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

I had Barbarian on my Atari ST. Fantastic game - there's nothing like ending a duel that's going badly by the sudden-death flying head-chop! I remember watching Red Sonja (1985) and realising that is where the makers of Barbarian had stolen the sword-fighting sound-samples from! Very naughty of them.

 

Haven't seen these films for years, used to love this series.

As a side note Tom Conway took over from Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes in the 1940's radio series with Nigel Bruce.

 

He must have been really old on the Carol Burnett Show

 

End of Days

The Governator has taken on fearsome aliens, Terminators, kindergarteners and now he takes on the prince of darkness himself in this insane apocalyptic action film. This film is a guilty pleasure of mine, as it has just enough unintentionally absurd moments to make it enjoyable for me. The one genuinely good thing from the movie is the always underrated Gabriel Byrne as Satan, who clearly is enjoying himself playing evil incarnate.

 

Not for a Dorf. According to Lord of the Rings, Dorves routinely live 250 years.

 

That movie came frighteningly close to being Rod Steiger's last film. What a way to go out that would have been.

 

And it has doves flying in slow motion

 

Lancaster (2013)
Short film about a British bomber crew in WW2. Excellent minimalist film-making, IMO. There's barely any character development and the plot is as simple as can be, but the atmosphere is palpable.

As far as the airplanes go, my only nitpick is the repeated shots that showed other bombers in formation; that's not the way the RAF flew night bomber missions. It was especially obvious that was wrong when the crew was talking about altering course and changing speed with the other bombers so close. I blame the VFX people for that goof. It didn't spoil my enjoyment, though, period airplane films were often much worse with those kinds of mistakes. And I have to give them credit for the dialog, which sounded very authentic.

 

I've collected a vintage Snake Eyes action figure. And a Stormshadow too. Might have to check out that movie.

Can we expect a Starscream origin story anytime soon cause that might be cool. Or Soundwave, even better.

 

I would expect a prequel to Snake Eyes to be nothing short of a masterpiece.

 

Soundwave is probably the most interesting Decepticon. He's unfailiingly loyal in an organization that is rife with treachery, and keeps an enormous powerset in reserve most of the time.

 

Spitfire Sisters, Women of the ATA (2010)
Documentary about women from Britain and around the world who delivered airplanes from factories to RAF bases during WW2. These young women had minimal training in basic visual flying, no training to fly on instruments, seldom got instruction in the types of planes they were expected to deliver, and modestly went about doing their bit for the war effort with no recognition or reward. As a pilot, I am amazed at what they accomplished with so little. And watching this film, it seems like they were all truly sweethearts to boot. I'm in love.

 

And a Lady Jaye origin: GI Jane

Destro and the Baroness: Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Cobra Commander origin: Eraserhead.

Flint: Platoon

Edit: Yeah, Soundwave is me fave Transformer.

 

Nocturnal Animals. Tom Ford’s film achieves a unique effect in that its storytelling mechanism isn’t just a frame story — the point of the story is very much about what is happening to Amy Adams in the “frame story”; it’s the main story of the film — but almost all of the film is told through flashbacks and fiction, with the story-within-the-story dominating the runtime.

Adams plays a successful but icy art gallery owner whose second marriage is falling apart. She receives a manuscript of her ex-husband’s new novel and becomes absorbed by reading it and disturbed by its violent reflection of their relationship. The film is mostly the story of the book, in which a man loses his family in a horrible tragedy and tries to find justice, and Adams’s flashbacks to her first relationship and its deterioration. The book narrative, with its incredibly wrenching scenes of the senseless crime and the man’s tense hunt for the suspects, provides all the film’s flash and is itself a gripping story, but the real drive of the film is the way Adams is affected, forced to reconsider her relationship and realize what she lost in giving up on it too soon and too selfishly.

The film boasts a fantastic cast: Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal as both the ex and the lead in the book, Isla Fisher as Adams’s book double, Michael Shannon as a weary detective, Aaron Taylor-Johnson in top form as the malevolent lead criminal, Michael Sheen in a bit part, glib psycho Armie Hammer as Adams’s glib psycho second husband, Laura Linney as her mother. And Ford has the eye to make sure it looks great. But Ford’s eye is perhaps a bit too heavily shaped by his fashion background; like a fashion ad, it’s beautiful but distant and cold. It’s at its best in Gyllenhaal’s book scenes, where the extravagant, visceral emotions of the storyline come through (and the scenes of Taylor-Johnson menacing Gyllenhaal’s family and destroying his life are genuinely, magnificently harrowing), but otherwise it maintains a sort of haughty remove that reinforces Adams’s icy nature but makes the film easier to admire than to engage with. I could like it, but I couldn’t love it, for all its excellence.

