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

Twisters
Started out great, faded a bit, still a good movie. Not as good as Twister, but still a fun ride. I get a little tired of the "guy starts out as a complete jerk; then becomes a slightly lesser jerk and woman falls for him" trope. Could argue that was Han/Leia but was much better done there.

 

With all due respect to Harry Potter, "The Raven" shows what a wizards' duel should look like.

 

Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron (2024)

A feature documentary from NHK available on MAX. There's been several documentaries over the past decade or so following the legendary mastermind behind Studio Ghibli; this is the latest one. As with the others, it doesn't just follow his work on the production of his latest films, but his personal life as well. If you don't know already, he's a very humble man. He can be seen walking around the neighborhood, passing schoolchildren who immediately recognize him and he invites them to his home on some occasions. I believe this is the first documentary to be filmed after longtime friend/rival Isao Takahata's passing, and you can see how it affects Miyazaki. There are other friends and colleagues who have passed during the time of filming, at they too impact his emotional state at times. He certainly is an interesting person, and this is a fine documentary that continues to show his humility.

 

Major League II. Comedy sequels don’t have the best track record, as running it back usually has diminishing returns. Diminishing returns are apparent here, but Major League II manages to tweak just enough to be a decent watch.

It opts not to fix what isn’t broken, bringing back as much of the cast as possible and going through the same underachievers-to-winners arc. But it puts a new twist on it, in that our players are now stars, but rather than stick with what worked, they’re all trying to reinvent themselves now that they’re in the spotlight, trying to be players they aren’t. It’s a decent idea, and helps disguise the fact that the film doesn’t have much else in the way of new ideas and does a clunky, undercooked job of developing its storylines.

The rough-and-tumble magic of the original is gone, but the film is at least still amusing and not stale. And, to no one’s surprise, Bob Uecker is the best part, still slinging zinger after zinger. Even if the rest of the film had sucked, it would have been worth it to see more of Ueck.

 

Saw this at the cinema and I can't remember anything about it, apart from old Arnie. I couldn't even tell you what they retconned. For me Terminator is dead in the water, the last 2 films were a disaster, I just don't think they know what to do with them.

 

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)
The history is really interesting (Doss was obviously a remarkable man), but I honestly never got properly pulled into the story. It’s a common issue for me with films based on real events.

 

Caught up to Mickey 17. Absolutely delightful. I was trepidatious after all the release date shuffling and Parasite is a hard act to follow, but this is definitely a great film in its own right. Pattison really knocks it out of the park in his dual role as Mickeys 17 & 18. Mark Ruffalo is a joy to watch as a bloviating politician/cult leader (where do these filmmakers get their ideas?) and Naomi Ackie, who really impressed me in Blink Twice last year, gives another fantastic, scene-stealing performance. It's very funny and ultimately very pointed and really got me invested in the fate of its characters. The ending made me tear up.

Also, the creature design here . . . fantastic. And this is a perfect example of how to use CGI. There was a moment here that literally made my jaw drop it was so awesome. CGI has been so bad to mediocre for so long that I can't even recall the last time that happened. Bong's definitely a visionary.

 

I thought Terminator 3, although mediocre, was better than Dark Fate.

 

Eight Men Out. The story of the Black Sox scandal, with a great ball team convinced to throw the World Series, is pretty noteworthy, and Eight Men Out puts together a strong cast to tell it. But it settles in to tell it in a rather unremarkable style, a straightforward historical drama that asks for sympathy for a few players who knew about the fix but played hard anyway. It’s a respectable but plodding, unengaging drama.

 

Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. Robert Mitchum is such a raw, earthy actor — cooping him up on a deserted island with a nun sounds like the setup for a dirty joke. But Mitchum taps in to his more restrained, stoically manful side and gives a great performance in this really solid John Huston drama.

Mitchum plays a stranded Marine who washes up on a Pacific island. Deborah Kerr is the other character in this two-hander (they’re the only two credited actors), a nun abandoned on the island in a botched evacuation. They survive together, making an unlikely but respectful odd couple. There’s romantic tension of course, but the movie is really just about them bonding and becoming friends, with Mitchum gallantly working to feed and protect Kerr even after the Japanese occupy the island.

Huston, Mitchum, and Kerr find in the film a sort of distillation of the traditional male-female dynamic, with these gender archetypes — the soldier and the nun — interacting respectfully and supporting each other. Kerr needs a protector, and just being around a woman makes Mitchum a better version of himself — politer, more conscientious, purposeful. It’s an old-school dynamic, but one that plays out very well. There’s a lot of charm in it, to go along with the wartime tension that increases when the island is occupied. It’s very well made by Huston, and Mitchum and Kerr are great.

 

Bedknobs and Broomsticks .

