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

While The Patient Slept (1935) starring Aline MacMahon and Guy Kibbee; directed by Ray Enright. It was a dark and stormy night, there's a big old house with sliding panels, loads of heavy drapes with people hiding behind them, bedrooms with 15 foot ceilings and two doors so folks may pass quickly through them after nefarious midnight doings, and oh yes, an elderly stroke patient who sleeps through 95 percent of his movie. Aline and Guy form a detective team and it's not their first time solving murders together, she a private nurse and he a homicide detective. Patient has a nasty large family just itching for him to die so they can squabble over his money; even his granddaughter, March (like the girls' names April, May, June, etc. only this one is March) only half likes him, but she protects him as he lies helpless. It's a Warners film, so the stars play well together as they have in dozens of other 30s films that Warners ground out; Allen Jenkins appears, usually a pleaser but I didn't like him this time because he was too loud and obnoxious.

This was a Clue Club series entry of 66 minutes, barreling along with lots of plot, characters and a killer whom I didn't spot. While it was 1935 and after the Hays Code became enforced, suggestive dialogue sneaked in surprisingly regarding one male relative being gay and Guy scolding his detective for failing to enter a locked bedroom "because that's your specialty, bedrooms." Perhaps the censors missed these lines because the dialogue was typically rat-a-tat fast Warners trademark! Clue Club movies lasted from 1935 to 1938 and were tied to Black Mask, a pulp magazine, which included several Perry Mason movie entries. Like RKO's Hildegarde Withers series featuring middle-aged detectives who flirt as they solve murders, While The Patient Slept shows Guy and Aline alternately bantering and being concerned for each other's safety. This was a cute "comedy mystery" of the Thin Man type, but without MGM's polish or A players.

 

Multiplicity

Quite an enjoyable romcom directed by the late great Harold Ramis and starring Michael Keaton and Andie MacDowell.

Keaton steals the show playing 4 quite different cloned versions of himself in order to solve his inability to juggle work, marriage, and fatherhood successfully.

It's like Mr. Mom meets Attack of the Clones except GL got the idea from Multiplicity.

I'd never seen this before and it was fun and one I'd definitely rewatch, especially as a Keaton fan. And the CGI and other fx created to have Michael interact with himself hold up for the most part even though this came out in 1996.

 

I have never seen an episode of the original TV series. I've seen the film sequel with Snipes, and you're right in that it doesn't work anywhere as well because of Snipes not having the same presence as Ford. In fact I think I've only watched that film once, it was ok and only worth watching for Tommy Lee Jones, but its got no where near the repeat value as The Fugitive. Maybe I should give it another watch.

 

The Go-Go's (2020)

Hmm... not sure about the spoiler policy for films released this year, so just to be safe...

Spoiler

A superb documentary that analyzes the impressive rise of a crucially influential band. I found myself quite intrigued, and learned far more than I expected. Surprisingly, I didn't stray from my spot on the couch until every last credit had rolled. There's a palpable honesty here, and I believe it's attained by the band's ability to accept their own flaws. Letting go of the baggage from strained relationships, the band members truly deserve credit for allowing the movie to achieve an authenticity hard to come by. I highly recommend the film, especially to those with an affinity for the 80s and retro enthusiasts in general. Hope you all give this one a whirl.

 

She touched my pepe, Steve.

 

Like the TV show, the film made sure to show Kimble is a good person. He sticks his nose out for people despite the consequences. In the TV show Kimble would come into a place, get caught up in a local person's problem and help them fix it and then have to leave town because that action caught Gerard's attention. Sound familiar? Throw in a musclebound green guy and you have the same weekly plot as The Incredible Hulk.

This is a terrific film and Andrew Davis is an underrated director with a number of great actions films under his belt. Despite his working in action films he's really good with actors. He even made good films with Chuck Norris & Steven Seagal. The Fugitive was the third time he worked with Tommy Lee Jones and deservedly won an Oscar. The marshals feel like a team and they have chemistry to burn. Too bad that he didn't direct US Marshals, it would have been nice to see him get another crack with that cast. BTW a lot of Davis' films take place in Chicago since he is a native and he captures the look of the city a lot better than many of the other films that take place there.

