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

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

 

Annnnnnd?

 

I will never understand how a person could watch that scene and still take the movie seriously for even a split second. It's taken a few years, but I feel like people are finally starting to admit that this movie sucks, thank God. It's a truly awful movie.

 

It's good (not the first time I've seen it). I know some will consider this heresy, but I think the live action remake with Emma Watson was even better.

 

I still like it. *shrugs*

 

I thought the live action version was fine. Certainly better than The Lion King remake but nowhere near as much fun as the Aladdin remake or The Jungle Book. Cinderella is still the best of the live action ones for me.

 

A Wing and a Prayer (2020)
Documentary about Al Schwimmer, a WW2 flight engineer (he scores a ton of cool points right there) who organized the airlift of weapons to Israel in 1948, saving the Jews from a second Holocaust. I found it informative, moving, and occasionally funny and heart-warming.

 

Footsteps in the Dark. Errol Flynn was one of those actors who wasn’t a great person off the screen, but was always charming and likable on it. Here he plays a financial advisor who secretly writes detective stories, and in which capacity gets pulled into an investigation of the death of a client. In the process, he has to cultivate a burlesque-dancer suspect, which with the double life creates a subplot in which his wife and mother-in-law are convinced he’s cheating. This is worth it primarily for a scene in which these upscale suspicious women attend her show and peer intently at a striptease act with opera glasses. Also highlights are Alan Hale and William Frawley as the police Flynn’s smug author is supplementing. It’s not a particularly good movie; it’s going for a kind of witty dash, a knowingly humorous Thin Man-style take on the murder mystery genre, but it lacks the script or the panache for it. But it’s functional, with a likable cast and some decent laughs. It just doesn’t have much going for it.

 

There was another movie called Creep (2004) starring Franke Potente as a woman locked in the London underground . It's pretty good too.

 

I'm going to watch just Nic Cage movies for a month. Next up: The dreaded Wicker Man remake.

 

He was spectacularly Cage-y, I'll give you that much.

 

Carnival of Souls
1962, Black and White

This film impressed me so much that after my first viewing on Tuesday evening of this week, I woke up early and rewatched it again Wednesday morning. I don't think I've ever done that with a film before.

At only 78 minutes, it goes by quickly, but mainly because it is just that good.

Carnival of Souls really reminds me of an extended edition of a top 10 episode of classic Twilight Zone.

It shares similarities with the TZ episode "The Hitch-Hiker" and with Hitchcock's Psycho in that all three feature intelligent, attractive blond women driving alone across country for differing yet equally desperate reasons.

In the case of this film, Mary, the elusive church organist, is leaving the midwest for a new church job in Utah after suffering a horrible car accident.

This film features a hauntingly beautiful organ score by Gene Moore. It's amazing what director Herk Harvey was able to produce out of a mere 30,000 or so budget.

The cast, music, story, set design, and camera setups all contribute to a brilliantly suspenseful and unforgettable movie experience.

10/10

 

Carnival of Souls is a classic.

 

This is a movie that works both riffed and unriffed. It's off-kilter and unsettling enough to work on its own, but is so out there that it provides a good amount of material for jokes.

 

Just watched "Ransom!", the 1956 drama that was the rather loose basis for the later 1996 thriller starring Mel "GIVE ME BACK MY SON!" Gibson. This one is more of a straight drama about how and why the father (played here by Glenn Ford) decides to withhold his son's ransom, and the result of that choice. It features a number of good performances, and served as Leslie Nielsen's screen debut, playing a reporter who starts off as a real jerk but gets better. The movie is also noteworthy in what it doesn't show us.
A while back, I recorded this off TCM (which runs it on occasion) and finally got around to watching it. I checked and found that its based on a live TV drama from the 50s, produced on "The U.S. Steel Hour". I'll have to see if there's a kinescope of that around somewhere.

 

The Aeronauts (2019)
That looked pretty good at home, wish I could have seen it on the big screen. It's "based on a true story", I can't say how accurate the history is, but it seems mostly plausible. They clearly made an effort to keep it realistic. I especially loved the one scene with the full circle rainbow around the shadow of the balloon on the cloud below; I've seen that IRL a couple of times and they got it exactly right.