I've always had a bit of a soft-spot for this movie, it's always compared to Mary Poppins of course. Now it has to be said in the songs dept. its definitely the loser. But the football game is still great fun and the FX are surprisingly good, I'd say the matte paintings are probably the best ever, and the compositing is excellent, most films of the time had obvious matte lines, B&B doesn't, I don't know what process they used. And the practical FX are also very creative, in the finale all sorts of inanimate objects come to life and in some cases I've no idea how it was done, delightfully baffling.

Roddy McDowell is 3rd on the cast list and yet he's hardly in it, he has 2 brief scenes and barely says a word, I wonder if much of his part was cut.

 

The DVD I have has some of the restored scenes where he plays a bigger role, but it's still small. Some of the restored scenes you could tell they had to improvise with some of the voices (like an additional minute with the Bookman where Browne and the Bookman exchange an additional threat).

The biggest addition in my DVD is the inclusion of the song "Nobody's Problems For Me," sung by Eglantine Price after Browne leaves for the train station. Also, the Portobello Road sequence is longer and the order is different in a couple of places than the theatrical version.

 

Nosferatu (2024) Robert Eggers' style is perfect for replicating the feel of the 1922 "original" Dracula ripoff. I actually prefer the dreamlike quality of the first half as opposed to the more narratively conventional second half. The vampire's immortality taking the form of not eternal youth but cursed to be an almost zombie-like shuffling, decaying, decrepit corpse who struggles to breathe is a difference from Dracula I appreciate.

It wasn't a totally faithful adaptation, though. I was disappointed that there wasn't a long sequence of Orlok awkwardly carrying around his own coffin.

 

Anora.

It was a decent movie but I couldn't shake the feeling I'd seen movies with a similar plot dozens of times before.

 

Greta (2018)
Chloe Grace Moretz returns a handbag she’s found on a train to its owner, Isabelle Huppert, and the two strike up a friendship that sours as Huppert becomes obsessive. It’s a watchable thriller, not particularly deep but well acted by Moretz and Huppert. I was creeped out by Huppert’s Greta, she’s just believable enough to be scary.

 

Lilo & Stitch (2002)

Believe it or not, this is the first time I've seen this film. I figured with the live action adaptation around the corner, now's as good a time as ever to catch up with the times (not that I have any intention of seeing the LA film at the cinema). An alien mad scientist creates an invulnerable, destructive life form, and it escapes captivity and finds its way to Hawaii. The little girl, Lilo, lives alone with her older sister; who are just trying to make ends meet on rough times. All the while, the galaxy police (or whoever they're called) are on Stitch's tail. It's a nice family story, more geared towards the younger crowd. The charm of the film is found between the bond between Lilo and her older sister; the aliens (outside of Stitch) serve as more of the comic relief.

 

Dementia 13. You would not necessarily watch this and think, “This guy’s going to be one of the great directors of the 1970s,” but Dementia 13 is a pretty well-shot movie, with some effective thrill-and-chill scenes. The problem is that the rest of the film is a mess. Roger Corman let Francis Ford Coppola make the film as a quick way to burn some extra budget on a Psycho-imitative axe murderer flick, and it’s predictably schlocky. The acting is terrible and the script sucks, with a convoluted plot that doesn’t have much in the way of a protagonist, yet doesn’t really manage to surprise, either. There’s a glimmer of interest in the setup, and Coppola’s direction is effective, but the film can’t really work when the rest of it is cheap schlock.

 

Caged Heat. TCM paying a fairly extensive tribute to the late Roger Corman is rather amusing, especially when you get Ben Mankiewicz up there trying to class up presenting a women-in-prison sexploitation film. It is Jonathan Demme’s debut, but there’s nothing else all that significant about the film. It’s cheap schlock that doesn’t even have the charm of atmosphere and texture and silly gonzo outrageousness that clings to so many exploitation films. It’s just a rather dull women-in-prison film, with bad acting and a halfassed, nonsensical plot (and an over-reliance on irrelevant dream sequences). It has a couple points where it tries to set itself apart — Barbara Steele’s sex-phobic warden, a bit of a sense of humor — but there’s nothing really there. At the end of the day all the film really has to offer is ogling beautiful women, which is not nothing but it’s not enough to drive a feature film.

 

Sinners
Unapologetically tells exactly the story it wants to tell with such prodigious audacity I kept hoping for just a little more coda. I did not want it to end, but it ended exactly where it had to. There’s a new masterpiece in the vampire musical subgrenre.

 

Which theater was this?

 

Tombstone (1993)

Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer star as Wyatt Earp and his best friend Doc Holiday in this Western that follows the aforementioned Earp who along with his brothers and their wives journey to the town of Tombstone in the hopes of settling in to retire. But even as they want to leave their gunslinging days behind them, unlawfulness is never far away. The film starts off kind of slow; just establishing the mood and developing the characters with some mild dialog, but then it gets better and more entertaining about halfway through. Kilmer really shined in this film; it was hard watching his performance in this film so soon after his passing. Overall I wouldn't rank the film among my favorite Westerns (I'd definitely rank it below Unforgiven, for example), but it was still up there.