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

The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion (2018)
Oh ****, if you like genre thrillers you have to see this. Genetic engineering, amnesia, bursts of violence... it's like The Bourne Identity and Push had a Korean love-child. Kim Da-mi gives a star-making turn as the young woman targeted by unscrupulous corporate forces.

I thought this was great and would recommend. If you're in the UK it's on All 4 in the Films section for the next 20 days or so.

 

Angel Has Fallen

action movie .

an action movie needs to be judged on its action , this was rubbish.

 

Ten Little Indians. A sixties adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic, it’s the kind of film you can tell is low-budget without it actually hurting the production — it doesn’t take much more than ten people and a mansion. The plot is one of those overly contrived but irresistible premises: throw ten strangers into a remote mansion on false pretenses, and then strand them after a recording accuses them all of murder, and let the resulting tension play out as they start dying one by one. You can certainly criticize its realism — I had to laugh at all the old British character actors puttering around as if they’re still on holiday while people drop like flies around them — but not its entertainment value. A thoroughly enjoyable staging of a neat little murder mystery.

 

The Last Blockbuster

Watched this on Netflix ironically. Apparently Blockbuster had an opportunity to purchase Netflix at one point. Wow, did they ever botch that deal.

Anyhow, it's an interesting documentary that has as its heart the survival of the very last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon where the owner runs it as a family business and has employed many of the young folks who live in Bend over the years.

It was rather sweet to see her shopping at big box stores to obtain new releases for her store; even going to costco to stock up on candy and popcorn for her concessions area.

Point being she is very dedicated and puts in extremely long hours to keep the store running. There is even footage of her taking apart old computers to salvage parts to restore her old machines.

It's also a sort of love letter to physical media collecting which I love.

In spite of the benefits and convenience of streaming and digital purchases; one can't help be reminded of what we've lost with the disappearance of nearly all the video stores. It was fun to go to them and browse and talk with people there about movies. Or even make it a date night, choosing a film with your significant other and then going home to watch together and stuff.

The Last Blockbuster is a good documentary that presents the facts well while also leaving you wishing there were still a few more places left to go and rent blu rays, DVDs, and tapes, rather than only streaming.

It's too bad it had to be either or as it were.

 

That one's been done to death since, although I did enjoy the miniseries And Then There Were None (2015). Great production values and they really ramped up the tension. The same basic premise was also used in the Renny Harlin flick Mindhunters (2004) starring Christian Slater and LL Cool J.

Bullitt (1968)
It's been about 15 years since I last saw this one, and the cinematography was really awesome for its time. Certainly no back-projections for the driving scenes. Because of the aspect ratio 1.85:1 rather than widescreen, it really filled our projector screen. The car chases looked much more impressive than they ever did on TV. I also vastly prefer the pacing of this one to, say, The Fast and the Furious, because it's quite slow at times and makes the chases pop out more.

 

Le Notti Bianche. Marcello Mastroianni plays a lonely newcomer to town who spends his night kicking around town hoping for something to happen, only to meet Maria Schell, a beautiful young woman who waits every night for the lover who left her with a promise to return in a year. Two lonely, shy, naive people strike up an awkward, hesitant bond, and of course the introvert Mastroianni falls for and is frustrated by the sheltered girl with her childlike obsession with the tenant who seduced her and left with an obviously empty promise. It’s a really vibrant film, an emotionally lush romantic fantasy set against the dreary backdrop of slummy Italian streets at night, following this fragile connection between two desperate loners with their emotions turned up to overwrought levels. The ending is so perfect, it’s almost inevitable: these naive romantics have gone through an emotional rollercoaster, and no one has learned a ****ing thing.

 

Substitute 'Florida teens' for 'old British character actors' and you have the pandemic!

 

That Charger wallows around those turns like a boat doesn't it? Cool cars though. And Steve McQueen is great in it.

 

I think it’s a classic story. Watched this version recently too along with the 1970s adaptation starring Richard Attenborough. However personally I prefer the 1945 version.


