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

Demons (1985) again. OTT Italian Evil Dead rethink that is dumb, loud, goopy and fun. I definitely prefer the horror movie everyone is watching in Demons than the threadbare film that unfurls around the fake movie, but there you go. Basically, theater goers are invited to the screening by the

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now possessed actor from the screening horror film in order to spread demon possession across Berlin and the world.

Don’t try on that demon mask in the lobby kids. Ironic joke, the character who does is named Rosemary

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and she gives ‘birth’ to the Demon outbreak inside the Metropol...so yeah Rosemary’s Baby.

I was inspired to revisit thanks to Claudio Simonetti’s awesome 80s synth theme, and with this revisit, I am glad I did not buy the new $$$$ blu ray set (If Arrow releases the print digitally here, I’ll buy that). Demons is fun, but not the first movie I grab when watching Italian horror. Still, if you know what you’re getting into, you’ll have a good time.

 

Adventures in Babysitting


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Adventures in Babysitting is definitely a product of the its era. It makes very little (if any) logical sense and a lot of outdated humor, but Elisabeth Shue and this zany 80s adventure. My wife and I decided to watch it because she never seen it and it's been a long while since I did. So many references to Marvel's Thor which was delightful to me. This film will always be endearing to me.

 

Feeling Through (2019)
A homeless teen who's out late at night with friends meets a deaf-blind man and keeps him company at a bus stop until his ride comes. The short film is based on a true story by the director, who met a deaf-blind man several years before. The actor who plays the deaf-blind man is himself both deaf and mostly blind. The film was executively produced by Marlee Matlin, the critically acclaimed deaf actress of Children of a Lesser God; among other films to date.

You can see the short film on YouTube.

 

The Terminal

The fact that they built the airport terminal on a set with working escalators and stores etc is pretty impressive. The bts footage shows that the massive set looks like an actual airport terminal.

There isn't a lot to say about this film except that it is really sweet and Tom Hanks gives a lovely performance as a kind man who travels from a fictional Eastern European country to NYC in order to get a jazz musician's autograph in order to fulfill a promise to his late father.

Due to several bureaucratic technicalities he is forced to live at the airport for nine months where he learns to adapt, get a job, fall in love, get his heart broken, and make new friends.

It's just a very sweet movie with a pleasant John William's score and Spielberg's typical mastery as a director.

 

Stanley Tucci is the best thing about that movie. That massive set comes in second, mainly because the set does not pound a bag of potato chips into dust with an apple and Stanley Tucci does, so I'm not really choosing a winner as much as I am just recognizing the facts.

 

Stanley Tucci did an excellent job.
He tows the line between kinda being the bad guy to being a stickler who is simply trying to do his job to the full letter of the law. Great performance.

And it was cool to see Diego Luna in another role as I mainly know him from Rogue One. All of the friends and acquaintances Viktor makes at the terminal are interesting characters. Reminded me of a Wes Anderson movie in that regard.

Also, Spielberg mentioned that Tom did a lot of improvising that made it into the film which is pretty neat.

 

I finally watched The Man Who Killed Don Quixote It was leaving the Crave streaming service that weekend and I figured I might as well watch this mythical movie before it disappeared from a streaming service rabbit hole to never been seen again as it was always forever not going to be made and then finally was. It's certainly loud. Adam Driver being crazed kinda helps (him shoving the subtitles out of the way mid scene was pretty great) and Jonathan Pryce is always watchable. Whole lot of nonsense though, basically.

 

I just got a like from @Sarge for my post about The Terminal.
Wonder if this is airplane related lol?

 

No, the airplanes were just generic boring background things. Tom Hanks was great, and I liked the way he and Catherine Zeta-Jones related.

 

I was just kiddin' around @Sarge
I agree, Hanks and Zeta-Jones were great together.

 

Mandy.
Panos Cosmatos made a great film a while back called "Beyond the Black Rainbow, but this definitely outdoes it.

 

The Day the Earth Stood Still. I’ve never really cared for the subgenre of stories about benevolent aliens who arrive to fix our awful civilization. There’s something off-putting about the combination of misanthropy — humanity is just so irredeemably awful that it is incapable of improving and must be uplifted from outside — and starry-eyed utopianism — there’s some perfect, benevolent race out there that, simply by virtue of not being humans, is flawless and wise. It’s a rather silly, superficial way of looking at human nature that does little to actually speak to our problems. This first-contact classic runs into all the same pitfalls that make me hate this trope.

It’s well-intentioned, and it at least gets some interest by rooting its concerns about human violence in Cold War, post-WWII fear for the future, and throwing in a rather heavy Christ parallel. Unfortunately, the religious element is rather superficial, not a deep or particularly thoughtful commentary on Christ’s message. And while the fears of nuclear apocalypse are potent, the film doesn’t do much more than clumsily embody that anxiety. And the ultimate message it offers is about as significant as a “coexist” bumper sticker: humanity just needs to stop violence. And if we don’t somehow change human nature, some other civilization’s robot police will come destroy Earth. Who are the violent ones here again? It’s a concept of pacifist utopia that’s not only shallow, but creepy. We will achieve peace and security, the alien spokesman says, by giving up our freedom, but only our freedom to make bad decisions, as our new robot overlords define them. And the film’s only answer of how this overhaul of humanity might happen is to live in fear of annihilation. So how is the regime of fear of robot annihilation supposed to be any better than that of fear of nuclear annihilation it’s explicitly supposed to uplift us from? The whole film is this kind of childish twaddle.