 

Sex and the Single Girl. This is about as raunchy as they could get in 1964 (which is not all that raunchy), a quite frank sex comedy that gets by on fairly stolid values — it’s ultimately mocking sexual liberation, along with a whole laundry list of other topics: psychiatry, trashy media, LA freeways. Tony Curtis plays a sleazy magazine editor doing a story on Natalie Wood’s sex-expert psychiatrist by presenting neighbor Henry Fonda’s problems with his wife Lauren Bacall as his own. Of course, Curtis and Wood fall in love and everybody gets in trouble. It’s amusing in its silly, old-fasionedly-modern way, but not particularly uproarious — until the finale, a gloriously madcap extended car chase between its bickering, clarification-seeking principals, a couple supporting cast members, and an increasing bunch of bystanders. Suddenly the film goes all-out for wild comedy and becomes an exhilaratingly hilarious ride. Worth it just for that finale.

 

"The Brain from Planet Arous", a really cheesy sci-fi/horror movie with John Agar heavily over-acting as a scientist possessed by the titular villain. And it looks like he gets to wear Gary Lockwood's contacts from the second TOS pilot.
Fortunately, I was watching it riffed via Zoom by the Mads. They made this thing bearable.

 

Treasure Planet

 

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. You ever watch a movie just to be able to say you watched it and have an opinion on it? I saw the other two movies in theaters and didn’t care for either, but managed to skip this one. I can now say that it, like the others, is not very good.

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films weren’t perfect, but they managed to overcome their weak points by having magnificent strong points that made the missteps minor detractions from cinematic masterworks. They were, quite simply, magical. There’s no magic here, unfortunately. Jackson’s Hobbit films seem to take it for granted that the viewer is in love with Middle-earth, and thus do little on their own to inspire devotion, preferring to simply ride on recognition. There is too little grace or originality, too much slapstick and shoehorned Legolas. It doesn’t help that, thanks to Jackson’s wonky 3D-related cinematography, the film is uniformly dull-colored, dingy, and unpleasant-looking. There is also a tremendous overuse of CGI, which Jackson had mostly kept out of LOTR. Now, there is hardly a lovely, convincing practical effect to be seen, just acres and acres of bad, rubbery, unconvincing CGI (the whole VFX budget seems to have gone into Smaug, the one CGI asset that looks good).

Much of this seems to come down to the fact that Jackson really didn’t know what to do with The Hobbit. A sprightly children’s adventure given gravitas by its sequel, it’s not immediately suited for the grandeur and scope of LOTR, but Jackson doesn’t feel comfortable pulling back to a hobbit-scale light adventure. The result is that, where Jackson was so successful in getting the epic scale of LOTR into a mere three pictures without feeling cramped, in super-sized pictures that zipped by gracefully, here he turns a small, fleet story into a bloated would-be saga. Some of the added material, the Tolkien-based matter with Gandalf at Dol Guldur, has potential, but most of it is just ugly bloat. The weakest parts of the LOTR trilogy were when Jackson would go off and color outside the lines; here, where so much of the movie comes from Jackson’s additions, the results are dire. Over-elaborate yet dull action scenes that go on and on. Hamfisted treatment of the elf/dwarf rivalry. So many bunglingly handled, silly, extraneous subplots and pointless elements: the extraneous love story, Stephen Fry and his mustachios, all the ludicrous Legolas action scenes. Jackson throws in all kinds of stupid slapstick, silly affectations, and bad comedy as if they will make up for the missing children’s-adventure energy he’s replaced with ponderous would-be significance and gloominess in a bid to recapture that LOTR magnificence that just falls flat. And this movie, as the middle chapter to an unnecessary trilogy, gets the worst of it, to the point that the whole thing feels like eighty percent bloat.

The film is mostly misguided, but it’s not entirely without value. McKellen, the best part of the original cast, is a delight whenever he’s onscreen. The new cast doesn’t stand out compared to the old one, but it’s solid, highlighted by Freeman and Cumberbatch. Howard Shore is still on fire with the score. There are moments, here and there, where the film works. But overall, what a disappointment.

 

Oh sure. Eldest Sister loves anything CGI and I saw this one to talk it over with her now that she's 6 hours' drive away. There's a list of films I'd go alone to see if nobody else wanted to see it and another *B List* (not to be confused with B movies!) that I'd go along to see as part of the crowd. When we could be in a crowd ...

 

The camaraderie between Gerard and his team is evident from their first scene and its one of the big strong points of the film. I just had a look at Davis's work and he directed some solid if unspectacular action films in the late 80's / 90's, notably Seagal in Nico and Under Siege, as well as The Package (I've not seen that) and Chain Reaction. I noticed the box office for The Fugitive and that was a really big hit, I remember it being on for a while back in the day, but I didn't realise it did that well at the box office, no wonder they did a sequel. Its just a pity that they couldn't get a bigger star than Wesley Snipes in it.