The Legacy saw this 1978 film pop up on one of the obscure movie channels and jumped at the chance to watch it again. I remember my dad renting this on vhs in the early 80s and I’ve never seen it since. It’s stars Katherine Ross and Sam Elliott as Maggie and Pete, an american couple who receive a $50,000 advance and a request to go to England for a job. Whilst taking a trip in the countryside they are involved in a crash with a local millionaire who offers to put them up for the night in his mansion. Little do they know that it’s all a set up, as unbeknownst to Maggie shes actually one of 5 other heirs to the millionaires satanic powers and his estate. Each of them have been summoned to the mansion and are gradually killed off in varying grisly ways until the last one remaining takes the legacy. Along the way Maggie and Pete try to get away but find all roads lead back to the mansion, they attempt to investigate the deaths, but the staff act bizarrely and no one seems to bat an eye lid at the murders. I’m assuming this ritual has been going on generations at the mansion. It’s got a lot of familiar faces in the cast and I’m not sure what this is supposed to be, I guess it’s trying to be a horror thriller. This scared me as a kid, watching it today for the first in over 35 years and it was ok, but I found Maggies change in character, from wanting to leave to becoming accepting of the legacy to be a bit confusing.

 

The irony on this one is that Blockbuster absolutely destroyed the local video store.

 

The New Mutants (2020)
Well now I can say I've seen the movie; just don't ask me particularly what I saw. It was about an hour and a half of hardly anything. For a theatrical film it was just beyond boring. It was like The Breakfast Club for Mutants. This would've made more sense as a made-for-tv flick on the WB.

 

This is true.

There's always a bigger fish as Qui-Gon said.

 

Bad Reputation (2018)
Now that was an awesome documentary I can't believe I never saw before. Joan Jett began her music career as a teenager in Hollywood in the mid 1970s with an all-girl band called The Runaways and then headlined The Blackhearts from the 80s onward. Over the next few decades she toured the world as well as influenced some of the biggest names in rock music in the 90s and 2000s. The film features a wide range of interviews and sound bites from Joan's own circle to brand names influenced by her like Green day's Billie Joe Armstrong and Miley Cyrus. It's on Hulu now.

 

Proxima 2019
Good performance by Ava Green as an astronaut who must leave her daughter for a year to go out into space. I enjoyed the family scenes more than the training scenes. Matt Dillon plays an astronaut, just no. I just couldn't buy that at all. Still worth watching.

 

Carry on Screaming I’m not sure if the Carry On series exported well out of the U.K. or not, but these films were staples on tv in the 70s and 80s and I watched all of them multiple times. For those that don’t know, they had pretty much a standard cast of actors who were part of the films playing different roles and there were all bawdy takes on historical events or gentle seaside postcard humour comedies. But this one was my favourite, a parody of the Hammer films of the time. It’s different from the rest as I think it benefits from not having the usual actors heavily featured, and instead stars Harry H Corbett (of Steptoe and Son fame) as the lead in his only Carry On appearance with a few of the regulars in supporting roles. Funnily enough it scared me when I was young, which is crazy when I watch it now. It’s a simple story, Dr Watt is sending his sinister creation Oddbod to kidnap women, the Dr then turns them into mannequins and sells them to clothes shops. It’s up to Inspector Bung (Corbett) and Sergeant Slobotham to investigate and put an end to his fiendish scheme. This has so many memorable quotes, characters and funny scenes and IMO it’s head and shoulders above the others in the series.

 

Gads, I love the Carry Ons and this one sounds great. Phil Silvers reached popular heights in the UK and starred in one; the cast members each tickled me, from Sid James and Hattie Jacques in the earlier ones to Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey throughout. Just wiki'd and discovered that 1981 heralded a Carry On Down Under for Australia, what a hoot that would have been if produced!

 

'Dracula' the 1979 version starring Frank Langella. I love this movie and I'd even go as far as saying that Langella is the second best screen version of the Count after Lugosi. The film indulges in( and in honesty probably created) some tropes that irritate vampire and horror fans. This is a hot blooded romantic and sexy interpretation of the Count. The thing that the movie gets right though is the characterization of our female lead Lucy played by Kate Nelligan. The character is portrayed as intelligent and loses none of her agency in her flirtation with the Count. Other films have tried this of course and it isn't surprising that this film was released just as Anne Rice was beginning her vampire saga. I still don't think anyone has been as successful as this film.

Aside from Langella and Nelligan the film has a rich supporting cast. An aging Laurence Olivier is Van Helsing but by this point in his career Langella's magnetism and screen presence overwhelms Olivier in the scenes they share together.

For a long time Director John Badham insisted that 'Dracula' only be released in a revamped version that muted the colors to give it an almost quasi black and white feel. The film was originally released with rich luscious color. It's odd that he preferred such an opposite. You couldn't get the original version on home video until just recently when Scream Factory released a new Blu-Ray release.

