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

Fantasia. I saw bits and pieces. My son really loves the music and the animations, though I don’t let him watch a couple segments.

 

That movie also has a fantastic John Williams score.

 

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)
Animated sci-fi rip-off of SW flavored with Camelot and Heavy Metal. Not an original idea to be seen, although the combination of concepts from other stories works better than it ought to. Animation is no better than you'd expect from '85, dialog is stilted, voice acting is meh at best.

 

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. This film wasn’t what I expected it to be. Most racial-issues pictures from the fifties and sixties are fiery, confrontational. A dignified black man clashes with a slavering racist, a message is projected to the audience that a wrong is being done. But while this is very direct about the subject matter — one hundred percent of the time, it is about interracial relationships and nothing else — it’s not a passionate, confrontational movie. It’s a comedy (a sort of proto-cringe comedy in a way, full of funny discomfort). What really distinguishes it is that most of those other movies are about an ongoing fight, backing the struggle for civil rights. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a film about having won the fight. Civil rights are here. People are equal. And now we have to start acting like it — as a film its target isn’t really snarling racists. It’s people like Tracy and Hepburn, liberals who have to adjust now to the fact that after years of fighting to change the world, the world has changed — and the consequences can land in their laps. They can’t just expect it to change for other people; it has to change for them too. It’s a film that challenges people to adjust — but not confrontationally. It acknowledges that it will take a little work for everyone to transition, and suggests that it’s best approached with some patience and grace and understanding, but we’ll make it work.

It’s a powerful message, but luckily there’s more to it than that. The film is genuinely funny, full of excellent performances from the whole cast. And the writing is really sharp. All four main characters are really well-defined, and there are a lot of interesting little character notes. Things like the way the time constraint on his approval gives Tracy an out: it’s not that he’s against the marriage for any bigoted reasons, it’s just that he can’t consent to anything so sudden so quickly. And anyway he’s not against the marriage per se; he’s just worried about the difficulties they’ll have to deal with as an interracial couple. Or the way that black characters of the earlier generation are extremely anxious about rocking the boat. Or the way the daughter acts like she just doesn’t understand how anyone could object but seems to get a rebellious thrill from going out of her way to shock people, to throw her news — her outstanding open-mindedness — in their face all of a sudden and dare them to react while playing innocent. Just a really great, well-crafted film that’s firing on every level.

 

The Conjuring

This was quite suspenseful and you really feel sorry for the family being tormented by these demons. It's well shot and directed and the actors do quite good work. The score is frightfully brilliant. This film is quite scary in parts.

My main takeaway is, once again, why on earth would anyone take their vulnerable families to live in such an obviously creepy and ominous house.
These adults making that choice are truly heedless and ignorant.

See The Haunting of Hill House, S1 of American Horror Story etc...

 

Raya and the Last Dragon for the 3rd time

Disney continues a Disney Princess tradition (and I consider Raya a Disney princess like Moana and Pocahontas she's the daughter of a chief) in that with princesses that only have one parent, that one parent is her father. Tiana was the only Disney princess with a mother as the only parent for most of the movie (although her father was alive in the beginning).

Ariel (father as single parent)
Belle (father as single parent)
Jasmine (father as single parent)
Pocahontas (father as single parent)

 

As is Robert Vaughn as sleazy Chalmers. And as a "Kolchak" fan, I noticed how un-Vincenzo-like Simon Oakland is as Frank's boss.

 

It's a pattern in B-westerns, too. I've watched tons of them and Gene, Roy, Hoppy, Wild Bill and all the rest seem to get involved with Miranda Prettyface, only child of rancher Hezekiah Prettyface with no Mrs. Prettyface around and not even a mention.

 

Not if you count singel step-mothers. Then you can ad Snow White and Cinderella.

Non princess but Jim in Treasure Planet is raced by a single mom

 

Hellboy (2004)

The film that gives you a candy bar loving hell spawn hitting a cthulhu monster with a bloody phone booth over a box of kittens. Perfection.

Still the best comic book movie in my eyes.

 

Certainly better than the remake.

 

Saw the remake once just to say that I did see it. Have the original on Blu-ray. That's among the movies that if it's on tv while I'm browsing channels I'll just watch it no matter which scene it's on.

 

Outerworld (1987)
Low budget sci-fi adventure, the cheese is strong with this one. Better actors would have made a big improvement. Still, they did a lot with not much to work with, and I enjoyed the story more than the telling. And I give them props for the charter pilot flying his spaceship while wearing aviator glasses.