 

IIRC (this was like 30 years ago and I was quite young), maybe not a whole origin story, but every fan wanted to know what Snake-Eyes looked like under the mask, why he wore it, why he never spoke, etc. It was a big, tantalizing mystery, and the comic book where they revealed his scarred up face was a huge hit.

 

Blood Red Sky

This was not the movie I was expecting. You don't expect much subtlety from a genre mashup like this, and you definitely won't get it here, but there are some lovely twists and turns that pleasantly surprised me more than once.

There were astutely ignored opportunities for it to be even more derivative than it was always going to be, including Hollywoodesque comic relief. The movie takes itself seriously, for whatever that's worth. What would have been the most justifiably theft of dialogue in the history of cinema:

Spoiler

"I've had it with these mother****ing vampires on this mother****ing plane," never happens, sadly

 

It was a great documentary. As you know I've read several novels following the theme of the female pilots during WW2. It's just really inspiring and a shame that it's taken so long for them to get the recognition they deserve. And you'd think Hollywood would jump at the chance to make a reputable movie about them. The stories are already out there; just read some of the novels like The Flight Girls by Noelle Salazar.

 

Patty Jenkins would seem to be a natural fit for a project like that. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these stories get used for the upcoming Rogue Squadron.

 

In the Fog: Cinematography & Production Design (2002) – Jennifer Peterson

Okay, so here’s one more bonus feature from the Insomnia Blu-Ray, last one I promise. This one is around fifteen minutes and it focuses on the fog chase sequence, which I somehow did not even mention in my multiple paragraph review of the movie, a sequence that’s just a pure Nolan set-piece. The short consists of behind the scenes footage while the audio is by Nathan Crowley, production designer for Nolan on all of his films except Following & Inception, and Wally Pfister, Cinematographer for Nolan on everything from Insomnia through The Dark Knight Rises. This being Christopher Nolan, none of this stuff was really done on a stage, nor was any of it digitally enhanced. The rocky beach was a for real location and the crew actually manufactured the fog for real and blew it over the beach with giant fans as the actors, including Pacino himself, and crew really did just dash around madly on wet rocks while hardly able to see. But, man, I think it was worth it; it’s a great sequence in the movie. And this short ends with what feels like a quintessentially Nolan filmmaking moment: the camera captures an actor disappearing into the fog, closely followed by Wally Pfister, staggering around with a huge camera on his back and right behind him is Nolan himself, swallowed up by the fog. Dashing into the unknown, right on the front lines, chasing his muse right into the fog. 2 stars.

tl;dr – behind the scenes feature focuses on the crafting of the magnificent fog chase scene from Insomnia, complete with real fog. 2 stars.

 

"House of Dark Shadows", from 1970. It's the first of two movies Dan Curtis made based on the soap opera, featuring the show's cast. It's pretty much what the original Barnabas Collins plotline would've been, had he not gotten popular and been transformed into a more heroic character. It's a good movie, shot on location in upstate New York, with a well-realized finish. It's also far more graphically violent than the show was ever allowed to get. However, the script has a big problem in trying to condense a plotline meant to run for several weeks, five episodes per week, into a movie running around 90 minutes. (By comparison, the Peter Cushing "Doctor Who" movies condensed serials running only seven and six episodes, respectively, into the same running time.) Also, they run the opening credits during the action, TV-movie style, which is really annoying. And the fate of Roger and Dr. Stokes makes little sense. Still, Jonathan Frid is great as Barnabas. And you have to watch the end credits carefully for a final twist.

 

Patton (Franklin Schaffner, 1970)

George C. Scott turns in a great performance as the titular General George S. Patton, made all the better because he manages to make it look like he’s having an absolute blast doing it. All the other actors are fine too, but we’re not actually watching the movie for anyone else.

It’s consistently ranked among “the best WWII movies evvah” and deservedly so. The actual battle scenes are very good as well (though once again, we don’t necessarily watch the film for those).

Patton was, in many ways, an unusual person. Apparently Scott was too; he won the Academy Award for his performance, but refused to accept it because of his dislike of competition among actors. You have to respect an actor with such principles.

“Be seated. Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.“



Very well worth your time if you haven’t seen it yet.

 

[. . .]

You give star ratings to DVD EXTRAS but you cant praise Elizabeth?!!!

For real.

 

Signs
I like the actors, the dialogue, the cinematography and the music in this film; can't really think of anything I don't like about it. The interactions between this family are priceless, very well done indeed.

It's my favorite M. Night Shyamalan flick along with Unbreakable.
Signs is always a fun watch for me alongside a film that inspired it called E.T.