 

Yeah, that 1945 version is the best, if you're going for a kind of light-hearted take on the material, which sounds weird, but it works in that version. I will always love the nihilistic ending from the book more than the happier one from the play, but it's a great play taken on its own merits. I've been in a lot of local theater productions. And Then There Were None isn't the overall production I'm the most proud of (Death of a Salesman), nor did it feature my best acting (A Doll's House). But it was, no question whatsoever, the most fun I've ever had doing a show. I don't have a single bad memory of that production. I was Blore.



Nomadland (2020) – Chloe Zhao

One of the things I love most about this life is that there’s no final goodbye. You know, I’ve met hundreds of people out here and I don’t ever say a final goodbye. I always just say, “I’ll see you down the road.” And I do.

I’m just really on board with what Chloe Zhao is doing as a filmmaker. I loved The Rider, her last film, and with this one, only her third feature, she’s crafted a true masterpiece of cinema, chasing the ghosts of the American Dream as they live out their lives on a never-ending road that, hopefully at least, leads them to a measure of solace, if not exactly redemption. As Zhao examines the journeys of the souls who have either dropped out or opted out of the larger American society, she likes to place her camera sometimes far from her subjects, capturing the individual alone, dwarfed by wilderness; she also likes to place it painfully close, letting the faces of her subjects, often weathered, worn and craggy, fill the screen so that we can see every flicker of emotion, examine those faces like landscapes themselves, formed, like the topography of the earth, by the long, slow efforts of time and circumstance. This is really beautiful, visually, and allows for incredibly nuanced performances, but I think she’s also getting at something thematic.

Because I suppose the question of those who have stepped outside of “normal” society is always “Why?” What would lead a person to move into this strange nomadic existence? And Zhao seems to be saying that the reasons are both big picture and deeply personal. The brutal devastation of a wrecked economy can’t be overstated as a reason nor can an overall de-emphasis on the value of older individuals. So far, societal. But the reasons are deeper than that. There are, in fact, as many stories on the road as there are people and most of those stories are painful, filled with sorrow and regret. As she did in The Rider, Zhao blurs the boundaries of fact and fiction, using documentary style to capture a lot of the nomads as they are, real people, sometimes playing versions of themselves, at other times seeming to simply just be themselves, as much as anyone ever is, even in a documentary. But those faces will stay with you forever, as will the “performances” of the supporting cast whether it’s Linda May or Bob Wells or Swankie or Derek Endres. Not sure I’ll find an organic place to bring him up, so I’ll mention David Strathairn; feels like it’s been ages since I’ve seen him, but he’s as excellent as always. Swankie, a non-professional who’s never been in a movie before, comes damn close to stealing the whole movie with a magnificent monologue about coming to the end of her life and still having dreams.

And the film does have powerful lines of dialogue, but it’s a minimal script really. Zhao, I think, likes examining subjects who aren’t talkative, people who are experiencing deep emotions, but not really articulating them. In a way, Zhao’s films are about exploding the myth of the unfeeling stoic; the people in her movie don’t emote a lot or talk about their feelings, but their emotions are intense and profound, just as they are for most of us. In some ways, maybe Zhao is specifically talking about the emotions that are too deep for words. I know that’s my experience with her movies; I’m often moved in ways that I can’t explain. I cried a lot watching Nomadland and I wasn’t always able to put into words why; sometimes it was a moment as simple as, you know, Fern standing next to a massive tree. There’s an immensity to the world Zhao captures here that is just inherently moving to me. Also of note here is Zhao’s use of music. The film features the compositions of Ludovico Einaudi and, though I believe none of them were written for the film, they match the gorgeous visuals and the deep emotion of the film to absolute perfection.

But I guess it’s time to talk about Frances McDormand as I wrap up. I could have really started with her, I suppose, so central is she to this movie’s power. I’m a fan of McDormand when she goes big; I guess all I have to say to illustrate that is to say I actually love her performance in Three Billboards. But here she goes very minimal; she’s taciturn, often poker-faced, quiet but steely. But as the film progresses, we start to understand her and the things that drive her and the things she’s chasing. It’s a performance of such lived reality, such naturalism, that it’s downright brilliant and we may look back in decades to come and consider this her best work. I think I’m ready to make that declaration now actually.

