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

Scent of a Woman. This is a solid Al Pacino performance but not a particularly notable one in his oeuvre; of course it’s the one he won his Oscar for. That always seems to be the way it goes. Pacino is good as a suicidal blind veteran in the sort of gently middlebrow movies the nineties were so good at putting out, but it’s not exactly Michael Corleone.

Which isn’t to say it’s a bad movie at all; it’s enjoyable and does some things pretty well. The lead is Chris O’Donnell as a relatively poor prep school student, who just before Thanksgiving witnesses the perpetrators setting up a prank on the corrupt, smug, insufferable headmaster, James Rebhorn. Rebhorn threatens O’Donnell and Philip Seymour Hoffman with expulsion if they don’t rat out the culprits, and dangles a Harvard scholarship if O’Donnell cooperates. He’s left considering his options, and whether Hoffman will flip, over the weekend while he takes a job watching over Pacino, the obstreperous, drunk, self-pitying semi-invalid. Pacino immediately takes over, hauling the boy down to New York for a long weekend of high living before he commits suicide. Now O’Donnell is stuck managing him as well as his personal dilemma.

Of course the usual bonding takes place, but I think the film handles it pretty well. The dynamic between the young man, in over his head and without anybody he can really turn to, trying to keep his head above water while Pacino yanks him around, and the domineering retired career officer who’s always keeping him off balance is really well developed. There’s a level of respect that gradually builds without being overdeveloped or too friendly: Pacino bullies him around but recognizes that the kid is young, but fundamentally decent and has some backbone when it comes to the important stuff, while O’Donnell can see just enough humanity behind Pacino’s jackass act to make a little connection with him, and he just plain cares that the guy doesn’t kill himself even if he is a jerk. It’s enough to build a relationship that stops short of full-fledged friendship, and develops in a way that feels natural.

The film also handles the snitching dilemma well. The kids O’Donnell is asked to inform on are unlikable twerps who aren’t really his friends. We have no reason to want them protected; the film isn’t trying to load the dice for the audience. “Not snitching” isn’t really presented as a great virtue, either; it’s not about being some kind of stand-up guy. O’Donnell’s question is entirely about whether he can respect himself if he knuckles under to Rebhorn’s slimy, petty pressure tactics. Does he want to be the kind of guy who takes a bribe? He doesn’t want to sacrifice his future, either, but does he want that whole future to be built on something as sleazy as turning in kids to this jerkoff? I really like the way that Rebhorn’s inherent despicability essentially overwrites the moral content of the question whether it’s right or wrong to snitch on your colleagues for a minor offense with whether it’s right to reward a heel like Rebhorn by taking his bargain and cooperating with him. Principles apply to how you do things, not just the outcome.

It’s still a solidly middlebrow film, but not in a bad way. It’s entertaining and respectably crafted, with some good handling of its biggest questions. That’s nothing to sneeze at. I enjoyed it.

 

Top 10 best movie reviews I've read anywhere on any site. @Havac
*tips cap*

Scent of a Woman is a classic and underrated methinks.

 

Did you know there's a sequel to Coming to America? Guess what they called it - yup - Coming 2 America. Completely past me by.
Anyway it has most of the original cast, I watched about half of it, hard to say if it's any good, I have little memory of the original. JEJ is in it.

 

I've looked for this on D+ but I can't find it. Is that definitely the title?

 

Yup that's the title. It was just made available recently.

 

Liar Liar

So many classic one liners and brilliant antics from Jim. His best role after Truman.
What a talented man.
Love the supporting cast too and the overall cheesy 90s vibe to the whole proceedings including the score. Very fun and entertaining.

 

FIRST PLACE! Winner winner chicken dinner!Thanks for the tips; some of those episodes were in the questions.

 

Sapphire. America has a long history of “race movies” about race relations, but they’re not exclusively an American phenomenon. This 1950s British police procedural murder mystery also happens to be a race movie, addressing prejudice in a society that was being exposed to increased immigration.

It’s a rather clever format to use, as the mystery revolves around the murder of a pregnant young mixed-race woman who was passing as white. Her white boyfriend and his racist family are suspects, as are older black boyfriends they dig up, and the film does a decent job of sustaining the mystery. By placing prejudice front and center as a murder motive, it foregrounds the social issue of racism naturally, while also using the different attitudes of the investigating detectives and various interviewees to make the point. It’s a solid film, interesting and well put together.

 

I watched 'Here'. I thought it was beautiful, original, and moving. Then I read the reviews and everybody seems to hate it.

 

Well then, everybody is clearly wrong.

 

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. A fifties monster movie about a giant dinosaur thawed by an arctic atomic test traveling by sea down to wreak havoc on New York — you would have to think this is a particularly uncreative Godzilla ripoff. But The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms actually predates Godzilla, and likely inspired it.

