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

There are lots of great moments in the last 20 minutes

Spoiler

 

The Last Blockbuster


In an emoji:

I saw The Last Blockbuster ironically on Netflix, the streaming service often credited for the downfall of video rental giant. This documentary points to mismanagement of revenue and other poor executive decisions that lead to the bankruptcy of Blockbuster. Before watching the documentary, I could have sworn that Blockbuster had closed most of its stores around 2004, but it was actually around 2008. Probably because I exclusively was renting movies from Netflix around 2004.

The second half of The Last Blockbuster is a love letter to only Blockbuster store still in existence and its Captain, Sandi Harding, which in itself somewhat ironic because this last Blockbuster store is run like a "mom & pop" shop. It's noted in the documentary that Blockbuster was able to strike a deal with studios to get movie titles on their shelves by revenue sharing, whereas "mom & pop" shops were paying like $100 per video tape, so the most they would have on hand is about 3 copies of any given movie. Sandi Harding would have to head to her local Target or buy movies on Amazon to stock her shelves. Anyway, the film delivers on nostalgia and makes the viewer want to root for the little rental store that could as it's a reflection of how technology has changed the life experiences from one generation to the next. That Blockbuster just wasn't a rental store, but a place that created cherished and memorable experiences.

 

Tombs of the Blind Dead (aka La noche del terror ciego)



When your movie has gloriously bad acting, epic nonsensical writing and film stealing templar zombies riding bloody horses, you got yourself a cult classic horror film. These sort of foreign horror exploitation films have always fascinated me, despite their quality or lack thereof. This one I consider to be a hidden gem of those sort of horror flicks, with the knights templar zombies being legit the best part of the film. The costume design is excellent on these guys and Antón García Abril's haunting score perfectly complements the undead, as well as the creepy medieval castle setting. One of those exploitations films that probably isn't really good, but very fascinating to me and now I'm morbidly curious about the sequel.

 

Ready Player One. It ticks all my boxes

 

The Swarm (1978)

Micheal Caine paying his taxes and/or alimony in a silly Irwin Allen disaster flick.

 

According to IMDb, he did this one for the same reason he did "Jaws: The Revenge": payment on a new house.

 

The Lady Vanishes 1938 Classic Hitchcock mystery about a woman who discovers that the elderly lady that she has just met on a train journey across Europe has gone missing during the trip. No one believes her and claim that the lady is just a figment of her imagination. Can she prove everyone wrong and find out whats happened to her? This is a film I can revisit again and again, it has so much charm, naivety and a real sense of the era in which it was made that can never be recaptured. The cast of English men and women have the stereotypical stiff upper lip that is so dated now when you watch films like this, but it all adds to the charm of the film. As do the miniature train work and the back screen projection. But above all that its the story that's very compelling and you can see how Hitchcock developed his story style in his bigger budget Hollywood films when you watch early films like The Lady Vanishes. A hero (or heroine) that no one believes, a bigger plot that needs uncovering. Fantastic stuff. I can't recommend this film enough.

 

That scene is somehow not on YouTube. That's hilarious.

 

The Art of Self-Defense (2019)
Worse Fight Club. Alessandro Nivola always reminds me he's underrated, though.

Gangster Squad (2013)
It's got a good cast and it's expensive-looking, but it feels like it was written by a fourteen year old. It's still watchable, but the clichés will make you wince.

 

The Green Girl (2013)
Documentary about the life of Susan Oliver, one of the most-employed TV guest stars from the 50's to the 80's, best known for playing Vina on Star Trek's original pilot The Cage and The Menagerie. She also directed episodes of MASH and Trapper John MD. What I just discovered recently is that she was also a very accomplished pilot who could fly gliders, antique biplanes, and Learjets, competed in air races, set records, and flew solo across the North Atlantic in a single-engine plane. Le sigh.

 

@Sith_Sensei__Prime

The Last Blockbuster really made me long for some sort of in person socialization with movies. It makes me scared that Covid has mortally wounded the movie theatre. Don't get me wrong I love discussing movies on the internet with you fine people but everyone's a critic and a cynic.