Anyway, I’ve gone on at length here, even by my own standards, but this is a film I connected with deeply. I’m so glad we got this movie before Zhao got sucked into the MCU machine. How do I feel about that? Well, I’d much rather she was making another movie like this one, but I am intrigued to see if she can get some of her own personal touch into a blockbuster and, if she gets a good paycheck out of the deal, I’m fine with that. And one of the few jokes in the movie, or maybe it’s actually not, has Fern wandering past a deserted theater advertising The Avengers. But, as strange as it is to consider Zhao in the setting of a blockbuster comic-book movie, in one sense she’ll be right at home. She’ll be tackling a superhero group called the Eternals, but really that’s who she’s always been making movies about. The nomads . . . they just go on, don’t they? 4 stars.

tl;dr – beautifully written & directed, featuring a magnificent central performance, Nomadland is as emotionally devastating as it is understated and wonderful. 4 stars.

 

@Ahsoka's Tano

I quite enjoyed the Bad Reputation documentary as well. Joan Jett is awesome. I saw her live about 8 years ago and she killed it.

 

Nomadland is something I want to see. I find myself attracted to such a life. Being a Grey Nomad travelling through Australian caravan parks in a campervan.

 

That’s fantastic that you got the chance to act in it. I went to see a production of it that was touring the country back in 2015 which featured a lot of familiar U.K. stage and tv actors. It lends itself very well to being adapted for the stage, I’m not sure if that was in Agathas Christie’s mind when she wrote it, but it certainly comes across like it was.

 

The Incident. A great, fiery movie from the sixties, it follows a subway car full of people that’s suddenly taken over by two hoodlums on a bender. It takes its time first introducing us to the pair of thugs (including Martin Sheen in his screen debut), young hellraisers who feel impervious, able to get away with anything by intimidating ordinary people, and then to the various people boarding the train in neat pairs, each with various problems, almost all of them with at least one unsympathetic member, a real collection of New York types including Ruby Dee, Beau Bridges, Brock Peters, Thelma Ritter, and Ed McMahon. But after the long setup, everything takes a hard left turn when the hoodlums board and start harassing everybody on board, working their way through the crowd one by one, with an uncanny, animalistic instinct for seizing on their weak spots. It works as a sort of social study, the way everyone’s instinct to keep their heads down enables these two to terrorize and intimidate a whole carful of people. It’s a little stagey, but not in a bad way, and the tension just keeps building and building. Just a vicious, gripping picture, with a great cast knocking it out of the park.

 

Le Mans '66 a.k.a. Ford v Ferrari (2019) The story about how Ford decided to win Le Mans, to make them seem cool/sexy and get the youth to buy their cars, and how they created the car to do it with. With focus on a the Carroll Shelby, who is the boss of the project, and Ken Miles, the project's main driver and mechanic.

This is not really a racing movie, it's more about the creation of the car and the dealings the men on the ground have to do to get the men on the top to give them what they need to create a winning car.

This is a really good movie, with really good actors having good roles and having excellent chemistry. I highly recommend it.

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Le Mans (1971) Unlike Le Mans '66 is this a true racing movie, the movie's main character is not really any of the humans but the Le Mans race itself. Using actual footage captured during the 1970 race held the previous June this movie shows the race from all manner of angels and perspectives and spends time on just showing what people do when not watching the race.

I really liked it and recommen it but think it may not be for everybody.

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Captain Apache (1971) a western starring Lee Van Cleef as a Native American U.S. Cavalry officer who tries to find out why the lockal Indian Agent (who also was his friend) was killed and what his last words ment.

Beside the opening song and the the bad guy's welldressed twin bodyguards is this movie mostly forgatable.

 

The movie did not speak to me and it's not a way of life I'd be interested in living. I posted my thoughts on this movie back in the Golden Globes thread.
https://boards.theforce.net/threads...demy-awards-etc.50055598/page-2#post-57264014

 

Another great review!

However, I don't think it's fair to say that Chloe Zhao got "sucked into the MCU machine" since she was the one that put the word out that she wanted to make a MCU film as noted in this interview with Moonlight director Barry Jenkins for Variety:

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In the following interviewer, Zhao talks a bit about how much creative freedom Marvel gave her after she made the pitch for Eternals and how it's been an incredible process with with a smile on her face.


Kevin Feige calls Zhoa's pitch for Eternals movie the best he'd ever heard as noted in this January 26, 2021 article from RollingStone titled, "The Wanderlust of Chloe Zhao"

For for some additional articles that may be of interest, Chloe Zhao Says ‘The Revenant’ Is Her ‘Eternals’ Inspiration [Interview]