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

Bad Boys Ride or Die will smith and Martin Lawrence are back as Lowery and Burnett. This time they’re trying to clear their ex-bosses name as he’s been linked to the drug cartels and now they’re on the run and in the frame as cop killers too. Who can they turn to and who can they trust to clear their names?

I got exactly what I wanted and what I expected from this. A buddy cop movie with humour and action. That will do me thank you very much. I was amazed to see that both this and the third one from a few years back both pulled in around $400m each. That’s good going for these films I think. I wonder if a fifth will be on the cards?

 

The Fearless Vampire Killers. Roman Polanski’s comedy has doddering vampire-obsessed professor Jack MacGowran and his nervous assistant Polanski finally find a castle full of vampires in Transylvania, and bumble their way through an attempt to rescue Sharon Tate and get out of their dilemma. I can kind of see the humorous sensibility that Polanski is going for, but the comedy is, to put it kindly, of a pretty mild sort, and the film just kind of putters its way through it all. There’s no energy, and the very bland, inert comedy falls flat. It didn’t work for me at all.

 

The Boys In The Boat

Just a nice little movie about the 1936 men's rowing team that went to the Olympics in Berlin against all odds. Nothing fantastic about it, but I liked it.

 

Been quite awhile since I’ve watched a movie and while I didn’t see both fully today I saw much of Blanchett’s Elizabeth 1&2. Both of them had a hell of a line up cast wise. I had forgotten just how many recognizable (and very young looking faces) were in these films.

 

Single White Female
Very 90's thriller but very well done.. At least until the third act, which gets very silly. Roommate from hell. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bridget Fonda are both excellent.
Point of No Return 1992
Wow I really enjoyed this. Bridget Fonda plays a criminal on death row who is turned into a sophisticated assassin by a secret government agency who fakes her death. Great cast, Gabriel Byrne, Harvey Keitel, Anne Bancroft and a young Dermot Mulrooney. She yearns for a normal life, but the assassin thing keeps getting in the way.

 

I thought for a moment that I hadn’t seen Point of no Return and then realised it was called The Assassin when I saw it back in the day at the cinema.

 

Abandoned. This is a solid noir — scandal, a smart-aleck reporter, Raymond Burr as a sleazy private eye, Mike Mazurki as a heavy, snappy dialogue, lots of atmosphere.

Dennis O’Keefe plays a reporter who bumps into Gale Storm, who is trying to find her sister, who disappeared after having a baby out of wedlock. They quickly find the sister is dead in a presumed suicide, and work to find out what happened and locate the baby, leading them to a black market adoption ring. Burr, a fixer for the crooks, lurks his way through the whole movie, keeping an eye on them.

It’s a short B picture, but it’s a good one. There’s nothing particularly memorable about it, but it does everything it needs to, it looks good, and it’s got good fundamentals.

 

Crawl 2019
One of my favorite B movies. A girl and her father are stuck in a basement in Florida during a hurricane and encounter a group of gators. Both leads are very intense and there are some impressive hurricane effects. Father and daughter are played by Barry Pepper and Kaya Scodelario.

 

Argylle (2024)
Not as fun as it wants to be, but nothing with Sam Rockwell in it can be all bad.

 

The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only and The Living Daylights the Bond films are being shown regularly, but in no particular order, on one of the terrestrial channels here in england, so I’ve set them to record. These 3 were the last ones I had on there so I binged them in one day whilst working from home. These 3 films are easily in my top 10 Bond films, possibly top 5 even. I think TSWLM is Moore’s best film, closely followed by FYEO. Both have some great setpieces and Moore has made the role his own. But also they’ve got a decent story too with some good villains and sidekicks. These more than any of the Bond films remind me of a lazy Sunday afternoon or Christmas, as traditionally these were the times they were on when I was younger. Dalton made a good Bond, it’s such a pity that he only got to do 2 films, his debut is really strong and a step up from Moore’s final outing in A View to a Kill. Again I like the villains and sidekicks and I think it’s got a solid story too.

 

Finally caught up to Godzilla Minus One and really loved it. A compelling exploration of guilt, shame and PTSD that would make for a good movie even if Godzilla wasn't in it. But Godzilla is in it! And so we get sequences like him chasing a minesweeping boat and attacking Ginza which are just ******* showstopping, pulse-pounding action sequences. The atomic breath has never been done better, never been this astonishingly jaw-dropping; when he unleashes it in Ginza, I just about jumped out of my chair. Certainly the best Godzilla movie I've ever seen.

