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

How could I forget Adam sanders run of films as well. @Havoc you makes great point about streaming, a load of stuff has been appearing on Netflix, light comedies that would probably have made the cinema in years gone by from people like the aforementioned Adam Sandler or Melissa McCarthy and even comedies featuring macho stars like the rock or Dave Bautista for example.

 

Jud Appatow and Seth Rogan had a run there a while back, but yeah, there hasn't been much comedy in the last 10 years. and we really could do with it.

 

Last genuinely great comedy I think I saw was Palm Springs and it went straight to streaming, though that was during the lockdowns. I really wanted to get to No Hard Feelings in theaters because it looked like a kind of raunchy, not-afraid-to-offend throwback, but I'm part of the problem: I didn't get to it, so when I do check it out, it'll be on Netflix.

Other great comedies of the last . . . ten years or so? The Jump Street movies. Hunt for the Wilderpeople was a knockout and I also liked What We Do in the Shadows, but Waititi seems to have exceeded his "best by" date, given that neither of his last two were any good. And . . . um, Toni Erdmann? Boy, what a weird list, but this is it for movies that have made me laugh out loud repeatedly in the theater (not counting some of the funnier MCU movies like Guardians and Ragnarok). All great theatrical experiences too, even Toni Erdmann which was at my local arthouse (you know, since it's a three-hour-long German comedy). Audiences having a lot of fun at all of those movies. I definitely think we need more good comedy in theaters.

EDIT: Kumail Nanjiani's movie, The Big Sick, was also a really good rom-com. Not as gut-bustingly funny as the ones I mentioned above, but consistently amusing. And that 9/11 bit was a massive laugh in my theater.

 

oh god

 

Conrack. Martin Ritt is a director with a lot of really great movies under his belt, but this isn't one of them. It's based on a book by Pat Conroy about his time teaching on a poverty-stricken South Carolina island, with Jon Voight as Conroy. It's the usual cliches of a teacher who cares bonding with his students and helping them grow, in this case overcoming the rock-bottom expectations and relative indifference of even their own principal, a black woman who sees the black kids in her charge as essentially hopeless. Voight is a sort of irreverent semi-hippie do-gooder who teaches his class casually by yammering about random topics like Babe Ruth and Beethoven and the glories of the uterus, making jokes that fly over their heads, teaching the kids football and how to swim, and taking them trick-or-treating for the first time. His affection for the kids comes through, but the film doesn't seem to have any clear idea about how his approach is actually benefiting them, what he's actually meaningfully teaching them, how he's improving their lives outside having an authority figure who actually engages with them. As understatedly stuffy superintendent Hume Cronyn says, Voight seems to be "just farting around," and this is one time in the movie he's right. It's an unfocused, unclear movie, stumbling earnestly but clumsily through uplift tropes without a clear idea of what to say.

 

A Haunting in Venice third of the Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot films. Poirot is seemingly retired in Venice, until an American author friend tempts him to go to a Halloween party and a seance at a home where a young woman recently committed suicide. Legend has it that it was once a childrens hospital where, during the plague, doctors locked them in and left them to die and stories say that the kids can still be heard and haunt the house. After the party the seance is held and the dead girl makes contact and is about to reveal how she actually died, but everyone is trapped in the house by a storm and when guests start dying in their midst its left to Poirot to solve their murders, solve the historic case of how the young woman died and also find out who made an attempt on his life in the house too.

The stories are much of a muchness - someone dies, everyone is the same place and their stories are picked apart until Poirot solves it, but they are so compelling I think. I've been a fan of the Kenneth Branagh incarnations of Poirot so far and I enjoyed this one too. The shots they get of Venice in the first act are beautiful, absolutely stunning and when the film moves to the party and seance it becomes very atmospheric. It sells the haunted house aspect with weird camera angles and jump scares, almost like a really old school 1960s/70s thriller with the camera work they were doing, but as the story unravels you realise why it does that. Overall a decent enough whodunnit, I'd happily take more of these.

 

Hangover Square. This gaslight noir features Laird Cregar as an Edwardian composer who has a bad habit of going into violent fugue states under stress. He has a supportive girlfriend, Faye Marlowe, but he's manipulated by Linda Darnell, a showgirl who cynically exploits Cregar in order to further her career with his music. George Sanders is the Scotland Yard doctor Cregar talks to, who remains suspicious of Cregar's potential for murders he can't even remember. It's a creepy, gothic setup, and the film does a good job of exploiting it for an hour and a quarter, building up to a really great, dramatic finale.

