayes and Yvette Vickers. Oh, and in a crucial scene, there's an apparent cameo by G.I. Joe.

And, last night, I went to a double-feature at Shankweiler's Drive-In in Orefield, PA. The first feature was the "Minecraft" movie. I know pretty much nothing about the game, and had only seen the trailer, so I went into this one wide open. It seemed more or less OK, in general. I was left a bit confused by the exposition-heavy opening minutes, wondering if there was an earlier "Minecraft" movie I wasn't aware of. After that, it seemed to settle into familiar territory. You've got your fantastic land accessed by magic, the magical object that must be located, the dark & terrible bad guys, the peaceful people under threat, and the heavy use of CGI. The characters were also pretty standard: clever mentor figure (Jack Black's role), outcast eccentric kid, more responsible older sibling, sassy African-American woman, and blowhard would-be hero. (That's Jason Momoa's role, and he seems to be trying to be Jack Burton, but the character is just not as cool.) I was a little surprised that one twist I was sure would happen didn't, but I could figure out the rest fairly easily. Again, it was OK, in general, but I'm not planning on seeing it again.

Actually, I was there for two reasons: to give Shankweiler's some business, and the second feature, my fourth viewing of "The Day the Earth Blew Up". (The last movie I saw four times during its initial theatrical release was "Solo", another underdog of a movie that I really enjoyed.) It's still a lot of fun, and I'm still noticing jokes I missed the earlier times I saw it.

And the trailers were for the new "Karate Kid" movie, the live action "How to Train Your Dragon" movie, and Shankweiler's upcoming revival showings of, respectively, "Harriet the Spy" and the first "Austin Powers" movie.

 

I haven't played Minecraft and haven't watched the trailer, but Mamoa on the film poster sold me. lol. I will wait until streaming though.

 

Not Just a Goof (2025)

The story behind the underrated "A Goofy Movie" film from Disney about the beloved character and a coming-of-age story involving his relationship with his son. It features archival footage discovered from videotapes going back 30 years ago as well as interviews with many of the crew behind it - both contemporary as well as archived. And yes, it does cover who Powerline was influenced by of course. It's an interesting BTS documentary on D+ right now.

 

Honestly, I think Ridley Scott's biggest mistake was not hiring you as a consultant.