If it were a better film, it might be able to get away with such a muddled, silly message, and just focus on the Cold War fears, but it’s not that good as a film. It’s got an interesting sequence as it sets up the first contact, but after that it just shifts into a rather dull, bad-B-movie-grade story about a woman letting her kid run around the city with a stranger. The script is awful, clumsy and juvenile. Robert Wise’s direction is uninteresting after the open. The acting, even from Patricia Neal and Sam Jaffe, is cheesy B-movie stuff. It’s just not a very good watch aside from embodying everything wrong with the stupid, shallow messianic-alien genre.

 

Flowers in the Attic 2014
Decent TV adaptation of the classic controversial novel. A mother with 3 children's husband dies and she must return to her rich parent's mansion and win back the dying father's approval. The father does not know the children exist, so the grandmother hides them in the attic. Days become weeks, weeks become months, etc. I prefer the 80's film but at least this had the book's ending. The book is best, then the 80's film, then this. Read the book or watch the 80's film. This is actually a very good book before the author became obsessed with certain things.

 

Sami Blood A movie about the Finno-Ugric indigenous people of northern Scandinavia, specifically a teenage girl in 1930s Sweden. She faces racism from Germanic Swedes and internalizes their contempt for her, deciding to abandon her family and culture. It is a sad story and reflects the sad story of the Sami under Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Russian domination.

 

Zodiac (2007) – David Fincher

I need to know who he is. I . . . I need to stand there, I need to look him in the eye and I need to know that it’s him.

I’m not gonna lie, I struggled with this movie on a first viewing. I think I went in expecting something different and part of that is probably the marketing of the movie. The posters certainly try to sell the movie as, if not pure horror, at least a scary thriller. And it’s not to say that this movie doesn’t have horrifying moments; one stabbing in particular is quite disturbing and there’s a genuinely terrifying scene involving a young woman with a baby having car trouble and encountering a “good?” Samaritan. But by and large this movie is nearly three hours about process and the slow, tortured routes an investigation takes to ultimately, well, never be able to prove a damn thing about any of the multiple suspects this movie trots out as red herrings and plot cul-de-sacs. It’s slow and methodical and surprisingly minimal. I was expecting, honestly, none of those things. But I watched it again and a second viewing really unlocked the movie for me and after a third viewing I’m prepared to call it an absolute masterpiece.

Let’s start with the absurdly stacked cast. Our three main characters are played by Robert Downey, Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo and these are all actors who tend to give very exterior, sometimes downright tic-ridden, performances. But Fincher gets them all to back down and give pretty minimal, but very human, performances. Downey Jr. gets away with more than the other two, but Gyllenhaal and Ruffalo are both about as minimal and subtle as I’ve seen them and I feel like Ruffalo in particular is maybe career best and he’s an actor I like a lot. Both Ruffalo and Gyllenhaal underplay their respective climactic scenes and that adds to the amibiguous, uncertain feeling that the film so carefully creates. A secret weapon here is absolutely Anthony Edwards as Ruffalo’s partner, a dogged, dead-pan Joe Friday-esque cop who is quick with an inflectionless quip. Brian Cox shows up for an extended cameo as celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli. Elias Koteas is absolute perfection as a detective. John Carroll Lynch only has a couple of scenes, but he’s absolutely brilliant as Arthur Leigh Allen, one of the suspects. Clea DuVall turns in a great performance with just one scene. Chloe Sevigny makes a character that is a bit underwritten, if we’re being honest, into a living, breathing human being. And Ione Skye makes an uncredited appearance in the film’s most frightening sequence. Charles Fleischer has another incredibly brief role, but he absolutely chills the viewer. And then let’s fill in the other supporting parts with the following: Philip Baker Hall, John Terry, Donal Logue, Dermot Mulroney, Zach Grenier, John Getz, James Le Gros, Adam Goldberg and, back when nobody knew who he was, an excellent Jimmi Simpson. This is very much an ensemble piece and Fincher has cast it down to the ground with pure gold.