 

The Phantom Carriage. The Phantom Carriage is a classic Swedish silent film about a drunk who, killed at the stroke of midnight at New Year's, is condemned to drive death's carriage for the next year, carrying off souls. At least that's how the myth he tells shortly before getting hit over the head goes, but what he actually ends up doing is being forced to realize how harmful his misspent life has been to those around him through a bunch of flashbacks, then trying to make amends and reform. It's a fairly standard form of morality play, but what makes the film stand out is its ambition as a 1921 silent film. Director and star Victor Sjöström uses a ton of double exposure to create his ghostly effects, making a visually strong movie, while also telling a fairly complex and dense story for its day, full of flashbacks and running nearly two hours. That ends up being a bit of a weakness; the story is too convoluted, juggling a lot of moving pieces for a story that really doesn't need all this material to make its point. A tighter film would be more effective. But the ideas behind the story are good, the visuals are excellent, and the performances are solid.

 

Gangs of New York William Cutting is the personification of US reactionaries: just a vicious, stupid psychopath. He urges people to stand against the tide, but that's impossible. Nothing stops the tide. Nothing can stop the demographic shifts caused by forces far beyond the "nativist" gangsters' control. He's just a convenient tool of the bourgeoisie and their politicians, drawing anger away from them. Although he's down in the dirt with the migrants, he doesn't make common cause. He's mostly concerned about his own petty status.

Irish migrants, the detrius of the brutal British Empire, come right off the boat and "volunteer" for the army of capital. They fight to free the slaves, but their own freedom is also severely limited by their circumstances. The "natives" and the immigrants fight each other, white mobs lynch black people while the upper class and their army run right over them. Bill has pretensions of power because thieves and a cop are scared of him, but Boss Tweed easily discards him when his behavior becomes inconvenient.

Not only are Irish migrants immediately absorbed into the Grand Army of the Republic, they're more gradually assimilated and become part of the power structure. They become cops, some work for the racists who wanted to kill them, one is even installed as sheriff. As they melt in the pot and they become "American," their oppression fades, memories fade, the system of oppression remains as the shacks of Five Points are replaced by shiny skyscrapers.

I think it's obvious I found the broader themes more interesting than another "revenge is kinda pointless" story.

 

East of Eden (dir. Elia Kazan, 1955) 4k disk

The setup: Set in 1917, Cal (James Dean) and Aron are the sons of Adam, a farmer and inventor, and Christian fundamentalist. Aron is happy, ambitious, and devoted to his father and his girlfriend Abra, and is the proverbial "good son". Cal, in contrast, is creepy and moody, feels misunderstood (kind of similar to Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause), and believes he is "bad." They live in Salinas, CA (not too far from where I live); these places were small agricultural communities at the time, and the film beautifully captures this.
Hitching a train from Salinas to Monterey, Cal creepily follows around Kate, who is implied to own a brothel. Cal's father had always told him and Aron that their mother was a virtuous woman who died when they were very young, but Cal suspects, correctly, that Kate is their mother.
Father Adam farms lettuce, has a plan for shipping lettuce by train while keeping it fresh with ice, but when the train is forced to make a stop and the ice melts, he loses the lettuce and thus the majority of his money. Cal, who's always felt his father loves his brother more than him, wants to win his father's love by earning back the money that this father lost. His plan: get money from his mother, get land, and grow beans; he's hoping the US will engage in the Great War that's going on in Europe, and that the price of beans will skyrocket. (SPOILER ALERT: the US does indeed enter the war). Meanwhile, he grows close to his brother's girlfriend.



Based on the novel by John Steinbeck, which I haven't read but is a classic. The story is (loosely) based on the Biblical Adam and Eve/Cain and Abel story. (So I suppose Monterey is Eden? It's a lovely city nowadays, with a very beautiful aquarium. Anyway.) The color scheme of the film is remarkable; because it's set in a mostly agrarian community, much of the film's color scheme focuses on earth tones (lots of browns and greens), and is really beautifully done.

There's an interesting subplot where one of the city's residents, a German immigrant, becomes the victim of harassment and xenophobia after the US enters the war.