 

Action in the North Atlantic. This World War II propaganda film takes on the under-covered subject of the merchant marine. Captain Raymond Massey and first mate Humphrey Bogart lead a crew of character actors (including Alan Hale, whom I’m always pleased to see) who make sure that materiel gets where it needs to go to keep the war going. After their first ship is sunk, they get a new one and head out as part of a convoy to Russia. It’s packed with propaganda to sell the nobility of this dangerous service, and with nautical action, full of great fire and water effects (the soundstage plane footage they resort to is less convincing). There’s a dastardly German U-boat captain, too, and I love the decision to present the Germans with plenty of coverage of them but no translations; you don’t need to translate their naval chatter to know what’s going on, and it keeps them really effectively menacing. It’s a well-executed, rousing World War II sea-action film with an excellent cast, definitely worth seeing.

 

Remember My Name. In this odd, unsettling film, Geraldine Chaplin stars as a woman who shows up in town and starts stalking construction worker Anthony Perkins and his wife. Obviously something is going on, but the film stays fairly opaque; you could call it a thriller, but it’s really more of a steadily unsettling character study of Chaplin’s obviously unhinged protagonist. It goes in a few unexpected directions, but despite being fairly well-executed it’s also frustratingly indirect, like it’s noodling around with the premise but isn’t completely sure where to take it. Definitely atmospheric, and Chaplin’s excellent, though.

 

Bad Road Trip


In an emoji:

Bad Road Trip is a film kind of made in the same mold of Borat. It's crazy, crude and will probably offend some people.

 

I just always like seeing how people react to the things in these movies. All the people on the bus, in that restaurant, at square dancing. Seeing the end as they react to knowing they're on camera for a prank movie is always fun.

 

This is what Allen Funt of Candid Camera would be doing now.

 

That reference tells me you are at least 50.

 

Rise of the Fellows hip (2013)
Indie film about 4 nerds and their quest to compete in an online Lord of the Rings gaming tournament. It's not a good movie, but the makers obviously obsessed over Peter Jackson's LotR films, and the way they set up many of the shots was amusing. The best parts were the sound FX and the Howard Shore-styled score, clearly echoing the movies.

 

Witness to Murder. An overlooked gem of a noir, it features Barbara Stanwyck as a woman who witnesses neighbor George Sanders murdering a woman. But by the time the police get there, he’s covered it up, and she’s dismissed as a hysterical woman. She continues to suspect him, but Sanders starts gaslighting her, making her look crazy to the police, getting her committed, and even causing her to doubt her sanity. Even detective Gary Merrill, who takes an interest in her and is generally supportive, doesn’t really think there was a murder. It’s not quite a Rear Window situation, though, since the audience knows what Sanders is doing — it just seems terrifyingly like there’s nothing anybody can do about it. It’s a suitably creepy noir, accentuated by fantastically atmospheric cinematography, that builds to a great madhouse climax (in which Sanders, who is a deranged Nazi theorist for the perfect cherry on top, gets to start shouting in German). A really potent film and an excellent little psychologically intense noir that was overshadowed by Rear Window’s release the same year.

 

Matador. Well, that was weird.

An early Pedro Almodovar film, it has Antonio Banderas as a sheltered, repressed bullfighting student who attempts a humiliating black-comedy rape and then can’t even get arrested when he confesses to it, prompting him to confess to a bunch of other murders, which happen to have been committed by his lawyer, a woman morbidly obsessed with sex and death who kills men in the throes of passion, and his bullfighting teacher, a man also obsessed with sex and death, who killed two students to satisfy his obsession with violence against women (the literal opening credits sequence of the movie is him masturbating to the kill scenes from giallos). And then when these two necrophiliacs meet, the sparks really fly, as they become morbidly obsessed with each other. Also, Antonio Banderas turns out to be psychic, a doctor shows up out of nowhere like halfway through who becomes romantically obsessed with him, and the probably-gay cop investigating the situation looks like a Spanish William Fichtner (the matador looks like a Spanish Jeremy Irons). Oh, and the whole perverted thing is a jet-black comedy. In short, this is about as bizarre, twisted, and lurid a film as you’ll find. I can go for some pretty dark humor, but this is totally out there. It was fascinatingly weird enough to hold my attention, but what the hell, Almodovar? Not really my thing.

 

Alien. Directors cut. Still a bonafide classic. I do prefer the directors cut though. The 4K release is excellent too.

 

And a fun tweak on Rasputin too.

Of course, I must your Solomon Kane avatar. That film deserved a sequel (especially since we didn’t get the proper Kane until very late into the movie.)