But even as it is very slowly paced and intellectually precise, it’s also a mood piece of a kind. David Shire’s minimal score is beautiful and absolutely perfect and the visuals are striking in their own way, not always showy or flashy (though when it wants to be flashy, as in a lengthy timelapse of the TransAmerica Building, it absolutely nails it), but incredibly evocative. The script is layered and complex and it’s really invested in capturing the atmosphere of the times. It isn’t economical or precise, but it shouldn’t be. It takes the time to lead you down dead alleys and into cul-de-sacs, spending sometimes a few scenes on a lead that goes nowhere or a crime that it turns out the Zodiac mostly likely isn’t even connected with. It peppers you with the names of suspects that you don’t even get to meet because it wants to create a fog of uncertainty. It isn’t sloppy, so it’s not foggy in the sense of confusing, just foggy in the sense of ambiguity. Because this is past history, right? And if you know anything about the Zodiac, the one thing you definitely know is that he was never brought to justice. I didn’t know a lot of the details of the crimes we see here, but I knew that going in. So while Greysmith and Toschi definitely feel like they know the identity of the killer by the end of the movie, we’re left with something of an unsatisfying conclusion or at least a melancholy one. The final shot of Ruffalo in the film is really brilliant, deeply sad in a way, evocative of a world where at least something approximating the truth can be known, but not really acted on. A conclusion can be drawn, but not arrived at, if you know what I mean. I think it’s best summed up with that final scene of Gyllenhaal’s character; he knows what he believes and he believes what he knows, but Gyllenhaal’s performance in that final shot is minimal enough that I’m not sure he gets the emotional catharsis he’s looking for. So the film treads a fine line of being ambiguous but not nihilistic and when you’re telling a story about a serial killer that’s a particularly fine line. Fincher, once again, threads the needle. 4 stars.

tl;dr – methodical, evocative, ambiguous film explores the Zodiac killer and the world he operated in; a sharp, layered, complex script and a near flawless ensemble of performers. 4 stars.

 

Swallow


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Swallow is a really bizarre movie from the characters to the story and then takes a turn that I did not expect. It's a very character driven film, that draws the audience in with each passing scene as it create a creepy atmosphere and an aura of intrigue. I don't think most people will be fully satisfied with the ending, but it's something that many with contemplate and discuss. Swallow is somewhat of a psychological thriller and worth a watch for those lazy matinees.

 

Unsane (2018)
Gripping but stupid.

 

Rarely has a movie been so succinctly, yet so correctly, described.

 

Sing And Like It (1934) starring ZaSu Pitts, Nat Pendleton, Pert Kelton, Edward Everett Horton, Ned Sparks, John Qualen; directed by William A. Seiter. It is in RKO's pre-code B movies like this one that character actors such as the above shine in lead roles; each is someone you'll recognize from dozens of 30s and 40s films as you see what they can do. It's a Runyonesque tale in all but the author (it's written by Aben Kandel, Marion Dix and Laird Doyle) in which gangsters don't do any really bad things and do it in a funny way with snappy one-liners. Nat is a mobster specializing in kidnapings for ransom, Pert is his live-in moll, Edward Everett is a hapless theater producer roped into a ghastly circumstance, Ned is his deadpan snarker self and John (ZaSu's boyfriend) **SPOILER ALERT** gets the last laugh. But before that laugh, Nat listens to a Mother song a la Olcott's Mother Machree and Bieber's Turn To You sung by ZaSu in her company's talent show. Her voice does things to Nat, but the ~Art of the song does more; he wants her, but not that way. He's between a rock and a hard place because Pert demands her own show, he's never tackled the show business racket and life is difficult until he railroads Edward Everett into producing when highjinks ensue. Woody Allen is said to have liked this movie and used some themes in his Bullets Over Broadway.

Seiter directed the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and Wheeler and Woolsey, so he's a natural at crafting a whirlwind movie like this one in its 72 minute running time. One running gag reminded me of 1933's W. C. Fields' The Fatal Glass of Beer in which Fields opens the door of his mountain cabin and exclaims, "And it ain't a fit night out for man or beast!" while a hand just off camera throws a fistful of snow in his face. Honestly, you'll swear you see the hand after many viewings. In Sing and Like It, the gag is "Your Mother" because ZaSu warbles it at least five times and each time she thinks she's the bee's knees. She prepares to Go All The Way with Nat because she believes she must, according to the casting couch stories she's heard about. It's telling that Pert listens to this theory amid disbelief and sarcastic retorts, but ZaSu remains dedicated to her ~Art so Pert goes with the flow. In what must have been an in joke, Pert calls ZaSu an "animated cartoon" and ZaSu served as Fleischer Studios Popeye cartoons as Olive Oyl's model who inspired Mae Questel's VA work.

It's also telling that 1934's domestic violence "humor" in the above clip will jar viewers in 2021, so be warned. Here's a more cheerful clip from 1933's The Bowery with Pert, who was the first Alice Kramden in Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners sketches before falling victim to the Hollywood Blacklist:

 

Pocahontas

First time I've seen it. It was good.

 

The Tomorrow Man 2019

John Lithgow , Blythe Danner .
Romance.
I enjoyed this , not sure why , not a lot happens , but the 2 stars are so comfortable in their roles and that's how I felt watching them.

 

Prometheus.
I really want to like this movie. I love Ridley Scott and i love Alien. There are parts that I did like, esp. the android. But despite it wanting to appear smart and profound it can just be so dumb at times. The way characters act, some of the lines. And the giant Engineers look like department store mannequins. Still entertaining in some ways.