 

Initially, the guy is trying to express his name to her, and she replies “Potato,” and I thought somehow it was supposed to be confusion and he mistakenly thinks she’s named Potato, which is dumb and random enough to be funny. But then I realized that that was actually her name and the joke is that he names potatoes after her, and that’s a joke so sublimely stupid I couldn’t help but enjoy it. It becomes like a whole subplot and there’s a scene of them eating potatoes with Queen Elizabeth later. It’s one of the dumbest, most random gags I’ve ever encountered. I love it.

The Glass Bottom Boat. This isn’t quite your typical Doris Day romantic comedy. She plays an accident-prone employee who catches the eye of space-program-contractor Rod Taylor, only for his colleagues to eventually become convinced she’s a Soviet spy by a series of ludicrous coincidences. It has its moments of funny insanity, and a strong cast that includes Paul Lynde as an overzealous security guard and Dom DeLuise as the actual, hilariously nervous and inept, spy. But it’s not particularly funny. It’s overly reliant on broad slapstick and a lot of gags that just aren’t very funny. The whole thing is corny and silly, and the writing is blandly mediocre. There are the elements of a good farce in here, but they’re buried under a lot of weak, random elements. It’s especially disappointed, because having caught a lot of Taylor’s movies lately, the guy has a really strong screen presence, just tons of charisma, but he seemed to very rarely get to show it off in good roles. Far too often he’s stuck enlivening mediocre movies. He feels like one of those actors who could have been a much bigger star if he’d gotten the right roles.

 

Halloween 4

Wow, that was surprisingly good. Sometimes it's good to have low expectations. Best Halloween film I've seen aside from the original John Carpenter masterpiece.

And that ending gave me the heebie jeebies.

*shivers*

 

Underwater ThIs wastes no time in getting to the action, within the first 5 minutes a deep sea underwater drilling facility starts to break apart following an earthquake. Losing contact with the surface a small team of 6 surviving workers try and find their way through a badly damaged and slowly flooding station to the escape pods. Finding the pods damaged they decide to walk a mile across the sea bed in pressurised underwater suits to another nearby station where, (hopefully), there are functioning life pods that can take them the 6 miles to the surface. As their journey unfolds they have to get out before their station explodes and it then emerges that they are not alone in the deep and have to battle their way to safety.

I went into this with low expectations as I'm sure it was released in the January graveyard last year and not only that it star Kirsten Stewart. However all in all it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Imagine a cross between The Poseidon Adventure, The Abyss and Alien and I think that's what this film is trying to be. It breaks no new ground, its not too bothered by character development, its got all the clichés that you'd expect from these kind of films. But I was engaged by it and I thought it had some tense moments too, however I think it maybe went on a touch too long and I wasn't a fan of the end monster reveal. At one point I thought it was going to turn in to an environmental statement against humans destroying the earth, but it thankfully quickly steered away from that. Not bad but not brilliant and an easy way to switch off your brain for 2 hours and I'd say a steady 6 out of 10.

 

"Mortally wounded"? People have been saying movie theaters are doomed for nearly seventy years. They'll survive. They may change, but they'll continue.

 

That's one of the biggest reason why the Last Blockbusters still exists in Bend, OR; the personal costumer service and the social interaction between the staff and customers. There's an opportunity to discuss movies and just chat in general. And yes, discussions of films in person tends to be more civil and people listen to each other instead of crafting a response. And also there's the occasional person that's just clueless and could really benefit from a helpful and knowledgeable.

I don't about 70 years, but I do recall hearing "the death of movies theaters" talk at the arrival of the VCR. But the way Godzilla vs. King Kong has performed during a pandemic and with a same day home release on HBO Max, the theatrical experience is something that a large amount of people still crave. And I do agree that things will likely change. That theater goers probably will head to theaters in mass for certain films, especially with the shorten theatrical window studios have been able to negotiate with many of the theater chains. Personally, I would probably more likely head to the theater for spectacle type of film, like a Marvel movie or a movie that takes full advantage of a large screen presentation like Christopher Nolan film but wait for a home release for an independent film like a Nomadland.