EDIT: for what it's worth, I watched it in color because I kind of view that as the canonical version of the movie or something. I then watched parts of the black & white version and I will say that the black & white looked really, really good. The decolorization was clearly done with great care and it looked great. But I missed the color in a lot of scenes; like the atomic breath just wasn't as good in black & white.

 

Minus Zero made Godzilla terrifying. Which he should be.

 

As someone would loved Godzilla Minus One, I don't know if Godzilla should be always terrifying, as I grew up on this version of Godzilla in the 70s.



It was fun and campy.

I think of Godzilla to be like Batman. The character can be dark, gritty and terrifying, but also humorous and campy.


Deadpool and Wolverine was the last movie I saw, BTW. It's a fun and entertaining movie, but I don't think it makes my top 10 list of comic book movies.

 

True I like all Godzillas.

 

The Thing if ever there was a movie that gained momentum and notoriety through word of mouth when I was a kid in the 80s then this was it. With the advent of home video rental it (pardon the pun) grew legs and became a monster. Back then my dad used to let me watch pretty much anything within reason, what a an era to grow up in BTW because we weren’t molly coddled, if anyone at school saw this film they’d be recounting the effects and scenes at school the next day. So I practically begged my dad to rent this one, which he did. This film had a real impact on me, I’d never seen anything like it. Of course we couldn’t go and watch it all the time because we didn’t have immediate access to films like we do now, so it had to live on through your own memories and word of mouth. I still think majority holds up now. Maybe not so much the end monster, buts it’s so visceral and tangible. The tension is palpable almost. An absolute classic.

 

Godzilla fought the Thing.

 

I liked that this Godzilla was scary and very hostile towards humanity (understandably, I suppose). I have enjoyed the American franchise's take on the character as just being a monolithic force of nature who wreaks havoc mainly by accident and ends up being a character that actually helps humanity in the face of other monsters. That's a cool take on the character for sure. But I also really liked just how terrifying and malevolent he was in Minus One.

 

Godzilla would be terrifying benign or not. We are like ants om a sidewalk to him

 

Look Who’s Talking. I can see the comedic potential here. The gimmick of having voiceover from the point of view of a baby brings in the opportunity for some silliness, some subversive stuff, maybe some goofy setpieces. But the movie never really seems to figure out a strong angle on it. The voiceover plays around with the naivety of a baby, and gets a few laughs, but doesn’t get much farther than that. I never felt like there was a strong angle on how to use the concept comedically. I respect the fact that the film doesn’t lean on it too heavily — it’s better than being a one-trick film — but if you take the gimmick away it’s still basically the same rom-com, and that seems like a sign nobody knew what exactly to do with the idea once they had it. They brought in Bruce Willis to do the voice, but rather than playing on the dissonance of Willis voicing a baby, he does a high-pitched kiddie voice that makes him barely recognizable.

The lack of a strong comedic perspective extends to the rest of the film, too. It’s otherwise a fairly standard rom-com in which somewhat neurotic, naively dim accountant Kirstie Alley gets knocked up by the ****bird married man she’s having an affair with and is absolutely shocked when he is revealed to, in fact, be a ****bird and not a reliable romantic partner. She has the baby on her own, but strikes up an unlikely friendship with John Travolta, the genially doofusy cabbie who took her to the hospital. He’s friendly, nice, a little goofy, and winds up as her regular babysitter by default, until she finally realizes that he’s into her, he’s great with the kid, and he wouldn’t make the worst dad in the world just because he’s poor. All of that is fair enough, I guess, if predictable and not very flattering to Alley’s character. But all the comedy it gets out of it is bland, hokey stuff. It’ll please a crowd well enough, but it’s pretty boring pablum. I just finished it and I can barely remember a single joke. And the romance isn’t going to do anything for anybody, either.

It’s not that the movie is bad. It’s that, despite having a distinctive gimmick, it still manages to be unmemorable. It’s a generic, thoroughly uninspired, toothless rom-com that coasts on a vague air of likability, much of it emanating from Travolta, and jokes that are just good enough to make you chuckle before you forget them. It’s the kind of movie that isn’t terrible; it’s just that there’s nothing about it you can point to as being worth anybody’s time.