 

Assassin's Creed (2016)

This rewatch made me realise what fascinatingly weird movie this is. I'm a massive fan of the AC series, have played all the games, yada yada. There were many options adapting the game series into a movie could have gone with, either more mainstream or diving deep into the weeds of fanservice, but ultimately the movie goes for a very different, quite alienating style.

It's really torn between two halves. One, the more prominent of the two, is a bizarre philosophical think-piece about the nature of violence. Rather than partaking in action or parkour or the historical aspects the series was famous for, the majority of the movie goes for slow, very deliberate talky scenes. It's very dry, discussing high ideas of inherited criminality and the role of violence in free will. Not very crowd-pleasing fare, but I do kind of admire the way the film leans into the thematic point that, sometimes, violent uprising truly is the only solution when presented with oppression. It's quite in keeping with the series' themes, but it makes for a strange viewing experience.

The film's other half is a quite stylish action piece set in the Spanish Inquisition. It's rather light on plot, even going so far as to be entirely subtitled rather than translating the Spanish. This serves to sort of distance the audience from events, but I do admire the choice to go a bit more daring. What action there is manages to stay compelling, though due to these sequences shortness compared to the modern day half it's hard to get a sense of historical place that the games are better at.

Other oddities arise from the fact that is not a reboot of the games, but is in canon with them. Spiritually it's a remake of the first Assassin's Creed, at least as far as the modern day goes, but it isn't like similar game adaptation I very much enjoy, Tomb Raider (2018), which synthesises elements from both Tomb Raider (2013) and Rise of the Tomb Raider to create a wholly separate work. So AC fits in a weird liminal space that makes it feel tonally distinct from the games on either side. It doesn't help that most of the movie remains un-mentioned afterwards in the games, with only a few light backstory references mentioning one of the characters in the following year's Origins. Other that it's been left as a strange artefact that seems unlikely to ever be followed up.

Additionally, the movie includes very few direct references, leaving it all as half-glimpsed props and off-hand comments. It even goes out of its way to retcon aspects from the games (The main villain, in the games a portly balding American, becomes a slender Brit with a full head of hair). But the movie also overloads on arcane lore about Assassin's and Templars and Apples of Eden, giving only surface explanations, so it's not great for newcomers (though I did see it with an ex for who it was their gateway into the series, so who knows),

The soundtrack is an odd beast too. Instead of perhaps going for a fitting period sound, the whole movie has this repetitive techno-infused sound, lots of droning and heavy percussion. I do like it, but it feels a bit, I dunno, not ill-fitting as such, just has slightly off quality.

So yeah, I don't really know how to rate this thing. Every actor in it is giving their all, but the material is so philosophical that it's hard to find humanity in most of them. By any metric of success the movie is a failure, remaining as its own unique instalment, but at the same time its more striking aspects in direction and themes do keep me invested. Even Ubisoft seems unsure, given that they filmed 2 alternate endings, where the supporting cast ranged from either all dying to all surviving, with the final cut having half of them live/die. It certainly deserves at least one watch for anyone who's played the games.

 

I'll copy and paste this if I ever get to The Rise of Skywalker.

 

I really liked the first Hobbit movie the first time I saw it. It didn't last. TBH I think much of the LOTR movies hasn't aged all that gracefully, but hardly anything about those movies was as obnoxious or poorly thought out as some of the stuff that was in the Hobbit films.

 

As I posted in the Retro thread, my recognized version of "The Hobbit" is the Rankin-Bass animated version. They did the reverse of Peter Jackson, and reduced the story to run about 90 minutes. And I think it worked very well.

 

Remember the bastardized version of "What Bilbo Baggins Hates"?

 

Peter Pan: Return to Neverland

 

Background to Danger. George Raft stars as an American caught up in a Nazi plot to try to drag Turkey into the war as an ally in this wartime thriller. The head Nazi is Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre costars as an interloper who may be a Russian spy . . . or he may be another Nazi. While it’s nothing noteworthy, the combination of a solid setup, a good cast, and Raoul Walsh make this wartime quickie solid entertainment.

 

Well, now I have to post this:

 

Lolita (1962, dir. Kubrick). Pretty good.

which means, given my expectations, it was a tad disappointing. The least good Kubrick, IMO, for as far as I’ve seen those. I’ll watch it again some day and I’ll probably appreciate it a lot more then.

 

Schindler's List (1993)

 

Giving Annihilation another look, as I do every few months.

Still trying to make sense of it.

 

The New Mutants I want my 90 mins back. Nothing memorable about it at all.