 

Yay! it's the setting that would be the "star," if I were to watch this and review. I can read Proust for character development.

 

They've been saying it since TV came along. That's one reason why the big, widescreen spectacles of the 1950s were made.

 

I still enjoy the blind dead themselves and think they are a great monster design. Outside of their scenes, Virginia’s mannequin factory stalking was great. The score is awesome. Synapse Films are working on a blu ray, but they’ve got a lot of restoration to go.

Shaolin Prince (1982) I wanted a playful Shaw Brothers wuxia and this fits the bill. I wish Ti Lung would have tried more comedy, he’s great fun here as the hidden royal raised by three bumbling Shaolin masters. It’s cute and has some crazy choreography. The exorcism is particularly ridiculous.

 

The Four Feathers. The lavish thirties production — color, masses of extras, shooting on location in Africa — looks handsome and gives the appropriate sense of epic adventure. It’s a bit stiff and stuffy at times, but it does a better job of setting up the main character’s motivations than the Heath Ledger version did. At the end of the day, it didn’t quite have enough personality for me — the characters are all rather blandly formal — but it has some nice sweeping action.

 

Bunny Lake Is Missing. Carol Lynley plays a young mother who shows up to school to pick up her daughter, only to find that she’s not there and nobody at the school seems to have seen her. Laurence Olivier is the police inspector who increasingly doubts whether the child exists, suspecting overly protective brother Keir Dullea is enabling his sister’s delusions.

The Dullea character points to one of the film’s great weaknesses: he’s not in the novel the film is based on, and the addition of another person vouching for the child’s existence seriously limits the ambiguity of the situation, especially since it takes a long time to get around to Olivier broaching the theory that Dullea is for some reason enabling her. The film gives you very little reason to doubt Bunny Lake’s existence, which is kind of the big draw of the premise. Director Otto Preminger tries to make up for it by giving the whole film a descent-into-madness character, full of jarring encounters, staff who don’t seem to take the situation seriously, a literal madhouse, a batty and creepy old woman who lives above the school listening to recordings of children talking about nightmares, Noel Coward as a lecherous landlord who goes on to the police about his interest in S&M and keeps letting himself into the apartment to hit on Lynley. This keeps the film working, despite underdelivering on its most significant hook and a plot that really doesn’t hold together at all once all is revealed. It’s so atmospheric, with absolutely gorgeous black-and-white cinematography. And the performances are excellent, headlined by the little-known Lynley, who is convincingly fragile and frantic in a way that really sells the character’s tenuous grasp on the situation. The highs of the movie definitely outweigh its narrative issues, and it makes for a really compelling experience overall.

 

The Runways (2010)
Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning star in this biopic about the teenage all-girl rock band that set the bar for a new generation of female artists in the mid 1970s. Michael Shannon plays their spaced out manager Kim Foley. I didn't know much about The Runaways but I'm a fan of their music, and even moreso of Joan Jett's, who went on her own with the Blackhearts after The Runaways disbanded. I thought it was a pretty good storytelling film with a good track (if you're into that music).

 

I liked it too (Saw it at the movies).

Woke up wanting more playful Fu, so I cued up a favorite indie The Challenger (1979). I love David Chiang and Norman Tsui in this, and the late Ko Fei was a beast as the baddie. Basically, Tsui is the title character seeking the location of Ko Fei who did wrong by him and his wife. Chiang is the goofy con artist who knows many fighting styles and embeds himself into Tsui’s vengeance quest. Chiang and Tsui are great together. And I still want a blu ray badly.

 

Just a follow-up, I saw Joan Jett in concert as a guest performer for Billy Joel when they reopened Nassau Coliseum in April 2017 (this video isn't mine).