This was James Dean's first movie, and now I've seen all three of Dean's movies. I know some people thought this one was his best one, but personally I think Rebel Without a Cause just edges it out (So, my ranking: 1. Rebel Without a Cause; 2. East of Eden; 3, Giant). Wikipedia informs me that some reviews at the time thought that Dean's acting style in this film was a bit too much of a carbon copy of Marlon Brando, but not having seen any of Brando's early films yet, I can't comment on that (On the Waterfront is on my list, though). My rating: 4 James beans out of 5.

 

That wedding speech was so awkward, the way she made it all about her. I lnow people like that.

 

The Leopard. The Leopard is a stately three-hour historical film, but calling it a "historical epic" feels wrong because it's such a resolutely small-scale, interior film. It is set amid the sweeping changes of the Risorgimento, but its focus is on Burt Lancaster as a Sicilian aristocrat facing those changes with resignation. He is not enthusiastic, he would prefer everything to stay exactly as it is, but he's not unable to adapt, either. He accepts his nephew Alain Delon's advice about the future, and navigates it by going along with the unification of Italy rather than fighting it and marrying the romantic, spendthrift Delon, who has attached himself to the cause of unification, off to Claudia Cardinale, the beautiful daughter of a crude, nouveau-riche local landowner, coopting his wealth to perpetuate the family rather than trying to dig a moat around his ivory tower. But while Lancaster can perceptively guide his family toward the future, he has little interest in it himself, feeling out of place. He can't quite bring himself to live in the world he's ushering Delon into. It's a fascinating portrait, and a handsomely made, subtle one. It's a character study that has a real feel for its place and time. I don't know that it needs to be three hours, but it doesn't drag, either. It's worth the time.

 

The first time I saw East of Eden I kept thinking, wow, he is really influenced by Brando here! It's a great movie and James gives a sensitive portrayal as Cal.

For early Brando, in addition to On the Waterfront, I would recommend The Men and A Streetcar Named Desire.

 

Comedies also don’t have global appeal (as senses of humor are generally parochial), and a lot of movie studios are only making movies with global appeal.

 

The Cave 2005
An overqualified cast make a creature in hidden caves movies we've seen a thousand times before. Cole Hauser, Lena Hedley and others form a team to risk their lives going into a dangerous underground cave with water and strange creatures because...I'm not sure why they do it. So we can have a movie. If you want to watch a good movie like this watch Alien or the Descent. I believe I saw this in the theater as I usually like movies like this but had almost no memory of it.

 

cocaine bear - maybe it's because my expectations were so low, but i actually found this really entertaining. it was well-paced, it had actual tension and actual laughs and over-the-top gore that i wasn't expecting. just an all-around fun time.

 

Finished rewatching Fire Walk With Me.

*chefs kiss

 

The Master of Ballantrae. Errol Flynn was well into the downslope of his career when he made The Master of Ballantrae; it was his last movie with Warner Brothers. But it's in color, it's directed by William Keighley, who made The Adventures of Robin Hood, among others, and it hangs together; it's better than the average Flynn movie from this period. It's not really good, but it's decent, and the swashbuckling action scenes are fun.

Flynn plays the heir to a Scottish estate; when Bonnie Prince Charlie lands, he joins the Jacobite rising while his younger brother, Anthony Steel, remains loyal in a ploy to make sure the family comes out on the right side no matter what happens. But when the rebels are defeated, Flynn is shot and rushed into exile, wrongly convinced that his brother betrayed him to get the estate and the girl. Flynn ends up becoming a pirate, always a good backup career for disgraced aristocrats, before returning for a showdown.

In the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, the Flynn character is far more sinister, and the narrative more complex. It's cleaned up for film so that Flynn isn't quite a good guy but he isn't quite bad either, which makes the whole thing weaker than if they'd just picked one or the other. It makes for an unfocused narrative and a lack of a strong perspective, but it does at least hang together coherently as a story, and there are plenty of swordfights to get you through the lackluster plot. It's functional, it's not bad, but it's not much more than that.

 

Hellraiser 2. My favorite in the Hellraiser series. More big budget and expansive than the first. Contains the classic line "your suffering will be legendary" which is how I would describe watching the later films in the series.

 

I prefer the first film but that joke is so good I may have to reconsider.

 

The first one is excellent as well. The 3rd is okay, then the rest are horrible.