It’s a fun, cheesy fifties monster flick, with scientist Paul Hubschmid trying to convince everyone the dinosaur is real, while it works its way down the coast for the big finale. The Ray Harryhausen stop-motion action is stupendous, and the film is quite effective as a thrilling genre romp. How can you argue with any movie that ends with Lee Van Cleef shooting the monster with a radioactive grenade from on top of a roller coaster?

 

Big Blue Sky (2007)
Documentary about the history of hang gliding. Most of the focus is on the early 70s when the sport was invented and popularized by hippy and surfer cultures. Their reminiscences are very nostalgic, and the old 8mm film clips fascinated me. Someday soon I need to try this.

 

House of Usher. Roger Corman begins his stretch of short, higher-budget (for him) Edgar Allen Poe films with this short story adaptation. The great Richard Matheson expands it out to (barely) feature-length with a script that focuses on the horror atmosphere. Vincent Price, playing the doom-obsessed Roderick Usher, is perfect casting. It all makes for an atmospheric, effectively creepy and morbid film.

 

Mickey 17

Almost without a doubt the very worst performance ever from Mark Ruffalo, and I saw Poor Things. In general I have no idea what the movie was trying to accomplish, but Ruffalo adds greatly to the confusion.

 

The Pit and the Pendulum. Richard Matheson does a good job of creating an appropriately macabre story for Roger Corman out of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, which focuses on the atmosphere of dread in a very limited scenario. Here it becomes the climax of a film about madness, torture, and death.

Protagonist John Kerr goes to his brother-in-law’s castle to investigate his sister’s suspicious death. The husband is Vincent Price, so he’s automatically a top suspect for some kind of nefarious wrongdoing. Price’s father was a torturer for the Spanish Inquisition and the dungeon is a torture chamber; with Price deflecting questions about the death, and then more creepy events happening around it, the story takes on a great creepy atmosphere of suspicion.

I really enjoyed the resolution, in which Price is not villain but victim, a man haunted by his past whose unsettling qualities come more from his own dread and fear of his family heritage, and is being gaslit into madness. It’s a nice switchup, and Matheson and Corman together really capture an effective mood that’s deepened by the twists that keep it from being predictable.

 

Transformers One

I've never been into Transformers, but I rather enjoyed this. It's good fun, the comedy beats work and it moves along , some great design work of the city and surface.

I couldn't help thinking: this is what Lightyear should've been like.

 

Atlas (2024)

JLo stars in this sci-fi film about a future where no one got the hint from either the Terminator films or I-Robot and are forced to take drastic measures when their household AI bots turn on them. She goes off on a mission to a distant planet, and has to rely on a mech suit that she has her own reservations with. It's not going to be on anyone's best lists, but I at least found the film entertaining. You've gotta give some credit to JLo for following up on an otherwise suspect acting career with mostly bombs; other singers turned actors would've quit long ago.

 

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Damn I have lot of thoughts about this movie, but will hold back until a second viewing if that ever happens, although I suspect I'll watch T2 twenty more times before ever revisiting this mess. It's definitely a choice to retcon the entire ending of T2 and John Connor no longer did **** cause he was killed and humanity is now saved by a young Mexican woman. But why does it take six writers to come up with a story and screenplay like this? The highlights of this movie are the cool Rev-9 effects and the score, but the cast is wasted and forced to read cheesy lines in a convoluted story, but not in a good way. One of Arnold's most banal performances too. Phone it in for a paycheck I reckon.

This movie, like The Last Jedi, is a disappointing and pointless money grab full of mediocrity and style over substance.

 

Price later spoofed the ending to this one in "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine", also from A.I.P.

 

It’s What’s Inside (2024)
A group of old college friends reconnect at a pre-wedding party, but things start to go wrong when one of the group suggests playing an unusual game.

This isn’t a horror, but it feels kind of adjacent to things like Scream or Cube. I don’t want to give away the plot because I went in cold and think that’s better than knowing where the film is going. I had a good time and think it’s worth watching if you want a slightly mind-bending thriller.

 

The Raven. Given the slimness of the poem as source material, Roger Corman takes this adaptation in a comic direction, making a deliberately silly and light film loosely inspired by the poem. Sorcerers Vincent Price and Peter Lorre team up against evil magician Boris Karloff. Lorre, who keeps getting changed into a raven, provides much of the comic relief, being devious, quarrelsome, and irreverent, but the funniest part of the movie may be that his son — a sixteenth-century earnest young man — is played by a young actor named Jack Nicholson. Nicholson’s energy in such an unexpected role is inherently funny. And it’s fun seeing the three leads together, with an enjoyably colorful and slightly silly climactic duel. But the rest of the film is just not that entertaining, with an indifferent plot and no atmosphere. Not the best of this run of Corman Poe films.

 

So, not as good as the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror take?