 

Proteus: a 19th Century Vision

A friend texted me about this last night. A documentary about bio-racist Ernst Haeckel (Kunstformen der Natur) and his stunning illustrations of marine life, particularly of radiolaria.

Best movie I've seen since The Lighthouse. I've never seen another documentary quite like it.

 

The Rock.
I normally don't like Michael Bay but he really knocked it out of the park with this one. Sean Connery and Nic Cage are wonderful together. Ed Harris is a great villain. Great score that I swore was Hans Zimmer but was not. A near perfect late 90's action movie. RIP Sean.

 

Rumors of Wars (2014) – Paul Tomborello

So this is a Christian movie in a somewhat sci-fi thriller mode. We follow two main characters in two different time periods. One of them is a soldier in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic world run by an evil corporation that has outlawed religion because of its intolerance which of course means that there are roving bands of soldiers cruising the streets at all times prepared to unleash a hail of machine gun bullets on anyone who is a Christian. This soldier finds a journal written by a college student sometime in the past before everything went to **** and this journal tells a story of a false flag terror attack that the government uses as an excuse to create a program of mandatory implantation of RFID chips that every US citizen has to have in order to buy or sell . . . you know, real Mark of the Beast stuff. We jump back and forth between these stories as the soldier reads the journal in between murdering Christians.

Anyway, this movie does have a couple of strengths that elevate it above a lot of Christian movies. Having these two stories to tell and still running right at ninety minutes means that this thing moves. I mean, one of the main issues I have with Christian movies is that they just often feel incredibly padded for time, but this one has A LOT to do and so it is kind of sprinting the entire time, which covers a multitude of sins. Secondly, with a PG-13 rating, the violence is less sanitized; I mean, I’m not saying the action sequences are artfully done or anything – this ain’t John Wick. But, you know, there are gunfights a plenty and one genuinely surprising moment where the movie’s villain manipulates things to have one of his own soldiers killed by a sniper. Now the bad which all kind of hews to the standard Christian movie template: the dialogue is poorly written, the acting is mostly bad (with a couple of exceptions in minor supporting roles) and the script isn’t very well-thought through. For one thing, it’s never clear how much time has passed between the two stories; at one point, I thought it was probably several decades and then later a character from the first story shows up and he looks MAYBE five years older, but then there’s a plot development that seems to indicate that a character that is at least thirty was born AFTER the events of the flashback story, so I still have no clue. The movie does also have a very open ending to both stories, with both characters on the run, searching for the truth about their situations. So, yeah, they totally thought they were going to get a sequel to this. I would bet they had a whole trilogy planned out. Well, you can’t win ‘em all. That’s the rumor anyway. 1 star.

tl;dr – fast-paced Christian thriller can’t quite move fast enough to cover up plot problems, bad dialogue and bad acting; has energy, but that’s about all. 1 stars.

 

Religious agenda movies are truly the antithesis of art.

Anyway...

The Hustler (1961)

Paul Newman absolutely kills it as a young, cocky small-time pool hustler looking to get his big break (I engineered that play on words..."break"....pool, get it?) by beating the greatest player around, "Minnesota Fats" played by Jackie Gleason.

I had no idea I'd love this movie as much as I did. Excellent performances all around, even though Gleason didn't have to do too much other than be fat and look like he knew how to play pool. I don't smoke or drink anymore but the characters in this movie made up for that for me.

 

Virginia City. In this Civil War Western, Errol Flynn stars as a Union officer sent to stop Confederate sympathizers, spies, and agents, led by Randolph Scott, from shipping a huge load of gold from Nevada to the floundering Confederacy. Of course, Flynn falls for Scott’s girl and fellow spy Miriam Hopkins, and there’s also Humphrey Bogart, trying and failing to put on an inexplicable Mexican accent, as a bandit leader. It’s interesting to see a cross between a Western and a wartime spy movie, and overall it moves well. It falls down a bit in the ending, though, where a film that’s blessedly avoided romanticizing the South suddenly gives in to it. It’s nothing particularly noteworthy, but it’s fair fun until the weak ending. Alan Hale (of course) and the wonderfully named Guinn “Big Boy” Williams are highlights as Flynn’s tough, comical sidekicks.

 

The Hale/Flynn screen team is a thing of beauty.

 

One thing you can say for the studios, when something worked, they knew enough to ride it.