 

Wing and a Prayer (1944)
Carrier action propaganda film shot with full cooperation of US Navy in the midst of WW2, starring Don Ameche, Dana Andrews, and a part for young Harry Morgan (well, younger). Acting is fair, dialog is cliche, characters are flat but believable stereotypes. Military strategy is ridiculous, tactics are laughable, but hey, there was a war on; they weren't about to put all our latest and greatest moves on film for everyone to watch. A lot of filming happened aboard CV10 USS Yorktown during her shakedown cruise, so the location shooting was way more real than I expected, and the airplanes looked great. There are a few shots with models and rear projection, but far fewer than usual for one of these movies. The scenes of life aboard a carrier in wartime rang very true.

 

Truer words have never been spoken.
Your review is great. It's an incredible Gojira movie.

 

First Blood a film that needs no introduction as it spawned a franchise of greatly finished returns and also became something akin to an indestructible antihero series than the original maybe even intended. They’re showing all the Rambo films consecutively every week on terrestrial tv and as it’s been a while since I’d seen it I thought, why not give it another whirl? It’s a classic after all.

This holds one of my favourite childhood memories, I remember a day in the mid 80s, I forget the year, but it must have been around 83 or 84. it was the school holidays and I’d been out for the day with a friend riding the BMXs. We get back to his house and he says his dad had got pirate copies of the Thriller music video and a film called First Blood, so we watched them in that order. The Thriller video was groundbreaking, it’s hard to explain its impact if you weren’t around at the time. But anyway we move on to First Blood, my abiding memory of the film was the scars and all the forest scenes. Again it’s something that kids would talk about on the play ground…… did you see the spikes trap? He sewed his own arm up after jumping off a cliff!!! What a time to be alive. This is why I love nostalgic stuff like Super 8 or Stranger Things, it captures the essence of kids in the mid 80s. Anyway I’m waffling - That opening 45 minutes of cinema established a cinema icon in John Rambo, it gives you his troubled backstory and then shows you what he is capable of. Even now watching it I am still captivated by that forest stalking scene as he takes down the police one by one, the score for the film is fantastic and I appreciated that more as I got older. I think its tension drops a bit when he escapes the forest to get the town, but even so it’s still a solid thriller. The support from Brian Dennehy is amazing, Stallone is so good here and this original film is I think a slightly more serious movie with a message than the others in the series were. It’s a proper thriller. I really think it’s an action classic, something that should be held in higher regard than it maybe actually is. Did it inspire or spawn a genre of the one man army films? Was there much like this before it came out?

A funny thing I still think of. In time my dad got a pirate copy of the rental home video release too, which would have been closer to 85 as I can clearly remember a huge advert for First Blood pt 2 coming up on the screen as Rambo walks down the steps at the end. Every time I see First Blood now I expect to see that ad on screen, it’s imprinted on my brain.

 

Kind Hearts and Coronets (dir. Robert Hamer, 1949)

Black British comedy from the Ealing studios.

The setup: Imprisoned Lord Louis D'Ascoyne (Mazzini Dennis Price) is to be executed for murder. On the eve of his execution he is writing his memoirs; the story is told by him in voiceover, in flashback. His mother, was born in nobility but eloped with an Italian opera singer, and subsequently god disowned by her noble family. Growing up, Louis acquired a sense of entitlement to his noble title of Duke. Gradually, Louis forms the plan to kill the eight living members of his family to become the first in line of succession (all played by Alex Guinness).



So, basically, it's a comedy about a serial killer. The whole thing is pretty funny and all presented very dryly. Price's voiceovers are very deadpan, but the best thing about the film is undoubtedly Alec Guinness in multiple, increasingly absurd roles. Joan Greenwood is also in this and she too is pretty awesome (and she has a great voice!). Rating: 4 dead members of the D'Ascoyne family out of 5.

 

What a classic. Have you ever seen a similar film, which had a very unique gimmick, called The List of Adrian Messenger? Well worth a look.

 

First Blood is very good. Brian Dennehy was one of my favorite actors; his presence elevates the movie from its B roots the way Tommy lee Jones would do in the 90's. One line I always liked was "you're going to get trouble with that flag on your jacket looking the way you do." It exposes some small town thinking, They love the USA and support wars but won't support a homeless vet right in front of them. The sequels got more cartoony, and I couldn't even finish the last one. The FB score is excellent; Jerry Goldsmith I believe.